Ideas, as we do not adequately appreciate, are profoundly important. They are not merely abstractions, because they lead to actions, to violence or to healing. As a doctor, I was a Resident at a department of psychiatry where ECTs were routine. This treatment is now considered inhuman and is banned in most countries; it continues in India.
Sumanyu Satpathy’s Will to Argue opens with a rather interesting excerpt from Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books about the ‘books of controversy’. Another excerpt from the same text, not quoted by the author, makes for a succinct comment on the momentous task that Satpathy has undertaken in this book.[B]ooks of controversy being, of all others, haunted by the most disorderly spirits, have always been confined in a separate lodge from the rest
This volume, divided into four sections, has thirteen carefully selected essays. It attempts at investigating the rise of ‘New Hindutva’ in India. This phenomenon has been defined by the editors as a ‘governmental formulation with considerable institutional heft that converges with wider global currents and enjoys an unprecedented level of mainstream acceptance’ (p. 1).
Who is a citizen of India and on what terms? This is the momentous question that this anthology poses before us with a compelling force, in the increasingly unsettling climate of vulnerability and fear that the recently sculpted trinity of CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019)-NRIC-NPR has produced in our Republic. With much care, analytical sophistication, and citizenly conscience, a number of researchers, legal scholars, social activists, journalists, and creative writers examine through the pages of this edited volume the conceptual, constitutional, socio-political and affective dimensions of citizenship, and more pertinently, its denial, and the entangled issues of rightlessness and statelessness that such disenfranchisement engenders.
Sikkim, a tiny Indian State with a population of less than a million, merged with India and became the 22nd State of the Indian Union in 1975. Ambassador Preet Mohan Singh Malik’s book, Sikkim: A History of Intrigue and Alliance, comes at a time when India’s strategic affairs are much debated notably after the Doklam, and Galwan Valley skirmishes.
In the title story of the short story collection The Adivasi Will Not Dance*, noted Santhal writer Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar sketched the character of Mangal Murmu who had accepted the opportunity to dance at a programme where the President of India would inaugurate a thermal power plant. However, upon learning that the whole project was constructed at the expense of the eleven villages whose inhabitants were evicted by an official diktat