Conflict Society and Peacebuilding: Comparative Perspectives is an edited volume of eleven essays, which explores the linkages between civil society, conflict and peace, drawing on empirical studies from regions in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe…
The Eagle and the Elephant is the best book on Indo-US relations written by an insider in the US administration. Vickery holds a bipartisan American view largely sympathetic to Indian concerns. It surpasses Denis Kux’s magisterial book—Estranged Democracies…
Mappila Muslims constitute more than ninety percent of the Muslim population in Kerala. The majority of these Muslims live in the northern part of Kerala, called Malabar region. Historians and sociologists like Roland E. Miller, Stephen F. Dale, K.N. Panikkar, Hussain Randathani and many others have written about the socio-political and cultural world of Malabar Muslims from various perspectives…
Islam is the predominant religion of contemporary Africa and Asia and has a large following in Australasia, Europe and North America. According to reliable demo-graphic sources in as many as fifty-one nation-states scattered over the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe followers of Islam are in a majority—in as many as forty of them the Muslim population being above 80%…
The existing vast scholarship on collective identities in India, whether it deals with caste, creed or nationalism, is dominated by a concern with their modern ‘construction’, a process generally seen as having occurred during the colonial period…
Sociality is a fact of human existence,however, not an unproblematic one.Even after centuries of contemplation, it is still as enigmatic as ever. With the advent of modernity, tension surfaced between the individual and the community to which the individual belonged…
With the passing of the 73rd amendment of the Constitution which empowered a three-tiered local (self) government system or panchayat raj, attention has been focused on the success of decentralization in India. Millions of local politicians have been elected with constitutional authority into the panchayat raj system since 1993…
Given the centrality that elections have come to occupy in the political fabric of this country, it is not surprising that election studies are one of the prominent and oldest research traditions in political science in India…
The metamorphosis of Sino-Indian interaction into a developing adversary relationship from 1959 onwards and the climax of this process which was reached in 1962, when Peking resorted to a military option and out-manoeuvred New Delhi…
Peter Ronald de Souza in his foreword sees the book’s central contribution in providing a ‘frame within which to understand the troublesome question as to how a democracy should respond when a group acquires a voice, when that voice be-comes louder, and when it perhaps grows to be a cacophony?’
The question of the nation—its presence or absence, expansion or stagnation,exclusivity or everydayness, or its accuracy and ambiguity, has quite often rendered the concept difficult and unyielding…
Reminiscences from the days of the Raj have been a favourite subject of many authors, even writers and historians not dealing with it otherwise. Sahib’s India: Vignettes from the Raj presents a picture of the much discussed era from the perspective of someone who has already…
Reading the short stories by Deepti Naval can be quite an exhilarating experience. In each story, one can feel the aesthethic sensibility that has helped her emerge as a multi-faceted artistic personality who can interpret and use each medium of expression to her advantage, be it acting, painting, photography or writing…
Cricket and Sri Lanka share a rather formidable history. Tracing this, the cricket enthusiast-turned-anthropo-logist Michael Roberts (University of Adelaide), draws on the diversity in team composition as testimony to the inherent cosmopolitanism of the island—as native to it as the strains of the raucous but vibrant (Tamil) Baila, i.e.,…
2012
Blue Blood is Uttara Chauhan’s second endeavour at fiction writing. A Canada based writer of Indian origin, who works as a policy analyst for the Government of Canada, Uttara Chauhan’s debut novel A Model House was a love story while the book under review strings together eight stories…
Barbed Wire Fence is a collection of short stories translated into English from the original Bengali versions dealing with the sociological, political and psychological problems arising out of the mass scale migration of Bengalis from East Bengal to the Barack Valley in Assam during Partition (1946-7), as also the migration of the Bangladeshis after the 1965 and 71 wars…
Christophe Jaffrelot, a noted French expert on Indian politics, has made a stupendous effort to bring together this collection of forty-five essays, including an Introduction and a conclusion by him of French writings on India. Prepared as a Reader for French students of Indian studies, this English translation connects Indian readers (students particularly) to analyses of various Indian issues over the years by French Indologists…
Pakistan has been a subject of scholarly gaze for some time. The unfolding of events in the post 9/11 period has given a peculiar twist to the usual Indo-centric analysis about its role in international affairs, thus bringing into the discourse such actors as the Taliban, Al Qaida and their interface with Pakistani polity…
The book presents an array of relevant issues in development studies, such as child labour, educational participation, poverty, inequality, gender issues, that have skewed sex ratio and its relation to women’s well being; and issues related to collection of data and interpretations of statistical results…
Crisis is an output of change; it is a new beckoning or a long awaited demise, a decisive break with the past arrangements. Global crises have happened more than once in the past and they are likely to happen again in the future…