Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Social science research focused on South Asia has for a long time had a critical shortcoming: the state is almost never an object of study in its own right, but rather studied in conjunction with factors—caste and ethnicity, party competition, regionalism, social movements—in the production of social outcomes.

…given the opportunity, women handle money more efficiently. They have long term vision, they handle money more carefully. Muhammad Yunus

The prolonged agrarian crisis in India since the mid-nineties is reflected by the meager growth rates in the agricultural sector.

The title of the book in discussion is indicative of the foundational tenet of the volume. The point of departure is to accept ‘right to work’ fundamentally as an issue of justice with reference to the rural communities of India.

Why, in a period of sustained national economic growth, have Indian agriculturalists been committing suicide in such larger numbers? And what might these acts signify with respect to the challenges facing rural India at this moment? These are some of the pressing questions A.R. Vasavi’s Shadow Space seeks to answer. Through six closely related essays, each of which takes up a different aspect of this crisis, Vasavi contends that the suicides express the marginalization of vulnerable agriculturalists within a political economy that has neglected their welfare. In laying out this argument, Vasavi has produced a work that is both meticulously researched and passionately argued—one that is indispensable for understanding the momentous shifts currently underway in Indian agriculture.

Community policing has several meanings. To begin with, it refers to a process of taking policing back to citizens, for according to some scholars, that is where it began as a measure of public safety even before states and regimes appropriated this role and created a ‘police force’ for maintenance of public order and, of course, for their own protection.

The age of liberalization, privatization and globalization has raised a number of issues, which are central to the tribal life in India. One such important issue is the land question, which is generally considered as a ‘philosophy of tribal life’.

Paul R. Brass’s mega project on ‘The Politics of Northern India: 1937-1987’ is steadily progressing. His style is unique, focusing on the second rung of leaders who played a vital role in the pre-Independence period and immediately thereafter.

Two more books to the Gandhi shelf! Looks like a library will not be enough to house books on and by him. Yet Gandhi is never going to cease to be an enigma.

The book under review is a very welcome addition to the growing interest in mining older Indian intellectual traditions to understand and account for many of the diverse, and often contradictory, impulses of anti-colonialism and nationalism.

Though Political Science is a contested discipline there is near unanimity about its basic foundational structure.

This is yet another book that obsesses and agonizes over China’s rise, how the logic of strategy will dictate the choices China makes and the responses its actions are likely to evoke. China’s political leaders are said to have little agency to dictate this future course though, ‘trapped’ as they are ‘by the paradoxes of the logic of strategy’.