Chandrika Kaul’s brief introductory remarks to the edited volume of essays, titled M.K. Gandhi, Media, Politics and Society, begins with a rhetorical flourish. Gandhi, she remarks, ‘both made the news and was the news.’ His preoccupation with media…
The volume under review is a reprint of the book with the same name written by Brijen K Gupta. While the Orient BlackSwan in association with Ashoka University has published the reprinted version in 2020, EJ Brill, Leiden, Netherlands, had published the original work in 1966…
This quote from an army recruitment propaganda pamphlet around World War I exemplifies the ethos of the average Indian sepoy. For him cultivation and soldiering were honourable professions and he was careful to distinguish himself from the menial followers in the army…
At the time of Independence India and Pakistan had to urgently deal with, among numerous other problems, the problem of incorporating those Princely States which were contiguous with and adjacent to their respective territories. The British had quite cynically…
As religious conversions come to be criminalized across India and alleged to be a threat to the ‘integrity’ of the nation-state, this edited volume is an important and timely contribution, enriching the existing scholarship on conversions as well as unsettling…
The ownership and manner of use of built heritage brings out intense emotion among people. This is true whether the heritage belongs to society at large or even when it is owned by private parties as evocatively shown in the popular film, Gulabo Sitabo. Meha Mathur’s maiden book…
Bombay/Mumbai will continue to fascinate historians, sociologists, artists, writers, filmmakers and poets for years to come. For there remains so much more to document, as is evident from the most recent addition to the collections of books on the city…
unrecognizable and the future uncertain. Fear and restrictions are its primary currencies, and far from the garbled promise of stability, it is inducing greater instability in the lives of the people. Mamdani answers his question by tracing the history of nationalism as a principle to organize the political association that is the state…
In the last few years, many academic books have been published on the Emergency in India. One of the first comprehensive academic interventions was Bipan Chandra (2003), In the Name of Democracy. The British sociologist, David Lockwood (1929-2014)…
Shaheen Bagh protests began on 15 December 2019, three days after the passage of the Citizenship…
The tripartite Assam Accord signed between the Indian government, the State Government of Assam and the All Assam Students Union (AASU) in 1985 marks a watershed moment in Assam’s socio-political history. The Accord ushered in a new era of competitive politics…
In rapidly urbanizing India the book Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums by Adam Auerbach is an important contribution to the existing corpus of political economy literature engaging with the themes related to development in urban India…
The book under review is an account by the late Pranab Mukherjee about his tenure as the President of India (2012-2017). This period was critical because as President, Mukherjee witnessed two governments of the ideologically opposing alliances…
The tradition of writing memoirs by civil servants has been handed down by the colonial administrators to their successors in the bureaucracy of independent India. Sardar Jarnail Singh too has penned a memoir of the fateful eight years of his life in the Prime Minister’s…