The question of the nation—its presence or absence, expansion or stagnation,exclusivity or everydayness, or its accuracy and ambiguity, has quite often rendered the concept difficult and unyielding.
Reminiscences from the days of the Raj have been a favourite subject of many authors, even writers and historians not dealing with it otherwise. Sahib’s India: Vignettes from the Raj presents a picture of the much discussed era from the perspective of someone who has already written extensively on the topic and has been a consultant for two BBC films on the Raj as well.
Reading the short stories by Deepti Naval can be quite an exhilarating experience. In each story, one can feel the aesthethic sensibility that has helped her emerge as a multi-faceted artistic personality who can interpret and use each medium of expression to her advantage, be it acting, painting, photography or writing.
Cricket and Sri Lanka share a rather formidable history. Tracing this, the cricket enthusiast-turned-anthropo-logist Michael Roberts (University of Adelaide), draws on the diversity in team composition as testimony to the inherent cosmopolitanism of the island—as native to it as the strains of the raucous but vibrant (Tamil) Baila, i.e.,
Blue Blood is Uttara Chauhan’s second endeavour at fiction writing. A Canada based writer of Indian origin, who works as a policy analyst for the Government of Canada, Uttara Chauhan’s debut novel A Model House was a love story while the book under review strings together eight stories.
Barbed Wire Fence is a collection of short stories translated into English from the original Bengali versions dealing with the sociological, political and psychological problems arising out of the mass scale migration of Bengalis from East Bengal to the Barack Valley in Assam during Partition (1946-7), as also the migration of the Bangladeshis after the 1965 and 71 wars.
Christophe Jaffrelot, a noted French expert on Indian politics, has made a stupendous effort to bring together this collection of forty-five essays, including an Introduction and a conclusion by him of French writings on India. Prepared as a Reader for French students of Indian studies, this English translation connects Indian readers (students particularly) to analyses of various Indian issues over the years by French Indologists.
Astri Sukhre describes how and why the US led international project in Afghanistan is in the trouble that it is. This helps with getting the picture right, for only then can prescriptions be examined for their worth.
Pakistan has been a subject of scholarly gaze for some time. The unfolding of events in the post 9/11 period has given a peculiar twist to the usual Indo-centric analysis about its role in international affairs, thus bringing into the discourse such actors as the Taliban, Al Qaida and their interface with Pakistani polity.
The book presents an array of relevant issues in development studies, such as child labour, educational participation, poverty, inequality, gender issues, that have skewed sex ratio and its relation to women’s well being; and issues related to collection of data and interpretations of statistical results.
Crisis is an output of change; it is a new beckoning or a long awaited demise, a decisive break with the past arrangements. Global crises have happened more than once in the past and they are likely to happen again in the future.
Suchetana Chattopadhyay’s book is three things wrapped in one cover. It is a narrative of the life of Muzaffar Ahmad, the founding figure of the Communist Party of India at the Bengal front. But it is not a biography of this leading Indian Communist.