The initiative of the Hyderabad Book Trust in publishing alternative literature in translation is commendable. By publishing K Purushotham’s translation of Yendluri Sudhakar’s Speaking Sandals: Narratives from the Madigawadas of Ongole, it has ensured the text pan-Indian visibility.
It is only now that the State has earned the description of a land of sand, sea and fun, an outcome of Goa being promoted as a tourist destination.
This is a textbook with a difference. It covers a well-known story of the development of India as a civilization, of its march to modern nationhood and does it with elegance, precision and sensitivity. It is this quality of tying together discrete elements of updated research, well-known debates and understanding with a brilliant array of visual material that makes this textbook genuinely a novel exercise in synthesis and analysis.
Exploring South Asian Urbanity edited by Urvi Mukhopadhyay and Suchandra Ghosh comprising fifteen essays explores the idea of urbanity in history. Divided into five themes, viz., the concept, urban spaces, textual representations, evolution of cities and urban violence
Colleen Taylor Sen, a culinary and food historian of South Asia—as the Foreword informs—picked up this study of Ashoka, the greatest and third ruler (c. 272/268-233 BCE) of the mighty Maurya dynasty
In beginning her book by repeatedly invoking the image of Gandhi’s prayer meetings as a counter to the violence of the Partition, the author is emphasizing a conception of secularism that many others have noted as specific to South Asia. At these prayer meetings,