From the thirteenth century onward, cities played a central role in the emergence, consolidation and subsequent expansion of Muslim power across large sways of the Indian subcontinent. The Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526), the Mughal Empire (1526– 1857), as well as smaller medieval Muslim principalities such as the sultanates of the Deccan, revolved around urban agglomerations that were simultaneously seats of power, centers of learning and economic hubs. The intimate relations of Indian Muslims with the urban environment remains epitomized, to this day, by the takhallus (nom de plume) of many Urdu poets, which showcases their belonging to a particular city.
Debjani Das’s book attempts a close look at the history of the establishment of asylums in various parts of Bengal throughout the nineteenth century. The book is rich in archival detail with the different chapters complementing the themes considered for discussion.The first theme is the exploration of the linkages of the politics of inner space and geographical location of the asylums with that of the emergence of the various definitions of insanity intervened by notions about race.
The historiography of colonial rule in India has for long been focused on the polarities of coercion and consent. Over the past two decades or so, historians have done much to further our understanding of the admixture of force and collaboration in sustaining colonial domination. More recent works inspired by Foucauldian notions of governmentality have drawn our attention to the workings of colonial power at its point of application. These have underscored the extent to which imperial governance was, in practice, far from being ideologically stable and self-confident, and was actually shot through with uncertainty and panic, hesitancy and contradiction
Almost all studies of the colonial Indian military establishment which impinge on the relationship between the British and Indian personnel of the colonial Indian armed forces focus attention on the existential crisis of the colonial subjects in military uniform. This existential crisis arose from the peculiar colonial circumstances which governed the lives and societies of these, to use a cliched term, peasants in uniform. There is no dearth of books and articles written on the subject of obedience and disobedience among the Indians who served as soldiers and junior officers first in the three Presidency Armies and later in the Indian Army. Many of these narratives are mentioned and discussed in the Introduction by Dasgupta.
Zia ud Din Barani, in his Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi begins his account of the history of the Delhi Sultanate where Qazi Minhaj ud Din Juzjani had left it in his Tabaqat-i Nasiri. Minhaj had covered the history of mankind from Adam till the end of Sultan Nasir ud Din’s reign. Thus, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi begins from the accession of Balban in AH 662/1266 CE and it is brought to the sixth year of Firuz Shah Tughlaq’s reign in AH 758/1357.
This book is the author’s attempt to make her reader experi-ence diverse aspects of the lives of the ‘poor’ in this country. Without going into the complexity of defining a phenomenon as massive as poverty, the author has simply taken the reader through journeys of people from various parts of India in their quest of the basics.
The Turn of the Tortoise (TOT) is an exhaustive and superbly written book that enagages the gamut of governance issues concerning growth, welfare and foreign policy with significant and unusual insights that derive from the author’s engagement with the real world. The book speaks to a wide range of issues ranging from entrepreneurship, corruption, governance, environment, poverty alleviation, foreign relations, and even compares the governance of growth in India and China and the implications of the rise of China for India.
India has recently been introduced to the idea of the Smart City. Exactly what shape any ‘smart city’ will take is a matter of debate. The reality of Indian cities is that they are messy, with multiple processes and phenomenon going on at the same time, several of which appear to be the exact opposite of one another. Sanjay Srivastava’s book Entangled Urbanisms: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon, contends with some of these processes that are making the city what it is
As a sociologist of education, I have dwelt on the inequalities present in not only our education system but also in the many processes, activities and inter-subjective interactions that characterize life in educational institutions. These have brought home to me the heightened significance of certain categories in understanding inequity in education, including caste, gender, religion, linguistic abilities, and disabilities of different kinds.
The ‘Insider’ versus the ‘Outsider’ debate is not new in social science research. Indian sociology, in fact, has largely privileged the Outsider. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is that the late 18th and mid 19th century Orientalists were convinced that Outsiders like themselves were more capable than Natives of obtaining authentic knowledge, because of their guiding principles of ‘objectivity’ and ‘scientific rigour’. Even after Indian Independence, many sociologists believed that emotional and intellectual detachment was possible by studying a social group very different from one’s own.
Destination India: From London Overland to India is the last co-authored book of Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph—the intellectual stalwarts and eminent scholars of modern India. The book under review is an intellectual biographical account of their joint academic journey of six and half decades revealing the historical trajectory of their writings. The book is neatly divided into three essays in a compact and small size with an attractive lay out.
The US Presidential elections are upon us and what better time to read political memoirs of the leading Presidential candidates than this? Bernie Sanders is junior Senator from Vermont and was the first Independent elected to the US House of Representatives in forty years. He is the longest serving Independent in the history of the US Congress and is the co-founder of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest caucus in Congress. He joined the Democratic Party in 2015 and is currently fighting for the nomination of the party.
Those with some knowledge of the rise and expansion of social welfare states in the West post-Second World War know that social welfare for the socially and economically underprivileged and needy was necessitated for the sake of capitalism in order to mitigate many social and economic tensions. It proved functional for a considerable length of time until about the 1980s when the new Right political philosophy and political economy came out with a virulent assault on social welfare and the public institutional structures built around it.
2015
India Since 2002 is a collection of critical reflections by Mukul Dube on the socio-political happenings in India in the aftermath of the Gujarat genocide of 2002, previously published in the weekly Mainstream between 2002 and 2015. Dube’s principal focus in this anthology is the depredations of the Sangh Parivar, the torch bearer of the ‘Vedic Taliban’ and Hindu fundamentalism.
In 1987, Doordarshan, the state-controlled television network, began to air Ramanand Sagar’s popular show based on the epic Ramayana. Its broadcast was a remarkable departure for a government institution like Doordarshan from the Nehruvian mandate to uphold a secular and modern character and eschew tradition, especially when invoked in the context of religion. The televisual retelling of the epic achieved unprecedented popularity.
This volume offers a comparative perspective of media in two very different countries, and the ways in which they are changing. Eighteen writers—mostly scholars and journalists—bring their experience and differing perspectives to it, and pick a range of subjects to look at, through twin perspectives. The editors devise a structure in which chapters on China and India alternate through four sections which explore structure, reporters, practices and comparative case studies in two areas—social media, and disaster reporting.
Along with Mohan Rakesh, Vijay Tendulkar and Girish Karnad, Badal Sircar was a preeminent playwright who shaped our modern theatre. Ebong Indrajeet (Evam Indrajeet, ‘And Indrajeet’, 1963) and Pagla Ghoda (‘Mad Horse’, 1967) are undisputed classics of the modern Indian stage, translated into several languages and performed across the country. They blazed a trail, and opened new vistas. Badal Sircar was a playwright of great power and technical sophistication.
The nature and purport of this book is clearly explained by its title. It is a dictionary in English of technical terms, legal, political and administrative, used in the Sanskrit language.Such works on Sanskrit already exist for grammar and priestly rituals. The most recent are Abhyankar and Shukla’s A Dictionary of Grammar, 1986, and Sen’s A Dictionary of Vedic Rituals, 1978. The need for one on law, statecraft and political science prompted the present compilation, it being felt that technical terms on these subjects were not available sufficiently in standard Sanskrit-English dictionaries.
2015
Suleiman Charitra is a truly amazing little book. A short work in Sanskrit from the 16th century, it’s title should be enough of a clue to even the casual reader about its hybrid nature. It is a perfectly synthetic work that, on the surface, tells a story from the Semitic tradition in the form of a classical Sanskrit narrative—the Charitra, i.e., the acts of a great man who might be a king, a hero, or even a god. But below the surface, there are currents and eddies, perhaps even whirlpools, that sweep us off our feet and away into an unexpected story land
In Chinglam, most of what I plan comes true and that has seldom happened to me in any other place. The days were stolen before they had begun; I think I never saw a day. When I was a child I remember days that stretched into infinity with the certainty of other infinite days; certain, unhurried and brimmingly full.For the reader, the beauty of life in a solitary mountainous retreat in the North East is evoked in this very image of time hanging so heavy; the author’s day-to-day journal describes small and unrelated acts of quotidian life, human exchanges, and communion with nature, children and animals minutely one after the other as she reminisces about her life as a recluse for a year.