Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

A friend, who trained at the National Cricket Academy (NCA) in Bengaluru, once reminisced about an interesting tussle he had at the academy nets. A right-handed batsman, he was receiving hard lessons on the perils of spin bowling. He began with a cover.

Bidyut Mahanty’s Lakshmi the Rebel: Culture, Economy and Women’s Agency is an  attempt to examine the status of women in society by exploring the links between history, political economy, culture and region in India. The uncertainties and the complexities of the narratives.

Zorawar Daulet Singh has made a very impressive intervention into the historiography of Indian foreign relations in the Cold War. His close historical study of the diplomacy of both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi reveals profound differences.

A veritable explosion in books offering China-India comparisons is a sign of the times. The two Asian giants offer strong similarities and contrasts, which belies an approximate 5-to-1 difference in the size of their economies.

The civilizational links between India and Southeast Asia established through its engagements and interactions with the region, has a long history. All the three major religions of Southeast Asia, namely, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, went either from or through India.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, focus of the international community has shifted from nuclear nonproliferation regime to nuclear safety and nuclear security. Active participation by large numbers of countries in the Nuclear Security Summits (NSS) demonstrates the significance of nuclear security in the contemporary world.

The 2014 general elections which saw the Bharatiya Janata Party return to power with an absolute majority is believed to have brought an important paradigmatic shift to Indian politics. Scholars commenting have termed it as a majoritarian shift.

In this illuminating study Jennifer Bussell explores a frequently talked about but scarcely studied phenomenon of Indian democracy, characterized aptly as ‘patronage democracy’, describing the relationship between elected representatives and the electors as ‘clients and constituents’.

Increasing corruption in public life has been a matter of growing concern in India since the early 1960s. The Administrative Reforms Commission recommended the appointment of the Lokpal institution in 1966. Since then, a number of Lokpal legislations were introduced.

The discipline of public administration emerged foregrounding two major Wilsonian fallacies. One, that ‘politics’ and ‘administration’ are distinct dichotomous governmental blobs which need to be dealt with separately, and the political and permanent executive must take note of it.

The Indian social, political and economic scenario has undergone and is still undergoing a process of rapid transformation. A change is particularly significant in the way we perceive Muslims and their concerns in India. The new institutional framework caused.

On the 28th of February of 2002, fifty-nine Hindu karsevaks (volunteers for a religious cause) were killed. It led to violent attacks on Muslims, which resulted in the deaths of nearly a thousand Muslims. Even by 2018, only hundred and fifty-two Hindus were convicted in the various cases, out of which 38 were acquitted.

In normal political discussions, the conscious Ambedkarites are scaled above and admired more over the other ‘non-active’ Dalits. In the post-Ambedkar period, the Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra and the formation of the BSP in Uttar Pradesh are two prominent examples.

Jai Bheem, Lal Salaam (Hail the Unity of the Ambedkarites and the Marxists) had become a catchphrase slogan in the aftermath of Rohit Vemula’s suicide in Hyderabad Central University in 2016, which immediately percolated to the streets around the power-corridors.

This is the revised and updated edition of a book originally published in 2003. Maithreyi Krishnaraj’s ‘Note from the Series Editor’ introduces the volume and places it in its context, while Uma Chakravarti’s ‘Afterword: Caste and Gender in the New Millennium’ provides.

This fascinating book provides a compelling narrative about the life and times of South Asia’s female heads of state. While the content focuses mainly on Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Khaleda Zia, Hasina Wajed, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Chandrika Kumaratunga.

The Silence and the Storm: Narratives of Violence Against Women in India is an addition to the existing corpus of literature on gender politics. Working as a journalist for four decades, the author Kalpana Sharma has drawn the trajectory of women’s struggles in India.

When globalization, dominant morality and caste clash, it is women who get trampled. Nowhere was this more evident than in the controversy that arose over so-called ‘dance bars’ in Mumbai in the new millennium. These were bars where men drank.

Migration, Gender and Care Economy focuses on the intersections of women’s role and their experiences in migration along with the care economy. Historically we know that women in general have been part of the care economy as unpaid carers and low.

Amiya Sen calls his book Chaitanya: A Life and Legacy: 1) a biography of Chaitanya, 2) a story that he has ‘narrated to himself’1 as a historian and ‘not as a scholar of religious studies’2, 3) a ‘not so serious yet reflexive’3 work which he believes will not please either the pious Vaishnava (‘for a palpable lack of faith’4).