Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

This book once again foregrounds the on-going debate on how to approach and conceptualize civil society in India. Is civil society a ‘realm of freedom‘ or a realm of hegemony?

1956 was a watershed year in the political history of India as this was the year when the reorganization of the states commenced thus paving the way for the demands for new/smaller states.

I must confess that, at the beginning, I was rightfully wary of picking up one more book presumably documenting how colonial modernity charted its course through literature produced during the so-called Bengal Renaissance,

In the early 16th century, when Albuquerque was conquering Goa and performing his extraordinary feats on and beyond the Konkan coasts and in the Arabian seas that bordered mainly the enemies of the Franks, as the Portuguese were called then, and an extraordinary priest,

At the Edges of Empire brings together the impressive range of Rosalind O’Hanlon’s scholarship over the last two and a half decades.

The book probes the nationalist trajectory of what Mohammad Sajjad calls ‘the lesser-known nation-makers of Muzaffarpur’ of north Bihar.

To understand the wider intellectual-political significance of this theoretically nuanced and methodologically sophisticated study of the Deccan’s past, one has to have recourse to a rather precise and systematic interpretive framework.

The self-fashioning of bhadralok Hindus in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their responses to colonial rule, is an area which is frequently traversed by researchers.

The book at hand attempts to study a significant and for the present times, a deeply pertinent field: the similarities, influences and overlaps in terms of the understanding, commitment and praxis of two of the most influential political leaders of the 20th century namely Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Muslim, Dalit and Subaltern Narratives is the fifth and latest volume published in the series Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857.

It is generally assumed that Bengal, and eastern and north-eastern India generally, remained unaffected by the anti-colonial struggle of 1857-58.

I’d already heard many good things about Himanjali Sankar’s young adult novel Talking of Muskaan, so I was really looking forward to reading the book.

The title of ChitraViraraghavan’snovel,The Americans, indicates that the Indian diaspora in the United States of America has indeed come of age. It also affirms that Indians in the US are not quite the outsiders who are trying to assimilate into the melting pot or are the hyphenated

Atale of a sleepy town with a tunnel that has its own history, sea with its beach beckoning you to come closer to listen as it whispers its own story and a lake whose depth of water sends its own invitation.

‘Life is a terminal illness’, says the character of Hugo Lamb in David Mitchell’s latest work The Bone Clocks that was also recently long listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Ahmed Ali (1908–1994) is better known in the English-reading world as one of the founder members of the Progressive Writers’ Association in 1936, as one among the four of the (in)famous Angaray group.

The figure of the youthful revolutionary is the space, both fictional and historical, real and metaphorical, from which the concerns of this book arise.

Dennis B. McGilvray in his book Crucible of Conflict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka, ex-plores the ethnography of the Eastern region of Sri Lanka, originally inhabited by Tamil Hindus, Moors, small number of Sinhala chena cultivators and Vedda hunters.

Reconciliation in post-war scenario is a complex process which involves genuine efforts by multiple stakeholders, not just the state to build a peaceful society.

In Kathmandu we discover, all the stories of the past are suffused with myth, and legends run circles around historical facts.