Scholars from varied disciplines of social science in the recent past have been engaged in revisiting the concepts of rural, urban, peasant, non-peasant, formal, informal labour, intermediaries, money-lenders, classes of labour, new forms of caste bondage, freedom and un-freedom, given the significant changes in rural and urban India.
India produces on an average 1.5 million engineers each year. Among the middle class and the lower middle class in contemporary India, a first degree in engineering remains the most coveted dream even though only a small proportion of such graduates actually make it to engineering as a profession given the declining importance of manufacturing and industry in India’s output and employment structure.
In the last three decades environmental history has grown rapidly and has made significant contribution in developing environmental sensitivity in historical narratives, specifically of the colonial period. Recent works on environmental history have focused on how ecological changes have adversely affected tribal people.
The Handbook of Alternative…
Set against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s presidency and the Brexit vote, Straight Talk on Trade, the latest book by Dani Rodrik, is an attempt to ‘set the record straight’ on trade—about how (mainstream) trade economists should have listened to their critics who warned about trade imbalances and job losses, instead of sticking to economic models…
Economic growth is often considered as one of the most important indicators to measure the success of an economic institution. While few would disagree with the importance of growth, the bone of contention would be how to achieve it and at what cost. In economics the concept of growth is linked with the idea of efficiency.
Marxist conceptions of imperialism as something systemically connected to the capitalist mode of production have focused on examining how the fundamental tendencies of the capitalist mode express themselves concretely in history when the necessary accompaniment of the mode—a class state—is national.
2018
This book by Bhaskar Ghose, a former civil servant is about a college founded in the 1880s by a group of scholars from a monastic order based in Oxford. This is his fifth book. Two of the previous ones, Doordarshan Days and The Service of the State were non-fiction. The other two, The Teller of Tales and Parricide were fiction, like this one.
2018
The Miss Burma in the title is Louisa Bension, the daughter of Benny, a Jew, and Khin, belonging to the Karen minority. And, she is also the mother of Charmaine Craig, the author of the book.
Saeed Naqvi in the editor’s Preface states that his belief is that Urdu has served as a link language for many centuries, and that writers of Urdu literature should be better known for the common thread of humanity discernible in their stories. Perhaps for the sake of retaining the focus on the Urdu language and literature, the editor skirts the vexed history of language politics…
It is not easy to put together an anthology. One could finalize a theme with relative ease but inclusion and exclusion of texts around the decided theme can be an unusually challenging task. At a time when literary and academic circles, for the most part, swear by theoretical propositions that deny individual choice its due, the compiler must gear up for answering a series of questions on why some pieces were included and others were not.
Why do we make documentaries? How do we make them? For whom do we make them? Where are our films shown and who sees them? What, if any, is the impact of our work? These are some of the compelling questions that are foregrounded and discussed in Towards A People’s Cinema edited by Kasturi Basu and Dwaipayan Banerjee.
Few other film-makers in the history…
Iqbaulnnissa Hussain (1897–1954) was an educationist, columnist, essayist, social rights’ activist and reformer, championing emancipation and modernization of the Muslim community, particularly its women. Stressing the importance of education, she encouraged coming out of purdah and securing economic independence.
The status of women in Muslim societies is a topic of active debate in recent times. The stereotypical impression of women in such societies is that of the oppressed and the subjugated. This oversimplified impression betrays an ignorance of reality. The variation in the status of women belonging to different societies and within a society has received little attention.
Zia Us Salam’s book is largely about the process of ‘Othering’ of Muslims and growth of Hindutva ideology. Salam, a noted literary and social commentator and currently Associate Editor of Frontline, begins his book discussing the rise of Hindutva, in Part I, tracing its history and growth from the time of VD Savarkar and MS Golwalkar.
This is an important work, not so much from the strength of its postulate, which in itself is questionable, but because it presents the thoughts of an Indian of eminence both among the fraternity of journalists, which holds him in esteem and in the Muslim community, the largest of India’s religious minorities.
At the heart of Ed Husain’s book The House of Islam: A Global History is his misplaced faith in the West and neo-conservatism. Husain writes ambitiously as a Muslim and evocatively as a westerner. This dual personality helps him to navigate through the tensions that Islam and the West supposedly have. Husain sees himself as an enlightened westerner-Muslim, but it is the West with which he feels comfortable despite his emphasizing the spiritual power of shrines and mosques throughout the book.
It’s Not Just Academic!: Essays on Sufism and Islamic Studies is a collection of Carl W Ernst’s previously published work on basic and critical issues relating to the study of Islam, with the purpose of presenting this material in a manner that is accessible to the reading public, and not just specialists.
This book should not have been published in its present form and the fact that it has raises disturbing questions at two levels.In the first instance, the book does not appear to have gone through a proper refereeing process. If it had, many of the problems outlined would have been obvious to any half competent academic reviewer.