Zorawar Daulet Singh

Zorawar Daulet Singh has made a very impressive intervention into the historiography of Indian foreign relations in the Cold War. His close historical study of the diplomacy of both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi reveals profound differences.


Reviewed by: Anton Harder
T.V. Paul

A veritable explosion in books offering China-India comparisons is a sign of the times. The two Asian giants offer strong similarities and contrasts, which belies an approximate 5-to-1 difference in the size of their economies.


Reviewed by: Kishan S Rana
S.D. Muni and Rahul Mishra

The civilizational links between India and Southeast Asia established through its engagements and interactions with the region, has a long history. All the three major religions of Southeast Asia, namely, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, went either from or through India.


Reviewed by: Baladas Ghoshal
Reshmi Kazi and Ashild Kolas

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, focus of the international community has shifted from nuclear nonproliferation regime to nuclear safety and nuclear security. Active participation by large numbers of countries in the Nuclear Security Summits (NSS) demonstrates the significance of nuclear security in the contemporary world.


Reviewed by: Neha Kumar Tiwari
Subhash Gatade

The 2014 general elections which saw the Bharatiya Janata Party return to power with an absolute majority is believed to have brought an important paradigmatic shift to Indian politics. Scholars commenting have termed it as a majoritarian shift.


Reviewed by: Parvin Sultana
Jennifer Bussell

In this illuminating study Jennifer Bussell explores a frequently talked about but scarcely studied phenomenon of Indian democracy, characterized aptly as ‘patronage democracy’, describing the relationship between elected representatives and the electors as ‘clients and constituents’.


Reviewed by: Ajay K Mehra
Rumki Basu

The discipline of public administration emerged foregrounding two major Wilsonian fallacies. One, that ‘politics’ and ‘administration’ are distinct dichotomous governmental blobs which need to be dealt with separately, and the political and permanent executive must take note of it.


Reviewed by: Tanvir Aeijaz
Maidul Islam

The Indian social, political and economic scenario has undergone and is still undergoing a process of rapid transformation. A change is particularly significant in the way we perceive Muslims and their concerns in India. The new institutional framework caused.


Reviewed by: Afroz Alam
Raheel Dhattiwala

On the 28th of February of 2002, fifty-nine Hindu karsevaks (volunteers for a religious cause) were killed. It led to violent attacks on Muslims, which resulted in the deaths of nearly a thousand Muslims. Even by 2018, only hundred and fifty-two Hindus were convicted in the various cases, out of which 38 were acquitted.


Reviewed by: Mohd Osama
Rajesh Kota

In normal political discussions, the conscious Ambedkarites are scaled above and admired more over the other ‘non-active’ Dalits. In the post-Ambedkar period, the Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra and the formation of the BSP in Uttar Pradesh are two prominent examples.


Reviewed by: Arvind Kumar
Rajesh Kota

Jai Bheem, Lal Salaam (Hail the Unity of the Ambedkarites and the Marxists) had become a catchphrase slogan in the aftermath of Rohit Vemula’s suicide in Hyderabad Central University in 2016, which immediately percolated to the streets around the power-corridors.


Reviewed by: Arvind Kumar
Uma Chakravarti

This is the revised and updated edition of a book originally published in 2003. Maithreyi Krishnaraj’s ‘Note from the Series Editor’ introduces the volume and places it in its context, while Uma Chakravarti’s ‘Afterword: Caste and Gender in the New Millennium’ provides.


Reviewed by: Kamakshi Balasubramanian
Anna Suvorova

This fascinating book provides a compelling narrative about the life and times of South Asia’s female heads of state. While the content focuses mainly on Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Khaleda Zia, Hasina Wajed, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Chandrika Kumaratunga.


Reviewed by: Padmini Swaminathan
Kalpana Sharma

The Silence and the Storm: Narratives of Violence Against Women in India is an addition to the existing corpus of literature on gender politics. Working as a journalist for four decades, the author Kalpana Sharma has drawn the trajectory of women’s struggles in India.


Reviewed by: Sabah Hussain
Sameena Dalwai

When globalization, dominant morality and caste clash, it is women who get trampled. Nowhere was this more evident than in the controversy that arose over so-called ‘dance bars’ in Mumbai in the new millennium. These were bars where men drank.


Reviewed by: Kalpana Sharma
S. Irudaya Rajan and N. Neetha

Migration, Gender and Care Economy focuses on the intersections of women’s role and their experiences in migration along with the care economy. Historically we know that women in general have been part of the care economy as unpaid carers and low.


Reviewed by: Srinidhi Raghavan
Amiya P. Sen

Amiya Sen calls his book Chaitanya: A Life and Legacy: 1) a biography of Chaitanya, 2) a story that he has ‘narrated to himself’1 as a historian and ‘not as a scholar of religious studies’2, 3) a ‘not so serious yet reflexive’3 work which he believes will not please either the pious Vaishnava (‘for a palpable lack of faith’4).


Reviewed by: Megh Kalyanasundaram
Suresh Balakrishnan

On receiving the two volumes of Eardley Norton: A Biography I, not unnaturally perhaps, wondered what had led Suresh Balakrishnan to embark on this thousand page plus project. Norton today would be barely known outside a small set with knowledge about the history of the legal profession in Chennai. Evidently this erasure of memory is what spurred the author, himself.


Reviewed by: TCA Raghavan

The books under review have different stories with a difference, stories of children of the urban poor in their own words. This is a graded series for beginner readers of English.
Muskaan, an organization working with urban deprived children from Denotified Tribes.


Editorial

Recovering children’s agency is not always a straightforward task, for their participation in social life and enquiry is always-already mediated by adult frameworks and understanding of children. Yet, that children play an important role as social agents, attending.


Editorial
Sadaf Hussain

The time of impersonal recipe books with no introductions or context, is long gone. They have slowly and steadily been almost completely replaced by food memoirs, travelogues with recipes of dishes one ate around the world or history books charting the origin,


Reviewed by: Anjula Ray Chaudhuri
Urmilla Deshpande

This slim volume belies its promise of a ‘first-of-its-kind’ collection ‘of noir and black humour at its best’. The cover image of a bitten apple and its subtitle, ‘Stories on breaking the Ten Commandments’ make explicit the pointlessly aggressive anti-Christian.


Reviewed by: Vaibhav Parel
Shubha Mudgal

The late Sheila Dhar was an art aficionado who was known for her witty portrayal of musicians and music lovers! After many years, Shubha Mudgal’s stories on real-time musicians shows the same flavour. The anecdotal bizarre situational complexities brought forth.


Reviewed by: Kasturika Mishra
Alex Rutherford

‘The Epic Story of Robert Clive and the Dawn of the British Empire In India’. So says the punch line on the front page of this exhilarating book Fortune’s Soldier by Alex Rutherford which though is to a large extent misleading. The reader would expect to be acquainted.


Reviewed by: Sabyasachi Dasgupta
Girdhar Rathi

In this eclectic anthology of stories from the Nayi Kahani or New Stories movement in Hindi literature which started in the late 1950s, acclaimed poet, editor and translator, Girdhar Rathi offers readers the translation of a personally selected array of seventeen short stories.


Reviewed by: Shubhra Gupta
Raghav Chandra

Every year most people learn of the persons who get the higher positions in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), the Indian Police Service (IPS) and the other top civil services, from the media—the newspapers and television.


Reviewed by: Bhaskar Ghose
Zadie Smith

‘Words are to be taken seriously.’(Grand Union p. 415)Zadie Smith’s Grand Union, an eclectic collection of short stories, represents the storyteller’s quest for diverse voices, dialects and possibilities. Born in the northwest London borough of Brent in 1975 to a black Jamaican mother and a white English father, Zadie.


Reviewed by: Nishat Haider
Easterine Kire

The opening line of the new novel by Easterine Kire, A Respectable Woman, resonates with a popular passage of the Bible (Ecclesiastes chapter 3) where the wise King Solomon articulates that there is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven.


Reviewed by: KB Veio Pou
Annie Zaidi

Two houses, both alike in wealth, are the scenes of Annie Zaidi’s newest work, a novel. There is going to be civil strife, for there is already blood in the streets and the air is heavy with grudges that foretell new mutinies to come.


Reviewed by: Asma Rasheed
Tom Sastry

In his poem, ‘Brother Fire’, Louis MacNeice addresses the London ‘Blitz’ of 1940 as a brother. Although an enemy, he views fire ‘expressing even its victims’ (James Reeves). The fire in Tom Sastry’s latest collection is also an oppressor but a force that.


Reviewed by: Yogesh Patel
Arundhathi Subramaniam

In 1912, the rhetoric by Ezra Pound was considered as a predecessor for what was to become the future of poetry: ‘Poetry is not a sort of embroidery, cross-stitch, crochet, for pensioners, nor yet a postprandial soporific for the bourgeoisie. We need the old feud between the artist and the smugger.


Reviewed by: Semeen Ali
Katherine Eban

Catherine Eban is an American journalist known for her ‘Investigative firepower’. Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom is her second book on the pharmaceutical industry. Eban’s first work Dangerous Doses: A True Story of Cops.


Reviewed by: MR Santosh
Mahima Nayar

Issues related to women’s mental health have always occupied centre-stage attention. The reasons for this are not hard to find. The lived realities of women’s existence that highlight their subjugation and distress in a patriarchal order have been.


Reviewed by: Namita Ranganathan
Namrata Joshi

Ever since cinema emerged as a dominant source of entertainment in the last century, its influence on the public psyche remains unsurpassed. Over time and across space, it has changed forms and with technological innovations, its range and capacity have hugely expanded.


Reviewed by: Amitabha Bhattacharya
Poonam Trivedi and Paromita

Any survey of Shakespeare requires an intricate triangulation of history, politics and culture. Shakespeare is so integrally related to Cinema that movies which adapt Shakespeare are used to showcase the multidimensional growth of cinema itself—from the minute-long.


Reviewed by: Joseph Koyippally
Yasir Abbasi

The major ingredient of the aura of Bombay Cinema is nostalgia. Films themselves satiate nostalgias for things and ways of living now lost, or never acquired. Nostalgia for rurality, small town sensibilities, the historical past, myths and fables are all important.


Reviewed by: Ghazala Jamil
Hariprabha Takeda

She is by no means an adventurous traveller recounting her excursions into ‘the Land of the Rising Sun’ wrapped in the secrecy of its isolation from the rest of the world. She was following her Japanese husband Oemon Takeda to visit her Japanese in-laws living.


Reviewed by: Geeta Doctor
Hari Dang

The Himalaya over millennia has hosted deities, rishis, hunters, shepherds, cultivators, pilgrims, and mountaineers, but in our heavily polluted age today, its overarching benevolence is almost narrowing to the last gasp, as the luxury of breathing.


Reviewed by: Bill Aitken
Sandeep Shastri

Leadership as a subject has received scant attention in the discipline of political science in India. Most of the writings are journalistic or biographical in nature. The focus in the available literature on political leadership is mainly on national leadership.


Reviewed by: Ashutosh Kumar