Monthly Archives: August 2017

This book, as noted in its preface, is ‘an Evaluation Report on the Elections and Voting Behaviour Studies conducted in India since the first general elections’ commissioned by the Indian Council of Social Science Research. It surveys and codifies this wide ranging, vast and dis­parate literature and includes the results of a survey of scholars concerning…

For most of the twentieth century, two countries dominated the scene: the United States and Russia (till 1991 as the erstwhile Soviet Union). Students of mod-ern history, political science and international relations, and indeed people more generally…

India’s foreign policy has been, and continues to be, driven by a host of factors which are not easy to delineate. India’s relations with the external world have often been driven by personalities-individual proclivities, orien-tations and worldview. History and geography have played their part in varying tones…

The (re)emergence of China over the last couple of decades as an economic powerhouse with significant military and technological prowess has a direct bearing on India in particular and the global order in general. The re-emergence of China and India in particular has resulted…

Tariq Ali is a gifted writer but can hardly rank among the most coherent political thinkers of our times. Revolu­tion is not a subject on which any work, howsoever monumental, can be said to be the last word, and the book under review is by no means monumental. It reads like a collection of booklets…

What is it about the lanes of Old Delhi that has every ‘authentic’ Dilliwalla preferring to live in their memories than in present-day Delhi? If only one had a time-machine, perhaps the mystery could be resolved. In the absence of such a mechanism, those of us who are bewitched by this city have only…

A renewed discussion over the histories of the Princely States in Colonial India has brought many interesting themes to the fore for some time now. While it is difficult to ascertain whether the subject itself has arrived in the mainstream of Indian historiography…

Empire’s Garden by Jayeeta Sharma is about the North Eastern province of Assam. The objective of the book was to show how a vast wilderness was transformed into a flourishing greenery of tea-plantation around which a colonial state was entrenched,…

The Andaman and Nicobar islands for all their remoteness have nevertheless been the subject of a number of books. Among the classics in ethnography is the study of the tribes of the islands by Radcliffe Brown and as ethnographical studies go it has yet to be replaced. The history of the islands, recorded…

The killing of Mallojula Koteshwar Rao, known as Kishenji, at the hands of counterinsurgency security forces in West Bengal’s West Midnapore district may be a setback to the Maoist movement but it gives no cause to rejoice… Over and above being a threat to security, the Maoist insurgency is a political question that needs political an-swers… His killing deprives the Maoist move-ment of a leader, but not the causes that sustain it…

Minorities and the State is a historical, analytical account of the relationship that has developed in the postcolonial period in Bengal, now comprising two regions, West Bengal in India and Bangla-desh. The province of Bengal was a central component of British colonial machina-tions in the Indian subcontinent.

Let me admit that I began reading this book from a position of considerable ignorance. As a political journalist, I have only followed environment movements from a hazy distance. What I do understand is politics, and a decade spent covering the emer-gence and consolidation of the Hindu right has convinced…

The image remains fresh to this day. Two young men in freshly starched kurta pyjamas enter the Balmiki colony. They know people there. I am sitting in a corner with a few young boys and girls, chatting with them about what was important in the early 1990s. I can’t remember what we were talking…

The title of this book might at first sight appear somewhat intriguing till one realizes that ‘Bombay’ is used by Nile Green as an adjective. At the same time this is not a study of some peculiar Bombay variant of Islam; rather, it tells the hitherto neglected story…

This is an excellent book, one which should be on the list of anybody interested in the question of the origins of the Mahayana. Studies of this issue have come a long way since 1907 when D.T. Suzuki, in his Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (1907) started with a set of premises about what the Mahayana should be and then tried to read back into the past from that to find its origins…

Historians have written about Delhi in authentic detail but it needed a writer for children to paint it in the seven colours of the rainbow. This is what Nita Berry, a freelance journalist and writer of fiction and non-fiction for children, has done…

Othappu does not exactly mean ‘The Scent of the Other Side’, as readers may tend to think, looking at the subtitle! It is a word to be found in the Malayalam Catholic Bible meaning ‘to stumble’ or ‘to falter’ from the straight way of the faith and to turn to evil ways (p. xx)…

Social change is an important subject in a society like ours which is both commit­ted to and is undergoing social change. Though study of this important subject has engaged sociologists and other social scientists for a long time, there has so far been no comprehensive treatment of the subject…

Abdul Rahman Siddiqi belongs to the rare, and now practically invisible, Dilliwallas who were born and brought up in Delhi. He belongs to the Dilli Punjabi Saudagran community which migrated to Delhi from Panipat during the reign of Shah Jahan, to settle as a trading community…

This book is a collection of research papers written by former graduate students and other close associates of Professor Zimmerman, an eminent sociologist who has done significant work in sociology, especially socio-cultural change in the rural-urban context, inter-group relations…