Ronojoy Sen’s work suggests that the history of sports in India is much more than mere pastime and play. A study of the chequered history of sport would for Sen reveal much about the nature of Indian society, its values, ethics, aspirations, fissures, and very importantly the dynamics of power play. As Sen’s book succinctly portrays, the saga of sports in India has been inextricably bound with issues of class, identity mobility and patronage.
Bahram Modi, the Parsi merchant in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke, turns to his associate in the last few pages of the novel and remarks poignantly, ‘When they make their future, do you think they will remember us… Do you think they will remember what we went through? Will they remember that it was the money we made here, the lessons we learnt and the things we saw that made it all possible?’ The urge to be remembered has been a recurring motive in history, though a privilege limited to very few.
Jihad is a much used and abused term in the contemporary twenty-first century. Today’s world has seen the proliferation of self-proclaimed jihadi groups claiming responsibility for terror strikes like the 9/11 attacks in the USA and the recent Paris strikes. The backdrop of these terrorist activities is the geopolitics of wars and oil refineries and the quest by western powers to spread democracy to the so called non-democratic Islamic world.
From the thirteenth century onward, cities played a central role in the emergence, consolidation and subsequent expansion of Muslim power across large sways of the Indian subcontinent. The Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526), the Mughal Empire (1526– 1857), as well as smaller medieval Muslim principalities such as the sultanates of the Deccan, revolved around urban agglomerations that were simultaneously seats of power, centers of learning and economic hubs. The intimate relations of Indian Muslims with the urban environment remains epitomized, to this day, by the takhallus (nom de plume) of many Urdu poets, which showcases their belonging to a particular city.
Debjani Das’s book attempts a close look at the history of the establishment of asylums in various parts of Bengal throughout the nineteenth century. The book is rich in archival detail with the different chapters complementing the themes considered for discussion.The first theme is the exploration of the linkages of the politics of inner space and geographical location of the asylums with that of the emergence of the various definitions of insanity intervened by notions about race.
The historiography of colonial rule in India has for long been focused on the polarities of coercion and consent. Over the past two decades or so, historians have done much to further our understanding of the admixture of force and collaboration in sustaining colonial domination. More recent works inspired by Foucauldian notions of governmentality have drawn our attention to the workings of colonial power at its point of application. These have underscored the extent to which imperial governance was, in practice, far from being ideologically stable and self-confident, and was actually shot through with uncertainty and panic, hesitancy and contradiction