In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of academic studies were released that tried to explain the East Asian growth miracle in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea (Amsden, 1989, Haggard and Cheng, 1987, Haggard and Moon, 1990). The central puzzle that political economists explained through these case studies of East Asian Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs)…
2014
Barua’s very first novel is an intricate pattern of cultures and politics, refugees and resisters and locates South Asian politics in a wider context. A political analyst and commentator, he turns to Tibet but spreads out in other directions both space wise and at ideological levels—India, China, Nepal and the US.
The wiki entry on Fatima Bhutto says, ‘she grew up effectively stateless’. In her debut novel The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, Fatima takes us to a town called Mir Ali, in North Waziristan, on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The novel is about people but it is also about the place. The location so much a protagonist here.
It seems that it is difficult to write a south Asian novel, especially one written by an expatriate without asking the extraneous questions about exile and memory, politics and individual life histories, some implications of sexual and ideological preferences and the meaning of it all.
A Fort of Nine Towers is the vivid recollection of a young Afghan author, Qais Akbar Omar, from the last years of the Russians in Afghanistan to the tumultuous years of factional fighting and the eventual dark and suffocating rule of the Taliban. It ends with 9/11 and the return of dance and music to the streets of Kabul.
In My Mother’s House is certainly not yet another book on the civil war in Sri Lanka. The book stands out on three key grounds. One, despite being one of the victims of war and becoming a refugee at a young age, the author, Sharika Thiranagama, does not build a narrative of herself, but of others in the society that she had left more than two decades ago.
When Orhan Pamuk and Mohammed Hanif, among many others, figure on the blurb of a book singing paeans to it, expectations run high and the reader feels apprehensive that she is bound to be disappointed by the actual reading of it. But this grand epic narrative lives up to every praise showered upon it and then some.
My first experience of Bombay was that of cognitive dissonance. This was partly due to the fact that my imagination of Bombay as a city was shaped, in substantial measure, by the newly emerging body of English literature based on the city and partly because the first place I was acquainted with, back in 2006,
In 2008, Nalin Mehta1 wrote about satellite television being not only a marker of the progress of the idea of India, but also being a fundamental contributor to it. Earlier in 2001, Robin Jeffrey2 had written about regional language newspapers being vital hinges on which the nation as a whole was supported.
Kalighat paintings…and brush drawings are monumental in their presentation on an otherwise mostly blank page. Preceding the work of Matisse, some of the brush drawings prefigure it. Out of Indian tradition and impressions of Western painting, the ‘bazaar’ painters, descendants of low-caste and hereditary craftsmen created forms as valid as, and akin to, some of the later work by leading artists in the West.
Tantalizingly titled, this endearing coffee table volume showcases through stunning imagery—albeit in black and white—the sharply contrasting and majestic landscape of Balochistan; the book serves as a bird’s eye view on the region’s complex problems and convulsions of civil military conflict through the eyes of British reporter Willem Marx, along with his French photojournalist friend Marc Wattrelot.
Asok Kumar Das’s passion for Mughal art never fails to awe us and his ventures in this arena never ceases to enrich our understanding of Mughal art and inevitably our perception of our own history and culture.
The volume under review is a delightfully knowledgeable anthology of nine well researched articles, the fallout of a conference held at Hyderabad, marvellously printed with enchanting pictures. It takes us beyond essentialist notions of Islamic and Timurid gardens that have dominated the discussion of gardens in South Asia, and to overcome the seeming evidentiary impasse…
The central role of women in the provision, management and safeguarding of water was recognized in 1992 itself with the adoption of the Dublin principles at the International Conference on Water and the Environment held in Dublin but the attempts at mainstreaming gender into water management initiatives have received very limited success.
Integrated water resource management is one of the most pressing policy issues confronting South Asian countries—not only at the regional but also at the national level. Situated in a contiguous geographical landmass but dissected by various states, the region is home to around one-fourth of the world’s population.
The study of the relationship between nature and culture has been given new impetus over recent decades and has opened up attractive theoretical avenues. A number of social anthropologists have published inspiring books on this theme. The excessive duality between these two domains that some researchers refer to when contemplating non-western societies has been rightly questioned.
The title of this volume on media studies, edited by Ravi Sundaram, a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, is a suitable one. There really are no limits to the mediatized society that each one of us is embedded, if not buried, in. At the same time, there are very severe limits to our understanding of it.
This book is a story of a young girl who is shot by a Taliban bullet, survives miraculously and lives to tell her tale. Malala Yousafzai is celebrated and recognized as a fearless symbol of education across the globe. Malala is an educational campaigner from the Swat valley, Pakistan. She came to public attention by writing for BBC Urdu about life under the Taliban.
In her book under review anthropologist Subhadra Mitra Channa provides a generalized model of the ‘Devi and the Dasi’ to understand what it means to be a woman in South Asia. For a book that has South Asia in its title, the focus is very narrowly on India. She justifies this by saying, in a footnote…
Safar was about the inner journey of the heart and mind that revealed the truth of one to oneself, and took one closer to that state known variously as enlightenment, self-realization, self-knowledge, satori, fana- …My safar to places of my past led me to intimacy with myself. Revealed who I am to me.