Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

International Relations (IR) theory has been a relative latecomer to South Asia. Until a few years ago, much of the IR literature in South Asia—and indeed on South Asia—had been unabashedly untheoretical. But the last decade has seen a flowering of very deliberately theoretical work in South Asian IR…

Good books often get their timing wrong. In the current context in India, where morality and ethics are both at a discount, this book is both timely and excellent. It comprises a collection of papers, of somewhat uneven quality, presented at a workshop in 2007 in Vancouver on South Asian ethical practices.

There is a great diversity in the in­equality of social, cultural, political, demographic and economic facets of the vast structure of Indian society. Mani­festations of many of the various indivi­ous modes of inequality, innate in this society, often make us appear to be a queerly ‘hierarchical breed’ of people.

India has completed nearly two ‘successful’ decades of economic liberalization aimed at unrestricted movement of goods, services and investments across economies.

First published in 1970, the book has been revised and updated to cover deve­lopments up to the first year of the Janata government to serve as a textbook for studying the determinants, institu­tions, and processes involved in foreign policy making.

International migration is not a new phenomenon for the globetrotting Indians who today constitute more than twenty-five millions living either permanently or temporarily in different countries around the world.

The articles in this book are written by various authors who deal with nume­rous aspects of the Government National Adult Education Programme of 1978. The book reads as though a group of people are discussing the means of trans­porting a doctor, some suggest that the doctor should be brought by road or by air and yet others are talking of the financial implications.

In the classical Marshallian framework, citizenship was visualized in terms of a contradictory relation to capitalism. The three components of citizenship, under the scheme Marshall espoused, referring to civil, political and social, were coterminous with the expansion of the right to free speech, right to participation and economic welfare.

There is a common belief that books published by government departments are not worthy of serious evaluation because of the lackadaisical treatment they generally receive from their publi­shers. But exceptions are there and this book under review happens to be one.

More so than most other Indian states, Gujarat appears enigmatic to many observers. Its most famous son is Mohandas Gandhi, but he is also a uniquely despised figure in much of middle class Gujarati society at home and abroad.

When Jan Breman’s book was first published in 1974, Rural Sociology and Anthropology was going through an in­trospection: community development and Panchayat Raj had failed to bring about the peaceful revolution which would end .­inequality and’ poverty.

Absolute unity will also mean a self-cancellation of love for it needs an other for it to live (p. 248)
Developing an idea of self-division for self-expansion in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Pradip Kumar Datta sums up in this tantalizing and aphoristic formulation, the central problematic of identity.

An understanding of the period from 1830 when Raja Rammohan Roy took first faltering steps on the road to what later came to be known as the Indian Renaissance, to 1947, the year which became the culmination point for various socio-political processes, is essential for a correct appraisal of our present predica­ment.

If it takes breadth of imagination and a grasp of geography to grapple with the enormity of the scale and consequences of the British Empire, the authors of The British Empire and the Natural World do it for their readers in one extended 91-word sentence. I reproduce here part of it: ‘If totalled as a single bloc from territories…

Anis Kidwai belonged to the illustrious Kidwai family of Barabanki family that has made more than a signal contribution to the making of India, not only in politics and governance but in diverse fields of creative endeavour.

It is always interesting to read a real story, the real story—and this is one that is about the Mutiny/ the First War of Independence/ the Great Uprising of 1857. But what earns the right to be called the real story, the truth? The answer now is that the truth is what is perceived by ordinary people, what they experience and record for us.

Mushirul Hasan is one of the most prolific historians specializing in the study of ‘modern Indian history’. His corpus of work is vast and consists of several monographs.

The study of an ideologized and activist organiation like the Majlis-i-Ahrar-i-Islam(MAI) is actually a journey through several inter-related domains including political Islam, South Asian Muslim identity politics,

Nancy Gardner Cassels’s book as the title suggests is a scholarly account of a range of East India Company legislation across various fields, from Sati to Emigrant labour, and from Meriah Sacrifice to the Pilgrim tax.

Colonial land management forms as such did not usher in a new mode of production or fundamental changes in India’s Socio-economic structures. Nor was our differentiated peasant society solely a colonial phenomenon.