This was a story that was waiting to be told, a personalized documentation of three decades of theatre in Bombay from the sixties to the nineties. This mapping is done through the three spaces which became a catalyst for a certain kind of theatre to bloom. Significant theatre actors and directors emerged from that period, learning as they experimented and engaged with text and space that did not fit the conventional template. This inadvertently created an alternative vision of how performance could be viewed
I happened to be reading A. Mangai’s book, Acting Up: Gender and Theatre in India, 1979 Onwards’ during the run-up to what promised to be high drama at the Shani Shingnapur temple in Sonai, Ahmednagar District, Maharashtra. Trupti Desai of Pune’s Bhumata Brigade had announced her plan to storm the sanctum sanctorum of the temple, forbidden to women, with an army of 1000 women. If the police debarred them from marching in, she planned to drop down on the open sanctum from a helicopter.
In 1983 the noted scholar of early Indian textiles and trade routes, Lotika Varadarajan wrote a seminal book on South Indian Traditions Of Kalamkari, published by the National Institute of Design & Perennial Press, It covered all three traditions of South Indian Kalamkari—Macchlipatnam, Srikalahasti and the lesser known Sikkinaikenpet.
To a Kolkata-Bengali to the core like me, who unfortunately has lived out of the city for almost a quarter of a century now and in this period has been to the city only once during the Pujas, that too more than a decade back, and yet who is aware of the fact that it is exactly during this period that Durga Puja in Kolkata has completely metamorphosed, and is vaguely aware of what he has missed out on, this beautifully produced book came quite literally as godsend. Beautiful the book certainly is—shaped, sized, priced, and in looks as it is like a coffee table book—with glossy pages, a wonderfully designed dust jacket, and almost five hundred full-colour photographs, and yet it is not your usual coffee table book.
Our experience, both at the personal and the public level, shows that Art lives and grows in a climate of freedom, peer rivalry, and infrastructural support. An element of spontaneity and a dropping of one’s defences are key for human expression to be creative, for your imagination to take flight. Art begins here, in that flight of fancy which all of us have experienced at one time or another. Fear, the fear of someone looking over your shoulder, is often the biggest enemy of such flights of fancy.
Religious nationalism remains an important phenomenon in the last three decades, which has manifested itself in an explicit manner after the fall of the Soviet Union. The books under review seek to study the phenomena of terror and violence unleashed across the globe, which the authors argue, have deep linkages with the advent of religious nationalism.
Drones, or remotely piloted aircrafts, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), so to speak, have added a new dimension to the way war is conducted in the 21st century. Drones, besides being used as lethal weapons of war, have added functions of being instruments used for collection of intelligence and surveillance. Proponents of the use of drones in warfare, counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency believe that drones have made it possible to target the enemy without much collateral damage (civilian casualties). The added advantage of a drone is that not only can it hover over an area of operation for a long time, but also it does not require manpower in the line of fire, thereby removing the greatest limitations states face in war: body bags.
Non-Traditional Security Challenges in Asia edited by Shebonti Ray Dadwal, Fellow and head of the Non-Traditional Security Centre at the Institute for Defence and Security Studies (IDSA) and Uttam Kumar Sinha, Fellow, IDSA is a compilation of papers presented by scholars in the field of Non-Traditional Security (NTS) threats at the 14th Asian Security Conference organized by the IDSA in February, 2012. It appears that while the International edition of this book was published in 2015, the South Asia edition has become available only in early 2016.
2016 got off to an inglorious start for India Pakistan relations with the attack on Pathankot’s Air Force base by terrorists allegedly affiliated to the Jaish-e-Mohammad militant group. The outfit, headquartered in Bahawalpur district, a cotton farming area in Pakistani Punjab, is one of a number of terrorist outfits operating in the region. In addition to Bahawalpur, areas like Rahim Yar Khan, Dera Gazi Khan, Chiniot and Jhang are considered fertile breeding ground for terrorist recruitment. Tashfeen Malik, one of the San Bernardino shooters, was apparently radicalized in Multan.
A complex, enigmatic web of contravening ideas and beliefs shaped Benazir Bhutto’s personality and also determined her political journey in one of the most challenging contexts in the region—Pakistan. As a newly created state with a religiously defined national identity, Pakistan’s social strata was yet to reconcile with the assertions and authority of women as politicians. Therefore, for reasons well understood, a wide range of scholarship has commented upon the life and political trajectory of the late Bhutto scion—a life so splendid, politically charged with its share of agony, yet cut short in a brutal assassination.
Don’t talk of hawks and doves. We are running a foreign policy, not a bird sanctuary.’ Former External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh’s riposte in 1988 when asked whether he was a hawk or a dove. Khurshid Kasuri served as Pakistan’s Foreign Minister (2002– 07) when General Parvez Musharraf was President. He succeeded Abdul Sattar, a former career diplomat, whom Musharraf had appointed immediately following the 1999 coup. (Sattar had briefly served in the same capacity in a caretaker government in 1993.
Burma’s strategic importance to India cannot be underestimated. A neighbour with 1600 kms border, a number of ports facing each other across the Bay of Bengal and four traditional roads connecting the two countries and administratively linked to India under British rule, India and Burma (Myanmar) share commonalities of history, culture, religion, ethnicity and spirituality. Myanmar is the perfect economic bridge between India and China and between South and Southeast Asia.
The plight of border communities, sundered by the Partition is now well recognized in all its dimensions—displacement, rehabilitation, economic and social disruption. While the brunt of the negative fallout was borne by the main inhabited areas along the Radcliffe Line (boundary between India and Pakistan and later Bangladesh), in more remote areas the impact was more economic. Yet over the years the communities living across each other along the border have found ways and means to continue their economic linkages through both formal and informal channels.
The book traces two centuries old history of plantations in Sri Lanka from its inception in the early 19th century to the present. In doing so the book highlights the complex interrelationship between power and class, gender and ethnic hierarchies. The authors are well known social scientists and have already made a mark as perceptive writers on Sri Lankan history and politics. Based on their rich experience, coupled with extensive use of archival and secondary sources and enriched by personal interviews with key players the book is an invaluable contribution to Sri Lankan history and politics.
2015
Tabish Khair’s The New Xenophobia is a bold effort to examine an increasingly pressing universal phenomenon, which the world has been ignoring as being part of the past. The importance of this work is that it seeks to place what it terms as ‘New’ in the perspective of what was the old xenophobia within the author’s broad concept that ‘Power refers to any imposition, the physical or not, of one consciousness upon another’ approvingly quoting Emmanuel Levinas, the French Lithuanian 20th century philosopher, on the nature of violence beyond the physical.
India’, according to Bharat Karnad, ‘is a latter day Hanuman, potentially powerful, but dwarfed by doubts, unsure of its strengths, [and] weighed down by a sense of its own weakness.’ The Monkey God in the Ramayana was able to at least shakeoff his misgivings and triumph when it mattered. For Karnad, there is little evidence that India can do the same. It is a nation, as his scathing critique suggests, which ‘has been down for so long in history’ that bursts of recognition from the outside are treated unevenly as a mark of achievement.
Billed as a ‘new history of the world’, this ambitious attempt at chronicling a version of world history from the perspective of the Eurasian Trade Routes is a great text. Peter Frankopan prefaces the book by condemning the excessively Eurocentric approach to traditional history writing as an explanation for this work. Outlining his dissatisfaction with the way history was taught, he talks about how as a child he had a world map in his bedroom.
Ronojoy Sen’s work suggests that the history of sports in India is much more than mere pastime and play. A study of the chequered history of sport would for Sen reveal much about the nature of Indian society, its values, ethics, aspirations, fissures, and very importantly the dynamics of power play. As Sen’s book succinctly portrays, the saga of sports in India has been inextricably bound with issues of class, identity mobility and patronage.
Bahram Modi, the Parsi merchant in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke, turns to his associate in the last few pages of the novel and remarks poignantly, ‘When they make their future, do you think they will remember us… Do you think they will remember what we went through? Will they remember that it was the money we made here, the lessons we learnt and the things we saw that made it all possible?’ The urge to be remembered has been a recurring motive in history, though a privilege limited to very few.
Jihad is a much used and abused term in the contemporary twenty-first century. Today’s world has seen the proliferation of self-proclaimed jihadi groups claiming responsibility for terror strikes like the 9/11 attacks in the USA and the recent Paris strikes. The backdrop of these terrorist activities is the geopolitics of wars and oil refineries and the quest by western powers to spread democracy to the so called non-democratic Islamic world.