Akbar: A Novel of History is an English translation of Shazi Zaman’s Hindi novel Akbar (Rajkamal, 2016). The novel had attracted lots of critical attention and was applauded for its intricate narrative weave, historical authenticity and creative scholarship. In its present English avatar, the author repositions himself as a writer-translator to revalidate his labour of love and make it available to a potentially larger readership.
Ramachandra Guha is one of the few historians to have considered with any degree of seriousness the role of the Hindi film in keeping the chaotic diversity of India together. Kaveree Bamzai’s engaging book under review extends Guha’s basic premise by examining the making of a shared cultural space, even as it traces compellingly the journey of the three Khans through the Hindi film industry and a globalizing India.
2022
To miss making one’s way through Sukrita Paul Kumar’s Vanishing Words and to forgo being absorbed into the vortex of its supraconscious stillness would be, for any reader of poetry, a serious deprivation. Many layered, teasing in its apparent simplicity, and haunting in its profundity, this slim collection of thirty-four poems interspersed with artwork by the poet herself, is dedicated to ‘all those who are struggling to survive the onslaught of disease and the loss of dear ones in the recent times.’
2021
On reading the poems in Speak Woman! what comes up powerfully is how the world is perceived and made visible through the eyes of Agarwal. She is visible in her poems and makes sure that her presence and that of other women are not reduced to being in the background in comparison to traditional forms of writing where one is supposed to remove oneself from actively identifying with their works.
Jhilam Chattaraj is a Hyderabad-based academic and poet. Her debut poetry collection, Noise Cancellation, covers wide-ranging themes, including, but not limited to, food, politics, memory, and the body. In addition, the poet employs, in a versatile manner, disparate styles to explore, sketch, and examine these themes.
2021
Sanjeev Sethi’s fourth collection of poetry, Bleb, depicts the transcendence of human soul from self-love to spirituality and detachment. Bleb explores varied aspects juxtaposed with love—sexual exploration, paternity, spirituality, and death. The providential merges with the personal, the everyday with the unusual, offering life lessons to artists and lay readers alike.
I have read many of RK Narayan’s stories and novels. To me his books epitomize the adage ‘Simple Living-High Thinking’. His words flow like soft rain, gentle and beautiful, bringing to life dormant thoughts and emotions in the reader’s mind. The quirky people of Malgudi—the loving ayah, shrewd matchmaker, naughty Swami and his friends are all like family for avid readers India of the 80s.
I enjoyed reading the book Unheard Voices from Ancient Times. But would I enjoy reviewing the book, I wondered. To my delight, I found that I did! Beginning with the cover design, I looked at it from all angles. It set me thinking. I stared at the expanding, green spiral. Did it show the passage of time from the Jurassic Age to the Age of the Puranas
In India everyone buys gold. We are the world’s largest gold consumers. Indian households are the world’s largest holders of gold and household gold is believed to be 40 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. The country’s obsession with the precious metals has been there since time immemorial. Gold has always been held as a symbol of success. Considered auspicious, it has helped many people and families sail through in both good times and bad. Gold symbolizes the aspirations, the dreams, the success that everyone seeks.
Aijaz Ahmad’s most celebrated book is In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. It is, somewhat surprisingly, the only book he wrote. He published four other books which are all collections of essays (one of which, Lineages of the Present, appeared in two editions with non-identical tables of contents), three books where he is credited as editor or co-editor, and one book of edited conversations.
2022
If the challenge is that of ‘theorizing from the global south’ (p. 50), then the question to ask is, to what extent has the author of this book been successful in meeting this call. Madhok’s interest in offering us an empirical account of ‘subaltern struggles and contestations over rights’ (p. 2) from South Asia is to bring to our notice the conceptual vocabulary used in these struggles, pointing to a different notion of human rights.
In his debut volume, When Ideas Matter: Democracy and Corruption in India, Bilal A Baloch seeks to underscore the salience of ideology in shaping, dictating, and motivating the political elite’s behaviour. Political analysts have conventionally focused on material motivations behind elite political behaviour during the course of an electoral cycle. However, to what extent executive action is determined by ideational frameworks of those in power has largely remained an under-explored theme.
Located in a remote corner of India and, regrettably, the minds of most ‘mainland’ Indians, the North Eastern region has never been an easy site and space to think of, let alone write about. Immensely complex in terms of geography (territory), history, immigration and ethnic composition, economics and politics, the North East, which Sudeep Chakravarti quite correctly rechristens as (India’s) Far East, emerged out of the subcontinental decolonization process
One of the arguments put forward for the abrogation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) under Article 370 in August 2019 by the Central Government was that it hampered development in the erstwhile State. This ‘underdevelopment’ narrative was stressed vehemently by the ruling party at the centre at that time.
2020
A story of many sojourns, Kushan Mystique is a narrative of a cultural anthropologist David Jongeward who got attracted to Kushan history and Gandharan art and developed the symptoms of ‘Kushanitis’. Now what is this ‘Kushanitis’? In a delightful foreword, Joe Cribb, formerly of the British Museum, explains this term by saying that it is a condition of mind which afflicts a person and spreads easily when one comes into direct contact with the puzzle of the Kushan kings.
For quite a long time now, highly interesting fields of research such as the early modern courtly audience, had been disregarded, being considered as a crucial part of classical diplomatic history and hence a flagship of antiquated and Eurocentric historiographical research. But thanks to the development of new theoretical approaches such as global history, postcolonial studies, and the ‘New Diplomatic History’, the courtly audience has emerged as an extremely fruitful field of research, as numerous publications in recent years have shown.
26th September 2020 marked the 200th birth anniversary of Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, one of the prominent figures in Bengal Renaissance. A prolific writer, his works are considered to be ‘classics’ in contemporary times. Vidyasagar’s writings are an important source to discern the evolution of ideas, thoughts, and practices in Bengal.
The book under review presents a crucial framework to understand environmental issues at a comprehensive and global level. It underlines that it is imperative to reconsider the centrality of the nation-state as the basic unit of studying environmental changes, and it is necessary to move beyond that as the unit of analysis. In other words, the book represents the idea of writing environmental histories as a ‘nature without borders’.
Dev Nath Pathak’s In Defence of the Ordinary: Everyday Awakenings is an inordinary demonstration of a routine exercise that most sociologists, certainly in their professional lives, claim an association with: sociological imagination. Pathak too informs us about the deep connections between his personal and the public but his concerns are routed in assuringly different ways. Indulging in a polemic against himself, the author invites his readers to undertake a not-so-usual reading of politics and philosophy of knowledge.
There is no gainsaying that violence has been instrumental in creating and shaping societies. Less attention has been paid to shame and guilt—emotions that rarely show up in discussions on politics and society. Durba Mitra places these ideas front and centre in her devastating explication of the history of the linkages between notions of sexuality and their impact on the evolution of social thought in colonial India.