Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The book under review brings together fifty-one book reviews and essays written by A. G. Noorani over the past four decades.

The foundations of Independent India’s Foreign Policy are contained in Article 51 of the Constitution which stipulates that the state shall endeavour to (a) promote international peace and security (b) maintain just and honourable relations between nations (c) foster respect for international law and treaty obligations in the dealings of organized peoples with one another; and (d) encourage settlement of international disputes by arbitration.

This collection of nine essays brings analytical reflections from as many Jammu and Kashmir scholars.

This evocative book takes us back through a time-machine, into the world in which the expatriate community, mainly western, lived in the quintessentially Chinese Peking in the early 20th century, immediately following the 1900 Boxer Uprising, right up to the 1949 triumph of the Communist regime and China’s Liberation. It provides a neat counterpoint to the flood of recent writing on China, showing us through the eyes of foreign residents the real distance the country has traversed.

Napoleon Bonaparte remarked that an army marches on its stomach. Military history bears several examples of how lack of food and fodder resulted in the disintegration of victorious armies. Napoleon’s Grande Armee disintegrated while approaching Moscow in the winter of 1812 due to lack of food and fodder for men and horses.

The book is an effort by a journalist to unravel the complex political and social factors involved in the re-emergence of the Gorkhaland Movement in the State of West Bengal, after a period of nineteen years.

Arguably not many works of history on modern Bihar were published earlier with the exception of Arvind N. Das’s Agrarian Unrest (Delhi: Manohar, 1983) and Vinita Damodaran’s Broken Promises (Delhi: OUP, 1992), the well-researched three-volume work of K.K. Datta, Freedom Movement in Bihar (1957), and the multi-volume compilation of essays in the Comprehensive History of Bihar (1976).

Although much has been written on the trade and political economy in southern India in the medieval and modern periods by scholars such as Burton Stein, S. Arasaratnam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, this recent book by Radhika Seshan on the Coromandel coast adds to the historical literature on regional studies.

he anthology under discussion consists of thirteen essays organized in three parts—the first titled Ancient Heritage and Modern Histories, the second Artefacts and Landscapes, and the third, An Archaeologist (John Marshall) and A Historian (D.D. Kosambi), written over a period of 20 years, between 1990 and 2010.