Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Journey to the Holy Land is much more than just a day-to-day account of Hajj that was undertaken in1929. Neither is it merely a historical document, valuable though it would be even if it were to be just that; it brings alive the economics, politics, beliefs and the colonial temper of the times, around and through the journey…

Sisir Kar’s 1988 monograph British Shashoney Bajeyapto Bangla Boi has long been one of the standard reference works on the history of censorship in colonial Bengal. A work of painstaking scholarship it was brought together a wide range of sources pertaining to almost every aspect of print cen-sorship under the British Raj…

The lack of sensitive models of inter-societal, inter-cultural and inter-personal exchanges emerges as the root cause of violence, misconstructions and exploitation in Sharankumar Limbale’s landmark Marathi novel, Hindu. The English translation of Hindu by Arun Prabha Mukherjee has opened the apparently transcasteist urban space to an awareness of the core issues haunting dalit politics and aesthetics in India today.

Sangam Poetry has long since fascinated and intrigued readers from different cultures. Fiercely treasured and guarded by Tamil pundits, chauvnistically valorized in Dravidian politics, Sangam corpus lays bare an entire worldview and civilizational ethos in cryptic, lyrical precision, leaving readers of every generation awe-struck and engrossed.

The verses of Bhartrihari are among the most quoted from secular Sanskrit literature. Their almost timeless topicality and often poignant brilliance won them a repute both widespread and long-standing…

Mahabharata, which literally means ‘the great story of Bharat dynasty’ is part of the Hindu itihas, i.e., ‘that which happened’. It is an extraordinary story of sibling rivalry, diplomatic manoeuvring and shifting of human values culminating in a direct confrontation on the battlefield of Kurukshetra between the five sons of King Pandu (Pandavas) and the hundred sons of King Dhritarashtra (Kauravas)…

An ELT specialist, a translator, and a creative writer, Rama Rao has naturally a lot to say about language use. He has put together sixteen of his articles in this book which is in two parts as the title indicates—one on literary translation and the other on language.

The edited volume to honour of Montek Singh Ahluwalia, with a foreword by Dr. Manmohan Singh, is a compilation of articles by economists who have either worked with him or have known him as an economist and policy maker. This volume would prove useful both for the admirers and critics of economic reforms in India…

Considering the inadequacy of literature on the subject of political economy, the book will be extremely useful for the scholars of political science, economics, history, sociology and even public policy. It has adopted an interdisciplinary approach to understand a wide range of political and economic phenomenon…

Media and Modernity is primarily about Kerala, its politics and its women and then about media and communication in Kerala. It is a book of previously published essays in which Robin Jeffrey explores his fascination with Kerala’s communism, its matriliny, its literacy, and its women. Intertwined with this is his research…

The core of any commercial cinema—be it Bollywood, Hollywood or the Tamil film industry—is its stars. The ones who make or break a film, set box office records and fashion trends and fire the dreams and imagination of billions of fans. They are the face of our popular culture. Then again the notion of stardom is not static…

The insecurity of people, faced with helpless conditions of violence, confron-tation, lack of access to basic services, has surged incrementally across India. In regions as ethnically complex and challenging as what is commonly called the ‘North-east’,

What are or should be the guiding principles of Indian foreign policy? At a function of the Ministry of External Affairs some time ago, an IFS officer was reviewing the year, gone by. ‘If I were to sum up the biggest success in our relations with other countries in one word, ‘ he said, with some pride, ‘It is continuity….

One of the stark reminders of the failure of the discipline of history was evident in the recent sessions of the Indian History Congress as it was clearly recognized that dalit history was virtually nonexistent, with very few exceptions. Mainstream historians’ apathy towards the dalit question indicates a failure of the historian’s…

Narendar Pani, In his introductory essay, states that the book was compiled in the wake of an absence of ‘a collective effort to recognize. . . (the city’s) past (4).’ After noting that a dialogue between ‘the present and the past’ . . . has never gathered momentum in Bengaluru,’ he offers an intriguing explanation for it…

One of the imperatives of transformative politics aiming for radical change has been to overcome the insurmountable complexity of pursuing praxis with a singularity of purpose, and yet not abandon critical enquiry into the philosophical presuppositions guiding that practice, as much as contributing to the philosophy itself…

Democracy and its accompanying value of secularism has been a target of heavy criticism for both academic and non-academic sections of India. Along with their practice, the very ideals are now questioned as undesirable and deeply flawed. Scholars like Ashis Nandy, T.N. Madan and Partha Chatterjee have come…

In this slim book noted economist C.H. Hanumantha Rao brings together his eight essays on regional disparities, smaller states and Telangana written at different points of time since 1969 with an Introduction and an Epilogue contextualizing them and observations on recent developments in Telangana…

There used to be a children’s game played by seven or eight year olds long ago, not really a game but a kind of verbal oneupmanship that seems so cool and clever at that age. The first step was to look for a suitable victim, an innocent new to the game. Then you had to get your victim to start off by saying…

Rabindranath Tagore, who famously declared that he was ‘nothing but a poet’, is read in this book for anything but his poetry. ‘Much of Tagore’s central claim to greatness lies in his social thought’, the back cover of Amartya Mukhopadhyay’s comprehensive volume declares, and even a cursory inspection will show…