Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The title—Coconuts on Mars as well as the cover photo of the book draws one’s curiosity to the contents of the book. It is not an easy read, as least not when you read it the first time but the book unravels beautifully only if you stay on a page.

Shanta Acharya exercises her poetic licence by quoting Elizabeth Jennings, ‘We have a whole world to rearrange.’ While she dismantles our perceptions, she rearranges her sentiments and opinions as poems laced with observations. A reason is given.

Given the interest in emotions in understanding human behaviour more fully than ever before, researchers in recent times have been looking at the crevices between thought and word, cracks and gaps through which meaning can slip unnoticed by readers.

A very intriguing title with the promise of opening up grand vistas of history. Let us see how far it succeeds.

The author starts out with the premise that the great epics, even in their oral form, have played a decisive role in the making of the history.

The book under review brings together the work of twenty-six women writers from Manipur. Translated into English from the original texts in Manipuri by a small group of translators, this anthology tries to locate a politics of the everyday across a wide.

During the mid-1970s, Nabaneeta Dev Sen wrote a trilogy of Bengali novellas for the Annual Puja Festival numbers of different magazines. Passing through the turbulence and the aftermath of the Naxalite movement that had swept over Bengal during that decade.

Khalil Ur Rahman Azmi’s monumental and definitive study on the Progressive Movement in Urdu Literature is now available in English, thanks to his daughter and translator, Huma Khalil. It must indeed be a joyful experience for researchers and scholars alike.

In 2007, when Giligadu was originally published and was available to the Hindi readers, it was received warmly as yet another socially relevant realistic novel by activist-writer Chitra Mudgal. It was hailed as a critical portrayal of the disintegration of family.

Githanjali’s book of short stories, The Rock That Was Not, deals with Indian women who are striving hard to stay afloat in wedlock, while claiming their own identity. Marriage becomes a tool for patriarchy to suppress their identity.

In 2004 directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, having photographed and filmed children of the prostitutes of Calcutta’s red-light district Sonagachi, released their documentary Born into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids to the public. It opened.

The Fate of Butterflies by the redoubtable Nayantara Sahgal is another testimonial to the author’s versatile imagination. Interweaving the personal and the political like many of Sahgal’s earlier novels, the novel narrates a history of the present from a fast receding liberal-secular perspective.

Purushottam Agrawal’s edited book on Nehru, provocatively titled Who is Bharat Mata?—among many other admirable qualities—has the grace of opportune timing. It comes at a precarious moment of our history when the memory of Nehru is dimming, almost irrevocably one.

Over the past few years, there’s been a growing debate about the implications of China’s rise for the future of the liberal international order. Is China a revisionist power that is seeking to craft a Sino-centric world order? Is it a fragile superpower whose actions.

This is a very fat book about a very thin man, a man moreover who was very arrogant, very rude, very obstreperous and, as the title suggests, very brilliant. In the end, though the brilliance served him poorly and he is remembered—by a rapidly dwindling number.

The work of historians is to deconstruct the past and re-present it, not necessarily as a coherent whole or one of consensus (Joan Scott, Gender and Politics of Representation) but rather, to explore the complexities in the past—including fissures and the conflicts that existed.

The title is a misnomer. This tantalizing title of a book of translation that is saturated with divinity is an invitation to the enterprising reader to explore what lies within and what lies beyond the imagined entity called ‘God’. I would like to begin my review.

This is a daring outlier of a book. At a time when genetic research, coupled with linguistic and archaeological studies, provide path-breaking revelations on ‘who we are and how we got here’, Harsh Mahaan Cairae has chosen to trace the journey of the Aryan.

Certain historical events—often, military or strategic in nature— engender obsessions with counter-factual questions. Questions such as, ‘what if Hitler and the Axis had won’, ‘what if Jinnah had died before August 1947’, and ‘what if the South had won the U.S. Civil War’, continually.

Before Robert Clive slit his jugular, perhaps in a paroxysm of violent pain in the abdomen, he had excused himself from a game of whist to visit the toilet. He was in his Berkeley Square townhouse in London and had ordered for his carriage to take him to Bath later after noontide.

‘The 1940s’, observes Ashis Nandy, ‘introduced into the South Asian public life a new actor—the refugee.’