A.K.Ramanujan, the poet, was discovered by Oxford University Press. Jon Stallworthy, a considerable poet himself, who edited the now-defunct Oxford Poets Series for the London office, responded to the typescript of this unknown poet with enthusiasm.
The assessment of socio-economic develop ment of a country requires reliable and comparable information on aspects of development reasonably comprehensively over time and space at meaningful levels of disaggregation and with adequate frequency.
Poverty and its underlying causes has been the subject of intense research in recent years attracting researchers from a variety of disciplines. Attempts at investigating poverty in its different ramifications have been undertaken under alternative methodological perspectives.
Caste-based quotas, whether in education, jobs, or electoral positions, are routinely vilified for lowering the quality of the space they are applied to, because of the belief that those chosen through quotas are inherently inferior to those selected on open, or non-quota, positions. This widespread belief transcends the boundaries between academic arguments and popular perceptions.
Purulia is a town in Bengal’s western periphery. Under British rule, it was the headquarters of the sprawling Manbhum district. At Independence, the entire district was allocated to Bihar. But its substantial Bengali population actively resisted what they perceived to be Hindi imposition. Demonstrations soon became a daily occur-rence as the State administration strove to contain the language agitation.
The recently concluded Assembly elections in Himachal Pradesh had a very interesting moment when a 101 years old voter pushed the button at his polling booth in the remote Kalpa village in Kinnaur district of the State. Shyam Saran Negi, would have been passed on for any aware and conscious senior citizen who believes in exercising his duty of citizenship by voting, had he not been India’s first voter.
Arecent revival in the unearthing culinary histories of India has brought forth some marvellous writing. The study of food has been serious business in certain parts of the world for quite some time, with university departments dedicated to the subject. However, India has lagged behind in this respect. This gap is slowly being filled, both through academic and popular writing.
Making tea is an art and making a perfect cup—hold on, is there a universally accepted way of brewing tea? There is, if we believe, the International Standard Organization; but who cares! George Orwell liked it without sugar, Maulana Azad liked it without milk —he thought adding milk is a British innovation. Hamid Dabashi likes it only in transparent cups. Gandhi didn’t like it all. Kashmiris prefer it with salt and Tibetans like it with Yak butter.
This masterly new work by Delhi University historian Anshu Malhotra enlivens the study of religion, gender, and caste in late colonial Punjab, with compelling explorations of post-Partition religious and cultural forms. The centre of her study is Piro (d. 1872), a female devotee of a nineteenth century guru named Gulabdas (1809-1873), who led a sect that came to be known by his name: the Gulabdasis.
Muslim life in urban India has attracted fresh attention since the publication of the Sachar Report a good decade ago. The subsequent debate has gone through three distinct stages. Initial scholarship, including the report itself, outlined and quantified the extent of Muslim disadvantage with a broad brush.
Akhil Katyal deals with a subject that has been researched upon recently. Bringing socio-psychological identi-ties and religious identities together in the same research needs courage, especially in the contemporary political ambience in the country. The blurb hints at certain exciting debates, Katyal unveils much more than that.
Performance and the Political uses five critical modes—vision, voice, ges-tural, machinic and animality to address questions that are intimately linked to our present such as: what is the political? How do we engage with performative practices in which transgression is not mapped through the paradigms of agency and individualized resistance? Spanning the time period from Emergency to neoliberalism…
The historian Ronald Hutton, an acknowledged expert in British folk-lore, and pre-Christian religions and paganism in Early Modern Britain, author of The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (1999) and The Druids: A History (2007), offers yet another treat to his readers.
Honour as the bedrock of family life and values is a familiar and well-researched idea in the literature on gender, family and kinship in South Asia. Honour Unmasked, while locating itself within this terrain makes a significant contribution to the field for the following three reasons. First, it is valuable for the site and context of study, as ethnographic work on gender and power in Pakistani society is relatively limited.
Enclosures and boundaries have a conflicted meaning for women. Enclosures are often not safe spaces for them and women have to constantly resist boundaries in order to live their lives. The book under review looks at how ‘conventional Tamil symbols—unbroken enclosures like bangles, pots, wedding halls, the kolam or doorstep design—signifying auspiciousness’ (p. 104), are reinterpreted in the songs of Tamil Paraiyar women as signs of deprivation and restriction.
Imtiaz Ahmad’s edited volume constitutes a departure from an academic tradition that has related Islamic pre¬cepts to Muslim customs and practices without considering regional customs and practices that bespoke much adapta¬tion. It provides the empirical evidence that Muslims, like other religious groups, have adapted their precepts and rituals to blend with their cultural environment and with customs and practices already in vogue.
The book under review is a companion volume to A.K. Banerji’s earlier study on India’s Balance of Payments 1921-22 to 1938-39 (1963). The hindsight enjoyed by the author has enabled him to attempt the construction of a continuous time-series of India’s balance of payments relating to almost the entire period of British rule in India.
1982
This is a book with a certain topical value but likely to be forgotten soon enough as another doctoral dissertation too hastily published. Despite Shashi Tharoor’s painstaking research, his effort is flawed by his preconceived notions and not quite redeemed by the quality of his scholarship. The thesis is outlined in the intro¬ductory chapter; the facts and the analysis that follow are simply to prove it. The book provides a lesson to students of diplomatic history how not to carry on research.