Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

I begin with a quote from B.D.Chattopadhyaya, ‘The volume makes a point that the pan-Indian patterns of civilization and historical processes may be best understood from their intersections with how these patterns shape and get reshaped in the context of regions’.

Epigraphic studies need special training and interpretative skills. Appasamy Murugaiyan, the editor of the present collection of essays, reiterates this by hailing the Indian epigraphic tradition and the contributions of the pioneers to South Indian epigraphy.

The title of the book is inviting and indicates in an immediate sense that there would be something new to look forward to. An initial glance at the contents page, however, lends a picture that we are already familiar with. The book under review is thus marked by a terrain that is all too well-known to students of history.

We have just completed the golden jubilee year of the publication of D.D.Kosambi’s ‘Combined Methods in Indology’ in the Indo-Iranian Journal in 1963. This remarkable essay was in print several decades before the vocabulary of ‘cultural turn’, ‘linguistic turn’, ‘ethno-archaeology’, ‘ethno-Indology’, ‘ethno-history’…

This volume of the People’s History of India deals with not just five hundred years of its history but also an important phase in the making of early India. It was marked by the consolidation of earlier trends in north India and the spread of cities and states in other parts of the country; with all their socio-political implications.

Romila Thapar’s book is a compilation of sixteen essays most carefully chosen, almost like selecting the best of pearls to be strung. A collection of essays on history would definitely open up with issues in historiography and so does the first section incorporating three essays.

This is a book that the world has been waiting for. Romila Thapar has been working on it for quite some time. She would publish an occasional paper on the theme since the middle of the seventies of the last century. Our appetite has been whetted ever since.

In the past few years Indian sportspersons, like their western counterparts, have exhibited unusual interest towards telling their personal stories in the form of authorized biographies or autobiographies.

The narrative of Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s debut novel traces the presence and interference of dahni-bidya (witchcraft) on four generations of a Santhali family in Kadamdihi, a village in the not-yet-formed Jharkhand.

In The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee’s second novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014,

A beautifully illustrated book, A Stamp is Born, by Chitta Ranjan Pakrashi, describes in detail his journey as a stamp designer.

Aranyani is a jungle goddess. Like Diana, at a remove from civilization, free to desire. And free to pursue what she desires. Aranyani is also the chosen pen name of the author of A Pleasant Kind of Heavy and Other Erotic Stories.

‘Personal is political’—a revolutionary slogan of the women’s movement summed up the felt need for state intervention in what was considered as private/domestic sphere. This gendered unequal private sphere was where women faced the worst forms of discrimination and violence and relations within the public space were a reflection of it.

Law and Social Transformation in India is a compilation of Mendelsohn’s publi-shed essays on the Indian legal system written over different points of time.

The above excerpt from the Valmiki Ramayan’s ‘Yudhkand’ has for long been relevant to the birth of a new political discourse in India with Lord Rama at the epicentre in the dying decades of the twentieth century and thereafter.

How and why could India remain a possible and successful democratic polity with an impressive economic growth despite the persistence of, inter alia, large-scale poverty,

Data on the growing deprivation of sections of people has started resurfacing with investigations into implementation of Rural Employment Guarantee Schemes (NREGS) across the country since 2008.

Data on the growing deprivation of sections of people has started resurfacing with investigations into implementation of Rural Employment Guarantee Schemes (NREGS) across the country since 2008.

Nandigram in West Bengal, Maha Mumbai in Maharashtra, POSCO in Odisha, Reliance in Haryana, Mundra in Gujarat.

A dalit died and 40 others injured in an attack by the upper caste while dalits in Rohtas, Bihar, were trying to unfurl the national flag.