Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

1991 is often referred to as the year when India faced severe political and social instability due to the rise of divisive identity politics in the aftermath of the Mandal and Mandir issues. The year also marked the country facing serious economic crisis which compelled…

Sometime during the early decades of the 1900s, with India in the throes of the anti-colonial movement, Kulsumbai decided that her family—the couple and their six children, three boys and three girls—would move to England, and the kids would be admitted to a boarding school there…

In this virtual world where image consumption on the screen is the norm and many web-based platforms offer our eye the luxury to look at the work of talented photographers, coming across the printed picture is an experience that still goes unmatched. The materiality of paper…

The United Service Institution (USI) describes itself as the oldest think-tank in Asia. Set up by the British, it opened in Simla in late nineteenth century. Soon after Independence, it moved to New Delhi. Though under considerable pressure from lack of resources in the early years…

The book under review is Nabaparna Ghosh’s crisp treatise about the para or the neighbourhood in colonial Calcutta. The book has four chapters apart from a very well laid out introduction and a tight epilogue. The introduction outlines the plan of the book and raises a number of questions…

Writing on the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir, in its post-1947 avatar(s), is a challenge that few of us have met without being called out for missing out on not one but many strings which weave together the chaotic mess that has come to be euphemistically called the Kashmir problem…

As we live through an unprecedented number of new infections of Covid-19, and deaths, we can take pride in that in this one indicator  we have even overtaken the USA. We are reporting close to 400,000 new cases every day and close to 4000 deaths every day…

The on-going farmers’ protest in India has once again highlighted the continuous significance of land on the one hand and its continuous process of making and re-making on the other. These protests point towards the fact that the land issues and agrarian politics are not settled…

British ethnographers and administrators commenced the documentation of Tribes and Caste in India. HA Rose, HH Risley, E Thurston, RE Enthoven, RV Russel and others made  painstaking efforts to identify different communities present in British India. After Independence…

Amartya Sen’s ‘Capability Approach’ and ‘Development as Freedom’ continues to intrigue, interest and push scholars to explore what emerges when these are applied in the concrete, on the ground, to specific sectors, and, categories of people within these sectors…

Rural society in India has undergone social and economic transformation in varying degrees during the past decades giving rise to new questions and issues such as decline or demise of traditional social classes and the rise of new ones, changes in patterns of power relations among them…

Academic writing in the field of education often presents a theoretical understanding that is disconnected from field realities. As a teacher educator, I have often found pre-service teachers struggling with theories, models and perspectives that are built on the basis of research…

In just seventy pages, the author Prasad has packed a lot of punch in this meticulously researched monograph on Khushwant Singh. The engaging narrative is peppered with laconic one-liners, tongue firmly in cheek. While he notes that Singh was many things to many people—a writer

‘When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.’– Benjamin FranklinIndia woke up to a spate of farmer suicides through Everybody Loves a Good Drought by P Sainath, and the first State where suicides were reported was Maharashtra. Two decades after that book…

A way from the hypnotic overreach, exaggerated deeds and the over-ritualized texture in the earlier works on the Bhakti poet Kabir, Kiran Nagarkar’s The Arsonist foregrounds the persona of Sant Kabir through a recital of the mundane, ordinary and the normal run of things in his life.

This book was, perhaps, envisaged along with a conference titled ‘Social Sector Development in North-East India: Problems, Issues and Challenges’. The most striking point the book states is that human capital development should be the focus of all efforts for the social development of the region…

When a friend sent me a copy of Indian Icon by Amit Raj, the timing was great! It had been a regrettably long time since I had read a good book and I was looking for something to get back into the habit. We have had Bullets in our family for three generations…

Kabir’s works stand thoroughly translated and analysed, yet the appeal of his ideas and writings continues to invite further translations and interpretations. Chandan Sinha’s book makes an important contribution to the existing knowledge on Kabir and places this possibly…

Past is a land of possibilities—creative, discussive, interpretive. The seductive aura of its myriad ifs and buts has always kept creative imaginations in thrall. Novelists have often latched on to its narrative possibilities to augment their fictionality and make a meaningful intervention in the present… 

Undermining Racial Justice is an archival exploration of the movement for racial justice that gripped the University of Michigan (henceforth UM) from the 1960s. Divided into eight lucidly written chapters complemented by an introduction and a discerning epilogue…