Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The figure of the youthful revolutionary is the space, both fictional and historical, real and metaphorical, from which the concerns of this book arise.

Dennis B. McGilvray in his book Crucible of Conflict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka, ex-plores the ethnography of the Eastern region of Sri Lanka, originally inhabited by Tamil Hindus, Moors, small number of Sinhala chena cultivators and Vedda hunters.

Reconciliation in post-war scenario is a complex process which involves genuine efforts by multiple stakeholders, not just the state to build a peaceful society.

In Kathmandu we discover, all the stories of the past are suffused with myth, and legends run circles around historical facts.

Nepal in Transition: From Peoples War to Fragile Peace straddles two choices—pulling in the writings of influential scholars who have politically explained the Maoist insurgency—Mahendra Lawoti (academic), Deepak Thapa (social scientist) and Devendra Raj Panday, (policy maker and civil society leader),

Prashant Jha’s Battles of the New Republic chronicles the two eventful decades, after 1990, of Nepal’s experiment with democracy.

In The Song of the Shirt: Cheap Clothes Across Continents and Centuries Jeremy Seabrook makes the despair of the garment workers of Bangladesh convincing.

The withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in 2014, leaving behind about 10000 odd soldiers for training and limited operations, in a sense symbolizes the end of an era.

Pakistan has been boxed in a peculiar paradoxical situation–on one hand it is pronounced as a state perpetrating militancy and on the other a victim itself of terrorism fighting rather hard to counter militancy.

aj Hashmi evidently utilized his four year stint at the US Department of Defence, Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, very well. He mentions conversations with student practitioners with service in theatres of the myriad and ongoing American wars.

This is a chilling account of the origins, ideological moorings, national ambitions and global outreach of one of the world’s most proscribed terrorist groups—the Lashkar–e-Taiba (LeT), designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation by the United States since December 2001 and also implicated by the United Nations since December, 2008 in its front denomination,Jamaat-ud-Daawa (JuD).

Ayesha Jalal’s latest work is a reflective account of Pakistan’s contemporary history and the nascent effort by its citizens to reimagine Pakistan, free from military dominance and as a ‘more resilient federal union’.