Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The image remains fresh to this day. Two young men in freshly starched kurta pyjamas enter the Balmiki colony. They know people there. I am sitting in a corner with a few young boys and girls, chatting with them about what was important in the early 1990s. I can’t remember what we were talking…

The title of this book might at first sight appear somewhat intriguing till one realizes that ‘Bombay’ is used by Nile Green as an adjective. At the same time this is not a study of some peculiar Bombay variant of Islam; rather, it tells the hitherto neglected story…

This is an excellent book, one which should be on the list of anybody interested in the question of the origins of the Mahayana. Studies of this issue have come a long way since 1907 when D.T. Suzuki, in his Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (1907) started with a set of premises about what the Mahayana should be and then tried to read back into the past from that to find its origins…

Historians have written about Delhi in authentic detail but it needed a writer for children to paint it in the seven colours of the rainbow. This is what Nita Berry, a freelance journalist and writer of fiction and non-fiction for children, has done…

Othappu does not exactly mean ‘The Scent of the Other Side’, as readers may tend to think, looking at the subtitle! It is a word to be found in the Malayalam Catholic Bible meaning ‘to stumble’ or ‘to falter’ from the straight way of the faith and to turn to evil ways (p. xx)…

Social change is an important subject in a society like ours which is both commit­ted to and is undergoing social change. Though study of this important subject has engaged sociologists and other social scientists for a long time, there has so far been no comprehensive treatment of the subject…

Abdul Rahman Siddiqi belongs to the rare, and now practically invisible, Dilliwallas who were born and brought up in Delhi. He belongs to the Dilli Punjabi Saudagran community which migrated to Delhi from Panipat during the reign of Shah Jahan, to settle as a trading community…

This book is a collection of research papers written by former graduate students and other close associates of Professor Zimmerman, an eminent sociologist who has done significant work in sociology, especially socio-cultural change in the rural-urban context, inter-group relations…

Reading the short stories of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas in the India of today-the emerging, global economy of enviable GDP growth, free market enterprise, bustling shopping malls-is a sobering exercise. They remind one of another India, the black and white India of the early Nehruvian years…

It has been our firm belief for long, now reinforced by the present example that the festschrift volumes should be a tribute to the dead, or, at the most, presented in honour of those who have retired or about to retire from public life.  A festschrift volume is perhaps too early for Professor Kaula…

Before I begin the review of G.J.V. Prasad’s work a word on the dust jacket cover: it speaks of the multicultural, multilingual, multifarious ways in which English is read, written, and spoken in India. Hence, fish swim in a sea of words taken from Hindi…

Iqbal A. Ansari’s book Uses of English, for the conservative, carries an explanatory sub-title ‘Varieties of English and Their Uses’. Conscious of some eyebrows being raised on the plural ‘Uses’ and afraid that the sub-title may not register, the author begins his preface with the following explication: ‘This book…

That there are multiple histories rather than a history of the Partition is borne out by studying the literature produced in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Contrary to popular perception, there is no generalized or undifferentiated response to the Partition among those who have chronicled it…

As the introduction to the Writers’ Workshop translation of Nagarjun’s novel Jamaniya ka Daba puts it, the author is one of the stalwarts of the Progressive movement in Indian literature, a move­ment committed to Marxism and to the depiction of social realism, Nagarjun usually handles social situations familiar in India…

By 2030, 40 per cent of India’s population will be living in urban areas according to projections. The gargantuan gap between the inexorable rise of the country’s urban population, on the one hand, and policy making on urban entitlements, investments, infrastructure, and administrative norms…

Integrating Services in South Asia’ comes at a very im-portant juncture when services negotiations are under way within SAARC nations and are also de-emed to be a very impor-tant part of bilateral and multilateral trading arran-gements with huge poten-tial for the region…

The theatre in Bengal in its early days came to be labelled by some newspapers as the Bilati Jatra, i.e., indigenous folk play presented in a western pattern. Curi­ous as it may sound, the expression rightly stressed the kind of interrelationship…

This compendium of essays edited by three distinguished Sri Lankan economists is a welcome addition to the economic literature on South Asia. The subject matter is of great import to policy makers and academics alike and poses a considerable challenge to both the editors…

Intimate Others is a well-researched and well documented work produced by the Jadavpur Uiversity’s School of Women’s Studies. The School deserves to be congratulated for having motivated the contributors to bring together this volume on a subject on which very little has been written…

When one considers the fact that the autobiography or memoir as a literary form is predicated upon the sense of an individuated self that emerged with modernity, one must wonder, is ‘feminist memoir’ a contradiction in terms? At one level, perhaps not, because feminism is such a quintessentially…