Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

At a time when adivasis are both central to the national political discourse on conversion, migration, the environ-ment, and insurgency, and yet strangely silenced, Alpa Shah’s straight up ethnography of a Munda village in Jharkhand is very welcome.

Any serious student of Indian federalism must be aware that if Indian federa-lism has been the key to holding this very complex and culturally diverse country together in conditions of democracy over the last half a century-a remarkable record of nation and state building in sharp contrast to the former USSR and many countries in the non-western world-the method that has informed the process of federation building (and re-building) in India has remained what is known as ‘reorganisation of States’.

Rights are of various kinds-every day we read about people struggling somewhere in the world, for the right to free speech, for sexual rights, for the right to a minimum wage, or for the right to freedom of religion. These rights are indi-vidual rights.

Whatever generalization you make about India, the reverse of it is equally true.
Joan Robinson

Ashok Mitra’s collection of sixty essays, published as column pieces in The Telegraph between 2009 and 2011, are self-confessedly quite disparate. The essay ‘A Country, Not a Nation’, however, gives an overall picture of the message that this book attempts to convey.

If we exclude the descriptive and institutional studies of the formal-legal variety, scholarship on legislative institutions in India would actually look threadbare.

On August 15, 2011, while addressing India from the ramparts of the Red Fort, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the problem of corruption was ‘a difficultly for which no government has a magic wand’.

The Battle for Employment Guarantee is a collection of seminal articles that trace the genesis of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Gurantee Act (MGNREGA), evaluate its implemen-tation, and provide a commentary on the extent to which the Act has been successful in fulfilling the entitlements that it was required to guarantee and uphold.

Divided into three parts, the twelve essays in this volume collectively emerge as a critique to the linear and often instrumentalist ‘developmental’ as well as ‘methodological’ perspective(s) of western modernity and its overwhelming hegemony across the Third World countries.

People are raising their voice against in-justice and inequity in every corner of the world. They occupy Wall Street in the US, they collect in Tahrir Square in Egypt and they also protest in several small villages in the Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra against the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project.

This is a work that is as interesting as it is informative. It is interesting on account of the several nuances that it is able to reveal pertaining to the Hindu ascetic tradition. Some of the information available here, as the author rightly claims, may be little known to the world outside maths and akhadas; on the other hand, there are also disclosures that might take the unsuspecting reader by surprise.