Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Laufer’s German version of the Citralaksana has no doubt been long known to the world of connoisseurs of Indian art. Coomaraswamy, Masson Oursel, Kramrisch and other great writers have indeed used this important document which was recovered from Tibetan.

This book is the revised and expanded edition of the 1981 edition of The Imperial Image by Milo Beach which focused on Freer Gallery collections produced for the Mughal Emperors ruling between 1560 and 1640.

I wanted to learn what it meant to know Islam in Pakistan and why this knowing was so easily brushed aside.

Commenting on the congruent genealogies of Oxford and the madrasas of South Asia (‘religious’ origins of both sets of institutions) and the eventual divergence (Oxford emerging as the fountainhead of ‘reason’ and madrasas positioning themselves as bastions of ‘orthodoxy’) between them, Masooda Bano argues that the main reason for the different development of these institutions was that they were operating in very different political environments.

The empirical work for Religion, Community and Education was conducted in two locations of rural Bihar namely Phulwari and Kasba blocks of Patna and Purnea districts, and highlights the historical trajectories and how it has shaped the educational development and disparities in educational attainment of the two communities.

Middle class, middle classes, bourgeoisie—these terms entered English and other European languages in a range of meanings and connotations with the rise of industrial capitalism in the late 18th century.

It was in the thirties that Dr. V. Raghavan had drawn attention to a form of theatre called Yaksagana. Much interest was aroused by his articles. In the early forties there was a lively dis­cussion amongst scholars about the origin of this fascinating form and its connec­tions with Kathakali.

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a scholar, most unique in the Islamic world. He is considered one of the most significant thinkers of the pre-modern Muslim world.

This is an anthology put together by the London and Sussex based Filippo-Caroline Osella team of anthropologists both having a keen research interest in South Asia.

John R. Bowen’s A New Anthropology of Islam addresses an ontological problem in sociology and social anthropology, one that pertains to the relationship between culture and tradition.

The volume under review, a fine-tuned and reworked doctoral thesis, is a critical narrative of the interpretation of everyday and ritual life of a Muslim shrine known as Hussain Tekri. Carla Bellamy took a plunge into this rather adventurous journey with passion driven by irrepressible intellectual curiosity.

This book is definitely a much-needed contribution to the study of the political philosophy of Allama Iqbal the poet. Iqbal Singh Sevea expends significant intellectual energy on the analysis of Iqbal’s well-known antipathy to the ideology of nationalism and the nation-state.

This book makes a major contribution to the literature on Indian nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s.

None of the ideas/ideologies of the modern age have aroused so much passion and emotion as has ‘nation-statism’. Despite the fact that it has caused unprecedented human tragedy in the form of genocide, displacement, dispossession, destructions and devastations; and despite the claims of its demise in the face of globalization, the nation-state continues to remain a dominant socio-political frame within which human beings organize themselves.

Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age is an inward look into how the traditionally educated scholars or the ‘ulama have frequently invoked the idea and necessity of reform within their faith.

The growing historical literature on the national movement in India is as yet comparatively poor in good biographical works. Two recent publications—S. Gopal’s Nehru and now B.R. Nanda’s Gokhale—will go a long way in filling this gap. Here is an authoritative, ex­tensively researched, scrupulously fair and extremely…

Ethnography is an art not very different from writing a novel. It is holistic. The anthropologist submerges his own special professional interest to study the whole society. But the person­ality of this author remains distinct and accounts for part of the uniqueness of the monograph…

T.K. Mahadevan, whose thoughts and writings have for many, many years revolved round Gandhiji, has now attempted an altogether ‘new kind of book’, which he calls an exercise in philosophical biography.

I must admit to having agreed to review this book with a high degree of trepidation. How could a single volume hope to cover in 658 pages, so vast an area with all its dimensions, conflict and, most of all the variety and the depth of its impact on civilizations across the world? And yet, by this singular work Lapidus, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California at Berkeley, has, in a book more compact, placed himself in the recording of Islamic history on a pedestal equivalent to Gibbon’s for that of Rome.

So much has been written about Mumbai’s Dharavi—the ‘slum’, the ‘city’, the ‘urban settlement’. Books, articles, feature films, documentaries—an idea of Dharavi has emerged through multiple sources.