The text vs the field, the classical vs the folk, the occasional vs the quotidian. These have been some of the key oppositional categories through which sociology of India, particularly understandings of Hindu life and culture have been articulated and debated.
I would like to begin this review in Jackson’s own words: ‘It is true that the border crosser who writes about another culture is part beggar, part stenographer, part Sherlock Holmes, part patchwork quilt maker’ (p. 309).
2007
Authority and Kingship under the Sultans of Delhi is rather complex in the sense that it begins on a promising note but does not achieve all. Reinforcing the thesis of centralization, the main crux of the argument—the Sultanate represented a centralized polity that was further embarked upon with a vengeance in the sixteenth century
2007
Prathama Banerjee’s rigorously argued book Politics of Time is both a meditation on questions central to contemporary theoretical concerns—namely modernity, subjectivity and agency—as also an exegesis on the colonial Bengali preoccupation with the past.
This selection of K.N. Panikkar’s articles published between 1976 and 2005 not only brings together in one place, the writings of a major modern Indian social historian, but also serves as a historiographical record of the changing concerns of Marxist social history over the last three decades.
Professor A.R. Kulkarni is the veritable doyen of Maratha history today. His research career began in the 1950s and the thesis that became (in English) Maharashtra in the Age of Shivaji (1969) was actually submitted in 1960.
The bitter resistance to Government’s attempt to introduce an adolescent education programme is symptomatic of the need to control and domesticate sexuality cordoning it off into the haven of community and tradition secure from the whirlwinds of globalizing influences.
Two decades ago governments looked askance, with suspicion or even with downright hostility at any attempt to introduce non-traditional security concepts into the national agenda; this was especially so in regard to the efforts of academics, think-tanks and NGO’s, which had begun around that time.
2007
John Kenneth Galbraith once said, ‘Under capitalism, man exploits man; under communism, it’s just the opposite’. The capitalism versus communism debate is as old as politics itself. In India, it much precedes independence from British rule.
If the state is what ‘binds’, it is also clearly what can and does unbind. And if the state binds in the name of the nation, conjuring a certain version of the nation forcibly, if not powerfully, then it also unbinds, releases, expels, banishes
Where Robin Jeffrey’s pioneering study—India’s Newspaper Revolution, left off, Sevanti Ninan’s Headlines from the Heartland, picks up the discursive narrative of the explosion of print capitalism in what was once the lagging Hindi language belt
Terrifying Vision is a slim little book on the ideas of the most visible ideologue of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Its author had earlier explored and written on the world and moods of four well-known makers of the Hindutva ideology (Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (2003).
2007
India has been in the thick of a revolution of rising expectations, visible more sharply for more than two decades. I believe that the new middle class, as is generally defined, is the by-product of high expectations thrown up by changing domestic opportunities
Nandini Nayar, whose earlier book for children, Pranav’s Picture, dealt with a child’s imaginary drawings, uses a different medium of expression used by children all over the world this time around, namely dough. While in the West, play dough or plasticine (as it used to be called in India some generations ago) is the chosen material for children to make shapes
In a yet unpublished book, this is how Suniti Namjoshi sets down the charter for her mission of storytelling, a charter she has already adhered viscously to in five books of her Aditi series for children. Namjoshi’s stories strive, above all else, to maintain the balance outlined by Aditi’s grandmother between levity and learning.