Over a decade ago, political theorist Partha Chatterjee embarked on what was a novel journey in the history of political thought in India and, perhaps in the postcolonial, non-western world. Bringing together the results of decades of his own intellectual engagement with Indian politics and the question of subalternity…
Thomas Bernhard was one of the most significant voices in twentieth century Austro-German literature, and one of the most striking writers in the modernist tradition. Yet he remains little known to the outside world, partly because his long, allusive, fevered sentences are tough to translate…
Thomas Trautamnn, in his pioneering work, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (2006) demonstrated that the astounding ling-uistic discovery of familial relations between languages-the formulation of the Indo-Euro-pean and Dravidian families of languages -was an outcome of the interaction between western orientalists and indigenous Indian scholarship…
This is a fascinating memoir and it is indeed commendable that Sikata Banerjee has chosen to translate this text which, until now, was only available to the Bengali reading public.Saraladebi Chaudhu-rani, the niece of Rabindranath Tagore,…
ANITA Desai’s latest novel Fire on the Mountain is a distinct let-down. It has many of the qualities that marked her first book, Cry, the Peacock; spareness, toughness and fine descriptive writing. But while Cry, the Peacock came off, Fire on the Mountain does not; perhaps because, trying the same trick once too often, Anita Desai achieves sensationalism instead of shock…
The latest offering from the indefatigable Joep Bor and his learned colleagues, this modestly titled volume should really have been called Companion to Hindustani Music. There are 25 essays cove-ring eight centuries from the thirteenth to the twentieth…