Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Studying and analysing disasters, their impact and how these are dealt with by governments, humanitarian agencies and people, is developing as a research area with a multidisciplinary approach. In recent times the University Grants Commission in India and the Division of Disaster Management in the Indian Government have given huge funding for developing studies around this.

The rise of nationalism in the West and the heart-rending images of refugees from the Middle East has brought back immigration as a topic of conversation across the world. Nationalism seems to trump humanitarian considerations in policies towards immigration, particularly towards refugees, whether it is the Rohingy as in Myanmar or the Syrian refugees.

India is an important actor in South Asia and it has been extending its role regionally and globally. However, in spite of participating actively India is not regarded as an ‘Asian Power’. Sandy Gordon’s book juxtaposes the changes which are necessary in the Indian domestic and neighbourhood policies for India to become an ‘Asian Power’. It also provides recommendations and actions which the Indian government should undertake to achieve the goal.

As Fukuyama was visualizing his ‘End of History’, a giant was stirring–awakened by a unique set of reform policies which liberalized the economics but not the politics of governance. The subsequent rise of China has oft been documented by admirers as also its critics. China is today the world’s second largest economy—a GDP of around USD 11 trillion or 15% of world GDP and 12% of world’s trade.

Modern India’s history is counted from 1947, but the making of India’s current foreign policy goes back to 1990 or there abouts. A number of factors, both global and domestic, that crystallized in the late 1980s-early 1990s mark a clear change in course at the time. In India, there was political turmoil, and two short-lived governments (led by PMs V.P. Singh and Chandrashekhar) followed by the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, had left India shaken both economically, and in terms of leadership.

Tabish Khair’s The New Xenophobia is a bold effort to examine an increasingly pressing universal phenomenon, which the world has been ignoring as being part of the past. The importance of this work is that it seeks to place what it terms as ‘New’ in the perspective of what was the old xenophobia within the author’s broad concept that ‘Power refers to any imposition, physical or not, of one consciousness upon another’ approvingly quoting Emmanuel Levinas, the French Lithuanian 20th century philosopher, on the nature of violence beyond physical.

In the long history of Christianity in India spanning millennia, the Christian faith came to be rooted in the multicultural pluralistic tapestry of India, and was articulated and found expression in multiple ways depending on specific contexts. During the course of its journey, Indian Christianity became complex and multilayered and known for its adaptations, collaborations and contestations with the local culture and history.

With Sufism being viewed as a counter narrative to radical Islam, there is a renewe interest in this mystical aspect of Islam, particularly of Sufi traditions in the subcontinent. These three books published recently highlight the cultural, historical and spiritual legacies of important Sufis in the subcontinent. Shaykh Usman Ali Hujwiri is popularly known as Data Ganj Baksh. Beginning with Data Sahib’s arrival in Lahore from Ghazna in the eleventh century, Sufi philosophy began to impact both the intellectual and social life of Muslim communities.

With Sufism being viewed as a counter narrative to radical Islam, there is a renewe interest in this mystical aspect of Islam, particularly of Sufi traditions in the subcontinent. These three books published recently highlight the cultural, historical and spiritual legacies of important Sufis in the subcontinent. Shaykh Usman Ali Hujwiri is popularly known as Data Ganj Baksh. Beginning with Data Sahib’s arrival in Lahore from Ghazna in the eleventh century, Sufi philosophy began to impact both the intellectual and social life of Muslim communities.

With Sufism being viewed as a counter narrative to radical Islam, there is a renewe interest in this mystical aspect of Islam, particularly of Sufi traditions in the subcontinent. These three books published recently highlight the cultural, historical and spiritual legacies of important Sufis in the subcontinent. Shaykh Usman Ali Hujwiri is popularly known as Data Ganj Baksh. Beginning with Data Sahib’s arrival in Lahore from Ghazna in the eleventh century, Sufi philosophy began to impact both the intellectual and social life of Muslim communities.

Hasan Ali Khan, the author of the book under review, teaches at Habib University in Pakistan. Unlike most of the historians, he is an architect by training. Not surprisingly, this professional hybridity of the author has added a new dimension to his research engagement which the learned and inquisitive readers should aspire to explore.

Decolonisation and the Politics of Transition in South Asia consolidates the debate concerning the transfer of power in South Asia, and maps the trajectories of the early postcolonial state in the region. Some of the essays in this volume are old and have stood the test of time. In fact, historians of my generation grew up with them in the last couple of decades.

The book under review, a representative selection of the writings of Sister Nivedita along with a detailed and perceptive. Introduction by its editor, demonstrates Nivedita’s engagement with the idea as also what then posited as the contemporary reality of India.

India’s national movement was special because it possessed social,economic and environmental dimensions in addition to the political goal of Independence. And special among its participants was Joseph Cornelius Kumarappa, born in 1892 into a talented family of Tamil Christians originating, close to India’s southernmost tip, in Palayamkottai.

Just when one thought that studies on colonialism has reached a significant milestone, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s book brings in a timely message that a comprehensive analysis of the colonial state is yet to be put down on paper. In his book The Colonial State: Theory and Practice, Bhattacharya claims that this has always been a subject that has been shoved aside to the scholarly margins and therefore, now, merits greater attention.

The monograph on Peter Peterson (1847–1899) by Namrata Ganneri is a part of a larger project undertaken by The Asiatic Society of Mumbai with the objective of publishing a series of monographs on the Founders and Guardians of the Society.

What makes a historical text ‘untimely’* or interventionist is the appearance of the text itself. In a time when the Indian polity and social imagination mark their presence as Hindu-centric, the liberal-multicultural analogy which nonetheless dominated academia since the colonial period falls short in explaining such communal assertion of the state and its people.

Today we stand at a juncture in our evolution as a state and society wherein as inheritors of a complex, yet particular cultural relationship with our past, the way we define the ‘idea’ of ‘ancient India’ is of utmost importance. Though written in two different temporal contexts, the title of Upinder Singh’s collection of essays The Idea of Ancient India resonates with a similar title The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani.