Anglophilia has long afflicted the average educated Indian Parsi. It was so in the Victorian era. It is so now. Cornelia Sorabji was no exception. Though only half a Parsi, she did not do things by halves.
About five decades ago, Louis Dumont (1911-1998) a French scholar of international repute, set the tone and tenor of the academic discourse in anthropology and sociology about the nature of Indian society. Dumont was a ‘pupil’ of Marcel Mauss; and he learnt Sanskrit when he was imprisoned in Hamburg during the Second World War.
The politics of Tamil Nadu has been pioneering in many ways. The non-brahmin movement which is now more than eighty years old is often considered as the forerunner of social justice in India. The Dravidian movement’s empowerment however has left the dalits who constitute 19 percent of the population untouched.
The book under review is a comprehensive exploration of the lives of artisans in early modern Rajasthan and associated complexities. An intricate web of relationships among a highly heterogeneous community/class called ‘artisans’ in the ever-changing dynamics of early modern Period in Rajasthan has been successfully nuanced.
2007
The authors should be commended for producing what will now be a compulsory text for all those interested in a serious academic discussion on human security, especially as it connects to debates and theories in International Relations (IR). That this book has been brought out as part of Routledge’s prestigious series on ‘Advances in International Relations and Global Politics’ is already confirmation of this status.
This is a timely book on an important issue that is centre-stage since the 2001 census, namely the disappearance of baby girls. The female male ratio (FMR) in the world —that is the number of females per thousand males—is 9901 . Western Europe has a figure of 1,064 females per thousand males and Africa, 1,015.
Once in a rare while, an academic reviewer gets to write about a book that is exciting, analytically sound, densely researched, thoroughly useful, wideranging, and yet focused. Meera Kosambi’s Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History is just such a book.
Images of the World is a useful and engaging collection of public addresses and writings produced over a period of roughly twenty years. The earliest of these goes back to 1987 and the most recent, produced in 2005. Altogether there are thirteen pieces put together for this volume which represent a continuing exploration of the significance of culture, religion, ethnicity and secularism by one of India’s foremost sociologists.
The book under review deals with a rare subject in Indian history—that of African slaves in India. These African slaves were a part of the slave trade of the Indian Ocean rim and have been regularly coming into India ever since the 12th century, when Qutab-ud-din Aibak founded the slave dynasty around Delhi.
2007
The history of Punjab over the last century and a half has attracted the attention of both scholars and political activists. The heavy military recruitment from the Punjab, the role of state investment in irrigation, the rural-urban divide in politics during the first half of the twentieth century, the Punjab tradition of administration have been the subject of several scholarly studies.
Capitalism was born with the mark of Cain on its brow. From the voyages of Prince Henry the Navigator in Portugal to the piratical enterprises of Francis Drake and Jack Hawkins (in which the Virgin Queen of England held a share) to the burning of whole islands of the Indonesian archipelago by Jan Coen,
Recent decades have seen a vigorous re-investigation of the nature of the Maurya and Gupta empires, but the historical processes of the period in between remain less understood. This is in spite of a wealth of detail about specific aspects, such as the histories of dynasties, religious cults and trade.
Saman Kelegama is a prodigious researcher who has published his work extensively both in Sri Lankan and foreign journals. In the fourteen chapters of Development under Stress he brings together 12 papers that have appeared in such journals as World Development, Developing Economies,
Professor Jan Breman’s academic engagements with labour relations in India are well-known. It started with his field work in two villages, in the early 1960s, in Surat district of South Gujarat.
This is a compendium volume bringing together two earlier monumental works by Angus Maddison. The first, titled ‘The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective’, was issued in 2001. The second, a companion volume titled ‘The World Economy: Historical Statistics’, was issued in 2003. Both were commissioned by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
One of the key concerns of a monogram on an individual artist is to draw attention to a body of significant work that might find just passing mention in sweeping art historical overviews. Often,
The central thesis of V.S. Parmar’s book is an important one. In the footsteps of subaltern historians he attempts to shift the focus of architectural history of India away from monumental architecture—palaces, temples,
In October 1980, a relatively unknown company from the San Francisco Bay area called Genentech created history on the New York Stock Exchange by raising US$ 35 million in its IPO. Though the figure itself is puny compared to those bandied about during the dotcom bubble,
This is a much welcome translation of Mártires Lopes original work in Portuguese, first published in 1993, with a second edition (also in Portuguese) in 1999. As the author herself states in the preface to her first edition, this is one of the few times that material from the Pastoral Visits and Church Rolls in Goa has been used.
Subaltern historiography is a comparatively recent discipline in India. With mainstream history appropriating the centre stage for long, the extended historical course traversed by the many subaltern and minority groups in the country on their way to becoming conscious of a distinct identity, remained unexplored until very recently.