Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Reading the short stories of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas in the India of today-the emerging, global economy of enviable GDP growth, free market enterprise, bustling shopping malls-is a sobering exercise.

Before I begin the review of G.J.V. Prasad’s work a word on the dust jacket cover: it speaks of the multicultural, multilingual, multifarious ways in which English is read, written, and spoken in India. Hence, fish swim in a sea of words taken from Hindi, Tamil and English, the fish possibly being us who swim in the multitudinous seas that make up the many currents of English usage in India today and of yore.

That there are multiple histories rather than a history of the Partition is borne out by studying the literature produced in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Contrary to popular perception, there is no generalized or undifferentiated response to the Partition among those who have chronicled it.

By 2030, 40 per cent of India’s population will be living in urban areas according to projections. The gargantuan gap between the inexorable rise of the country’s urban population, on the one hand, and policy making on urban entitlements, investments, infrastructure, and administrative norms, on the other, is therefore extremely discomfiting. This is not for lack of scholarly interest in the subject.

Integrating Services in South Asia’ comes at a very im-portant juncture when services negotiations are under way within SAARC nations and are also de-emed to be a very impor-tant part of bilateral and multilateral trading arran-gements with huge poten-tial for the region.

This compendium of essays edited by three distinguished Sri Lankan economists is a welcome addition to the economic literature on South Asia.

When one considers the fact that the autobiography or memoir as a literary form is predicated upon the sense of an individuated self that emerged with modernity, one must wonder, is ‘feminist memoir’ a contradiction in terms?