Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

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…

Sikeena Karmali’s ‘Chahar Bagh: The Mulberry Courtesan’ is the longest in this collection of twenty-two stories. Like Tabish Khair’s‘Night of 16th January, 1955,’ Uzma Aslam Khan’s ‘From Trespassing’ and Mohsin Hamid’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist,’ it is an extract out of a novel, although this one was awaiting…

Tlism-i-Hoshruba, an epic fantasy, a part in the long series of Hamza dastans, was in many ways a watershed in the popular Urdu literature of its time and continues to generate academic and popular interest till date. In that it compares with Greek myths or Homer’s epics. In India, Tilism-e-Hoshruba is available in two versions…

Editing a substantial collection of short stories is a daunting task; it becomes especially so when the editor also doubles up as the trans-lator—that too of not one or two stories in the collection but all 22 of them. That Amina Azfar is a prolific translator is apparent from a quick look at the fly leaf of her new book…

This book grew out of a seminar organized in March 2008 by the India Theatre Forum, which had the idea of bringing together alarge group of theatre persons, academics, activists, thinkers and critics, and permitting them over three days to talk about issues relevant to India’s theatre today. The book is not a record of what was said…

Lakshmi Subramanyam’s book, Modern Indian Drama:Issues and In-terventions is a welcome endeavour given the lack of substantial theoretical work on postcolonial Indian drama. So does Subramanyam’s book break new ground in undertanding drama, theater and performance studies in India? Perhaps a closer look at the book could provide answers…