Shehan Karunatilaka

Cricket and Sri Lanka share a rather formidable history. Tracing this, the cricket enthusiast-turned-anthropo-logist Michael Roberts (University of Adelaide), draws on the diversity in team composition as testimony to the inherent cosmopolitanism of the island—as native to it as the strains of the raucous but vibrant (Tamil) Baila, i.e.,…


Reviewed by: Simran Chadha
Uttara Chauhan

Blue Blood is Uttara Chauhan’s second endeavour at fiction writing. A Canada based writer of Indian origin, who works as a policy analyst for the Government of Canada, Uttara Chauhan’s debut novel A Model House was a love story while the book under review strings together eight stories…


Reviewed by: Nishat Zaidi
Nirmal kanti Bhattacharjee

Barbed Wire Fence is a collection of short stories translated into English from the original Bengali versions dealing with the sociological, political and psychological problems arising out of the mass scale migration of Bengalis from East Bengal to the Barack Valley in Assam during Partition (1946-7), as also the migration of the Bangladeshis after the 1965 and 71 wars…


Reviewed by: Indu Liberhan
Christophe Jaffrelot

Christophe Jaffrelot, a noted French expert on Indian politics, has made a stupendous effort to bring together this collection of forty-five essays, including an Introduction and a conclusion by him of French writings on India. Prepared as a Reader for French students of Indian studies, this English translation connects Indian readers (students particularly) to analyses of various Indian issues over the years by French Indologists…


Reviewed by: Ajay K. Mehra
Yunas Samad

Pakistan has been a subject of scholarly gaze for some time. The unfolding of events in the post 9/11 period has given a peculiar twist to the usual Indo-centric analysis about its role in international affairs, thus bringing into the discourse such actors as the Taliban, Al Qaida and their interface with Pakistani polity…


Reviewed by: Tahir Kamran
D. Jayaraj

The book presents an array of relevant issues in development studies, such as child labour, educational participation, poverty, inequality, gender issues, that have skewed sex ratio and its relation to women’s well being; and issues related to collection of data and interpretations of statistical results…


Reviewed by: Gitanjali Sen