There is one kind of lament about Indian politics that has become commonplace: politics has become characterized only by corruption, selfindulgence, and venality. In fact, as this review is being written, India seems racked with some of the worst scandals at the highest levels of government since the infamous Bofors scandal of the 1980s…
This like all books on the Progressive Writers Movement is to be heartily welcomed as an attempt to redress a very serious historical neglect. To subtitle it an episode is however to acknowledge and reinforce the overarching and unquestioned authority of the national question over all other approaches and framings of this period…
Representation, of all genres and kinds, in the media and elsewhere takes on a meaning outside the boundaries of human discourse and behaviour. It takes on greater and more worthy connotations as the process subsumes the depiction of communities, both communal and caste, genders, sexualities…
Zahida Zaidi says that she has not attempted a work on the history of Urdu literature in this endeavour. Notwithstanding, I would argue that she has subconsciously ended up providing a very fine outline of the same in the course of writing this book…
A number of books describing the birth of Bangladesh have appeared in India and abroad, some soon after the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent country, others a little later; but few analyse the operations as objectively as General Sukhwant Singh has done in this very readable book.
Beginning in the late 1960s, sociological and historical interest in homosexuality in Britain and the United States began by academics questioning the validity of using culturally specific terms like gay or homosexual to describe desire and sexuality across time and space. Social constructionist researchers often suggested…