As the old song does not have it, old soldiers never die nor fade away, but write memoirs. But let us grant it to them, they usually make a much better job of it than old civil servants. At least General Chaudhuri does. The book is written in crisp and cultivated English, which I attribute less to Sandhurst and the lesser English school…
It is seldom that one finds genuine pleasure in reviewing a book, but involvement in its theme can make the exercise rewarding. Ram K. Vepa belongs to the Indian Administrative service. The blurb describes his book as one written by a ‘practising administrator for the benefit of other administrators’…
History, notoriously, is not about the past.-Amitav Ghosh in The Man Behind the MosqueVishwajyoti’s Ghosh’s Delhi Calm reminds one of the daily calm that is being witnessed along with the daily alarm of scams, jams, inflation and general deflation of spirits. The phrase ‘India shining’ was the buzzword…
Based mainly on Sanskrit, Prakrit and Apabhramsha texts, the present work is a sequel to P.C Jain’s Labour in Ancient India (1971). Divided into six chapters, it seeks to study the social and economic condition of various categories of Indian…
According to Dr. S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru’s involvement with the kisan struggles in eastern U.P. in the early twenties had a greater impact on him than his ‘unformative years’ at Cambridge and in London when he was exposed to the influence of Fabianism. Another scholar, Dr. Gyanendra Pande…
Most seminars based on a broad theme shed some light and create some obscurity. This one is no exception. Planned as an open-ended discussion, it studies movements of protest and reform in India over the centuries, directed against things as disparate as ‘slavery, untouchability and colonialism’ (in the words of a participant)…