Monthly Archives: October 2017

In a literary career spanning over a decade, Goodnight and God Bless is Anita Nair’s first time as an essayist. According to Aldous Huxley, ‘…a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel.

Navtej Sana is a skillful story-teller. His narrative cunning was seen in his debut novel, ‘We Weren’t Lovers Like That”, published five years ago. And he seems to have chosen a promising story to tell – the life of Duleep Singh, the youngest son of the only successful Sikh emperor Ranjit Singh from his youngest wife Jindan.

Jammu and Kashmir today is a house divided. In 2008 as I write this review, there are processions in favour of land for Amarnath Yatris, being taken out in Jammu and counter-processions in Kashmir by Muslims. The shadow of violence has now been hanging over the Kashmir valley for nearly five decades.

For those who read ‘The Toda Tiger- Debates on Custom, Utility and Rights in Nature, South India 1820- 1843’ by Gunnel Cederlof in the 2005 publication called Ecological Nationalisms, this new book offers a more detailed and valuable narration of the establishment of colonial rule in the Nilgiri hills by a complex and simultaneous process of law making related to land rights and settlement of land claims.

This book brings together within its beautiful covers ten extremely relevant and timely articles written by world renowned scholars from multiple disciplines working on the conceptualizations of and contestations over ‘natural’ resources. The term is put within quotation marks here because the labelling suggests the existence of these resources outside of culture, something that is not of human-construction.

The centrality of the dynamics of the colonial family, a product of the inter¬racial sexual contact between European men and ‘native’ women, in the shaping of imperial policy during the company rule has received scant attention from scholars.

In this study Salahuddin Malik looks at the 1857 Revolt as viewed from Britain, helping us to make sense of the bewildering variety of perspectives discernible in the flood of contemporary books, pamphlets, sermons, newspaper reports and articles about the Revolt published in the metropolis.

The Centre for Studies in Social Sci¬ences, Calcutta has been trying to take stock of the place of history as an academic discipline and also looking for alternatives to ‘academic’ histories. An earlier volume, based on presentations at a conference held in 1999 was edited and published under the title History and the Present.

This book is as big and as sprawling as its full title: Kalahar (White Water-Lily): Studies in Art, Iconography, Architecture, and Archaeology of India and Bangladesh (Professor Enamul Haque Felicitation Volume). With 370 folio pages of long and short essays and a few short notes, and innumerable plates appended to the main text in seventy-six additional pages, it has been designed as a monumental “felicitation” volume.

Beyond prostitution is a collection of twenty-three essays on sex work in India. Of these only two essays have been previously published in academic journals. The essays in the collection range from serious analyses of themes in sex work in India, historical and literary surveys of various forms of the practice, brief field based reports, a panel discussion…

One of the most extraordinary – and positive – outcomes of the second upsurge of the women’s movements in the 1970s was the movement’s engagement with health, going beyond issues of reproduction.

Radha Chakravarty’s book Feminism and Contemporary Women: Rethinking Subjectivity is based on her Ph.D. dissertation on the same subject and retains all the qualities of a solid, well-researched dissertation. It investigates a familiar enough field of enquiry – subjectivity, with related notions of identity and agency – which has continuously engaged philosophers,…

Discussing the geopolitics of empire John Bellamy Foster says the inherent instability of empire under capitalism points to potentially more dangerous wars.

Bob Woodward’s fourth book on President George Bush and his war on Iraq is subtitled ‘A Secret White House History 2006-2008.’ His earlier three books are: Bush at War(2002),Plan of Attack(2004, ) and State of Denial(2006).

‘We have been so long accustomed to dictate to the world’ that it was ‘rather galling now that we find ourselves playing second fiddle to the autocratic ruler of the United States.’

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has been writing for fifteen years, during which she has honed her talents; the range of her work has consisted mostly of fiction: novels, short stories and the occasional article in prestigious journals. She has made use of various techniques to project her views on marriage and gender…

This book surveys the field of philosophical discourse in modern Maharashtra, by revisiting three iconic figuresPhule, Vinoba Bhave and Savarkarthrough their writing, and the responses it has evoked, in Marathi. In the process, G.P. Deshpande interrogates contemporary trends in historiography…

Literature of Resistance: India 1857 is a compilation of academic papers pre-sented at a seminar held in late 2007 at the D.A.V. College for Girls in Yamuna Nagar, Haryana.

Gayatri Spivak, Helen Tiffin, Aijaz Ahmadwith the opening batters like the first two and such a number three, the danger is that you may never get to see the others in action! But get you must, since this team of writers includes many more who would be part of a Worlds Eleven of Postcolonial Studies…

We Indians love watching rich family dramas play out on the screen. The big screen has KJo and the small screen has Ektaa Kapoor and her Band of Bahus. The workaholic Kapoor alongwith Star TV changed the way Indians watch television. A few others joined the bandwagon and the world of tradition…