Rakesh Satyal’s No One Can Pronounce My Name is a positivetale of transition and discovery which the negation in the title does not really disclose. When one starts reading, one expects another anxiety-ridden tale of culture conflict and identity issues of Indian immigrants. Satyal’s book is all these but significantly much more. The novel set in Cleveland, Ohio is a complex weave of stories of disparate individuals caught at a time when they are struggling to make meaning of their existence.
No city reveals itself easily; Delhi even less so. For, as Mir has said: it is not just any other city, it is Delhi (Pagdi apni sambhaliyega ‘Mir’/Aur basti nahin ye Dilli hai). Even those who ambled in its nooks and crannies and became its cobblestones—how much did Delhi show itself to them? So begins Intizar Husain’s Dilli Tha Jiska Naam (Once There Was A City Named Dilli), a cultural biography of Delhi.
No city reveals itself easily; Delhi even less so. For, as Mir has said: it is not just any other city, it is Delhi (Pagdi apni sambhaliyega ‘Mir’/Aur basti nahin ye Dilli hai). Even those who ambled in its nooks and crannies and became its cobblestones—how much did Delhi show itself to them? So begins Intizar Husain’s Dilli Tha Jiska Naam (Once There Was A City Named Dilli), a cultural biography of Delhi. In posing that question, and in making it clear that he is not one of the cobblestones of Delhi, Intizar Husain is absolving himself of knowing Delhi intimately.
In the third chapter of Abigail Williams’s wonderful book, we encounter an extract from soldier and journalist Alexander Somerville: ‘My father and mother had a window (the house had none) consisting of one small pane of glass, and when they moved from one house to another…they carried the window with them and had it fixed in each hovel into which they went as tenants.’ That portable window was the only means by which the Somerville family could afford the luxury of reading indoors.
The history of circulation in Europe of tales purportedly comprising the Arabian Nights (as the commonest moniker for the collection goes, though literally it should be ‘thousand nights and a night’, if translated ad verbatim from the Arabic title alf layla wa layla) has frequently been read as but a symptom—a symptom of how the Orient was textually constructed for consumption in the West, and how the East often strove hard to cast its imagining of itself in that reflected light.
2018
Chandrashekhar Kambar’s novel Karimayi dwells on the shifting borders of myth and history, a fashionable location in current ideological debates, but written many years ago by a seasoned novelist with a fine eye for cultural details. Thanks to a commendable new translation by Krishna Manavalli, global access to this iconic Kannada novel has become possible.
This is a great book, even a magnificent one, that chronicles the story (I’m not using the term ‘history’ deliberately because history of literature has now become a sophisticated genre by itself, generating a plethora of theoretically informed materials around it that deal with different aspects of the genre, addressing the primary question of how much of ‘history’ and how much of ‘literature’ will make the correct combination) of the development of Pakistani writing in English.
Autobiographies are always a great source of learning and inspiration. In reading about someone else, the reader gets a perspective about things that are often missed in one’s own life. Writing about oneself is cathartic as much for the writer as it is for the reader, as both can connect in disjointed, but similar life experiences.
Ethnography is the study of social interactions and behaviour that occur within communities or organizations. Specifically, school ethnographies can capture a spectrum of experiences that characterize life at school such as play, curiosity, appreciation, joy, love and admiration for people and happenings; more importantly, they can capture the broader social, economic and political aspects of schools. They can also spark off deeper and more instinctual auto ethnographic perspectives.
Marmar Mukhopadhyay’s book is a welcome addition to a still somewhat under-represented segment of educational discourse in India. In his present endeavour, with almost pedantic devotion, Mukhopadhyay focuses on his quest to define and operationalize quality management and quality knowledge creation in higher education. Without any biases or pre-judgements, he delves into the philosophical underpinnings of higher education and analyses its need and purpose.
The book gives a detailed account of four religion based educational systems, wherein the origin and development of the Gurukul, Monastery, Madrasa and Dera systems are traced. The text is based on extensive data collected by the author, covering the six States of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. 49 institutions in total, with at least 11 institutions representing each education system comprise the sample.
The book under review examines the ways in which science, science education, science praxis and its representation is loud in its absence of women within its narrative. The lack of women in science does not mean they do not exist, or occupy an important space within its disciplinary boundaries. In fact as the book suggests, through its 15 chapters, women are the reason the scientific boundaries are constantly being challenged. The book’s strength lies in the questioning of the knowledge practices embedded in science which follow in excluding women from science in ways that either relegate them to minor positions, or diminish their contributions.
Megha Kumar’s book revolves around three episodes of communal violence based on the fulcrum of local specificities which the book argues manufactures the modality of sexual violence during the preparation and activation time within a communal conflict. Traversing through the timeline reads into the 1969, 1985 and 2002 communal conflicts in Ahmedabad.
Two separate incidents within one month, July 2017, rocked the conscience of urban upper class India. Both these incidents are an important indicator of the increasing woes of the domestic workers employed in the urban households of India. In the first incident of July 12th, hundreds of people gathered in front of Noida’s Mahagun Society protesting against the family accused of beating up of a domestic worker who had also gone missing.
Rarely does one come across a work of serious social science dealing with the phenomenon of inequality which is not ‘overly theoretical’ (to use one scholar’s phrase), and yet accurately describes that elephant in the room. The authors and editor of First Citizens: Studies on Adivasis, Tribals, and Indigenous Peoples in India are none of them blind men or women as in the fable, but clear-eyed economists, historians, and sociologists.
National art’ elicits a very different response today than in the 1990s when two leading art historians, Partha Mitter and Tapati Guha Thakurta wrote about it. While both setup a wider frame with a focus on Bengal, Maholay-Jaradi narrows her interest on a specific royal art collection and art institutions associated with Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda in Gujarat. As a result, she brings into view an under-studied and under-researched geography of art, making it an important site not only for the region but also of national and ‘global’ cultural politics at the height of the colonial era.
The four essays in this book are arranged around questions concerning Islam, both past and present, posed by Perry Anderson, a prominent historian and sociologist who has worked on Indian and western social formations. These questions are responded to in a conversational tone by Suleiman Mourad, a noted scholar of Islam, well-versed in both American and Islamicate pedagogy.