Monthly Archives: June 2017

Novelist Tagore, the most recent endeav- our by established Tagore translator and scholar Radha Chakravarty, is proof that translation is the closest form of reading.

Rabindranath Tagore often saw in his mind’s eye his writings turn into dust ‘under the wheels of time’, as he put it in 1939. When he was barely thirty-five years of age and a rather obscure poet he wrote a poem addressing his readers a century later: ‘A hundred years from now/ I wonder who you are reading this poem of mine’ (1895).

Judy Wakabayashi and Rita Kothari’s Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond, now in its Indian edition, seeks to unearth what the Introduction calls the ‘local stories of translation’, premised on the assumption that local cultures and contexts determine the nature of translation and translation theory.

The nature of poetry has always been held to be fictive. That is, it doesn’t record or report facts; and even if it is recording or reporting facts, the poet’s creative imagination works on them in such a way that the quality of factualness recedes into the background. Hence, Shelley’s famous observation in his A Defense of Poetry…

This work is a collection of essays written over the past decade exploring the issue of disability, culture and society in the Indian context. The author is a sociologist working in one of the leading universities in the country giving the area of social science research and writing on disability an academic respectability…

The back page write up on this book reads thus: ‘A compendium in Prose and Verse of Crimes perpetrated after office hours on sundry aspects of economy and society by a lapsed social scientist in the cause of expanding the horizons and shaping the values of young and unpromising scholars.’

The book under review opens with a con- ceptual framework for understanding local governance as it flows through the regions of good governance, decentralization and reforms in India. He has reiterated the fact that there is a vital need to shift the focus from ‘government’ to ‘governance’, there-by, emphasizing decentralization rather than delegation.

The book under review is fascinating and disappointing at the same time. It is a masterly survey of the developmental and economic history literature on the significant changes that have taken place in the global economy over a long historical period stretching into many centuries.

Long before the city became trendy, there was the Indian city. It existed in our colourful and incredible mythology. It existed when the first of human civilization took root on the subcontinent. It was central to the multiple kingdoms that flourished from corner to corner in this vast land for centuries.

Among the recent works on Bihar, men- tion may be made of Vinita Damodaran (Broken Promises, 1992), Papiya Ghosh (Community and Nation, 2008), Hitendra Patel (Communalism and the Intelligentsia, 2011), Narendra Jha (The Making of Bihar, 2012), Lata Singh (Popular Translations of Nationalism, 2012).

The postmodernist invasion has not only pushed certain traditional histories out of circulation but also relegated the extremely useful analysis of class and movements that Indian history was used to.

The book under review discusses the cul- tural contours of North East India in three key areas: the integrated approach to the understanding of history using folk materials; tradition and change in folk culture; and the pan-Indian connections of religion, epics, arts and crafts.

The question of identity vis-à-vis migra- tion in Assam is a much debated, highly complex, thoroughly contested issue. The issue is enmeshed in the cauldron of contending views and is delivered differently by intellectuals, administrators, media, and various elements of the Assamese social structure, including individuals both natives and the migrants.

The book under review seeks to critically analyse the factors, circumstances and processes that underlined the tumultuous and painful march towards the creation of the State of Telangana as the twenty-ninth State of the Indian Union marking the conclusion of a long-drawn struggle of the people of Telangana seeking separate Statehood for their region.

The year 2014 would be remembered mainly for a rather bitter, raucous, debilitating and personalized election campaign, which has not only driven the already polarized electorate to choose on the basis of religion, caste and ethnicity, but also enlarged the area of influence of marginal players transforming the political landscape of India for all time to come.

Indian federalism has of late been receiving greater attention from academics, policy makers, and the media within India, but more conspicuously, abroad. The age of treating the States in the Indian federation, condescendingly, as ‘glorified municipalities’ is passé. Since the onset of India’s reforms in the early 1990s…

The accounts on Kashmir will generally tell stories from a particular prism, explaining that either there is no problem and that peace has returned to the Valley after a violent phase, or keeping in mind the global concern for human rights, that the Kashmir issue is nothing but a case of Human Rights violations that needs to be addressed.

Since 2001, the United States led war on terror has consistently dominated the regional strategic discourse. Parallel to this has been the discourse on the ties between the US and Pakistan, its long-time ally ever since its creation in 1947.

The author has impressive credentials. With a doctorate from MIT, he has taught at the US Naval War College and lectured at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He is currently Associate Professor at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The catch is that an American of Turkish-Egyptian origin…

Simply put, there is no good option in Syria. Not only has the time passed for the international community to be able to effect an internal solution to the crisis inside the country, the geopolitical dynamics outside Syria are also changing at a rapid pace. So even if there was a good solution today,