Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Chandrika Balan’s collection of short stories is a rich addition to the multicultural and multilingual reality of our times.

This novel is by the well-known academic, the sociologist of middle-class India, Dipankar Gupta. The Crime Writers Festival at Delhi revealed that he had written LTY under the pseudonym of Doug Gunnery.

Bruce King’s Rewriting India charts new grounds in the study of Indian English writing. Any discussion on Indian English writing is bound to fall into the familiar trap of postcolonialism and the writers’ complicity in furthering the imperial discourse.

Bhagwandas Morwal is one of those rare Hindi writers who have consciously and continuously striven to extend the limits of their socio-creative oeuvre.

This is a remarkable story. The author, his wife and daughter (the book has been authored by the father-daughter duo)—all enthusiasts, music lovers, avid collectors are rummaging through a kabadi shop when Abha (wife) stumbles across dusty cartons of cylinders which the shopkeeper tells her are textile yarn winding accessories. They bring the cartons home. Some of the cylinders are labelled and dated.

Although this is yet another volume on dalit writing which adds to the burgeoning dalit discourse, it is welcome because dalit literature constitutes an important segment of postmodern literature in India in particular and is a prominent literary site in the South Asian context in general.

Inclusion and exclusion are two contradictory processes which coexist in both the developed and developing countries. The widening gap between rich and poor across the world is an instant example of exclusion.

‘Nearly every book’, George Orwell famously wrote in 1946, ‘is capable of arousing passionate feeling’—feeling which may range from ‘passionate dislike’ to equally passionate admiration—in the mind of the reader (George Packer [Comp.] George Orwell: Critical Essays, London, 2009, p. 290).

Innovations in Maternal Health: Case Studies from India (2014) edited by a team of researchers from the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) describes a series of interventions which aim to improve maternal health among some of India’s poorest communities.

The study of masculinity as a distinct area framing and being framed by cultural and collective practices rather than as a binary of gender is a relatively recent phenomenon within the academic discipline of gender studies.

Indians who travel abroad or migrate internationally rarely write about the societies they intimately encounter and adopt as ‘home’. Contrastively, from the time of the colonial era, western writers have produced a copious and authoritative body of travelogues, fiction, and scholarship on the Indian subcontinent.

In the post-economic reform era the Chinese society has witnessed the emergence of newly rich class enjoying the benefits of economic prosperity. There is growing awareness over delivery of services, quality of products, protection of legal rights, i.e., based on the weiquan movement of early 2000s, as argued by Jonathan Benney (2013) in his celebrated work Defending Rights in Contemporary China.