Ritu Dalmia

India is perhaps the best place to be a vegetarian. Unless you want one, your options while dining in or out are never restricted to a bowl of steamed vegetables.


Reviewed by: S. Anukriti
Malati Mathur

The poetry of this collection of poems is the poetry of the glide. It is poetry that results from the choreographed re-focussings of the main thought into the body of the poem.


Reviewed by: Raji Narasimhan
Jayna Kothari

In recent times, legal engagements with disability have increased considerably following India signing and becoming signatory to the United Nations Convention of Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) in 2007.


Reviewed by: Nilika Mehrotra
Rita Kothari

Rita Kothari’s book focuses on Banni, a small region in northern Kutch that ‘interrupts the idea of Gujarat as a linguistically, culturally and politically cohesive territory with bounded citizenship’ (p. 3). Kutch, which became a district in the linguistic state of Gujarat in 1960 is marked by a long history of mobility and migration that questions the idea of the homogeneity of Gujarat that is an essential and recurring feature of the government’s discourse today.


Reviewed by: Aparna Balachandran
Rila Mukherjee

Oceans have always represented the vast unknown, and been the gateways for exploring uncharted territories and new worlds. New discoveries and improved technology led to the era of colonization and global capitalism, creating a more closely connected inter-dependent world.


Reviewed by: Kanakalatha Mukund
Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir

As a primordial form of identity, people in the Indian subcontinent possess a remarkable affinity to the place where they come from. Different regions have their own sense of linguistic, literary and cultural dynamics that bind people together while also distinguishing them from those inhabiting other regions.


Reviewed by: M. Raisur Rahman
Amar Farooqui

The life and times of Bahadur Shah Zafar II have generally been examined from the perspective of the 1857 uprising and the exile of this ‘tragic’ emperor who experienced the collapse of the vestiges of Mughal power. The book under review, however, strikes a different note.


Reviewed by: Srimanjari
Ishrat Alam and Syed Ejaz Hussain

This is a somewhat motley, though interesting, collection of articles. There is little to string them together, in terms of a theme. Yet this is precisely what constitutes a smorgasbord of historical work and musings, from which almost everyone would find an interesting tid-bit or two to sample.


Reviewed by: Radhika Chadha
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

This volume, despite its slightly vague title, is a valuable collection of essays which survey writings on various areas of Indian history, especially ‘new and developing areas of study’.


Reviewed by: Amar Farooqui
Bhairabi Prasad Sahu

I begin with a quote from B.D.Chattopadhyaya, ‘The volume makes a point that the pan-Indian patterns of civilization and historical processes may be best understood from their intersections with how these patterns shape and get reshaped in the context of regions’.


Reviewed by: Suchandra Ghosh
Appasamy Murugaiyan

Epigraphic studies need special training and interpretative skills. Appasamy Murugaiyan, the editor of the present collection of essays, reiterates this by hailing the Indian epigraphic tradition and the contributions of the pioneers to South Indian epigraphy.


Reviewed by: R. Champakalakshmi
Meera Kosambi

We have just completed the golden jubilee year of the publication of D.D.Kosambi’s ‘Combined Methods in Indology’ in the Indo-Iranian Journal in 1963. This remarkable essay was in print several decades before the vocabulary of ‘cultural turn’, ‘linguistic turn’, ‘ethno-archaeology’, ‘ethno-Indology’, ‘ethno-history’…


Reviewed by: Krishna Mohan Shrimali
Irfan Habib

This volume of the People’s History of India deals with not just five hundred years of its history but also an important phase in the making of early India. It was marked by the consolidation of earlier trends in north India and the spread of cities and states in other parts of the country; with all their socio-political implications.


Reviewed by: Bhairabi Prasad Sahu
Romila Thapar

Romila Thapar’s book is a compilation of sixteen essays most carefully chosen, almost like selecting the best of pearls to be strung. A collection of essays on history would definitely open up with issues in historiography and so does the first section incorporating three essays.


Reviewed by: Susmita Basu Majumdar
Romila Thapar

This is a book that the world has been waiting for. Romila Thapar has been working on it for quite some time. She would publish an occasional paper on the theme since the middle of the seventies of the last century. Our appetite has been whetted ever since.


Reviewed by: Kesavan Veluthat