Gunnel Ceder’s Founding an Empire is an important contribution to the historical scholarship on colonial state making in South Asia in general and frontier and borderland studies in particular. Taken together, her earlier works on the interfaces of agrarian, environmental and legal histories in colonial and early colonial South India and eastern Bengal and the book under review on India’s North Eastern frontiers, speaks of the author’s…
This is an engaging, poignant and important autobiography. It will be a serious ‘reality check’ for all readers! Biswas is a wonderful story teller, his almost ‘matter-of-fact’ style engages the reader and virtually transports him or her to the rice paddies, river banks and muddy creeks which are indelibly part of Biswas’s formative years.
This collection of essays edited by two eminent Indian women brings together contributions from some of the best known and most respected scholars and activists in the country. It is the second edition—coming three decades after the first—of a collection of essays that is described as a precursor to the ‘Towards Equality’ report. Surely a book that will endure as a benchmark in the field of women’s studies, to be quoted and cited for many years to come.
Tarun Das transports the reader on a 30-year twin journey: he narrates the opening up of India, from its hesitant and wayward path before P.V. Narasimha Rao became Prime Minister in 1991, gaining traction after the latter launched economic reforms; that story is juxtaposed with a detailed account of the transformation of an obscure engineering industry association into what became for a time India’s most powerful non-state economic actor.
This is not just a tribute, as suggested in the title, it is a ‘labour of love’ undertaken at speed by a former admiring junior colleague and Venkat’s one sonin-law, and motivated, as the editors elaborate in an introductory note, by the conviction that the hero of the volume was such a unique person that he should be remembered forever.
As David Thelen said the main ‘challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present.’ This recovery and introduction is being done by historical writing, which is one variety of written expression that seeks to inform and persuade the reader through the use of evidence organized around a central thesis or argument. Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History recounts the modern history of Sri Lanka, starting from colonial times to the present, a story of about two centuries.