Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The study of psychology is growing roots and gaining its own threshold in India. The book is both a culmination and proof of the vibrant field of the subject in the country. As Misra points out in the preface,’The publication of this volume indicates that there is substantial work being done by Indian scholars that needs to be shared.’

Smallpox eradication remains one of the most outstanding achievements in the area of international public health. Any account of this extraordinary achievement of the collective human race ought to evoke interest,

This book, a brilliant book, received extraordinary attention in India. You might disagree with me, but I believe we do not have a rich literary culture.

In 2008, as America cheered and roared for change, Barack Hussein Obama, the son of an African father and a Caucasian mother, became the 44th President of the United States of America. Considering the blood splattered, radically disturbing history of the country, this indeed was a huge change.

The boredom of teaching and learning social stratification in the ambit of social science is nearly an abiding experience in academia. Teachers end up recycling the monolithic categories and students learn the trick of obtaining good grades in the course.

This striking book, a collection of thirteen papers, on the genealogy, locations and practices of sociology in India tries to locate within the complex, contradictory, and contesting histories of sociological traditions in the various settings during the colonial period and immediately after, before the spiralling expansion of the university system in the 1960s.

Gail Omvedt’s book attempts to understand caste, critiquing the position that equates Indian tradition with Hinduism making Vedas the foundational texts of Indian culture that imprisons even secular minds within brahmanical perspective and proposes to go beyond the debate of posing secularism or reformist Hinduism as an alter-native to Hindutva.

The book under review unravels the way in which the adivasi society negotiated with itself and interacted with shifts and changes that were taking place during the colonial period. The book is divided into three parts consisting of 13 papers.

At a time when adivasis are both central to the national political discourse on conversion, migration, the environ-ment, and insurgency, and yet strangely silenced, Alpa Shah’s straight up ethnography of a Munda village in Jharkhand is very welcome.