Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The study of material culture has evolved alongside the discipline of anthropology, though the field has taken an interdisciplinary turn only in the last two decades or so.

The life and personality of Maulana Azad remains, to put this in a clichéd manner, an enigma. Aside from his deep scholarship,

West Bengal, one of the major States in India’s East, an unfortunate by-product of the Partition of India in 1947 and the one which bore the brunt of the Partition by receiving millions of refugees from across the border, remained for a long time India’s most ungovernable State since Independence.

Arunachal: Peoples, Arts and Adornments in India’s Eastern Himalayas by Peter van Ham is a strikingly beautiful book.

This is a fairly slim book. It has only about 15 odd pages of text, and 60 photographs. Yet, it contains a lot to think about and see. In any case, if it is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, then this intriguing little volume contains more than 60,000 words worth of matter.

This is a splendid volume that brings to- gether the recent approaches and researches around the theme of Indian Painting in honour of Professor B.N. Goswamy who continues to inspire and motivate potential scholars of art and history in various capacities and contexts.

Any discussion of traditional art forms in India would not be complete or possible without stepping into the realms of the narrative painting tradition.

To assess music as the purveyor of the spiritual is Antony Copley’s project in this compelling and erudite study.

The book in reference is a coffee table, well-illustrated memoir entitled The Master Through My Eyes.

This episodic narrative meanders charm- ingly while the authors digress to regale us with myths and legends, with no particular historical perspective.

In the early twentieth century, K.C. Bhattacharyya underlining the cultural enslavement of India proposed that it is in philosophy, if anywhere, that the soul of India could be discovered.

On 15 August 1947, from the depths of his Ashram in Pondicherry Aurobindo sent a celebratory message across the airwaves to the free nation.