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Volume 49 Number 1 January 2025
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That we are now celebrating the half century mark has been made possible entirely due to the support and solidarity of our large panel of reviewers. If the journal is published with unfailing regularity every month, it is because we can confidently rely on our reviewers who never renege on deadlines, and deliver reviews in delectable prose and critical analysis. We are also thankful to the publishers for extending financial support by sponsoring issues, taking advertisements, underwriting the costs for seminars and organizing lectures


Editorial

By G.S. Cheema Manohar Books

The Empire was, by the end of the seventeenth century, essentially an ‘Empire of the Indian Subcontinent’, encompassing almost the entire subcontinent. In the formative phase of his military career Aurangzeb had gained his experience in Central Asia where he had been deputed by Shah Jahan for campaigns in Balkh and Badakhshan.


Reviewed by: Amar Farooqui

By Harit Joshi

Evaluating the nature of court histories and court chronicles, Joshi raises a few historiographical issues. Relating his concerns, he asserts that while these narratives depict the occurrences pertaining to official gatherings or festive events attended by elitist politically powerful male members,


Reviewed by: Meena Bhargava

By Ranabir Ray Choudhury

Urban improvement by accumulating funds through lottery was popular in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British colonies. The basic idea was that city-dwellers would voluntarily buy lotteries, and improvement would be funded from that money.


Reviewed by: Ritajyoti Bandhyopadhyay

By Aparna Vaidik

In the succinctly written Introduction, Aparna Vaidik, besides providing a bird’s eye-view of the book, discusses the complex nature of the primary theme of her study, viz., the historical-legal aspects of the Case, and the difficulties that she, as a historian, faced while working on it. An important challenge which she faced related to presenting a difficult theme in ‘accessible prose’


Reviewed by: Amol Saghar

By John Slight

From a geopolitical perspective, British involvement in the Hajj served multiple strategic purposes. It allowed the empire to assert control over trade routes and exert influence in key regions such as Jeddah. Simultaneously, the British sought to earn the loyalty and legitimacy of their Muslim subjects by facilitating the pilgrimage, a move that was both pragmatic and symbolic. However


Reviewed by: Parvin Sultana

By Sayali Goyal

Sometimes the amalgam worked well, as in the architecture of Lutyens Delhi; most times it was terrible! Luckily rural India and our temples and mosques remained more or less immune from this scourge.


Reviewed by: Laila Tyabji

By K.K. Gopalakrishnan

As a dancer, I found the chapter on ‘The Commune and the Community’ most interesting. It served to make for an understanding of the various offerings that every Theyyam makes. Some start by sowing seeds, worshipping the Goddess, worshipping nature, ancestors, warriors, heroes, animals, snakes, etc. All the three stratospheres are included. Multifariousness is its hallmark. People of all faiths are devotees. It is a suspense of logic or scientific thought. It also goes beyond dogma and prescribed faith. The Devi can be ruthless in blaming the people for their misdoings. But is also a forgiving and prophetic Mother.


Reviewed by: Leela Samson

Edited by Tapati Guha-

Mukherjee was nearing fifty when she cast the 12-ft high Ashoka at Kalinga. Sculpted in twenty-six parts, Mukherjee’s greatest worry at the time was to find a place to cast the complex work. Two-and-a-half decades later, she began work on another monumental sculpture, this time of the Buddha himself in whose teachings Ashoka had found his meaning of life. Having begun it in December 1996, the 14-ft high Buddha was conceived in sixty-six pieces, and she had cast most of it before she passed away in January 1998 of cardiac arrest.


Reviewed by: Kishore Singh

By Swapna Liddle and Madhulika Liddle with photographs by Prabhas Roy Niyogi Books

Nor was it only the royal men who commissioned gardens—Shah Jahan’s daughter Roshanara had an elaborate space named after her, quite near what was to be known as the Grand Trunk Road. Throughout the book, the Liddles provide us with interesting nuggets of information on Mughal history. Roshanara was close to her brother Aurangzeb, supporting him when he usurped the throne from their father. She was rewarded with the then enormous sum of five lakh rupees and made the head of the palace.


Reviewed by: Malavika Karlekar

Edited by Sumangala Damodaran

The next paper by Sazi Dlamini also discusses the ngoma not just as music but as organized sounds because ritual and ceremonial use of ngoma involves dance, possession by spirit, healing practices and initiation rites. The performance with the ngoma lungundi drum is central to the identity of the Venda ancestry and this memory also speaks of resilience in the face of conquest and migration


Reviewed by: Mohammad Kamran

By Anand Singh

In addition to lying on the Uttarapatha, Nalanda, says the author, is, ‘Geographically… a part of the Indo-Gangetic trough but some of its parts were connected with the Siwalik ranges in the northern part of Champaran district and partial fringes of the peninsular block in the south. Nalanda lies in the Magadha-Anga plain in the south Ganga region.’ It was also close to the ports of Champa and Pataliputra.


Reviewed by: Sudhamahi Regunathan

By Nadira Khatun

This secular and positive portrayal of Muslims in the 1950s and 1960s was largely due to the significant involvement of Muslims in the filmmaking industry during this period. While these portrayals often relied on certain stereotypes—such as the use of poetic Urdu, Lucknowi aristocracy, and elaborate costumes—the author argues that by the 1970s, the social genre introduced Muslim characters, especially women


Reviewed by: Harish S Wankhede

By Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav

The book later covers the last phase of Rai’s politics and his ultimate alignment with the Hindu Mahasabha. The work seriously engages with complete writings and required contextual readings and comes out with a coherent and fresh perspective on the life and thought of Lajpat Rai. Having said that, in her attempt to portray Lajpat Rai’s politics and work in a more coherent manner


Reviewed by: Krishna Swamy Dara

By Hilal Ahmed

This identity has various facets—historical, cultural, social, political, religious, and liberal—dealt with in separate chapters. Ahmed argues that there is a serious reconfiguration of these thematic aspects of Indian Muslim identity in the present time, the New India: arguably an ideological framework and a process that has redefined the Indian political context. This framework’s bent is on the ‘responsive government-responsive people’


Reviewed by: Mohammad Osama

By Aruna Roy

These are notes helping us fathom how our own imperfections make us dream of a perfect world, how each time we heal the world a bit, we heal ourselves. No one who reads the book will be left with the excuse of not daring to change because they are ‘ordinary’, for this is a story of how ordinary seeming people can harness their individual and collective strengths to create solutions that had never been imagined. Like the author says


Reviewed by: Ankita Anand

By Dinesh C Sharma

Encapsulating the development journey of Hyderabad in great detail, Sharma notes that the Great Flood of Musi on the fateful day of September 28, 1908 is considered a turning point. ‘It attempted to change it from being a late-medieval city to becoming a modern metropolis. The flood was a natural and ecological disaster but it triggered a project of modernisation of the city,’ he observes.


Reviewed by: K Venkateshwarlu

By Sadaf Wani

What makes this book truly unique is its blend of personal memory, collective experience, and anthropological insights. Wani’s narrative delves into the evolving identities of Srinagar’s residents, particularly the distinction between the ‘shahri’ and ‘gaam’ identities, showing how class, culture,


Reviewed by: Anahita Mir

By Shahu Patole. Translated from the original Marathi by Bhushan Korgaonkar

At the heart of Patole’s narrative lies the inextricable link between caste and food, a relationship that is inseparable in Indian society. As he insightfully remarks, ‘Just as caste is cemented at birth, so is diet.’ He challenges the pervasive caste and class divisions within Indian food culture, asserting,


Reviewed by: Pooja Duggal

By Bhagwan Chowdhry and Anas Ahmed

For the past one decade in particular, we have started expecting digital and technological solutions to become massively adopted by the masses for doing their day-to-day financial work through mobiles, apps, calls, internet, messages, IVR, touch screens, machine voices, et al. But we are hugely disappointed that people are not adopting. Why are people not doing online transactions? Why are people not paying online? Why are people not selling online? Why are people not receiving and sending money among their peers, and trusted relationships?


Reviewed by: Osama Manzar

by Rubani Yumkhaibam

Nandi and Saria speak of contexts of proximity and blurring between Hindus and Muslims in the Hijra universe that are similar and yet clearly distinct. In Odisha for instance, Saria observes that ‘their beliefs and practices would often adhere to one while being claimed as characteristic of the other’, necessitating the ethnographer’s ‘fidelity to the way the crossovers between Hindu and Muslim theologies were lived—that is, both as an instantiation and a limit of the notion of religious syncretism’ (Saria, p. 14). Nandi suggests that the kinship hijras in her study in Bengal feel with Muslims is based on the Islamic practice of circumcision—with several hijras converting to Islam after their ritual initiation and constructing the hijra identity within a spiritual framework marked by celibacy and asceticism.


Reviewed by: Kalpana Kannabiran

By Kiran Manral

Each chapter posits a clue in the form of a tag line to the name. A short introduction to the individual is followed by the reason for choosing her story. The rest of the chapter is divided into sections that mark the twists and turns of that journey. The stories end by focusing on one dominant norm/stereotype of that life and the ‘hacks’ that the individual exercised to overcome or storm that norm.


Reviewed by: Bhashwati Sengupta

By Rajan Mehta

Mehta writes in one of the chapters that breaking a problem into parts helps not only in understanding the problem but also in developing solutions for it (p. 178); he follows a similar design by breaking down his thesis into short, concise chapters. These chapters find their thematic basis in the scientific knowledge of climate change present in the introductory chapters where Mehta provides fundamental information about the science behind environmental degradation. He highlights the causes of climate change and assesses the available data attributing these changes primarily to fossil fuels, industry, and land use changes


Reviewed by: Mir Wafa Rasheeq

By Swadesh Deepak. Translated from the original Hindi by Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt and Sukant Deepak

In the stories, Deepak emerges as a master narrator who calibrates movements of his characters to generate necessary suspense. The names of the characters are often revealed only after two-three pages. And often anecdotes and sub-plots thicken the texture of the stories. The settings in the stories are functional, and dynamic in the sense that their details keep recurring in a haunting way.


Reviewed by: Akshaya Kumar

By Syed Mujtaba Ali. Translated from the original Bangla by Nazes Afroz

The dobhasi (bilingual) love tale of Shabnam, an Afghan girl, and Majnun, a teacher from ‘Bangla-land’, unfolds against the backdrop of the Afghan Civil War of 1928–29, in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan. These two lovers bond over their shared passion for poetry. As political upheaval shakes the country with the rise of Bachae-e-Saqao (Habibullah Kalakani) and his Saqqawists challenging Amanullah Khan


Reviewed by: Sanobar Hussaini

By Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. Translated from the original Bangla by Prasun Roy Fingerprint

Prasun Roy’s translation keeps alive the uneasiness about the ghosts, whether they are antagonistic or friendly and generous, and their doings. But there are numerous sentences and phrases that sound grating to the ear. Tautological expressions like ‘a face soaked in emotional sympathy’ (p. 54), ‘was infamous for being uncannily notorious’ (p. 102), ‘immoral wickedness of this boy’ (p. 106), and ‘the forest was infamous for these notorious beasts’ (p. 128) could certainly have been altered to sharper and more cryptic, non-repetitive ways of saying them by the editor(s). Other hiccups that disrupted fluent reading included imprecise expressions like


Reviewed by: Nivedita Sen

By Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

The interplay between Anuradha, Vardhman and Nandini is central to this lyrical, melancholic novel and its complex exploration of love and life. Shanghvi’s prose is lush, poetic and enchanting in its use of imagery, painting vivid pictures in a story that resonates with the bittersweet music of life’s most enduring truths. The Last Song of Dusk does not offer any easy resolutions as it meditates on the fleeting nature of beauty and the inevitability of loss, told through the lives of characters who are as flawed as they are compelling.


Reviewed by: Ranjana Kaul

By Suresh Sundaresan

Within this circularity are trapped endless stories of the people Chandrakant comes into contact with, who teach him lessons in both life and music, and also of people he never meets, only hears about. The story moves back and forth in time, from Chote Ustad to Bade Ustad, Jaffar Ali Khan, and from there to his Ustad, Sajjad Hussain, who, in turn, had been a disciple of Ustad Muhammad Jafri, the originator of the Karachi Gharana.


Reviewed by: Rana Nayar

By Sudeep Chakravarti

To most Indians the grisly murder and its aftermath story may appear, given the preponderance of similar stories in contemporary times, as another run of the mill. But this is where Chakravarti intervenes to read an otherwise ‘routine’ crime in a most intellectually insightful and sensitive way. His novel analysis, most importantly, brings in the volatile urban political and spatial-temporal context of 1970s-80s Delhi to understand not only the specific crime committed against the Chopra teenagers but also reflects on, among others,


Reviewed by: Nabanipa Bhattacharjee

By Lakshmi Kannan Olive Turtle

The title story captures a tableaux moment when Bhagyalakshmi emerges. The baby elephant not only leaves its mahout out of breath but also splashes water on Pratibha, Sashi and Indira, who are on a trip without informing their families. The exuberance of the baby elephant matches the first taste of freedom by the young women. The story, ‘A for Apple’ highlights the longing of a young boy to taste the luscious apple that is printed in his textbook. When he does manage to steal some money, buys an apple and eats, it becomes a moment of disappointment. In an act of repentance, he buys flavour-rich guavas to share with his family.


Reviewed by: V. Bharathi Harishankar

By Shahnaz Habib

Habib’s anecdote about her trip to Paris with her partner and the insurmountable barriers encountered by her will certainly hit home to residents of a Third World country! The anxiety to ensure that her travel comes through by the end of the chapter will meanwhile compel the reader to encounter a degree of racial discrimination that the travel industry rests upon. And so, through a series of examples


Reviewed by: Suman Bhagchandani

By Aishwarya Iyer

Another theme running through the poems which strikes the reader is that of desire. But to understand how desire functions in Iyer’s poems, it will be fruitful to recollect Sara Ahmed’s question in her book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, namely, ‘What do emotions do?’; she later elaborates, ‘Emotions are simply not something “I” or “we” have. Rather, it is through emotions that surfaces and boundaries are made: the “I” and the “we” are shaped by, and even take shape of, contact with others.’ It is through this framework of illuminating both the object and the subject that the desiring-subject functions in Iyer’s poems.


Reviewed by: Ankush Banerjee

By Sharmistha Mohanty

Sharmistha Mohanty has a voice that has the ability to stay with the reader long after Book One has been read. In fact, this book would make the reader want to read more of her latest writings as well. It is a book that seems to come from a place of personal relevance; it carries within an unhurried pace, thus mirroring human thought itself. In these days of insta-living and gratification, it is only in the mind that we can lead a slow and defined existence.


Reviewed by: Sonya J Nair

By Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi. Illustrated by Stina Wirsén

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi who works and lives in a village in north Goa has won many awards for his writing, like the Betty Trask Award, UK, and the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy. He has been shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize for his novel The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay.


Reviewed by: Nita Berry

By Bijal Vachharajani. Illustrated by Rajiv Eipe

Through Amit’s experiences with Pokey, the author highlights that having a pet demands patience and involves responsibilities. From badly wanting a pup at home to wishing it leaves their home soon to embracing it wholeheartedly, Amit comes a full circle at the end.


Reviewed by: Divya Shankar