Meeta Deka

Emerging scholarship on urban studies in South Asia poses a critique of the application of Eurocentric models to capture urban processes in the global South. South Asian scholars, while arguing that urbanization is not uniform, argue for a contextual understanding of urban shifts. In addition to examining urban patterns concerning colonial history, and the roles of the state and the market, studies on urban processes also bring under their purview other categories such as gender, caste, kinship, ethnicity and culture.


Reviewed by: Aleena Sebastian
Ashok Kumar Pandey

Well-known Gandhian scholar Sudhir Chandra has poignantly noted in one of his essays, ‘Gandhi’s Sorrows’, that while in the thirty-two years that he spent resisting colonial rule Gandhiji was never once harmed, Independent India was able to keep this apostle of peace alive only for a mere five and a half months. This has remained a shameful blot on the otherwise glorious history of India’s struggle for Independence. Ashok Kumar Pandey’s Why They Killed Gandhi: Unmasking the Ideology and the Conspiracy and Appu Esthose Suresh and Priyanka Kotamraju authored The Murderer, The Monarch and The Fakir: A New Investigation of Mahatma Gandhi’s Assassination provide fresh perspectives to one of the most hotly contested political developments in Independent India


Reviewed by: Amol Saghar
Venugopal Maddipati

Venugopal Maddipati’s book opens with a charming anecdote of Charles Correa toppling over a model of a high-rise block strategically placed by his side during a lecture to architecture students at School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi. Correa’s performance was meant to demonstrate that low-rise, medium density housing could easily create more humane and economical solutions for living (than in a high-rise), and therefore possibly more suitable to India’s climate and cultural context.


Reviewed by: Aftab Jalia
Ranu Uniyal, Nazneen Khan and Raj Gaurav Verma

Reading Gandhi: Perspectives in the 21st Century as the acknowledgement page states is an outcome of a one-day conference held in the Department of English at Lucknow University in 2019. Structurally divided into an introduction and fourteen chapters, the anthology captures several interesting and less considered aspects of Gandhi’s life written by scholars drawn from diverse regions. The book is designed to present Gandhi’s thoughts navigating from his politics to principles and code of life. It helps us understand the Mahatma’s legacy and his philosophy which has always been a topic of discussion, especially in the contemporary world.


Reviewed by: Anita Singh
Suranjan Das

The eight-week Champaran Satyagraha, the scene of the first triumph of Gandhian technique in India was a striking example of protest action and mustering support for that from the urban nationalist leadership through the initiatives of local peasants. Since his South African days, it had been Gandhi’s wish to invoke passive resistance or Satyagraha, as he preferred to call it, in his own country. He considered Satyagraha a panacea for all ills of the country.


Reviewed by: Jawaid Alam
Preet S. Aulakh and Philip F. Kelly

Aulakh and Kelly provide readers with a brilliant conceptual framework to situate the themes of interdependent capital and labour mobilities. The choice of Asia is dictated by the latter’s phenomenal economic growth in the last couple of decades, it being both the source and destination of significant new migration corridors, as well as its distinctive institutional arrangements created to regulate these mobilities. Besides mapping the standard forms of capital mobility, the authors emphasize the significant role that remittances play in economic development at both local and national levels in the countries of origin of Asian migrants.


Reviewed by: Padmini Swaminathan