The book under review, an edited volume by Saitya Brata Das and Soumyabrata Choudhury, comprising fifteen articles divided into two sections, is one of the important epistemic interventions concerning violence and its metaphysics. Besides addressing aforesaid questions in different ways, the book surprisingly and illuminatingly underlines the question of violence or violence theory in those thinkers/philosophers (Rene Girard, Sigmund Freud, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Schelling, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Musil, Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin) who are otherwise known for their different impactful and consequential works. Identified realms of weight of violence are religion, language and politics.
In his obituary to Benedict Anderson, historian Ramchandra Guha recollects a letter from him in which he asked, ‘How many public intellectuals are there in India? In Southeast Asia they are dying, replaced by professors and bureaucrats to whom not many ordinary people pay any attention… I guess your Gandhi was a public intellectual, but probably Nehru not???????’The worry about the disappearance of the institution of public intellectual is widespread. Romila Thapar expressed her own anxiety about the decreasing tribe of public intellectuals in the annual Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture in 2014 titled To Question or Not to Question
To those who describe Bhikhu Parekh as the leading political theorist of Indian origin, essays in this volume will show that such parochial frames of representation do not do justice to his ideas. He is, and must be viewed as an eminent political theorist of our time, whose work has contributed enormously to our thinking about political concepts that we use to analyse the modern world and confront the challenges of our time.
It is perhaps a cliché to argue that South Asia is a potpourri of different influencing societies, nationalities, ethnic traditions and cultural heritages. South Asian culture is rich and varied underlining the complex relationship between its myriad common traditional cultures. The nations share an ethnic background and most of the territorial divisions have come up only in the recent past.
I have just read the 40 years of the Book Review. Wonderful, if you have not read it, well need I say you should! One of the editors is close to me, in many ways. I think she wanted to render homage to the words and books which, nurtured us, accompanied us. We grew up in a home, I say home not house for therein lies the difference, for words meant a lot to us, in a home I was saying, where the walls were lined with books which murmured wherever we moved, whatever we did. This constant presence never did quieten, throughout our lives the ‘emanating words, words from the walls words from the air’
To review a classic is always difficult. How much could one praise and fawn over a book which reads so delightfully that you tend to forget that it is a nonfiction piece of work? Malcom Mcdonald was the UK High Commissioner to India in the 1950s and lived in the heart of Delhi, the Lutyen’s zone. Being a bird watching enthusiast he spent a lot of time observing the feathered ones in his garden.
For many people living in rural and suburban areas, coming across wild animals is a part of life. Be it that friendly squirrel or the (ever-dwindling) flock of sparrows, or the sinister snake that lives at the end of the garden. However, as urban sprawls expand to swallow up green spaces, these relationships are becoming ever scarcer.
In her first book of poetry Indu Mallah has chosen as her epigraph an exquisite poem by Ralph Nazareth. The glassblower’s art becomes a metaphor for the art of writing: ‘I’ve seen / Glassblowers/ stretch little / Into much. / Such is my hope / For words—/ Blowing syllables up / To hold a world / Close to breaking.The first part of the poems in this collection deals with her family, husband, sons, daughter. The feelings of intense love, pain and loss pervade this section. In the first poem, ‘Meeting Points’, is to her husband, whom death snatched away.
As a curious reader scans the titles of the poems listed on the contents page of the poetry collection of Jayant Parmar’s Pencil aur Doosri Nazmein translated by Nishat Zaidi as Pencil and Other Poems, an unsurprising summation ensues: poems related to nature with images from the flora and fauna; ghazals and nazms, predictably expected from an Urdu poet; then poems that are dedications to persons; poems about persons and poems related to places and travel. The reader is reassured of the obvious terrain to traverse. Comforted, the process of reading the poems begins.
Sahil Loomba’s debut novel The Faceless Saldirgan is the perfect screen play for a masala potboiler. A thriller with the right blend of intrigue and suspense, it keeps the reader on edge as suspicion darts from one suspect to the other. For a seasoned discerning reader of crime fiction, none are above suspicion but Loomba factors in the right elements, ‘a multi-billionaire victim, gruesome body art, tantalizing allegations, media frenzy, destroyed reputations and what not!’ along with a gripping pace and provocative clues
2015
Amitava Kumar’s Lunch with a Bigot is divided into four main sections— Reading, Writing, Places and People. They offer a road map to navigate through the different articles that were written and published in diverse places.In the first section, there is a journey through his childhood experience and him emerging as a person who was grasping varied experiences and incorporating them as his ‘resource bank’. I have recently read Sudhir Kakkar’s memoirs and the narration of his own childhood. In my mind, there is an intermingling of his narration with that of Amitava’s in terms of the evocative details offered of the experience.
2014
The book is set against the backdrop of the rise of insurgency in Kashmir, when what began as a conflict between rival political groups escalated into youth crossing the border into Pakistan to return with kalashnikovs. The brutality with which the army responds turns the valley into a war zone. Kashmir is virtually under siege. The novel provides an insider’s view of how political apathy coalesces with mindless military brutality to wreak havoc on the lives of ordinary people by focusing on one woman’s desperate and futile search for her missing son.
2015
Crimson City, the fourth Muzaffar Jang mystery by Madhulika Liddle, is a whodunit set in mid-seventeenth century Dilli with the Mughal court as its backdrop. Emperor Shah Jahan’s grandiose plans have begun to deplete the exchequer dangerously. A Mughal army is besieging the fort of Bidar, as a first step towards conquering the Bijapur kingdom with its enormous wealth.
Writings by Adivasis (ecriture) which have emerged in India during the last three decades mark an important milestone in the context of the cultural expression of Adivasis hitherto found only in the oral-performative tradition (orature). These writings are markers of identity assertion and cultural activism by educated Adivasis who want to write about themselves in their own words to combat their degraded or exoticized depiction by non-Adivasi writers. One needs to read Narayan’s interview (Kocharethi, OUP, 2011, 208–16) to realize why educated Adivasis are prompted to pick up their pen.
2015
Rohith Vemula’s hanging body; Soni Sori’s swollen face; Kawasi Hidme’s ejecting uterus; Monisha, Priyanka and Suranya’s floating bodies—all have one thing in common—these are Dalit bodies. Living or dead, their faces, uterus, eyes, hands and feet are first Dalit, then parts of a human body. This raises a crucial question: how can a human body, an anatomical subject formed of cells that are always dissolving, regenerating and growing, embody something as non-biodegradable as caste?
There is hardly any doubt that Kannada has one of the richest traditions of literary writings and debates, reflecting a largely uninterrupted continuity from pre-colonial to modern times. For whatever awards are worth, it is perhaps not accidental that its writers have received the highest number of Jnanapith awards in post-Independence India. Assured of their bedrock of literary output and open always to literatures across the world, Kannada writers have written their own works and translated from the best writing available, always evolving as the social context changed, in terms of literary form and content.
2015
Ashapurna Debi is one of the first Bengali women writers to bring to the fore the condition of Bengali women in the larger part of the 20th century. She was known as one of the first Bengali writers to write realistically about the life these women faced within the four walls of the house, in the midst of complex family relationships, petty jealousies and other experiences. The stories in this collection The Matchbox, translated from the Bengali by Prasenjit Gupta are part of this same mosaic, delineating the emotions of the ordinary middle class Bengali, whose outward lives seem devoid of sensationalism, to the extent that everyday is like the previous one, or even the next one, yet these same lives contain within them a psychological and emotional terrain that is far more complex than the external image.
The Last Candles of the Night is the fourth and last novel by Ian Bedford, who passed away, at the age of 76, shortly after the novel was published. He must have been a remarkable man. He did his Master’s in Lahore, studied Islam in Pakistan and India, did much field research work in India, Pakistan and elsewhere in Central Asia, translated Urdu poetry, explored Sufism and Indian classical music, and married an Indian woman. And yes, he worked in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University for decades before taking to writing fiction.
In 1931 sculptor Carl Milles cast Poseidon in 23 feet of imposing metal and the Southern Port City of Gothenburg, Sweden installed him atop a fountain as homage to the seas and their Viking past.About 60 years later a Swede left Gotaplatsen and the shadow of Poseidon behind him and travelled East until destiny brought him in front of another idol.30 odd feet of garishly painted metal sheeting tacked to a bamboo scaffolding!
In a recent interview, US President Barack Obama said, ‘when I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels.’ Shane Joseph’s latest book, In The Shadow of the Conquistador, is indeed one such novel from which we can learn much. While on its surface it might appear to be a lovetriangle romantic story, it has a lot to offer in our understanding of the human spirit that at times lusts for conquest and colonization, but can develop bonds of friendship which sometimes lead to betrayal, and yet through the power to love it can overcome evil.