Tariq Ali is a gifted writer but can hardly rank among the most coherent political thinkers of our times. Revolution is not a subject on which any work, howsoever monumental, can be said to be the last word, and the book under review is by no means monumental. It reads like a collection of booklets…
What is it about the lanes of Old Delhi that has every ‘authentic’ Dilliwalla preferring to live in their memories than in present-day Delhi? If only one had a time-machine, perhaps the mystery could be resolved. In the absence of such a mechanism, those of us who are bewitched by this city have only…
A renewed discussion over the histories of the Princely States in Colonial India has brought many interesting themes to the fore for some time now. While it is difficult to ascertain whether the subject itself has arrived in the mainstream of Indian historiography…
Empire’s Garden by Jayeeta Sharma is about the North Eastern province of Assam. The objective of the book was to show how a vast wilderness was transformed into a flourishing greenery of tea-plantation around which a colonial state was entrenched,…
The Andaman and Nicobar islands for all their remoteness have nevertheless been the subject of a number of books. Among the classics in ethnography is the study of the tribes of the islands by Radcliffe Brown and as ethnographical studies go it has yet to be replaced. The history of the islands, recorded…
The killing of Mallojula Koteshwar Rao, known as Kishenji, at the hands of counterinsurgency security forces in West Bengal’s West Midnapore district may be a setback to the Maoist movement but it gives no cause to rejoice… Over and above being a threat to security, the Maoist insurgency is a political question that needs political an-swers… His killing deprives the Maoist move-ment of a leader, but not the causes that sustain it…