Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho encouraged me to take cinema seriously as an art form with its own methods and a visual language distinct from the words being spoken by the characters on screen writes Jai Arjun Singh in Monsters I Have Known an engaging and expansive essay on the horror films that spoke to him in ways no film scholar could understand.

Daisy Hasans deeply atmospheric novel is set in Shillong in the North East. The central motif that runs like a thread in the novel is the attempt on the part of the characters to retrieve the sense of belonging to a place.

Pick up a travel guide to India. Look for any of the followingKakur Naichanpur Ikhar Davangere Azamgarh. Youd be lucky to find them mentioned in any detail. Even in cricket-centered talk these places dont ring a bell.

Performance studies in India should be very pleased with the intervention made by Bishnupriya Dutt and Urmimala Sarkar Munsi. Taking the elements of search as well as identity quite seriously, the authors have managed to keep their work and explorations away from the theoretical closure that often accompanies such endeavours.

You might run across Damodar K.K. Ghanekar cycling in Panjim quite absent-minded and lost deep in thought.

The state defines prison as a space for the isolation and reform of individuals not fit to live in society. Prisoners narratives of everyday life are jabs in this faade that bleed over the fabric of total spaces and stain it with its own fallacies.

The Spirit of Hindu Law interestingly
takes law beyond its legal definition and tries to relate it to the ordinary world. It talks of its ethos as well as what constitutes Hindu law and how it operated.

Dowry and its implications on women have perhaps been most discussed and debated when it comes to womens issues in India, so much so that the word dowry itself is almost synonymous with womens oppression.