Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

India’s North East region has offered many paradoxes for observers over the years, thus emerging as a major field of research.

Journalists have been the first off the block in coming out with books on the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Close on the heels of Rajdeep Sardesai’s 2014: The Election That Changed India comes a book by another senior journalist, Harish Khare, titled How Modi Won It: Notes from the 2014 Election.

As an individual greatly enthused by the life and labours of Swami Vivekananda, this is a book that I have eagerly awaited and indeed, it is doubly rewarding that I should now also be among its reviewers.

The 150th year of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth in 2011 generated a lot of renewed interest in the writer’s works and the fruit of that is discernible in various new volumes available in the market.

A political science professor at the University of Hyderabad, Vasanthi Srinivasan is clearly also at home in other disciplines such as philosophy, religion and history.

What is poetry? Is it as Wordsworth says a spontaneous overflow of emotions recollected in tranquil­ity? If so, is it possible for language to reflect these emotions? Which leads us to the more troubling question as to what language is.

Banerjee, a bestselling author, came out with her first book in the year 2011. The Mumbai based author has also doubled up as a screenplay writer for Bollywood, having written the script for Hate Story 2, and for another yet-to-released film.

I have always admired Ruth Vanita’s work on account of its articulate lucidity. Re­viewing her translation of short stories by Mannu Bhandari, Rajee Seth and Archana Varma from Hindi to English promised to be an exciting possibility.

Daruwalla has written an entire vol­ume of stories on islands. The sto­ries extend to looking at people as islands spread across this world. The first story Island Sermon involves a nameless nar­rator who is visiting India to see a hermit and has certain fixed notions about what constitutes a good story. The swami reveals self-destructive tendencies and suffers from dementia. Further into the story, the inner ramblings of the mind are revealed—‘I have been obsessed with islands, their solitary ex­istence, the way they cope with themselves.

Indian fiction in English by women, vi­sualized as Jasmine on a String by Mar­garet Paul Joseph includes writing not just by women who may or may not have lived in India but also those who may not be Indian by birth too.

You know that a discipline has come of age when academics and practitioners talk the same talk. They discuss ap­proaches and strategies to and of their com­mon area of interest, and find that they are actually on the same page and not at the extreme ends of the spectrum.

The book under review is an anthol¬ogy of short stories put together by Indian novelist and publisher, David Davidar. The collection is inimitable with thirty-nine short stories by literary giants like Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand, R.K. Narayan, Saadat Hasan Manto, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer…

Natwar Singh’s book is like the man himself—to the point, sparse and understated. It covers mostly his public life and carefully spans over the pri¬vate in measured words. If there are expecta¬tions that he will ‘spill the beans’ and come out with juicy details over private life happenings…

Malavika Karlekar has produced an¬other work for the ‘Common Reader’, as Virginia Woolf called the general reader, who would have special¬ized or lay interests in a multivocal world. Colonialism has been read for the last hun¬dred years from many vantage positions. What Karlekar attempts to do is to compress her erudition, while dispensing with foot¬notes…

As a narrative which relies on photo­graphs to communicate, The Camera as Witness is a remarkable book of his­tory. Possibly one of the first academic his­tory writings of its kind on North East In­dia, it traces the history of Mizoram from the colonial to the contemporary times.

The book is a long awaited one on three counts. One is that it fills a gap in South Asian strategic affairs litera­ture and on that score will be valued by stu­dents and initiates among the attentive pub­lic.

Jürgen Habermas has been a sine qua non social theorist of contemporary times. Habermasian political theory is one of the critical/crucial defences of moder­nity in the era of absolute subjectivism and sheer positivism. Habermas defies time and space. His ‘universal’ is eternal and location free.

The conversation around Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal work A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: To­ward a History of the Vanishing Present refuses to die down.

Traversing Bihar portrays Bihar’s inter­nal contradictions and struggles and is an attempt to interpret some of the paradoxes existent in contemporary Bihar.

Ideas and practices associated with India’s living document, the Constitution of In­dia have remained central to the politi­cal imagination and assessment of democ­racy in contemporary India. Recent writings on ideas, institutions and processes in In­dian politics have attempted to foreground the language of democracy in deliberations involved in the making of India’s Constitu­tion.