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Editorial
Denis Judd

This is a short book on a very long and tumultuous period of Indian history and Judd is ambitious in tracing the rise and fall of the East India Company rule and the subsequent British Raj in this summary fashion. However, this concise account is written in the best traditions of popular history and is aimed, one would surmise, primarily at the general reader rather than an academic audience per se.


Reviewed by: Chandrika Kaul
Anindyo J. Mazumdar

The subject dealt with in Lethal Games is of considerable contemporary concern. It is important enough for a leisurely analysis by the academic community, policy makers and the bureaucracy who are normally pressed for time due to the hurly burly of the daily grind. The book has seven chapters and two annexures.


Reviewed by: K. Santhanam
P R Chari

The first fifteen years of a nuclear rivalry can be very rocky. This is when the rules of the competition are still being written, when vulnerabilities are greatest, and when monitoring capabilities are spotty, at best. It therefore comes as no surprise that India and Pakistan are going through a dangerous passage.


Reviewed by: Michael Krepon
Michael Krepon

The Stimson Center and Vision Books have brought out a well researched paperback on a subject which the Center has pioneered in South Asia – Confidence Building Measures and Risk Reduction. The hopes that motivated the Stimson Center, led by Michael Krepon, on leading India and Pakistan to a “progressive and cumulative set of CBMs between 1991 and 2003, have been belied, owing to ‘geopolitical realities’”.


Reviewed by: Raja Menon
Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema

Pakistan is a state that appears to be in rapid movement, but has in fact changed very slowly. In the last few years it has become an overt nuclear weapons state, the army seized power for the fourth time in a coup, there was an ill-fated military adventure across the Line of Control at Kargil, the leadership signed up with the American-led (but ill-named) war on terrorism, and most recently Pakistan’s revered “father of the bomb,”


Reviewed by: Stephen P. Cohen
Mridu Rai

History hangs heavy on Kashmir. The state’s complex and contested past resurfaces repeatedly in its present-day dilemmas, and today’s headlines are often coloured by references to disputes of the past. To understand what is going on right now draws one into what is a never-ending debate about events that took place half-a-century ago or more.


Reviewed by: Salman Haidar
Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen’s Nirbachito Column first came out in Bengali in 1991and soon thereafter it swept the Kolkata market, creating waves in the psyche of the Bengali bhadralog class; most women were elated, while conventional men and women did not conceal their scepticism and even launched sharp criticism of her contentions.


Reviewed by: Gargi Chakravartty
Paola Bacheta

The two books, Paola Bacheta’s Gender in the Hindu Nation and Shahnaz Rouse’s Shifting Body Politics under review are similar in that they both approach the formation of state and nation through the discursive strategies adopted by civil society. Predicated upon a largely unstated Gramscian understanding of the state and civil society the books remark upon how civil society organizations and formations negotiate with and complement the state.


Reviewed by: Sumathy Sivamohan
Anita M. Weiss

The book is a collection of papers by well known authors who are acknowledged experts in their fields of interest. The editors, Anita Weiss and Zulfiqar Gilani, have done excellent editorial work to bring out the basic problems that beset Pakistani society.


Reviewed by: General Jehangir Karamat
By Humayun Khan and G. Parthasarathy

Diplomatic Divide co-authored by two eminent diplomats of India and Pakistan, in a mere 138 pages, brings out in a very readable form, numerous anecdotes, incidents and behind the scene activities which has also influenced, even if momentarily, the crucial phases of India’s relationship with Pakistan.


Reviewed by: T. Ananthachari
Abida Sultaan

Shahryar Khan, formerly Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary and Ambassador in France, Jordan etc., and presently Chief of the Pakistan Cricket Board, is an old friend. This is his late mother’s autobiography.


Reviewed by: S.K. Singh
Barbara D Metcalf

“Scores of studies exist on caste groups,” Mushirul Hasan wrote recently, “but not on the Muslims.” For reasons beyond this review, over the past half century, social sciences in India have sported a blind spot that may be called the Case of the Missing Muslim.


Reviewed by: Satish Saberwal
Asgar Ali Engineer

A serious enquiry into the psychology of communal violence, this anthology brings together essays, editorials, surveys, articles, opinions, documents and reports. The book transcends its stated goal of providing the future generations with a great deal of information and its usefulness to policy makers to question the contentious issues of ‘secularism’, ‘nation’, ‘identity,’ and ‘community’ through a polyphony of voices.


Reviewed by: Tania Mehta
Edited by Denis Vidal , Gilles Tarabout and Eric Meyer

Religion is not about love and compassion only. It is also about exclusion, hatred and violence. Being a total narrative, religion gives meaning to existential and societal concerns of the believers.


Reviewed by: Purushottam Agrawal
Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty

The history of the book, or book history, as it is beginning to be called now, has for long been the preserve of bibliographers and antiquarians. This has been especially so in India. Looking at books from a narrow and often bibliophilic, if not bibliomaniac, perspective they were more often than not most concerned with debates no more exciting than who printed the first book, which press came first, the role of Christian missionaries, who contributed more to such-and-such language printing, etc.


Reviewed by: A.R. Venkatachalapathy
Chandrika Kaul

The British established their Indian Raj by various means including the sword but undoubtedly they secured it with modern means of communication. Ruling India from distant London was a difficult and complex affair in which the press came to play a critical role specially from the mid-nineteenth century.


Reviewed by: Anirudh Deshpande
Himanshu Prabha Ray

Himanshu Prabha Ray’s The Archaeology of Seafaring in Ancient South Asia makes a convincing case for the need to abandon an insular view of ancient India. Viewing the subcontinent within the larger world of the Indian Ocean, it replaces the usual episodic view of trade by a nuanced long-term narrative that stretches from the third millennium BC to the fifth century AD.


Reviewed by: Upinder Singh
Michael Gottlob

Thank God for Michael Gottlob, who has put together a book we have felt the lack of for many years, and done nothing about. Here is two hundred years (1786-1993) of ‘the development of historical consciousness in South Asia’—from William Jones to Ramachandra Guha. This is the translation of what was part of an 8-volume series, in German, on “historical thinking in intercultural comparison”.


Reviewed by: Narayani Gupta
Jackie Assayag and Véronique Bénéï

For the best part of the decades after World War II, the social sciences and the humanities have been marked by debates that can be best described as mediations on the ‘encounter’ between the West and the non-West, the First and Third Worlds, of which Franz Fanon’s 1960’s writings were but the beginning. Since then the writings of Edward Said, and the refractions through poststructuralism and postcolonialism have produced a large body of writing in the academia. There are scholars from the West who have complicated this discourse.


Reviewed by: Ravi Sundaram
Judith M. Brown

As the fifth generation of the Nehru-Gandhis prepares to test his (and the family’s) popularity in the marketplace of the great Indian elections, attention will turn, once again, to the legacy of the dynasty and, more specifically, its most famous representative, Jawaharlal Nehru.


Reviewed by: Harsh Sethi
Janet and Sayeed Rizvi

Sayeed and Janet seem to be an unlikely couple to write a cook book. Sayeed is a thinking administrator and Janet is a genuine intellectual who has written seminal books on Ladakh. At the same time Sayeed is a gourmet and Janet is the type of cook whom gourmets dream of and the lucky ones marry. On second thought, therefore, this book is no surprise.


Reviewed by: M.N. Buch
Major General D.K. Palit

Old soldiers like Monty Palit do not fade away. They become prolific writers and lead active lives, both physically and mentally, after retirement. Several of Palit’s books like Essentials of Military Knowledge have sold well, and I believe that his War in High Himalaya: The Indian Army in Crisis, 1962 is probably the best book written about the Sino-Indian border conflict.


Reviewed by: P.R. Chari
Leila Seth

Autobiography and memoir—are they the same? In the subtitle the book is an autobiography, in the author’s preface it is “a memoir”. If you go by the COD, an autobiography is the story writing of one’s own life. But a memoir is just a record of events or history written from personal knowledge or special sources of information. It is only memoirs that become synonymous with (auto) biography.


Reviewed by: M.S. Ganesh
Heta Pandit

Goa is a seductive place—it offers each what they are looking for. The young come for sun, fun and the sea while others enjoy the idle amongst the lush green and magnificent buildings. This little conclave was ruled by the Portuguese from the 16th century until it was occupied by Indian forces in 1961.


Reviewed by: Ramu Katakam
Nilima Chitgopekar

This set of three volumes aims to cover the salient features of God and God-alike appearing in different religions, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. The contributors have given a comprehensive bird’s eyeview of their origins along with anecdotes that manifest their awesome personality. The cultural settings of the three religious heads vary considerably.


Reviewed by: Malabika Majumdar
Johanan Grinshpon

This scholarly and imaginative study of the Upanishads makes a significant point: It argues that the Upanishadic texts have been traditionally viewed as consisting of two distinct and separable parts—“metaphysics” and “story”.


Reviewed by: Kunal Chakrabarti
Rana Nayar

It’s one of those unsettling questions endlessly asked: what makes immigrants stay on in their land of adoption (generally western) if they end up unhappy, can’t strike roots, feel alien, homesick or abused; if the culture shock is hard, if memories of the motherland wring the soul…


Reviewed by: Latika Padgaonkar
Tapan Basu

Translating Caste is a significant addition to the literature of caste now available in English. The first English-language anthologies of dalit literature, such as Barbara Joshi’s Untouchable! Voices of dalit Literature (1986), Arjun Dangle’s Poisoned Bread (1992), and the Anthology of Dalit Literature by Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot (1992) have served very well as windows on Dalit writing, especially the radical literature of protest that appeared in Marathi and other languages from the 1960s.


Reviewed by: Gautam Chakravarty
Richard F. Burton

Benjamin Disraeli could well have had Sir Richard Francis Burton in mind when he remarked in his novel Tancred that the East is a career. Following his expulsion from Oxford for unruly behaviour, the young Burton headed East under the auspices of the East India Company, to become at various points of time an explorer, diplomat, soldier, translator, poet, writer, linguist, Sufi mystic and a most remarkable Victorian.


Reviewed by: Satyajit Sarna
Vijay Nambisan

In the wake of numerous little publishing houses opening up to cater to a vast English market, translations on the one hand and creative takes on contemporary concerns, usually in the format of essays have become the prime products of these houses.


Reviewed by: Nandini Chandra
Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy has a long history of evoking extreme reactions from those who have read her, and even more extreme reactions from those who haven’t. People either hate Roy or love her. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a writer, it makes almost impossible any pretensions to objectivity on the part of the reviewer.


Reviewed by: G. Sampath
Mariam Karim

My Little Boat is a promising first novel that offers a delightful read. Set in contemporary India, it is primarily concerned with its female protagonist’s search for selfhood and subjectivity.


Reviewed by: M. Asaduddin
Sanjay Nigam

The Transplanted Man of the title is the Union Health Minister of India who has so many transplanted organs in his body he can proudly say he truly represents India. Once he was very corrupt but having often been close to death he has begun to actually feel the pain of the mother of a dying child and is determined to do some good for his country before he dies, except that he is not sure he will survive his latest illness.


Reviewed by: Shobhana Bhattacharji
Molly Daniels-Ramanujan

A.K.Ramanujan, the poet, was discovered by Oxford University Press. Jon Stallworthy, a considerable poet himself, who edited the now-defunct Oxford Poets Series for the London office, responded to the typescript of this unknown poet with enthusiasm.


Reviewed by: Girish Karnad
B.S. Minhas

The assessment of socio-economic develop ment of a country requires reliable and comparable information on aspects of development reasonably comprehensively over time and space at meaningful levels of disaggregation and with adequate frequency.


Reviewed by: Vikas Chitre
Ravi Kanbur

Poverty and its underlying causes has been the subject of intense research in recent years attracting researchers from a variety of disciplines. Attempts at investigating poverty in its different ramifications have been undertaken under alternative methodological perspectives.


Reviewed by: D.K. Srivastava
Satish Chandra

This volume is an anthology of valuable essays by Professor Satish Chandra, published earlier in different journals and books. Since the earliest of these essays was written in 1946, the shape and direction of history writing have undergone a tremendous change. The essays in this collection reflect – and have also been responsible for determining – new currents in history writing over the last five decades.


Reviewed by: Meena Bhargava
Romila Thapar

This up-dated and significantly expanded edition of Thapar’s most widely read book, Early India, is now available in paperback. Incorporating the essentials of new data and fresh explanations besides retaining the relevant among older arguments, the book is yet structured mostly within the original edition’s framework of worldwide recognition.


Reviewed by: Rajan Gurukkal
Romila Thapar

An event takes place. It impresses different people in different ways. Situated at different points in time and with differing interests, they talk about it or ignore it variously in their writings.


Reviewed by: Kesavan Veluthat
V.K. Madhavankutty

V.K. Madhavankutty’s expertise in the art of remembering is well-known. His new work in Malayalam, Asreekaram (Accursed) which is under translation into English, is no different, what with a bouquet of reminiscences and recollections of life in a village in Kerala unfolding into a poignant story:


Reviewed by: M. Mukundan
Dina Mehta

Dina Mehta’s Mila in Love is a “cute” novel that wants to be more than a cute novel. Result: A novel with an identity crisis. This novel is an M&B romance, but meant not so much for the inexperienced teenybopper, as for the Femina woman of substance.


Reviewed by: G. Sampath
By Alai Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin

Tibet geographically is to the South-West of mainland China. The Tibetan nomads settled in this region several centuries ago. Because of its geographical location the Tibetans were largely insulated from the changes taking place in the outside world.


Reviewed by: Ashok Vohra
G.J.V. Prasad

Vikram Seth has emerged as one of the most significant authors of Indian fiction in English. He is also the most versatile – he is a poet, travel writer, playwright and novelist – and has won major awards in each category. He has a cosmopolitan identity having lived in England, California and China as a student.


Reviewed by: Rita Joshi
C.D. Narasimhaiah

C.D. Narasimhaiah is more of an institu- tion than anything else. It is not easy to come across ‘a mere village shopkeeper’s son’ (p.11) going on in the 1940s for an English Tripos at Cambridge, finding F. R. Leavis as his Tutor there, getting nominated by him for a Rockefeller Fellowship to Princeton, making acquaintances with R. P. Blackmur


Reviewed by: Simi Malhotra
A. Banerjee

Among the different incarnations of energy, electrical power occupies a unique position for its ease of use and range of applications. Switch off electricity from modern life and you might as well turn off all industrial development, agricultural prosperity, urban and rural services and indeed lose most of the amenities that help improve our quality of life. It is therefore not surprising that successive Indian governments since Independence have given top priority to the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity.


Editorial
Annie Chandy Mathew

The books under review are two collections of short stories by wife and husband Annie Chandy Mathew and P.Chandy Mathew—their first creative efforts. As writers they acknowledge their debt to each other as their lives enrich each other’s ‘story’, yet their short stories need to be looked at as independent works (even though both the collections are imbued with a yearning for basic human values which will restore some order to the chaos of divisive voices, warring interests and frenzied passions.


Editorial
Naqi Husain Jafri

With the rising popularity of Comparative Literature as a subject of formal study, comparative critical theory has assumed fresh importance as a complementary discipline, and received greater scholarly attention, including curricular provision. But, the discipline suffers from the paucity of adequate primary materials—the literary principles of target literatures essential for the appreciation and evaluation of their individual genius and interrelated aesthetic bearings.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Samit Sawhny’s All the World’s a Spittoon is an account of a maverick Indian’s atypical journey. The author’s unconventionality comes to the fore in his choice of the title itself. Why a spittoon? Sawhny refrains from making a clean breast of it.


Editorial
Giti Thadani

Science students remember Moebius strips fondly; odd playful creations, a clever twist and a basic rule of space lies broken. Run your finger along the side and you feel a strange frisson of confirmation—you always knew what would happen, but it’s still strange. Similarly, Giti Thadani sets out on a road trip—and it’s been established that road trips have led to many a fascinating book, a la Blue Highways—but it’s an extraordinary feeling to find one that compels you to leave your seat and hit the highway.


Editorial
Kavita Watsa

Few persons are likely to have done more reading of the books on South India written during the colonial period than Kavita Watsa. Intelligently selecting from that reading, she combines her selections with perceptive observations made on journeys through South India as well as in places she has called home during a young life spent on much moving about.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Twenty-one million people spread over 110 countries with an estimated combined income of US$160 billion. So goes the statistics of the Indian origin people world over. A lot has been written on their success stories in the respective host countries. The book under review is one such, but with a difference.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

The famous Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang (more familiar in India in the old transliteration Hiuen Tsang) has left a deep imprint on his own country, on India where his journey led him, and on several lands in between. He was a profoundly significant figure of his time, an elevated spirit of unmatched learning and unbelievable drive. His determination to learn about Buddhism in its original home sent him along the hazardous overland route to India, a hugely dangerous venture across brigand-infested and barely charted deserts and mountains.


Editorial
Maria Aurora Couto

There is this charming passage on page 61 of the book where Aurora, recounting the tense and fluid months after the Liberation of Goa, gives us a glimpse into that private world that she and Alban, an IAS officer of the Bihar cadre sent to Goa to help with the transition, had to negotiate. ‘He could sense my personal turmoil and my wistfulness, but to him I was Maria. He has come to know and acknowledge Aurora best perhaps only in the reading of this book. (“Oh no”, he had said when we were engaged to be married, “North India is full of Aroras/Auroras; it is a surname there, and I have a subdivisional officer called Arora. Please, please let me call you Maria. Besides, I cannot even pronounce Aurora the way it should be.”’


Editorial
Francine R. Frankel

American scholarship and policy has traditionally treated India and China as falling within two different geopolitical contexts. In the past decade, US scholarship on China has dealt predominantly with the challenges posed to the US by a rapidly growing Chinese economy and military capability.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Sudarshan Bhutani served as a young officer in the Indian Embassy in Beijing in the years covered in this elegantly written short study of some 215 pages, not including the appendices. It lucidly summarizes the essentials of the India-China border dispute as seen from an Indian perspective, offering a kind of ‘everyman’s guide’ to an issue that must figure as a problem to be resolved, as the two countries move forward in a relationship that has gradually moved beyond that dispute’s legacy of bitterness.


Editorial
D R Kaarthikeyan

On the evening of May 21st I had gone out for dinner after completing a sequence of poems. The last poem was a first draft. I came back and faired it in long hand. It ran: The Messenger Announces At Pasargadae the Terrible News My Lords, both Persian and Mede, rumour precedes horsemen. So I have ridden twenty hours a day to be here amongst you and beat rumour by a length.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

The problem of Jammu and Kashmir and of the Kashmir valley in particular, must be the most explored and the most overworked theme in a variety of studies that range from conflict, to nationality and nation, to federalism, to patriotism, to security, to terrorism, to accounts of the Partition, to communal conflict, and to India-Pakistan relations. Looming large over all these scholarly imaginations is the ‘P’ factor—Pakistan, the ‘T’ factor—terrorism, the ‘S’ factor—security, and in the aftermath of 9/11 the ‘I’ factor—Islamic terrorism.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

This volume is an edited collection of the papers presented as part of an advanced seminar at the School of American Research, Santa Fe. Margins are normally discussed in terms of a centre but here the perspective is somewhat reversed: margins are not just where the rationalized administrative forms of the state are less effectively represented, but rather practices and policies outside the mainstream that somehow also play a role in constituting the state as a necessary entailment.


Editorial
Jose Maria Maravall

The issue of political obligation has been a central concern of modern political theory. Why should people obey the state? Why should individuals subject themselves to the authority of the sovereign? Early liberal theorists referred to such benefits as, peace, security, freedom, and protection of one’s basic rights, as reasons for abiding by the law promulgated by the sovereign. As the movements for democracy and greater participation gained ground, the nature of sovereign authority and the accountability of the sovereign became the primary concerns.


Editorial
Andrea Martinez

The idea of this book came to the scholars at the Institute of Women’s Studies (IWS) at the University of Ottawa in the fall of 2000 when the World March for Women was energizing the women’s movement and feminist studies globally. A general call was put out for research papers, without setting any boundaries to the authors as to what and how they should write. The response was enormous.


Editorial
Nivedita Menon

The experience of the women’s movement throughout the world has led to an increasingly critical engagement with legal discourse. In many systems the substance, structure and culture of the law are actively discriminatory to women denying them equal rights. Even in areas where there is de jure equality, the de facto position of women is far from equal because of the way all the actors involved interpret laws.


Editorial
K.G. Kannabiran

“The Constitution, it may be mistakenly believed, represents a break with India’s colonial past. What is perhaps true is that it could have been a point of departure from colonial priorities and practice. But the pragmatism that characterized executive decision-making and functioning, and the continuity that dogged the legal and judicial system, turned the Constitution on its head, entrenching distortions that stayed with the system through what should have been an era of change. It should have been plain, we may think, that rights of the people and wrongs of the government ought to be consonant with the expectations that the freedom struggle fostered in us; but when it is the letter of the law interpreted through the lens of precedent set by colonial courts which determines the course that is set for us, there is evidence that the relevant past of the freedom struggle has been wilfully relegated to a zone that is ruled by amnesia. And with that historical background absent from the understanding and interpretation of the Constitution, it is no surprise that “the institutions under the Constitution were looked upon as a continuation of the colonial system of administration”(p. 22).


Editorial
Leonard Fernando

An easily accessible history of Indian Christianity was much needed, and Fernando and Gispert-Sauch’s work supplies this deficiency. The work describes concisely, but with care and scholarly acumen, the long history of the religion in India: from the legends of the first arrival of the message of Jesus Christ in India with St Thomas in the first century AD to recent debates about the place of Christianity in the modern Indian state.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

There are many streams of discussions that are going on within political sociology. Development, democracy and participatory governance is one such stream. The nation-state, civil society and social movements is another stream. The ongoing discourse within the realm of political sociology about nation, civil society and social movements highlight the place and role of the nation, civil society and state in the lives of citizens of a nation and the members of a society.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

The entire collection of essays in this volume is a modest reverberation of the debates that one has been trying to tackle over the last four decades in the field of Lesbian and Gay studies, yet, the most striking part of these twenty-six essays, collected in this handbook, is their contemporaneity. The ideas and debates tackled through these essays are indicative of ever new grounds that are being approached by Lesbian and Gay studies as a distinctive field of study in the social sciences today. Whether it be the idea of exploring a “queer cyber space” (pp. 115-145) or talk about the “cultural visibility” of a minority homosexual population vis-à-vis their political freedom as “sexual citizens” of a nation state (p p. 183-199, 231-253, 427-443) or thwart basic stated assumptions of defining one’s identity and status through the norms of heteronormativity (pp.73-83, 253-271). The underlying thematic of almost all these essays, I would say, undertakes a social approach to sexuality, where basic assumptions of what constitutes the social have been challenged and new paradigms have been suggested.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

I would like to pose a simple question—what does it mean to study sexuality—before discussing Srivasatava’s edited volume on ‘sexualities’, ‘masculinities’ and culture in South Asia. Is the category of sexuality the same within the theoretical apparatuses of anthropology, history or literature? Does it include only sexual ideologies, practices, patterns and norms, or does it necessarily extend to gender relations, constructions of masculinity and femininity?


Editorial
Radhika Chopra

The proliferation of men’s studies and the theorizing of masculinities in the western academia could be traced back to R.W. Connell’s seminal contribution on multiple masculinities. Connell argues that masculinities are constructed, performed, experienced and perceived through differences of class and sexual orientations and not tied to male bodies.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Shree Ghatage (born 1957) moved to Canada in the nineteen-eighties; her first book, Awake When All the World is Asleep (1997) is a collection of short stories. Brahma’s Dream (first published in Canada in 2004) is an unusual coming-of-age story, because the heroine grows up in the shadow of a life-threatening disease. The novel raises philosophical questions about man’s fate, but at the same time gives a realistic picture of members of a Chitpavan Brahmin family living in Shivaji Park in suburban Bombay in the nineteen-forties.


Editorial
Mulk Raj Anand

In a sultry evening in Delhi, here I am, reread-ing Mulk Raj Anand—from time to time kicking in the air to ward off aedes aegypti. For most of us Indians, the history of reading is in two parts. If you are not educated in a public school, you have to wait until you have learnt enough English to begin reading books in English, while you read—or you are read to—in your mother tongue at a very early age.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

For a reader uninitiated in the tradition of the short story in the Punjabi language Slice of Life offers a rich harvest of examples of writings from within this tradition. The stories selected, translated into English by Rana Nayar, are arranged in chronological order and range across the entire span of the twentieth century.


Editorial
Bh. Krishnamurti and C. Vijayashree

It appears that the editors of this anthology of English translation—Bh. Krsihnamurti, a linguistics man and former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, and C. Vijayashree, Professor of English at Osmania University—did not have much of a choice. They have translated a Telugu anthology put together by Vakati Panduranga Rao and Vedagiri Rambabu after a three-day workshop in 1997.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

One of the main missions of Vaidehi, among the most compelling Kannada women writers of our times is the retrieval of the woman’s voice from the past. That suppressed past which gains a voice in the present, even while it continues to exist in more nuanced textures.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

The modernist movement (navya) in Kannada literature was significant in many ways. The navya writers created an idiom which even to this day resonates with the many new twists that came into the “being” of a literary work. The idiom of the navya writers was multi-dimensional and accommodated varied experiences and diverse ideas.


Editorial
Premanand Gajvee

Emergence of the dalit theatre is consid- ered as one of the prime aspects of the post-independence Marathi theatre. Marathi theatre which was centered around the middle-class sensibility till then, witnessed for the first time, the low-born, the underdogs of the society, giving vent to the unprecedented humiliation and persecution that they were subjected to, down the centuries.


Editorial
Gangadhar Gadgil. Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Dixit

Prarambh is a successful blend of history and fiction: a hi-story of the beginnings of Mumbai. The environment of the early 1800s is authentically depicted, the characters that are both real and fictional match quite well, and the story runs both as fact and fiction blended. The National Book Trust of India must be thanked and congratulated for bringing it out in English for the benefit of not only the non-Marathi Indian readers but also the international readers who will be able to get important insights into and information about the social-cultural-business renaissance that gave its initial shape to the internationally significant city, Mumbai.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Ever since the translation of indigenous literature, mainly into English, was initiated almost a decade ago, it has triggered off reams of publications, and gradually evolved into a specific genre. Obviously, this process has been a tremendous success as publishing houses of renown have made forays into this sphere, though often glossing over prominent credits to the key player, i.e. the translator.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

A collage, a photo frame, a diary! No, none of these define the flavour of the book. The memoirs are spun and crafted in a beautiful Tea-Cozy, much to Shaukat Kaifi’s liking, keeping the incidents alive and warm. The title is suggestive of a collection of dates and events, people and places to construct and deconstruct a whole life. The following narrative offers a mirror image of her time, for the generations ahead. Acquiring a more autobiographical element, Shaukat begins from the beginning and tells her own story sequentially.


Editorial
Anamika

In an era dominated by prose and the prosaic, poetry is a saving grace. This is especially so, when—trudging through the turbulence of times—it is able to ‘sponge-in’ the world into words, soak them with the possibilities and probabilities of humane existence without being superficial, hysterical or partisan about it.


Editorial
Anamika

In an era dominated by prose and the prosaic, poetry is a saving grace. This is especially so, when—trudging through the turbulence of times—it is able to ‘sponge-in’ the world into words, soak them with the possibilities and probabilities of humane existence without being superficial, hysterical or partisan about it. This cognitive-aesthetic soaking in of life into words through poetry is, however, a hugely demanding and humbling task.


Editorial
Geetanjali Shree

As the Hindi short story spills beyond its patriarchal enclosures, rebellious fervour gives way to a self-reflexive and intellectually calibrated mode of storytelling. There are no easy passionate outbursts or relentless bouts of ideological sloganeering. The young breed of woman Hindi writers, particularly of the 90s, sustain the credo of protest set into motion by an earlier generation of writers, through a critical resurrection of the issues that were once thought to have been sufficiently clinched in favour of the woman. Old denouements inspire new dialogic take-offs.


Editorial
Krishna Sobti

Krishna Sobti’s Shabdon Ke Aalok Mein is a book of miscellany that evolves as a continuous narrative of her ever-evolving personality—both as a writer and as an individual. Woven around memory and nostalgia, travel fragments and everyday associations, dialogic-monologues and interviews, creative-critical reflections/impressions and academic interactions, this narrative tends to foreground Sobti the woman, her milieu and some of the literary moments she has lived through in the near past.


Editorial
Aruna Chakravarti

Readers of short fiction will be happy to welcome this new anthology. I enjoyed reading the stories as they are well selected and translated. Writers range from the end of the nineteenth (Rajsekhar Basu, 1880) to the middle of the nineteenth century (Suchitra Bhattacharya, 1950) and include some of the best-known artists of the Bangla language.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

In the sixties Sunil Gangopadhyay, already a well-known poet, wrote his first two novels: Jubak Jubati and Atma Prakash, spearheading a movement that brought the Bengali novel out of the shadows of romance and cautious social comment to the glare of harsh introspection and relentless probing into the tensions of a post-Independence urban reality.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Vilas Sarang reminds me of O.V. Vijayan of Malayalam, although, unlike Vijayan, he is a poet, apart from being a fiction writer and critic who writes in Marathi and in English. Vijayan’s stories of the modernist period were mostly allegories, parables, stories with a sort of cast-iron frame into which human situations or predicaments were set, as if following some kind of predestined design. The modernists are well-known for their philosophical predilections, notably confined to certain schools of the West.


Editorial
Abraham Eraly

Abraham Eraly has selected and transcribed a collection of legends from Kottarathil Sankunni’s Aithihyamala which is an eight volume work published between 1909 and 1934. The translation of the chosen stories is easy and lucid, with no embellishment. Eraly has the confidence of someone who understands the culture and the varieties of communities which integrate in the fabric or canvas of daily interaction.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

M.Mukundan is the story-teller par excellence in contemporary writing in Malayalam. His texts seldom resist reading like those of Anand or O.V. Vijayan often do. He takes the reader into confidence and easily carries him/her along the narrative. Still he does not repeat himself like many popular authors do: he keeps experimenting both with themes and structures, likes to play with space and time and mix reality and fantasy in different measures.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Sivasankari is a well-known Tamil writer who is exceptionally sensitive to the issues that confront contemporary society. Her concerns get reflected in The Betrayal and Other Stories, a collection of dexterously woven tales with universal themes, ordinary characters and everyday incidents. This anthology contains a kuru novel (a short novel/a long story) and fifteen short stories.


Editorial
Bama

This collection of ten stories is a testimony to Bama’s skills and intent as a writer. Anecdotal in nature, the stories take you almost effortlessly into the lived lives of dalit parayars in Tamilnadu. This is a world that is in the process of change, where the dalits are learning to challenge the hegemonic hold of the landowning castes on them.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

For quite some time now, creative writing in Tamil has been on the high with a vigour and a vibrancy not seen before. The language of Tamil fiction was never more charming; the prose nevermore lilting and rich in vocabulary, or more down-to-earth, assertive and hauntingly aggressive. It is the language of the people, reflected in all its earthy simplicity and glory that brings tears to your eyes.


Editorial
Ambai

When I was told to review Ambai’s short stories I refused. Reviewing is tough for me for I am no verbally confident academic with one or more well-earned degrees and the terminology of criticism properly internalized. So all that I can do is to say whether I liked a book or not; and if I did so, to talk about it with a passion to any willing listener.


Editorial
Jey Manokaran

The nineties of the last century saw a second wind of creativity in Tamil writing, particularly fiction. Largely unnoticed by the readers of the pulp magazines that sold in thousands, a new crop of writers were exploring new themes and new areas of experience in little magazines and original work published as books.


Editorial
Ashokamitran

“It took me more than ten years to give shape to this work of fiction ….. The nearest form to this narration (which is somewhat new to Tamil letters) is the novel. It has a hero, a scene of action (United States), a period (1973-74)” says Ashokamitran (AM from now on) in his brief introduction to the Tamil original of this work. Ostensibly a travelogue of his some seven months stay at the University of Iowa as a writer in residence that the US government had sponsored as part of its strategy to win Third World intellectual support for itself in the Cold War days, it defies classification as a genre.


Editorial
Joe D'Cruz

Aazhi Soozh Ulagu, the title of the novel under review, is an exquisite phrase from Kamban’s Ramyanam (circa 12th century CE), which occurs in Kaikeyi’s exhortation to Lord Ram before he is sent away into exile for fourteen years. ‘All of this ocean-ringed earth is Bharathan’s to rule,’ declares Kaikeyi, while Ram must travel into the jungle to undertake ‘intolerably arduous’ penance, live austerely and bathe in the waters off hallowed pilgrimage centres, before returning home in two times seven years.


Editorial
Pa. Raghavan

In the recent past there is an appreciable rise in the number of books published in Tamil on national and global issues. That such books have a good market augurs well for the future of Tamil. And who are the readers for these books? The last few decades of the last century found a new class of readership, that was recently empowered by education but still, that lacked an adequate knowledge of English, the language of intellectual dialogue internationally. And yet, these new readers were thirsting for knowledge and wanted to know all that was happening around them near and far. Their expectations were not belied and books dealing with a variety of issues started appearing.


Editorial
A.R. Venkatachalapathy

Reading this book was as pleasurable as having a cup of that delicious brewed coffee that became a cultural signifier of the Tamil way of life in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. To those who associate scholarship with dullness, I would strongly recommend Chalapathy’s book since it is consistently both scholarly and lively.


Editorial
Geeta Dharmarajan

Ghost Stories is a book which tells stories with a touch of mystery and suspense. ‘The Lady of the House’ is about a young ayah, called Malina, who comes to work in the house of Ginnima. Ginnima is an old lady, who has been trapped in her bed for 55 years, because she is overweight. When she first meets the old lady, something about Ginnima’s eyes scares Malina, because she feels like she is being trapped.This is a scary story.


Editorial
Poile Sengupta

Good Heavens is the name of the book, or the feelings of shock that came over me as I finished it? Do Indian authors really think that 10-12 year old read stories about elephants named ‘Elphie’ or wasn’t that meant for five year olds? Are Indian children really that juvenile? My advice, please write books that are really for the pre-teens and teens of our country and not for the ‘kids’.


Editorial
Geeta Dharmarajan

What is it that sets apart a children’s book from a book for adults? Should there even be such distinctions? After all, the best children’s books also appeal to adults. But the converse, unfortunately, is not true. There are many books which adults like, that a child would not enjoy reading. And anyway, how does one decide what makes a good children’s book? The ones that teach children valuable lessons?


Editorial
Mehran Zaidi

It’s easy to review a field guide: does it cover all of the 1200-or-so species in India? Does it have good illustrations? Are the differences between Blyth’s and Richard’s Pipits accurately represented? What are the descriptions like? Are the latest taxonomic changes incorporated? That there are fewer than half a dozen comprehensive field guides to the region doesn’t hurt either. They’re familiar territory.


Editorial
Joshua Mowll

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, children grew up on books about fairies, and smiling mushrooms, detective dogs and five children, faraway lands and enchanted forests. Today’s children are privy to battles larger than themselves, larger than life. Between prophesied heroes and worlds torn apart by evil—children learn the larger binary of life early in life.


Editorial
Anees Jung

The word “childhood’ brings many delight- ful memories to our minds. We were carefree and happy…We were not overburdened in any way….Yes, those were the days of innocence. Yet Anees Jung shatters the myth in Lost Spring Stories of Stolen Childhood. Child labour stares in the face as Jung ruthlessly describes the experiences of the young ones.


Editorial
Lila Majumdar

After reading Vandana Singh’s Younguncle Comes to Town, I remember talking to a friend, and our saying that the book was almost as funny and whimsical as Lila Majumdar’s children’s writing—and there is no greater compliment that we could bestow. That is an index of Majumdar’s secure place in the Top of the Pops of Indian children’s writing.


Editorial
Gita Wolf

We are forever surrounded by masks. The kathakali dancer in performance; the goalkeeper in hockey; the rescue worker at a collapsed building site; the traffic policeman at a busy, polluted intersection; the football fan with painted face; the robber at a bank heist; the surgeon at work; and even a heavily made-up Page 3 socialite—they all use masks of one kind or another. Some of these masks are functional and are meant to protect the wearer from hazards.


Editorial
Mamang Dai

Mamang Dai’s book is a fascinatingly nuanced account of the life of the Adi tribe of Aruanchal Pradesh. Here is an upland valley, an immensely varied and difficult terrain, and wedged in by the deep gorges and dense forests. The Adis have lived there for ages nurturing their long history and unique ways of life.


Editorial
Ahalya Chari

Originally slated as a publication for and by teachers within Krishnamurti schools, this journal has far wider relevance. The issues covered, ranging from contemporary crises in consciousness and the role of education, to detailed thoughts on curricula, content and subject teaching, are significant for teacher-educators, administrators, parents and indeed anybody with a serious interest in the educational challenges of our times.


Editorial
Meenakshi Thapan

Micro studies of schooling and life at school were literally non- existent in India till Meenakshi Thapan’s first edition of the book was published in 1991. The book has brought into limelight the sociological forays into the micro-interpretive approach towards education and schooling in the Indian context.


Editorial
Lalit Kumar Barua

The volume under review examines the interlinkages between education and culture in Northeast India using a socio-historical and cultural lens. The author argues that the erstwhile province of undivided Assam’s trajectory of development of education was quite different from the rest of India owing to the delayed growth of western and higher education in Assam.


Editorial
Aparajita Chowdhury

The idea of family life education (FLE) evokes many images when it comes to India. The editors of the book under review remind us that FLE is relatively a new academic discipline and there exists no research-oriented theory based book on the subject.


Editorial
Michael W. Apple and James A. Beane

If you believe Margaret Mead’s words that we should, never “doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has”, then the four examples of democratic schools presented in this book will enrich, invigorate and serve as a much-needed tonic. It appears as if there exists a universal tacit agreement on schools becoming factories, of being further distanced from the community etc.


Editorial
Mushirul Hasan

Jawaharlal Nehru, on a number of occasions and in a number of ways, defined himself as a product of the Indian National Movement and all that it stood for. This implied among other things anti-imperialism, commitment to national sovereignty, and a measure of internationalism. In addition Nehru also acquired early in his political career a left-wing orientation to politics. All this he inherited from the national movement and practised, with some exceptions, during his long tenure as independent India’s Prime Minister.


Editorial
Amit Dasgupta

Amit Dasgupta is a career diplomat who ruefully intimates that career compulsions have made him into something of a specialist on that bureaucratic labyrinth, the World Trade Organisation. Poring over the arcana of the Uruguay Round, and import quotas, and non-tariff barriers and intellectual property rights, and purchasing power parity…


Editorial
Bapsi Sidhwa

Bapsi Sidhwa’s Water is an unusual work which translates Deepa Mehta’s film “Water” into a novel. It renders an audio-visual experience into words, significantly reversing the commoner trend of turning novels into films and problematizing the usually assumed authority and “originality” of the literary text over the “adapted” cinematic version.


Editorial
Devyani Saltzman

Shooting Water is Devyani Saltzman’s memoirs about her experiences during the shooting of her mother Deepa Mehta’s film Water. The title is a bit misleading because the book is not so much about the shooting of the film (even though it is also about that) but about her struggle to grow up in two worlds after the divorce of her parents. Her relationship with her mother becomes perennially haunted by her decision to live with her father.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

In Satyajit Ray’s film Shatranj ke Khilari there is a memorable scene when Colonel Sleeman is confronted by Urdu poetry. His assistant is reciting a poem composed by Wajid Ali Shah. “Is that all?” asks Sleeman in disbelief when the poem ends after a few couplets. “Yes, Sir.” “And what does it mean?” he inquires in a broad Scots accent, tapping the end of his cigar.


Editorial
Prabhakar Acharya

Prabhakar Acharya’s The Suragi Tree is a delightful novel. The 400 plus narrative is surprisingly a quick, absorbing read: racy, but relaxed, spanning over six decades but time-warped, tale of a solitary man but peopled with an enormous number of characters; each one vivacious and memorable, the intertwining of a rural landscape with a distinct community orientation…


Editorial
Hameeda Akhtar Husain Raipuri

My Fellow Traveller is an offbeat memoir, a debut offer- ing which has morphed Hameeda, a housewife-turned- writer, into an instant celebrity. No honed language, no philosophical snippets, no overarching story, and yet it is a most compelling read. What accounts for much of its breakout popularity is its confiding, subdued narrative, which rarely breaks its leash.


Editorial
Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa

This is a new edition of the English translation of this Urdu classic (1900) which was first published in 1970 under the series. ‘Unesco Collection of Representative Works’, and later reprinted by Disha Books. Umrao Jan has almost become a figure of folklore after Ruswa immortalized her in his novel, Umrao Jan Ada which by now has several celluloid versions of it produced both in India and Pakistan.


Editorial
Ashok Da. Ranade

Hindi film songs are immensely popular throughout the length and breadth of the country and appeal to people of all age groups. Such was the popularity of Hindi film songs as far back as 1952 that when All India Radio (under B. V. Keskar) banned the airing of film music, ‘Binaca Geetmala’, which was broadcast from Radio Ceylon, became a major success across the country.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

This may be a cliché but Begum Akhtar was like the proverbial shama to which countless parwanas have lost their souls. Stories about her life are legendary and add to the mystique of her musical personality. There is for instance the famous one about a poet in Lucknow driven mad by her music who roamed the streets scrawling her name on walls.


Editorial
D.K. Ghosh

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is obviously one of the major forces currently shaping the contours of our society. It is changing the way we interact with others, the way we do business and the way we entertain ourselves. Obviously any technology which causes such profound change in the way we live would also have similar implications for rural India.


Editorial
Amiya Kumar Bagchi

The best economic history mines data from the past to establish dis- tinct patterns, impute causal effects and unravel the mechanisms that drive economic sub-systems. But given the demands set by scholarship based on archival records and atypical sources, the advance of knowledge often tends to be marginal and yet controversial.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Terrorism has not just gripped the globe – discussion on this seemingly all-encompassing phenomenon tends to dominate not just the print media and television – but the world of books. If you pick up a western or Indian newspaper these days, it’s quite possible that three out of five reports are related to terrorism. There’s a huge amount of information pouring into households on the menace, but how much of it is authentic and based on fact?


Editorial
Badruddin Umar

Badruddin Umar is one of Bangladesh’s best known intellectuals. As a commentator and author on the internal social and economic dynamics of Bangladesh, his views have been ideologically consistent over several decades and commanded attention even from those who may disagree with him. His work on the language movement in East Pakistan has received critical acclaim.


Editorial
Rafiq Dossani

The title of the book under review is utterly misleading. It certainly misled me when I agreed to do the review. First of all, this is not a book about South Asia if we go by the widely accepted definition of the subcontinent. South Asia is supposed to have at least seven states: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives.


Editorial
General V.P. Malik

The end of the Kargil conflict (May-July 1999) witnessed a burst of creative activity with scores of books being published on this clash of arms. It was also subjected to an official inquiry headed by K. Subrahmanyam, resulting in the Kargil Review Committee (KRC) Report, later published by Sage.


Editorial
Knut Vikore

The Sharia is a dynamic living sacrosanct and comprehensive code. It contains the body of rules and legal principles based on the expres- sion of God and concurrence to the same by the Holy Prophet (PBUH). It is capable of accommodating the competing interests of all the people irrespective of their creed, class, caste, or nationality and it also offer solutions for the needs and demands of contemporary society from time to time.


Editorial
Asim Roy

In relation to South Asia, the basic story goes like this: Once upon a time, there existed a composite or syncretic culture among the Hindus and Muslims. Then, sometime during the eighteenth or nineteenth century, in some cases even the twentieth century – depending upon the place and the context, the ‘frail’ composite culture was fractured.


Editorial
Gyanendra Pandey

A new book by any member of the early Subaltern Studies collective remains an eagerly awaited event – even when it consists, in the main, of already published essays as this one. Gyanendra Pandey has, of course, been a leading historian of modern India and given continuing and ample proof of his reputation by producing books and articles that have been provocative, original and densely described.


Editorial
Amartya Sen

Professor Amartya Sen interrogates a large number of ideas in currency in the contemporary world including the tendency to categorize individuals and communities based on one overarching identity, clash of civilizations, multiculturalism, the presumed superiority of the West, terrorism emanating from religious fundamentalism and the like. As a review is constrained by limitations of space I shall rest content by discussing some of them.


Editorial
Lloyd I. Rudolph

The anarchist Prodhoun once famously denounced the state in the following terms: “To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.


Editorial
James D. Hunt

James Hunt’s explorations on Gandhi in this inspiring series of essays are set in a postmodern context and an attempt has been made to recover the real Gandhi from the various influences and events that surrounded him through his journey of life. The author moves between an open admiration, to an objective analysis of the man, and the Mahatma.


Editorial
Kamran Shahid

It is always useful and insightful to review past events in tranquillity after the dust of fevered controversy has settled. Hindsight helps fill in missing details and information that might have influenced contemporary judgement and could lend perspective to what was until then a confused and unfolding narrative. However, far from shedding any new light, Kamran Shahid’s “new perspective” further clouds the great issues of the day that he seeks to discuss with a perverse thesis.


Editorial
Lloyd I. Rudolph

Gandhi continues to fascinate and frustrate those who read him. He refuses to retire peacefully into the archives and asks to be made contemporary. His admirers address the question of his relevance by mining his voluminous writings for meanings they are partial to, as if asking for his grace to be bestowed on their eloquence.


Editorial
Femida Handy

There are signposts and imprints in the text and even the subtext that evoked instant recognition having traversed them myself—as a feminist, as a woman and as one involved in the inception of a grassroot organization: the intersecting themes of the book lured me on. The agonized comments of the feminist founders in their endeavour to confirm to a collectivist form to ensure egalitarianism…


Editorial
A. Banerjee

The deleterious impact that the repetitious ‘drip feed of media material’ has on the human mind and behaviour has been fairly substantially assessed over the years. In the book under review, Sharda J. Schaffter, a communication analyst, has attempted to study how advertising in India has privileged the privileged and, consequently, disprivileged women, the traditionally disprivileged.


Editorial
Ashok K. Jain

The Saga of Female Foeticide In India by Ashok Jain attempts to highlight some of the issues of and considers preventive strategies regarding female foeticide in India. It consists of six chapters over which it traces the historical context of female foeticide in India, examines some of the data on sex ratio in the country, and scrutinizes some policies and debates on abortion, as well as the new reproductive technologies available to those desiring sex selection.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Women in the subcontinent have been under a paradoxical purview; on the one hand, major issues pertaining to them are peripheral in the body politic; on the other, they have been the repositories of religious mores and the cultural custodians of their habitat. Even so, their public façade mirrors the whims of the political and socio-religious strictures outlined by the major opinion building agency…


Editorial
Avril A. Powell

This collection of ten essays explores the themes of domesticity, the body and modernity in colonial India, examining in the process the relationship between the ideal and the real with respect to gender ideologies in the colonial period.


Editorial
Madhavi Malalgoda Ariyabandu

This book is a useful ‘how to’ guide to mainstreaming gender in the management of natural disasters. For anybody in the field, this is likely to be a handy tool. The writers demystify links between gender and disaster management, within a sustainable development framework. It is a reader-friendly book, with exceptionally evocative sketches, although the cover is inexplicably ugly.


Editorial
Navnita Chadha Behera

Pakistani scholar, Tayyab Mahmud, speaking of the “spectre of the migrant” that haunts the modern world, says that immigration in public debate and political rhetoric is presented as a “problem to be solved, a flaw to be corrected, a war to be fought, and a flow to be stopped.” The immigrant, he says, hovers at the edges of her adopted society:


Editorial
Anuja Agrawal

Migrant Women and Work includes a collection of papers that were presented at an international conference on Women and Migration in Delhi in 2003. This work challenges the popular misconception that migration is a male activity. This volume adds to a growing body of literature that demonstrates the contribution that a gendered analysis can make to understanding the complex phenomenon of migration and the feminization of labour migration in particular.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

This volume comprises eleven contributions by scholars from Bangladesh, Canada, India, Nepal, Netherlands, Sri Lanka, U.K. and USA on diverse aspects of gender studies, the focus being on women who have adopted migration as a survival strategy. The message of this book is clear : poor women migrants are assets not only to their families but to their home country.


Editorial
Devaki Jain

In his Foreword Professor Amartya Sen has rightly celebrated Devaki Jain’s refusal to take up the theme of her book in a minimalist framework of a tedious chronological regurgitation of what Charles Dickens would call ‘facts, facts and facts’. Instead, we have been offered a rich narrative of development, a history of women’s movement worldwide, its dreams, challenges and fissures, bringing alive a distant policy-making body like the United Nations, jiving with development refracted through the world’s women.


Editorial
Bina Agarwal

The book examines critically Sen’s contribution to some fundamental issues of human welfare from a gender perspective. Sen, has displayed feminist sensibilities, rare among economists. His ideas on notions such as justice, freedom, social choice, agency, ‘functionings’, and capability as a set of philosophical categories have not only enriched our understanding but has given us a whole new vocabulary and evaluative tools for judging human development, values that should underpin our goals.


Editorial
Aziz Kurtha

The recent publication of Aziz Kurtha’s Francis Newton Souza: Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art is perhaps unsurprising in a context where prices of modern Indian art generally are constantly reaching ever more spectacular levels both nationally and elsewhere. Certainly, one of the key objectives of the book is to offer an art market perspective to the art collector, the many asides with reference to ownership, signature and prices are a clue to these concerns.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Alternate Lyricism is a confused mélange of essays written for Jehangir Jani’s different shows and some composed specifically for this publication. Contributors include Shivaji Panikkar, Ranjit Hoskote, Nancy Adjania, Mortimer Chatterjee, Girish Shahane, Anupa Mehta and Deeptha Achar. The essays have been gathered by Ratnottama Sengupta, whose own contribution is an interview with Jani.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

A lavishly produced book on Indian art, Dictionary of Indian Art & Artists fills up a lacuna within the study of Indian art. Although the entries for contemporary Indian art are informative and exhaustive this book aims to reach back to the past as much as possible within the constraint of a dictionary format and also offers elucidation of technical terms concerning art practice.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Amrita Sher-Gil is probably the most significant 20th century painter who heralded the changing direction of modern Indian art1 . Of Indo-Hungarian origin, Sher-Gil’s short life (she died at the age of 28) was intense, exotic and amazingly productive. Her best known works were painted within a short span of just over a decade – a period in which her style evolved as a result of changing influences and experimentation.


Editorial
Mira Seth

The first thing that struck me about the book was that it was of large format and well-printed, covering a subject of India’s Art History on which no comprehensive book had been published so far. Historically speaking, one of the earliest rediscoveries of Indian art, the Ajanta caves and the mural paintings inside these caves had aroused much interest during the last quarter of nineteenth century.


Reviewed by: Ratan Parimoo
Lizzie Collingham

As a young child, in late 1970’s Britain, I would often walk into the kitchen to find my mother making a curry. To this day I can still picture it; some kind of meat (probably beef), an onion, a few teaspoons of curry powder and for that touch of exotica, it would be topped off with some raisins. She never served it to me, as she knew I hated it and I cannot remember seeing her eat it either. My parents divorced in the 1980s and following my father’s departure from the household the ‘curry’ was never seen again.


Editorial
Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck

Nearly two decades ago, I made my first journey to Bhutan. I was told that I should take the road up from Phuntsoling rather than go by air, because that way I would be entering Bhutan “the right way.” That was sane advice. From the moment that one crosses the Bhutan gate at Phuntsoling, one is in a way entering another world and it is best to do it gradually.


Editorial
Bindu Manchanda

Forts and palaces in India are increasingly becoming a cultural reference for the concerned regions and communities of the country. They are also a new source of income for their private owners (be they the descendants of the erstwhile princely families or more recent owners) or for the different states considering the increase of tourism in India for the last number of years, and its expected growth in the coming ten years.


Editorial
Iris Macfarlane

The history of British women during the Raj seems to be in the process of arrival. OUP cites three other such books on the back cover of this one and we remember Ketaki Kushari Dyson’s A Various Universe that came out some years ago.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

In an appendix to the book there is a list of Indian members of the army of the Raj who won the Victoria Cross in WW II. Among them: Havildar Major Chhelu Ram, 6th Rajputana Rifles at Jebel Garci in Tunisia: ‘ran through enemy fire armed only with a tommy gun and tin helmet, killing all occupants of the machine gun post. Also attended to an officer in an exposed position though himself seriously wounded. Died on the field.’


Editorial
A. Banerjee

The book under review is an outcome of a conference on “ Population, Birth Control and Reproductive Health in Late Colonial India”, held at the Centre for the History and Culture of Medicine, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. It is also one in the series of New Perspectives in South Asian History.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Reproductive and Child Health Programme was seen as a radical departure from the ‘target oriented’ family planning programme after the ICPD conference in Cairo. This programme was seen to be a more comprehensive approach that included sexual and reproductive health concerns.


Editorial
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

The late nineteenth century in Punjab, as in Bengal, witnessed huge debates about the role of “indigenous” science and “western” science – harbingers of today’s concerns with “Hindu” science, mathematics and so on. Many factors went into the making of these discourses. One of course was the reaction to colonial efforts to deligitimize them as unscientific and empirical medical methods, to be distinguished from the universal, scientific and rational methods of biomedicine.


Editorial
Annette Susannah Beveridge

Babur Nama is an autobiography of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire in India, which he established in 1526 after defeating Sultan Ibrahim Lodi in the first battle of Panipat. More appropriately, Babur Nama is a memoir and a diary kept by Babur since he was ten years old until a year before his death in December 1530.


Editorial
Himanshu Prabha Ray

Many years ago, one of my students gave me a Marg volume titled Of Kings and Coins. Its sumptuous, luminous photographs were my introduction to the beauty of ancient and medieval Indian coinage. I held on to that volume and used it for many years as a teaching aid to show students the variety and aesthetic richness of numismatic sources. Over a decade later, here is another Marg volume on coins, this time with a special focus on coins as expressions of power and as media of communciation.


Editorial
Martin Brandtner

These essays have been put together in honour of Professor Hermann Kulke, one of the finest historians of his generation of pre-modern India. Although Kulke’s list of publications covers many aspects of the history of India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, he is particularly known for his contribution to the study of regional state formation and construction of regional identities in early medieval India.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Reconstructing ancient society has always been a challenging task for a historian. How do we shrug off the ‘baggage’ of modernity that we carry and relocate ourselves in the (very distant) past so as to be accurate? The only way to do it is with curiosity and with honesty—approach the ‘sources’ with an open and eager mind, without preconceived notions, which is what is being attempted in this compilation of articles written over a period of roughly two decades. Uma Chakravarti, in her incredibly inquisitive and penetrating style, moves, quite literally, ‘beyond’ hackneyed discussions of state, political institutions and the caste system, to highlight lives of wideranging groups and communities which played a significant role, but have been treated cursorily by most historians. She seeks to ‘represent’ Ancient India with essays related to peasants, servile labour, dasas and karmakaras, widows, monks and householders and the bhaktin; hitherto grey areas of historical studies and in doing so, reveals how methods of production, processes of social stratification, creation of ideological structures and institutions are inherently linked to each other.


Editorial
Patrick Olivelle

The history of the preparation of critical editions of Sanskrit texts has been long and somewhat complicated. Both the potential and the pitfalls of this endeavour have been best exemplified in the attempts to produce critical editions of the Mahâbhârata and the Râmâyana. Olivelle tackles a text that is apparently simpler: it is obviously far shorter than either of the epics. Nonetheless, the task is a heroic one. What we have at hand is a Sanskrit text prepared through the painstaking and meticulous collation of the text from over fifty manuscripts, with variants carefully documented in endnotes, a new annotated translation in English, as well as introductions to both text and translation that will enrich our understanding of what Olivelle aptly characterizes as a controversial but important document (p. 4).


Editorial
Malabika Chakrabarti

‘In the first half of nineteenth century, there were seven famines, with an estimated total of one and a half million deaths from famine. In the second half of nineteenth century, there were twenty-four famines (six between 1851 and 1876, and eighteen between 1876 and 1900), with an estimated total according to official records, of over 20 million deaths’.– R.P. Dutt, India Today, Calcutta, 1970, p. 125.


Editorial
A. Banerjee

Colonial and Post-colonial Geographies of India, a collection of fifteen essays by scholars from India, western Europe, and the U.S., is a pointer to emerging critical geographical work on India, though it is not, as the editors point out in their introductory essay, the first time that geographers have invested in India. Colonial ‘technologies of governance’ mapped India through gazetteers, district reports, surveys and the census. The departments of geographies established during the colonial period were tasked with the discursive and literal mapping the country for imperial rule (p.14). Despite these rich documents, there is much that remains to be understood and revealed about both the colonial mapping of India as well as postcolonial geography of opposition. The editors for example point out that Gandhi’s strategies of resistance employed a profoundly geographic politics of opposition to imperial rule which has received little attention. While much has been written about Nehru’s vision of India, the imaginative, discursive, and material geography of modern nationhood mapped through dams, canals, roads, and industrial centers, has in comparison been neglected.


Editorial