Monthly Archives: July 2017

Today India is home to about 1,500 tigers. A century ago, sportsmen killed that many every year. One Rajput, Fateh Singh, bagged 375 himself, not to mention 991 leopards, over his hunting career. The populations, conditions, and cultural meanings of wildlife in India have changed fundamentally since the heyday of the Raj.

Of Birds and Birdsong serves the purpose of a reference book, text book and field guide without being one. It is lay person-friendly. And it is useful for the nature specialist.

Navina Jafa wears many hats. Classical dancer, academician, ‘heritage consultant’, are terms associated with her many roles, but perhaps she is best known for ‘Jafa Heritage Walks’, an exercise in what she describes as ‘academic cultural tourism’.

I always have two open books on the round antique table in my hallway, chosen for their illustrations and subjects.

There has been a raging debate on the nature and scope of doing anthropology in contemporary times. The debate is more precisely about the politics and poetics inherent in the practice of ethnography contributed by the likes of Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, George Marcus among others. It has posed an imperative for anthropologists in the contemporary world to explore new methods and new sights with a fair sensibility toward the politics of writing culture.

After A. Svechin’s work entitled Strategy published in 1926, Sokolovskiy’s collection first published in the summer of 1962 was the most comprehensive work on Soviet military strategy. The second and third editions were published in the Soviet Union in August 1963 and March 1968 respectively…

It is difficult to pigeonhole this book as a ‘philosophical tract’, a ‘prophetic discourse’, a ‘journey into the human mind’, a ‘guide for human survival’, a ‘spiritual treatise’. It is an amalgam of all these and more. Embellished with profuse quotations from various sources, modern and traditional, spiritual and scientific, the volume reaches out to those who are already uneasy about the way we on this earth are progressing. C.B. Rao as he is fondly called, an Indian Administrative Service Officer, has not allowed the iron of long years in the bureaucracy to enter his soul or stifle creative thinking. If this sounds like high praise from a fellow bureaucrat, let the discerning reader decide if he is correct in the use of such adjectives!

The colonial encounter has thrown up a serious existential and intellectual challenge to the traditional Hindu in the nineteenth century.

In 1997 Partha Chatterjee stated eloquently that ‘there is no promised land of modernity outside the network of power. Hence one cannot be for or against modernity; one can only devise strategies for coping with it.’

To argue that banking cannot be done with the poor because they do not have collateral is the same as arguing that men cannot fly because they do not have wings.* – – Muhammad Yunus

The past decade has seen the introduction of a series of rights-based legislations in India, which the author calls a ‘veritable rights revolution’, with the enactment of the Right to Information Act (in 2005), the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (in 2005), the Forest Rights’ Act (in 2006) and the Right to Education Act (in 2009).

Let us begin by posing a simple question: have contemporary western democracies ceased to interrogate their political (democratic) processes? Not quite, perhaps.

At first glance, one cannot help but overlook the idiom ‘never judge a book by its cover’, and, quite rightly so. If the title of Toward a Geopolitics of Hope intrigues, the provocative stance and ideas presented throughout the tome do not fail to deliver either.

The feminist perspective of Pakistan is one that recognizes and explains how a nation is created through the intersection of ideologies and structures of patriarchy and how these mould the identities as well as relations between genders, between people and communities.

There has been a plethora of books on Afghanistan in the last few years; un-fortunately, most of them have been written by Europeans and Americans.

Apart from the nuclear strategies of the two erstwhile superpowers during the acme of the Cold War, the only other nuclear strategy that seems to have attracted the attention of the analysts of the security and strategic affairs may arguably be the nuclear strategy of India and Pakistan.

This fascinating book is a detailed study of the Indian ‘career’ of the Italian Orientalist, Angelo de Gubernatis (1840-1913). It is based on a systematic exploration of archival material on this subject available in Florence.

Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India for the most part appears as a straight-forward account of Bengal indigo (indigofera tinctorium)—the natural dye that could colour cloth in intense blue.

Just when one thought that the theme of Europeans in India during Mughal rule had been nearly exhausted, Pius Malekanda-thil’s book came for review. The author, how-ever, seems to have produced new wine from an old bottle exploring various dimensions of Portuguese activities in India.

Whiting speaks of the Chinese calculus of deterrence ‘as an attempt to infer what general strategy underlies persistent patterns of behaviour aimed at persuading a perceived opponent that costs of his continuing conflictual activity will eventually prove unacceptable to him because of the Chinese response…