Vijay Seshadri

Vijay Seshadri’s two earlier collections, Wild Kingdom and Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 1996 and 2004 respectively), have already been reviewed well. Richard Wilbur, Frank Bidart, Evan Boland, and Campbell McGrath (the known and the lesser known ones) have noted his poetic merit in unmistakable terms. The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker had words of praise for him.


Reviewed by: Anisur Rahman
Sujata Bhatt

Sujata Bhatt’s meditative and reflective verse has established her among the much feted poets of promise writing in English today. Her poetry is marked by a poignant search for home, language and love. She conducts this search with deep sympathy and empathy through the use of memory and history in her work.


Reviewed by: Amrita Mehta
Vijay Seshadri

Vijay Seshadri’s two earlier collections, Wild Kingdom and Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 1996 and 2004 respectively), have already been reviewed well. Richard Wilbur, Frank Bidart, Evan Boland, and Campbell McGrath (the known and the lesser known ones) have noted his poetic merit in unmistakable terms. The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker had words of praise for him.


Reviewed by: Anisur Rahman
Juhi Sinha

There are many kinds of travelers in this world. On one end of the spectrum, you have the “been-there-done-that” variety. Every place they visit connote just another ‘conquest’ and memorabilia they bring back (not to forget the footage on that indispensible handycam), ‘trophies’ to show off. And then you have the type that are mentally so scared to venture out of their environment…


Reviewed by: Sowmya Sivakumar
Richard Zimler

Richard Zimler’s Guardian of the Dawn, a historical mystery, is the third of his trilogy on the Zarco family, the other two being The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, and Hunting Midnight, set in the 16th and 19th centuries, the setting encompassing different countries and different generations of the family. Guardian of the Dawn is set in 16th century Goa against the background of the Roman Catholic Inquisition and Portuguese colonialism.


Reviewed by: Rajarshi Kalita
Anita Nair

In a literary career spanning over a decade, Goodnight and God Bless is Anita Nair’s first time as an essayist. According to Aldous Huxley, ‘…a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel.


Reviewed by: Anandana Kapur
Navtej Sarna

Navtej Sana is a skillful story-teller. His narrative cunning was seen in his debut novel, ‘We Weren’t Lovers Like That”, published five years ago. And he seems to have chosen a promising story to tell – the life of Duleep Singh, the youngest son of the only successful Sikh emperor Ranjit Singh from his youngest wife Jindan.


Reviewed by: Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr
Shivanath

Jammu and Kashmir today is a house divided. In 2008 as I write this review, there are processions in favour of land for Amarnath Yatris, being taken out in Jammu and counter-processions in Kashmir by Muslims. The shadow of violence has now been hanging over the Kashmir valley for nearly five decades.


Reviewed by: Vijaya Ramaswamy
Gunnel Cederlof

For those who read ‘The Toda Tiger- Debates on Custom, Utility and Rights in Nature, South India 1820- 1843’ by Gunnel Cederlof in the 2005 publication called Ecological Nationalisms, this new book offers a more detailed and valuable narration of the establishment of colonial rule in the Nilgiri hills by a complex and simultaneous process of law making related to land rights and settlement of land claims.


Reviewed by: Manju Menon
Amita Baviskar

This book brings together within its beautiful covers ten extremely relevant and timely articles written by world renowned scholars from multiple disciplines working on the conceptualizations of and contestations over ‘natural’ resources. The term is put within quotation marks here because the labelling suggests the existence of these resources outside of culture, something that is not of human-construction.


Reviewed by: Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt
Durba Ghosh

The centrality of the dynamics of the colonial family, a product of the inter¬racial sexual contact between European men and ‘native’ women, in the shaping of imperial policy during the company rule has received scant attention from scholars.


Reviewed by: Kamala Menon
Salahuddin Malik

In this study Salahuddin Malik looks at the 1857 Revolt as viewed from Britain, helping us to make sense of the bewildering variety of perspectives discernible in the flood of contemporary books, pamphlets, sermons, newspaper reports and articles about the Revolt published in the metropolis.


Reviewed by: Amar Farooqui
Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee

The Centre for Studies in Social Sci¬ences, Calcutta has been trying to take stock of the place of history as an academic discipline and also looking for alternatives to ‘academic’ histories. An earlier volume, based on presentations at a conference held in 1999 was edited and published under the title History and the Present.


Reviewed by: T.K. Venkatasubramanian
Gouriswar Bhattacharya, Gerd J.R. Mevissen, Mallar Mitra and Sutapa Sinha

This book is as big and as sprawling as its full title: Kalahar (White Water-Lily): Studies in Art, Iconography, Architecture, and Archaeology of India and Bangladesh (Professor Enamul Haque Felicitation Volume). With 370 folio pages of long and short essays and a few short notes, and innumerable plates appended to the main text in seventy-six additional pages, it has been designed as a monumental “felicitation” volume.


Reviewed by: Fakrul Alam
Rohini Sahni, V. Kalyan Shankar and Hemant Apte

Beyond prostitution is a collection of twenty-three essays on sex work in India. Of these only two essays have been previously published in academic journals. The essays in the collection range from serious analyses of themes in sex work in India, historical and literary surveys of various forms of the practice, brief field based reports, a panel discussion…


Reviewed by: Anuja Agrawal
The Boston Women's Health Book Collective

One of the most extraordinary – and positive – outcomes of the second upsurge of the women’s movements in the 1970s was the movement’s engagement with health, going beyond issues of reproduction.


Reviewed by: Mohan Rao
Radha Chakravarty

Radha Chakravarty’s book Feminism and Contemporary Women: Rethinking Subjectivity is based on her Ph.D. dissertation on the same subject and retains all the qualities of a solid, well-researched dissertation. It investigates a familiar enough field of enquiry – subjectivity, with related notions of identity and agency – which has continuously engaged philosophers,…


Reviewed by: S. Manzoorul Islam
Dubravka Zarkov

Discussing the geopolitics of empire John Bellamy Foster says the inherent instability of empire under capitalism points to potentially more dangerous wars.


Reviewed by: Vasanth Kannabiran