Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Situated somewhere between an autobiography and a memoir, Dev Anand’s narrative of his life and times in the Bombay film industry and his rise to stardom, opens up certain contradictions which are usually connected with a star’s autobiographical project.

There has been a lot of writing on the Hindi cinema as popular culture in recent years that has ranged from the journalistic to the academic. The spread of film studies as a discipline since the eighties put the pressure of academic writing on writers who were specialists in their field, but who had not internalized academic theory.

With new publications on Hindi cinema arriving with startling frequency, every month or so, it is daunting to keep track of what new is being said. However, Anil Saari’s writings on Hindi cinema are hardly recent. Born in 1945, film journalist Saari began to write on films and filmmaking in the seventies and continued to do so till his demise in 2005.

When I first heard the title, I mistook this co-edited volume to be a sequel to Global Hollywood and Global Hollywood 2, the well-known co-authored books that provide an analysis of how Hollywood globalized itself to become the most powerful film industry in the world.

It is apt that this review is written at a time when Girish Kasaravalli’s latest film Gulabi Talkies has won the Osian’s Best Indian Film Award. It is ironical that someone who is an important figure within the stream of parallel cinema has not found a place in the intellectual debates around parallel cinema.

There has been a new interest in the histories of regional cinema industries in academic institutions which are manifested in ongoing research and recent conferences.

Selvaraj Velayutham’s edited volume, which is perhaps one of the first academic attempts to take a comprehensive look at the Tamil film industry , “of one of India’s largest, most prolific and increasingly significant cinemas” (Velayutham: 1) has hit the market at a time when Bollywood is hogging attention and space in academic circles as a global brand.

Brand Bollywood by Derek Bose is a study of the commercial possibilities of popular Hindi cinema of Mumbai. It looks at the many strands of technology available to increase the revenue of Hindi films.

Vijay Seshadri’s two earlier collections, Wild Kingdom and Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 1996 and 2004 respectively), have already been reviewed well. Richard Wilbur, Frank Bidart, Evan Boland, and Campbell McGrath (the known and the lesser known ones) have noted his poetic merit in unmistakable terms. The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker had words of praise for him.

Sujata Bhatt’s meditative and reflective verse has established her among the much feted poets of promise writing in English today. Her poetry is marked by a poignant search for home, language and love. She conducts this search with deep sympathy and empathy through the use of memory and history in her work.

Vijay Seshadri’s two earlier collections, Wild Kingdom and Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 1996 and 2004 respectively), have already been reviewed well. Richard Wilbur, Frank Bidart, Evan Boland, and Campbell McGrath (the known and the lesser known ones) have noted his poetic merit in unmistakable terms. The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker had words of praise for him.

There are many kinds of travelers in this world. On one end of the spectrum, you have the “been-there-done-that” variety. Every place they visit connote just another ‘conquest’ and memorabilia they bring back (not to forget the footage on that indispensible handycam), ‘trophies’ to show off. And then you have the type that are mentally so scared to venture out of their environment…

Richard Zimler’s Guardian of the Dawn, a historical mystery, is the third of his trilogy on the Zarco family, the other two being The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, and Hunting Midnight, set in the 16th and 19th centuries, the setting encompassing different countries and different generations of the family. Guardian of the Dawn is set in 16th century Goa against the background of the Roman Catholic Inquisition and Portuguese colonialism.

In a literary career spanning over a decade, Goodnight and God Bless is Anita Nair’s first time as an essayist. According to Aldous Huxley, ‘…a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel.

Navtej Sana is a skillful story-teller. His narrative cunning was seen in his debut novel, ‘We Weren’t Lovers Like That”, published five years ago. And he seems to have chosen a promising story to tell – the life of Duleep Singh, the youngest son of the only successful Sikh emperor Ranjit Singh from his youngest wife Jindan.

Jammu and Kashmir today is a house divided. In 2008 as I write this review, there are processions in favour of land for Amarnath Yatris, being taken out in Jammu and counter-processions in Kashmir by Muslims. The shadow of violence has now been hanging over the Kashmir valley for nearly five decades.

For those who read ‘The Toda Tiger- Debates on Custom, Utility and Rights in Nature, South India 1820- 1843’ by Gunnel Cederlof in the 2005 publication called Ecological Nationalisms, this new book offers a more detailed and valuable narration of the establishment of colonial rule in the Nilgiri hills by a complex and simultaneous process of law making related to land rights and settlement of land claims.

This book brings together within its beautiful covers ten extremely relevant and timely articles written by world renowned scholars from multiple disciplines working on the conceptualizations of and contestations over ‘natural’ resources. The term is put within quotation marks here because the labelling suggests the existence of these resources outside of culture, something that is not of human-construction.

The centrality of the dynamics of the colonial family, a product of the inter¬racial sexual contact between European men and ‘native’ women, in the shaping of imperial policy during the company rule has received scant attention from scholars.

In this study Salahuddin Malik looks at the 1857 Revolt as viewed from Britain, helping us to make sense of the bewildering variety of perspectives discernible in the flood of contemporary books, pamphlets, sermons, newspaper reports and articles about the Revolt published in the metropolis.