2018
The book is a compilation of conference papers related to Turkish people and their contribution to Islamic world from Spain to India. The conference was held in May 2010 on the occasion of the nineteenth Giorgio Lei Della Vida Award to recognize the late Professor Gustave Von Grunebaum, and his contribution to the Semitic languages and history of Middle East and the United States.
Professor Gulshan Dietl, who effortlessly combines lucidity, rigour of logic, and diligent research, was till recently Professor at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University heading the Gulf Studies Programme. She was also Chairperson of the Centre for West Asian and African Studies. She has taught also at universities outside India, in New York, Paris, Copenhagen, and elsewhere.
The title says it all. India’s approach to Afghanistan has little to do with Afghanistan. It has everything to do with Pakistan. This tells us something about India, about how we see ourselves, which is essentially in relation to our Siamese twin, Pakistan. This is not quite how we project ourselves—as a regional power and emerging great power, measuring up against China and a strategic partner of the US.
Historians, political commentators, journalists have all, almost uniformly, depicted an objectified Afghanistan: it is played upon by external powers, not a player. A ‘great game’ has, since at least the nineteenth century, been played out by these powers, but Afghanistan itself is not supposed to have agency. That phrase was first used by a British intelligence officer, Arthur Conolly, in 1840, in a letter to a colleague.
This feisty book as echoed in the title, We Are All Revolutionaries Here, is a fascinating mapping by a Pakistani woman of the journey that a generation of ‘born again’ Pakistanis have taken towards the re-constitution of a Pakistani Islamic identity that rejects the hotchpotch of western culture and Pakistan’s plural ethnic cultures to embrace a version of militant Islam that erases all other versions and problematically condones ‘fringe’ vigilante groups using violence in the name of faith. Babar unpacks the contestations in Pakistan’s socio-cultural dynamics which have been framed in a context produced by the nexus of political Islam and militarism.
Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), signed between India and Pakistan in September 1960 to share water from the Indus Rivers System (IRS), has survived the wars (1965, 1971 and 1999) and all other forms of tensions between them. However, the Treaty and people engaged in making it possible are, till today, being accused of selling out their ‘own’ water to ‘them’ by majority of the scholars…
In September 1960, during a rare five-day visit by an Indian Prime Minister to Pakistan, Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan President Ayub Khan drove in an open car together to the hill station of Murrie. The air would have been chilly, but not colder than the mood in the car, and the two leaders spent most of the drive without uttering a word. The outcome of the drive that dispelled all chances of a thaw between India and Pakistan is detailed in various accounts by Nehru, Ayub and diplomats of the time, which have been collated in former High Commissioner to Pakistan TCA Raghavan’s book under review.
Given the extra emphasis that Pakistan receives in India (some would even call it an obsession), books authored by Indian scholars, especialy those who have spent time in Pakistan in some official capacity have been few. Given the harsh fact that some of the best books on Balochistan and NWFP (now KP) were written by former British bureaucrats and military officials, and those who accompanied them, this becomes even more important.
Running into 345 pages of text, this volume is by no means a concise history. This revised fourth edition has run into 27 chapters of uneven length, episodic treatment, wavering focus and disjointed narrative. To update the volume, the author has appended a few chapters at the end but this has marred the continuity. Reading through this book, most Indians will marvel at the way Pakistanis are able to produce an alternative narrative of their foreign policy, because so much of it is about India.
China-Pakistan relation is among the most fascinating in the post-Second World War international politics. It is one of the closest and longest strategic relationships in the contemporary international system, surviving changes of governments and domestic and international turmoil, and continuing to gather strength even after the end of the bipolar Cold War period in which it initially formed.
The 19th century was about European empires dominating the world and an era of consolidation. Yet in 1816, barely 40 years after US independence, Thomas Jefferson prophesied, ‘Old Europe will have to lean on us … what a power shall we be.’ This happened at the end of the Second World War and after nearly fifty years of endless violence. The US strategic planner, George Kennan, one of those original Cold Warriors was sure that the US would not give up its primacy where, with 6.4 % of the global population, that country owned 50 % of the global wealth.
Despite its phenomenal growth and diversification in the last decade, Indian media, both print and television, remains an inadequate and flawed vehicle for the communication of serious ideas. Most analysts disparagingly refer to the dumbing down of the media, the unhealthy growth of a page 3 culture, an obsession with titilatory gossip and the ever-present three Fs – films, fashion and food.
2006
The one thing that strikes the reader as he closes the book is: Interesting people, uninteresting thoughts. The section, “About the Authors” makes for more interesting reading than the book itself. This is a puzzling thing, apart from being an obvious paradox. And it needs some explanation. The Stephanians who have contributed to this 125th St. Stephens College anniversary issue are successful bureaucrats, diplomats, journalists, politicians, academics.
Thrity Umrigar’s second novel , The Space Between Us is, to put it very simplistically, the story of Sera Dubash, a middle class westernized Parsi, and Bhima, her maid. In this novel Umrigar moves beyond the world of middle-class Parsis which she portrayed so well in Bombay Time, and depicts the wide spectrum of class and society which constitutes the fabric of life in a modern Indian metropolis.
2006
In many ways, Esther David’s Book of Rachel resonates with rather than follows from the preoccupations in her earlier books. As in her previous book Book of Esther, whose very title suggests a certain proximity to this new one, and also her former novel The Walled City, David is concerned with depicting Jewish life in a contemporary Indian context.
Mythili Sivaraman has written an outstanding book. It is moving, angry, grounded in the everyday, and speaks, in true democratic spirit, to the common reader (its subject, Subbalakshmi, was one such avid, intelligent reader) and to academic specialists in history and women’s studies. Its focus is Sivaraman’s grandmother, the aforementioned Subbalakshmi, who lived from c. 1897 to 1978, in a Tamil Brahmin milieu.
The memsahib as arrogant, snobbish, exclusive, is one of numerous stereotypes we have been saddled with since the end of colonialism in India. There are plenty of others, including the idea that Macaulay forced English and English studies down the throats of Indians. British colonialism in India has been treated as a monolith, with little suggestion of varied voices, attitudes, achievements.
Reading this extremely well researched and lucidly written study took me back to the 1950s in what was then Bombay when small volumes bound in dark blue, the World’s Classics, were there to be bought, and one wondered in one’s ignorance whether the motto on the crest was to be read downwards (Dominus illuminatio mea) or across (Dommina nustio illumea!).
S.L. Bhyrappa is one of Kannada’s most prolific and popular writer, having won several literary awards within and without the state. Outside Karnataka, he may be known more from his novels that were made into films during the 1970s, including Vamsavriksha (directed by Girish Karnad and B.V. Karanth) and Tabbaliyu Ninade Magane which was made into Godhuli (directed by B.V. Karanth).
By far the best-known novel by the most loved Oriya writer, Fakir Mohan Senapati (1843-1918), Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third) has lost none of its century-old popularity in Orissa. It first made its serialized appearance in the magazine Utkal Sahitya between 1897 and 1899, and was published in book form in 1902.