Nestled within an idyllic ecological environment, the hill stations have always been an ideal summer retreat. However, the quietude of these settlements and the tranquility of their landscapes belie a history of conflicts and negotiations mostly dated to the nineteenth century, between the hill communities and the British.
The text under review is a re-publication of a monograph that initially appeared in 1975. It looked at the emergence of, what the author calls, a ‘national consciousness’, in late nineteenth century colonial India.
This is a volume of engaging essays intended as a festschrift in honour of the eminent sociologist, Professor A.M. Shah, edited by two of his former students who are today well known academics themselves. Covering a vast array of subjects, the volume is eclectic in character, bringing to the reader the freshness of each contributor’s individual on going academic interest.
The dominant scholarship on India’s North East is focused on the study of militancy and violence in the region. The concern of scholars, by and large, has been to understand and explain the conditions, circumstances and background driving the agendas of local identity movements, their grievances leading to radicalization in the public sphere, and the politics of militancy and their outcomes (Baruah 2005; Misra 2000; Hazarika 1994; Nag 1990).
Christopher Bayly’s new book, Recover ring Liberties: Indian Thought in in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, traces the history of political thought in India with a specific focus on liberalism. Bayly attempts to trace the lineages of liberal political language in the Indian subcontinent from the beginning of the nineteenth century with Rammohan Roy to the middle of the twentieth.
On the cover of this elegantly written reportage-cum-travelogue is a shabbily dressed teenage girl holding a toddler. In the background we see the thatched houses and many tell-tale signs of extreme poverty. From the cover photograph itself you have a fair idea what this book is all about. At the top of the cover it reads Beautiful Country:
‘Everything becomes a story one day.’ So begins the PS section of this Bangladeshi contemporary classic. Its writer, Mahmudul Haque, is credited with fashioning a new idiom and a distinctly modern sensibility in the post-1947 writing coming out from what was once East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh.
As summer looms upon us, a Gujarati friend living in Calcutta becomes more and more disgruntled. Her plaint is the lack of kesri ker no ras (aam ras or mango pulp) in her city. Upon a suggestion that she purchase mangoes and make it at home, came a most painful shriek: you don’t understand! In Gujarat right now, everyone is talking mango, buying mango, selling mango, cooking mango.
Even as Delhi has been celebrating the centenary of its restoration as capital of India, a proud fragment of its built heritage and history, it is fitting that we re-member the doyen of Delhi’s lived cultural heritage, Amir Khusrau (1238-1325), the most loved acolyte of the great sufi divine, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya who, like his master, lies buried in Nizamuddin.
Just when journalism in India is going through a transition of sorts, when values and ethics lost in the process are being questioned, M.S. Prabhakara’s book Looking Back Into The Future helps restore some faith.
Poet and essayist W.H. Auden once remarked that every autobiography is concerned with two characters, ‘a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self’. Vinod Mehta’s literary self-portrait Lucknow Boy fits the description quite well. Only that in this memoir the two characters never appear together, at least not on the same page.
In 2002, the Government of Karnataka prohibited the sales of a massive two-volume history of Kannada cinema published by Hampi University Press. It apparently had factual errors and, more importantly, had misrepresented Dr. Rajkumar, the Kannada film superstar.