Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

These combatants have been documented as well-educated females from affluent families, making their profiles complex and multifaceted. She groups the motivations for these radical female recruits into three categories: the uniting factor of religious ideology, the narratives of victimhood, and a political choice made to liberate oneself from the patriarchal traditions. They were committed to the roles of recruiters, facilitators, fundraisers, and were even stationed as gatekeepers of patriarchy tasked with promoting gendered policies (p. 112). Like their Pakistani counterparts, these women were also part of several

Epigraphy, Literary Criticism, Cultural Studies and Ethnohistory. Influenced by Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies tradition, the contributors argue that oral narratives, ritual practices, pilgrimage customs, songs, and collective memory can serve as legitimate historical sources when supported by independent evidence. The chapters move logically from the political and cultural settings of first-century North-West India and South India to discussions of the Acts of Thomas, the Seven Churches, Mylapore Archaeology and Syriac, Arabic, Patristic, Portuguese and Papal sources. The loss of Syriac and Malayalam manuscripts destroyed by Portuguese colonizers during the

where the earlier generation sought structures, they seek subjectivities. These are legitimate and productive shifts. The difficulty arises only when such approaches are presented as superseding structural history. The two are inseparable. Faizi’s self-fashioning cannot be understood without imperial patronage, and Anand Ram Mukhlis cannot be understood apart from the fiscal and political fragmentation of eighteenth-century Mughal India. Diplomats existed because states existed. Munshis emerged because bureaucracies required them. The self is never autonomous

Rosen offers a critique of Eric Stokes’s 1959 classic, English Utilitarians and India. Rosen argues that Stokes went along with Élie Halévy’s interpretation of Utilitarianism, mistakenly assuming that James Mill, as a follower of Jeremy Bentham, uncritically endorsed autocracy. Dube’s essay reassesses the relationship between Bentham’s Utilitarianism and the ideas of the Mills. In the case of James Mill, Bentham’s opinion was that ‘His creed of politics results less from love of the many, than from the hatred of the few’ (p. 47). Majeed suggests that we need to take into account the linguistic and aesthetic dimensions that had a bearing on James Mill’s views about Britain’s empire in India. He was critical of William Jones’s romanticization of Indian culture, which created difficulties for undertaking reform.

This involves pooling funds, advancing informal loans, and adhering to social expectations and religious norms. Although driving is an overwhelmingly male occupation, Chillia women in Pathanwadi undertake maal, small-scale piecework for sale that is conducted from the confines of the home. Some women also serve as religious teachers in the community. Bedi highlights the centrality of women’s work to the family economy, sustaining households in the face of constant precarity.

A widely loved version of an armed Buddhist deity is Bodhisattva Manjushri, the face serene, the arm wielding the sword of wisdom. The battles here are metaphoric, the sword cutting through the obstacles to spiritual liberation—ego, attachment, greed, ignorance and delusion. I couldn’t help feeling some unease at the generalized deployment of an image from the Vajrayana tradition—with its complex intersection of Buddhist psychology and visual arts left unexplored here—for a book that focuses largely on forms of state-sponsored violence and monastic deviations in the Sri Lankan, Burmese, and Thai contexts.
But then this slim volume is by a journalist, not a historian or a sociologist or philosopher of religion.

Four named khattats carry the chapter from there: Mohammed Ghalib, who still writes out the Quran and volumes of verse by hand outside a shop numbered 4181, and speaks of the work as inheritance rather than income; Shiraz Hussain of Khwab Tanha Collective, whose studio still finds buyers for his poster-calligraphy at exhibitions and fairs; Mohammed Zubair, who learned the craft from an older brother as a boy, was once turned away from formal training for being too young, and is not teaching it to his own daughter; and Mushtaq Ahmed, who has taught the discipline to some two thousand students across fifty years and says, plainly, that none of it has ever been enough to live on. The chapter is proof, in miniature, of how the whole book works: patient attention, a named source behind every claim of significance, and testimony given room to speak for itself

These formative years run like a thread through his later work, shaping his worldview of how large organizations can build trust, uphold dignity, and draw strength from both resilience and imagination. He joined the Tata group in 1964 and spent over twenty-five years with Tata Motors, rising to Executive Director and guiding the company through major changes in the 1980s. In 1989, he moved to the United States to work with Arthur D Little, where he became a Board member and gained wide experience in restructuring and strategy. Returning to India, he served as Chairman of Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in India from 2000 to 2008, advising corporations on leadership and organizational change. In 2009, he was appointed to the Planning Commission of India,

One, higher financial returns are detrimental to real investment in these countries since only those projects would be undertaken which have a higher return than these financial returns. This could potentially lead to deindustrialization, as she shows with the exception of China. Two, countries have to keep their exchange rates inflated (artificially appreciated), which has a negative impact on their trade numbers. An expensive rupee means expensive Indian goods for the international markets and cheaper

And yet these cities and towns are changing and growing as some businesses wither, some grow and new ones are born. Entrepreneurship has been a male-dominated field for many reasons: family businesses being passed on to the sons, only the sons’ business acumen deemed worthy of investment, occupational stereotypes and familial gender roles. Despite all odds being stacked against them, women have established, expanded and worked in businesses across the middle cities and towns of India.

inordinately large numbers of young Keralites remain unemployed or under-employed; though female labour force participation is comparatively high, it has declined significantly since the 1980s. Discussing the Kudumbashree experience, KB Valsala Kumari points to the meagre presence of women in political leadership, and hopes the substantial social capital that the programme has generated will translate into political capital too. K Ellangovan points out Kerala’s health paradox: ‘despite high public spending, individuals still bear the brunt of healthcare costs’, most of the health budget goes towards salaries at the expense of quality improvement.

These became a blueprint of sorts for the Constitution of postcolonial India. Coining a term which is replete with irony, Teltumbde calls these the ‘constitutional castes’, meaning thereby that they, along with the later addition called ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBCs), are castes which have been legally accorded the right to reservation. Once caste had been legally ‘entrenched’, with minimum objection from within the Constituent Assembly, the radical Ambedkarite discourse of caste annihilation was marginalized by the pragmatic discourse of state-administered justice via caste-based reservations. Thus, instead of being used as a contingent fire-fighting mechanism to narrow down caste disparities, reservations, with no timeline and no yardstick to measure the degree of their success or failure, have, over time, been installed as the ultimate panacea for the redressal of a caste-riven social order.

Islam’s response to the deep conflictual turmoil in South Asia, especially Bangladesh, is one of a resilient and resisting silence. Violence appears to be the norm everywhere; poets and writers in the ‘central jail of silence’ turn inwards to make sense of a world increasingly chaotic. Here a ‘postcolonial teacher’ teaching TS Eliot’s famous poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ deals with ‘the faces that mull over/ how one measures life/ with coffee spoons;/ the faces that look up schizophrenia/ googling a virtual dictionary.’ Intense images are interconnected to reveal the sense of disorder around; the only option left is that of silence, both a prison and a stance— ‘Silence has gripped the whole world/ No one weeps anywhere anymore/ As if all await the final call.’

The poem ‘Will You be My Friend?’ gives a refreshingly novel articulation to women’s anger by exposing the asymmetrical power equation between husband and wife, where the wife is forced to tolerate his scorn, condescension, infidelities and so much more. The wife reminds the husband that being the ‘better half’, she won’t ‘stoop’ to pay back in the same coin. She then moves on to invite him to be her friend:

It lends the book a very dramatic kickstart. Mixing registers of hagiography, history and biography in one torrent of possessive emotion, the writer-translator steps into the inner recesses of Peero, creating in the process her own ‘Peero’. In the subsequent formal extended ‘Introduction’, Peero is heralded as the first Punjabi woman poet, a title which, for the time being, may hold. Still, if the maturity of her verses is any yardstick, it is difficult to believe that she did not have able, wo

The books that came my way this time have filled me with a sense of hope that Indian poetry in English continues to ask difficult questions and has been able to resist the silencing of voices that one increasingly witnesses. It is not easy to write in an environment where one begins to feel stifled; and maybe it is in such moments in history that poets have emerged with renewed urgency. The collections included in this combined review range from coming down hard on rigid ideas to entering a world of nostalgia and softness, from confronting the forces that threaten to unmake us as a people, to grappling with issues of identity and one’s place in the larger world.

‘A Few Announcements!’ brings out the agony, anger and will power of the insulted and the humiliated to struggle for freedom. They seek no mercy. ‘We are untamed horses with iron jaws and wings. We submit to no reins. We fly away with caves and sell them to the man of old goods… Many will come to our songs, enraptured by our battles against the adversities that won’t let us speak for ourselves, eat our food, or shake our hands with ourselves’ (p. 52).

Indeed, the consistency with which the novel enwraps us in the mist of its world lies, paradoxically, in its very inconsistency. Not all sentences march to the same rhythm; paragraphs and thoughts wander, and characters do not inevitably resolve along expected trajectories. Yet everyone, in their varied way, carries a shimmering knowledge of life; everyone is granted something sharp, something infused with mysticism, to say. A melancholic patriarch, Manav, touches upon the core of the matter when he advises Sunny to abandon the certainties of the West and go straight to the mystics to understand ‘who you should have become instead of the person that you are’

That said, almost all the Indian characters in the novel are given supernatural powers at some point in their narrative lives. Chandran’s mother is said to have possessed the power to detect fire accidents until she was twelve. Vijaya takes Chandran to a cave and performs an occult sexual ritual that helps her conceive a child. A Polish character Chandran dreams up in vivid detail gives him hitherto unknown information about Lydia’s brother. It is the casual indifference of these characters to all these incredible events that makes the novel truly magical realist.

In ‘Un-Timely’, a woman who is granted one final day with her lover before death separates them, treats mortality as a boundary briefly permeable to grief, and this is narrated as a matter of fact rather than as fantasy. ‘Zha, the Unique Letter’ turns the device toward the state, imagining a government banning a Tamil letter outright, its bureaucratic plainness exposing how power echoes through speech. The translator clarifies in a note that the letter ‘zha’, which once alluded to the liberation struggle for eezham in Sri Lanka,