Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Pakistan’s imminent failure as a nation state has spawned many books. Pakistan’s principal attraction for writers and experts is the country’s central role in sustaining and promoting regional and international terrorism. Numerous terrorist incidents in recent times, anywhere in the world, seem to have a Pakistani connection or signature.

If and when foreign observers of Pakistan want to discover more about how the country behaves as it does, they can get some answers from two books published in 2013: Husain Haqqani’s Magnificent Delusions:Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding and Francesca Marino’s Apocalypse Pakistan…

One of the first writers, if not the first, to compare the condition of Muslims in India and Jews in Europe was a British Professor at Aligarh, Theodore Morison, who happened to be the son-in-law of the first Jewish graduate of Oxford University. Writing in 1899, shortly after the founding of the World Zionist Organization, Morison portrayed the newly launched campaign…

The first is that the sanguineous-sounding Blood Telegram refers to a cable sent by Archer Blood, Consul General in Dacca (now Dhaka) on 6 April, 1971 to the US State Department drawing attention to the inhuman atrocities being perpetrated by Pakistani troops in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) on the local Bengali population.

How does anything happen? The question seems simple enough, but its answer, once you have side-stepped the philosophical minefield of whether causes exist at all, can take you into diverse intellectual domains:

The Partition of British India in 1947 into the new nations of India and Pakistan, and the transformation of East Pakistan into the Republic of Bangladesh, in 1971, were events characterized by violence, displacement, and multiple alienations.

The books under review are two additions to the long and distinguished line of books that have puzzled over the improbable success of democracy in India. Sumantra Bose starts off by recalling Seymour Martin Lipset’s view that ‘the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy’.

The main argument of this comprehensive volume of nuclear weapon activity in Asia is that it is only here that there is the fear of renewed and widespread nuclear proliferation. The era of bipolar competition is looked back upon with nostalgia as an era when the two superpowers fully realized the dangers of nuclear weapons and strove to keep them safe…

India is perhaps the best place to be a vegetarian. Unless you want one, your options while dining in or out are never restricted to a bowl of steamed vegetables.

The poetry of this collection of poems is the poetry of the glide. It is poetry that results from the choreographed re-focussings of the main thought into the body of the poem.

An active engagement with disability in India only began in the mid-nineties. Some of the defining works on gender and disability in India were Anita Ghai’s (Dis)Embodied Form:

In recent times, legal engagements with disability have increased considerably following India signing and becoming signatory to the United Nations Convention of Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) in 2007.

Jan Breman’s scholarship on the rural economy in the Indian subcontinent has remained one of the most significant contributions on the literature in the past several decades.

The global financial crisis of 2008 has dealt a double blow at the fundamentals of the world economic system, which the latter is still grappling with.

Rita Kothari’s book focuses on Banni, a small region in northern Kutch that ‘interrupts the idea of Gujarat as a linguistically, culturally and politically cohesive territory with bounded citizenship’ (p. 3). Kutch, which became a district in the linguistic state of Gujarat in 1960 is marked by a long history of mobility and migration that questions the idea of the homogeneity of Gujarat that is an essential and recurring feature of the government’s discourse today.

Oceans have always represented the vast unknown, and been the gateways for exploring uncharted territories and new worlds. New discoveries and improved technology led to the era of colonization and global capitalism, creating a more closely connected inter-dependent world.

As a primordial form of identity, people in the Indian subcontinent possess a remarkable affinity to the place where they come from. Different regions have their own sense of linguistic, literary and cultural dynamics that bind people together while also distinguishing them from those inhabiting other regions.

The life and times of Bahadur Shah Zafar II have generally been examined from the perspective of the 1857 uprising and the exile of this ‘tragic’ emperor who experienced the collapse of the vestiges of Mughal power. The book under review, however, strikes a different note.

This is a somewhat motley, though interesting, collection of articles. There is little to string them together, in terms of a theme. Yet this is precisely what constitutes a smorgasbord of historical work and musings, from which almost everyone would find an interesting tid-bit or two to sample.

This volume, despite its slightly vague title, is a valuable collection of essays which survey writings on various areas of Indian history, especially ‘new and developing areas of study’.