Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

What could be a better testimony to the perennial appeal of India’s epics than the fresh retellings and translations being published at fairly regular intervals? Each generation appears to need its own version in language that it can relate to. Now Uberoi’s 1996.

The work under review is the thirty-first volume in the People’s History of India textbook series edited by its author Irfan Habib himself. The publisher’s intention behind this series is the promotion of ‘scientific method in History, and resisting communal.

Yogendra Yadav’s voice has a familiar, unruffled and calm quality to it even as it has pronounced on the turbulent ructions of Indian politics. That same calm, unruffled quality can be heard speaking through these many pages of this  voluminous book that combines more..

One of the casualties of the perennial India-Pakistan face-off is an academic understanding of the other side. The kind of first-hand sense of a locale that can be obtained over many field trips is denied to Indian academics with Pakistan as subject of scrutiny.

Madrasas in the Age of Islamophobia by Zia Us Salam and M Aslam Parvaiz offers us an insight into the different facets of the world of madrasas in India. The preface spells out the central question/intent: what the reality of madrasas is today, a ubiquitous part of the landscape.

The ideational cohesion holding together this compelling collection of essays is driven by the need to visibilize the particularity of Kashmiri women’s ‘own ways of knowing’. The title Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak? Narratives of Resistance and Resilience.

Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo is a tribute to one of Africa’s and Zimbabwe’s greatest modern thinker, Sam Moyo, who made an astounding contribution to social science with his intellectual work on the land and agrarian questions of the global South.

Rethinking Social Justice was published earlier this year in honour of MSS Pandian, the late historian of South India. The volume comprises an array of essays on a wide range of topics that are thematically organized into five sections: ‘Politics of Culture.

For the last hundred years, Ambedkarite politics has been imperatively speaking to the people of India about the idea of constitutionalism. In 1919, while submitting a memorandum to the South Borough Commission on behalf of the Depressed Classes.

Women constitute a significant composition of Indian diasporic communities universally. Even though the role of female sojourners has been invisible in diasporic accounts for considerable period of time, feminist and subaltern interventions made substantial advancement.

The ‘exceptionalism’ of the book under review according to its author, a senior journalist, lies in the fact that it seeks to unravel the rise of the Modi leadership ‘from the middle class perspective’ without adhering to ‘any ideological point of view’ unlike ‘other books.

Tribal societies are marked by contestation, competition, movement, conflict, etc., in the contemporary period. These concerns are mainly revolving around the question of livelihood and survival of tribal communities. Their livelihood and survival largely depend.

The Covid-19 global pandemic has changed the way of life for one and all across the planet, and the battle against the virus is still ongoing. Many books about Covid-19 have been published since the virus first emerged in Wuhan, China, addressing various aspects of it.

Representation is a tricky word as there can never be an authentic representation. Any act of representation conceals a lot and only offers a timid glimpse of reality. Cinema is well known for such deception. It often claims to be a reflexive comrade that would showcase.

More than a cinematographer extraordinaire, Shyam Benegal is a phenomenon, an institution of sorts. So strong is his influence on the parallel or new cinema of contemporary times that one may easily speak of the Benegal school of film-making. It is another matter.

The three plays, introduced with a skilled and analytically detailed discussion, rise above parochialisms of time, space, culture and language.  They resonate with universal themes and emotions like love, duty, guilt and the sheer tedium of existence that saps one’s soul of vibrancy and one’s life of joy.

This novel is really a chronicle, like Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, of a time, and characters who lived in that time, kings, nobles, knights and wizards; what happened to them, the events of which they were part, and how they survived or were destroyed. But that’s where any resemblance fades.