Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

While the grand narrative of South Asian freedom from the yoke of colonial rule and partition pays due deference to the tragedy of the loss of millions of lives and the largest human displacement in history in its aftermath, the implications of hundreds of princely states being sacrificed at the altar of the Indian Union is a largely untold tale.

The final chapter of this book opens with perhaps the most persuasive argument for the volume. Journalist Ammu Joseph scans the pages of the Bangalore press on February 16, 2006, and finds the patterns and trends of representation of women in the papers more or less conform to the findings of a major new international study…

Vasanthi Ramans The Warp and the Weft examines the changing contours of community and identity in the city of Banaras through a focus on Muslim handloom weavers employed in the famed sari industry of the city. Using the metaphor of tana bana (warp and weft) to characterize the close intermeshing of relations between…

The book Gender Equality and Womens Empowerment in Pakistan by Rashida Patel provides the reader a comprehensive understanding of the issue of violence that confront women in Pakistan on the basis of her experience as a practicing lawyer and being a member of various womens organizations which deal with womens issues…

The historical studies of Women and Gender in South Asia and the Islamic world have come of age. The gendered nature of cultures of travel has received increasing attention in recent years from imperial and South Asian scholars. These scholars have tried to explore the economic, political, social and cultural lives of Asians…

The current widely shared concern for building an egalitarian and just society in India often prompts scholars to inquire into the prerequisites for achieving this laudable objective. An understanding of the processes of change specific consti­tuents of Indian society have experienced over a period of time can provide useful insights in this context.

The nationalist renditions of ancient Indian history were part of a cultural battle in the context of colonial domination which turned the bodies of women into sites of struggle. A Vedic woman of high status in the ancient past was made to stand for the authentic nation and her declining position in society was explained through largely…

The study of urban history and processes in the early history of the subcontinent has remained much neglected. Teaching a class of fourteen year olds, I realized that the word ‘city’ conjures up a very modern imagery in their mind.

Syed Anwarul Haque Haqqi’s book is a revised and enlarged version of his doctoral dissertation approved by the Aligarh Muslim University under the supervision of the great historian of the time, Professor Muhammad Habib.

The work under review represents several years of serious research and reflection on the life of Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), popularly known as Sri Aurobindo since 1926. Heehs already has to his credit a shorter biography of Aurobindo (1989), a collection of his writings and speeches (2005) and more recently (2006)…

The book edited by Manu Bhagwan brings together seven essays in a series of three interrelated conversations—‘On the Landscapes of the Margins’, ‘On the Dreamscapes of Literary Imaginings’ and ‘On the Heteroscapes of history’—united under the general scheme of what Foucault called heterotopia or the possibility…

This anthology, Makers of Modern India, edited and introduced by Ramchandra Guha includes selected writings and speeches of the nineteen ‘thinker-activists’ of the past two centuries of Indian history. In October, 2005, Guha had reviewed Amartya Sen’s Argumentative Indian for the EPW.

The Satpanth Ismaili Muslims or Khoja Ismailis in India and Pakistan have a remarkable tradition of religious poetry called Ginans which they have sung for several centuries in daily rituals.

Editors Daniela Berti and Gilles Tarabout explore the concept of territory as a social construct rather than a purely jurisdictional unit of political control. Borrowing from geographer Bonnemaison and acknowledging that the concept of ‘territory’ itself remains largely unexplored in the social sciences, they pursue territoriality more…

Ritual Matters is an anthology of essays visualized as a contribution to ritual studies. These presentations were part of two sets of conferences held in 2006. Almost inevitably, some of the papers are more interesting than others, but before turning to the specifics it may be worth outlining some of the issues raised by the editors in their introduction…

At the time of writing this book review, the scent, or rather, the powerful odour of the Tunisian ‘jasmine revolution’ wafts through the Arab world smiting a country here and there while charging congeries of people with revolutionary fervour. It would be interesting to speculate what Taqî al-Dîn Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328)…

Sri Lanka was not only considered an outstanding ‘model of Third World democracy’, but also one of the developing world’s few welfare states. Sri Lanka has an enviable record of social development and has been cited as ‘the most widely noted case’ for having relatively high Private Quality of Life Index despite being…

Challenges to India’s security and future have never been more complex. India is increasingly hemmed in by a neighbourhood which is politically unstable, economically fragile and prone to be exploited by external forces, if not entirely inimical but with divergent strategic objectives.

The Book of the Dun Cow is another addition to the many novels in the genre of fantasy narratives like Watership Down and Lord of the Rings. Not perhaps as utterly captivating as these classics, it nevertheless has its own intrinsic magic.

If one goes through all the works of Emile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology, and German philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche, one would discover that there was little in common in what the two great thinkers said. Except one thing. Both Durkheim and Nietzsche agreed that punitive states were weak states…