Professor A.R. Kulkarni is the veritable doyen of Maratha history today. His research career began in the 1950s and the thesis that became (in English) Maharashtra in the Age of Shivaji (1969) was actually submitted in 1960.
The bitter resistance to Government’s attempt to introduce an adolescent education programme is symptomatic of the need to control and domesticate sexuality cordoning it off into the haven of community and tradition secure from the whirlwinds of globalizing influences.
Two decades ago governments looked askance, with suspicion or even with downright hostility at any attempt to introduce non-traditional security concepts into the national agenda; this was especially so in regard to the efforts of academics, think-tanks and NGO’s, which had begun around that time.
2007
John Kenneth Galbraith once said, ‘Under capitalism, man exploits man; under communism, it’s just the opposite’. The capitalism versus communism debate is as old as politics itself. In India, it much precedes independence from British rule.
If the state is what ‘binds’, it is also clearly what can and does unbind. And if the state binds in the name of the nation, conjuring a certain version of the nation forcibly, if not powerfully, then it also unbinds, releases, expels, banishes
Where Robin Jeffrey’s pioneering study—India’s Newspaper Revolution, left off, Sevanti Ninan’s Headlines from the Heartland, picks up the discursive narrative of the explosion of print capitalism in what was once the lagging Hindi language belt
Terrifying Vision is a slim little book on the ideas of the most visible ideologue of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Its author had earlier explored and written on the world and moods of four well-known makers of the Hindutva ideology (Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (2003).
2007
India has been in the thick of a revolution of rising expectations, visible more sharply for more than two decades. I believe that the new middle class, as is generally defined, is the by-product of high expectations thrown up by changing domestic opportunities
Nandini Nayar, whose earlier book for children, Pranav’s Picture, dealt with a child’s imaginary drawings, uses a different medium of expression used by children all over the world this time around, namely dough. While in the West, play dough or plasticine (as it used to be called in India some generations ago) is the chosen material for children to make shapes
In a yet unpublished book, this is how Suniti Namjoshi sets down the charter for her mission of storytelling, a charter she has already adhered viscously to in five books of her Aditi series for children. Namjoshi’s stories strive, above all else, to maintain the balance outlined by Aditi’s grandmother between levity and learning.
Payal Dhar’s fantasy novels A Shadow in Eternity and The Key of Chaos tell the story of Maya Subramaniam, a twelve-year old girl who lives a normal boring life in Bangalore, until one day an eerily tall man called Noah arrives to tell her that she is meant for greater things,
Turning the Pot… is an important book to sensitize young adults, particularly of the so called educated middle classes in these times of tremendous economic and social differentiation. Dignity of labour has been a casualty of the caste system in India,
I’ve read To Market, To Market! greedily for the fourth time, absolutely delighted with the beautiful illustrations, but also because I couldn’t really remember the text terribly well the first time around. To Market…is undoubtedly a wonderful work visually, but I found myself thinking, at various points,
A Winter’s Night and Other Stories is a sleek production of ten stories, supposedly for children. In the ‘Translator’s Note,’ Rakhshanda Jalil makes two irreconcilable remarks. ‘This selection has been made especially for young readers of the age group twelve to fifteen years
Kumar Mukherji died just as this book was published. The enthusiastic reception (Ram Guha in his column in The Hindu called it one of the most significant non-fiction books written in post-independent India) would have pleased him enormously. He was certainly keen to share his vast fund of stories and knowledge with a wider Indian audience.
Naiyer Masud is a great scholar of Persian and has three collections of short stories to his credit which include Seemiya, Itre Kaafoor and Taa’uus Chaman ki Mayna. A two-time winner of the Katha Award (1993 and 1997) for his stories ‘Ray Khandan ke Asar’ and ‘Sheesha Ghat’ and the winner of the Presidential Certificate of Honour
Kazi Nazrul Islam is a legendary poet in the modern literature of India in the twentieth century. Inspite of the fact that Rabindra Nath Tagore was active and alive, he became the most popular poet of Bengali of his time. Unfortunately, for those who are not able to read him in the original Bengali
Akhtar Husain Raipuri’s memoir The Dust Of The Road offers a varied fare to its readers. The wide range of his experiences and the eventful times through which he lived makes Raipuri’s memoir interesting. A man of sound secular upbringing and Marxist leanings, Raipuri’s account of his travels and travails is in fact a retrospective glance cast over a life lived to its full.
Dil e nadaan tujhe hua kya hai Akhir is dard ki dava kya hai? Ghalib.
Sringara, viraha, ishq, prem, love—these are the themes of this cultural history of love in South Asia. The only way to succeed in such a mammoth venture is frankly to admit your limitations, which is exactly what the editor Francesca Orsini does.
Memoirs fascinate me: not just because like most humans I have an insatiable curiosity about other people’s lives but because of the landscapes embedded in memories that emerge defiantly from nostalgic syrup and startle you with a rare insight. Often, whole cities,