Gita Wolf

The Colour Book is mesmerizing. It invites you into a here-now, gone-now world that you dipped into happily as a child but which may have evaded you as a greying adult. A heady mix of poetry and science, The Colour Book evokes long-buried memories of the colours you once discovered.


Reviewed by: Sowmya Rajendran
Frances Hardinge

Alice fell down a rabbit’s hole and discov- ered a wonderland! Neverfell fell down into Caverna and found a world of darkness that is strangely exquisite, of sinister characters that have a hundred faces without souls and a grotesque underbelly of faceless poor!


Reviewed by: Premola Ghosh
Troilokyanath Mukhopadhyay

There is a Bengali social institution called an adda that is very hard to capture in mere words. It is much more than a conversation because usually at least three people are talking at the same time. It is at times a debate but then some of the debaters are liable to argue for both sides of the subject if they are feeling particularly excitable.


Reviewed by: Subhadra Sen Gupta
Soonoo Taraporewala

When I began reading Soonoo Tara- porewala’s biography of Fateh Singh Rathore, I thought I would right away begin encountering thrilling tiger tales. I was disappointed. I trudged on, nevertheless, wondering when I would sight the tiger.


Reviewed by: N. Kalyani
Pran Neville

Fascination with ‘Otherness’ manifests it- self in many ways; whether it is the intrepid 16th century European explorers embarking on dangerous journeys time and again to find strange new lands, or writers travelling across cruel landscapes to meet new people and create new genres or painters reaching out to exotic settings and subjects for their art.


Reviewed by: Purnima Dutta
Lakshmi Kannan

Lakshmi Kannan’s volume of translated short stories contains selections from her previously published stories. In the author’s note Kannan explains her reasons for choosing these stories: they were the ones that elicited the strongest reactions amongst her readers and often generated controversy.


Reviewed by: Anita Balakrishnan
Rakhshanda Jalil

The Progressive Writers’ Movement stands out among the literary trends in Indian literature because it came as a breath of fresh air in a literary scenario that was struggling under the onslaught of western values.


Reviewed by: Mehr Afshan Farooqi
Diwan Singh Bajeli

As a dance critic, I came to know of the work of Bhanu Bharti, through his friend and celebrated director Ratan Thiyam. Bhanu’s adaptation of K.N. Pannikkar’s Malayalam play Pashu Gayatri, a community theatre of the Bheels of the Mewari region of Rajasthan had drawn the attention of serious theatre practioners.


Reviewed by: Sunil Kothari
Silvia Federici

It is indeed ironical that I was reading to review this absolutely brilliant book by Sylvia Federici around Halloween, which narrates the dark saga of Witch Hunts in Europe during the 15th-17th century. In fact Witch Hunts had consumed Europe for more than 200 years, a practice that coincided with the rise of capitalism in Europe.


Reviewed by: Sona Mitra
Joan Mickelson Gaughan

Feminist scholars have over the last two decades focused upon the involvements of white women in the British Empire, and on their location and agency in the construction of ‘a gendered colonialism’.


Reviewed by: Ranjana Sheel
Sharit Bhowmik

Contemporary globalization characterized by the restructuring of the economy through deregulated markets, international networks, multi-nationalization of production and transformation of production technique has led to systemic changes with serious implications for labour.


Reviewed by: Zaad Mahmood
Sunanda Sen and Byasdeb Dasgupta

This review of the above mentioned title must begin on an unusual confessional note. It must be declared that I read this book as a student of social science in general, neither with the focus nor with acumen of a student of economics or development studies, to whom this book is broadly addressed.


Reviewed by: Anubhav Sengupta
Martha C. Nussbaum

In Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, Nussbaum argues that societies aspiring to justice must not only frame their policies according to reasonable principles of justice, but that such societies must also cultivate political and public emotions, like that of patriotism, in their members.


Reviewed by: Shefali Jha
Neil Wilkof

The book under review examines intel- lectual property overlaps in the legal contexts of the UK, the US and, where necessary, the EU. The editors have brought together a formidable scale of collective experience and expertise ‘from those primarily engaged in academic scholarship to those who combine scholarly publishing with practice of intellectual property.’


Reviewed by: Kabir Dixit
Ashwini Deshpande

It is often stated that caste is class in India and that considerations of caste is more important than religion. It is for this reason that Ashwini Deshpande’s work deserves attention as she has researched extensively on caste and the policy of reservations in India.


Reviewed by: Sushila Ramaswamy
Mukulika Banerjee

India’s democracy is acknowledged and cel- ebrated, at home and abroad, especially because very few Asian, African and Latin American societies have been able to maintain liberal democratic institutions and practices.


Reviewed by: Ashutosh Kumar
Meenakshi Jain

One of the critical currents of con- temporary Indian political history has been Hindutva’s cerebral politics over the Ram Janmabhumi-Babri Masjid conflict and continuous struggle by its historians to create a coherent and authentic historical narrative that would demolish the dominant narrative on Ram and Ayodhya as constructed by the ‘Left Historians’.


Reviewed by: Pralay Kanungo
Kris Manjapra

Kris Manjapra’s Age of Entanglement is a worthy and comprehensive study of the transnational engagements between Germans and Indians, from the nineteenth century to the Second World War, when both nations were trying, in their own ways, to free themselves from British hegemonic control.


Reviewed by: Simi Malhotra