Sayeed and Janet seem to be an unlikely couple to write a cook book. Sayeed is a thinking administrator and Janet is a genuine intellectual who has written seminal books on Ladakh. At the same time Sayeed is a gourmet and Janet is the type of cook whom gourmets dream of and the lucky ones marry. On second thought, therefore, this book is no surprise.
Old soldiers like Monty Palit do not fade away. They become prolific writers and lead active lives, both physically and mentally, after retirement. Several of Palit’s books like Essentials of Military Knowledge have sold well, and I believe that his War in High Himalaya: The Indian Army in Crisis, 1962 is probably the best book written about the Sino-Indian border conflict.
Autobiography and memoir—are they the same? In the subtitle the book is an autobiography, in the author’s preface it is “a memoir”. If you go by the COD, an autobiography is the story writing of one’s own life. But a memoir is just a record of events or history written from personal knowledge or special sources of information. It is only memoirs that become synonymous with (auto) biography.
These two well illustrated slim books on the living cultural heritage of India are easy to handle and priced modestly. Asha Rani Mathur writes with felicity. In her book on the Indian Shawls she covers some of the major shawl making areas.
Goa is a seductive place—it offers each what they are looking for. The young come for sun, fun and the sea while others enjoy the idle amongst the lush green and magnificent buildings. This little conclave was ruled by the Portuguese from the 16th century until it was occupied by Indian forces in 1961.
This set of three volumes aims to cover the salient features of God and God-alike appearing in different religions, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. The contributors have given a comprehensive bird’s eyeview of their origins along with anecdotes that manifest their awesome personality. The cultural settings of the three religious heads vary considerably.
This scholarly and imaginative study of the Upanishads makes a significant point: It argues that the Upanishadic texts have been traditionally viewed as consisting of two distinct and separable parts—“metaphysics” and “story”.
It’s one of those unsettling questions endlessly asked: what makes immigrants stay on in their land of adoption (generally western) if they end up unhappy, can’t strike roots, feel alien, homesick or abused; if the culture shock is hard, if memories of the motherland wring the soul…
Translating Caste is a significant addition to the literature of caste now available in English. The first English-language anthologies of dalit literature, such as Barbara Joshi’s Untouchable! Voices of dalit Literature (1986), Arjun Dangle’s Poisoned Bread (1992), and the Anthology of Dalit Literature by Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot (1992) have served very well as windows on Dalit writing, especially the radical literature of protest that appeared in Marathi and other languages from the 1960s.
Benjamin Disraeli could well have had Sir Richard Francis Burton in mind when he remarked in his novel Tancred that the East is a career. Following his expulsion from Oxford for unruly behaviour, the young Burton headed East under the auspices of the East India Company, to become at various points of time an explorer, diplomat, soldier, translator, poet, writer, linguist, Sufi mystic and a most remarkable Victorian.
In the wake of numerous little publishing houses opening up to cater to a vast English market, translations on the one hand and creative takes on contemporary concerns, usually in the format of essays have become the prime products of these houses.
Arundhati Roy has a long history of evoking extreme reactions from those who have read her, and even more extreme reactions from those who haven’t. People either hate Roy or love her. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a writer, it makes almost impossible any pretensions to objectivity on the part of the reviewer.
2004
My Little Boat is a promising first novel that offers a delightful read. Set in contemporary India, it is primarily concerned with its female protagonist’s search for selfhood and subjectivity.
The Transplanted Man of the title is the Union Health Minister of India who has so many transplanted organs in his body he can proudly say he truly represents India. Once he was very corrupt but having often been close to death he has begun to actually feel the pain of the mother of a dying child and is determined to do some good for his country before he dies, except that he is not sure he will survive his latest illness.
Sir Olaf Caroe, the former British civil servant in India, was not much off-centre when (in the mid-1940s) he pro¬pounded the doctrine of ‘Wells of Power’. He emphasized West Asian oil which was absolutely essential for the Western powers and hence should be shielded from the Communist Bear, This, coupl¬ed with the fact that the Indian Ocean does not, like its bigger counterparts, the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, extend northwards into the cold cli¬matic regions, saddles it with paramount strategic signi¬ficance.
When I was asked if I would review some Russian books on Psychology and Child Deve-lopment, I agreed immediately since I had not read much literature emanating from Eastern Europe in recent years. Familiarity with the English language predisposes one to keep largely to books coming out of the USA and England, and to translations of French and German writings.
Chaitanya’s new volume, edged in a glossy royal blue, is the fourth in a series of five which venture to span Indian painting—beginning from pre-historic rock paintings to the ‘modern temper’ of the Tagores, of Shergil and Jamini Roy. The author’s credentials need no elaboration and his erudition rides high despite the modesty of the blurb on the dust jacket—perhaps to popularize the sale of a scholar’s work:
The sociological study of contemporary Hindu society has suffered from many con¬straints, some of which—most notably, borrowed para¬digms of social order and social change—have been by now widely recognized; others have received less attention. Thus the implica¬tions of the fact that most sociologists and social anthro¬pologists of the last fifty years have been high caste Hindus of middle or upper-middle class urban background have not been examined.
What does development imply? It implies, according to conventional economic theory, growth as measured in terms of gross national product and in terms of per capita income. Economic growth should also be accompanied by certain structural changes. While the primary sector including agri¬culture may register growth, its growth is overtaken by that of the secondary sector consisting of manufacturing indus¬tries and later by the growth of the tertiary sector consisting of transport and other services.
Interest in the character and fate of the former Hydera¬bad state is still widespread-and likely to endure. It is almost as great as in the evo¬lution of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir. This is surprising as the latter basi¬cally is still alive and kicking, while Hyderabad state has been scrambled in such a way that it has lost its identity almost completely.