Volume XXXI No. 6 – JUNE 2007

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto founded the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and became the country’s first elected Prime Minister. Despite his socialist credo of ‘food, clothing and shelter’ which he used in his 1970 political campaign, the left regarded him with mixed feelings.

The Autobiography of Lutfullah, A Mohamedan Gentleman and His Transactions with His Fellow Creatures (the original title of the book when it was first published in 1857) belongs to the popular genre of travel writing in the 19th century.

With the publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981 Indian Writing in English was finally said to have come of age. Such proclamations notwithstanding, even a quarter of a century after Rushdie’s magnum opus Indian writers in English continue to be assailed with questions such as whether they are being authentic to their culture or commodifying it for the benefit of foreign publishers, markets, and readership.

Fiction written in the past affords us authentic glimpses of that era and also an insight into the social psyche of different groups of persons of that period through imagined characters. The poor plight of Indian women and lower classes was a strong theme in British colonial propaganda to legitimize its presence in India.

The word shringara, the title of Shanta Acharya’s fourth full-length poetry collection, has a special reverberation for me. In my childhood, reading Bengali poetry from the olden days, I would come across this mysterious word,

There are occasions when you feel a kind of bliss when you read a book that is able to deal with things that are dear to your heart. Here is such a publication: an anthology that collects writing by Gujarati women over a century.

Anglophilia has long afflicted the average educated Indian Parsi. It was so in the Victorian era. It is so now. Cornelia Sorabji was no exception. Though only half a Parsi, she did not do things by halves.

About five decades ago, Louis Dumont (1911-1998) a French scholar of international repute, set the tone and tenor of the academic discourse in anthropology and sociology about the nature of Indian society. Dumont was a ‘pupil’ of Marcel Mauss; and he learnt Sanskrit when he was imprisoned in Hamburg during the Second World War.

The book under review is a comprehensive exploration of the lives of artisans in early modern Rajasthan and associated complexities. An intricate web of relationships among a highly heterogeneous community/class called ‘artisans’ in the ever-changing dynamics of early modern Period in Rajasthan has been successfully nuanced.

The authors should be commended for producing what will now be a compulsory text for all those interested in a serious academic discussion on human security, especially as it connects to debates and theories in International Relations (IR). That this book has been brought out as part of Routledge’s prestigious series on ‘Advances in International Relations and Global Politics’ is already confirmation of this status.

This is a timely book on an important issue that is centre-stage since the 2001 census, namely the disappearance of baby girls. The female male ratio (FMR) in the world —that is the number of females per thousand males—is 9901 . Western Europe has a figure of 1,064 females per thousand males and Africa, 1,015.