Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The Chhotanagpur region, in the news as the very heart of the Maoist movement, is arguably also at the epicentre of theChristian discourse in India, both by its protagonists, and by the Hindutva Parivar which challenges it and has launched its own political and religious proselytizing in the region that stretches over many states in Central and East India…

Most of the essays in the volume under review were written by Professor Satish Chandra in the last ten years and published in various journals and were, as the author himself admits,’often difficult to locate’. Their compilation and publication in a single volume by Oxford University Press is, therefore, significant…

The Times man of last year is the protester. With protests raging across different countries, it is quite clear people are generally unhappy about many aspects of their lives. While in the Middle East and Africa, it is primarily about the regimes and change in the regimes, in India the focus…

This book is an interesting contribution to the tradition of travelogues of the Buddhist pilgrimage sites of northern India. It gives a first-hand account of the experiences of an English pilgrim to the Buddhist sites during the nineteen nineties…

If there is one thing everyone who watches television news agrees…

Here is another meticulous book, well thought out and jointly authored by two scholars of select works of Indian painting covering nearly seven hundred years of its history. The framework within which the authors, John Guy and Jorrit Britschgi, write is interesting and engaging…

Right from the cover the book unfolds a discussion on the role of censorship and debates around the context of spectatorship of Bombay cinema. The designer Anuradha Roy has very artistically and craftily used images that may look vulgar and obscene and need scissors…

At the outset, it would perhaps be apt to say that in order to locate the origin of a theory in the larger universe of an existing, living, dynamic realm of identification, construction, and production of culture in the form of moving images, film in other words, it becomes increasingly necessary to substantively…

Upon opening this book, the first thing that will no doubt strike the reader is the ambitious aims. It sets itself the not inconsiderable project of defining a ‘new literary theory’ which combines ethics with aesthetics, and represents a break with ‘the traditional approach (to literature) from Aristotle…

This is an interesting and pioneering addition to the corpus of literature which exists on the family history of the Tagores. Its relevance lies in treating a theme which may be considered taboo to many Bengalis, that of the life of Rathindranath, the only surviving son of Rabindranath, and Rathindranath’s extra-marital friendship…

In the year commemorating Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary, the highest gain has been in taking ‘Gurudev’ be-yond Bengal. The attractive and erudite volu-me, The Essential Tagore, edited by eminent scholars, Radha Chakravarty from India and Fakrul Alam from Bangladesh immediately makes…

Feelings and emotions, however trite, can never be classed as meaningless, but one’s way of portraying them can often fall short of an aesthetically acceptable standard. The Salt Doll is erotica without style. It is peopled with characters whose actions are largely conditioned by their own private compulsions…

Mulk Raj Anand’s first novel Un­touchable was published in 1935. Anand, then a Bloomsbury intellectual, had writ­ten the first draft over a long weekend in 1930: ‘the book poured out like hot lava from the volcano of my crazed imagina­tion’. He revised the book after a short stay with Gandhiji…

This is the first novel of a writer who has so far been well known to Bengali readers as a poet. But her novel is not poetic in the usual sense of the term.In a style that is cerebral as well as graceful, Nabaneeta Deb Sen writes of a situation uneasily familiar…

The principal purpose of Nigel Harris’ book seems to be to attack some of the more durable prejudices underlying urban policy in India. The analysis of Bombay’s problems is merely an instrument for put­ting forward what could be described as a radical economist’s view of city planning…

I read Through the Eyes of the World with a growing sense of frustration harassed by the thought that none of the contributors really came to grips with the American phenomenon. It is difficult enough to come to an understanding of, say, Japan or France, nations made up, for the most part…

I had never been much of a fan of Jug Suraiya’s column in the Sunday Times of India (STOI). It seemed dull, self indul-gent, trite and even pointless at times. His sense of humour escaped me and the satire was lost on me at the time when I did read his column…

This is a tough one: there are several collections of Munshi Premchand’s translations in the market, and to at-tempt a new ‘best of’ is a daunting challenge to take on. But Rakhshanda Jalil takes on this tricky task ably: her translations of seventeen short stories…

This collection of stories (originally written in Tamil and translated into English by the author herself) brings to the reader slices of life tinged with courage, pathos, humour, in short, situations and expe-riences that we can identify with in a myriad ways…

Going by this illuminating statement, let us look at the poems themselves. The very first poem gives the reader a foretaste of what is to come. ‘Egomobile: An Ad’ is like a mock-advertisement of an automobile. Almost all human preoccupations and passions are squee-zed into this tight structure…