Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

As the title indicates this book is about the malleable boundaries between migrants, refugees and the stateless in a world where borders become indicators of freedom of movement. The regional focus is South Asia with all its geographical, historical, political and social complexities.

This book needs to be appreciated as a culmination of a three ecade engagement with the city of Madurai and a select set of residents who became the author’s respondents and very close friends.

Aquestion calculated to test the mettle of even those intimately familiar with the history of colonial Calcutta—what is common to Mahesh-chandra Das De, Aghor-chandra Das Ghose and Jaharilal Sil? These names will not occur in any roll call of honour but as pamphleteers of urban phenomena such as storms, bridges and fish epidemics, they were nonpareil.

‘The ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity.’ (Giorgio Agamben, What Is The Contemporary?, p. 45)

Secularism in India has always been a contested terrain at both conceptual and practical levels. With the advent of modernity and democracy preceding the wave of industrialization, unlike in the West, it has largely been understood as a peculiar Indian phenomenon distinct from the western secular models.

Secularism in India has always been a contested terrain at both conceptual and practical levels. With the advent of modernity and democracy preceding the wave of industrialization, unlike in the West, it has largely been understood as a peculiar Indian phenomenon distinct from the western secular models.

Secularism in India has always been a contested terrain at both conceptual and practical levels. With the advent of modernity and democracy preceding the wave of industrialization, unlike in the West, it has largely been understood as a peculiar Indian phenomenon distinct from the western secular models.

Until the end of the 19th century the Adivasis enjoyed a relatively bucolic existence in the Princely State of Bastar. They were not subject to the exploitative caste relationships that existed on the plains, and the sparsely populated forests provided them with space to practice shifting cultivation, collect forest produce and hunt animals.

There are two intrinsic aspects that characterize the newness of this study. The book establishes a serious engagement between political theorization and everyday world of tribal communities in contemporary India. It evokes the notion of law as a determining reference point to understand the changing political world of tribal communities.

We need to establish that proper names are an integral part of systems we have been treating as codes: as means of fixing significations by transposing them into terms of other significations. Would this be true if it were true, as logicians and some linguists have maintained that proper names are, in Mell’s phrase, ‘meaningless’ in signification?
– Levi-Straus