Literature on peasantry and peasant revolts in India has grown steadily over the past fifteen years or so. Although quantitatively this development has been impres¬sive, this body of literature has only a few works which could be pointed out as noteworthy contributions in terms of quality as well as originality of new analytical insights. Since 1981 Guha has started editing a series of Subaltern Studies, of which two volumes are already out.
‘Rape and domestic violence are forms of punishment’, says the author,
for women who have step¬ped out of line, and attempts to re-impose patriarchal dis¬cipline in a society which is no longer patriarchal.
Prehistoric rock painting is one of the more recent arrivals on the Indian archaeo¬logical scene. The present work attempts to synthesize the available information and present a composite picture. The author has visited most of the sites and also had the advantage, as he mentions, of intensive discussions with scholars like Mathapal, Misra and Wakankar who have been active in this particular field for quite some time now.
We love the city of our birth for the same reason for which we hate it. And we hate it precisely because it is the city of our birth. I was born in Delhi and I hope I never grow so indifferent towards it as to come to love it.
There are Delhis and Delhis. The Delhi that Khushwant Singh and Raghu Rai depict in this book is the Delhi that our Tourism Development Cor¬poration would like to present on a platter to the tourist when, made of flesh, blood and foreign exchange, he lands at Palam to the traditional Indian welcome of garlands, tilak, and embraces.
This is Shashi Deshpande’s first novel, but it has been published after two others, The Dark Holds No Terrors and Come Up and be Dead which is a mystery thriller. For a reader who is familiar with The Dark Holds No Terrors, this new novel is of interest as having a similar theme and similar strengths but containing flaws which the author had obvi¬ously managed to outgrow by the time she wrote The Dark.
In the last two lines of Mahapatra’s final poem (‘In the Fields of Desolate Rice’) he tells us:
In the end
I come back to the day and to the rain.
This is good news, though distant in tone and spirit from the rest of this volume.
At first reading, Life Signs impressed me with its techni¬cal qualities, the fluidity of the style and the power of the imagery; attributes strong enough to still, if not dissolve, a certain latent disquiet.
This publication is part of the Oxford Series on India-China Studies which aims to develop interdisciplinary research on historical and contemporary relations between the two countries. In so far as the effort is to bring to light scholarship beyond the current preoccupation with geopolitical issues, Thakur Gadhadhar Singh’s self-published travelogue from 1902 seems, at first glance, an excellent choice. Thakur Gadhadar Singh was a member of the 7th Rajput Regiment mobilized in 1900 as part of the British contingent to fight the Qing dynasty in the wake of the Boxer Uprising in China. Published in Hindi on Singh’s return to India, Chîn Me Terah Mâs, is a catalogue of his experiences and thoughts during the China sojourn.
Tariq Khosa, a former Director General of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) in Pakistan, grabbed the attention of the Indian media for a brief moment for an article he wrote in the Dawn newspaper on 3 August 2015 on the Mumbai attacks trial. In that article he pointed out how the investigations in Pakistan had been able to find strong evidence that the Mumbai attacks were planned and launched from Pakistani soil and that Pakistan should face the truth and admit mistakes and ensure that the perpetrators and the masterminds of the terror attacks were brought to justice. But the Indian electronic media misread that article as an exposé of the involvement of the Pakistani establishment. However, nowhere in the article Khosa had said as much. What he had acknowledged was that there was strong evidence against Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militants but the reason the trial process had stalled was due to the difficulties in conducting it in a different jurisdiction.
Over the years, the different aspects of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and its fallout on Pakistan and the wider world have been discussed threadbare. Yet, books are being written on it and the book under review is one among such books published in 2017. As the title of the book indicates, the author of this book Imrana Begum discusses the various dimensions of the intervention of the erstwhile Soviet Union in Afghanistan and its multiple impacts on Pakistan. This book covers not just the period of Soviet presence in Afghanistan but also its legacy which is continuing even now in many ways.
Under the assault of social media, attention spans have contracted somewhat. But that is not any reason to worry. There are short introductions available to catch up on weighty matters, such as in the case of national security. These help in gaining a working understanding of issues outside a reader’s usual beat and on the quick, being small handbooks intended unambitiously as ‘introduction’. The Oxford series comprises some 30 paperbacks covering daunting topics such as monetary policy and capital flows and exchange rate mechanisms, alongside appealing titles such as Bollywood and Mughal painting. These are a mite bigger than OUP’s Very Short Introductions, paperbacks smaller in size, but not on that account any less in academic content. Placed strategically at airport bookstalls they provide intellectual fare to last a flight, given India’s distances.
The book under review, Another South Asia! orbits around a simple but ambiguous premise of what South Asia is. While the answer to this question varies academically, politically and discursively, Dev Nath Pathak, through this book, has tried to provide an alternative conceptualization or imagination of this region. The work is a product of Pathak’s engagement with this question in the South Asian University (SAU), where he teaches sociology and more specifically a product of a seminar sponsored by the Japan Foundation, held at SAU in 2015. Therefore, the thread that binds the contributors is their dissatisfaction with the existing understanding and treatment of this region within the framework of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).
In his memoir Neighbours in Arms, the former U.S. senator, Larry Pressler, advances a simple theme: ‘India’s democratic government [and] location … make it a natural … geopolitical ally. We should decisively choose India … We must downgrade Pakistan and treat it as it is: an irresponsible, dishonest, rogue state’ (pp. 53–54). His book focuses on his legislative efforts in the eighties and Pressler claims that if a law bearing his name—the Pressler Amendment—had been enforced, Pakistan ‘would have been forced to shut down its [nuclear weapons] programme’ (p. 198). While Pressler’s viewpoint may resonate with sections of the Indian security establishment, these positions—like Pressler’s book—are naive and gloss over historical facts.