Monthly Archives: October 2017

There are not too many Indian English novels that address the concerns of the Christian community in India. It is hard to think of instances beyond Arundhati Roy, I. Allan Sealy and David Davidar in recent years.

Alka Saraogi has made a big name in the realm of Hindi fiction. Her first novel Kalikatha: Via Bypass made such a mark that her reputation runs the risk of always being stitched to her first novel. It is hoped the rest of her work is not bypassed.

The finest testament to good writing is surely the demand for an accurate response in its reader. Sunetra Gupta’s So Good in Black refuses the exigencies of large frames. Hers is not a global or postcolonial novel.

A Fragile World, the English translation of Bishnu Mohapatra’s Oriya poems, published in 1997 under the title Pakhira Swabhabik Mrityu (‘The Natural Death of a Bird’) is the poet’s first collection. Like all first collections it expects to do something different from the ones that came before and to introduce a new poet promising to set a new trend in the genre of his writing.

Sometimes idols always fail to impress on first sight leaving dedicated fans vaguely dissatisfied. My first glimpse of the legendary Lata Mangeskar was in pre-Emergency 1970s when Doordarshan featured excerpts from the ‘Lata Mangeshkar Nite’ held at Asoka Hotel, Delhi

In this impassioned study based on what the inside cover of the volume describes as ‘situated reflections, story telling and ethnographic accounts,’ Angana P. Chatterji, a social and cultural anthropologist at the California Institute of Integral Studies, in the United States, attempts to understand organized Hindu majoritarianism in the eastern province of Orissa.

‘Judicial Reforms’ is a theme which is much talked of so much about but too little is done. The Indian judicial system has a long history right from the pre-British days. In the 18th century a uniform pattern of judiciary emerged and during the British regime High Courts were established in presidency towns.

Interested in the social and cultural practices underlying popular politics in India and elsewhere, in this volume, Michelutti investigates the engagement of the important Yadav caste-cluster with the political and electoral processes in North India.

The South Asia Defence and Strategic Yearbook has been an important yearly publication highlighting the main events that have happened in the larger South Asian region.

The book under review is a massive sweep on the contours of India’s continuously evolving foreign and economic policy challenges that are in tune with the changing times. The volume contains as many as nineteen chapters by scholars from India’s premier universities and think tanks covering many leading countries and regions with which India’s foreign policy has remained significant. The contributors are leading.

This volume edited by T.B. Subba et.al. is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on Northeast-related studies and enriches our knowledge of Christianity in India. For long, Northeast India, known as the region of ‘seven sisters’ comprising the states of Arunachal, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura and now also Sikkim, did not receive adequate scholarly attention.

The present global economic crisis has generated considerable interest in the role of central banks in regulating the behaviour of commercial banks. Though the Indian story in this regard is seen in positive terms, we do not clearly know for certain as to what channels the monetary policy actions are transmitted to the real economy.

Do ‘active citizens’ and ‘effective states’ change the world? According to the sub-title of the book From Poverty to Power by Duncan Green they do. Yet, as the author himself recognizes there is ‘good’ change and ‘bad’ change. What Green means by good change is change that helps ‘build a secure…

Did India have economists before 1947? If so, how many? Who were they? What did they do? Until J. Krishnamurty decided to find out, these questions had not been asked in a any serious manner.

Janet Rizvi, with Monisha Ahmed has, after six years of intensive research, written a book on Pashm, Pashmina and the textiles woven from this incomparable fibre which promises to be the most authoritative book on the subject.

The objective of the collected essays in this volume is to expand our understanding of the colonial experience by focusing attention on relatively neglected areas of study, especially on ‘subaltern groups and actors’ who are rarely explored through the use of conventional archives.

This is one time I wished I had been invited to contribute rather than being asked to do a review. In other words, one can unequivocally state that this is one festschrift volume that is richly deserved.

In the Idea of Justice, Sen engages the work of John Rawls, who died in 2002, and was one of the foremost contemporary American philosophical thinkers on justice.

Payal Dhar’s A Shadow in Eternity, The Key of Chaos and The Timeless Land, describe the journey of Maya Subramaniam, a girl of thirteen from Bangalore, to Eternity—a hyper-real land that the author creates as the primary setting for her science-fiction trilogy. Under the care and tutelage of her Watcher, Noah Jarryd,…

It does not take much to guess why the main protagonist of this unusual mystery novel is called Nose Uncle. But unlike most people with outsized honkers, Nose Uncle, whose real name is not disclosed, is proud of his nose and insists on being called ‘Nose Uncle’ and nothing else.