By Soubhik Chakraborty and Ranjan Sengupta (with co-authors: Anirban Patranabis, Vidhi Salla, Apoorva Chakraborty, Pranjala Shukla, Lopamudra Dutta, Sudakshina Bhattacharjee, Moupali Mitra and Sulochana Lamichaney)

Returning to the book. It is divided into two parts, the first part is a biographical study, which consists of three essays, one each by three of the co-authors. These three essays could easily have been one. The essays repeat very well-known basic biographical facts, including her date of birth that is mentioned several times in each essay, including multiple times on the same page. The replication is not confined to specific facts.


Reviewed by: Ashwini Deshpande
By Richard David Williams

Williams puts together a picture of a man of complex and varied tastes: an innovator rather than a curator of past practice. The textual evidence is formidable. The collections of song-texts that Williams examines show the Nawab’s close collaboration with his senior Begum, Khas Mahal, and include dhrupad, hori, sadra, khayal and tarana


Reviewed by: Amlan Dasgupta
By Radha Kapuria

Ethnographical studies in the region remain an inescapable methodology due to the subcontinent’s knowledge systems embedded in oral traditions. There is also an institutional lack of a proper archival system. For most scholars in the past, ethnography had led them to innovative revelations, unlike the archives which have revealed partial information with politics of power inclined towards the educated elites of the society.


Reviewed by: Pushpita Mitra
By Abir Bazaz

To the perceptive reader, Nund Rishi: Poetry and Politics in Medieval Kashmir is a sombre book. This impression starts to build right from the rather symbolic jacket, which bears a photograph of a gloomy Charar-e Sharif mausoleum on an overcast winter day. This monument, belonging to that solitary strand of Kashmiri Sufism which once drew…


Reviewed by: Shonaleeka Kaul
By Lakshmi Subramanian

Mohandas Gandhi was no musician. Subramanian herself acknowledges (p. 188) he was ‘neither a patron nor a connoisseur of music’, and that he was attracted to it solely for its ‘power as a medium of affect’. His engagement with music was correspondingly restricted to employing its powers of affect for his larger political and social…


Reviewed by: Abhik Majumdar
Edited by Tejaswini Niranjana

These essays serve an important purpose in setting the stage for the next section, ‘New Musical Publics and the Formation of Taste’ which deals with the unfolding of the complex question of aesthetic pleasure and the creation of different public spheres around the problem of taste. Although the players and the narratives within which they operate are different, these two essays offer a key turning point in the book where we encounter the ‘surpluses’ of publicness in all its complexity.


Reviewed by: Vibhuti Sharma