Even after 66 years of Independence, it is difficult to imagine an India devoid of rules governing what can or cannot be publicly or creatively expressed, a scenario that could be described, for want of a better descriptive palate, as an agonizingly prevalent and multifaceted ‘culture of censorship’.
This book is the published version of what must have been an immensely diligent PhD thesis prepared for Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. The book bears the marks of a thesis.
The back cover often plays an important role in the reader’s journey from picking up the book from a stack to making it to its last page. It’s so important that many a book and blog have been written for helping writers and publishers write the perfect back page, or ‘creating a killer back cover.’
Niraja Gopal Jayal’s Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History presents what she variously calls a history of ideas, a genealogy, or a biography of citizenship in India. Standing as the proxy for ‘the Indian people’, citizenship is the tragic protagonist of her story. Every story of citizenship is, necessarily, also a story of the state.
There already exist two full-length studies on Satyajit Ray: a biographical study by Marie Seton and Robin Wood’s Apu Trilogy. But Orient Longman’s expensively brought out Our Films, Their Films is a rare book-a noted film-maker’s musings about himself, his craft and about other film makers….
The book under review is part of the ‘India Library’ series not ‘learned treatises on Indology, nor meant to be reference works … ‘ but’ … to give encyclopaedic, compressed information on each subject’. As such, this book is a simple plebian attempt to undergo a journey into Raga—the sound of Indian music…