2017
This like all books on the Progressive Writers Movement is to be heartily welcomed as an attempt to redress a very serious historical neglect. To subtitle it an episode is however to acknowledge and reinforce the overarching and unquestioned authority of the national question over all other approaches and framings of this period…
Representation, of all genres and kinds, in the media and elsewhere takes on a meaning outside the boundaries of human discourse and behaviour. It takes on greater and more worthy connotations as the process subsumes the depiction of communities, both communal and caste, genders, sexualities…
Zahida Zaidi says that she has not attempted a work on the history of Urdu literature in this endeavour. Notwithstanding, I would argue that she has subconsciously ended up providing a very fine outline of the same in the course of writing this book…
A number of books describing the birth of Bangladesh have appeared in India and abroad, some soon after the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent country, others a little later; but few analyse the operations as objectively as General Sukhwant Singh has done in this very readable book.
Beginning in the late 1960s, sociological and historical interest in homosexuality in Britain and the United States began by academics questioning the validity of using culturally specific terms like gay or homosexual to describe desire and sexuality across time and space. Social constructionist researchers often suggested…
In the BBC Hard Talk interview aired on January 5 January 2011, Bruce Riedel, former CIA officer, national security official to Presidents Clinton and Bush, and adviser to President Obama on Afghanistan and Pakistan announced that Pakistan is the most dangerous country on earth…
This book straddles several anomalies that are rather obvious once stated but are rarely formulated as such. How is it that the world of Urdu literature becomes so dominated by people from the Punjab in a span of fifty years, beginning circa 1900s, and in a sense, continues to remain so? Iqbal, Faiz, Meeraji, Rashid, Bedi, Manto, Krishan Chander…
The Brill Dictionary of Religion describes pilgrimage as timehonoured migrations to outlying sacred places. This phenomenon of religious mobility is attested among peoples of ancient times This devotional journeying is underscored by the belief that the local presence of a deity, a hero, or a saint in this specific place makes transcendence in immanence especially effective and available to experience, and thereby especially efficacious for ones own concerns.
One of the most difficult topics in the field of nuclear diplomacy in South Asia is, surely, Pakistan’s nuclear programme and its objectives. Documentation is hard to come by, information is sparse and rumour rife.
Madhu Trivedis knowledge of cultural and artistic production in Nawabi Awadh is very evident throughout the text. An introductory chapter sets out the historical background to Awadh in the Nawabi era (17221856), followed by detailed information on the place of Shii Islam, literary production, music, painting…
The Dangers of Nuclear War is in marked contrast to the bulk of the literature on nuclear war generated in the West. The central message of the book is, to quote Lord Zuckermann, ‘that wars may start as central planners predict but history shows that they rarely if ever proceed or need end as predicted.’
In Multiple Meanings of Money: How Women See Microfinance, the authors explore women’s own money management strategies, group dynamics and learning processes in groups. The book is an impact study using participatory research methodologies in an actor-oriented perspective framework that essentially results…
Economist Paul Romer said: A crisis is a terrible thing to waste; Shekhar Gupta says: ‘This book (Surviving the Storm) is proof of that’; and I say: ‘I agree’.The book, a chronicle of the 2008 financial crisis has several parts revolving around a theme, the last theme on Theoretical Underpinnings, actually glimpses of the huge debate of questioning mainstream economics…
It is alleged that government officials, urban planners and politicians cater to the interests of the elite and not to lower income groups in matters of urban development. Arif Hasan has considerable direct experience in urban architecture and planning, therefore, this book approaches the many challenges practitioners face in achieving the goal of executing participatory development projects in countries such as Pakistan from paper to practice.
Trade liberalization over the last few decades, (led, to a large extent, by a paradigm shift in China, India and South East Asian countries), has generated much optimism, although it is not an unmixed blessing for all.
Arjan de Haans book is timely and comes at a time when the global financial crisis is pushing more people into unemployment and making governments in the developed and developing worlds slash budgets and shrink the states interventions in the social sectors.The role of social policies in the shaping of wellbeing…
South Asia is the second fastest growing region in the world after East Asia. This growth has reduced poverty rates but they have not fallen fast enough to reduce the total number of the poor. This is despite growth being complemented with various poverty alleviation programmes.
.the special case assumed by the classical theory happen not to be those of the economic society in which we actually live, with the result that its teaching is misleading and disastrous if we attempt to apply it to the facts of experience. Expanding debates on macroeconomics and gender is crucially important given the hegemony of macroeconomic theory informing national and regional policies and its expressed goals to remove poverty and gender inequality.
It is indeed one of the worst ironies of our time that the greater the urgency of the problem of climate change and its devastating consequences, the slower and weaker are the attempts to combat the problem. One can indeed be forgiven for being pessimistic about outcomes of successive meetings aimed at resolving…
In the spring of 1980 there is little praise to be heard about the formulation or conduct of US foreign policy. On the contrary, Americans and non-Americans alike see the US facing the danger of an ‘over all paralysis barely veiled by surface diplomatic activity’.