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Volume 50 Number October 2026
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By Ayesha Ray

These combatants have been documented as well-educated females from affluent families, making their profiles complex and multifaceted. She groups the motivations for these radical female recruits into three categories: the uniting factor of religious ideology, the narratives of victimhood, and a political choice made to liberate oneself from the patriarchal traditions. They were committed to the roles of recruiters, facilitators, fundraisers, and were even stationed as gatekeepers of patriarchy tasked with promoting gendered policies (p. 112). Like their Pakistani counterparts, these women were also part of several


Reviewed by: Reshmi Kazi

Edited by Pius Malekandathil, K.S. Mathew, James Kurikilamkatt and Jenee Peter

Epigraphy, Literary Criticism, Cultural Studies and Ethnohistory. Influenced by Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies tradition, the contributors argue that oral narratives, ritual practices, pilgrimage customs, songs, and collective memory can serve as legitimate historical sources when supported by independent evidence. The chapters move logically from the political and cultural settings of first-century North-West India and South India to discussions of the Acts of Thomas, the Seven Churches, Mylapore Archaeology and Syriac, Arabic, Patristic, Portuguese and Papal sources. The loss of Syriac and Malayalam manuscripts destroyed by Portuguese colonizers during the


Reviewed by: Diana Agnes

By Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

where the earlier generation sought structures, they seek subjectivities. These are legitimate and productive shifts. The difficulty arises only when such approaches are presented as superseding structural history. The two are inseparable. Faizi’s self-fashioning cannot be understood without imperial patronage, and Anand Ram Mukhlis cannot be understood apart from the fiscal and political fragmentation of eighteenth-century Mughal India. Diplomats existed because states existed. Munshis emerged because bureaucracies required them. The self is never autonomous


Reviewed by: Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Edited by Martin I. Moir, Douglas M. Peers, and Lynn Zastoupil

Rosen offers a critique of Eric Stokes’s 1959 classic, English Utilitarians and India. Rosen argues that Stokes went along with Élie Halévy’s interpretation of Utilitarianism, mistakenly assuming that James Mill, as a follower of Jeremy Bentham, uncritically endorsed autocracy. Dube’s essay reassesses the relationship between Bentham’s Utilitarianism and the ideas of the Mills. In the case of James Mill, Bentham’s opinion was that ‘His creed of politics results less from love of the many, than from the hatred of the few’ (p. 47). Majeed suggests that we need to take into account the linguistic and aesthetic dimensions that had a bearing on James Mill’s views about Britain’s empire in India. He was critical of William Jones’s romanticization of Indian culture, which created difficulties for undertaking reform.


Reviewed by: Amar Farooqui

By Tarini Bedi

This involves pooling funds, advancing informal loans, and adhering to social expectations and religious norms. Although driving is an overwhelmingly male occupation, Chillia women in Pathanwadi undertake maal, small-scale piecework for sale that is conducted from the confines of the home. Some women also serve as religious teachers in the community. Bedi highlights the centrality of women’s work to the family economy, sustaining households in the face of constant precarity.


Reviewed by: Prashant Kidambi

By Sonia Faleiro

A widely loved version of an armed Buddhist deity is Bodhisattva Manjushri, the face serene, the arm wielding the sword of wisdom. The battles here are metaphoric, the sword cutting through the obstacles to spiritual liberation—ego, attachment, greed, ignorance and delusion. I couldn’t help feeling some unease at the generalized deployment of an image from the Vajrayana tradition—with its complex intersection of Buddhist psychology and visual arts left unexplored here—for a book that focuses largely on forms of state-sponsored violence and monastic deviations in the Sri Lankan, Burmese, and Thai contexts.
But then this slim volume is by a journalist, not a historian or a sociologist or philosopher of religion.


Reviewed by: Maya Joshi

By Rajinder Arora Vaam Prakashan,

Four named khattats carry the chapter from there: Mohammed Ghalib, who still writes out the Quran and volumes of verse by hand outside a shop numbered 4181, and speaks of the work as inheritance rather than income; Shiraz Hussain of Khwab Tanha Collective, whose studio still finds buyers for his poster-calligraphy at exhibitions and fairs; Mohammed Zubair, who learned the craft from an older brother as a boy, was once turned away from formal training for being too young, and is not teaching it to his own daughter; and Mushtaq Ahmed, who has taught the discipline to some two thousand students across fifty years and says, plainly, that none of it has ever been enough to live on. The chapter is proof, in miniature, of how the whole book works: patient attention, a named source behind every claim of significance, and testimony given room to speak for itself


Reviewed by: Kanupriya Dhingra

By Arun Maira

These formative years run like a thread through his later work, shaping his worldview of how large organizations can build trust, uphold dignity, and draw strength from both resilience and imagination. He joined the Tata group in 1964 and spent over twenty-five years with Tata Motors, rising to Executive Director and guiding the company through major changes in the 1980s. In 1989, he moved to the United States to work with Arthur D Little, where he became a Board member and gained wide experience in restructuring and strategy. Returning to India, he served as Chairman of Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in India from 2000 to 2008, advising corporations on leadership and organizational change. In 2009, he was appointed to the Planning Commission of India,


Reviewed by: TCA Ranganathan

By Sunanda Sen

One, higher financial returns are detrimental to real investment in these countries since only those projects would be undertaken which have a higher return than these financial returns. This could potentially lead to deindustrialization, as she shows with the exception of China. Two, countries have to keep their exchange rates inflated (artificially appreciated), which has a negative impact on their trade numbers. An expensive rupee means expensive Indian goods for the international markets and cheaper


Reviewed by: Rohit Azad

By Shinjini Kumar

And yet these cities and towns are changing and growing as some businesses wither, some grow and new ones are born. Entrepreneurship has been a male-dominated field for many reasons: family businesses being passed on to the sons, only the sons’ business acumen deemed worthy of investment, occupational stereotypes and familial gender roles. Despite all odds being stacked against them, women have established, expanded and worked in businesses across the middle cities and towns of India.


Reviewed by: Shimaila Mushtaq

Edited by K.M. Chandrasekhar and T.P. Sreenivasan

inordinately large numbers of young Keralites remain unemployed or under-employed; though female labour force participation is comparatively high, it has declined significantly since the 1980s. Discussing the Kudumbashree experience, KB Valsala Kumari points to the meagre presence of women in political leadership, and hopes the substantial social capital that the programme has generated will translate into political capital too. K Ellangovan points out Kerala’s health paradox: ‘despite high public spending, individuals still bear the brunt of healthcare costs’, most of the health budget goes towards salaries at the expense of quality improvement.


Reviewed by: Govindan Nair

By Anand Teltumbde

These became a blueprint of sorts for the Constitution of postcolonial India. Coining a term which is replete with irony, Teltumbde calls these the ‘constitutional castes’, meaning thereby that they, along with the later addition called ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBCs), are castes which have been legally accorded the right to reservation. Once caste had been legally ‘entrenched’, with minimum objection from within the Constituent Assembly, the radical Ambedkarite discourse of caste annihilation was marginalized by the pragmatic discourse of state-administered justice via caste-based reservations. Thus, instead of being used as a contingent fire-fighting mechanism to narrow down caste disparities, reservations, with no timeline and no yardstick to measure the degree of their success or failure, have, over time, been installed as the ultimate panacea for the redressal of a caste-riven social order.


Reviewed by: Tapan Basu

By Ammar Aziz

Islam’s response to the deep conflictual turmoil in South Asia, especially Bangladesh, is one of a resilient and resisting silence. Violence appears to be the norm everywhere; poets and writers in the ‘central jail of silence’ turn inwards to make sense of a world increasingly chaotic. Here a ‘postcolonial teacher’ teaching TS Eliot’s famous poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ deals with ‘the faces that mull over/ how one measures life/ with coffee spoons;/ the faces that look up schizophrenia/ googling a virtual dictionary.’ Intense images are interconnected to reveal the sense of disorder around; the only option left is that of silence, both a prison and a stance— ‘Silence has gripped the whole world/ No one weeps anywhere anymore/ As if all await the final call.’


Reviewed by: Payal Nagpal

By Bilquis Zafirul Hassan. Edited by Naghma Zafir and Deeba Zafir

The poem ‘Will You be My Friend?’ gives a refreshingly novel articulation to women’s anger by exposing the asymmetrical power equation between husband and wife, where the wife is forced to tolerate his scorn, condescension, infidelities and so much more. The wife reminds the husband that being the ‘better half’, she won’t ‘stoop’ to pay back in the same coin. She then moves on to invite him to be her friend:


Reviewed by: Nishat Zaidi

Translated from the original Punjabi with an introduction by Neeti Singh

It lends the book a very dramatic kickstart. Mixing registers of hagiography, history and biography in one torrent of possessive emotion, the writer-translator steps into the inner recesses of Peero, creating in the process her own ‘Peero’. In the subsequent formal extended ‘Introduction’, Peero is heralded as the first Punjabi woman poet, a title which, for the time being, may hold. Still, if the maturity of her verses is any yardstick, it is difficult to believe that she did not have able, wo


Reviewed by: Akshaya Kumar

By Satya Mohanty

The books that came my way this time have filled me with a sense of hope that Indian poetry in English continues to ask difficult questions and has been able to resist the silencing of voices that one increasingly witnesses. It is not easy to write in an environment where one begins to feel stifled; and maybe it is in such moments in history that poets have emerged with renewed urgency. The collections included in this combined review range from coming down hard on rigid ideas to entering a world of nostalgia and softness, from confronting the forces that threaten to unmake us as a people, to grappling with issues of identity and one’s place in the larger world.


Reviewed by: Semeen Ali

By K. Hanumantha Reddy. Translated from the original Telugu by the author

‘A Few Announcements!’ brings out the agony, anger and will power of the insulted and the humiliated to struggle for freedom. They seek no mercy. ‘We are untamed horses with iron jaws and wings. We submit to no reins. We fly away with caves and sell them to the man of old goods… Many will come to our songs, enraptured by our battles against the adversities that won’t let us speak for ourselves, eat our food, or shake our hands with ourselves’ (p. 52).


Reviewed by: J Ravindranath

By Kiran Desai

Indeed, the consistency with which the novel enwraps us in the mist of its world lies, paradoxically, in its very inconsistency. Not all sentences march to the same rhythm; paragraphs and thoughts wander, and characters do not inevitably resolve along expected trajectories. Yet everyone, in their varied way, carries a shimmering knowledge of life; everyone is granted something sharp, something infused with mysticism, to say. A melancholic patriarch, Manav, touches upon the core of the matter when he advises Sunny to abandon the certainties of the West and go straight to the mystics to understand ‘who you should have become instead of the person that you are’


Reviewed by: Nikhil Kumar

By Carlos Tamilavan. Translated from the original Tamil by Gita Rajan Thornbird,

That said, almost all the Indian characters in the novel are given supernatural powers at some point in their narrative lives. Chandran’s mother is said to have possessed the power to detect fire accidents until she was twelve. Vijaya takes Chandran to a cave and performs an occult sexual ritual that helps her conceive a child. A Polish character Chandran dreams up in vivid detail gives him hitherto unknown information about Lydia’s brother. It is the casual indifference of these characters to all these incredible events that makes the novel truly magical realist.


Reviewed by: Ramakrishnan V

By D. Ravikumar. Translated from the original Tamil by V. Ramakrishnan

In ‘Un-Timely’, a woman who is granted one final day with her lover before death separates them, treats mortality as a boundary briefly permeable to grief, and this is narrated as a matter of fact rather than as fantasy. ‘Zha, the Unique Letter’ turns the device toward the state, imagining a government banning a Tamil letter outright, its bureaucratic plainness exposing how power echoes through speech. The translator clarifies in a note that the letter ‘zha’, which once alluded to the liberation struggle for eezham in Sri Lanka,


Reviewed by: K Samuel Moses Srinivas

By Razia Sajjad Zaheer. Translated from the original Urdu by Saba Mahmood Bashir

A positive spirit pervades most of the stories, with the characters facing and overcoming their difficulties with the help of others. Even when there are notes of bitterness and fear, for instance, in the first story about the fear left behind as the legacy of the Partition, or in another story, a courtesan’s anger at the double standards employed by the bourgeois world, the climax of the stories is usually positive with a message of hope. Therefore, it is a bit of a surprise to read the last story in the collection, which is about the harsh reality of the life of a woman who does not know her place—she wants to be educated and tries to educate herself—but the story ends with her husband destroying her books and with her pouring kerosene over herself and burning herself to death.


Reviewed by: Shefali Jha

By Perumal Murugan. Translated from the original Tamil by V. Iswarya

Such a setting recurs in his novels. Many of his students hail from the ‘rock bottom of society’ (p. 108) with non-literate parents for whom making ends meet takes urgent precedence over getting higher education. Fear of the English language haunts many of his students. Their inadequate command over it seems insurmountable to them because the department of English in colleges is either under-staffed or lacks well-trained teaching staff. The instance illustrates the shortcoming of ethno-centric medium of instruction in Tamil Nadu but also resembles various linguistic contexts where asmita (identity) built on the so-called first language—such as Odia—stymies the mobility of the disadvantaged students in a globalized world. Institutional failure to provide resources for competency in the English language reinforces caste,


Reviewed by: Purnachandra Naik

By Shyam Manohar. Translated from the original Marathi by Jerry Pinto

As a short novella, however, it dragged and dragged and dragged till the dialogues—as repetitive as in real life—started spinning in my head. My copy had some misaligned pages—while pages 81 to 95 were missing altogether, the pagination didn’t just jump. Instead, the pages between 67 and 80 were repeated in random combinations, several times, and I didn’t even realize it—the entire structure being so similar—dialogues in a loop going nowhere, a sense of overwhelming ennui, the pointlessness of everything… if that was what the writer intended to convey, he succeeded, but left me, the reader, with the sense that the book was quite pointless.
It is of course possible that the Marathi prose sparkled; the English text was simply prosaic. And while I have frequently felt thrilled at the inventiveness of writers from Arundhati Roy to Zadie Smith, realizing how


Reviewed by: Bharati Jagannathan

By Ashokamitran. Translated from the original Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström

Jamuna and Chaya are sisters and residents of the street, as are Teacher Amma, the landlady, and assorted other characters. They navigate their way through the water drought according to their individual sensibilities. Teacher Amma bears the brunt of an abusive husband and a cheerless home, and yet has the empathy to offer Jamuna a shoulder to cry on when Chaya says she can’t take it anymore and moves out to a hostel.


Reviewed by: Malini Seshadri

By T.M.C. Raghunathan. Translated from the original Tamil by Prabha Sridevan

Raghunathan, while delving deeper into Sister Nivedita’s advice to Bharati, also brings out the fact that Swami Vivekananda was ‘the patriot of all patriots and the father of Indian nationalism’ whose impact was felt not only in Bengal but in far-away Tamil Nadu too: on VOC, Bharati and Subramania Siva, among others. A chunk of this chapter also deals with Sister Nivedita’s role in the Indian struggle for Independence. When Bharati met Sister Nivedita, they were all dejected after the Partition of Bengal. And then her fiery speech to him was the ‘sun that dispelled the darkness of his soul’. Raghunathan goes on to the role played by the Bhagavad Gita in the freedom struggle,


Reviewed by: Ahana Lakshmi

By Kanwar Mohinder Singh Bedi ‘Sahar’. Translated from the original Urdu by Kamna Prasad

Bedi along with some important citizens and police officials went from door to door, requesting the occupants to vacate the premises. Several members of the committee, unable to tolerate the abuses hurled at them, gave up, but Bedi with two others persisted and, in a few months, ‘almost all the residential houses were vacated’. A second incident involved someone who had fled his home in Karol Bagh during the riots and wanted to recover the valuables he had left behind. Bedi accompanied him to his house which was then occupied by a Sikh refugee. On being apprised of the matter, the Sikh immediately called his family out and told the claimant:


Reviewed by: Bodh Prakash

By Shanta Gokhale

They hurt one another too often. Not always because they are cruel but because they lack courage, are slaves of convention, or simply because they understand too late. For instance, in ‘The Quilt’, Mugdha is betrayed by her Brahmin lover, Vijay, who gives in to his caste-conscious mother and marries Avantika, the woman she has chosen. Heartbroken, Mugdha still attends their wedding reception and gifts them a handmade quilt—the one she had stitched for her own imagined wedding night with Vijay. Vijay discovers that Avantika has another man in her life. For Avantika, their marriage can simply provide a respectable cover under which both can continue with their parallel lives. A shaken Vijay returns to Mugdha, hoping to revive their relationship,


Reviewed by: Umesh Kumar

By Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge, now ninety, tells a story to Lucy Barton. What starts as a simple memory about Olive’s mother turns into a moving reflection on lost love. The story focuses on Olive’s mother, Sara, whose young romance ended because of class differences and social pressures. Years later, a discovery shows that neither lover ever truly forgot the other. The idea of ‘living with ghosts’ is also a key theme in the novel. In Strout’s work, these ghosts are memories, disappointments, missed chances and past relationships.


Reviewed by: Parvin Sultana

Edited and translated by Kannan M., Rebecca Whittington, D. Senthil Babu and David C. Buck

The story’s achievement lies not in its action but in its rhythm. Repeated words, ‘Ready…Ready…Ready’ and interrupted thoughts recreate the body’s own apprehension of danger. Rain accompanies the narrative with uncanny persistence. If at one moment, ‘The rain was blessing them’, elsewhere ‘the sky was looking at us with thunderclaps of laughter’. Nature is represented neither as consoling nor as condemning. Instead, it witnesses. Landscapes are not sceneries but archives in which human histories are absorbed.


Reviewed by: Anupama Nayar CV

By Tara Douglas and Jatwang Wangsa

Many of these stories shed light on the origin of prevalent social hierarchies and fraught relationships between neighbouring villages such as ‘The Migration Story of Jagan Village’. But some of these stories also offer insights into cultural practices such as that of headhunting, and the prestige and honour associated with it. It is also striking to observe that women are largely absent, occupy a secondary status or remain silent participants in these stories. ‘The Story of Yeast’ reveals how women of the Wancho tribe came to be accorded the privilege of brewing wine and how men are forbidden from even touching the ‘tonkhah’ used for the fermentation process, but any kind of privilege is undercut by the revelation that women were bestowed with this privilege so that they could have some control over men at least in an inebriated state. Another migration story, ‘The Story of Our Village and the Village in Myanmar’


Reviewed by: Shibani Phukan

By Arupa Patangia Kalita. Translated from the original Assamese by Ranjita Biswas

They occupy a liminal space with no social position. Kalita’s powerful images and metaphors convey the devastating loneliness and agony of Durgi and her son, Laba. Durgi hallucinates about women like her floating over the tea bushes with vague sounds coming from them—‘Were they singing, or weeping, or angry?’ She could neither enter the respectable Assamese society, nor her own community living in the labour lines; and stepping into matrimony with a white man was unthinkable. While her son Laba, treated like an untouchable in a North Guwahati household, enters ‘a cave of loneliness’,


Reviewed by: Jayashree Borah

By Sunil Gangopadhyay. Translated from the original Bengali by Chitrita Banerji

In the very first story ‘The Drought’ we are shown how eight reporters going from the city to report on a particular event for a company promotion are stranded midway in the Chhota Nagpur region when their car breaks down. They put up at a guest house, drink, and lazily while away their time talking and debating endlessly over different issues and have the best rice in that drought-stricken area for lunch. The debate about what they should do with the surplus food makes for interesting reading and the way in which a journalist is grappling with moral fatigue in a drought-stricken land leaves us awestruck.


Reviewed by: Somdatta Mandal

By Nirmala Thomas. Translated from the original Malayalam by Radhika P. Menon

Self-talks help Aswini get a clearer focus on her random thoughts. She voices her opinions to others without inhibition. For instance, she doesn’t care to concede and agree with everything that her friends tell her anymore. She helps Vidya, one of her friends, in finding a very crucial answer to her query about life and love. Aswini is not a weak character from the beginning, but she becomes stronger in the process. Her world is turned upside down when her meticulous timetable is disrupted with the onset of illness. After she starts to depend on herself more than friends and family, she grows sturdier in mind.


Reviewed by: Nithya Mariam John

By Raj Sekhar Basu

It is so striking that the militarist metaphor used in this campaign enters the world when the RF funds the global war on malaria, using DDT. DDT was devastating environmentally as shown by Rachel Carson in The Silent Spring, published in 1962. The production of DDT was dependent on oil produced by the Rockefeller industries. The RF supported the discredited Khanna Study, on which India’s family planning programme was based;


Reviewed by: Mohan Rao

By Maia Sutherland

The author’s claim that this diet is a panacea for all ills is however hard to accept. Fasting is an important component of the diet under consideration. The author can’t stop waxing eloquent about fasting which she, her mother and her brother have done successfully and for a long time.


Reviewed by: Jaya Krishnamachari