Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

This book, in the shape of an edited volume of fourteen papers presented in the two-day seminar organized by the Department of Defence and Strategic Studies of the University of Pune, has attempted to address the various issues of internal security in terms of the need for evolving appropriate ‘security policy’, particularly in the context of ‘political, economic and socio-cultural dimensions’.

If the original tradition of India is contained in the Vedas, the Vedanta, epics, Puranas and the Kathasaritsagar (“Ocean of Stories”), its Buddhist corpus is the Tripitaka. In a way, the counterpart of the Kathasaritsagar is the Jatakas consisting of 547 stories of past births of the Buddha as Bodhisatva (‘enlightened being’) in animal and human form.

The author argues that two significant aspects Elwin’s advocacy of protectionism for tribal people have contributed to the construction of an anti-modern tribal identity. First it was based on an ecological romanticism that glorified the past and held that “tribal people had been living in harmony with nature since ancient times (p xv)….

‘Diaspora’ is an ancient word, derived from a Greek term that refers to the act of sowing or scattering seeds. Historically connected with the dispersal of the Jewish people,

This is a compilation of articles written by various academic researchers belonging to one of two backgrounds: law and economics (in particular international trade).

Starting from the inception of women’s studies at a visible level after 1975, the primary focus of scholars in South Asia has been the identification and examination of certain aspects of society which situated women in a different context from those of the western countries.

At a time when minorities and women of different classes are facing all manner of threats in the name of nation, culture and religion it is important for historians and non-historians alike to revisit the complex dynamics of social reform and the ‘women’s question’ in modern India.

This book is a contribution to the sociology of embodiment—mediated by gender and class—in the context of women’s lives in urban India today.

The writings of dalit women are gaining greater visibility today, especially through translations. The Weave of My Life, Maya Pandit’s English translation of Urmila Pawar’s autobiographical work Aaydan (2003), is a welcome addition to this fast-growing archive.

The book under review with its intriguing title is by Gail Omvedt, the pioneering historian of Jotiba Phule and his movement. Since the publication of Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society (1976) Omvedt has maintained a steady stream of publications on Ambedkar and lower caste movements which have enlarged our understanding of dalit resistance and assertion.

The essays in this book reflect the general intellectual climate of the 1990s in India. Ravikumar’s essays—as Susie Tharu eloquently puts it in the Foreword entitled ‘Labour of Theory’—‘even in the black and white of print .

This collection of essays has a sense of polemic, since the writers are keen to bring the analyses of class as a category back into the sociological debate.

‘Subhashini’, the author declares at the beginning of the book ‘is all but absent from history, though history is not absent from her life’. A cryptic statement as this carries us nowhere. Who is it who does not have history in their lives, although not all lives are in history or are material for history?

Ranajit Guha has over his long career as the ‘founder and guiding spirit of Subaltern Studies’ (p. 1) and also for his own passionately committed writing, earned great significance worldwide among scholars and students of colonial and post-Independence Indian history and of the nature of historiography in general…

This book by Anne Broadbridge is an interesting portrayal of diplomacy and kingship in the medieval Islamic world. Written in a narrative style, the details on the dynasties and the Sultans sometimes get monotonous but this does not take away the importance of the details that she provides lucidly on the role of ideologies,

The title of the book is not the Early Medieval of South India—which would have implied that the author is studying one phase amongst the many phases in the history of South India.

Jason Hawkes and Akira Shimada rightly point out in their Introduction to this book that although Buddhist stupas have been studied by many scholars over a very long period of time, an integrated understanding of the stupa still eludes us.

Tribal studies in India have been dominated by the romanticization of tradition visualizing the egalitarian community institutions as a pivot that propelled grassroot democracy and regulated the relationship of the tribals with their environment.

This book is a study of the history of printing in South India focussed on the role of folklore in printed books. The author approaches the matter from a folklorist’s perspective and finds the proverbial saying “that print did not produce new books, only more old books” holds true.

Calcutta defies all stereotypes. It is commonly believed that the civic chaos and economic stagnation that would have killed any other city have not been able to subdue the spirit of this strange urban agglomeration.