In the last two decades a number of autobiographies have been published both in English and regional languages documenting the experience of dalit-ness and the constitution of the dalit self. Some of these autobiographies are by dalit women and it forefronts the gendered experience of caste, critiquing dalit men, the dalit movement and the mainstream feminist movement..
The known academic culture of India also harbours within it another unknown culture made up of provincial universities rooted in the spirit of the area.
At the core of the spread of mass schooling in democratic nations has been a set of ideas and beliefs.
Beginning in the 1970s, sociology of education in India has been marked more by debates and theories than field work. Ethnographies of Schooling in Contemporary India is an important contribution to this context.
Part of the Oxford Series of short introductions Political Economy of Reforms in India by Rahul Mukherji runs over 200 pages.
The recent right turn in Indian politics has left the Left parties in a lurch. The 2014 Lok Sabha election electorally devastated the entire Left, particularly the Communist Party of India-Marxist. Vijay Prashad’s No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism examines the existential crisis faced by the Left parties in India given the formidable challenge from the Right, especially from the dizzying electoral success of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
wo young women in creative collaboration, looking at a train winding its way through the hills and immortalizing this moment on canvas—all the symbols on this cover—the blue sky, the hills in the distance, the misty horizon, the train, the sparse vegetation, the canvas and brush and the two female figures—signal the literary intention of the writer. She has set out, in the six short stories in this collection, to decode the lives of women as they negotiate their lives and search for meaning and identity.
Having been close to Khushwant and hearing countless stories firsthand, reading the book made me feel as though I am sitting by him, listening to him recount his impression of ideas, people and places. He remains the best raconteur I knew, and will probably never meet anyone better.
The Spinner’s Tale is a confusing title for this book. The Making of a Jehadi would have been a more apt title for it. It begins with an improbable scene.
Walt Whitman, the American poet, essayist and humanist, had famously declared, ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
In 1989–90, an Islamist insurgency broke out in the Kashmir Valley. This was a time when much else was happening around the world. The mighty Soviet Russia had taken a beating in Afghanistan.
Books on actresses working in the public theatres in India are a rarity and in that sense Sarvani Gooptu’s The Actress in the Public Theatres of Calcutta is a bit of a novelty. It begins with a premise of tracing the journey of women and their engagement with early theatrical practices in Calcutta.