Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

This anthology, Makers of Modern India, edited and introduced by Ramchandra Guha includes selected writings and speeches of the nineteen ‘thinker-activists’ of the past two centuries of Indian history. In October, 2005, Guha had reviewed Amartya Sen’s Argumentative Indian for the EPW.

The Satpanth Ismaili Muslims or Khoja Ismailis in India and Pakistan have a remarkable tradition of religious poetry called Ginans which they have sung for several centuries in daily rituals.

Editors Daniela Berti and Gilles Tarabout explore the concept of territory as a social construct rather than a purely jurisdictional unit of political control. Borrowing from geographer Bonnemaison and acknowledging that the concept of ‘territory’ itself remains largely unexplored in the social sciences, they pursue territoriality more…

Ritual Matters is an anthology of essays visualized as a contribution to ritual studies. These presentations were part of two sets of conferences held in 2006. Almost inevitably, some of the papers are more interesting than others, but before turning to the specifics it may be worth outlining some of the issues raised by the editors in their introduction…

At the time of writing this book review, the scent, or rather, the powerful odour of the Tunisian ‘jasmine revolution’ wafts through the Arab world smiting a country here and there while charging congeries of people with revolutionary fervour. It would be interesting to speculate what Taqî al-Dîn Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328)…

Sri Lanka was not only considered an outstanding ‘model of Third World democracy’, but also one of the developing world’s few welfare states. Sri Lanka has an enviable record of social development and has been cited as ‘the most widely noted case’ for having relatively high Private Quality of Life Index despite being…

Challenges to India’s security and future have never been more complex. India is increasingly hemmed in by a neighbourhood which is politically unstable, economically fragile and prone to be exploited by external forces, if not entirely inimical but with divergent strategic objectives.

The Book of the Dun Cow is another addition to the many novels in the genre of fantasy narratives like Watership Down and Lord of the Rings. Not perhaps as utterly captivating as these classics, it nevertheless has its own intrinsic magic.

If one goes through all the works of Emile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology, and German philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche, one would discover that there was little in common in what the two great thinkers said. Except one thing. Both Durkheim and Nietzsche agreed that punitive states were weak states…

The Kaziranga Trail has been awarded the Shankar’s Gold Medal for the best book written for children. Conscious writ­ing for the young is a fairly recent deve­lopment in India.

The majority-minority issue is ever complex in South Asia because of the changing political geography of the region. Just like the cliché, ‘today’s terrorist is tomorrow’s freedom fighter’, because of this changing political geography it is often the case that today’s majority is tomorrow’s minority or vice versa. ..

The International Year of the Child provided an opportunity for national and international reviews of the needs of children and of the impact of the pro­grammes taken up for them in the past.

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a growing recognition of the role of exclusive identities in the perpetuation of hostility in societies experiencing inter-group tension. While identity is a quintessential expression of the Self, central to the conception of a collective identity is its relationship with those identities that it distinguishes itself from…

Books about Bangladesh written outside the subcontinent are few and far between. Wanting to learn more about the author, I began by reading the book jacket’s back-flap. The few lines there were informative (the author is based in London), but not very revealing. The book took on new interest for me when I reached page 107…

A former military officer in the Pakistani army and now an assistant professor of postcolonial literature at an American university, Masood Ashraf Raja challenges the notion that the Pakistan Resolution passed by the All India Muslim League on 23 March 1940 was the initial point of Muslim/Pakistani nationalism, as the mainstream historiography…

Pakistan has occupied a great deal of India’s attention from the time it emerged in 1947. The Muslim League’s demand for parity with the Congress has transmuted into Pakistan’s desire for parity with India, and it may be argued that the north India centric Indian establishment, and media, have contributed to this aspiration…

Between the idea And the reality ………………………… Falls the Shadow This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men This is a sad, sad book, the autobiography of a promising Pathan boy born in the Frontier town of Mardan in 1929, the year the Muslim League hit its nadir, unable to gather even…

China and India are poised to join the United States as great powers well before 2050, shaping the world into a tripolar order instead of a multipolar one. With this strong assertion, the book tries to explain why the current multipolar global system will be short-lived than it is usually argued by international affairs analysts…

Siddiq Salik, one time lecturer and journalist joined the Pakistan Army as Public Relations Officer and his tour of duty got him to Dacca in January 1970. He remained there until taken as a prisoner of war to India where he spent two years mulling over the fiasco that his bosses had so callously brought about.

Over the years, debates on China-India relations have evolved from being just fashionable to becoming ever more rigorous and complex. Driven by the need to develop their special niche, a number of recent studies have begun to focus on examining and highlighting the enormity, complexity, uniqueness…