Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The Chhotanagpur region, in the news as the very heart of the Maoist movement, is arguably also at the epicentre of theChristian discourse in India, both by its protagonists, and by the Hindutva Parivar which challenges it and has launched its own political and religious proselytizing in the region that stretches over many states in Central and East India.

Most of the essays in the volume under review were written by Professor Satish Chandra in the last ten years and published in various journals and were, as the author himself admits,’often difficult to locate’.

The Times man of last year is the protester. With protests raging across different countries, it is quite clear people are generally unhappy about many aspects of their lives.

This book is an interesting contribution to the tradition of travelogues of the Buddhist pilgrimage sites of northern India. It gives a first-hand account of the experiences of an English pilgrim to the Buddhist sites during the nineteen nineties.

If there is one thing everyone who watches television news agrees on it is that these channels are highly watchable but they are not news.

Here is another meticulous book, well thought out and jointly authored by two scholars of select works of Indian painting covering nearly seven hundred years of its history.

Right from the cover the book unfolds a discussion on the role of censorship and debates around the context of spectatorship of Bombay cinema.

At the outset, it would perhaps be apt to say that in order to locate the origin of a theory in the larger universe of an existing, living, dynamic realm of identification, construction, and production of culture in the form of moving images, film in other words,

Upon opening this book, the first thing that will no doubt strike the reader is the ambitious aims. It sets itself the not inconsiderable project of defining a ‘new literary theory’ which combines ethics with aesthetics, and represents a break with ‘the traditional approach (to literature) from Aristotle to Heidegger and de Man to Zizek’.

This is an interesting and pioneering addition to the corpus of literature which exists on the family history of the Tagores. Its relevance lies in treating a theme which may be considered taboo to many Bengalis, that of the life of Rathindranath, the only surviving son of Rabindranath, and Rathindranath’s extra-marital friendship with Meera Chattopadhyay, wife of Nirmal Chandra Chattopadhyay, a Professor of Eng-lish at Visva Bharati in the 1940s and 1950s.

In the year commemorating Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary, the highest gain has been in taking ‘Gurudev’ be-yond Bengal.