Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

An anthology is like an Indian thali—it serves small portions of different things, a couple of staples, and by providing a representative sample it facilitates further explorations.

Wildlife, forests and natural resources in India have never before been under such a concerted threat of obliteration, as they are now, under a regime that is as keen on overexploiting them as they are cavalier towards the intrinsic value of the environment to human survival.

Elephants and Kings is a thorough survey of where war elephants came from, where they went, and where they did not go.

Today, in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, it is nearly impossible to not hear something or the other about China every day.

Science and technology are often understood as socially disembodied and outside the cultural domain of values, although this view has been criticized by scholars working in the field of Science, Technology and Society (STS) Studies since the 1970s, and the scholarly endeavours resonated well with the civil society critique of the epistemology of modern science and the moral universe S&T was embedded in.

Thanks, perhaps to the Himalayas, India has largely had a westwards ori-entation. Or to be a bit more accurate, the West has always looked towards India, from the time of Alexander the Great. Neither statement is fully true but it does tell us how India’s links with the East have never been quite as deep as with the region to the West of India. Historically the only link that India had with the East was through Buddhism. In a large measure, conquest has been the reason for this orientation.

Colonisation: A Comparative Study of India and Korea edited by eminent scholars Vyjayanti Raghavan and R. Mahalakshmi is a timely study of the colonial experiences of the Indian subcontinent and the Korean Peninsula.

The visit by the Chinese President Xi Jinping to Pakistan in April 2015 saw repeated references to some clichéd phrases describing Sino-Pak relationship, like ‘all weather friendship’. Some new linguistic coinage emerged, such as, ‘visiting brother’s home’ and, ‘security for one as stability for the other’.

For an accurate, quick, synoptic as well as visual history of Russia, there could not have been a better book than Ian Barnes’s Historical Atlas of Russia.

Robert Crews of Stanford University’s Department of History has penned an unusual narrative about Afghanistan, dispelling the negative portrayals of it—as an anachronistic, unchanging, primitive, and ethnically divided ‘graveyard of empires.’ From a rugged, variegated transit territory, it was cobbled into a country two and a half centuries ago. Its sense of nationhood has remained strong (it has not had a secessionist movement in recent memory), even if its state structure has been weak. Contrary to the current western discourse, Crews sees Afghanistan as ‘an expansive space that accommodated varying kinds of networks that crisscrossed the region and the globe, rather than a static collection of tribes

The very divergent political evolution of the Indian and Pakistani armed forces has long puzzled political analysts. Why has the Indian Army turned its back on domestic politics, while the Pakistan Army has directly ruled the country for extended periods and controls its national security policy? Why do the two Armies, cut from the same cloth, behave so differently?

While I was in the midst of reading this book, repetition of a gruesome incident in neighbouring country, Bangladesh, shook me up.