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
Kanwar Khatana

The term ‘Saffron Terror’ was coined almost two decades ago in 2002 and gained popularity in 2007-2008. At times, terms like Hindu terrorism or Hindutva terror are also used instead, allegedly to describe acts of violence motivated by Hindu extremist nationalism. In all probability, the term comes from the symbolic use of the saffron colour by most of the temples in India and many Hindu nationalist organizations.


Reviewed by: Air Marshal Anil Khosla
Rahul Ranjan

Birsa Munda is a revolutionary figure who has inspired many generations to fight against the injustice of both colonial rulers and the postcolonial exploitative development model. Though largely overlooked and portrayed marginally as a ‘nationalist’, who fought against British rule in present-day Jharkhand in the last decade of the nineteenth century,


Reviewed by: Kamal Nayan Choubey