Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

This fascinating ethnographic analysis of political action through the lens of political theatre breathes and brings new meaning into our conceptualizations of ‘development’. Situated in two districts of West Bengal in Eastern India, the study critically looks at the ways in which one organization, the Jana Sanskriti…

Andre Beteille is one of India’s foremost sociologists, well known for his work on social inequality and institutions, and for his qualities as a teacher, always meticulous and eloquent, enthusiastic, supportive and generous with students, and ever ready for a good discussion and argument. In his engaging style…

About 10 years ago Pavan K. Varma wrote The Great Indian Middle Class, in which he lamented the fact that this class had forgotten the virtues of nationalism and social concern which inspired it during the freedom struggle and in the years after Independence, and how it so easily abandoned itself to the easy…

Pranay Gupte provides us a highly gripping multidimensional account of Indira Gandhi’s life, times and politics. As a credible journalist of with varied media outlets like the prestigious New York Times, Forbes and BBC he has taken great pains in reaching out to his potential news sources to capture the complex personality of India’s…

The political memoir is a much underdeveloped literary genre in India. Our politicians and policy-makers are seldom tempted to pen detailed and analytical accounts of their role in crafting and executing policies. This has had a deleterious impact both on the historical memory of our institutions and on the writing of contemporary history…

The multifaceted encounter between tradition and modernity in colonial Indian society continues to intrigue today’s historians, who discover new dimensions in the recorded experiences of that period. A little over a decade ago, Tapan Raychaudhuri, in a brilliant study called Europe Reconsidered (1988), explored the changing perceptions…

As with earlier works by the author, Writing The Self is a book that I read with avid interest. And having read the work it would be quite uncharitable of me not to admit that there is much on offer here. First, there is the sheer excitement of encountering the unusual: in this case, an autobiographical fragment written by a Baul…

In her essay on ‘The Crafty Feeling’, Zadie Smith describes the craft of writing. It is a love-hate relationship that an author has with her work. A work desultorily begun can become something altogether different once the ‘middle’ stage is reached.

Kalpana Swaminathan is a surgeon writer, and the influence of her profession is evident in the choice of her themes in Venus Crossing: Twelve Stories in Transit.

What a delightful collection of stories—all about women who take lovers, cuckold their husbands, have a great time and mostly, live to tell the tale. Or rather, in this case, have their tale told.

Examination of the rural women of India implicates lot of things the foremost among which is that we are covering an overwhelming majority of women in the country.

The two authors undertook the study with a research grant awarded by the Achuta Menon Foundation and claim that theirs is a ‘disinterested’ (un-biased) perspective.

The book under review seeks to address an issue which has ever remained an area of great concern, how to improve the governance structure of the elementary education system in India.

The issue of language has always drawn attention in social science debates on such diverse themes as culture, nationalism, nationality, education, and social mobility.

Vandana Shiva has been a powerful voice for the rights of the dispossessed in an era of unequal, elite-led globalization. She has long rooted for maintaining biodiversity, and has shown that a bottom up approach to sustainability and conservation is both desirable and possible.

Author Randhir Singh rightly critiques capitalism as the root cause of today’s global environmental crisis in his exposition of the Marxist view on the subject.

This volume is part of the series entitled A People’s History of India. It deals with the ecological history of India from pre-historic times to 1947.

Critics have complained about the incessant output of books on Bombay/Mumbai. Each book has, obviously, a story to tell. This ‘Maximum City’, which is the second most populated city in the world and the richest city in India today, was a sparsely-populated, sleepy hamlet of mud-houses till the mid-eighteenth century. But, by 1780s,

This volume is among the genre of narratives of major events concerning the twentieth century that have appeared in the first decade of the new century, e.g.: William R. Keylor,

Tirthankar Roy has set out ‘to write an economic history of institutional change in South Asia’. A major theme in economic history is the institutional framework in which trade and commercial activities were carried on in pre-colonial societies.