The growing historical literature on the national movement in India is as yet comparatively poor in good biographical works. Two recent publications—S. Gopal’s Nehru and now B.R. Nanda’s Gokhale—will go a long way in filling this gap. Here is an authoritative, extensively researched, scrupulously fair and extremely…
Ethnography is an art not very different from writing a novel. It is holistic. The anthropologist submerges his own special professional interest to study the whole society. But the personality of this author remains distinct and accounts for part of the uniqueness of the monograph…
T.K. Mahadevan, whose thoughts and writings have for many, many years revolved round Gandhiji, has now attempted an altogether ‘new kind of book’, which he calls an exercise in philosophical biography.
I must admit to having agreed to review this book with a high degree of trepidation. How could a single volume hope to cover in 658 pages, so vast an area with all its dimensions, conflict and, most of all the variety and the depth of its impact on civilizations across the world? And yet, by this singular work Lapidus, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California at Berkeley, has, in a book more compact, placed himself in the recording of Islamic history on a pedestal equivalent to Gibbon’s for that of Rome.
So much has been written about Mumbai’s Dharavi—the ‘slum’, the ‘city’, the ‘urban settlement’. Books, articles, feature films, documentaries—an idea of Dharavi has emerged through multiple sources.
If there is any one specific condition that belies the hype of the success of the new economy in India, then it is that of the state of food security.