Opinion

About this archive

This page aspires to be a complete digital archive of Opinion, which was published weekly from 1960-1983, with a gap during the Emergency -- over a 1000 issues in all. Along with Opinion, I am also collecting issues of the Opinion Literary Quarterly, a shortlived journal which was published in 1973-74 under the overall editorial guidance of A D Gorwala, but steered by the poets Gauri Deshpande and Kersi Katrak.

At present, the site hosts a digitised catalogue of the complete Opinion weekly over its lifespan. In addition, I have been able to digitise about 110 copies which were in my possession. These are available as pdf files, hosted on archive.org, where they can be viewed, searched, and downloaded. A subset of these 110 digitised copies have been scanned with optical character recognition (OCR), which allows us full-text search within the issues themselves.

You will find a list of individual cards, one representing each issue, at the bottom of this page. Hovering above the card will reveal the table of contents for that issue. If the issue has been digitised, you have the option to download the PDF, or open the issue on the reader at archive.org.

Using the archive

Here are four things you can do to search within the catalogue:

• Jump to a random issue using the surprise me link. You can choose whether to search within the entire catalogue, or within the set of issues which have been digitised.
• Search the catalogue for article titles and authors using the search toolbar. For instance, typing "Kashmir" will pull up all articles with "Kashmir" in the title; "Noorani" will pull up all articles by A. G. Noorani. Here, too, you can choose to search over the full catalogue, or restrict your search to issues which have been digitised.
• Browse a list of articles by particular authors, using the drop-down menu in the search toolbar.
• Do a full-text search inside the digitised issues for which we have an OCR scan.