Monthly Archives: July 2017

Kanti Bajpai and Harsh V. Pant have edited this book for the benefit of graduate students studying Indian foreign policy, those teaching the subject as well as the general reader interested in its key aspects.

Anyone who has asked an Indian Army officer why it has got bogged down in a bloody quagmire in the North East, why it made such a hash of the operation in Sri Lanka, or why the lives of so many jawans were squandered in Kargil, hears the same answer: ‘We fought with one hand tied behind our backs’. Apart from being hard to do unless you have a tail or other appendage to which the hand can be tied, that excuse absolves many sins. That is also the first of many limitations in this book.

The discipline of International Relations in India, although vibrant and growing, has suffered from the straitjacket of having as its only points of reference, IR Theories originating in the western hemisphere.

2013 has been a good year for law related publications in India, with a clutch of high quality titles from some of the leading publishing houses in the country. Among these, Nitya Ramakrishnan’s In Custody: Law, Impunity and Prisoner Abuse in South Asia would count among the more significant ones.

Coalition Politics and Democratic Consolidation in Asia highlights the experience of four Asian countries, namely India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Japan with coalition politics.

The eastern part of the Indian subcontinent hosts the confluence of two mighty river systems of the subcontinent, the Ganga and the Brahmaputra, known as the Padma and Jamuna in Bangladesh respectively.

Since the path-breaking work in the 1990s on women abducted during the Partition violence in divided Punjab, at least two generations of much needed scholarship have built upon and extended the literary archive of the years of trauma and displacement that followed the Partition of 1947.

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Professor of Asian History at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, has earlier enriched our understanding of South Asian history by his ground-breaking research on the complex relationship between caste, society and politics.

Is Indian Civilization a Myth? is a collection of articles by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, most of which have been previously published in Outlook, India Today and the London Review of Books.

It was not so long ago that Mohandas Gandhi was, at least to the academic world, a largely forgotten figure.

In economic matters judgements ba­sed on statistically tested hypotheses are surely to be preferred to hunches or guesses however clever. Where how­ever ‘facts’ derived through statistical analysis fly in the face of what is widely believed to be the reality, before procee­ding to accept them without reservations one…

In the very first paragraph of the first chapter of his book the author claims that the Arab community has played a significant role both in the collapse of the old international order and in setting in train the quest for a new one. While this categorical statement may sound chauvinistic to some, one cannot but agree with him on this point…

Indo-U.S. relations have followed a turbulent course. The appreciation of American support to India’s Indepen­dence struggle was soon dissipated by the U.S. arming of Pakistan following their Mutual Aid Treaty of 1954. There­after U.S. sympathy for India, in the wake of the Chinese aggression…

Social history as an academic specia­lization is quite recent and in India it is still a largely unexplored field. While in the last few years some critical re-exa­mination has been done of the role of Raja Rammohan Roy as a modernizer…

This is a study of British and Indian policy-makers in the penultimate years of the raj. The British, both in London and Delhi, could not see that the days of Bri­tish rule were numbered and planned on the basis of staying on in India indefini­tely by utilizing the Princes and the Muslim communal elements against…

Delia Davin’s study of the rise of the working woman in China is a sober, factual, historical account giving insights of special interest to us in India of an almost identical system of social cons­traints upon women, but in a wholly different social setting. We never had bound feet to cripple a woman’s useful­ness and productivity…

The Remembered Village illustrates most persuasively M.N. Srinivas’s central concerns. First, a healthy respect for the rural person, his life style, his know¬ledge. While social scientists and ad-ministrators are constantly figuring out programmes for rural folk on the assumption that they…

Some years back, I found myself attending the farewell function of a sarkaari officer, a bureaucrat. The usual white-cloth covered chairs, the podium with a small shaky wood table, a vase of short stemmed officious looking desi roses and a red carpet on the stage. Like the tradition of speech delivery goes, the speeches started from the junior-most officers and slowly moved upwards, in peculiar babu English.

The two volumes of Sahitya Akademi’s publication The Best of Indian Literature 1957-2007 is a must have collection for any connoisseur or even someone who is interested in Indian literature of the post-Independence period.

In Season 6 of the Game of Thrones, an American epic fantasy television drama series, an adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin’s series of fantasy novels, one of the characters Lord Baelish poignantly remarks, The realm You know what the realm is? Its a thousand blades of Aegons enemies, A story we agreed to tell each other over and over till we forget it was a lie