Asok Kumar Das’s passion for Mughal art never fails to awe us and his ventures in this arena never ceases to enrich our understanding of Mughal art and inevitably our perception of our own history and culture.
The volume under review is a delightfully knowledgeable anthology of nine well researched articles, the fallout of a conference held at Hyderabad, marvellously printed with enchanting pictures. It takes us beyond essentialist notions of Islamic and Timurid gardens that have dominated the discussion of gardens in South Asia, and to overcome the seeming evidentiary impasse…
The central role of women in the provision, management and safeguarding of water was recognized in 1992 itself with the adoption of the Dublin principles at the International Conference on Water and the Environment held in Dublin but the attempts at mainstreaming gender into water management initiatives have received very limited success.
Integrated water resource management is one of the most pressing policy issues confronting South Asian countries—not only at the regional but also at the national level. Situated in a contiguous geographical landmass but dissected by various states, the region is home to around one-fourth of the world’s population.
The study of the relationship between nature and culture has been given new impetus over recent decades and has opened up attractive theoretical avenues. A number of social anthropologists have published inspiring books on this theme. The excessive duality between these two domains that some researchers refer to when contemplating non-western societies has been rightly questioned.
The title of this volume on media studies, edited by Ravi Sundaram, a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, is a suitable one. There really are no limits to the mediatized society that each one of us is embedded, if not buried, in. At the same time, there are very severe limits to our understanding of it.