By Krishna Mohan Shrimali

This led, further, to disintegration of large kingdoms. Shrimali, while following Sharma’s formulations closely, pushes the beginnings of feudalism to circa 100 CE. This timeline removes Sharma’s key causative factor, i.e., the Hun invasions, from the frame of analysis because these took place only around the fourth-fifth century. This leads to the situation of a solution emerging about four hundred years before the crisis. Secondly, the early centuries of the Common Era are associated with the high point of international trade. Shrimali airbrushes both anachronisms by saying, ‘…the rise of the toiling, subject and immobile peasantry and artisans…are the hallmark of the feudal apparatus…’ (p. 427). If agrarian relations alone were to define the nature of society,


Reviewed by: PK Basant
By Kundan Kumar

Further strength of the monograph lies in its integration of environmental history into political analysis. Kundan Kumar’s close reading of inscriptional references to rivers, forests, irrigation structures, and agrarian categories allows him to reconstruct the ecological contexts of state formation. The transformation of forested zones into agrarian villages emerges as a crucial dimension of early medieval expansion. Political authority was inseparable from environmental modification, rulers and their beneficiaries reshaped landscapes to generate revenue and sustain ritual institutions. In this sense, territoriality was materially grounded in processes of cultivation and ecological reordering.


Reviewed by: Amol Saghar
By Anirudh Deshpande

Nowhere is that tension clearer than in the contested legacy of Chhatrapati Shivaji, claimed in turn by Hindu nationalists, by high-caste Brahmins, and by Bahujan-Dalit movements. Deshpande’s careful reading shows instead a practical and tolerant ruler who respected all faiths, built a mosque in his capital for his Muslim subjects, and trusted Muslims with the command of his navy. That record sits awkwardly with every party that invokes his name to divide people. Beneath the portrait runs a sharper argument, which is that the icon was itself manufactured over time,


Reviewed by: Avanish Patil
By Christopher Lynch

Military thinkers after him including Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) point out that Machiavelli’s understanding of military matters was of a very high order. Machiavelli emphasized that it was not always prudent to rely on established military doctrines as this could mean depending on others’ ideas. He therefore advocates reliance on one’s own arms or ability to conduct warfare.


Reviewed by: Maj Gen Nalin Bhatia (Retd.)
By Rohit Saran

While doughnut pie charts laying out ownership patterns of NSE-listed companies can be illuminating, the average person does not get meaningfully informed about the implications of categories such as ‘promoter’ and ‘non-promoter’, or about the shifts in equity ownership. Are large-cap stocks being preferred by retail investors? What income bracket are these urban investors coming from? Are Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs) investing differently over the last decade, and what sectors are they concentrating on? For more probing questions,


Reviewed by: Yusra Khan
By Anoushka Jain

The book would be a remarkable tool-book for those walkers or others (whether in Delhi or distant from it) keen on knowing Delhi, especially the monuments in Old Delhi, and the general ambience around them—street food, transport facilities, the people. A valuable aspect of the book is that it ‘creates a roadmap for a feminist lens of reading the city’, and focuses on ten powerful, influential women of the historical past, particularly the Mughal past, who contributed to the cityscape and architecture of Delhi. These women, erased from the patriarchy-driven contemporary popular accounts, perhaps because of their non-conformism and daring emboldened spirit, are retrieved by Jain from behind the purdah, the walled harem.


Reviewed by: Meena Bhargava