Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of Muslims live outside the Middle East, the words Arab and Muslim are used synonymously and the Arab world continues to remain the ‘center’ of the Muslim world. It takes bomb blasts for the world to sit up and notice that something is happening in the ‘Islamic periphery’ as well…

Fakirs with their puppet shows exhibit military conflicts which end with the flight of the English. Songs resound the praises of our enemies and reports are industriously spread to rouse thenative troops and inferior classes of inhabitants in action . . . The very salt we manufacture is said to be mixed with the blood of cows or swine, Hindus and the Musulmans’…

R.C. Dutt, the first ‘condenser’ of the Mahabharata’s one lakh slokas, chose to spare the Western reader the ‘unending morass’ and ‘Monstrous chaos’ of epi­sodical matter by leaving out whatever he felt to be superincumbent.

Close to 300 insurgency-related deaths were reported from Balochistan in 2009, which is a marginal improvement over the previous year’s toll of 350. Such ‘statistics’ notwithstanding, the Baloch insurrection remains a critical problem for the nation building exercise in Pakistan. Pakistan’s attempt to enter into a process of dialogue…

Alyssa Ayres’s 217-page book is a mas-terful exposition of the role that language has played in ‘engineering’ the ‘idea of (modern) Pakistan.’ Divided into ten chapters, Ayres fleshes out Pakistan’s experience with the Urdu language, used by the state as a means to justify the ends of nationalism and national unity…

The partition of India is once again big news. Last year the BJP stalwart, Jaswant Singh in Jinnah: India-Pakistan-Independence, New Delhi: Rupa and co.), was summarily expelled from the party for daring to suggest that it was the intransigence of leaders like Nehru and Patel that compelled Jinnah to go down the road of a separate homeland of Pakistan for Muslims of India.

This last book by Papiya Ghosh, released posthumously almost three years after her tragic death in 2006 is a work of great acumeninvolving exhaustive research with arguments and findings based on a plethora of sources. The valuable manuscript was almost lost but was retrieved from the stolen computer held in police custody…

About a year ago as an Honorary Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library I had chosen to work on Nehru—first from 1930–1947 when Nehru was preparing himself for taking India to an exciting future; second, 1947–1964 when Nehru did become the steward of India’s development, policy, direction and journey.

This is the third volume in a series of books about the author and his family. Daddyji, dealt with the paternal side of his ancestry while Mamaji deals with the maternal side. His own life has been por­trayed in Face to Face.

The Difficulty of Being Good is as wonderful a title for a book as it is a philosophical statement that provides the parameter for a lifetime’s quest. The declaration, for it is such, boldly encapsulates theproblem that has compelled humankind for centuries. For me, it circumscribes the central problem of being, it is the very definition of the human condition.

Like manna from the skies or the well-timed appearance of an oasis to a thirsty wanderer in the desert comes this publication, heralding a critical moment in the study of Indian mythology.

The first millennium bc saw the develop ment of the brahmanical traditions of ritual adherence to varnashrama-dharma and the ideology of renunciation. From about 500 bc there was a growth of sectarian worship of particular deities which resulted in devotional worship. Performing puja is a way of expression of love or devotion (bhakti) to a…

This collection of essays contains nine articles on different aspects of the archaeology and ancient history of the Indian subcontinent. Written by young scholars, they provide an indicator to the direction which Indian historiography, particularly in relation to the earlier periods, is taking in the twenty-first century.

Riven by Lust is a deceptively slim volume: the main text is a little over 200 pages. However, it encapsulates scholarship that is breathtaking in both its depth and range.

Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, who passed away recently, is to me more than a brilliant academic and critic.R.K. Narayan had analysed his own strengths: ‘I have roots in family and religion.’ Meenakshi was probably no believer; but I had sensed all along that she had roots in family and Indian culture…

Farrukh Dhondy’s delightful collection of linked short stories, Poona Company, was initially published in 1980 and has been reissued in the Harper Perennial Modern Classics series. Largely centered around a cast of characters that hangs around Sarbatwalla Chowk in Poona in the 1950s, the book takes us back…

One of Rabindranath Tagore’s widely discussed novels, Gora, is set in Kolkata some three decades prior to the date of its publication, 1904, and narrates the interactions, intimacies, incompatibilities and introspections within a community of Hindu and Brahmo educated elite of that period…

What is the best way to write a biography of a reticent, reclusive, shy man? You get the others, more willing to speak, to speak. And in this, Kamini Mathai, the author has excelled.

Here then is a short description of Telugu cinema: it is a cinema in the Telugu language made with borrowed plots, for ten crore speakers of the language, by an industry that makes politicians because it cannot make profits.’ This is how Srinivas concludes his book on the megastar Chiranjeevi. It is a ‘conclusion’ that sums…

The road much travelled by women who lived in the earlier part of the twentieth century was a road paved with an earnest search for meanings, an eager attempt to grasp the new worlds that education and independence opened up for them in its entirety and the consistent attempt to bridge the gap dividing…