The topic of NGOs, especially those which are rights-based, in Pakistan is an intriguing and polarizing case in media discussions, always instigating hype by the critics over alleged negative roles and pushing the western agenda or by the proponents who appreciate NGOs’ capacity to challenge the authoritarian status quo.
The volume under review is remarkable for many reasons. The painstaking empirical research and the rigorous analysis of the same from a feminist perspective will make this book a very important source of reference to understand the lives, work and struggles of women in Asia.
A chronological political history of Punjab—the title is self-explanatory—Rajmohan Gandhi began the journey of writing this book at the point of its denouement, Partition. It was the need to understand the painful birthing of two nations, of why the father of the Indian nation…
2014
In 1976, within a year of its publication, Wendy Doniger’s Hindu Myths met with a bad press. ‘The title (of the book) is offensive’, a reviewer of Indian origin wrote, ‘to the Hindu, the stories of his sacred literature are not myths: they are as much reality and are as sacred as are the stories of the miracles of Christ or of Adam and Eve or Noah to the Christians…
Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857 is a seven-volume series that has emerged from a research project based at the University of Edinburgh involving collaborative research and international conferences beginning in the 150th year marking the revolt.
The Calendar of Persian Correspondence in 10 volumes was originally published by the Imperial Record Department, subsequently incorporated into the National Archives of India. These volumes span the period 1759 to 1793 providing details of the circumstances and processes by which the English East India Company consolidated…
In the prologue to his account of Gandhi’s early career in England and South Africa, Ramachandra Guha declares, ‘There are some striking resemblances between the central character of this story and his counterpart in the great Indian epic, the Ramayana.
2014
Minorities in Pakistan, published by Pakistan Publications, Karachi, was the first book I read on religious minorities in Pakistan before Bangladesh was created. The book begins with the words of Mahomed Ali Jinnah’s (spelt in a rather strange way) most significant part of the speech to the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947…
The title of the book suggests that it is only a narrative on the attack on Taj Hotel, one of the several targets during the three-day long Mumbai terrorist attacks in November 2008. And yet, The Siege tells a full story of the terrorist ‘Operation Bombay’, almost.
Post-9/11, two words, namely Jihad and Terrorism, have acquired much of our attention. These terms unintentionally as well as intentionally are used interchangeably, often, to indicate that Islam and terrorism share an organic relationship. The book under review, on the face of it, seems to defy this generic…
Babar Ayaz’s book does not present an ordinary diagnostic enquiry into the health of a state called Pakistan. His is no run-of-the-mill attempt—quite a fad today—to put Pakistan in the dock. There are plenty of writers these days looking at Pakistan in an uncharitable manner.
Pakistan’s imminent failure as a nation state has spawned many books. Pakistan’s principal attraction for writers and experts is the country’s central role in sustaining and promoting regional and international terrorism. Numerous terrorist incidents in recent times, anywhere in the world, seem to have a Pakistani connection or signature.
If and when foreign observers of Pakistan want to discover more about how the country behaves as it does, they can get some answers from two books published in 2013: Husain Haqqani’s Magnificent Delusions:Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding and Francesca Marino’s Apocalypse Pakistan…
One of the first writers, if not the first, to compare the condition of Muslims in India and Jews in Europe was a British Professor at Aligarh, Theodore Morison, who happened to be the son-in-law of the first Jewish graduate of Oxford University. Writing in 1899, shortly after the founding of the World Zionist Organization, Morison portrayed the newly launched campaign…
The first is that the sanguineous-sounding Blood Telegram refers to a cable sent by Archer Blood, Consul General in Dacca (now Dhaka) on 6 April, 1971 to the US State Department drawing attention to the inhuman atrocities being perpetrated by Pakistani troops in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) on the local Bengali population.
How does anything happen? The question seems simple enough, but its answer, once you have side-stepped the philosophical minefield of whether causes exist at all, can take you into diverse intellectual domains:
The Partition of British India in 1947 into the new nations of India and Pakistan, and the transformation of East Pakistan into the Republic of Bangladesh, in 1971, were events characterized by violence, displacement, and multiple alienations.
The books under review are two additions to the long and distinguished line of books that have puzzled over the improbable success of democracy in India. Sumantra Bose starts off by recalling Seymour Martin Lipset’s view that ‘the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy’.
The main argument of this comprehensive volume of nuclear weapon activity in Asia is that it is only here that there is the fear of renewed and widespread nuclear proliferation. The era of bipolar competition is looked back upon with nostalgia as an era when the two superpowers fully realized the dangers of nuclear weapons and strove to keep them safe…
India is perhaps the best place to be a vegetarian. Unless you want one, your options while dining in or out are never restricted to a bowl of steamed vegetables.