Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the leadership of Mao ‘liberated’ Tibet in 1951attempting to bring the region under Communist rule. However, the promises made by the PRC (of respecting the religious beliefs of Tibetans) were disregarded and thus Tibet witnessed the first ‘uprising’ against Communist rule in 1959.

The renewed presence of religion in the public sphere has allowed many to question the relevance of an extended cling to the conventional western usage of secularism or many of its existing forms and has initiated a new political discourse which although it doesn’t manifest in an anti-secularist or ‘alternative to secularism’ discourse in any way has set into motion a new ‘alternative secularism’ discourse.

The book under review seeks to investigate nonproliferation as a concept and examine the role of initiatives like counter-proliferation and its offshoots and their place in the nonproliferation regime.

In general, national security is the sum total of the stability of the state and is measured using indicators of military security, economic security, resource security, regime steadiness, social order and a general sense of wellbeing. In case of a large developing democratic country like India, national security is subject to more variables than the standard…

India-South Korea interaction which has been on a continuous increase in the recent years recognizes several factors—a growing strategic partnership marked by improving politico-security understanding in the Asia-Pacific region, expanding economic complementarities and opportunities, mutual technological needs and cultural compatibility.

The study of the early histories of Indian soldiers has suffered a considerable amount of neglect, particularly with respect to their role in the two World Wars.

Abstract notions like nationalism, secularism, and Islamism still haunts scholars of as real a movement as the one that culminated in the Independence of India and the creation of Pakistan.

This book is a very useful summary of the recent debates on the decline of the Mughal Empire.

Most secondary school students in India would recognize this couplet as a reference to the greased cartridges that they study as the immediate cause of the Revolt of 1857.

India is one of the richest countries in epigraphic documents, belonging mainly to the ancient and medieval periods of history. These documents are invaluable in that they contain brief hints or elaborate accounts of past events and practices.

What is the relationship between hagiography and biography? For too long scholars have simplistically associated hagiography with sacred legend and biography with secular science.

Voices across the Ocean: Poems from Australia &India(Cyberwit, 2014)is third in a series of collaborative anthologies by Rob Harle and Jaydeep Sarangi. The collection brings together 12 national portraits in verse, featuring five Indian and five Australian contemporary poets and a poem each from the editors.

Chandrika Balan’s collection of short stories is a rich addition to the multicultural and multilingual reality of our times.

This novel is by the well-known academic, the sociologist of middle-class India, Dipankar Gupta. The Crime Writers Festival at Delhi revealed that he had written LTY under the pseudonym of Doug Gunnery.

Bruce King’s Rewriting India charts new grounds in the study of Indian English writing. Any discussion on Indian English writing is bound to fall into the familiar trap of postcolonialism and the writers’ complicity in furthering the imperial discourse.

Bhagwandas Morwal is one of those rare Hindi writers who have consciously and continuously striven to extend the limits of their socio-creative oeuvre. He had burst on the Hindi literary scene with Kala Pahar and has, over the years, consolidated his position as a novelist with Babal Tere Desh Mein and Ret.

This is a remarkable story. The author, his wife and daughter (the book has been authored by the father-daughter duo)—all enthusiasts, music lovers, avid collectors are rummaging through a kabadi shop when Abha (wife) stumbles across dusty cartons of cylinders which the shopkeeper tells her are textile yarn winding accessories. They bring the cartons home. Some of the cylinders are labelled and dated.

Although this is yet another volume on dalit writing which adds to the burgeoning dalit discourse, it is welcome because dalit literature constitutes an important segment of postmodern literature in India in particular and is a prominent literary site in the South Asian context in general.

Inclusion and exclusion are two contradictory processes which coexist in both the developed and developing countries. The widening gap between rich and poor across the world is an instant example of exclusion.

‘Nearly every book’, George Orwell famously wrote in 1946, ‘is capable of arousing passionate feeling’—feeling which may range from ‘passionate dislike’ to equally passionate admiration—in the mind of the reader (George Packer [Comp.] George Orwell: Critical Essays, London, 2009, p. 290).