This volume is a collection of 14 papers covering Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan in the north, Maharashtra in the central and old South Travancore in south India. The papers are organized in VI parts. Part I is composed of four papers which deal with Khalapur in western Uttar Pradesh – the first two are about Chuhras during 1950s and the second two draw from later fieldwork undertaken in 1984 with a gap of about thirty years.
The book under review is the second part of the two-volume publication on the emergency period (1975-1977), but it covers only the 21-month period (November 1, 1974 to July 24, 1976) with focus on the run-up to the point when the democratic set-up was demolished and a loose autocratic rule put in place which had neither any purpose nor any well-defined ideas to defend the collapse of democracy.
It is common to hear from both extreme left and right that contemporary Indian foreign policy is adrift of its moorings. Ninan Koshy’s book attempts to put forward the left basis for this claim. He believes a desire among India’s foreign policy establishment to attach itself to the coattails of the United States is the main cause of India’s heresy.
Kees van der Pijl is the director of the Centre of Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex. His earlier books include The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (1984) and Transnational Classes and International Relations (1998). He is currently working on a project entitled “Tribal and Imperial Antecedents of Contemporary Foreign Relations”.
2005 saw the publication of Forging the Raj, a collection of more than a dozen essays by Thomas R. Metcalf, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.
Thee subtitle given to it explains the content and context of the book ]eevana Rekhalu, Vakchitralu. This book contains life-sketches and views and attitudes of twenty-five literary personalities who have been associated with the world of letters in contemporary times, and draws for us the images of these writers in their own words.
Translation is a desperate act, but culturally imperative and worth every attempt, on the part of the translator, to mediate between a canonical author and an eager reader when they are divided linguistically.
Owing to the inordinate emphasis on English writing in India, there has been hardly any perceptible recognition of writings in other Indian languages. Recently, Sahitya Akademi has published two big volumes comprising selected writings of individual authors.
Autobiography has of late been taking unusual turns to reach us. Fiction is an easy choice when writers give their voices to handpicked characters, but we notice nearly everyone telling us where they live and what they live for in critical essays, professional notes and comments,
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union it was propounded that we have reached the end of history where Liberal capitalist democracy was declared as the highest stage we are likely to achieve. Some differ and talk about a third way between socialism and capitalism.
This book gives evidence of truly formidable scholarship in a multiplicity of areas and disciplines, an acute and sophisticated mind, and a striking originality of approach; and in terms of scope and coverage it is monumental and encyclopaedic. However, the author’s novel thesis, though powerfully argued, ultimately left this reviewer unpersuaded.
A common predilection among historians is to protest against the tyranny of received paradigms and thereafter, to assert how their research departs from existing models. This predilection, even predicament, is in many ways tied up with the very practice of history-writing—a feature that often promises new revelations and strange riches, but even more often ends up with only partial qualifications and modifications.