2010s

As is being discussed worldwide, the age of digital technology has given a new lease of life to analogue photography. The ability to scan and make digital files out of old fragile negatives and paper prints has given impetus and ease to the facility of making visual archives. Here are two presentations that are a valuable gift to the connoisseur of the not so recent cultural history of the Indian subcontinent that have been made possible by the effort of The Alkazi Collection of Photography.

Robert Elgood presents high-quality photographs of some two hundred items from the armoury of the Jaipur Court accompanied by technical descriptions and comments on the provenance of each. Sample, ‘hilt with the baluster grip with off-centre knop and projecting pommel’; or ‘nephrite “jade vert bronze” hilt … decorated with volutes, with two buds serving as vestigial quillons’. The author’s comments provide not only deeply-researched historical information but absorbing trivia for the curious browser.

This was a story that was waiting to be told, a personalized documentation of three decades of theatre in Bombay from the sixties to the nineties. This mapping is done through the three spaces which became a catalyst for a certain kind of theatre to bloom. Significant theatre actors and directors emerged from that period, learning as they experimented and engaged with text and space that did not fit the conventional template. This inadvertently created an alternative vision of how performance could be viewed

I happened to be reading A. Mangai’s book, Acting Up: Gender and Theatre in India, 1979 Onwards’ during the run-up to what promised to be high drama at the Shani Shingnapur temple in Sonai, Ahmednagar District, Maharashtra. Trupti Desai of Pune’s Bhumata Brigade had announced her plan to storm the sanctum sanctorum of the temple, forbidden to women, with an army of 1000 women. If the police debarred them from marching in, she planned to drop down on the open sanctum from a helicopter.

In 1983 the noted scholar of early Indian textiles and trade routes, Lotika Varadarajan wrote a seminal book on South Indian Traditions Of Kalamkari, published by the National Institute of Design & Perennial Press, It covered all three traditions of South Indian Kalamkari—Macchlipatnam, Srikalahasti and the lesser known Sikkinaikenpet.

To a Kolkata-Bengali to the core like me, who unfortunately has lived out of the city for almost a quarter of a century now and in this period has been to the city only once during the Pujas, that too more than a decade back, and yet who is aware of the fact that it is exactly during this period that Durga Puja in Kolkata has completely metamorphosed, and is vaguely aware of what he has missed out on, this beautifully produced book came quite literally as godsend. Beautiful the book certainly is—shaped, sized, priced, and in looks as it is like a coffee table book—with glossy pages, a wonderfully designed dust jacket, and almost five hundred full-colour photographs, and yet it is not your usual coffee table book.

Our experience, both at the personal and the public level, shows that Art lives and grows in a climate of freedom, peer rivalry, and infrastructural support. An element of spontaneity and a dropping of one’s defences are key for human expression to be creative, for your imagination to take flight. Art begins here, in that flight of fancy which all of us have experienced at one time or another. Fear, the fear of someone looking over your shoulder, is often the biggest enemy of such flights of fancy.

Religious nationalism remains an important phenomenon in the last three decades, which has manifested itself in an explicit manner after the fall of the Soviet Union. The books under review seek to study the phenomena of terror and violence unleashed across the globe, which the authors argue, have deep linkages with the advent of religious nationalism.

Drones, or remotely piloted aircrafts, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), so to speak, have added a new dimension to the way war is conducted in the 21st century. Drones, besides being used as lethal weapons of war, have added functions of being instruments used for collection of intelligence and surveillance. Proponents of the use of drones in warfare, counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency believe that drones have made it possible to target the enemy without much collateral damage (civilian casualties). The added advantage of a drone is that not only can it hover over an area of operation for a long time, but also it does not require manpower in the line of fire, thereby removing the greatest limitations states face in war: body bags.

Non-Traditional Security Challenges in Asia edited by Shebonti Ray Dadwal, Fellow and head of the Non-Traditional Security Centre at the Institute for Defence and Security Studies (IDSA) and Uttam Kumar Sinha, Fellow, IDSA is a compilation of papers presented by scholars in the field of Non-Traditional Security (NTS) threats at the 14th Asian Security Conference organized by the IDSA in February, 2012. It appears that while the International edition of this book was published in 2015, the South Asia edition has become available only in early 2016.

2016 got off to an inglorious start for India Pakistan relations with the attack on Pathankot’s Air Force base by terrorists allegedly affiliated to the Jaish-e-Mohammad militant group. The outfit, headquartered in Bahawalpur district, a cotton farming area in Pakistani Punjab, is one of a number of terrorist outfits operating in the region. In addition to Bahawalpur, areas like Rahim Yar Khan, Dera Gazi Khan, Chiniot and Jhang are considered fertile breeding ground for terrorist recruitment. Tashfeen Malik, one of the San Bernardino shooters, was apparently radicalized in Multan.

A complex, enigmatic web of contravening ideas and beliefs shaped Benazir Bhutto’s personality and also determined her political journey in one of the most challenging contexts in the region—Pakistan. As a newly created state with a religiously defined national identity, Pakistan’s social strata was yet to reconcile with the assertions and authority of women as politicians. Therefore, for reasons well understood, a wide range of scholarship has commented upon the life and political trajectory of the late Bhutto scion—a life so splendid, politically charged with its share of agony, yet cut short in a brutal assassination.

Don’t talk of hawks and doves. We are running a foreign policy, not a bird sanctuary.’ Former External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh’s riposte in 1988 when asked whether he was a hawk or a dove. Khurshid Kasuri served as Pakistan’s Foreign Minister (2002– 07) when General Parvez Musharraf was President. He succeeded Abdul Sattar, a former career diplomat, whom Musharraf had appointed immediately following the 1999 coup. (Sattar had briefly served in the same capacity in a caretaker government in 1993.

Burma’s strategic importance to India cannot be underestimated. A neighbour with 1600 kms border, a number of ports facing each other across the Bay of Bengal and four traditional roads connecting the two countries and administratively linked to India under British rule, India and Burma (Myanmar) share commonalities of history, culture, religion, ethnicity and spirituality. Myanmar is the perfect economic bridge between India and China and between South and Southeast Asia.

The plight of border communities, sundered by the Partition is now well recognized in all its dimensions—displacement, rehabilitation, economic and social disruption. While the brunt of the negative fallout was borne by the main inhabited areas along the Radcliffe Line (boundary between India and Pakistan and later Bangladesh), in more remote areas the impact was more economic. Yet over the years the communities living across each other along the border have found ways and means to continue their economic linkages through both formal and informal channels.

The book traces two centuries old history of plantations in Sri Lanka from its inception in the early 19th century to the present. In doing so the book highlights the complex interrelationship between power and class, gender and ethnic hierarchies. The authors are well known social scientists and have already made a mark as perceptive writers on Sri Lankan history and politics. Based on their rich experience, coupled with extensive use of archival and secondary sources and enriched by personal interviews with key players the book is an invaluable contribution to Sri Lankan history and politics.

Tabish Khair’s The New Xenophobia is a bold effort to examine an increasingly pressing universal phenomenon, which the world has been ignoring as being part of the past. The importance of this work is that it seeks to place what it terms as ‘New’ in the perspective of what was the old xenophobia within the author’s broad concept that ‘Power refers to any imposition, the physical or not, of one consciousness upon another’ approvingly quoting Emmanuel Levinas, the French Lithuanian 20th century philosopher, on the nature of violence beyond the physical.

India’, according to Bharat Karnad, ‘is a latter day Hanuman, potentially powerful, but dwarfed by doubts, unsure of its strengths, [and] weighed down by a sense of its own weakness.’ The Monkey God in the Ramayana was able to at least shakeoff his misgivings and triumph when it mattered. For Karnad, there is little evidence that India can do the same. It is a nation, as his scathing critique suggests, which ‘has been down for so long in history’ that bursts of recognition from the outside are treated unevenly as a mark of achievement.

Billed as a ‘new history of the world’, this ambitious attempt at chronicling a version of world history from the perspective of the Eurasian Trade Routes is a great text. Peter Frankopan prefaces the book by condemning the excessively Eurocentric approach to traditional history writing as an explanation for this work. Outlining his dissatisfaction with the way history was taught, he talks about how as a child he had a world map in his bedroom.

Ronojoy Sen’s work suggests that the history of sports in India is much more than mere pastime and play. A study of the chequered history of sport would for Sen reveal much about the nature of Indian society, its values, ethics, aspirations, fissures, and very importantly the dynamics of power play. As Sen’s book succinctly portrays, the saga of sports in India has been inextricably bound with issues of class, identity mobility and patronage.

Bahram Modi, the Parsi merchant in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke, turns to his associate in the last few pages of the novel and remarks poignantly, ‘When they make their future, do you think they will remember us… Do you think they will remember what we went through? Will they remember that it was the money we made here, the lessons we learnt and the things we saw that made it all possible?’ The urge to be remembered has been a recurring motive in history, though a privilege limited to very few.

Jihad is a much used and abused term in the contemporary twenty-first century. Today’s world has seen the proliferation of self-proclaimed jihadi groups claiming responsibility for terror strikes like the 9/11 attacks in the USA and the recent Paris strikes. The backdrop of these terrorist activities is the geopolitics of wars and oil refineries and the quest by western powers to spread democracy to the so called non-democratic Islamic world.

From the thirteenth century onward, cities played a central role in the emergence, consolidation and subsequent expansion of Muslim power across large sways of the Indian subcontinent. The Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526), the Mughal Empire (1526– 1857), as well as smaller medieval Muslim principalities such as the sultanates of the Deccan, revolved around urban agglomerations that were simultaneously seats of power, centers of learning and economic hubs. The intimate relations of Indian Muslims with the urban environment remains epitomized, to this day, by the takhallus (nom de plume) of many Urdu poets, which showcases their belonging to a particular city.

Debjani Das’s book attempts a close look at the history of the establishment of asylums in various parts of Bengal throughout the nineteenth century. The book is rich in archival detail with the different chapters complementing the themes considered for discussion.The first theme is the exploration of the linkages of the politics of inner space and geographical location of the asylums with that of the emergence of the various definitions of insanity intervened by notions about race.

The historiography of colonial rule in India has for long been focused on the polarities of coercion and consent. Over the past two decades or so, historians have done much to further our understanding of the admixture of force and collaboration in sustaining colonial domination. More recent works inspired by Foucauldian notions of governmentality have drawn our attention to the workings of colonial power at its point of application. These have underscored the extent to which imperial governance was, in practice, far from being ideologically stable and self-confident, and was actually shot through with uncertainty and panic, hesitancy and contradiction

Almost all studies of the colonial Indian military establishment which impinge on the relationship between the British and Indian personnel of the colonial Indian armed forces focus attention on the existential crisis of the colonial subjects in military uniform. This existential crisis arose from the peculiar colonial circumstances which governed the lives and societies of these, to use a cliched term, peasants in uniform. There is no dearth of books and articles written on the subject of obedience and disobedience among the Indians who served as soldiers and junior officers first in the three Presidency Armies and later in the Indian Army. Many of these narratives are mentioned and discussed in the Introduction by Dasgupta.

Zia ud Din Barani, in his Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi begins his account of the history of the Delhi Sultanate where Qazi Minhaj ud Din Juzjani had left it in his Tabaqat-i Nasiri. Minhaj had covered the history of mankind from Adam till the end of Sultan Nasir ud Din’s reign. Thus, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi begins from the accession of Balban in AH 662/1266 CE and it is brought to the sixth year of Firuz Shah Tughlaq’s reign in AH 758/1357.

This book is the author’s attempt to make her reader experi-ence diverse aspects of the lives of the ‘poor’ in this country. Without going into the complexity of defining a phenomenon as massive as poverty, the author has simply taken the reader through journeys of people from various parts of India in their quest of the basics.

The Turn of the Tortoise (TOT) is an exhaustive and superbly written book that enagages the gamut of governance issues concerning growth, welfare and foreign policy with significant and unusual insights that derive from the author’s engagement with the real world. The book speaks to a wide range of issues ranging from entrepreneurship, corruption, governance, environment, poverty alleviation, foreign relations, and even compares the governance of growth in India and China and the implications of the rise of China for India.

India has recently been introduced to the idea of the Smart City. Exactly what shape any ‘smart city’ will take is a matter of debate. The reality of Indian cities is that they are messy, with multiple processes and phenomenon going on at the same time, several of which appear to be the exact opposite of one another. Sanjay Srivastava’s book Entangled Urbanisms: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon, contends with some of these processes that are making the city what it is

As a sociologist of education, I have dwelt on the inequalities present in not only our education system but also in the many processes, activities and inter-subjective interactions that characterize life in educational institutions. These have brought home to me the heightened significance of certain categories in understanding inequity in education, including caste, gender, religion, linguistic abilities, and disabilities of different kinds.

The ‘Insider’ versus the ‘Outsider’ debate is not new in social science research. Indian sociology, in fact, has largely privileged the Outsider. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is that the late 18th and mid 19th century Orientalists were convinced that Outsiders like themselves were more capable than Natives of obtaining authentic knowledge, because of their guiding principles of ‘objectivity’ and ‘scientific rigour’. Even after Indian Independence, many sociologists believed that emotional and intellectual detachment was possible by studying a social group very different from one’s own.

Destination India: From London Overland to India is the last co-authored book of Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph—the intellectual stalwarts and eminent scholars of modern India. The book under review is an intellectual biographical account of their joint academic journey of six and half decades revealing the historical trajectory of their writings. The book is neatly divided into three essays in a compact and small size with an attractive lay out.

The US Presidential elections are upon us and what better time to read political memoirs of the leading Presidential candidates than this? Bernie Sanders is junior Senator from Vermont and was the first Independent elected to the US House of Representatives in forty years. He is the longest serving Independent in the history of the US Congress and is the co-founder of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest caucus in Congress. He joined the Democratic Party in 2015 and is currently fighting for the nomination of the party.

Those with some knowledge of the rise and expansion of social welfare states in the West post-Second World War know that social welfare for the socially and economically underprivileged and needy was necessitated for the sake of capitalism in order to mitigate many social and economic tensions. It proved functional for a considerable length of time until about the 1980s when the new Right political philosophy and political economy came out with a virulent assault on social welfare and the public institutional structures built around it.

India Since 2002 is a collection of critical reflections by Mukul Dube on the socio-political happenings in India in the aftermath of the Gujarat genocide of 2002, previously published in the weekly Mainstream between 2002 and 2015. Dube’s principal focus in this anthology is the depredations of the Sangh Parivar, the torch bearer of the ‘Vedic Taliban’ and Hindu fundamentalism.

In 1987, Doordarshan, the state-controlled television network, began to air Ramanand Sagar’s popular show based on the epic Ramayana. Its broadcast was a remarkable departure for a government institution like Doordarshan from the Nehruvian mandate to uphold a secular and modern character and eschew tradition, especially when invoked in the context of religion. The televisual retelling of the epic achieved unprecedented popularity.

This volume offers a comparative perspective of media in two very different countries, and the ways in which they are changing. Eighteen writers—mostly scholars and journalists—bring their experience and differing perspectives to it, and pick a range of subjects to look at, through twin perspectives. The editors devise a structure in which chapters on China and India alternate through four sections which explore structure, reporters, practices and comparative case studies in two areas—social media, and disaster reporting.

Boundary lines between constituencies not only determine who controls parliament or a legislative assembly but their functioning as well. Fixing Electoral Boundaries in India is based on the central idea that drawing constituency boundaries has serious implications for both the practice of politics and the working of democracy. This book underscores the point that demarcating constituencies is not a routine ‘techno-bureaucratic’ exercise but involves ‘philosophical, legal, political, technical and practical’ considerations

This is a volume where the editors lend it gravitas because of their redoubtable scholarship. They are further assisted by twenty essays written mostly by scholars who would invariably be part of a volume like this either because of their previous works and association and thereby justify inclusion in a compendium like this. As the title goes, it provides a wide canvas for the essays to explore wide issues ranging from importance that should be given to history, to importance of poetry in today’s increasingly monosyllabic and geometric world.

Given the legacy of colonialism and the lack of transition that the South Asian states have made to frameworks for understanding alternative cartographic imaginations, nation-states, modernity, development and security issues both at the national and regional level, Niel De Votta’s edited work, An Introduction to South Asian Politics, is an important contribution towards laying out the broad contours and contemporary canvas of South Asian politics. It has been argued that fragile domestic structures in South Asia have largely been responsible for determining the national, regional and international politics of South Asia, and the idea of South Asia in the 21st century and beyond will continue to be governed by this important variable.

Critique is essential to the healthy existence of a society. From its inception as an independent nation to its functioning for more than seven decades there have been many critiques of the dominant ideas that shape Indian society and its daily life. One of the most pervasive ideologies that Indian society is inflicted with is the ‘mahatma-ness’ of Gandhi and the dazzling statesmanship of Nehru. It is normally perpetrated through the medium of text-books and other state apparatuses upon the people’s life. It is not the purpose of this review to argue that Gandhi and Nehru were not great men but to show and acknowledge the existence of an ideological apparatus that profits from maintaining the projection of the extraordinary greatness of these personalities.

The book under review, an edited volume by Saitya Brata Das and Soumyabrata Choudhury, comprising fifteen articles divided into two sections, is one of the important epistemic interventions concerning violence and its metaphysics. Besides addressing aforesaid questions in different ways, the book surprisingly and illuminatingly underlines the question of violence or violence theory in those thinkers/philosophers (Rene Girard, Sigmund Freud, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Schelling, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Musil, Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin) who are otherwise known for their different impactful and consequential works. Identified realms of weight of violence are religion, language and politics.

In his obituary to Benedict Anderson, historian Ramchandra Guha recollects a letter from him in which he asked, ‘How many public intellectuals are there in India? In Southeast Asia they are dying, replaced by professors and bureaucrats to whom not many ordinary people pay any attention… I guess your Gandhi was a public intellectual, but probably Nehru not???????’The worry about the disappearance of the institution of public intellectual is widespread. Romila Thapar expressed her own anxiety about the decreasing tribe of public intellectuals in the annual Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture in 2014 titled To Question or Not to Question

To those who describe Bhikhu Parekh as the leading political theorist of Indian origin, essays in this volume will show that such parochial frames of representation do not do justice to his ideas. He is, and must be viewed as an eminent political theorist of our time, whose work has contributed enormously to our thinking about political concepts that we use to analyse the modern world and confront the challenges of our time.