Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

There is a common critical consensus that the 1947 Partition of South Asia correspondingly affected two regions in particular—Punjab and Bengal. However, the recent scholarship on the 1947 Partition[1] explicates that the waves of refugee migration and the ensuing rehabilitation of individuals and families have had an enduring impact on other regions in India…

This work, an important contribution to the gendered history of colonial Indian labour migration, offers a fresh perspective on coolie women’s everyday experiences and their contribution as producers and reproducers of labour to the plantation economy of Federated Malaya States (FMS) in British Malaya…

Any story of India’s culinary culture begins with an enquiry into its ostensible Indianness. The first few fundamental questions often have to do with the origin of staple vegetables and spices such as tomatoes and chillies. That both were introduced into the subcontinent’s basic diet, with the colonial contact and that too only recently…

Maharashtra is the second largest State in India in terms of the number of Lok Sabha seats. Amongst the top five States sending the largest contingent of parliament members, Maharashtra was the only State wherein the Congress was able to retain power for significant years in the post-1989 phase of Indian politics…

Aprolific writer, Nayanjot Lahiri’s new book is a foray into the post-Independence trajectory of Indian archaeology. The method of enquiry involves tracing the life of MN Deshpande, who served as Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (henceforth ASI) from 1972-1978…

As an opening sentence, it is perhaps the best yet. A blind king, Dhritirashtra, asks his charioteer, Sanjaya, what his sons and the sons of Pandu, both of whom were wanting to fight, did on the battlefield?The suspense-filled question, however, occurs in the middle of the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata.  Sanjaya’s  account has come to be known as ‘The Book’ sacred…

Let me say this at the very outset. Kiran Doshi is a dear friend of 48 years and he is a reviewer’s nightmare. Once he wrote a novel in verse. I retaliated by writing the review in verse. Using that logic, I should write this review in what they call a ‘briefs’ form. But I am not going to let him get away that easily…

After writing four fictional works, Diksha at St. Martin’s, Day Scholar, Patna Rough-cut, and Patna Manual of Style, and attracting a fair amount of informed critical attention, Siddharth Chowdhury is back with a novel that his imagined editor qualifies as ‘short’ with the insert symbol on the cover…

One must marvel at the extraordinary image makeover in recent years of Jhumpa Lahiri, an acclaimed American author of Indian descent. From 2000 when Lahiri burst onto the literary landscape of USA with her debut collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies to 2013 when she published her second novel…

First, a disclosure: I have never been fond of Ishiguro. A lifetime of teaching and correcting has made me wary of the good student—the one who writes impeccable but boring papers, the one you are tempted to give ‘A’ without reading but force yourself to read to the bitter end because you are that kind of teacher, that kind of reader…

Breakfast with Evil and Other Risky Ventures: The Non-Essential Ashis Nandy is a collection of columns, essays, forewords to books, interviews, and lectures by Ashis Nandy originally published between 1975 and 2018. The book contains thirty-six chapters and is divided into five parts. In these texts…

Jointly authored by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal, Betrayed By Hope is a play on the life of the nineteenth century poet, Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873). The play is based on extensive research by the authors spanning a period of nine years. A five-act play, the plot is structured around Dutt and the fictional character…

Of all the figures from the celebrated ‘Bengal Renaissance’ still remembered today, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar (26 September 1820-29 July 1891) seems the most unlikely candidate of all to have been at the centre of a political storm in the run up to the 2019 general elections (when a bust of his was broken during a rally)…

Ever since the sesquicentennial birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore in 2011, there has been a steady increase in scholarly publications on him from various perspectives and even a decade later, the trend is still continuing. Tagore practiced all the major literary genres—poetry, drama, fiction…

Complementing Gandhi’s famous autobiography and structured as an inter-woven narrative, Restless as Mercury: My Life as a Young Man, an edited life story, is a monumental endeavour, and an experiment in creating a new genre. The book is both deeply illuminating and challenging…

The paradigmatic method of studying the story of India is through its languages, declares Peggy Mohan with a rhetorical flourish in the title of her book Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through its Languages.Mohan’s thesis draws upon Jawaharlal Nehru’s…

Balbir Madhopuri lives in New Delhi. He grew up in Doaba, a region of Punjab known for its high population of Dalits. He has not forgotten his years of struggle against economic hardship and caste discrimination, but he does not advertise his pain and uses it instead to generate light and hope…

It is wonderful to see a reissue of the translation of Volga Se Ganga by Rahul Sankrityayan with a fine introduction by Maya Joshi. The original translation by VG Kiernan has been edited by Kanwal Dhaliwal and Maya Joshi with an additional translated chapter that had been missed out in the original edition…

‘ I remember a river flowing inside my father and never growing old, …’. This opening line of Apurva Narain’s Introduction beautifully brings out the essence of Kunwar Narain’s poetry.  The book is a tribute to a man who was not just a father, but also an artist par excellence…

We inhabit a noise-saturated world. The enveloping noise has not only stunted our sensibilities and sensitivities but has, as a consequence, tended to insulate us from ourselves and our surroundings. The crass materiality of the contemporary civilizational curve has taken its toll on our elemental connectedness and communicative empathies…