As libraries in most universities in India are in decline, books unavailable and institutes out of reach, there is a fear that many of the most incisive and important articles written by scholars get lost to the new generation of scholarship…
Part of the four sets of Readers that have been designed by the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur as Readings in Gender Studies, this happens to be the second volume of the first set. The other three are listed as forthcoming and having gone through the already published material, one looks forward to the forthcoming publications…
There has been a huge academic industry on Kerala’s demographic transition.Birth rates in Kerala began to decline in the second half of the 20th century despite little urbanization, industrialization, and economic growth—key factors that had led to demographic transition in the West in the 19th century…
This volume of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru covers the period of two months from November 1957 till December 1957. Its relevance is two fold. One, it contains enough data to throw light on some important facets of Nehru’s life and politics. Two, like earlier volumes on the 1950s, this too has a contemporaneity. Many of the issues that Nehru talked about and engaged with are still with us in some form or the other, some unresolved and some unresolvable…
The book under review represents a scholarly endeavour to analyse the role of ideas in the interpretation of Indo-Muslim politics since the time of its advent in the mid-nineteenth century till the vivisection of India in 1947…
The decades following the Independence of India witnessed the study of early Indian history taking significant strides in more than one direction and thereby adding new and fresh dimensions in the realm of Indian historiography…
2012
Nestled within an idyllic ecological environment, the hill stations have always been an ideal summer retreat. However, the quietude of these settlements and the tranquility of their landscapes belie a history of conflicts and negotiations mostly dated to the nineteenth century, between the hill communities and the British…
The text under review is a re-publication of a monograph that initially appeared in 1975. It looked at the emergence of, what the author calls, a ‘national consciousness’, in late nineteenth century colonial India. Though it has a new introduction, the main body of the text is not a revision of the earlier edition…
This is a volume of engaging essays intended as a festschrift in honour of the eminent sociologist, Professor A.M. Shah, edited by two of his former students who are today well known academics themselves. Covering a vast array of subjects, the volume is eclectic in character, bringing to the reader the freshness of each contributor’s individual on going academic interest…
The dominant scholarship on India’s North East is focused on the study of militancy and violence in the region. The concern of scholars, by and large, has been to understand and explain the conditions, circumstances and background driving the agendas of local identity movements, their grievances leading to radicalization in the public sphere, and the politics of militancy and their outcomes (Baruah 2005; Misra 2000; Hazarika 1994; Nag 1990)…
Christopher Bayly’s new book, Recover ring Liberties: Indian Thought in in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, traces the history of political thought in India with a specific focus on liberalism. Bayly attempts to trace the lineages of liberal political language in the Indian…
On the cover of this elegantly written reportage-cum-travelogue is a shabbily dressed teenage girl holding a toddler. In the background we see the thatched houses and many tell-tale signs of extreme poverty. From the cover photograph itself you have a fair idea…
2012
‘Everything becomes a story one day.’ So begins the PS section of this Bangladeshi contemporary classic. Its writer, Mahmudul Haque, is credited with fashioning a new idiom and a distinctly modern sensibility in the post-1947 writing coming out from what was once East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh…
As summer looms upon us, a Gujarati friend living in Calcutta becomes more and more disgruntled. Her plaint is the lack of kesri ker no ras (aam ras or mango pulp) in her city. Upon a suggestion that she purchase mangoes and make it at home, came a most painful shriek: you don’t understand! In Gujarat right now, everyone is talking mango, buying mango, selling mango, cooking mango…
Even as Delhi has been celebrating the centenary of its restoration as capital of India, a proud fragment of its built heritage and history, it is fitting that we re-member the doyen of Delhi’s lived cultural heritage, Amir Khusrau (1238-1325), the most loved acolyte of the great…
Just when journalism in India is going through a transition of sorts, when values and ethics lost in the process are being questioned, M.S. Prabhakara’s book Looking Back Into The Future helps restore some faith…
Poet and essayist W.H. Auden once remarked that every autobiography is concerned with two characters, ‘a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self’. Vinod Mehta’s literary self-portrait Lucknow Boy fits the description quite well. Only that in this memoir the two characters never appear together, at least not on the same page…
In 2002, the Government of Karnataka prohibited the sales of a massive two-volume history of Kannada cinema published by Hampi University Press. It apparently had factual errors and, more importantly, had misrepresented Dr. Rajkumar, the Kannada film superstar…
This book highlights a conceptual and political impasse that is at the heart of the most recent postcolonial scholar-ship on India.On the one hand, much effort is expended at exposing the contradictions and limits of British colonial rule (scholars tend to mostly ignore the Portuguese colonial presence!)…
In 2004, I went around the research institution where I work in search of a discussant for a paper on the historical shaping of public consent for family planning in 20th century Kerala. This was interdisciplinary work which reexamined some of the received wisdom of demography pertaining to Kerala from a critical historical perspective…