Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

This book is a collection of essays published in a Sri Lankan newspaper The Island as a weekly column. Written by the erudite and politically conscious Rajiva Wijesinha, the book is a delightful survey of twentieth century English literature. While he threatens/promises to locate his readings in contemporary Sri Lankan politics, we find that either he has edited them out of the book or that such anchoring was provided only now and then in the original columns themselves.

From the author of the much acclaimed Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns comes another novel set in Afghanistan, moving with its actors to Europe and America.

The book under review is a commendable study of modern art in Pakistan and closely analyses the work of a few prominent artists as it deconstructs notions of modernism in their work. While the title of the work makes a reference to the art of ‘South Asia’, it would perhaps have been more appropriate to restrict its scope to ‘Pakistan’ as almost all the artists and the work discussed in the book have emerged out of Pakistan.

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.

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.