New trends in social science research indicate a major departure in the assessment of the role of the researcher or the investigator. The traditional role of the researcher as a detached and ‘neutral’ analyst, while it proved suitable to a certain extent to describe the world as it exists, hardly equipped him to work for changing it.
Works of fiction often bear the charge of blasphemy, creating thereby a tenuous relationship between the art of narrative fiction and the fatwas issued against it. What this establishes beyond reasonable doubt, besides the threat to the authors life, is the fearful ability of art to mould, shape and influence the real and tangible world out there…
Scholars now widely recognize that folk literature is a rich source of information on popular culture of a society. Systematic collection and publication of folktales and folklores in India began in the 19th century.
In reviewing this third volume of the three volume collection of short stories, one is immediately stuck by the importance of writing about the interiority of the economic. This more than anything, and rightly so, is an aspect of life that finds a stream of expression across the stories. And why should not the economic be represented…
Mumbai Fables by Gyan Prakash is as layered as the city it explores. Walter Benjamin mentions a collectors passion bordering on the chaos of memories. The collector for him was as much a part of as he was apart from the various texts that make memories. There have been several writers who have used the collector as a tool to understand modernity…
A collection of essays on a wide range of issues on women and media the book makes for an insightful reading and presents an interesting exposition of how media texts in both their fictional and non-fictional accounts are increasingly influenced by the often simultaneous but disconnected even opposed sets of forces including feminist influences…