Monthly Archives: October 2017

Mexico City is among the most distant places from India where Indian history and culture are taught and studied. The Centre for Asian and African Studies, part of El Colegio de México which was founded as the ‘Casa de España’ in 1938 with the purpose to offer a place of study to Spanish intellectuals who had fled the civil war in their country, is the largest and most prestigious of its kind in Latin America.

Govardhanram Madhavram Tripathi (1855- 1907) wrote and published four parts of his novel Sarasvatichandra between 1887 and 1901. For over a century it has remained a canonical text of Gujarati literature, unmatched in popularity and influence. Govardhanram chose the novel form not for its aesthetic possibilities but because it allowed shaping the minds of his people.

Twenty-two year old ‘Mr Knight, Merchant’ caught a glimpse of the Empire’s underbelly even as he stepped off the steamer that brought him to Bombay on 8 October, 1847.

The year 2007 was celebrated in India as the 150th anniversary of the Great Uprising of 1857 by the state and the community of Indian historians with much fanfare. Seminars were held all over the country to celebrate the event.

Alice Albinia’s book Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River brings to life almost all major episodes in the long history of human settlements along the river Indus. The river rises on the northern slopes of Mt. Kailash in the Gangdise range of the Himalayas in the region of Tibet.

The book, a narrative of the growth of chemical sciences during the colonial period, is authored by a trained analytical chemist whose work presents an insider’s view on the subject.

Third Frame: Literature, Culture and Society, a new quarterly journal seeks, according to its editors, to provide a platform for ‘voices and concerns from developing societies’.

The knowledge of the universe in the social sciences can be divided into two exclusive spheres—normative and creative. Both provide an understanding of the history, economy, culture and politics of existing societies.

Poetry, lest it should sublimate into a rarefied expression beyond the possibilities of participation, needs to be recovered from the excesses of soulful profundities. If the ‘novel’ de-escalates the epic imagination, poetry in its march in the domain of the secular, too peels off the sedimentations of sublimity.

Edna Fernandes, a British Indian journalist, has written about the Kerala Jews ‘charting their rise and fall, from their heyday to a decline in the twentieth century and the twenty-first century denouement’.

Fieldwork in a ‘total institution’ is perhaps among the most challenging sites for ethnographic exploration and Suvarna Cherukuri’s attempt to represent the lives of women in a prison in India, is commendable for taking up this challenge.

This collection of 17 articles (including the introduction) is a must read for feminists, law reformers, lawyers and judges. It compiles a range of perspectives on the social and juridical frameworks of rape in complex and yet accessible ways.

This book is an outcome of a seminar on the National Policy for Empowerment of Women, organized by the Sarojini Naidu Centre for Women Studies and the Department of Social Work, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. It comprises twelve essays which are organized around four broad themes of women’s empowerment, women’s work, religion and health.

Wandana Sonalkar’s timely and elegant translation of Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon’s account of the Ambedkar movement and its key women activists, Amhihi Itihas Ghadavila—first published by Stree Uvac in Marathi in 1989—extends the frame of a masculinist dalit history which is typically narrated as ‘history before and after Ambedkar’.

Kerala has, since the 1970s, assumed an undisputed position for being a ‘model’ of Third World development. The pillars of this model are a well-rehearsed litany—favourable sex ratios, high literacy, high life expectancy, low child mortality, and, yes, . . . low fertility. Till the 1970s,

This book under review draws upon a wealth of talent to throw light on an institution that even as it is familiar remains been little examined. This book explores literary and cultural representations of the Indian family to examine the evolution of the Indian family from ancient times, through the colonial period to the present.

In the brahmanical patriarchal scheme, the husband is the harbinger of brahmanical patriarchal ideology; an ally; one who puts into practice the patriarchal formulations of the texts in the actual laboratory of human experience—the grha.

The aim of the book is to explicate the moorings and development of social, economic and political thought prior to the institutionalization of social science disciplines at universities in India.

The defining moment of Pop art is in the 1960s, the materials in question for analyses are film, television, magazines, billboard advertising. These question the elitism and insularity of modern art.

In this contribution to Indian Cultural Studies Pramod Nayar focuses on those intersections of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture where the hegemony of one kind of public culture is established; an aspect that has informed the contours of cultural identity since Independence. Strategies of exclusion and inclusion ensure that paradoxically both ‘high’ (museum) and ‘popular/mass’ (conventional cinema, comic book) culture are in fact working towards maintaining the status quo and the idea of a pan-Indian identity.