It is unsurprising that China, its development and its intentions, continues to hold the interest of academics around the world. As the world’s second largest economy, speculated to displace the United States from its current number one position in the coming decade, the role China plays in international affairs today and how it can be expected to behave in the future are issues that merit meditation…
The Tibetan movement has witnessed some significant events in recent years. Foremost among these is the 2008 protests in not just the Tibet Autonomous Region but in four other provinces in China with Tibetan populations…
Twenty years after the birth of Bangladesh, the three protagonist nations involved in this birth-Bangladesh, Pakistan and India have their own narratives on the event. Bangladesh has a war crimes tribunal (International Crimes Tribunal), Pakistan is reconciled to its break up but still sore with India and India remains triumphal about its own just war…
Amongst the numerous armed groups operating within India and many outside India’s borders targeting India, the most potent perhaps is the Lashkar-e-Taayyeba or the LeT. It is also the most ‘visible manifestation’ of the al-Qaida in India…
‘We were told that Muslims in Kashmir are not allowed to practice their religion and Islam is in danger. This is what moved me to come here and fight Indian troops’, said 17-year-old Lashkar activist Mohammad Abdullah nervously in police custody in August 2002…
Rumour-mongering is a national pastime in Pakistan. This habit is perpetuated by the situation of extreme volatility, uncertainty and instability which has plagued Pakistan for the last three decades. Building on the late Benazir Bhutto’s statement that there is always…
Riaz Mohammad Khan’s book Afghanistan and Pakistan adds to the numerous books already available on the shelves on the linked Afghanistan-Pakistan situation. The Taliban-takeover of Afghanistan, the 9/11 terror attack that provoked U.S. military intervention leading to Taliban’s ouster…
Before you get too comfortable with a single view of Pakistan as a Talibanized state, here are two new publications that offer some new and previously less discussed dimensions of the state. The first one by Saadia Toor examines the progressive movement in Pakistan…
Before you get too comfortable with a single view of Pakistan as a Talibanized state, here are two new publications that offer some new and previously less discussed dimensions of the state. The first one by Saadia Toor examines the progressive movement in Pakistan…
The concept of deterrence is as old as the history of conflict. The earliest caveman raised his club menacingly to deter his attacker. The medieval knight clad in full armour, bearing an array of personal weapons also served as a deterrent force…
The Foreword to the volume by George Anderson, President of the Forum of Federations, informs us that at the end of the Second World War there were only four functioning federations, namely, the United States, Canada, Australia and Switzerland; today, the world has about thirty, and many more are on the path of becoming so…
Over a decade ago, political theorist Partha Chatterjee embarked on what was a novel journey in the history of political thought in India and, perhaps in the postcolonial, non-western world. Bringing together the results of decades of his own intellectual engagement with Indian politics and the question of subalternity…
2012
Thomas Bernhard was one of the most significant voices in twentieth century Austro-German literature, and one of the most striking writers in the modernist tradition. Yet he remains little known to the outside world, partly because his long, allusive, fevered sentences are tough to translate…
Thomas Trautamnn, in his pioneering work, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (2006) demonstrated that the astounding ling-uistic discovery of familial relations between languages-the formulation of the Indo-Euro-pean and Dravidian families of languages -was an outcome of the interaction between western orientalists and indigenous Indian scholarship…
This is a fascinating memoir and it is indeed commendable that Sikata Banerjee has chosen to translate this text which, until now, was only available to the Bengali reading public.Saraladebi Chaudhu-rani, the niece of Rabindranath Tagore,…
ANITA Desai’s latest novel Fire on the Mountain is a distinct let-down. It has many of the qualities that marked her first book, Cry, the Peacock; spareness, toughness and fine descriptive writing. But while Cry, the Peacock came off, Fire on the Mountain does not; perhaps because, trying the same trick once too often, Anita Desai achieves sensationalism instead of shock…
The latest offering from the indefatigable Joep Bor and his learned colleagues, this modestly titled volume should really have been called Companion to Hindustani Music. There are 25 essays cove-ring eight centuries from the thirteenth to the twentieth…
In 1988, I had just been appointed the Chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, and had finished chairing the first meeting of my Governing Council, when I was approached by a frail figure, grey-haired and bearded, clad, if I remember correctly, in saffron…
The recent exhibitions in Delhi and Mumbai of the works of painters Amrit and Rabindra, popularly known as the Singh Twins, drew in many accolades especially for ‘taking Indian miniatures to a completely new level’ because of their ‘reflec-tions on contemporary life…
The stories included in this Anthology of Modem Bengali Short Stories, selected and translated by Enakshi Chatterjee, range from ‘The Music Room’ by Tara Shankar Banerjee, published in 1934, to Kabita Sinha’s ‘The Strange Island’ and Baren Gangopadhyay’s ‘The Hand’, both published in 1966…