Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

In the public domain, public knowledge of Orissa (now happily renamed Odisha) seldom goes beyond Biju / J.B. / Navin Patnaik, Tata/ POSCO projects, starvation deaths in Kalahandi, and now, the menace of Maoist violence on the Andhra-Orissa border. More polite conversation might veer around Oriya bureaucrats…

The Trauma and the Triumph is the second volume of a collection of writings and documents on the partition of India of 1947 with a special emphasis on Eastern India and on gender. The first volume had come out in 2003 and this second part continues the discussion ‘focusing more fully on both East Bengal and West Bengal…

The present volume is one among a number of publications that have accompanied well-curated exhibitions based on the extensive holdings of the Alkazi Collection of Photography in New Delhi, London and New York.While editor John Falconer’s detailed introduction to James Waterhouse’s life and work in India…

The ten essays reprinted in this volume are intended to summarize the ‘most important information’ (p. ix) uncovered by S.P. Verma’s prolific research of many years on Mughal painting. They were originally published during the period from 1977 to 2003, deal with a mix of subjects including studies of artists, manuscripts and genres…

An acknowledged master of the genre of travel writing, William Dalrymple once again brilliantly manages to hold the reader’s undivided attention with his most recent book, Nine Lives. In a skilfully restrained register, he contextualizes the diverse religious traditions of India and Pakistan within the framework of social changes…

The turtle dove first appeared in an old English folk song that tells longingly of lost love. O yonder doth sit that little turtle dove, He doth sit on yonder high tree, A-making a moan for the loss of his love,
As I will do for thee, my dear,
As I will do for thee…

Today the best of students and the best of parents have shifted their academic allegiance from ‘social/humane’ to ‘professional’ education under the diktat of market imperatives. The professional pragmatics, powered by information, technological and market superhighways, have forever changed the pedagogical contours…

Diplomats, statesmen, journalists, writers, and poets—women have been at the forefront in almost every field in Pakistan. But if that made you think that this is due to the liberal society of Pakistan which perhaps allows equal opportunities to women, then you got it all wrong. On the contrary, the social and political milieu of Pakistan…

While the rest of the country moans about the lack of new playwrights, the one state that seems to happily buck the trend is Maharashtra. The Marathi language seems to have a special affinity with playwrights. At any given time, there are at leastfour or five talented playwrights producing new plays…

Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid published by Tulika Books is a major event in interdisciplinary scholarship on cinema and academy oriented independent publishing, both of which have gained considerable foothold in India in the last two decades.

Religious institutions are governed and managed by authorities who are mortal yet professing deep spiritual commitment to the dogmas of their faith. The Catholic Church and its institutions are no exception. As such, they are expected to set high moral standards and are looked up to for guidance on a range…

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.