Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

China is arguably India’s most important bilateral relationship and its foremost foreign and security policy challenge. India-China ties are complex and fraught. Kanti Bajpai presents these in an accessible way. His analysis, based on years of research and thinking, is refined and expressed lucidly. The conclusions he draws are stark and maybe disagreeable…

Pan-Asianism is a general term used to describe a wide range of ideas and movements that called for the solidarity of Asian peoples to counter western influences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The concept of Pan-Asianism first emerged in Japan sometime in the late 19th century. The movement gained wider acceptance following…

Those who have read Shivshankar Menon’s first book, Choices, would be familiar with his sharp analytical skills and ability to cut through a mass of disparate detail to focus on underlying patterns that tell a coherent story. Choices pegged its learnings from a set of specific events in which he himself was involved as a practitioner…

Arhyming story meant as a ‘diverse children’s book’, Tuck-a-Tuck Dragon is supposed to be about ‘overcoming childhood fears’, through the tale of a ‘boring tan dragon who wins the respect of his colourful peers when he faces his fears and realizes his special gift’…

Ten minutes later, the Marker apartment was teeming with masked men and women, all reeking of hand sanitizer and nervous energy.Any time else, a murder scene crowded with masked people, air tinted with sanitizer smell and nervous energy, and a cordoned off building in the middle of a lockdown…

Leopard Diaries: The Rosette in India is a 360o view of the life of one of the four big cats of India’s wildlife seen through the eyes of conservation biologist Dr Sanjay Gubbi. Passionate about his pet subject, Panthera pardus or the leopard, the book is written in an autobiographical style and captures a decade of untiring work that involved a tedious amount of field activity with all the trappings of modern technology-driven analysis. ..

Abiochemist and a health journalist come together to write about what happens when biology and history come together—the field of archaeogenetics opens up and lets the human story unfold in exciting new ways. In fact, the authors state that genetics must become an essential element of historical writing…

Niall Ferguson has a penchant for writing sweeping histories. Over the years, Ferguson has managed to cast his spell over a wide audience through what can broadly be called as ‘popular history’. From empires and money to global leadership, Ferguson has enchanted his audience by introducing them to newer albeit obscure topics…

The author of this edited volume, Sanjaya Baru correctly highlights uncertainty as the key problem caused by COVID-19. But the eminent economists who have contributed to this volume have largely ignored it. Most of them have analysed the situation as it existed sometime in the later part of 2020…

Despite the post-positivist and postmodern epistemic shifts that have blurred the boundary between traditional notions of objectivity and subjectivity, it wouldn’t be erroneous to proclaim that the most plausible historical evaluations have emerged in retrospect. The temporality of our subjectivity plays…

Adetailed and well laid/mapped trajectory of the passage of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, in India, this book can be read in three parts through clustering the five detailed chapters apart from the introduction and the conclusion: the role of ideas and multi-layered process of institutional change…

The book by Debal K SinghaRoy provides an exquisite illustration of the situational reconstruction of new, fluid and layered identities in collective mobilizations, along the axis of caste, class, tribe, nationality, ethnicity, citizenship and social movements, resulting from the unprecedented social transformation caused by the spread…

In the existing scenario whereby the literature on urban life in India has almost reduced urban neighbourhoods to abstract monolithic entities embodying human settlements, and the ecology thereof, to the utter neglect of the embeddedness of these settlements in different communitarian identities and categorical values…

There is a common critical consensus that the 1947 Partition of South Asia correspondingly affected two regions in particular—Punjab and Bengal. However, the recent scholarship on the 1947 Partition[1] explicates that the waves of refugee migration and the ensuing rehabilitation of individuals and families have had an enduring impact on other regions in India…

This work, an important contribution to the gendered history of colonial Indian labour migration, offers a fresh perspective on coolie women’s everyday experiences and their contribution as producers and reproducers of labour to the plantation economy of Federated Malaya States (FMS) in British Malaya…

Any story of India’s culinary culture begins with an enquiry into its ostensible Indianness. The first few fundamental questions often have to do with the origin of staple vegetables and spices such as tomatoes and chillies. That both were introduced into the subcontinent’s basic diet, with the colonial contact and that too only recently…

Maharashtra is the second largest State in India in terms of the number of Lok Sabha seats. Amongst the top five States sending the largest contingent of parliament members, Maharashtra was the only State wherein the Congress was able to retain power for significant years in the post-1989 phase of Indian politics…

Aprolific writer, Nayanjot Lahiri’s new book is a foray into the post-Independence trajectory of Indian archaeology. The method of enquiry involves tracing the life of MN Deshpande, who served as Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (henceforth ASI) from 1972-1978…

As an opening sentence, it is perhaps the best yet. A blind king, Dhritirashtra, asks his charioteer, Sanjaya, what his sons and the sons of Pandu, both of whom were wanting to fight, did on the battlefield?The suspense-filled question, however, occurs in the middle of the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata.  Sanjaya’s  account has come to be known as ‘The Book’ sacred…

Let me say this at the very outset. Kiran Doshi is a dear friend of 48 years and he is a reviewer’s nightmare. Once he wrote a novel in verse. I retaliated by writing the review in verse. Using that logic, I should write this review in what they call a ‘briefs’ form. But I am not going to let him get away that easily…