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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
Increasing corruption in public life has been a matter of growing concern in India since the early 1960s. The Administrative Reforms Commission recommended the appointment of the Lokpal institution in 1966. Since then, a number of Lokpal legislations were introduced.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Displacement—within and across countries—of large numbers of people, owing to political instability or civil strife, is a fact of contemporary life. UN statistics show that nearly 70 million people, or 9% of the world’s population, are displaced at present.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
Anisha Shekhar MukherjiAtman: Odissi Nritya Puran is both a poetic history and a dance manual. The basis for the book is the Odiya text in verse composed by Guru Surendra Nath Jena. Encapsulated in this poetry is his knowledge of the Odissi dance form.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The book under review is not only a rich ethnographic account of hand paintings from the Cheriyal village in the northeastern part of Telangana, a State in southern India but also an almost complete account of the personal journey of Bose the ethnographer.
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.
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.
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.
Esther Fihl is the Research Leader of the Tranquebar Initiative of the National Museum of Denmark, and Professor at the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. She has compiled a monumental work, which brings.
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.
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.
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.