Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Popular and academic discourses on Northeast India have for long been centred around the themes of conflicts, ethnicity and insurgency. This is not surprising given that the region has been seen as a ‘troubled periphery’ marked by ‘durable disorder’. Seen against this backdrop, the book under review marks a significant…f

Narratives about lives popularly regarded as successful or marked by significant achievements, written by celebrities or eminent public figures, have always been eagerly received by a wider reading public. However, writings by those at the margins have visibly toppled the conventions of this genre in the twentieth century…

Reverence for the Prophet of Islam through an affirmation of his exceptionality has a contested legacy and an emotional salience that has captured the imagination of the political landscape of South Asia. Recently, the National Assembly of Pakistan was pressed to debate its infamous blasphemous laws in the context of the demand…

In recent times there have been several challenges to the use of theories that have been developed to investigate Euro-American societies, for understanding South Asian realities. Many of these challenges have emerged within the social science disciplines of sociology, social anthropology and political science…

The book under review serves as a ready description of ‘Brand New India’ in both economic and cultural terms. The earlier binaries of core/periphery, developed/developing, poor/rich are discarded to define the new India, which is more prosperous, mobile and enterprising. To redefine global capitalism, the author brings in the politics…

Over the last decade or so, there has been a remarkable expansion of scholarly interest in the rise of public and private forms of violence in democracies across the world, including India. One major reason for this attention is the concern that ‘toleration or encouragement’ of violence is often considered to be a ‘precursor of democratic breakdown…

Professor Nyla Khan’s newest book is a call to action: action formulated in a deep consciousness of understanding and caring. Composed out of her own experience and care for the peoples of Jammu and Kashmir and their trauma of insurgency and of the new, native nationalism of India…

The very title of the book—India: The Last Super Power–is intriguing. It is one of the few works by a foreigner that places India at the centre of global politics. Hiroshi Hirabayashi, a veteran Japanese diplomat, is highly hopeful of India joining the existing list of leading world powers: US, Russia and China. Once it joins…

Simultaneous Identities: Language, Education and the Nepali Nation (2020) comes at a time when education stands at a critical juncture in South Asia. As educational inequalities become the centre of analyses in the post-pandemic world, this book reminds us of the need to build a comprehensive understanding of educational practices…

Amish Raj Mulmi’s All Roads Lead North: Nepal’s Turn to China is a fresh breeze. It is based on his extensive travels in Nepal, formal interviews, relaxed and spontaneous chats, and first-hand observations of geography and experiences at Nepal’s northern border during the travels. Yet, this reportage is not simply a travelogue…

Economist and freedom fighter Rehman Sobhan is a unique personality who has helped shape the course of contemporary history in the subcontinent. A brilliant man and a friend and contemporary of former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the second volume of his memoirs which deals with the early days of the founding of Bangladesh…

This is an autobiography of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan based on a 1983 text written by him in Pukhto.  An earlier 1969 account, also translated and published in English, was deemed incomplete by Bacha Khan and he therefore wrote a more complete account which is now available to a non-Pukhto knowing readership…

The book under review examines financial inclusion and monetary change in Pakistan, where liberalization of money and markets was initiated in the last few decades. Pakistan had been a low-inflation economy until liberalization and had for many decades maintained both fixed exchange rates and fixed pricing. However…

Asma Faiz’s excellent book on Sindhi nationalism fills a much needed gap on ethnicity and ethnic conflict in Pakistan. Works on ethnicity in Pakistan—both research articles and books—have focused on providing a more general outline of ethnic conflict and movements including that of Tahir Amin, Adeel Khan, Mehtab Ali Shah or have focused more…

Abdul Basit’s book consistently shows that he eschewed the role of an envoy during his assignment in India; instead, becoming a rigid zealot, he became a bone stuck in the throat of his government. An elected and secure government would have reassigned him quickly enough. That Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif did not do so was on account of Pakistan’s…

Amid the forest of debates about the relations between history and biography one line of disputation stands out, that between the promoters and detractors of the Great Man Theory. Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century Scottish historian was its most well known promoter; he famously said that the history of the world is but the biography of great men…

In the nineteenth century, the Wuyi Mountains in northwest Fujian emerged as a key centre of China’s famed tea industry. Located in the mountain cliffs were more than a hundred factories producing a global commodity that had become integral to the country’s economic fortunes. The factories were maintained by merchants based in the market town of Chongan…

In school, I had always noticed ‘China (Tibet)’ or ‘Tibet (China)’  on maps showing India’s borders and wondered why no one talked about it, why the fuss was always about Pakistan. And in those days there really were not too many places to go looking for information either. So when the ‘Tiananmen Incident’ of June 4, 1989  happened in China…

The South China Sea is a semi-enclosed area measuring 3.6 million square kilometres in the Pacific Ocean. It spreads from the Straits of Malacca and Karimata to Taiwan Straits and is bordered in the north by China and Taiwan, the Philippines in the East, Brunei and Malaysia in the south, and Vietnam in the West. It contains numerous islands…

The rapid deterioration of China’s relations with India over the past year has generated voluminous literature. Kingshuk Nag’s contribution to this body of work, A New Silk Road is an excellent primer on the India-China bilateral relationship.  Nag takes a very hawkish position throughout this book and perceives China…