Aloka Parasher Sen

Aloka Parasher Sen’s latest collection brings together seven essays dealing with gender and religion, almost all of which were previously published, and have been revised for inclusion in this volume. Taken collectively, the volume is a three-pronged history of the intersections of gender and religion in local contexts. Parasher Sen’s stated intent is to trace how women subscribed to and broke out of the prescriptive norms that were laid out for them and to generally explore how religious ideas shaped gender relations in early India, while trying to bring in the particularities of local history in all this (p. xviii).


Reviewed by: A Soheb Vahab
Azra Razzack and M. Atyab Siddiqui

In the vicinity of walled-Delhi, or old Shahjahanabad, stands a school with a long, fraught and yet cherished history. The magnificence of the Anglo-Arabic School is amplified by the Indo-Persian architectural style of the mosque and buildings, and the astoundingly serene and sprawling campus within which it is housed.


Reviewed by: Tanweer Fazal
Alf Hiltebeitel

In January 2023 the world of Indology lost Alf Hiltebeitel, prolific Mahabharata scholar who hewed new pathways through that thorny thicket to reveal fresh vistas of understanding. Freud’s India explored personal experiences following his father’s death and his own divorce that recalled Freud’s life and Freud’s connection with India through Dr. Girindrasekhar Bose (‘an extraordinary professor who had founded a local psychoanalytic group in Calcutta’—Freud, 1922). Bose sent Freud an icon of Vishnu seated on Ananta which he kept on his desk. This features as the cover.


Reviewed by: Pradip Bhattacharya
Christopher C. Doyle

Creating fiction, poetry and drama based on the Mahabharata, the Ramayana or the Puranas is a well-established tradition in Sanskrit and the Bhashas. Indian English novelists and poets have turned to reinterpretations of Hindu mythology in a big way only in the twenty-first century: the twentieth century had just a few writers, like KR Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo and TP Kailasam who attempted this. Christopher C Doyle has gone a step further; having studied the Mahabharata for fifteen years, he makes good use of incidents in the epic to build up his series of thrillers.


Reviewed by: Shyamala A Narayan
Yashika Singla

If feminism was a colour, we would all be colour blind. It is, by nature, a fiddly matter; one that people trip over, trying to understand. It is both an aesthetic and a burden for the modern world we live in; a jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece if you like. The metaphors are endless, like its many (mis)interpretations. Enter Yashika Singla. Colour corrected glasses in hand, theories tucked under her arm, ready to clear the fog around feminism—the word, its meaning, and its practice.


Reviewed by: Nandini Bhatia
Ronojoy Sen

The Indian Parliament completed 71 years during April-May 2023.  The study of the institution, which began soon after the publication of Parliament in India by WH Morris-Jones in 1957, a classic till today, is still a work in progress, as is Indian democracy.  There have been authored studies and edited volumes on the Indian parliament with rich material. 


Reviewed by: Ajay K Mehra