Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Arjan de Haans book is timely and comes at a time when the global financial crisis is pushing more people into unemployment and making governments in the developed and developing worlds slash budgets and shrink the states interventions in the social sectors.The role of social policies in the shaping of wellbeing…

South Asia is the second fastest growing region in the world after East Asia. This growth has reduced poverty rates but they have not fallen fast enough to reduce the total number of the poor. This is despite growth being complemented with various poverty alleviation programmes.

.the special case assumed by the classical theory happen not to be those of the economic society in which we actually live, with the result that its teaching is misleading and disastrous if we attempt to apply it to the facts of experience. Expanding debates on macroeconomics and gender is crucially important given the hegemony of macroeconomic theory informing national and regional policies and its expressed goals to remove poverty and gender inequality.

It is indeed one of the worst ironies of our time that the greater the urgency of the problem of climate change and its devastating consequences, the slower and weaker are the attempts to combat the problem. One can indeed be forgiven for being pessimistic about outcomes of successive meetings aimed at resolving…

In the spring of 1980 there is little praise to be heard about the formulation or conduct of US foreign policy. On the contrary, Americans and non-Americans alike see the US facing the danger of an ‘over all paralysis barely veiled by surface diplomatic activity’.

The past few years have been notable for the rapid and sustained economic growth of Asian economies, India and China and other countries of Southeast Asia. The spectacular growth performance of Asian nations continues unabated even as the advanced industrial economies of the world have grappled with rising…

In recent years community forest management has become a panacea for all forest conservation. It is assumed that community forestry gives people a stake in forest management, and hence induces them to cooperate in and conserve the forests.

Transforming Faith is an exploration of Dr. Farhat Hashmis Islamic school for women, Al Huda International that was established in the 1990s and has slowly turned into something of a social movement. Literally, the name AlHuda translates to a School for Guidance. Armed with a particularly useful interview…

The question of fertility and the prac­tice of family planning among Muslims is the subject of considerable political controversy in India. The book under review makes an important contribution to demographic literature by presenting detailed statistics on Muslims in Kanpur city based on a sample survey of 330 Muslim couples.

While the grand narrative of South Asian freedom from the yoke of colonial rule and partition pays due deference to the tragedy of the loss of millions of lives and the largest human displacement in history in its aftermath, the implications of hundreds of princely states being sacrificed at the altar of the Indian Union is a largely untold tale.

The final chapter of this book opens with perhaps the most persuasive argument for the volume. Journalist Ammu Joseph scans the pages of the Bangalore press on February 16, 2006, and finds the patterns and trends of representation of women in the papers more or less conform to the findings of a major new international study…

Vasanthi Ramans The Warp and the Weft examines the changing contours of community and identity in the city of Banaras through a focus on Muslim handloom weavers employed in the famed sari industry of the city. Using the metaphor of tana bana (warp and weft) to characterize the close intermeshing of relations between…

The book Gender Equality and Womens Empowerment in Pakistan by Rashida Patel provides the reader a comprehensive understanding of the issue of violence that confront women in Pakistan on the basis of her experience as a practicing lawyer and being a member of various womens organizations which deal with womens issues…

The historical studies of Women and Gender in South Asia and the Islamic world have come of age. The gendered nature of cultures of travel has received increasing attention in recent years from imperial and South Asian scholars. These scholars have tried to explore the economic, political, social and cultural lives of Asians…

The current widely shared concern for building an egalitarian and just society in India often prompts scholars to inquire into the prerequisites for achieving this laudable objective. An understanding of the processes of change specific consti­tuents of Indian society have experienced over a period of time can provide useful insights in this context.

The nationalist renditions of ancient Indian history were part of a cultural battle in the context of colonial domination which turned the bodies of women into sites of struggle. A Vedic woman of high status in the ancient past was made to stand for the authentic nation and her declining position in society was explained through largely…

The study of urban history and processes in the early history of the subcontinent has remained much neglected. Teaching a class of fourteen year olds, I realized that the word ‘city’ conjures up a very modern imagery in their mind.

Syed Anwarul Haque Haqqi’s book is a revised and enlarged version of his doctoral dissertation approved by the Aligarh Muslim University under the supervision of the great historian of the time, Professor Muhammad Habib.

The work under review represents several years of serious research and reflection on the life of Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), popularly known as Sri Aurobindo since 1926. Heehs already has to his credit a shorter biography of Aurobindo (1989), a collection of his writings and speeches (2005) and more recently (2006)…

The book edited by Manu Bhagwan brings together seven essays in a series of three interrelated conversations—‘On the Landscapes of the Margins’, ‘On the Dreamscapes of Literary Imaginings’ and ‘On the Heteroscapes of history’—united under the general scheme of what Foucault called heterotopia or the possibility…