Monthly Archives: July 2017

Though Political Science is a contested discipline there is near unanimity about its basic foundational structure.

This is yet another book that obsesses and agonizes over China’s rise, how the logic of strategy will dictate the choices China makes and the responses its actions are likely to evoke. China’s political leaders are said to have little agency to dictate this future course though, ‘trapped’ as they are ‘by the paradoxes of the logic of strategy’.

The Peace of Westphalia 1648 laid out the ideals of the state, the Westphalian ideal, which was only realized three centuries later with the end of the colonial era and national self-determination as the sole principle of the political organization of the world. The world became populated by bounded national, social, economic and cultural communities.

This is a hilarious coming of age story set in Madras of the 1970s. The author obviously belongs to an illustrious family—and is an illustrator, cartoonist, graphic designer and writer, all of which you can see the protagonist of the book Gopi has the potential for becoming later in life.

We are fast moving towards an era when we look to admire tigers in far­off forests, enjoy the antics of monkeys in zoos and fish in glass bowls.

When asked to review the book Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by The Ramayana, I was initially quite excited. The reasons were many, but primary was the fact that due to the interest of my four-year old daughter in Indian mythology, I had been reading the Ramayana almost every night with her, telling her the story of ‘Ram-Sita’.

The work of Professor T.N. Madan is in the league of classical sociology in India, which echoes the issues that heralded the Lucknow School of Sociology in mid-twentieth century. Though there has been considerable discomfort in dubbing it a school of thought Lucknow did play a key role in the early sociology of India.

Chamars have emerged as an important political category capable of influencing larger electoral consequences in North Indian politics. It has been possible due to the ongoing struggle and movement in over a century inside the group.

As the struggle for self-determination and against oppression is being waged in Central and East India, this book is a timely contribution. It is a useful compilation of the different policy briefs and declarations by indigenous people, United Nations and international finance institutions (World Bank and Asian Development Bank) on the rights of indigenous people in the past two decades.

What is the relationship between the public histories of societies and movements, and the personal stories of individuals who participated in them, shaped their direction, and witnessed their transformation? Is there an aspect of history which we can access only through tracking the trajectories of an individual’s thinking and action? These questions are particularly pertinent in the case of political movements that possess a strong ethical orientation.

This interesting if hugely controversial story of Arjun Singh’s life takes off with a rather colourful phrase: ‘It all started when the first grain of sand fell into the crucible of time on 5 November 1930, the date on which I came into this world.’

‘E- governance’ is now commonly referred to as the fourth wave of administrative reforms. In India as well, the verve of E-Governance based initiatives, which began in the late 1990s continue to be seen as the primary mechanism for improving service delivery.

This handbook deals with a wide range of India’s economic development experiences on poverty, industrialization, displacement, demography, institutional reforms, macroeconomic reforms, sectoral reforms and issues related to globalization, besides giving a sketch of India’s development experience at the macro-level both from colonial and post-Independence periods.

The book under review brings together fifty-one book reviews and essays written by A. G. Noorani over the past four decades.

The foundations of Independent India’s Foreign Policy are contained in Article 51 of the Constitution which stipulates that the state shall endeavour to (a) promote international peace and security (b) maintain just and honourable relations between nations (c) foster respect for international law and treaty obligations in the dealings of organized peoples with one another; and (d) encourage settlement of international disputes by arbitration.

This collection of nine essays brings analytical reflections from as many Jammu and Kashmir scholars.

This evocative book takes us back through a time-machine, into the world in which the expatriate community, mainly western, lived in the quintessentially Chinese Peking in the early 20th century, immediately following the 1900 Boxer Uprising, right up to the 1949 triumph of the Communist regime and China’s Liberation. It provides a neat counterpoint to the flood of recent writing on China, showing us through the eyes of foreign residents the real distance the country has traversed.

Napoleon Bonaparte remarked that an army marches on its stomach. Military history bears several examples of how lack of food and fodder resulted in the disintegration of victorious armies. Napoleon’s Grande Armee disintegrated while approaching Moscow in the winter of 1812 due to lack of food and fodder for men and horses.

The book is an effort by a journalist to unravel the complex political and social factors involved in the re-emergence of the Gorkhaland Movement in the State of West Bengal, after a period of nineteen years.

Arguably not many works of history on modern Bihar were published earlier with the exception of Arvind N. Das’s Agrarian Unrest (Delhi: Manohar, 1983) and Vinita Damodaran’s Broken Promises (Delhi: OUP, 1992), the well-researched three-volume work of K.K. Datta, Freedom Movement in Bihar (1957), and the multi-volume compilation of essays in the Comprehensive History of Bihar (1976).