Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Today the best of students and the best of parents have shifted their academic allegiance from ‘social/humane’ to ‘professional’ education under the diktat of market imperatives. The professional pragmatics, powered by information, technological and market superhighways, have forever changed the pedagogical contours…

Diplomats, statesmen, journalists, writers, and poets—women have been at the forefront in almost every field in Pakistan. But if that made you think that this is due to the liberal society of Pakistan which perhaps allows equal opportunities to women, then you got it all wrong. On the contrary, the social and political milieu of Pakistan…

While the rest of the country moans about the lack of new playwrights, the one state that seems to happily buck the trend is Maharashtra. The Marathi language seems to have a special affinity with playwrights. At any given time, there are at leastfour or five talented playwrights producing new plays…

Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid published by Tulika Books is a major event in interdisciplinary scholarship on cinema and academy oriented independent publishing, both of which have gained considerable foothold in India in the last two decades.

Religious institutions are governed and managed by authorities who are mortal yet professing deep spiritual commitment to the dogmas of their faith. The Catholic Church and its institutions are no exception. As such, they are expected to set high moral standards and are looked up to for guidance on a range…

As a police icon, K.F. Rustamji can perhaps be compared only to B.N. Mullick although the latter was very autocratic and controversial, which Rustamji was not. This book will rank very high as a biography, culled as it is by the editor from three thousand pages of his diaries and seven thousand pages…

The essence of science lies in the uninterrupted growth of knowledge through the development of theories, methods and techniques, and their continuous refinement. New techniques emerge as a result of new perspectives in both social and natural sciences. Obviously, new methods of investigation open new vistas…

This is a book that ends without an index. Even with the aid of new technology (software), preparing an index remains the most tedious job, particularly because the job has to be taken up only after the painstaking finalization of the print-ready copy. Nevertheless, an index of a book is as important as the title of the book…

The genesis of disciplinarity and the universalistic aspiration of creating knowledge unembedded in specific contexts is primarily the act of service of knowledge to the purpose of administration and power. Kaul’s treatise excavates the construction of knowledge in the field of economics, the rise of universal theory…

As Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz sounded the alarm at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association that the US economy could slip back to recession in 2010, the (so called) debate on ‘free trade vs. protectionism’ once again has come back to the forefront…

This book of essays addresses an important issue of liberalization of service trade in South Asia. It examines seven individual country cases of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives and Bhutan.In addition, there are three other chapters, an Introduction by Saman Kelegama, a South Asian…

The book under review here is a selection of columns contributed by the author, between December 2006 to December 2008, to the Business Standard and Outlook. As one may expect from such a volume, a large number of questions of contemporary relevance are touched upon in these short essays…

In a refreshing departure from existing studies and understandings of urban informal economy in general, and, scavenging, waste and recycling economy in particular, the above book provides a contextualized picture of a waste and recycling chain, which study necessitated that the author supplement field economics…

This book attempts to look at the difficult problem of analysing dalits in terms of their differences which is a historical problem as old as time. The question is how they are named, by themselves and others.

The book is the outcome of a network called the Dowry Project, established in 1995 at an International Conference on Dowry and Bride Burning at Harvard, with the aim of encouraging , sharing and disseminating research in the areas of dowry, bride burning and son preference in South Asia and its diaspora.

This edited volume attempts to capture the particular and indeed very peculiar characteristics of the public sphere in India. There is a constant juxtaposing of the rational orderliness of the Habermasian public sphere to the seemingly more chaotic, raucous quality of the Indian public sphere. The opening section of the book contains…

R.S. Sharma’s work is marked by a particular and long-term commitment to both his politics and history. The essays in this volume address many themes: from colonial historiography to nationalist utopias; from issues of methodology to the mode of production; from marking transitions to a detailed study of social relations…

Kumkum Chatterje’s The Cultures of History in Early Modern India is an extremely important contribution on a range of themes which include historiography and historical traditions, the relationship between an imperial centre and (its) province, as well as, culture and power. It shows these registers to be concretely interconnected…

Andhra Pradesh History Congress has been doing commendable work in furthering the cause of historical research in that part of the country, taking the most recent advances in the discipline to the researchers and teachers there as well as publishing the rather ambitious series on the Comprehensive History…

Vijai Pillai, the author of this posthu-mously published work, was terminally ill with cancer when he wrote to a friend: ‘Death for me is a great theme, worthy of a greater subject than my pains, and I wish to approach it with my mind and spirit in full flow in open amazement that my life, like any life, ever was, and is now going…