Partition is one of the major historical junctures in the history of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. When it comes to talking about the horrors of Partition, it is mainly categorized in cinema and literature. The edited volume by Nukhbah Taj Langah and Roshni Sengupta is an interesting addition to the discourse.The book does not limit itself to the horror of Partition; it goes beyond and covers its continued trauma.
Gandhi is possibly the greatest Indian to have lived since Buddha. His greatness, however, lies not in his invulnerability—but rather, in his struggle to overcome his many frailties. Gandhi’s story is an alluring, yet rare, tale of the triumph of human will over seemingly insurmountable odds. One is reminded of Albert Einstein’s famous phrase describing Gandhi, ‘Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.
Prathama Banerjee’s book offers a brilliant academic contribution to the histories of the non-western world with its primary focus on the Indian subcontinent. This book is about ‘histories of the political’ by exploring the question of what is ‘political’ in the context of modern India. Thus, its overall focus is on how the modern ideas of political practice emerged in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century Bengal out of different Indian philosophical traditions as well as influence of colonialism.
The two edited volumes under review comprise a collection of twenty-four essays incorporating an understanding of land in South Asia, exploring the purview beyond disciplinary boundaries. They historically map out South Asia’s land distribution and the negotiations involved in it among various actors on those lands. In Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History, among the eleven essays, those by S Nurul Hasan, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Burton Stein, and Nilmani Mukherjee start with a precolonial understanding of the land and extend to their modern-day implications.
This book, with about 250 pages and multiple useful illustrations, is a much-needed comprehensive work that fills the existing gap in both academic and non-academic understanding of early historic Gujarat. Apart from the Foreword and Introduction, the Appendix which follows the Conclusion is extremely useful as it introduces the different types of pottery of Gujarat.
Before jumping into analysing the book’s strengths, it is important to highlight the complexity of this project. Tracing a transnational project like the movement of labouring bodies across oceans, while being a scholar in a middle-income country is a feat. While the subjects of this book may be Indians, looking for their archival traces would require transcending national boundaries—something that not many early career scholars find possible.