It would be no exaggeration to say that Amartya Sen has an iconic and towering presence in the world of economics in present times. The sheer range as well as depth of his work is formidable even by the standards of his fellow Nobel laureates in the subject in the last thirty-five years or more.
Biography, according to Lytton Strachey, is “the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing”. It is also a difficult art particularly when the story told is that of Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who strode the world like ‘a gentle colossus’ until very recently, and whose life was an open one, openly lived almost in ‘the glorious privacy of light’.
Sharankumar Limbale’s autobiography Akkarmashi was published in 1984 and received critical acclaim. The author was twenty-five years old at the time. Written in a dialect of the Maharas, Akkarmashi was considered a path-breaking milestone in dalit autobiographical writing in Marathi.
Astride the Wheel is an accomplished translation of Yantrarudha, a 1967 Oriya novel by Sahitya Akademi Award winning writer, Chandra Sekhar Rath. Its appearance is yet another example of the ongoing attempt on the part of publishers and translators alike to rescue Indian bhasa literatures from the ghettos of provinciality to which they had hitherto been consigned.
A Village Divided is a wonderful book, well worth spending money to buy and time to read.Rurially autobiographical, Rahi Masoom s Adha Gaon (1966) is a record of the life d times of his village in UP where Muslims d Hindus lived together in an accord which y has begun to seem mythical.
What do you do when faced with nothing much to quarrel about with a book under review? Concur. Quote. Applaud. Celebrate. Concurrence, however, breeds few words, and a lot of yawning space. Quibbling, on the other hand, might come to your rescue. New Poetry in Hindi offers both the paths.
Manna Dey is a legend in Hindi Film Music. The only surviving male singer of the golden era of Hindi Film music, he started his playback career way back in 1942. Memoirs of such a distinguished artiste are bound to be an important addition to the history of this stream, as well as a goldmine of anecdotal information.
Once in a while you come across a book that you need to mull over, savour, read in instalments in order to derive maximum pleasure and benefit, go back and forth over, and let sink into your soul. This is one such book, a born classic.
This is Imtiaz Dharker’s fourth volume of poetry. All her books carry her trade mark sketches, as aesthetic, striking, and at times as searing as her poems. One can but stand on the sidelines and admire such wealth of talent. She started sensationally with Purdah (1989), her first volume: Purdah is a kind of safety.
2004
A surprising find, A Model House is a pot pourri, the author’s life and interests held up to a mirror for all to see. Alaknanda moves from being Al in the leafy suburbs of Wisconsin, living in a fairy-tale world of NRIs to Nanda at ABCD, a design and architecture school in Gujarat.
2007
There is something about mandatory family jollifications that brings out the worst in one. Chris Carver, in Hari Kunzru’s third novel My Revolutions chooses Christmas lunch to tell his family that he is a Communist, that he was leaving the London School of Economics to which he had gained admission,
In 1898, when the sun never set on the British Empire, Kirparam, young and penniless, left his village on the Jhelum to end up, almost accidentally, in Kenya. (Tana is a river in Kenya.) There were thousands of men like him in India
2004
The portrayal of same—sex relationships in 20th century Indian literature has been characterized, most frequently, by ambiguity or by an incipient homophobia. Critical responses to Ismat Chugtai’s Lihaaf and Ugra’s collection of short stories Chocolate…
2007
The book is a rich multi-site ethnography that spans continents, tracing histories and movements of people of Hyderabadi origin. The fieldwork was done over a period of ten years from 1990 to 2000 in Hyderabad, the United Kingdom,
The birds flying home in pairs Through the soft mountain air of dusk- In these things there is deep meaning, But when we are about to express it, We suddenly forget the words.
The text vs the field, the classical vs the folk, the occasional vs the quotidian. These have been some of the key oppositional categories through which sociology of India, particularly understandings of Hindu life and culture have been articulated and debated.
I would like to begin this review in Jackson’s own words: ‘It is true that the border crosser who writes about another culture is part beggar, part stenographer, part Sherlock Holmes, part patchwork quilt maker’ (p. 309).
2007
Authority and Kingship under the Sultans of Delhi is rather complex in the sense that it begins on a promising note but does not achieve all. Reinforcing the thesis of centralization, the main crux of the argument—the Sultanate represented a centralized polity that was further embarked upon with a vengeance in the sixteenth century
2007
Prathama Banerjee’s rigorously argued book Politics of Time is both a meditation on questions central to contemporary theoretical concerns—namely modernity, subjectivity and agency—as also an exegesis on the colonial Bengali preoccupation with the past.
This selection of K.N. Panikkar’s articles published between 1976 and 2005 not only brings together in one place, the writings of a major modern Indian social historian, but also serves as a historiographical record of the changing concerns of Marxist social history over the last three decades.