By Kunal Purohit

The term ‘H-Pop’, conceptualized by Purohit, provides a potent analytic that connects ‘local’, ‘small’ phenomena with mainstream, national discourse. A direct reference to the South Korean popular musical form K-Pop, Hindutva Pop is less a hybrid genre and more a theoretical framework to navigate the currents of a communalized public, from the ground up. The work gains from this critical framing, allowing the metanarrative of toxic, high-volume, public emotions, and communal violence, to become the backdrop and trope.


Reviewed by: Aranya
By V.R. Devika

Devika has, with great ingenuity, titled the chapters to coincide with the Margam, or a graded Bharatanatyam performance, starting from Mallari and ending with Thillana and Mangalam. In a way, you journey through Rukmini Devi Arundale’s life in the same pace and rhythm that you would progress through the performance of a dance form that became her life’s work.


Reviewed by: Avantika Bhuyan
By Dr. Sonal Mansingh

From the expansiveness of collective consciousness to the privacy of life’s travails is not an easy transition, yet Sonal Mansingh in the chapter called ‘Dwijaa’ (twice born) bravely describes her period of critical illness in Germany and Canada. A highway accident left her nearly paralysed, so much so that she was given a choice between a surgery where the outcome was unknown and a bed-based recovery where too the outcome was unknown. She instinctively chose the latter, and with the help of a medical team in Montreal,


Reviewed by: Malashri Lal
By Shalini R. Ayyagari

his book conceptualizes the musicians’ attempted negotiation and intermingling of the two value systems, feudal and neoliberal—the former requiring them to be subdued and localized and the latter competitive and entrepreneurial—as resilience, a concept theoretically established in several disciplines including ethnomusicology, but one Ayyagari also aptly translates from the indigenous term ‘lachila’.


Reviewed by: Spandita Das
By Tarun Tahiliani

It is exciting that these days, exhibitions of India in the West are not just of objects from our museums but of contemporary Indian design, be it the one on the ‘Offbeat Sari’ in London recently, or the ‘Fabric of India’ a few years earlier. Dastkar was fortunate to develop products for the ‘Handmade in India’ exhibition hosted by the Crafts Council of UK.


Reviewed by: Laila Tyabji
Compiled and edited by Lakshmi Swaminathan. Foreword by Satish Kumar

Traditional wisdom had to observe what was at hand and to learn what did or did not harm…there are no universal rules…in all ancient traditions, they honour the elements…water is Apanswarupa. She sustains all being…Water is a divine gift.


Reviewed by: Rafiq Kidwai