Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

With the exception of a few brief intermissions, throughout the British rule in India severe controls were put on the growth of public opinion and on the literature of nationalism or self rule…

Bhisma Sawhney is known for his progressive views in literature and for stories and novels which provide pleasant reading material. His recent novel with the significant title Tamas (The Darkness) is primarily concerned with the human tragedy of communal frenzy, a social phenomenon that has always engulfed the society…

Mulk Raj Anand is one of the pioneers of the modern Indo-Anglian novel. Since his first novels were written and published abroad he has added to his reputation as a humanist, as an art critic, as a committee man who has served in various capaci­ties and as one known to people who are worth being known to…

The authors have tried to analyse the basic con­straints in implementation of programmes designed for the improvement of the socio-economic condi­tions of the deprived sections of our population.

Marxism has been described by one of its lead­ing contemporary critics as ‘equivocal and inexhaustible’. Generations of scholars, with varying degrees of seriousness and sympathy…

The task of attempting a study on the population geography of Muslim Indians, assessing the present in the historical context, as Dr. Siddiqui has done, is a particularly hazardous task since India today has only about a third of the Muslims who inhabit the sub-continent. It should, however, have been possible…

The democratic process has frail roots in Pakis­tan and the system seems destined to preserve in­herited privilege.

Howard Spodek is an old Gujarat hand, having written authoritative books on the modern history of Saurashtra, including Rulers, Merchants and Other Groups in the City-States of Saurashtra: India, Around 1800 (Philadelphia: Center for the Study of Federalism, Temple University, 1974/77).

Raminder Kaur’s book primarily traces the history of nuclear power in India from 1945 which was marked by the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki until 2008 when India signed a treaty with the United States for increased nuclear cooperation.

One of the curious paradoxes of the sociology of science concerns the flowering of world class science in India in the early decades of the 20th century. With very little government support, working with improvised, in some cases discarded equipment, without much access to international journals, Indian scientists did some very high quality science—C.V.

Much to the chagrin of their leftist sympathizers in the outside world more and more Soviet dissidents refuse to subscribe to any shade of socialist the­ory and practice. Unlike a growing number of socialists in, say, France or Italy, they seem to be convinced that socialism cannot rhyme either with freedom…

With stabbings and race riots, the relationship between India and Britain is today much in the news. To most of us, especially those in and across middle age, that relationship is overlaid with a large number of historical hang-ups, We have known the best and the worst of this contact; and in l947…

Speeding Financial Inclusion by Sameer Kochhar is based on the first ever nationwide multi-stakeholder study entitled ‘National Study on Speeding Financial Inclusion’ which was undertaken by the Skoch Development Foundation.

The study of myth has undergone a sea-change since the mid-nineteenth century when it came into vogue. Between Freud and Levi-Strauss it is now open to a vast span of interpretation. Not all the points along this span have as yet encroached on to the study of Indian mythology…

Dimensions of Economic Theory and Policy is a festschrift honouring Professor Anjan Mukherji who retired as the Reserve Bank of India Professor of Economic Theory at the Center for Economic Studies and Planning, (CESP) Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2010.

Other things being the same, does economic success, like lightning, strike countries randomly? Or can the probability of being struck by it be significantly enhanced by governments? Peter Blair Henry, Dean of the Stern School of Business in New York, says yes, it can. His prescription for success is simple, old as the hills and eternally valid: discipline in policies.

Most of the discussions and reports on Muslims in India often embrace the sketchy phrase Pakshe Kerala Muslims (But Muslims in Kerala) to emphasize the ‘exceptional’ standards that Muslims of Kerala have achieved.

The book is a study of the ways and processes in which adivasi livelihood has been affected through the colonial and postcolonial period and adivasi responses to it. It is divided into two parts.

The collected essays of historian Sarvepalli Gopal (1923-2002) has finally arrived, meticulously edited with a fine introduction by Srinath Raghavan. Raghavan and the general editors of the series, Ramachandra Guha and Sunil Khilnani make a strong case for a Gopal revival.

One of the most enduring myths of the founding of the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) is that of the rescue and subsequent marriage of the Englishman Job Charnock to an Indian woman. Marriages between Europeans and Indians were not quite uncommon in the early colonial period, most famously chronicled by William Dalrymple in his White Mughals.