Utsa Patnaik, Prabhat Patnaik

The authors are emeritus professors of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Both secured their doctorates in economics from Oxford University, UK. Utsa’s main areas of research interest are the problems of transition from agriculture and peasant predominant societies in a historical context, at present in relation to India, and questions relating to food security and poverty. She has authored several books including Peasant Class Differentiation: A Study in Method (1987), The Long Transition (1999), and The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays (2007).


Reviewed by: TCA Ranganathan
Adhir Biswas. Translated from the original Bengali by V. Ramaswamy

Following the Partition of the subcontinent, the migration of refugees from East Pakistan into West Bengal did not occur in a single wave, as it did along Pakistan’s western frontier, where over fifteen million people crossed the border in the year of Partition. The former’s border crossing had various crests and troughs throughout the decades, which is why the problem has been viewed differently and often goes unacknowledged.


Reviewed by: Aman Nawaz
Aanchal Malhotra

The further we get from the events of Partition, the more the art of writing about it changes. Memories fade and change, its custodians no longer those who were direct participants as they have aged. In the Language of Remembering looks at the implications of these flows through a carefully collated selection of interviews both with those who lived through the traumatic events of the mid-20th century in South Asia and their descendants.


Reviewed by: TCA Achintya
Anindita Ghoshal

It is now generally accepted that the Partition of India happened in two quite different ways. In the West, it was short, swift, extremely violent, and quite definitive, while in the East the process was prolonged, fluid, and relatively less bloody. Thus, the historians have termed the Partition in East India as the ‘Long Partition’. Another difference between these two processes of Partition seems to be associated with the dual process of forgetting and remembrance.


Reviewed by: Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay

Declaring India to be an independent nation in 1947 encapsulated fundamental historical changes. India was no longer a collection of kingdoms as it had been before it was colonized, nor were the people of India any longer subjects of the British crown as under colonial rule. We were now a sovereign democratic state whose population consisted of free and autonomous citizens of a nation. 


Editorial
Whitney Cox

Commentarial traditions and language-centred interpretive conventions were arguably the most important modes of knowledge production in India for much of the second millennium CE. This practice commenced in all earnest in the eighth century CE, although we know of several instances of earlier commentaries too, including Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya that is older than the first century BCE. Modern scholarship has relied upon these works for a long time, and works such as Sāyaṇa’s commentary on the Rigvēda and the ones on the bṛhattraya texts (Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya, Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha and Śrīharṣa’s Naiṣadhīyacarita) have been indispensable in producing critical editions of the respective texts.


Reviewed by: Manu V Devadevan