This book, a brilliant book, received extraordinary attention in India. You might disagree with me, but I believe we do not have a rich literary culture. This is of course fundamentally related to India’s caste structure, and that we haven’t changed that much since Independence. There is little public space for books…
This is not a plain tale from the Raj even though it is the journal of the wife of a British officer serving in India. The touch of the mem-sahib is inevitable since Honoria Lawrence was one; however, it remains a mere streak in an otherwise rich and complex personality and it is the individual who comes through strongly in the pages of the journal. She is a woman of many strands and if her husband was regarded as someone rather special then she has claims to the same regard in her own right.
In 2008, as America cheered and roared for change, Barack Hussein Obama, the son of an African father and a Caucasian mother, became the 44th President of the United States of America. Considering the blood splattered, radically disturbing history of the country, this indeed was a huge change…
The boredom of teaching and learning social stratification in the ambit of social science is nearly an abiding experience in academia. Teachers end up recycling the monolithic categories and students learn the trick of obtaining good grades in the course. The categories of social stratification, such as race, gender,…
This striking book, a collection of thirteen papers, on the genealogy, locations and practices of sociology in India tries to locate within the complex, contradictory, and contesting histories of sociological traditions in the various settings during the colonial period and immediately after, before the spiralling expansion of the university…
Gail Omvedt’s book attempts to understand caste, critiquing the position that equates Indian tradition with Hinduism making Vedas the foundational texts of Indian culture that imprisons even secular minds within brahmanical perspective and proposes to go beyond the debate of posing secularism or reformist Hinduism…