Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The book under review on linguistic politics in India born out of a happy marriage of anthropology and history is a very well planned and carefully organized textual commentary giving an account of use and misuse of the labels language and mother tongue for political purposes. The book is divided into six chapters on each…

Well-known writer and Sahitya Akademi Award winner (2008) Manohar Shyam Joshi, has had a very varied and distinguished literary career, writing novels, short stories, film scripts, as well as being a prolific journalist.Written in a satiric, comic vein, the brief novel eventually culminates in frustration and depression, not only for the protagonist…

One must thank the publishers and the translator for making Giriraj Kishores Pehla Girmitiya available in English. Published first in Hindi in 1999, it has taken this award winning novel more than a decade to arrive in English. It is a huge book, and not just in length but also in its scope and intent. The Girmitiya Saga is not just a book about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi…

This highly readable book provides a recent history of Indias population problem. It is not a demographic analysis as the title might suggest, but rather a collection of episodes that are woven into the authors own life experiences.Ashish Bose, a renowned demographer, recounts, through the deft use of vignettes from his own experience, Indias contemporary history in the population and family planning field set within the larger political context…

Mention Kalahandi and it immediately evokes images of poverty and destitution. The hunger zone. Stories of starvation. Even the sale of children. Why is it that such conditions continue to prevail in that region? Is Kalahandi a special case, an aberration in independent India Arima Mishras passionately written book tackles these questions headon…

Vijay L. Kelkar, the chairman of thirteenth finance commission, has about thirtythree years of experience in Indias public policy. From his role as an economic adviser at the Ministry of Commerce in the year 1977, to working in the finance ministry as an adviser to the finance minister in 2004,

Globalization has presented itself as unavoidable, a universal truth supposedlyabove, all the disputes between groups with differentiated power. (Porro: 286)Superbly written and edited, Land Tenure, Gender and Globalization offers detailedglimpses into the heterogeneous nature of the local, as it confronts and responds to the global, via case studies from Ghana…

This book consists of 39 essays written over a period of one year for a weekend newspaper. The great appreciation of the weekly column by readers has led to this.The author, a seasoned Central Banker and currently the Senior Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, has been a policy maker, university lecturer, and an author of many papers on economic issues…

It is surprising that there are not many serious studies on crime in India, notwithstanding the fact that prevalence of crime affects every day life so seriously. The academic community has by and large ignored this subject.

The regulatory framework around water n India grew over a long period of time and resembled a patchwork that contained laws of diverse origins, some drawn from ancient local customs and traditions and others from British common law by the colonial government. The resultant amorphous laws, principles, rules and judicial…

Globally, malaria continues to be a major disease with 300 to 500 million clinical cases every year, with about 1.5 to 2.7 million deaths. It kills more than one million children each year in Africa alone. In India there are about a million or more cases every year; however, we have seen a rising incidence of the more dangerous…

Corporate history affords severalcase studies of companies changing and reinventing themselves over time, acquiring a contemporary shape and form simply not foretold in their original genetic code. Mutations in product profile are a part of corporate evolution. But few companies manage to retain the unmutated gene of corporate criminality…

This book under review tries to explore the complex relationship between religion and development in two different ways. It questions the modernist assumption that religion is the personalaffair of an individual while development is entirely a matter of secularpublic policy. Examining religion as a sociological category…

The current academic scholarship over the idea of nationalism represents a dynamic shift from the modernist ideals and framework. The idea of nationalism is critically analysed by posing certain essential postmodern question, which earlier had a little discursive capacity. Parimala V. Raos work on Tilaks nationalism supplements this methodology…

This book is a collection of nine articles on different aspects of the economic history of India during British colonial rule. They were published in Nineteenth Century Studies, Bengal Past Present, Journal of Development Studies, Frontier, Journal of Peasant Studies, IESHR, as also in edited books like Essays in Honour of Professor S.C.Sarkar…

Zanskar was opened to foreigners in the late 1970’s and this is among the first of the travel books which can be expected to follow from the opening of the area. Peissel is well known to those familiar with the travel literature on the Himalayas and his account of a visit to the kingdom of Mustang, remains interesting reading for those concerned with western Nepal and its vicinity.

The present volume, of which Brenda Beck is the editor as well as main contri­butor, is an interesting collection of seven essays on social anthropology, physical geography, demography and urban deve­lopment.

While reviewing the first volume in the series edited by M.S.A. Rao, (The Book Review IV, 1, July-August 1979) I had commented on the substantive issues of theory, concepts and methodology’ that Rao had raised in his introduction.

It will remain for a long time one of the much debated issues in Indian Ad­ministration: whether Jawaharlal Nehru did the right thing in 1947 in opting (deli­berately or otherwise) for a policy of ‘gradualism’ rather than making a clean break with the past.

The adequacy of public services in the democratic context and environment of rapid change is a matter of continuing concern. As the residuary of authority there is a continuing love-hate relationship between the public and governmental ser­vices for, the latter is supposed to serve the former.