Edited by Anshu Malhotra O

Purnima Dhavan’s ‘A Feast for the Heart and Mind: Print Culture, Polemics and Religious Debate in Punjab in the 1870s’ discusses the evolution of Islamic literature after the arrival of print in late-nineteenth century Punjab focusing on the Baran Anva, a lengthy seventeenth-century text, and Pakki Roti, a short booklet written in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Muslim Punjabis, Dhavan uses these texts to discuss printing enterprises, script, language and education in the 1870s. Going against the grain, she argues that Punjabi Muslims learnt about Islam not from Arabic or Persian, but through texts in Shahmukhi script that were in Punjabi and occasionally Urdu.


Reviewed by: Vikas Rathee
By Anna Sailer

They were also not fixed in time but products of historical circumstances. Thus, the author points out, during the 1870s this system was used by the employers to maintain a ‘reserve army of labour, in a context of recurring labour shortages’. But during the 1890s, the multiple-shift system represented ‘a qualitatively new development’ in which the managers tried to control deployment of labour in certain crucial departments of jute industry in the name of standardization and rationalization. The process of control intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century and finally the multiple-shift system and work gangs were abolished by the early 1930s. Single-shift system was now imposed in many mills with increasing managerial control over the work process.


Reviewed by: Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay
By Pratap Padode

The urban disposition they have conceived is a triad, a three-legged stool, which must ‘articulate normatively where it begins and what motivates it, be able to think analytically about how cities actually work as well as about the nature of complex urban problems and move operationally to point to how one could get to different desired ends’. It is not a new urban theory or paradigm, but a process to engage with the problems of cities in order to produce new knowledge towards change that one desires, but crucially, it is never fully predetermined or a priori.


Reviewed by: AG Krishna Menon
By Amrita Saikia

The section on research methodology and methods is particularly engaging and insightful. Saikia has elaborately articulated how she accessed the field, which is far removed from her world. To inform herself about the Tibetans in exile before conducting her research, she referred to books, research articles, documentaries, and newspaper articles. She also identified and joined a week-long programme in Dharamshala (her field) to gain access to the community. This programme was run by a Tibetan NGO called Students for a Free Tibet (SFT).


Reviewed by: Juanita Kakoty
Edited by Meenakshi Malhotra, Krishna Menon, Rachana Johri Routledge

The themes the authors address represent different ways in which we seek to embody ourselves in the world, whether through negotiation, submission, dissent, protest or critique. We make the world what it is. The world no doubt exists out there with its structures and fixed meanings, through which we are viewed as embodied humans, but we too have the wherewithal to modify that fixity, and transform it to make our lives meaningful in the ways in which we seek to live. This brings agency to the foreground and emphasizes the role of the human subject in not merely living out a human life but in transforming that process in whatever way possible. Embodiment is therefore not fixed or unchangeable.


Reviewed by: Meenakshi Thapan
Edited by Ranu Uniyal and Fatima Rizvi

Gaele Sobott’s essay titled ‘I Can Hear Her Breathing: Disabled Writers Writing Disability’ explores possibilities for widening intellectual and aesthetic horizons through the disruption of dominant disablist narratives by writers with disabilities writing for themselves and telling their own authentic stories. Sobott herself is admittedly more interested in writing that supports a world with diversity, like works by disabled writers of colour and works translated into English rather than writing that strives to make the experience of disability more palatable to a non-disabled audience.


Reviewed by: Vedamini Vikram