Shanta Acharya

Looking In, Looking Out, Shanta Acharya’s third poetry collection, houses fifty-two poems, representing work over a decade. Most of these poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, internationally. The title defines the theme of the collection — the poet and her environment.


Reviewed by: Usha Kishore
Ketaki Kushari Dyson

These two volumes of poetry need to be noticed for more than one reason. This is perhaps the first time that the Sahitya Akademi has published English writings. This is truly welcome in poetry, where even established poets struggle to find publishers.


Reviewed by: G.J.V. Prasad
Alexander McCall Smith

Isabel Dalhousie is the literary descendant of Emma Woodhouse in Jane Austen’s eponymous novel. Like Miss Woodhouse, Miss Dalhousie is a lady of comfortable means, solidly upper middle class and with an interest in people which the uncharitable would say borders on the “meddlesome”. But there the comparison ends.


Reviewed by: Bunny Suraiya
Tom Alter

Being fungible is a key trait of today’s highfliers, in the arena of job profile at least. Don’t we love to rant about sportsmen, particularly cricketers, delving into the realm of Bollywood when they appear in commercials and even TV serials and films? But what about Bollywood actors delving into the realm of sports,


Reviewed by: Anoop Verma
Anita Nair

Anita Nair’s new novel is a book on relationships, told in many voices, going back and forth in time, across continents. It is a book which deals with infatuations and obsessions across the gulfs of religion, marriage, legitimacy and conventions.


Reviewed by: Sachidananda Murthy
Neelum Saran Gaur

Now here’s a bold book that attempts to bring together in its leaves three literary giants whose writings belong to three entirely different genres. No mean task this, considering also that the gentlemen were not contemporaries, despite being very nearly so. Charles Dickens is widely regarded as first and foremost a storyteller, and that was how the contemporary public viewed him.


Reviewed by: Kishore Thukral
Vishwanath Tripathi

Iam tempted to describe Nangatalai ka Gaon by Vishwanath Tripathi as one of the most challenging literary works that I have ever read. It is also intriguing and complex, primarily because the writer uses a highly sophisticated genre to express his life and times. He describes the work as Smriti-Akhyan, which could translate as ‘remembered narrative’ or more enigmatically, and more interestingly too, as ‘a legend of memory.’ This literary work, which defies categorization and definition,


Reviewed by: Alka Kumar
Vikram Seth

Perhaps the most pertinent question one can ask about a memoir is whether the author has made the person or period s/he wishes to evoke relevant to readers. In Two Lives the persons concerned are Vikram Seth’s maternal granduncle Shanti and his German-Jewish wife Henny who met in Berlin when Shanti boarded as a student at her home,


Reviewed by: Eunice de Souza
Tutun Mukherjee

While fiction, autobiography and poetry by Indian women have received considerable critical attention in recent years, women’s drama has remained a relatively neglected area. Staging Resistance seeks to redress this lacuna, foregrounding the contribution of women playwrights to the development of a subversive “womanist dramaturgy” in India.


Reviewed by: Radha Chakravarty
Suchitra Bhattacharya

Madhavi, the daughter of Yayati has intrigued writers over the decades. There have been novels, plays, short stories in many Indian languages focussing on her fate. The tale of Yayati’s gifting away of his daughter to Galav who asks her to bed three kings and his Guru so that he may fulfil his vow to offer appropriate Guru dakshina has,


Reviewed by: B. Mangalam
David Crystal

This slim volume is a significant expression of concern for the future of minority languages and the attendant cultural casualties in the age of electronic communication. The author, who is one of the foremost authorities on the English language today, also watches the direction and profile of English as a global language,


Reviewed by: Murari Prasad
Charles Stewart

Travel literature has all along remained a relatively neglected sub-genre, at least, in the realm of literary studies. Perhaps, it would have continued to be so, had it not been for the aggressive, militant postures of the postcolonial theorists.


Reviewed by: Rana Nayar
Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff

The Autobiography of An Indian Indentured Labourer by Munshi Rahman Khan is a volume that is the English translation of the autobiography of a first generation indentured worker who migrated from Uttar Pradesh in India to Dutch Surinam in Latin America. He left India in 1898 at the age of twenty-four and died in Surinam in 1972,


Reviewed by: Rohit Wanchoo
Thomas R. Trautmann

As students of early Indian history know only too well, the Aryan question just refuses to go away. It remains the subject of conversation in middle-class homes, and, in the last decade or so, has been the theme of stormy academic (and not-so-academic) debates. It is in this context that this volume in the Oxford University Press Debates series is most welcome.


Reviewed by: Kumkum Roy
Joan Martinez-Alier

This book is aimed at the very heart of belief in the modern world: the ineluctable faith in economic growth. The idea of progress tied to inexhaustible desire and the unrelenting quest for want driven development have, in concert, become elements central to the globalizing economy. In the media generated imagination, a rising stock market, increasing exports,


Reviewed by: Rohan D'Souza
James Gustave Speth

James Gustave Speth is now Professor at the School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences at Yale, an institution founded a century ago by the legendary Bernhard Fernow. Having studied Law, Speth was one of the founders of the Natural Resources Defence Council. Equally useful in terms of his insights into governmental policymaking was his role as an advisor to Jimmy Carter,


Reviewed by: Mahesh Rangarajan
Uwe Skoda

This book is based on a PhD thesis recently awarded by the University of Berlin. The author lived in an Oriya village called Mundaloi for 18 months during 2000-02 to collect data for his thesis. Until I read this book I had a kind of belief that PhD theses do not make good books even if they are substantially revised.


Reviewed by: T.B. Subba
Ammu Joseph

Given the range it represents in terms of location, generation, community and caste, this volume of eighteen interviews seeking to explore issues related to gender and censorship often invites the reader to lose herself in individual accounts that open up unfamiliar areas of experience, of history and of political struggle.


Reviewed by: Niharika Gupta
J. Devika

This book has a fresh and endearing sense of timelessness, although the essays translated here are of women writing in their native tongue in the 1930s. While U.R Ananthamurthy was called in by the Kerala government to help revive government schools and the teaching of Malayalam,


Reviewed by: Susan Visvanathan
Joyce Outshoorn

The way to assess the patriarchal leanings of a state is to go through its policies towards the so called ‘oldest profession in the world’— prostitution. Ideally, state policy should reflect sensitivity to the socio-economic and historical issues related to prostitution, policies should differentiate between prostitution as a socio-cultural institution that treats women as marketable commodities, encourages women and child trafficking,


Reviewed by: Jaya Tyagi
Mike Marqusee

Bob Dylan is like an arrow that has never returned to an area it has once traversed. As much as his fans have wanted him to revisit the glory days of the 1960s, Dylan has moved on. Yet, it would be difficult to argue that the 1960s were anything but Dylan’s decade.


Reviewed by: Jayanti Seth
Gregory Booth

As a researcher and participant in an anti-poverty project in eastern UP in which we were trying to come up with suitable livelihood activities for the 40 percent of the population that was totally landless and dependent on agricultural labour, a surprising item would appear in the list of activities that dalit members of the target group expressed an interest in taking up.


Reviewed by: Prabhu Ghate
Uma Vasudev

Uma Vasudev’s biography of Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, the renowned flautist, comes across as a mixed bag. At one level, there is little to distinguish it from most run-of-the-mill hagiographical accounts of musicians and their lives. Other reviewers hold that it reads more like an autobiography.


Reviewed by: Abhik Majumdar
M. Lalitha

In this study of violin playing techniques in western classical and south Indian classical music Dr.Lalitha elaborates her understanding of contrasting techniques used in playing the violin in two distinct musical traditions. The violin was a late and foreign entrant in Indian classical music.


Reviewed by: Lakshmi Subramanian
James Kippen

James Kippen’s book on the tradition of tabla in Lucknow first came out in 1988, as part of the series of books entitled Cambridge Studies in Ethnomusicology. Re-reading the work at this distance dimly recreates the excitement of our introduction to ethnomusicology: for many of us, it was a new kind of writing on music, that generated both admiration and resistance strongly.


Reviewed by: Amlan Dasgupta
Desmond Peter Lazaro

Pichwai painting is one of the best documented painting traditions in India. There have been several studies of pichhwai painting’s background, themes and iconography, such as Robert Skelton’s Rajasthani Temple Hangings of the Krishna Cult (1973), Talwar and Krishna’s Indian Pigment and Paintings on Cloth (1979) and Amit Ambalal’s Krishna as Shrinathji (1987).


Reviewed by: Kavita Singh
Bimal Bandyopadhyay

For most people, the term ‘Buddhist monuments of India’ automatically brings to mind the Sanchi stupa and the magnificent cave complex at Ajanta; or perhaps the medieval monastery at Nalanda. Names like Lalitagiri, Ratnagiri and Udayagiri in all probability draw a blank.


Reviewed by: Tulsi Vatsal
C N Srikantan

This slim volume provides the reader more than what the title page promises. Besides the immensely readable English translations by Vasanthi Sanakaranarayanan of ‘Ramayana retellings’ by two outstanding contemporary Malayalam literary figures,


Reviewed by: Vinod C. Khanna
Shanta Rameshwar Rao

It is interesting that popular stories often bordering on the scandalous and the profane should now be so freely and evocatively retold in the English language for, as a student of history, I am apt to recall that only about a hundred years back, the same had been indignantly assailed by the first crop of English educated Indians.


Reviewed by: Amiya P. Sen
V.M. Mohanraj

Srimadbhagvadgita—or Gita in short, has been interpreted in many ways. It is considered one of the three fountainheads of departures of the authentically ‘Vedic’ worldview, the other two being the Brahmasutras and the eleven principal Upanishads. No philosopher can expect his views to be taken as ‘authentic’ extension or evolution of the perennial Vedic wisdom, if he cannot produce a convincing commentary of these three texts—the Prasthan Trayee!


Reviewed by: Purushottam Agrawal
Danielle Feller

Myths have fascinated all human societies, from the oral tradition to the written and to the age of cyber technology. Myths live forever, and, like genes, mutate and learn to survive and flourish in every generation. The term myth originates from the Greek muthos, which means “speech” and resembles the Sanskrit katha, vac (“story telling”, “narration”).


Reviewed by: Heeraman Tiwari
Vamsee Juluri

In a world trying to grapple with the contradictions of a global reality and a need for cultural identity rooted in local traditions and history Vamsee Juluri’s book Becoming a Global Audience tries to address some of these issues through her study of music television and specifically countdown shows.


Reviewed by: Abhilasha Kumari
Amiya Kumar Bagchi

One of the problems with a book that covers the gamut of communication forms and technologies and from Harappa to the present is that it is too demanding of any reviewer, certainly this one. The volume in question attempts to do this based on a set of papers presented in the panel on “History of Information and Communications Technology in India” at the Mysore session of the Indian History Congress, 2003.


Reviewed by: Prabir Purkayastha
OUP

There is an increasing realization that in our age of globalization, a kind of homogenization of cultures and life styles is taking place leading to a mono culture and macdonaldization. Cultural diversity and indigenous ways of life are coming under threat. This mono culture spread by multinational corporations and the law of the market is a kind of aping of western life style and values.


Reviewed by: Prahlad Shekhawat
Bhupesh Bhandari

Outside the Information Technology industry, Ranbaxy is India’s most genuinely multinational company. This well-researched book tells the story of Ranbaxy’s evolution. Bhupesh Bhandari has woven the tale well – it has strong personalities, serendipitous events, the twists and turns of policy changes, and even intrigue. Far from being a dry account of business history, The Ranbaxy Story is thus a highly readable work of contemporary business history.


Reviewed by: Rishikesha T. Krishnan
Sudip Chaudhuri

The Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) have inspired close to 300 tomes and treatises since the agreement among the signatories of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) came into effect in 1995.


Reviewed by: Madhumita Chakraborty
Biplab Dasgupta

The author of the book, Biplab Dasgupta, whose untimely death a few months ago has caused a big void, was an erudite scholar, respected teacher and affable parliamentarian with staunch Leftist leanings. After the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP)/Structural Adjustment Package (SAP) in India in 1991,


Reviewed by: K.L. Krishna
Guljit K. Arora

In the last two decades, it has been observed that the rise in wealth and trade at the global level has been accompanied by increase in poverty and lack of access to resources and opportunities for the majority. Developments in science and technology as well as intensified use of natural resources have led to a lopsided global order.


Reviewed by: Shakti Kak
Steve Pile

City dwellers, by and large, think of their environment in material terms: streets and traffic, buildings they live and go to work in or use for entertainment; infrastructure services (or the lack of them) that support urban living, parks and other public spaces. These are the tangible, ‘rational’ components of the city, whether planned or unplanned, with which they relate on a daily basis.


Reviewed by: A.G. Krishna Menon
Evelin Hust

The book reviewed is a publication of the French Research Institutes in India & South Asia Institute, New Delhi. The contents of the book are therefore the work of various researchers – compiled and edited by Evelin Hust and Michael Mann, both senior scholars based in Germany. Both the editors have had a long association in conducting research in the South Asia region with a special emphasis on development issues in India.


Reviewed by: Snehanshu Mukherjee
Jai Sen

For seven days in January 2004 Mumbai staged a kind of khumbh mela for the concerned and the sensitive souls. From across the world came scholars, activists, intellectuals, grassroot workers, and all others who wanted to associate themselves with an occasion that celebrated dissent. Mumbai,


Reviewed by: Harish Khare
Devesh Vijay

In many ways, the volume under review is a strange one. For one thing, it is a volume that seeks to track writings by ‘Left intellectuals’ in India over the last few decades – that is, precisely in the period when Left wing thinking has seen its most serious ever crisis worldwide and has become somewhat out of tune with the times.


Reviewed by: Aditya Nigam
Javeed Alam

Who wants democracy? A terribly simpleminded question many might say. In an Indian democracy everyone must. But as Javeed Alam, a prominent political theorist shows in this simply, yet elegantly written book the answer to his basic question is not quite that simple. Using data compiled from a study by V.B. Singh and Subrata Mitra, Professor Alam statistically illustrates some of his always interesting, often profound findings.


Reviewed by: Kamal Mitra Chenoy
Surendra Bhana

It was probably in 1990 that as an impressionable student embarking on a specialized study of history, I heard Fatima Meer, a close associate of Nelson Mandela in the African National Congress speaking about the hopes and aspirations of the Africans, Indians and others in a society emerging out of the shadow of the apartheid system.


Reviewed by: Rakesh Batabyal
Amartya Sen

It would be no exaggeration to say that Amartya Sen has an iconic and towering presence in the world of economics in present times. The sheer range as well as depth of his work is formidable even by the standards of his fellow Nobel laureates in the subject in the last thirty-five years or more.


Reviewed by: Pulin B. Nayak
Sarvepalli Gopal

Biography, according to Lytton Strachey, is “the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing”. It is also a difficult art particularly when the story told is that of Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who strode the world like ‘a gentle colossus’ until very recently, and whose life was an open one, openly lived almost in ‘the glorious privacy of light’.


Reviewed by: K.R. Narayanan