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This is portrayed in chapters that focus on his time as a district officer in Chhotanagpur that cover the management of a land dispute involving Santhals, a dispute over the Ghatwali tenure system and the 1881 census. What is especially intriguing is how the resolution of disputes involved negotiations with different groups such as the Santhals and Bhumij and other ICS officers who often differed on courses of action. The exploration of the disputes also reveals the complex relationship between ICS officers and European-owned businesses, which were seen by the officers like Risley to cause problems and yet had to be supported in the interests of the empire.

Though Mani rarely expressed bitterness about her own Ph.D. refusal, she later told sociologist Abha Sur in an interview that her late friend deserved one at least posthumously. In The Uncut Diamond, published nearly 25 years after Mani’s death in 2001, Gopinathan makes a strong case for both women receiving posthumous doctorates. It will be interesting to see if the Indian Institute of Science ever considers this.

Sita’s Veil consistently upholds the author’s vision in its portrayal of Sita’s resoluteness in persevering with her ideals, her insistence on the importance of education and her championing of other women characters, at times even suggesting the radical possibility of viewing instances such as her abduction as one of abuse and therefore, viewing Sita as a survivor. However, one does note an element of essentialism too in the author’s suggestion of women being intrinsically connected to nature or the spiritual, and more disturbingly, in the detailing of women’s expertise in the kitchen or their natural aptitude at mothering.

‘The Blouse’ interrogates civility and its absurdities. An innocent old woman, compelled to conform to the propriety of wearing a blouse to cover her breasts, develops a cyst—a mysterious tool that may enable her to assert agency over her own choices. Perhaps the most thought-provoking story in this oeuvre is Sundara Ramawamy’s ‘The Breaking of a Story’. As the media rushes to cover an unfolding event,

Kaveri, positioned in a transitional phase, experiences turmoil as she attempts to balance inherited traditions with her personal sense of self. Aparna, the youngest, represents a more liberated orientation toward life and appears freer in her choices; yet she too struggles with emotional expression and communication within relationships.

The anthology opens with explorations of identity that challenge foundational social constructs. Moushumi Kandali’s ‘A Tale of Thirdness’ (translated by Atreyee Gohain) is a study of gender transcendence. Its protagonist, a professor and dancer, embodies a femininity and yearning for motherhood that exist independently of biological sex. Kandali, through lyrical and metaphorical prose—comparing the scent of a kitchen to longing,

101 is auspicious perhaps to ward off the readers’ profane thoughts and to invoke the humane sublimity in them. If brevity is the soul of wit, then these are not just brief tell tales but are close to Sufistic and Biblical aphorisms. Some of the tales have a philosophical and ethical slant while some are able to depict and reflect upon the socio-economic processes as well. For instance, the story titled ‘Sage’

That earlier urgency diminished, and with it, a certain fire; the impulse to know more, understand more, and remain connected to one’s immediate oral environment. In linguistics classes, the first thing we are taught is how words are produced in the mouth as we speak them.

The play of colour, shapes, forms, and contrasts of light and dark is Sen’s métier, making cognition of the precepts in this volume predominantly visual. Even though this volume is black-and-white, he captures the Arjuna tree’s transformation across the day in captivating prose. When it catches the first rays of the sun, it looks like Gautama Buddha in deep meditation. At high noon, in the harsh mercury-white light and lamp-black shadows,

This restrained fury runs through the collection’s most recent poems. They come from a tradition of Bengali literary conscience that has always understood literature as a moral act. Sengupta continues that tradition without announcing it. His poem ‘Tradition’ turns a familiar concept into something quietly subversive:

they were branded as criminals by the British under the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act, which made their traditional way of life illegal. Junglee, a Pardhi girl herself, protects a vulnerable tiger cub, even though her community is blamed for hunting such animals.

The ‘secret question’ works like a small lesson in resistance. When the ghost copies the mother’s voice, the girl uses what she knows about her widowed mother. She remembers that her mother does not apply alta. She even breaks the rule about not touching the chuhla to burn the ghost’s wolf-foot,

Should he have mentioned his name Ashoka more often? Again, if this was a name specifically connected with his Buddhist affiliation, he may have preferred not to use it in inscriptions meant for a wider, diverse readership/audience, choosing other epithets instead. And, given that we now have the label inscription from Kanaganahalli, mentioning Rāyo Asoko, it is possible that people were familiar with the name. Further, although perhaps anachronistic,

limited in their study to lives and worldviews of individuals. However, with the waning of the teleological, unilineal view of history, historians are now beginning to realize the need to place human experiences, emotions and everyday events within the larger historical context. With this has come the realization that personal accounts are not just records of individual experiences but rather reflect an incessant interaction of the individual self with the wider socio-cultural discourse in diverse spatial and temporal contexts. The current work by Simon Digby, a renowned British scholar of pre-Mughal India,

This question of the role of Brahmans in the kali yuga is a central one around which Brahman scholarship and judicial power pivot themselves over the centuries. One discursive context can be found in the history of critical responses of Maratha Brahmans like Krishna Sesa (16th c.) and Kamalakarabhatta (17th c.) to Gopinatha’s Jativiveka (circa 14th/15th c.). The Jativiveka, a key scholarly reference point until the 19th century and consulted in various disputes across centuries into the colonial period, defended the varnashrama dharma, was hostile to varnasamskara and Bhakti, and traced Kayasthas to a degraded pratiloma intermarriage. While both Krishna Sesa and Kamalakarabhatta widened the range of communities to which the ‘good’ Sudra status applied, Kamalakarabhatta also defended the survival of Kshatriyas and Vaishyas in the kali yuga,

The Subaltern Studies collective after four decades of its academic rise and dominance has now started being questioned in terms of what it has really achieved. The recent book by Meera Nanda has already been cited and follows another book-length study over a decade earlier by Vivek Chibber, Post-Colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, which was equally damning in terms of its assessment.

Like Jaffe, Robb also emphasizes dialogue between imperial ideals and local realities. However, he goes further and excavates the moral self-understanding of administrators themselves. Moreover, Robb’s approach adds a significant layer to intellectual histories of the empire, such as those explored in the works on liberal imperialism. Unlike ideological accounts that locate justification in theory, the present study turns our gaze to administrative interiors, showing how moral and legal discourses shaped bureaucratic decision-making in substantial ways.

Datta serves up this delicious nugget that one of the more well-known residents of the area was Florence Ezekiel, more popularly known as Nadira, the actress!
The history of Mumbai’s Irani restaurants, cafés and bakeries has been documented in films and books. Sadly, many have shut down, the latest being another favourite, B. Merwan opposite Grant Road station.

The Delhi Sultanate, ruling over large parts of the subcontinent till the early sixteenth century, became the home of immigrants from the Central Islamic lands. Pant’s treatment of Delhi’s cuisine under the Sultans is disappointingly brief as it mainly relies on information from the writings of Amir Khusrau, the famous poet and Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth century Moroccan traveller.

‘A Takli Procession organised by the Congress to Encourage the Art of Hand Spinning’. Such descriptions make the photographs speak to us and give an insider’s view into the mood of the nation. Manufacturing salt as a form of protest is so well documented that one finds these series of pictures a learning manual in salt making! Predominantly women but also men are shown congregated at the Chowpatty beach as well as other sea fronts of Bombay collecting brine. Many photos have pots of salt water boiling in the foreground with the crowd looking on and even tasting the product. Two lovely photos that are posed for the camera on the street are described as those of ‘Gujrati Women