For the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, as Indian diasporic writing carved a niche for itself in the publishing and academic world, the rubric was used as a fairly monolithic one, encompassing a range of what many seem as distinctive conventions and characteristics.
2008
The City of Love is a fascinating novel ranged around the central metaphor of multiple journeys that traverse the globe and the inner reaches of the mind and also recreates in fine ethnographic detail the era of colonial expansion of the early years of the sixteenth century that brought East and West face to face with each other.
In this collection of nine short stories Nalini Jones conjures up two worlds that her predominantly Roman Catholic characters seek to explain to each other and to themselves.
Lived Heritage, Shared spaces is a book about courtyard houses in Goa. It is a very personal and detailed effort from an author who was born and lived in Portugal but is of Goan descent.
This book offers a poetic journey into the art of the Pallava dynasty, celebrating its artistic triumph in inaugurating lithic traditions in southern India. The Pallavas, as is well known, came into prominence in the late 6th century through a burst of activity recorded in inscriptions and art monuments.
The book on Krishen Khanna, designed in a large format, reflects the scale of promotional activities in support of Contemporary Indian artists, one is witnessing these days. Logistically it is jointly published by a leading Indian and a leading British publisher.
Shakespeare has proved to be not only a man for all seasons but for all countries. In India his admirers are limited not only to English literature classrooms but are found everywhere among all classes, and he has become a part of popular culture. His plays have been translated into several Indian languages and are widely staged.
Few recent books on Indian film offer a range of analysis as extensive and insightful as Ranjani Mazumdar’s Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. True to its title, Bombay Cinema offers a new set of ideas and a fresh dynamic—the city—to think seriously about how and why we continue to watch popular Hindi cinema.
Invariably, the demand for water has increased in different sectors of the economy which has led to conflict between the sectors, between river basins, within the river basins, between states within a country and between countries.
This is a slim and easily readable volume tracing the economic history of the princely State of Hyderabad from 1875 to 1948. This is the period in which the Asaf Jahi dynasty ruled the state.
Redefining Family Law in India is a fresh look at family law, independent of religious personal law. The essays by scholars across disciplines honour Professor B. Sivaramayya
Gayatri Reddy’s book provides an important and thought provoking ethnographic study of a community of hijras in Hyderabad. The lives of hijras has so often been spoken about in narrow terms and confined to marginalized spaces.
The long process of decolonization in the Indian subcontinent shortly after the end of World War II brought freedom to many Asian and African countries also generated a variety of social and political tensions in most postcolonial societies, exposing their political and administrative systems to a multitude of stresses and strains.
When on fieldwork in Jhabua district in Madhya Pradesh last winter, I was introduced to the local MLA, an extremely articulate RSS activist and ideologue. He was clearly the most dynamic of the local activists engaged in the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in the area and ran a boarding school at his own expense where poor girls and boys could both study and stay.
Community and Nation consist of ten seminal essays written by Papiya Ghosh who is sadly no more with us.* Thus this review is a tribute to a distinguished scholar. Written in the course of her post-doctoral research, they have been competently put together with an introduction by Biswamoy Pati.
This study of texts relating to Padmini, legendary queen of Mewar, discusses a remarkable range of material in Avadhi, Bangla, English, Rajasthani, Sanskrit and Urdu, from Jayasi’s sixteenth-century tale of love to drama and histories produced during the nationalist movement in Bengal.
Eric Dinerstein’s book Tigerland and Other Unintended Destinations provides a vivid account of some incredible wild places and magical creatures that inhabit our planet. Tigerland engages the reader’s attention from the first chapter and keeps you riveted until the end.
Karnataka has been above the national average in indicators of income, human development governance and many others. But it does shine better, if a road map is given as a quality reference document.
Since the beginning of colonial expansion in the late eighteenth century a wealth of material has been generated by colonial administration and scholars. This documentation has often formed the base material of the writings of future historians, and often provides us the only non-vernacular account of local practices and beliefs.
Agra Summit and Beyond a collection of essays, interviews and personal remembrances of the Agra summit, undoubtedly an important event in Indo-Pak relations, in the recent years. Khalid Mahmood covers the road to Agra and the events that took place during the summit meeting in a chronological sequence on who said what and on which date. His essay also covers major opinions published in leading dailies.