Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Master of Life Skills, a first novel by Vijay Nair, an organization consultant, could not have been better timed. The present day urban landscape is replete with stories of battered lives seeking solutions through ‘process work’, ‘personal growth programmes’ etc.,

In his book Redefining Urdu Politics in India (OUP, 2007), Ather Farouqui raised some very pertinent questions regarding the past, present and future of Urdu language in India.

Technology has taken over both the methods of warfare and its representations, and the human body, the victim of war’s cruelty, has been effaced from our perceptions of armed combats in recent times.

Love and Samsara is a historical novel set in the sixteenth century. It explores the consequences of the discovery by Vasco da Gama of the sea route from Europe to India.The importance of this discovery has been a subject of revision since the fifties; the quinquennial celebrations of his landing in Calicut were deemed politically incorrect and had to be abandoned.

Ever since he arrived on the literary scene in the second half of the nineteenth century, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee has never been out of the news, for the right or wrong reasons.

When Marx wrote Das Kapital, he theorized about the social relationships involved in the act of production of commodities under capitalism. But what happens when the commodities being produced are strictly speaking not of a material nature—for instance, what happens when stories are produced? Walter Benjamin addressed this question in one of his most brilliant essays, ‘Author as Producer’.

Having had the good fortune to have browsed through the animating ‘Soho Road to the Punjab’ Exhibition, curated by Rajinder Dudrah at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, in London last September, the journey through his book, Bhangra, was partly familiar terrain.

The British Museum has initiated a new series of books which, in detail, discuss the preponderant motifs or themes that characterize the art of a particular region or religion.