Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

For those who read ‘The Toda Tiger- Debates on Custom, Utility and Rights in Nature, South India 1820- 1843’ by Gunnel Cederlof in the 2005 publication called Ecological Nationalisms, this new book offers a more detailed and valuable narration of the establishment of colonial rule in the Nilgiri hills by a complex and simultaneous process of law making related to land rights and settlement of land claims.

This book brings together within its beautiful covers ten extremely relevant and timely articles written by world renowned scholars from multiple disciplines working on the conceptualizations of and contestations over ‘natural’ resources.

The centrality of the dynamics of the colonial family, a product of the inter¬racial sexual contact between European men and ‘native’ women, in the shaping of imperial policy during the company rule has received scant attention from scholars.

In this study Salahuddin Malik looks at the 1857 Revolt as viewed from Britain, helping us to make sense of the bewildering variety of perspectives discernible in the flood of contemporary books, pamphlets, sermons, newspaper reports and articles about the Revolt published in the metropolis.

The Centre for Studies in Social Sci¬ences, Calcutta has been trying to take stock of the place of history as an academic discipline and also looking for alternatives to ‘academic’ histories.

This book is as big and as sprawling as its full title: Kalahar (White Water-Lily): Studies in Art, Iconography, Architecture, and Archaeology of India and Bangladesh (Professor Enamul Haque Felicitation Volume).

Beyond prostitution is a collection of twenty-three essays on sex work in India. Of these only two essays have been previously published in academic journals. The essays in the collection range from serious analyses of themes in sex work in India,

One of the most extraordinary – and positive – outcomes of the second upsurge of the women’s movements in the 1970s was the movement’s engagement with health, going beyond issues of reproduction.

Radha Chakravarty’s book Feminism and Contemporary Women: Rethinking Subjectivity is based on her Ph.D. dissertation on the same subject and retains all the qualities of a solid, well-researched dissertation. It investigates a familiar enough field of enquiry – subjectivity, with related notions of identity and agency – which has continuously engaged philosophers,

Discussing the geopolitics of empire John Bellamy Foster says the inherent instability of empire under capitalism points to potentially more dangerous wars.

‘We have been so long accustomed to dictate to the world’ that it was ‘rather galling now that we find ourselves playing second fiddle to the autocratic ruler of the United States.’