Volume XL No. 8 – AUGUST 2016

Till about the dawn of the twentieth century, Chanakya’s Arthashastra and his other works had remained in oblivion for modern scholars. The singular credit for the discovery of this 2500 year old manuscript on statecraft and political economy goes to Dr Rudrapatnam Shamashastry of Mysore, who not only unearthed the text but heralded a new era in Indian administration and statecraft. At the same time he also helped refresh the western minds that Indian thought was not entirely geared to discovering the ‘other-worldly’ merits.

The book cannot be categorized as belonging to a particular genre as far as its story line is concerned. Undoubtedly a fiction, the reader is left wondering if the protagonist was actually a ‘real person’ who did not wish to reveal her identity, and yet wanted the world to know about her life and the people linked with her—their experiences, their mindsets, and their thinking that most of the time directed their actions. What comes across is a level of honesty that existed in the primary players and an acceptance of human failings—if one may call it that—of their loved ones.

Qayenaat, the heroine of The Cosmopolitans, has been married once, doesn’t like to cook, has a friend called Sathi who’s actually her ex-boyfriend, but hasn’t quite gotten over her, and is fiftythree years old.The novel opens with the arrival of Baban Reddy on the Bangalore art scene. On display at ‘Navya’, the new art gallery is Baban’s gigantic piece of art Nostalgia. So big is Nostalgia that you have to climb up a ladder to inspect it closely! The art lovers of Bangalore are agog with the news and vying with each other to catch the attention of the artist Baban, who has a lady-friend accompanying him called Tanya.

I must admit to having agreed to review this book by the celebrated Barkha Dutt after a spectacular launch spearheaded by Dutt herself through her pivotal position in NDTV, with a degree of trepidation. Yet the opening chapters and my discovery of Barkha being the daughter of that Amazon among free India’s young journalists of the time, Prabha Dutt, much admired by her contemporaries, who, like her, quested to break new ground in a brave new world, allayed these apprehensions. Through her own words Dutt comes across as a demonstrable example of what free India has made of the new woman: emancipated, independent, free thinking, not only ready but keen to challenge accepted wisdom and go where few Indian women have gone before.

Autism: Book of Revelations is a unique take on the subject of autism in terms of the spiritual insight experienced by professionals involved in autism care. In fact it would be an oversimplification to state that the book deals with the ‘spiritual’ considering the vast array of ways that people with autism and professionals involved in caring for them experience autism as a state of being beyond what is humanly possible, a state of ‘soul consciousness’ as Tasleem Farzana and Pekka Kontiainen summarize in the foreword to the book.

This is a memoir of a part of the political life, of sixteen years to be precise, of the President of India Pranab Mukherjee. It is clearly not an autobiography, though obviously Mukherjee is the narrator of his story and a commentator of goings-on around him, which he does in a lucid narrative. It follows his earlier publication The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years (2014). It must be stated at the outset, critiquing a political memoir is not an easy task for any reviewer, I would therefore critically look at the events he has described and commented upon.

Displacement and migration constitute what might be called a traumatic experience for many as they lead to uprooting one from one’s base. But if this happens due to some large scale violence, which has a communal and a caste overtone, it doubly marginalizes the victims. Till recently, it was the violence in Muzzaffarnagar that had become such a distressing story. According to a conservative estimate, more than 41,000 Muslims were rendered homeless, with most of them never being able to return to their villages and having to live the lives of destitutes. Gujarat (2002) was another example of communal violence which led to the displacement of a large number of people, as more than 2 lakhs were displaced within the first two years itself.

Political writing is dangerous in proportion to the ignorance and fanaticism of hearers and readers, and it is more than likely that, if sedition continues to avowed [sic] with impunity by a few, it will become the leading idea of many.It is very easy to attribute these words to any leading light of the present government. However, these words that betray so much anxiety with so much candour belong to a nineteenth century colonial official. Writing in 1875, M. Kempson, Director, Public Instruction was building a government consensus towards a greater clampdown on political literature in public circulation which was to eventually culminate in the Vernacular Press Act, 1878. In the case of draconian colonial laws, we often have the luxury of hindsight on our side. But contemporary governments and their pallbearers often speak in forked tongues and are seldom so candid about their intentions. It is then left to us to look for our sources elsewhere.

The public sphere is a phrase coined by Jurgen Habermas to refer to the critical space for public discourse and rational argument. It has its roots in postEnlightenment critiques of state authority. Increasingly the public sphere has been seen not only as a conceptual space but also as a physical one, the locus for action, but made possible only within a truly democratic polity: the sphere where men act with other men. Mit-sein is the Heideggarean term that Divya Diwedi’s essay imports to demarcate where the private and the public interface: human beings are related to others through their deeds. The polis, in Greece, was the theatre for all such interactions.

Incarnations, the dust jacket reveals, is based on the celebrated BBC Radio 4 series, broadcast in 2015. Perhaps the terms of commission had stipulated fifty lives—as a substantial number, and a round one. Fifty lives lived end-to-end would just about span the two-and-a-half millennia between Sunil Khilnani’s bookends: the Buddha and Dhirubhai Ambani. However, a footslog through history is not his aim. While the fifty subjects appear in chronological order, seven individuals feature from the first one thousand years and twenty-one from the last century alone. Exactly six women make the cut—under-represented to the same degree as in the current Lok Sabha. This Khilnani blushes at but blames it on the absence of non-royal women from records till the twentieth century.

The German philosopher Theodor Adorno once stated that the true basis of morality is to be found in bodily feeling and in identification with unbearable pain, that the metaphysical injunction that one shall not inflict pain can only find its justification in the recourse to material reality, i.e., corporeal, physical reality and not in any pure idea, which would be at its opposite pole. As the editors state in the preface, is an enquiry into this ‘materiality of hurt as a felt sentiment, with its own taxonomies of affect. When and how does a materialist understanding of political rationality make way for apprehensions of fear and pain?’ (p. xii) Their book explores the question of bodily feeling, of sentiment and its inevitable entwinement with politics and cesnsorship in the current Indian scenario. Metaphysics, as Adorno stated, has slipped into material existence.

“Provided that they (The Indian Army or IA) do their duty, armed insurrection in India would not be an insoluble problem, If however the IA were to go the other way, the picture would be very different.”These lines sum up the essence of the book under review which examines the critical role played by the Indian Army during a vital period in the history of the subcontinent, the end of the Second World War and the rapid unravelling of the subcontinent as a single administrative unit culminating in a divided subcontinent in 1947 with all the attendant horrors which followed. The book argues that the Indian Army despite being put to unimaginable strain did not fall apart and continued to perform as a highly professional force, notwithstanding some aberrations.

The book begins with Ram Prasad Bismil’s poem sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil me hai which captures the fire of sacrifice and intense loyalty for nation held by men and women in the Hindi heartland.The main thrust of this book is to explore the contribution of lesser known women who made sacrifices for the sake of freedom. The narrative embarks with the ordeal of Rajkumari Gupta, a freedom fighter of Kanpur. Her involvement in the movement left her homeless, as she had a pivotal role to play in the Kakori plot that resulted in her arrest and consequent rejection by her in-laws. The author starts her discussion culled from oral and archival sources about the role of women participants in the Kakori incident, and furnishes information regarding their experiences and identities.

The book under review, Partition: The Long Shadow, delving into the notions of ‘foreignness’ and ‘belonging’, focuses upon three significant themes: one, it brings back the peripheral regions of the subcontinent, e.g., Assam, Sindh, and Ladakh, into the academic discussion on Partition; two, it gives voice to the second and third generation memories of the event; and three, it suggests a larger study of the psychological aftermath of Partition.

Education occupies an intersecting space between economic, cultural and political spheres in society. In this context, the book under review investigates the nature of identity formation among economically deprived adolescent Muslim girls in Delhi by focusing on the interstitial spaces of the ‘home’ and ‘school’. It examines issues of religion, patriarchy and education, to interrogate the universalistic norms which are generally gendered in India. The volume using an interdisciplinary approach and multiple research methods attempts to contribute to the study of socialization and modern education among minorities and other marginalized groups.

This is one of those books that not only immediately captures one’s attention, but becomes something of an academic page turner. Lila Abu-Lughod’s book may be dismissed by many as an apologia for the abject condition of women in the Islamic world. Her response would be that those who make the most about the issue of the degraded condition of Muslim women are under the sway of what she calls ‘IslamLand’. This is an unchanging notion of the lands of Islam and Muslims that does not take into account the multifarious and diverse ways in which women lead their lives in these many regions, territories and nations of the world. Abu-Lughod’s training as an anthropologist equips her with precisely this imperative to look into the complex matrix of diversity, hopes, miseries, desires, ambitions, dreams and uncertainties with which women lead their lives. Her focus is on the Middle East and in particular a remote village of Egypt in which she has followed the lives of her many female interlocutors about whom she has written, quite often with great empathy.

Sujit Kumar Chattopadhyay’s book titled Gender Inequality, Popular Culture and Resistance in Bankura District is in keeping with the spirit of our times. There has been a rethink in gender studies on the importance of cultural norms and institutions in sustaining gender inequality compared to the more visible social and economic structures such as family and market. Studies have explored the strength of gender norms perpetuated through popular culture and the insidious ways in which it operates to solidify and naturalize gender based inequality (Chowdhry 1994, Uberoi 2009). The turn to cultural studies in gender studies set out as its agenda the need to take cultural forms seriously and use them as subversive sites of resistance. The book therefore contributes to the growing research on popular culture as a site of gender inequality as well as its resistance.

The title of the book Purdah to Piccadilly: A Muslim Woman’s Struggle for Identity is very apt, literally and metaphorically. The book follows the journey of a Muslim woman’s struggle for creating an identity in a world where a woman herself is a non-entity. Based through a timeperiod that sets the background of the story through the social and political upheaval of the pre- and post-Independence era, the story chronicles the life of the author from birth till present times where Zarina Bhatty is leading a quite retired life in Mussorie. The review presented here is more from a gender perspective than anything else.

Aparna Bandopadhay’s book creates a narrative out of the heartrending journey of desire and defiance that women in colonial Bengal went through for daring to assert the aspirations of their hearts. Caught between a patriarchal society and a patriarchal state, it shows in detail how classic patriarchy excludes and punishes women who challenge its control over their sexuality. The chapter ‘Quest for Legitimacy’ recounts the instances when women from kulin Hindu and Brahmo families asserted their right to choose their life partners. The Hindu ideal of marriage was a non-consensual marriage at a pre-pubertal age. Although the Brahmos accepted the concept of mutual consent, they too imposed restrictions of caste endogamy, Brahmo endogamy, regional endogamy, and obtaining the approval of the families. Any choice that did not meet with these criteria was considered transgressive. Young kulin women, haunted by the spectre of lifelong spinsterhood or marriage to a polygamous older man and subsequent early widowhood, married men who were not vetted by their families.

This timely collection of essays is in equal measure a product of and a detailed comment on an important moment in the history of feminism in India, in which feminists reject the need for a unified subject of feminism, and turn towards a deeper interrogation of the activist/academic divide in making sense of feminism itself. It contains excellent essays that reveal the extent to which feminism in India has become alive to the intertwining of many different strands of power shaping of our patriarchies. The editor in her introduction remarks that the essays in the volume are about ‘doing’ gender rather than just ‘thinking’ it, but many of these essays show that feminism in India has often complicated that divide—it is not always just thinking, they seem to say. Rather, it was often the effort to develop a praxis in the fullest sense.