Jaithirth Rao

Gandhi is possibly the greatest Indian to have lived since Buddha. His greatness, however, lies not in his invulnerability—but rather, in his struggle to overcome his many frailties. Gandhi’s story is an alluring, yet rare, tale of the triumph of human will over seemingly insurmountable odds. One is reminded of Albert Einstein’s famous phrase describing Gandhi, ‘Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.


Reviewed by: Syed Areesh Ahmad
Prathama Banerjee

Prathama Banerjee’s book offers a brilliant academic contribution to the histories of the non-western world with its primary focus on the Indian subcontinent. This book is about ‘histories of the political’ by exploring the question of what is ‘political’ in the context of modern India. Thus, its overall focus is on how the modern ideas of political practice emerged in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century Bengal out of different Indian philosophical traditions as well as influence of colonialism.


Reviewed by: Vijaya Ramadas Mandala
Robert Eric Frykenberg

The two edited volumes under review comprise a collection of twenty-four essays incorporating an understanding of land in South Asia, exploring the purview beyond disciplinary boundaries. They historically map out South Asia’s land distribution and the negotiations involved in it among various actors on those lands. In Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History, among the eleven essays, those by S Nurul Hasan, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Burton Stein, and Nilmani Mukherjee start with a precolonial understanding of the land and extend to their modern-day implications.


Reviewed by: Satarupa Lahiri
Atusha Bharucha

This book, with about 250 pages and multiple useful illustrations, is a much-needed comprehensive work that fills the existing gap in both academic and non-academic understanding of early historic Gujarat. Apart from the Foreword and Introduction, the Appendix which follows the Conclusion is extremely useful as it introduces the different types of pottery of Gujarat.


Reviewed by: Mamta Dwivedi
Madhwi

Before jumping into analysing the book’s strengths, it is important to highlight the complexity of this project. Tracing a transnational project like the movement of labouring bodies across oceans, while being a scholar in a middle-income country is a feat. While the subjects of this book may be Indians, looking for their archival traces would require transcending national boundaries—something that not many early career scholars find possible.


Reviewed by: Aprajita Sarcar
Daman Singh

Ideas, as we do not adequately appreciate, are profoundly important. They are not merely abstractions, because they lead to actions, to violence or to healing. As a doctor, I was a Resident at a department of psychiatry where ECTs were routine. This treatment is now considered inhuman and is banned in most countries; it continues in India.


Reviewed by: Mohan Rao
Sumanyu Satpathy

Sumanyu Satpathy’s Will to Argue opens with a rather interesting excerpt from Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books about the ‘books of controversy’. Another excerpt from the same text, not quoted by the author, makes for a succinct comment on the momentous task that Satpathy has undertaken in this book.[B]ooks of controversy being, of all others, haunted by the most disorderly spirits, have always been confined in a separate lodge from the rest


Reviewed by: Surbhi Vatsa
Thomas Blom Hansen and Srirupa Roy

This volume, divided into four sections, has thirteen carefully selected essays. It attempts at investigating the rise of ‘New Hindutva’ in India. This phenomenon has been defined by the editors as a ‘governmental formulation with considerable institutional heft that converges with wider global currents and enjoys an unprecedented level of mainstream acceptance’ (p. 1).


Reviewed by: Mirza Asmer Beg
Harsh Mander and Navsharan Singh

Who is a citizen of India and on what terms? This is the momentous question that this anthology poses before us with a compelling force, in the increasingly unsettling climate of vulnerability and fear that the recently sculpted trinity of CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019)-NRIC-NPR has produced in our Republic. With much care, analytical sophistication, and citizenly conscience, a number of researchers, legal scholars, social activists, journalists, and creative writers examine through the pages of this edited volume the conceptual, constitutional, socio-political and affective dimensions of citizenship, and more pertinently, its denial, and the entangled issues of rightlessness and statelessness that such disenfranchisement engenders.


Reviewed by: Manabi Majumdar
Preet Mohan Singh Malik

Sikkim, a tiny Indian State with a population of less than a million, merged with India and became the 22nd State of the Indian Union in 1975. Ambassador Preet Mohan Singh Malik’s book, Sikkim: A History of Intrigue and Alliance, comes at a time when India’s strategic affairs are much debated notably after the Doklam, and Galwan Valley skirmishes.


Reviewed by: Banshanlang Marwein
Nirmal Kumar Mahato

In the title story of the short story collection The Adivasi Will Not Dance*, noted Santhal writer Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar sketched the character of Mangal Murmu who had accepted the opportunity to dance at a programme where the President of India would inaugurate a thermal power plant. However, upon learning that the whole project was constructed at the expense of the eleven villages whose inhabitants were evicted by an official diktat


Reviewed by: KB Veio Pou
Sharat Sabharwal

Many Indian works analyse Pakistan, to understand this subcontinental neighbour. This book is an important addition thanks to the balanced, nuanced, and insightful perspectives offered.Sharat Sabharwal spent eight years in Pakistan (1995-99, 2009-13). Few in our Foreign Service have had similar lengthy exposure.


Reviewed by: Kishan S Rana
Tehmton S. Mistry

There is much in common between these six books. They all carry a subtitle, are inexpensive and light reading, though about a rather heavy topic; are tales simply told; and are about the lesser remarked aspects of war. Other than the one by Hisila, they have been penned by people other than the respective protagonists, with Punia having his daughter along as co-author. All are of stories in southern Asia, other than Punia’s which is situated in West Africa.


Reviewed by: Ali Ahmed
Sebastian Schwecke

The popular image of the village moneylender is often that of a rapacious scoundrel who impoverishes people by lending money at exorbitant rates, a monopolist who retards the development of free market forces, someone who needs to be eliminated in the name of progress. This line has been propagated both by the government (right from the colonial times through enactments such as the Usurious Loans Act) and the Reserve Bank of India.


Reviewed by: TCA Ranganathan
Krishna Kumar

Krishna Kumar’s deep and critical engagement with education and its impact on the child is clearly reflected in the slim volume of 18 collected essays, Smaller Citizens: Writings on the Making of Indian Citizens. Some of these essays have been published earlier, while others appeared in the form of lectures which the author had delivered at various fora. Bringing these essays together in a single volume signifies the common theme that binds all of them together.


Reviewed by: Veena Kapoor
Viplav Baxi

Discussions on what is wrong in classrooms and institutions of education are part and parcel of staff-room conversations among teachers. Some reflective teachers take these discussions as trigger points for further exploration through reading and research. However, there are few spaces where books cover a range of issues in education, with a solution focused approach that is positive, but not prescriptive.


Reviewed by: Toolika Wadhwa
Ashwin Prabhu

If the poor have to be schooled in struggles to reclaim their humanity, how can schooling help the privileged to reclaim theirs? The book under review, Classroom with a View: Notes from the Krishnamurti Schools seeks to provide a possible answer. The history of these schools spans nearly a century and we have a large corpus of literature on them.


Reviewed by: CN Subramaniam
Swati Ganguly

In the period between 1850 and 1947, parallel to the slow expansion of a public education system set up by the colonial administration, the subcontinent witnessed several experiments in both school and higher education. Almost all of these experiments were in one way or another a response to the crises brought about by the colonial experience (including the colonial policies on education).


Reviewed by: Varadarajan Narayanan
Disha Nawani

All three published by Eklavya and edited by Disha Nawani, Nandini Manjrekar, Rashmi Paliwal, Ruchi Shevade.. All three books published by Eklavya and edited by Disha Nawani, Nandini Manjrekar, Rashmi Paliwal, Ruchi Shevade, Noam Chomsky. while speaking on ‘values for a new world’, identify three major problems of the world today


Reviewed by: Sharad Chandra Behar
Jandhyala B.G. Tilak

The book Education in India: Policy and Practice is a collection of papers/articles on education written in the journal Social Change over a period of five decades. It was published in 2021, when Social Change celebrated its Golden Jubilee.In his introduction to the series, Manoranjan Mohanty writes about the major social and economic changes and mass movements in India in the post-Independence period. Specific theme based issues of the journal have captured these developments.


Reviewed by: Sadhna Saxena
Urmila Chowdhury

Warriors come in many shapes and forms: artists, writers, humourists; a democracy needs them all, and Shovon Chowdhury is each of these. Today when the fourth pillar of democracy has all but crumbled, we need these truth sayers. The journalism fraternity lost a rare human being when he passed away in February 2020.


Reviewed by: Malati Mukherjee
Gayatri Sinha

The first of the two-volume opus that explores India’s ‘multifaceted journey of the photographic apparatus’ (Karode, p. 10) edited by art critic and curator Gayatri Sinha, Points of View: Defining Moments of Photography in India is a collection of 15 articles while its companion, The Archival Gaze: A Timeline of Photography in India, 1840-2020 charts out the historical terrain of photographic practice.


Reviewed by: Malavika Karlekar
Amit Ambalal

In his seminal essay, ‘Ornament’, published in the Art Bulletin (1939), AK Coomaraswamy had analysed the meaning, function, and symbolism of ornament, adornment, or embellishment in Indian artistic traditions. Towards this, he interpreted evidence from a range of textual sources—the Vedas, Brahmanas, Aranyakas, epics, Pali Buddhist canon, Jatakas, and the Alamkara Shastras—developing upon J Gonda’s earlier research on the terminological and semantic implications of the term alamkara (ornament/adornment).


Reviewed by: Parul Pandya Dhar
Duncan Stone

The enduring tradition of cricket literature regards the game as a quintessentially English—more precisely, Anglo-Saxon—institution. In this view, cricket encapsulates the values of an eternal England unsullied by the forces of modernity. This literary tradition was inaugurated in the early nineteenth century, at the very moment when industrialization was profoundly transforming the English landscape. Over time, the idea of cricket as a national sport centred in the countryside and devoid of class tensions became deeply entrenched.


Reviewed by: Prashant Kidambi
S. V. Srinivas

The book under review is a collection of articles that presents a multi-dimensional view of the here and now of cinema in India with indications of what trajectories it might follow. The editors say in their introduction that they ‘invited researchers from a variety of disciplinary and critical perspectives to reflect on Indian cinema’s current place among other media-cultural forms, public institutions and what the forms’ possible futures might be’ (p. 3).


Reviewed by: Anupama Srinivasan
Diptakirti Chaudhuri

Trifles makes perfection, and perfection is no trifle’ goes a famous saying, often ascribed to Michelangelo. Bollywood films are far from perfect, but a ‘crazy trivia guide to Bollywood’ can be as mesmerizing as a blockbuster is to the countless addicts of Hindi commercial cinema.The pan-India appeal of films made in Bombay (should Bollywood be now renamed Mullywood in view of its changed name to Mumbai!) continues unabated despite challenges from the South.


Reviewed by: Amitabha Bhattacharya
Samir Kumar Das & Bishnupriya Basak

One of the festivities that is held in great reverence is the Durga Puja. Though it is a five-day journey, Bengal, and Bengalis (across the globe) prepare for the festival throughout the year.The Making of Goddess Durga in Bengal: Art, Heritage and the Public is a collection of articles authored by various scholars is an ethnographic study, divided into four parts, of its colonial past and the artists involved. 


Reviewed by: Oly Roy
Suresh Menon

Suresh Menon’s collection of essays, Why don’t You Write Something I Might Read? is that rare book that leaps up at first glance with multiple hooks. To begin, is the poignant pull of Westland’s Context logo—from what used to be India’s oldest independent book house, felled for closure earlier this year, after its buyout by Amazon.


Reviewed by: Rina Ramdev
Ananta Kumar Giri

The book under review is indeed a very carefully curated anthology of essays that brings together the lesser known side of thinker, scholar and activist Chitta Ranjan Das. The volume is a collection of Das’s writings on a wide variety of subjects related to culture, politics, literature and life and thereby holds up the spectacular canvas of his extremely creative and life-affirming personality.


Reviewed by: Ananya Pathak
Kolakaluri Enoch

Where do stories come from? Where and how do they reach? How does the reader respond to the stories unknown, unheard and unwritten earlier? How do stories of the other become instrumental in understanding the interface between the self and the other? The twelve stories in Asprishya Ganga and Other Stories articulate the experience specific to identities such as community, class, occupation, region and language.


Reviewed by: K Suneetha Rani
Manindra Gupta.

Pebble Monkey! What an enchanting title, you think. You open the novella to a quaint world–at 12,000 feet, on a snowy mountainous terrain, live ibexes. One ibex dislodges a pebble. The pebble is thrown up in the air, and when it falls it bounces into the tunnel. Soon afterwards, someone can be heard swimming in the water.


Reviewed by: Meenakshi Shivram
Nawaaz Ahmed

Radiant Fugitives by Nawaaz Ahmed is a lavish book, with a plethora of complex themes dealt with in a generous, benevolent way. The canvas is large. It straddles America and Chennai, misogyny and homophobia, Islam and Blackness in America, and a slice of time stretching from America’s attack on Iraq up to Obama’s victory in elections.


Reviewed by: Sumitra Kannan
Deepa Agarwal

As the title itself suggests, childhood and memory are the two very important dramatis personae of this book. Deepa Agarwal is an accomplished writer of literature for children and young adults. It is this biozone that her reading and imagination have revealed and animated for her readers. And, when she uses this expertise to cross-pollinate her poetry, the result is as vibrant as a field of wildflowers in the bugyals of the Himalayas.


Reviewed by: Smita Agarwal
Sharanya Manivannan

Written in lyrical prose, Sharanya Manivannan’s graphic novel, is a treat to read. It evokes emotions as does powerful poetry. The accompanying sketches by Manivannan recreate a magical world under water. Page colours include multiple shades of blue, red, and yellow, while doodles and writing are in white. The book explores stories and lore about merfolk.


Reviewed by: Shamayita Sen
Yashpal

…when, as a consequence of the growing age of human society, the swaddling cloth of its infancy starts oppressing its body, would it not be better at that time to create for it an extensive cloth of new ideas? Must we constrain its body such that it fits within its old limits?’—these words are a part of the introduction by the writer Yashpal for his seminal political novel that was considered a pioneer in the world of Hindi literature and was published in the early 1940s.


Reviewed by: Semeen Ali
Samira Shackle

Life in an ‘edgy’ city is more a cause for dread than for wonder in our part of the world. The violent underside of ‘developing’ neo-colonial/globalizing urban spaces has had its share of steady gazes, for instance, Mumbai, Maximum City or even Calcutta: City of Joy. So, the immersive experience of Karachi that Samina Shackle offers us echoes and resonates with the subcontinental reader in a way that goes beyond exoticization of a culturally and economically distant land.


Reviewed by: Ipshita Chanda
Mihir Vatsa

Tales of Hazaribagh is much more than the exploratory travelogue its title promises: along with a rich, complex narrative of Vatsa’s discoveries of the Chhotanagpur Plateau, it has autobiography, stories of suspense and the supernatural in the best tradition of ghost stories, social critique, historiography, and an intimate introduction to his roads, his waterfalls, his friends and family.


Reviewed by: Vinita Chandra
Pronoti Datta

The ‘skein of duality’ that runs through Pronoti Datta’s debut novel gives it its special character, and as one toggles between the past and the present, between people and places, and between culture, politics and history, all of which make up the warp and weft of the story, the reader is drawn irresistibly into its multihued narrative.


Reviewed by: Anjana Neira Dev
Shekhar Pathak

The Himalaya is an integral part of the natural habitat of India and some other neighbouring countries. It ensures rain in the field areas, and many rivers coming out from the Himalayas, including Ganga, are the basis of life and civilization in north India. The Himalayas have also been a source of cultural identity, not only for people who are living in this region but also for the people of other parts of the country. 


Reviewed by: Kamal Nayan Choubey
Rajesh Tailang

Mature is the word that comes to my mind the moment I think of Rajesh Tailang, a sensitive writer and actor with a staggeringly successful career in Bollywood and Digital Media. After earning laurels for his acting in movies like Siddharth, Mukkabaaz, and the web series Delhi Crime and Mirzapur, his passion for writing took him to attempt plays, cinematography, and poems.


Reviewed by: Shuby Abidi
S.R. Harnot

The introductory line of the novel sets the tone for what we witness throughout its narrative. Sunma is no ordinary woman. Her tears symbolize a tenacious grip over the capitalist and globalized reality, and how it has caused a systemic destruction of rivers and natural resources.


Reviewed by: Bharti Arora
Ramachandra Behera

I put it down to serendipity that I read the short story collection under review shortly after reading Ramachandra Behera’s novel Mukti ra Ruparekha (1990) both in the original and in its just published English translation entitled Contours of Liberation. An amazing novel about the tragic outcome of the conflict between desire for personal pleasure and parental obligation and filial love, the work betokened certain signature qualities of the acclaimed Odia writer, which the short story collection has happily confirmed.


Reviewed by: Himansu S Mohapatra
Syeda Javeria Fatima

Syeda Javeria Fatima’s collection of poems is not as whimsical as the title suggests; in fact, it is quite the opposite. Written in simple rhyme schemes, the poems voice the observations of a child’s world which has been marred by experiences too mature for her. Divided into sections that range from spiritual belief to romantic love, and her mother’s sacrificial omnipresence for her family members to friends that include her schoolmates and her grandparents.


Reviewed by: Suman Bhagchandani
Marco Moneta

Aripper of a yarn that defies the imagination while bringing to light historical nuggets: this is the story of Nicolo Manucci, a semi-literate Italian teenager who ran away from home to become a renowned medical practitioner in Mughal India, a respected diplomat and a chronicler of the age.  Marco Moneta recounts Manucci’s colourful tale with a flair that reads almost like fiction, while providing the perspective that makes the book a useful historical record.


Reviewed by: Govindan Nair
Malini Seshadri

Dalit Literature is not simply literature…Dalit Literature is associated with a movement to bring about change….at the very first glance, it will be strongly evident that there is no established critical theory or point of view behind them; instead there is new thinking and a new point of view’ (Dangle, 1994).Since Dalit writing is, by its very nature, revolutionary inasmuch as it seeks to overturn stereotypes and accepted norms of society and behaviour—therefore, also being transformational—it cannot be concluded that there is a radical ideology at work behind all Dalit writing.


Reviewed by: Malati Mathur
Saeeda Bano

To read Saeeda Bano’s supremely candid, flamboyant, and emotionally charged narrative of her extraordinary life is to launch oneself on a roller coaster ride of high emotional drama that has its own moments of tragedy and comedy. Intense, funny, heart-breaking and inspirational all at the same time, Saeeda Bano’s story is the story of a woman who dared to break taboos.


Reviewed by: Nishat Zaidi