Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

This is the fourth in the series by Women Unlimited on ‘Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism’. Each volume so far, other than providing a range of excellent writing on key issues, has tried to explode the myth of a singular feminist position on an issue by bringing out the nuances of divergent positions within the women’s movement.

From Mathura to Manorama invites us to think critically of how feminist projects opposed to violence against women are con- structed. This exciting book shows us how feminist politics against violence has been varied in its forms,

Much scholarly work, particularly from feminists, engages with different aspects and dimensions of violence, and with the aftermath of what are now episodes of history, such as the partition, the massacre of whole communities, particularly the Sikhs and Muslims, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the Godhra train carnage, to name a few.

The book’s conceptualization of gender justice as both an outcome and a process is a refreshing departure from the conventional approach where one or the other is high-lighted. After all it is the process that shapes the outcome. It is the means and ends connection. In the current overemphasis on so called empowerment of women, this critical insight is lost sight of.

This book is based on weekly commentaries on economic issues published in a Sunday newspaper for about 10 months from the last week of May 2005 to March 2006. Most of these commentaries were written under the pen-name Economist by the author of this volume.

This is the autobiography of Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize and the creator of the Grameen Bank, the micro-finance institution that revolutionized lending to the poor. Naturally, perhaps, the book focuses on the Grameen Bank and how it came into being, ignoring, some may cavil, more personal aspects of Professor Yunus’s life.

This book, based on a significant Ph.D work in an area where academic work is sparse, has been brought to our attention through its belated publication by the Pakistani Branch of the Oxford University Press. Despite the fact that it deals with events which took place 35 years ago, it is not cast as an exercise in social history (more on this later).

This book is a compendious account of the situation in respect of water resources in Pakistan. It packs an impressive amount of material into 126 pages, and both the presentation of information and the discussion of issues are lucid and highly readable. It is an extremely useful book.

The book under review looks at the South Asian Cooperation and India-Pakistan relations through the prism of the relationship between Indian-Punjab and Pakistan-Punjab. Maini belongs to the post-India—Pakistan partition generation and, therefore, does not carry the mindset of hate of the pre-partition generation and hence his perspective, is important.

‘The corrosive effects of authoritarianism, on people and countries and in particular on those who perpetrate it needs constant attention.’ It was this need for constant attention that propelled the author to bring out this book, which is an updated version of his earlier two books. The underlying theme of the book is to answer the key question: what exacerbated violence in Sri Lanka?

For those who may not realize that the lengthy title of this book means more than what it says, Critical Economic Theory is a Marxist addition to the critique of political economy. Today, of course not all adherents to the theory are Marxist.