Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The coincidence was too obvious not to provoke comment…The entire affair lent further weight to the suggestion of collusion since Yahya Khan had, by this amendment, made it possible for Bhutto to force a postponement of the National Assembly by requiring all his men to resign prior to the summoning…

A good cookbook is more than just a collection of recipes. It tells stories about the writer and the ingredients. It transports you to kitchens and markets both familiar and unknown.

In a world of growing interest in urban problems such as pollution and environmental hazards, it is good to know that the Indian village continues to attract the social anthropologist. D.B. Miller’s revised doctoral dissertation is a study in minute ethnographic detail: whether he is talking informally about…

Love Stories # 1-14 is not arranged in the numerical order one expects to find on turning the first page—this is the book’s first surprise. And it is this note of whimsy that connects the threads of Annie Zaidi’s fourteen love stories in the collection under review.

Contradiction and Change by Anand Chakravarti is the outcome of intensive field work in Devisar, a multi-caste village in Rajasthan. The book is of interest to the serious student of sociology. This is not a light book to be pursued by those who are interested in getting a glimpse of the process…

It is a pleasure to hold a book of short stories, flip its pages and discover that each story is actually short, about 4-5 pages.

Thinner than Skin, my first engagement with Uzma Aslam Khan’s work has been a beautiful experience. Truly, there is no other word to describe her writing, which is well-researched as well as derived from her personal experiences.

Kaliprasanna Sinha, born into wealth, spent his brief life in the Calcutta of the mid-nineteenth century busying himself with social and literary work that must have baffled his peers, to whom anything not effete was pointless.

The Paradox of Poverty is a series of articles concerned with the multifarious aspects of the population problem in the underdeveloped nations of Asia and Africa. The two broad areas that are examined in the studies are the factors affecting fertility decisions and the pattern of socio-economic and political…

The protracted Naga problem has been a much debated topic in the political sphere, yet very little has found its way into the literary realm.

The 9th article of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China states, ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat.’ This seems to sum up, with typical Chinese compression, what the Doomsday men anticipate when population increases in the present stage of exponential growth…

China looms large over South Asia. It borders four of the eight countries comprising the region—Afghanistan, India, Nepal and Bhutan, of which it has unresolved border disputes with India and Bhutan.

The book under review is the result of an endeavour by the journal Think India Quarterly committee. The committee came out with a special issue to mark the sixtieth anniversary of diplomatic ties between India and China.

China’s military spending, its weapons acquisitions and technological investments have been the subjects of commentaries for many years now. Even though debates on the true value of China’s military budget and the quality of its indigenous defence industry continue, it is generally acknowledged that these issues merit deeper study because the growth in China’s military prowess has consequences for the global international order.

Maxime Rodinson has over the years established himself as one of the most discerning—most nonaligned—writers on Islam. A Marxist, born in a Jewish Communist family, former member of the French Communist Party, who left it (or was thrown out) because the party line was too dogmatic…

History connects the past to the present. It is left to us as to what we make of our understanding of history. Too often, societies and leaders get frozen in their understanding of history and fail to comprehend the role they could play in dealing with problems and issues left over from history.

At the centre of Kathleen Barry’s book Unmaking War: Remaking Men is the question: ‘Why do wars persist in the face of our human urge to save and protect human life?’

A book on employment policy need not, (there­fore), aim exclusively at those in power. This one certainly does not’ writes Sen. That, in my opinion, is the mildest understatement in the book; whoever it aims at, it will floor. In the range of issues it covers, the amount of information it provides on the existing literature…

This compilation on neighbourhood armies in South Asia is a timely academic effort by a team of area experts at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) and brings together a bird’s eye perspective of the security environment, geo-political and strategic background under which armies in different countries in India’s neighbourhood have evolved.

Nowadays, when you mention ‘transition’ in the Afghan context, the definite article gets left out and the first letter capitalized; it becomes ‘Transition’, a proper noun and an entity that will produce a new Afghanistan of uncertain lineament.