Monthly Archives: October 2017

On August 9, 1945, Hiroko Tanaka’s life changed forever. As she rejoiced at the thought of her future with Konrad, her German lover, a mushroom cloud enveloped Nagasaki. Hiroko survived, the design on her silk kimono burning its imprint on her back.

Tash Aw, the Malaysian novelist living in England has been making waves. His The Harmony Silk Factory won the Whitbread Award for a first novel, and also the Costa Award. Incidentally he was reported to have been paid an advance of 500,000 Sterling for that one, though he has denied it.

The languorous beginning of this 500-page novel complements the aura of indolence that also marks its unnamed first person narrator.

Several years ago when I was still a green, young and aspiring editor, Ravi Dayal, then editorial head of the Oxford University Press, gave me my first book to edit.

Epistemologies of Elegance is a book comprising twenty-one ghazals of Ghalib that are favourites of Azra Raza and Sarah Suleri Goodyear. Raza is, surprisingly, a research scientist and cancer specialist who was born in Karachi and now lives in Manhattan.

Diary writing is a very personal and spontaneous recollection of and reflection on everyday life events. A true diary is never written with the intention of publishing it and only rarely assumes importance to people beyond one’s immediate periphery.

The book is the South Asian edition of Geopolitical Exotica: Tibet in Western Imagination which attempts to bring together representations of Tibet and the study of international relations.

The work under review is a carefullyresearched resource on the Tibetan movement in exile, focusing in the main on the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA)—for all intents and purposes, the Tibetan government-in-exile—based in Dharmasala in Himachal Pradesh, India and headed by the 14th Dalai Lama.

The story of Burmese resistance to military junta’s oppressive rule and its democratic struggle has been chronicled by many scholars, journalists and activists from different perspectives and preferences.

As a student of ‘ethno-nationalist’ conflicts in South Asia, it was with a sense of awe and challenge that I watched Nepal’s Maoist revolutionary upsurge unsettle conventional conflict theories.

Until just a few years ago history had still not escaped the overpowering influence of Leopold van Ranke, the great German historian of the nineteenth century.

Joint studies of conflictual issues by the protagonists is always a useful exercise in conflict resolution. This little volume, was sponsored by the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, Delhi and has been authored by two Pakistani scholars,

Although small, the book under review encompasses everything one wants to know about the Sri Lankan ethnic crisis. It traces the historical development of ethnic and national consciousness in Sri Lanka,

Liberalism is the most desired popular ideology for governance. Yet, the task of achieving it is not easy. The experience is that states enjoying democratic credentials often pursue illiberal policies and behave in an undemocratic manner.

Civil societies are increasingly playing a significant role in the politics of the developing world. It is known in different countries by different names—non-governmental organizations, citizen sector, independent sector, initiative sector, social economy sector and voluntary sector.

The Northeast has come to occupy a pivotal position in India’s foreign policy as a future ‘gateway to Asia’; yet despite a policy reorientation towards the Northeast, the region continues to suffer from festering low intensity armed conflict.

Noted Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid speaking of the problem nearer home, says that: ‘The Pakistani Taliban movement is turning into a multiethnic movement, not limited to Pashtuns;

This book, in the shape of an edited volume of fourteen papers presented in the two-day seminar organized by the Department of Defence and Strategic Studies of the University of Pune, has attempted to address the various issues of internal security in terms of the need for evolving appropriate ‘security policy’, particularly in the context of ‘political, economic and socio-cultural dimensions’.

If the original tradition of India is contained in the Vedas, the Vedanta, epics, Puranas and the Kathasaritsagar (“Ocean of Stories”), its Buddhist corpus is the Tripitaka. In a way, the counterpart of the Kathasaritsagar is the Jatakas consisting of 547 stories of past births of the Buddha as Bodhisatva (‘enlightened being’) in animal and human form.

The author argues that two significant aspects Elwin’s advocacy of protectionism for tribal people have contributed to the construction of an anti-modern tribal identity. First it was based on an ecological romanticism that glorified the past and held that “tribal people had been living in harmony with nature since ancient times (p xv)….