Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Hindi cinema, or if one may, Bollywood, is such a fascinating subject of study that almost any lens through which you might choose to look at it offers myriad possibilities of providing fresh perspectives on history, culture, society, politics, nationhood, gender etc. The precondition of course is that the exercise should…

In his autobiography Nirad Chaudhuri describes how on his wedding night he asked his young bride Amiya if she had heard of Beethoven. To his relief she had indeed heard of the composer and even spelt out the name correctly. This anecdote may not seem amusing any longeranxious Bengali babus…

There are not many Indian authors who had the courage and confidence to write about the United States of America despite the fact that many young and not-so-young men, and young and no-so-young women in post-Independent Indiaespecially from the 1950s and 1960s onwardshave literally grown up loving American popular fiction, popular music and popular cinema (Hollywood).

Divided into four sections, each one with an introduction, this book is with five essays on the renaissance in Europe, four on the Indian subcontinent, and two each on eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe and ‘Art and Philosophy’, the scope of this book is quite vast even if it is largely Eurocentric…

Reviewing Shanta Acharyas previous collection of poetry, Shringara (2006), I had called it a sheaf of grief, an elegiac volume about the loss of loved ones, through which a rawness of the pain still throbbed. In the present volume, her fifth collection, we see her emerging out of that phase with the help of those precious resources…

Following the publication of her ambitious doctoral book The Hindi Public Sphere in 2002, Francesca Orsini was promptly acknowledged as one of the more knowledgeable and capable Hindi scholars teaching in the West and writing in English. (A fair proportion of them happen to be, like Orsini…

When a man has spent as long as Jamsheed Marker did at the highest levels of diplomacyhe was Ambassador of Pakistan in ten countries with another nine concurrent accreditationsthe memoirs are bound to be of considerable interest. The author brings much erudition and a felicitous writing skill to the task aided…

At a time when India is seen, rightly or wrongly, as intensely engaged in an effort to get closer and closer to the United States, it is useful to read this book by the wellknown journalist and author Kalyani Shankar. The principal theme is how Indira Gandhi was crafty enough to outwit Richard Nixon, himself a superb practitioner…

This is another book on Keynes and still not another book. It offers fascinating insights by a Keynes buff. This book has several thoughtful pieces on what Keynes wrote, the works on Keynes and also aspects of Keynes’s work that have not been highlighted. It relooks at Keynes’s contribution to different…

This has been a tumultuous decade for the academic study of India. In his Offence: The Hindu Case, Salil Tripathi provides a timely overview of the growing censorship and harassment that scholars working on India have faced. Not a pretty sight to behold: people have felt the need to ban books and terrorize authors…

This earnest and thoughtful volume is invaluable, not least because it brought back to the present reviewer the presence of Professor K.J. Shah, the first philosopher who connected emerging approaches to purushartha, including his own, to Gandhijis thought and praxis. Parel himself discusses in the introduction K.J. Shahs work on Gandhi.

Apart from the fact that the major river systems in our countryIndus, Ganges and Brahmaputratraverse our neighbouring countries, almost all perennial rivers of India flow through more than one state. The disputes on account of the international rivers are understandable; however, conflicts around sharing…

The slight sarcasm added in the subtitle to Environmental History,as if nature existed, triggers questions for the reader of this volume. Why as if? Are we to be taken en route through a landscape of perceptions and constructions, or are we brought to see the raw realities behind benign conservation regimes?…

Since the inception of the discipline, there has been a close link between archaeology and the state. This was the case since the early decades of the nineteenth century when archaeology was both an imperial project and a military endeavour, often an offshoot of colonial policies and which included their relationships…

This book ventures into previously nexplored areas of South Asian history, indicating the exciting possibilities of research in social and economic history. Consumption in South Asia begins with the observation that The history of consumption is not an identifiable sub-field among South Asianists, nor are there any individual historians…

From the desert state of Arizona in the U.S., a researcher was drawn to the printed word emerging from this small region called Goa. Donna J. Young tells Frederick Noronha what made her look at the literature of this distant land, and why she found Goan writing (primarily in English, which she studied) to be interesting…

Zadie Smith in her collection, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays has a piece where she talks of the craft of writing.In ‘The Crafty Feeling’, Smith says that it is when the writer reaches a point called the ‘middle’ that the novel and the experience of writing it begin to totally consume her. She has to finish writing it…

Siddharth Dhanavant Shanghvi’s novel has all the ingredients of a classic potboiler: love, lust, power, violence, murder, suspense, scandals and courtroom drama.Yet it does not quite succeed, either as a gripping narrative or as an intense scrutiny of modern social trends.Inspired by the Jessica Lall murder case and liberally strewn with episodes that recall recent sensational news stories, the book nevertheless affirms its status as fiction…

Anthologies serve as signposts in the general trajectories of literary discourse, assimilating changing aesthetic tastes and exerting a vital influence on the future course of literary genres. This anthology of Indian woman poets commissioned as part of the Sahitya Akademi’s effort to showcase Indian English women writers…

We have here a bunch of old letters (with apologies to Jawaharlal Nehru, who gave this title to his collection) that reveal the author’s select correspondence with the famous, like Governor-Generals Mountbatten and Rajagopalachari; Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai and Rajiv Gandhi; savants E.M. and Morgan Forster, M.F. Husain, R.K. Narayan, Nadine Gordimer, Han Suyin, K.K…