Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

There is a growing interest among western scholars in various aspects of South Asian languages, in general, and in Urdu in particular. However, the book under review is least about Hindi (Nagari), and very much less about what came to be known after Partition in 1947, as Pakistan. This is rather an exploration of ‘the history of Urdu literature as a sociological phenomenon’.

Editing an anthology has always been a risky proposition. One can hardly predict from which perspective the readers will look at, educationists receive and the critics evaluate it: of academic value, the representation of genres, movements and authors or the overall approach reflected in the introduction and the contents.

Yeravedekar and Tiwari have presented an insightful argument towards the need for strengthening the internationalization of higher education in India. Their rich experience as scholars as well as administrators in India and abroad has contributed to the development of meaningful insights in locating education in India within the context of neighbouring countries and the world at large.

It is hard to remember a time when ‘Higher Education’ in India was not in a ‘state of crisis’. It is equally difficult to meet a ‘stakeholder’ in the system—student, teacher, administrator, policy maker, prospective employer, educational entrepreneur, consultant or lobbyist—who would not complain about how ineffective, inefficient, corrupt, expensive, exploitative, unjust, unimaginative and soul crushing the system is. All of them concur that the existing order is unviable.

The work of years of immersion in Hindustani music, these two massive volumes are a very important contribution to the documentation and study of khayal, the preeminent genre of raga music that we recognize today as ‘classical’.

In a country where audio and filmic documentation of theatre is abysmally poor, Badal Sircar will perhaps be remembered primarily as a playwright simply because we don’t have nearly enough record of his plays in performance for future generations, and what we have is not of very good quality.

The title of Ruskin Bond’s autobiography derives from a poem he wrote some years ago and is so central to the text that it deserves retelling:

The name of Satyajit Ray, the famous filmmaker is known to film lovers across India. But most Bengalis of my generation would know that Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) was far more than an extraordinary filmmaker. He was an immensely talented music composer, a best-selling writer and one of Bengal’s most gifted illustrators and typeface designers.

M.K. Ranjitsinh’s timing is impeccable. He joined the IAS in 1961. Having gone through the obligatory training and having started his climb up the administrative ladder in the State of Madhya Pradesh, he fulfilled his childhood vow to become the Collector of Madla in 1967. Just when the last 66 barasinghas were at the fag end of their struggle for survival at Kanha enters the one Collector who had an interest in wildlife and was familiar with village resettlement for conservation (from Dungarpur and Dachigam). Supported by his superior, the redoubtable Mahesh Buch, he resettles the villages located on the Sonph grassland (an unprecedented exercise) and the barasinghas begin their recovery.

A Passionate Life is a collection of essays on Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, edited by Ellen Carol Dubois and Vinay Lal. Here is a woman, born in 1903, in a rural area in South West India, not only breaking every social and cultural norm of that era, but walking into the highest places in India’s freedom struggle. There are hardly any substantial writings by the prominent modern history scholars on this woman’s life.

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was first and foremost a very courageous woman who dared to fight against all odds and achieve for women a status of dignity, self-reliance and creative agency in a time and milieu that was hostile, inhospitable and even against the equal rights of men and women.

David Kinsley says in his preface that he came to Calcutta to undertake resear­ch on the Bengal Vaishnavas—‘and it was with some eagerness that I anticipa­ted seeing Krsna expressing himself in a cultic context’. Then he tells us about the tumultuous celebrations of Durga Puja he saw, finally how ‘in the rear…

The structural violence at both the public and personal levels that Indian women face routinely in the physical world has taken the better part of four decades to recognize, articulate and resist. Today, it continues to remain one of the biggest crises of Indian social life, taking on new forms and permeating new ecologies. Foremost among these new ecologies is the cyber space.

When, during the first half of this century, art surrendered to a revivalist ethos because a subject people had to cling to memories of past greatness to forget their current humiliation, art criticism mostly amounted to singing the greatness of the legend, poetry or epoch of which the paintings were illustrations…

The thesis this book presents is based on Jaques’s speech in As You Like it, ‘All the world’s a stage’, which postulates the view that human beings in a social context are like actors in a play per­forming their parts, filling out their roles. ‘Otherwise put, reality is a drama, life is theatre, and the social world is in­herently dramatic’…

Rahul Ramagundam teaches at the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. His book, Including the Socially Excluded: India’s Experience with Caste, Gender and Poverty explores the politics around the issues of Poverty and Exclusion. Some chapters are updated versions of articles published in various journals and publications, while others are based on studies conducted in the field by the author mostly in the Gaya region of Bihar, said to be among the poorest districts in the country.

The international trade in arms has reached alarming proportions. Some $5 billion worth of military equipment has been transferred to Third World coun­tries each year during this decade. The trade is unlikely to reduce, since the fervent desire of the arms-producing countries to sell is matched by the eager­ness…

This edited anthology is a timely intervention that aims to contribute to the body of scholarship on formations of desire and intimacy framed by the asymmetries of global contact and interpenetration. In order to establish the continuing potential of queer theory as a transformative body of knowledge this anthology brings together an impressive range of scholars from differing locations who analyse the links between law, culture and queer politics.

Hiren Mukerjee is a queer bird. I am tempted to use the phrase, with its P.G. Wodehouse flavour, because he might well have used it to describe himself. It suits his evocative, metaphorical, often devastatingly penetrating, if some­what dated, literary style. It also fits a personality who for 25 years…

This fat book is really a rag-bag. It consists of the papers presented to a series of seminars held over two years, from 1972 to 1974, by the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. The theme was leadership, but the word was interpreted so widely as to mean almost anything…