Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

When was the last time that one has come across a co-authored book that takes the form of an explicit debate? Among the qualities that make this book so stimulating, its genuinely dialogical structure must come first.

Women’s Studies (WS) in India emerged in the wake of the women’s movement of the 1970s and shared its transformative goals.

A city is not an onion that can be unpeeled to reveal its layers. It is a breathing organism shaped by the ideologies that create it.

With the surging idea of civic participation in affairs of governance in India, there cannot be a more opportune time for K.C. Sivaramakrishnan’s book which presents an informative and detailed background of the early efforts made in the area of urban development in the country.

Last year marked twenty years of the demolition of Babri Masjid, followed by a series of large-scale communal violence, clashes and riots in different parts of India, especially in the Bombay then and now Mumbai.

Climate change as a political issue has usually been on the backburner in India, coming forth for intense public discussion only around the time when Indian representatives are off to attend yet another round of negotiations.

Professor Rudra’s book, meant more for postgraduate students than for the layman, is an excellent survey of one approach to planned development in India. It deals with the use of ‘formal’ models of economic relationships—‘formal’ in the sense that these relationships are encapsulated in mathematical equations involving exactly specified variables…

With the dawn of an era of liberalization and globalization in India, rural and urban development cannot be strictly compartmentalized.

Kaushik Basu who has written the foreword for the book says ‘Taking advantage of this (2011) being the Golden Jubilee Year of the IES (Indian Economic Service), it was decided to bring out a book written entirely by the officers of the service.’

Craig Jeffrey’s book can be summed up in one equation: Unemployed Jat students of Meerut in limbo—political activism.

Technological progress has taken very diverse forms in different environmental conditions and periods of history, so diverse that it has sometimes not even been recognized as such when viewed through un­familiar eyes. ‘No Chinese peasant’, commented Victor Hugo, ‘goes to the city without carrying back…

Velli midi palagai vengalathal nadavum Alli midi midikka adainjavanur vun- mamam. Saliya weavers in south India today still sing of forefathers that wove on looms of silver and ropes of bronze.

Given that the flag of Indian enterprise has not been fluttering of late, this book should help boost the morale of Indian business and its elan at home and around the world.

The practice of conceptualizing the political world in binaries is fairly common. While these binaries have been useful for conceptual clarity scholars who are committed to binary conceptualizations such as modernity/tradition, religious belief/secularism, state neutrality/intervention and individual/community sometimes risk ignoring specificities of actual texts or events; they assume that patterns are produced over time fitting into mutually opposed set of ideas.

The celebrated New Left historian and political essayist Perry Anderson’s latest book The Indian Ideology appears at a time when several mainstream publishers with their assorted wares are proclaiming India’s arrival on the stage of world history.

The idea of ‘minority’ and ‘minority rights’ has been a matter of intense debates, ever since the modern nation-states came into existence.

The plethora of commentaries and critiques on Indian political thought in the early seventies that saw a dismal disconnection between theoretical endeavours and philosophical traditions, was based on the fact that the latter seemed to play no role in the way social sciences and politics were practised in India and elsewhere.

Anchoring on Banaras—a site where not only cultural plurality permeates and colours its social fabric but where medical plurality also thrived within the context of East-West encounter—Indigenous and Western Medicine in Colonial India delineates varied shades of the social history of medicine reflecting on ‘the multiplicity and complexity of social interaction and encounter between indigenous and western medicine’ (p. XI) that still endures in Banaras.

I had the privilege of reviewing Mridula Ramanna’s earlier volume, Western Medicine and Public Health in Colonial Bombay, 1845-1895 in The Book Review (Vol XXVII, No.8, August) in 2003.

Nile Green is an unusually gifted historian. He has been engaged, almost single-handedly, in a quiet revisionism in the social history of early modern India. His work has served to introduce fresh perspectives to our understanding of early modern epistemology, bringing in dimensions of corporeality and embodiment to processes of knowledge formation.