Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The indefatigable Subhadra Sen Gupta! All children from eight to eighty (this phrase was made famous by Satyajit Ray) must be her fans. No one has done more to make history accessible and as much fun as her numerous books on the nationalist movement and leaders testify…

Published this year of the London Olympics INDIA at the Olympic Games is a timely and informative publication. It is also fun! It begins with a letter from Abhinav Bindra, India’s first individual Olympic gold medalist, where he says: ‘I believe every child should have the chance to play’.

We seldom realize, in thinking about human culture and history, how much we depend upon the written word for all we know about the past. Civilization is actually synonymous with writing and for all modern archaeological techniques, it is still writing alone that tells us how people in ancient times lives…

Harold Ross of New Yorker once asked James Thurber if he knew English. Thurber thought that Ross meant French or a foreign language. Ross repeated: ‘Do you know English?’ When Thurber said he did, Ross replied: ‘Goddamn it, nobody knows English.’…

Sachin: Born to Bat by veteran journalist Khalid A.H. Ansari and edited by Clayton Murzello is a unique poem to cricket’s popular batsman, Sachin Tendulkar born in Mumbai to Ramesh Tendulkar and Rajni Tendulkar. The book is a chronicle of the achievements of Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar…

An outcome of a three-way collaboration between British Council, Abhinav Bindra Foundation and Tulika Publishers, India’s Olympic Story is a slim book targeted at teenagers but can also be useful to anybody interested in a quick read about the Olympic Games and India’s achieve-ments at this greatest sporting extravaganza.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who could not sing. She did not know any song. All day long, while going about their daily work, all the other women would sing. She was enchanted by their singing, and wanted to know how she could get a song to sing…

If you are looking for a book to gift a 7-year old that doesn’t depict 10-year olds acting like grownups to solve a murder mystery, but something that tells a story about child-like children who live close to the earth, are faced with the not so pleasant reality in the process…

Children are the citizens of the future. To become a good adult, it is important for them to be good citizens as well. The book is a timely aid to parents and teachers, in reiterating and simplifying what the main principles and goals of the Indian Constitution are.

One of the notable features of the developments in India during the colo­nial period was that despite what may be called perpetuation of her underdevelop­ment and her structural retrogression. ‘India had a larger industrial sector, with a stronger element of indigenous enter­prise, than most underdeveloped countries of the world’.

Anushka Ravishankar has done it again. She effortless in style and is a very contemporary story teller. The illustrations by Shilo Suleiman complete this package.

This is an annotated version of Gandhiji’s works, first published in 1932. This volume has been annotated by Lalita Zachariah who is a noted expert on Gandhiji’s works.

It is to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that the credit for embarking Pakistan on a nuclear course goes. The idea of an Is­lamic Bomb was his and it was he who against much opposition, set up the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology and started negotiations for the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant.

Enslaved Innocence: Child Labour in South Asia examines the exploitation of children in India which has the largest number of child labour in the world today.

A volume such as this has been needed for a long time. It is true that the peasan­try did not play such a crucial and spec­tacular role in modern Indian history as it has done in other parts of the world, and it is not surprising that India finds no mention in a book like Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century.

Mother Maiden Mistress is an attempt to map women’s representation in cinema from 1950-2010. The contribution of women in the Indian film industry has received minimal attention. This is a much needed addition to the historical narrative of Indian cinema. The book is premised on the argument that no matter how the decades…

The city of Chennai was remembered until the early 2000s for its huge banners lining most of the arterial roads. Huge hand painted film hoardings battled for prominence with equally massive ads for consumer products. And then suddenly the denizens of Chennai felt that these hoardings were not really aesthetic and were also…

The adaptation of fiction into films is one of the earliest interventionist modes of analysing cinema and bringing the cinematic medium at par with the written word. Cinema needed ‘respectable’ literary moorings to step out of the shadows. James Naremore in his seminal work on film adaptation…

This book is a collection of essays in English by Satyajit Ray, dating from as early as 1949 to 1989, collated from different newspapers, journals and bulletins on cinema from India and elsewhere. Twenty-two written pieces have been arranged accordingly in three segments titled,…

Donald Preziosi in his, A Crisis in, or of, Art History? recounts an instance which will become the cornerstone to radicalize the conventional disciplines of art history. He talks about the 1982 Winter issue of Art Journal which was dedicated to the theme of ‘The Crisis in the Discipline’.