Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Portuguese imperialism sought to present itself as the embodiment of a divine Caesar and thereby to absolve itself from the obligation of render¬ing the spoils either unto God or unto Caesar. Rapine became thus an essential part of the crusade. The Portuguese could thus evolve a curious blend of lust for gold and souls. Its numismatic expres¬sion was the Cruzado.

Among the Western inter¬preters of Indian art, Alice Bonar was remarkable in that she was not only an art his¬torian but also an artist her¬self with the deep insight and vision which only a practising artist can possess. Born in Switzerland, she studied art in Brussels, Munich and Basle and set up her own studio, first in her native country and later in Paris.

This book, a revised version of the author’s Ph.D. thesis, seeks to ‘highlight processes of socio-religious transforma¬tion within a specific region and cultural context into which iconography provides useful and interesting insights’. The author believes that this approach will fulfill a long-felt need for a meaningful analysis of the evolution of iconographic concepts and their im-pact on socio-cultural groups and religious systems.

Krishna Chaitanya’s book is the first of a series on different aspects of Indian cul¬ture being put out by the India Library. The book is a broad survey that includes material from our religions, literature and the arts. It can be considered a book of ideas; each idea is examined for its contribution to the meaning and texture of our life-style and world-view.

During the past two deca¬des there has been a greater emphasis on the in-depth study of ‘regional history’. It has been observed that the general tendencies in history apparently found over a vast geo-political reality take differ¬ent forms in diverse situations. Like most other regions, Gujarat assumes some peculiar features which are reflected throughout its history. Being a coastal area, it has been open to the outer world for centuries—mainly for merc¬antile transactions.

This book is one of the pro¬ducts of a two-year travail undertaken by a committed European socialist social his¬torian to understand trade unionism among Nigerian port and dock workers and to interpret its implications for them. With disarming frank¬ness, the author reminds us of ‘the 150-year old tradition in the literature on the working class which holds that socia¬lism is necessary in order to overcome capitalist exploita¬tion, oppression, anarchy and waste’ and that ‘the force to bring about the overthrow of capitalism is the working class’.

Mushirul Hasan’s edited, volume deals with the 47 years before Independence in which there was an upsurge of poli¬tical activity both in the Hindu and Muslim communities. This series of nineteen articles deals with two correlated develop¬ments over this period, the politicization of the Muslims through the Khilafat move¬ment which was pegged on a pan-Islamic concept —the reinstatement of the Turkish Khalif, a titular custodian and defender of Islamic holy places after his displacement by the British in 1919—and on communalism and its political usage.

This first volume of a projec¬ted series follows generally the pattern established in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Selected Works, which is a project of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memo¬rial Fund. This volume covers the period upto 1918 when Motilal was poised to emerge on the national scene as a close colleague of Gandhiji during the first Satyagraha Move¬ment.

In this latest publication, Professor Amartya Sen sets out to debunk an accepted doctrine in national and international food policy with his well-known talent for logical ana¬lysis, factual home-work and clarity of exposition.

In February 1962 there ap¬peared a document at the Oberhausen Festival known in film history as the ‘Oberhausen Manifesto’. Twenty-six young signatories documented their frustration with German Cinema and their will to change it. The ‘Manifesto’ noted the collapse of the con¬ventional German Cinema and declared that the new cinema needed

With a Newground publi¬cation, there is no need for the embarrassed wariness with which one normally confronts the Slim First Collection. Newground is a group of young poet-publishers who are careful about what they com¬mit to print. Like other poets they have published (Santan Rodrigues, Eunice de Souza, Saleem Peeradina), Manohar Shetty makes poems seriously, and has honed away at his productions for six years before offering up this spare collection.

There is a change in the manner in which cookbooks are being written now. Earlier, they were mere recipes. The transformation that has come about is that a related history about the dish, or about the concerned region, from where the recipes have been chosen are now added.

Temsula Ao, a poet and a short story writer, is the recipient of several awards, among them the Padmashri and the Sahitya Akademi Award. Her works include These Hills Called Home, a collection of stories and Laburnum for My Head, her memoir, about her growing up years. And now Zubaan has brought us this refreshing novel.

Unmaking the Global Sweatshop is a volume that brings together a rich collection of ethnographic studies which focus on the deplorable safety conditions at work and the poor status of health and well-being of workers employed within current garment production regimes.

The book under review undertakes and accomplishes the daunting task of laying bare the relationship between the capitalist class and the state in Independent India and its consequences for the specific trajectory of capital accumulation that emerged. The task is challenging as the state-capital relationship is often made invisible through laws and customs and obfuscated with the aid of faulty or irrelevant economic logic.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protests by Zeynep Tufekci is a brilliant account of the organization, mobilization and spread of dissent in a digital age. The over 275-page description of protests in the ‘networked public sphere’(p. 19) is a riveting account of the role of the internet in movements ranging from the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement in New York.

Ambedkar’s observation made about India almost decades ago applies equally even now to modern democratic globalized India. The unfortunate part is that over the period Ambedkar himself could not stand indifferent to the practice. Today, a diverse section of people cutting across caste, class and ideological backgrounds appreciate Ambedkar for his ideas.

For half a century (from the 1920s to the 1960s), like a colossus, Master Tara Singh straddled the region, the society, the community we call Panjab. His life had immense highs and lows and his role in the
making of modern Panjab and the history of Sikh politics elicit diverse opinions.

Three bearded men, between them, occupy a major part of air time on Indian television. The first gets on TV mainly because he often generates the ‘news’ of the day and also because his face is used for hard-selling government programmes —recycled or re-invented, feasible and un-achievable, successes or failures.

Last year, when PM Modi launched the by now infamous Goods and Services Tax at an expensive event in Delhi, he was invited to the podium by an over-enthusiastic compere, who welcomed him with these words: ‘GST yaani ek rashtra, ek kar, ek bazaar, (GST as in one nation, one tax, one market) yahi hai ek bharat, shreshtha bharat (this alone is one India, great India)…