Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

101 is auspicious perhaps to ward off the readers’ profane thoughts and to invoke the humane sublimity in them. If brevity is the soul of wit, then these are not just brief tell tales but are close to Sufistic and Biblical aphorisms. Some of the tales have a philosophical and ethical slant while some are able to depict and reflect upon the socio-economic processes as well. For instance, the story titled ‘Sage’

That earlier urgency diminished, and with it, a certain fire; the impulse to know more, understand more, and remain connected to one’s immediate oral environment. In linguistics classes, the first thing we are taught is how words are produced in the mouth as we speak them.

The play of colour, shapes, forms, and contrasts of light and dark is Sen’s métier, making cognition of the precepts in this volume predominantly visual. Even though this volume is black-and-white, he captures the Arjuna tree’s transformation across the day in captivating prose. When it catches the first rays of the sun, it looks like Gautama Buddha in deep meditation. At high noon, in the harsh mercury-white light and lamp-black shadows,

This restrained fury runs through the collection’s most recent poems. They come from a tradition of Bengali literary conscience that has always understood literature as a moral act. Sengupta continues that tradition without announcing it. His poem ‘Tradition’ turns a familiar concept into something quietly subversive:

they were branded as criminals by the British under the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act, which made their traditional way of life illegal. Junglee, a Pardhi girl herself, protects a vulnerable tiger cub, even though her community is blamed for hunting such animals.

The ‘secret question’ works like a small lesson in resistance. When the ghost copies the mother’s voice, the girl uses what she knows about her widowed mother. She remembers that her mother does not apply alta. She even breaks the rule about not touching the chuhla to burn the ghost’s wolf-foot,

Should he have mentioned his name Ashoka more often? Again, if this was a name specifically connected with his Buddhist affiliation, he may have preferred not to use it in inscriptions meant for a wider, diverse readership/audience, choosing other epithets instead. And, given that we now have the label inscription from Kanaganahalli, mentioning Rāyo Asoko, it is possible that people were familiar with the name. Further, although perhaps anachronistic,

limited in their study to lives and worldviews of individuals. However, with the waning of the teleological, unilineal view of history, historians are now beginning to realize the need to place human experiences, emotions and everyday events within the larger historical context. With this has come the realization that personal accounts are not just records of individual experiences but rather reflect an incessant interaction of the individual self with the wider socio-cultural discourse in diverse spatial and temporal contexts. The current work by Simon Digby, a renowned British scholar of pre-Mughal India,

This question of the role of Brahmans in the kali yuga is a central one around which Brahman scholarship and judicial power pivot themselves over the centuries. One discursive context can be found in the history of critical responses of Maratha Brahmans like Krishna Sesa (16th c.) and Kamalakarabhatta (17th c.) to Gopinatha’s Jativiveka (circa 14th/15th c.). The Jativiveka, a key scholarly reference point until the 19th century and consulted in various disputes across centuries into the colonial period, defended the varnashrama dharma, was hostile to varnasamskara and Bhakti, and traced Kayasthas to a degraded pratiloma intermarriage. While both Krishna Sesa and Kamalakarabhatta widened the range of communities to which the ‘good’ Sudra status applied, Kamalakarabhatta also defended the survival of Kshatriyas and Vaishyas in the kali yuga,

The Subaltern Studies collective after four decades of its academic rise and dominance has now started being questioned in terms of what it has really achieved. The recent book by Meera Nanda has already been cited and follows another book-length study over a decade earlier by Vivek Chibber, Post-Colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, which was equally damning in terms of its assessment.

Like Jaffe, Robb also emphasizes dialogue between imperial ideals and local realities. However, he goes further and excavates the moral self-understanding of administrators themselves. Moreover, Robb’s approach adds a significant layer to intellectual histories of the empire, such as those explored in the works on liberal imperialism. Unlike ideological accounts that locate justification in theory, the present study turns our gaze to administrative interiors, showing how moral and legal discourses shaped bureaucratic decision-making in substantial ways.

Datta serves up this delicious nugget that one of the more well-known residents of the area was Florence Ezekiel, more popularly known as Nadira, the actress!
The history of Mumbai’s Irani restaurants, cafés and bakeries has been documented in films and books. Sadly, many have shut down, the latest being another favourite, B. Merwan opposite Grant Road station.

The Delhi Sultanate, ruling over large parts of the subcontinent till the early sixteenth century, became the home of immigrants from the Central Islamic lands. Pant’s treatment of Delhi’s cuisine under the Sultans is disappointingly brief as it mainly relies on information from the writings of Amir Khusrau, the famous poet and Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth century Moroccan traveller.

‘A Takli Procession organised by the Congress to Encourage the Art of Hand Spinning’. Such descriptions make the photographs speak to us and give an insider’s view into the mood of the nation. Manufacturing salt as a form of protest is so well documented that one finds these series of pictures a learning manual in salt making! Predominantly women but also men are shown congregated at the Chowpatty beach as well as other sea fronts of Bombay collecting brine. Many photos have pots of salt water boiling in the foreground with the crowd looking on and even tasting the product. Two lovely photos that are posed for the camera on the street are described as those of ‘Gujrati Women

Probably the first of longitudinal research with adoptive families, the chapter highlights that most adoptees achieve emotional stability, become fully functioning adults, and form stable relationships. Children who struggled in rigid school systems found themselves in creative fields.

We carry awhile the burden of our Karma like stones; we rise from ashes like jewelled birds; we fly away into the blue, on extended wings’ (p. 5) The extended passage exemplifies Vajpeyi’s mode of writing, in which metaphor and abstraction are mobilized to render ethical crises and human emotional geographies legible.

Islamic societies to reiterate that education has always been reduced to social hierarchies, norms and structures. Her revisiting and reconstruction of the apprentice teacher model, and the emergence of normal schools map not only the genesis of the programmes but also the shift in epistemological assumptions such as what counts as knowledge, who is authorized to teach, what capacities a teacher must embody,

His approach to nationalism was differently textured, particularly in his two novels, Gora (1910) and Ghare Baire (1916). There, nationalism was neither entirely rejected nor hailed, but it cemented a bond among those fighting for India’s emancipation from the British yoke.

Centred here, the story moves backwards and forwards to London and New York, and to a few places in Europe and India. It is the time of the pandemic.
Other than those who dominate the writer’s visual canvas, there are characters in the background and the foreground. Each is drawn with a master’s spare, sure touch. But those who rule the canvas are rendered with a magical mix of lucidity and inscrutability. We never know anyone enough,

What follows is neither a saintly portrait nor a sentimental tribute, but a steady, unsparing account of a woman too forceful to be idealized. At the same time, the memoir reads unambiguously as a record of what Roy has made of her life—of the success, security, and meaning she has accumulated along the way. She animates a private archive she has long mined in fiction, now approached with the directness and vulnerability of memoir