Just when journalism in India is going through a transition of sorts, when values and ethics lost in the process are being questioned, M.S. Prabhakara’s book Looking Back Into The Future helps restore some faith…
Poet and essayist W.H. Auden once remarked that every autobiography is concerned with two characters, ‘a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self’. Vinod Mehta’s literary self-portrait Lucknow Boy fits the description quite well. Only that in this memoir the two characters never appear together, at least not on the same page…
In 2002, the Government of Karnataka prohibited the sales of a massive two-volume history of Kannada cinema published by Hampi University Press. It apparently had factual errors and, more importantly, had misrepresented Dr. Rajkumar, the Kannada film superstar…
This book highlights a conceptual and political impasse that is at the heart of the most recent postcolonial scholar-ship on India.On the one hand, much effort is expended at exposing the contradictions and limits of British colonial rule (scholars tend to mostly ignore the Portuguese colonial presence!)…
In 2004, I went around the research institution where I work in search of a discussant for a paper on the historical shaping of public consent for family planning in 20th century Kerala. This was interdisciplinary work which reexamined some of the received wisdom of demography pertaining to Kerala from a critical historical perspective…
Conflict Society and Peacebuilding: Comparative Perspectives is an edited volume of eleven essays, which explores the linkages between civil society, conflict and peace, drawing on empirical studies from regions in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe…