Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Innovations in Maternal Health: Case Studies from India (2014) edited by a team of researchers from the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) describes a series of interventions which aim to improve maternal health among some of India’s poorest communities.

The study of masculinity as a distinct area framing and being framed by cultural and collective practices rather than as a binary of gender is a relatively recent phenomenon within the academic discipline of gender studies.

Indians who travel abroad or migrate internationally rarely write about the societies they intimately encounter and adopt as ‘home’. Contrastively, from the time of the colonial era, western writers have produced a copious and authoritative body of travelogues, fiction, and scholarship on the Indian subcontinent.

In the post-economic reform era the Chinese society has witnessed the emergence of newly rich class enjoying the benefits of economic prosperity. There is growing awareness over delivery of services, quality of products, protection of legal rights, i.e., based on the weiquan movement of early 2000s, as argued by Jonathan Benney (2013) in his celebrated work Defending Rights in Contemporary China.

S lavoj Zizek while discussing his new work at LSE recently, emphatically un derlines the ‘Universalism of Capitalism’ and further states that at the level of economy ‘capitalism has triumphed worldwide’ in contemporary times. For Zizek ‘the mask of cultural diversity today is sustained by the actual universalism of global capital’.

On the morning of January 26, 2001 when India was celebrating the 52nd Republic Day, a great tragedy befell Gujarat. As the earthquake struck, around 14,000 people died, houses fell into rubble, hundreds of villages ‘totally collapsed’ and oil spill was reported. The most affected areas of Gujarat were Kutch, Bhuj and Anjar.

Will there be workers organizing in neo-liberal times? Yes, workers will be organizing in a new liberal fashion! Rina Agarwala’s book Informal Labour, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India suggests that workers in the informal sector in India are successfully negotiating their livelihood demands taking advantage of intensely competitive politics particularly at the State level.

One does not envy the lot of an academic taking on the task of writing a comprehensive history of Modern India, balancing both events and interpretations. First, there is the question of the audience. Is the book geared towards a casual, general reader looking for an informed but flowing narrative? Is it going to serve the needs of the ‘average’ undergraduate student? Or is it a go-to book for researchers and teachers?

Christopher Chivvis is the quintessential policy wonk having rotated in and out of government and the academia, so typical of the career profile of public intellectuals in the United States. Given that he needs the government for access to information and the policy high table, as much as the government needs his brains, it is inevitable that he would write up a favourable account of the US role in toppling Gaddafi.

It is heartening that after a gap of a decade and a half, Amalendu Guha’s Medieval and Early Colonial Assam: Society, Polity, Economy is once again available in bookshops. The twelve chapters originally published as articles between the 1960s and 1980s, were compiled and published as a book in 1991.

India’s North East region has offered many paradoxes for observers over the years, thus emerging as a major field of research.

Journalists have been the first off the block in coming out with books on the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Close on the heels of Rajdeep Sardesai’s 2014: The Election That Changed India comes a book by another senior journalist, Harish Khare, titled How Modi Won It: Notes from the 2014 Election.

As an individual greatly enthused by the life and labours of Swami Vivekananda, this is a book that I have eagerly awaited and indeed, it is doubly rewarding that I should now also be among its reviewers.

The 150th year of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth in 2011 generated a lot of renewed interest in the writer’s works and the fruit of that is discernible in various new volumes available in the market.

A political science professor at the University of Hyderabad, Vasanthi Srinivasan is clearly also at home in other disciplines such as philosophy, religion and history.

What is poetry? Is it as Wordsworth says a spontaneous overflow of emotions recollected in tranquil­ity? If so, is it possible for language to reflect these emotions? Which leads us to the more troubling question as to what language is.

Banerjee, a bestselling author, came out with her first book in the year 2011. The Mumbai based author has also doubled up as a screenplay writer for Bollywood, having written the script for Hate Story 2, and for another yet-to-released film.

I have always admired Ruth Vanita’s work on account of its articulate lucidity. Re­viewing her translation of short stories by Mannu Bhandari, Rajee Seth and Archana Varma from Hindi to English promised to be an exciting possibility.

Daruwalla has written an entire vol­ume of stories on islands. The sto­ries extend to looking at people as islands spread across this world. The first story Island Sermon involves a nameless nar­rator who is visiting India to see a hermit and has certain fixed notions about what constitutes a good story. The swami reveals self-destructive tendencies and suffers from dementia. Further into the story, the inner ramblings of the mind are revealed—‘I have been obsessed with islands, their solitary ex­istence, the way they cope with themselves.

Indian fiction in English by women, vi­sualized as Jasmine on a String by Mar­garet Paul Joseph includes writing not just by women who may or may not have lived in India but also those who may not be Indian by birth too.