As a theatre of ethnic conflicts, India’s North East has generated a corpus of studies and policy prescriptions. Yet many of these, informed as they are by brief field visit/administrative posting in different parts of North East India, fail to capture the multilayered nature of conflicts among indeterminate ethnic groups in the region.
Surely the nature of the subject shapes the researcher? More so, if the subject is one of the most important individuals of the twentieth century, renowned for his contemplative philosophy? However, neither quiet contemplation nor honest soul-searching marks these two recent works on Gandhi, which are united, seemingly, in their hurried thoughts and haste to publish a work.
Book reviews make a commentary on the argument of the book they seek to review. This task however becomes difficult with an edited book (in this case two) consisting of several chapters, that address themes of varying contexts. While the common theme of citizenship does unite them, citizenship studies in themselves have become vast enough to have journals, institutes, centres and courses dedicated to it.
In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of academic studies were released that tried to explain the East Asian growth miracle in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea (Amsden, 1989, Haggard and Cheng, 1987, Haggard and Moon, 1990). The central puzzle that political economists explained through these case studies of East Asian Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs)…
Barua’s very first novel is an intricate pattern of cultures and politics, refugees and resisters and locates South Asian politics in a wider context. A political analyst and commentator, he turns to Tibet but spreads out in other directions both space wise and at ideological levels—India, China, Nepal and the US.
The wiki entry on Fatima Bhutto says, ‘she grew up effectively stateless’. In her debut novel The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, Fatima takes us to a town called Mir Ali, in North Waziristan, on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The novel is about people but it is also about the place. The location so much a protagonist here.