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I begin my review of Amina Jamal’s Jamaat-e-Islami Women in Pakistan: Vanguard of a New Modernity with a couple of questions which I consider pertinent: Do women’s multiple narratives reveal a capacity for alternative ways of negotiating the construction of conflictual identities? Does the assumption of agential roles by traditional women in a patriarchal culture cause an identity conflict crisis which can be resolved through a firm commitment to specific values and goals? Women, as evidenced by the work of constructive and rehabilitative work undertaken by political and social women activists in South Asia during both turbulent and peaceful times, have more or less power depending on their specific situation, and they can be relatively submissive in one situation and relatively assertive in another.

Let me begin by confessing I am not the most appropriate reviewer for this book. When I volunteered to review the book, I was certain that the book would be about transnational commercial surrogacy or biocapital, as Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s work brilliantly shows us, where finance capital is intermeshed with trade in body parts: ova, fertilized embryos, embryonic stem cells and cord blood, a global business running into trillions.

Bhangya Bhukya’s The Roots of the Periphery: A History of the Gonds of Deccan India is a comprehensive history of the Gonds of Deccan India, an adivasi community. The research is based upon a wide range of sources ranging from the manuscripts, census, gazetteers, published government reports, journals and newspapers, unpublished documents, interviews and secondary sources.

Madhumita Sengupta’s Becoming Assamese: Colonialism and New Subjectivities in Northeast India is a welcome contribution to the study of colonialism and the making of 19th century Assam. The relations between the two processes have been the subject of research in the past, and continues to attract attention today. These researches have tried to look into aspects such as state making, political economy, production of culture, and the formation of identities. Sengupta’s book provides a background to these existing studies.

David Arnold begins his book with an impressive but brief survey of historic references to poison in India’s past. Poisons were widely known in ancient India. For example, in several ancient Indian texts appears the legend of vishkanya or poison-maiden, a woman whose body had been impregnated with poison as she took incremental doses of poison. Any physical intimacy with her could be fatal. As Sushruta Samhita mentions, ‘if she touches you, her sweat can kill, if you make love to her, your penis drops off like a ripe fruit from its stalk’ (p. 18).

Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay’s Historiography in the Modern World: Western and Indian Perspectives is a brilliantly compiled book, a re-view of the whole trajectory of historical thinking, sometimes based on primary sources and at times on secondary texts. Upadhyay’s book not only records history as an objective area of study, it also documents the history of historical methods. Unlike what the title suggests, the book is not only an exploration of the concept of historiography focusing on modern times, it also looks into the evolution of the concept from pre-modern to the modern times.  However, as the author suggests, one has to make a distinction between the past, history and historiography.