Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The boredom of teaching and learning social stratification in the ambit of social science is nearly an abiding experience in academia. Teachers end up recycling the monolithic categories and students learn the trick of obtaining good grades in the course. The categories of social stratification, such as race, gender,…

This striking book, a collection of thirteen papers, on the genealogy, locations and practices of sociology in India tries to locate within the complex, contradictory, and contesting histories of sociological traditions in the various settings during the colonial period and immediately after, before the spiralling expansion of the university…

Gail Omvedt’s book attempts to understand caste, critiquing the position that equates Indian tradition with Hinduism making Vedas the foundational texts of Indian culture that imprisons even secular minds within brahmanical perspective and proposes to go beyond the debate of posing secularism or reformist Hinduism…

The book under review unravels the way in which the adivasi society negotiated with itself and interacted with shifts and changes that were taking place during the colonial period. The book is divided into three parts consisting of 13 papers. The Editor’s introduction seeks to explore the nature of tribal society in colonial India…

At a time when adivasis are both central to the national political discourse on conversion, migration, the environ-ment, and insurgency, and yet strangely silenced, Alpa Shah’s straight up ethnography of a Munda village in Jharkhand is very welcome. It grounds her critical discussion of these larger issues…

After a gap of many years, Margaret and Percival Spear returned to India to recall and reflect on the life they had to­gether spent in this country during the twenties, the thirties and half the forties of this century.

Any serious student of Indian federalism must be aware that if Indian federa-lism has been the key to holding this very complex and culturally diverse country together in conditions of democracy over the last half a century-a remarkable record of nation and state building in sharp contrast to the former USSR and many countries…

Rights are of various kinds-every day we read about people struggling somewhere in the world, for the right to free speech, for sexual rights, for the right to a minimum wage, or for the right to freedom of religion. These rights are indi-vidual rights. One can also have a right to a place in a university, not as an individual…

Whatever generalization you make about India, the reverse of it is equally true.Joan RobinsonAshok Mitra’s collection of sixty essays, published as column pieces in The Telegraph between 2009 and 2011, are self-confessedly quite disparate. The essay ‘A Country, Not a Nation’, however, gives an overall picture of the message that this book attempts to convey…

If we exclude the descriptive and institutional studies of the formal-legal variety, scholarship on legislative institutions in India would actually look threadbare. For a large number of students of Indian politics, obviously influenced by the behavioural revolution, institutions have simply not mattered. Consequently…

On August 15, 2011, while addressing India from the ramparts of the Red Fort, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the problem of corruption was ‘a difficultly for which no government has a magic wand’. To the extent that unclean hands include not only the greased palms in public offices but also those belonging to the citizens that do the greasing…

The Battle for Employment Guarantee is a collection of seminal articles that trace the genesis of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Gurantee Act (MGNREGA), evaluate its implemen-tation, and provide a commentary on the extent to which the Act has been successful in fulfilling the entitlements…

Divided into three parts, the twelve essays in this volume collectively emerge as a critique to the linear and often instrumentalist ‘developmental’ as well as ‘methodological’ perspective(s) of western modernity and its overwhelming hegemony across the Third World countries. They also deal with agencies and institutional structures working…

People are raising their voice against in-justice and inequity in every corner of the world. They occupy Wall Street in the US, they collect in Tahrir Square in Egypt and they also protest in several small villages in the Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra against the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project. Ecological degradation…

The problem of scientists functioning in a non-rational culture, with conse­quences to their own personalities and to their work, is not a new one. Newton studied trigonometry and geometry to help him solve riddles of alchemy and astrology and Halley, the first secretary of the Royal Society, admiring a calico shirt imported from India.

This is a work that is as interesting as it is informative. It is interesting on account of the several nuances that it is able to reveal pertaining to the Hindu ascetic tradition. Some of the information available here, as the author rightly claims, may be little known to the world outside maths and akhadas…

There was every reason to linger on her swift passage from tree to bush to rock through the forest. A universe of dark green light and darker shade shimmered all around her. The world seemed to constantly explode and re-form in ever-changing colours and liquid forms. Everything demanded redefining, renaming…

Random Curiosity, as the name suggests, is a compilation of the answers to almost three hundred random questions that Professor Yash Pal received. In partnership with his son, Dr. Rahul Pal, Yash Pal answers each of these questions in his own inimitable style. Most people will remember Yash Pal from the popular science programme of the eighties…

Dr. Raza H. Tehsin is a well-known conserva-tionist and wildlife expert, and the book begins with high praise for his work on wildlife conservation in Southern Rajasthan and his vast experience as a naturalist. His love for nature is quite apparent when you read this collection of short stories based on wild animals and their interaction with humans…

‘This is a labor of love in more ways than one—deep love both for the scientific work that went into it and for the people whose language and knowledge are the object of this book.’…