Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Fresh scholarly interests evoking curiosity and concern have come up after the rise and consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India. The capture of power by the BJP in 2019 has made the causes and consequences of its victory a timely and tantalizing prospect for analysis, spanning volumes of work in academia and journalism. Accounting for the rise of the Hindu Right, studies have explored complex polarization strategies, majoritarian logic, suave use of caste-class algorithms, alliance making, attracting funds of corporate houses, deft social media marketing…

A conversion by change of name within Hinduism is a clandestine conversion which can be of no avail—AmbedkarThe quote above is a reflection of the fact that Dr. Ambedkar denounced any potential for liberation for Dalits within Hinduism. Despite that, several Dalit castes connect themselves to the great tradition of Hinduism and perceive religion as an emancipatory space. The desire for pain-sharing, an aspiration to equality, dignity and self-respect provided grounds for religious traditions to enter into the life world of the marginalized. Alternative religious traditions helped provide this…

Shaikh Ali Hazin, one of the greatest Persian poets of the day, moved to Delhi from Isfahan in 1734, a couple of years after the great Safavid dynasty of Iran was ended by Nadir Shah Afshar. While he was widely venerated in India, Shaikh Hazin denigrated Indian writings in Persian, which he found corrupted and unfathomable. In response Khan Arzu, one of the greatest scholars of the age, an uncle to the poet Mir, and a philologist who anticipated William Jones by a few decades, defended Indians’ ability to compose in Persian as they liked by making a distinction between the spoken language and the learnt literary language…

The volume by Manu V Devadevan, The ‘Early Medieval’ Origins of India, is a significant contribution to pre-modern South Asian history. A reappraisal of the historiography of the period 600-1200 CE referred to as the ‘early medieval’, it is a valuable addition to the debate on what India is and how it should be understood. Critical of the scheme of periodization in Indian history and prevailing wisdom on early medieval period, the book is provocative and radical in its claim that India is a product of the early medieval times. It stands strongly against the popular imagination and existing knowledge that trace the beginnings of ‘Indian civilization’ to the second millennium BCE or the age of the Vedas…

This book is a collection of papers presented at a two-day seminar titled ‘Mughal Art and Culture’ organized by the KR  Cama Oriental Institute, Mumbai in 2017. A wonderful exhibit of the institutional patronage provided by the Parsi community to historical research pertaining to Iran and India, the book is a welcome addition to the history of the Mughal era while retaining its specialized focus on the history of art and architecture of the period. It begins with a short Foreword by Muncherji Cama (since deceased), President, Cama Institute, and Owner-Editor of Bombay Samachar, the Gujarati newspaper…

So far as a rigorous history of the upsurge of 1857 is concerned, Professor Rudrangshu Mukherjee is a formidable name.  After every 50 years of the event, something spectacular has happened. Scholarship on the history of 1857 has been rising with state-funded seminars, conferences and publications, in 1957, and 2007.  Mukherjee’s interventions have been much more profound and way beyond such sponsored research. He has also paid special attention to Awadh and Kanpur…

The book Waiting for Swaraj: Inner Lives of Indian Revolutionaries makes a distinctive contribution in locating the lives of revolutionaries of the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) and Hindustan Republican Socialist Association (HRSA) beyond their acts of heroism. It is, as the author Aparna Vaidik calls it, the evaluation of an ‘emotional community’ that these revolutionaries primarily belonging to the North of India forged. They were crafting in the process an incipient Hindi speaking public sphere that contributed to a lexicon in Hindi to imagine a new discursive India…

Narrative Pasts narrates the formation of the Muslim community in 15th century Gujarat. The work highlights the representational power of various literary genres—biographical, historical, genealogical etc. and the way these memorialize the 15th century landscape. It successfully demonstrates that the region of Gujarat had a significant position in the world of Islamicate South Asia wherein it shaped the literary developments as well as the identity of the Muslim communities in the subcontinent. The region was also the focal point of textual knowledge formation as well as a thriving urban settlement. Moreover…

Sometime around the 11th-12th century CE, Ramanuja, a great Shrivaisnava saint, accompanied by two disciples travelled from Srirangam (presently in Tiruchchirappalli district) to Tirukottiyur (currently in Sivaganga district) in the Tamil Nadu region to meet a renowned acharya (loosely translated as teacher) for the purpose of learning a mantra (esoteric sacred knowledge) otherwise exclusively confined to the Brahmanas of the Shrivaisnava community. We are told that Ramanuja’s interaction with the acharya was a test of his will power and patience…

Bhairabi Prasad Sahu, a veteran historian, has published a collection of fourteen essays on the history of pre-modern Odisha. The book explores the ‘convergences of culture, language, society and territory’ (p. 20) in the making of the Odisha region from the post-Mauryan times to the sixteenth century. It engages with issues of monarchical state formation, expansion of state-society, shaping of a region-specific caste system, spread of Puranic religions, growth of trade, markets and urbanization, and the evolution of Odia language and script…

Aloka Parasher Sen, otherwise known amongst students of history for her groundbreaking works on forest spaces and forest dwellers, especially the Mlecchas, has made another crucial intervention via the book under review. This book on the early history of Deccan is her labour of love, a token of gratitude to the city of Hyderabad, where she taught as Professor in the Department of History, Hyderabad Central University. In another piece of writing, a rather interesting bio-note, Sen admits that her stay in Hyderabad made her sensitive to the immediate environs and got her interested, academically, in the region…

Urbanization is considered to be a significant moment in human history. Mumford argues that urbanization took an unprecedented form by throwing off natural limits of the environment with industrialization. Thus, while urbanization in the past was a historical moment for detaching labour from land and nature, urbanization in the present is about bringing nature back to tackle the question of livability of the city. This has made contemporary urban discourses witness the emergence of debates such as green urbanism, eco-city, sustainable city, etc…

In writing Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India, Jessica Hinchy has given the world of gender and sexuality studies a much required in-depth history of the Hijra community. Based on years of her archival research published as independent papers in different journals, this book is also the story of encounters with violence, resistance, and resilience. Hidden behind the detailed academic analysis is the tale of survival of a community whose non-normativity and visibility made it a target of colonial control, surveillance, discrimination and even extermination…

The book The Death Script: Dreams and Delusions in Naxal Country is primarily a document discussing death in the aftermath of the Maoist insurgency of Bastar. The author Ashutosh Bhardwaj is a journalist who lived in the forests of Dandakaranya. His narration is a departure from journalistic writing as he uses creative ways to tell the stories of the Red Corridor of India, in which he is a participant rather than a mere observer. The book is divided into seven chapters. Each chapter is categorized in a creative way, and as a whole…

The events of Karbala are part of a tradition that is well documented in the observation of Moharram all over the world. The story told has also been across generations making these events a cultural artefact to be remembered and shared, with every episode echoed in a majlis, marsiya, noha, and more. Ismat Chughtai’s Ek Qatra-e-Khoon is a recounting of these events presented in the form of a novel, and particularly unique if one considers it alongside her other works…

1857 is etched in the historical memory of India, particularly of Indian Muslims, as a singular event that ushered in a tectonic shift in Indian history and transformed their fate forever. Their claim to equal citizenship, let alone supremacy, was permanently eroded and the process of their minoritization was slowly set in motion. Nineteenth-century Muslim intellectuals like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Mirza Ghalib had a vague sense of it. But others, especially those writing in the wake of  the 1947 Partition…

The Collectors’ Chughtai is a collection of twenty-nine short stories by Ismat Apa, or Ismat, as she is popularly referred to in the Urdu literary circles. Tahira Naqvi, who has translated other works by Chughtai, is the translator for this volume. Women Unlimited have once again done a favour to readers of translated Urdu afsanas and admirers of Ismat. Chughtai’s works regularly feature in graduate and postgraduate courses of literature or culture studies the world over. This is interesting since her works were first translated from Urdu to English not earlier than 1990…

To write is to demonstrate a principled willingness to be judged. The writer knows that her neck is on the line but she lives with this awareness and continues moving towards something more honest. She knows she will never be able to capture the entire human being, that her words—her most trusted aides—will fail her eventually, but she continues inching towards that failure ensuring that she fails well. In every failure she finds her reasons for embarking upon another failure, of a different and, preferably, better kind…

Shahryar (1936-2012) was a name incarnate indeed; the prince perfect of modern Urdu poetry. He was a person of suave manners and a poet of soft tone and tenor who stood out as an embodiment of urbanity in life and literature. He looked at life with clinical detachment and at literature with passionate commitment. During a literary career spread over five decades (1960-2012) and an academic career spanning over three decades (1966-1996), he earned a name for himself as an academic, editor, poet, and a film lyricist while balancing all these roles against one another with great distinction…

Grief and mourning are some of the hardest emotions to write about. The ongoing experience of the pandemic has returned us to these elemental experiences of loss and reminded us that words still carry the anguish of sorrow and the power of cathartic healing. Rabindranath Tagore’s poignant lyrics in Smaran and Palataka are both personal as well as timeless; they speak to all those who have lost beloved family members and those who fear such losses…