Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Tarun Das transports the reader on a 30-year twin journey: he narrates the opening up of India, from its hesitant and wayward path before P.V. Narasimha Rao became Prime Minister in 1991, gaining traction after the latter launched economic reforms; that story is juxtaposed with a detailed account of the transformation of an obscure engineering industry association into what became for a time India’s most powerful non-state economic actor.

This is not just a tribute, as suggested in the title, it is a ‘labour of love’ undertaken at speed by a former admiring junior colleague and Venkat’s one sonin-law, and motivated, as the editors elaborate in an introductory note, by the conviction that the hero of the volume was such a unique person that he should be remembered forever.

As David Thelen said the main ‘challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present.’ This recovery and introduction is being done by historical writing, which is one variety of written expression that seeks to inform and persuade the reader through the use of evidence organized around a central thesis or argument. Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History recounts the modern history of Sri Lanka, starting from colonial times to the present, a story of about two centuries.

This is a splendid book on cultural interactions across Eurasia from approximately the 3rd-10th centuries CE. In keeping with its title, the book itself crosses many boundaries—disciplinary, national and conceptual—to provide us with an awe-inspiring picture of the ‘different forms of transmissions, transgressions, hybridizations, dialectic encounters,

This book will generate very different responses from its readers. Indian academics may contest its premises and conclusions, but will have to grapple with a thesis so novel, which argues that Indian diplomacy flows from the Mahabharata, emerging from the progressively narrower and corroded conduits of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru…

A book with so formidable a scope as Rahul Govind’s The Infinite Double: Persons/Things/Empire/Economy cannot be limited to a critique. And if it’s salutary ethical tonality doesn’t determine its explicit intellectual object while also not being a mere critique of imperialism, then what sort of a book is it?

This is the latest offering of the author, who is the John Hawkes Professor of English and Humanities at Brown University, and the founding co-editor of the journal Post-Colonial Studies. Postcolonial studies represent an academic branch of studies which debunk and challenge western interpretations of thought.

This is a well-written book and goes into some considerable detail on each of the major battles of the 1962 conflict between India and China in both the Eastern and Western Sectors. The narrative is riveting and supported by maps particularly of battles in the Eastern Sector as well as reproductions of photographs of many important personalities and events associated with the conflict culled from multiple sources.

As redundant as publishing the screenplay for the latest film set in JK Rowling’s mersmerizing wizarding world is, the power of marketing is equally magical, such that every gullible fan has bought, ordered or stolen a copy of the screenplay of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them.

The first sighting of the High Himalayas is invariably an occasion of wonderment, often an epiphany. Himalaya tells us how Wolfgang Buscher found himself shouting with delight as the peaks unexpectedly revealed themselves;

The 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore in May 2011 generated so much of renewed interest in the writer and his work that every other day we now see the proliferation of Tagoreana in all possible literary and cultural forms.

The 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore in May 2011 generated so much of renewed interest in the writer and his work that every other day we now see the proliferation of Tagoreana in all possible literary and cultural forms.

The 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore in May 2011 generated so much of renewed interest in the writer and his work that every other day we now see the proliferation of Tagoreana in all possible literary and cultural forms.

The 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore in May 2011 generated so much of renewed interest in the writer and his work that every other day we now see the proliferation of Tagoreana in all possible literary and cultural forms.

The 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore in May 2011 generated so much of renewed interest in the writer and his work that every other day we now see the proliferation of Tagoreana in all possible literary and cultural forms.

The 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore in May 2011 generated so much of renewed interest in the writer and his work that every other day we now see the proliferation of Tagoreana in all possible literary and cultural forms.

The 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore in May 2011 generated so much of renewed interest in the writer and his work that every other day we now see the proliferation of Tagoreana in all possible literary and cultural forms.

The legendary Gandhian Narayan Desai died on December 24, 2015 at the age of ninety. He was the last of the ‘true’ Gandhians who lived his life practising and preaching Gandhi’s philosophy. His father Mahadev Desai was Gandhi’s close associate and also his personal secretary; hence, Narayan Desai’s upbringing had been under the tutelage of Gandhi.

The 1920s has been noted as an exciting decade for scholars tracking the histories of modern sound. Jonathan Sterne has shown how sound reproduction technologies amplified as well as grew out of the ‘maelstrom’ of modern life that was marked by the rise of industrial capitalism, massive population shifts and the rise of mass media.

One thing is apparent; the book, Mohammad Rafi: God’s Own Voice has been written by two earnest fans and ferocious defenders of the renowned playback singer Mohammad Rafi (1924–80).