Yasmin Khan

2015

The Raj at War: People’s History of India’s Second World War by Yasmin Khan, an Associate Professor of history at the University of Oxford and a winner of the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize, 2007, indeed justifies the prestigious award by being another magnum opus after The Great Partition. History from below was the project of subaltern historians during the 1980s, which was a paradigm shift in the study of history itself, by giving due attention to the excluded and marginalized voices and recognizing their important contribution in our society. The Raj at War does not claim to be one such text but it is written on similar lines.


Reviewed by: Parvez Alam
By Sachidananda Mohanty

Odisha and Odiya language faced a crisis in the second half of the nineteenth century. Institutions and dispositions introduced by colonial modernity had produced a crisis of survival and autonomy before the Odiya speaking gentry. The new system of education, style of governance, use of technology, maritime trade, new revenue regulations, modern science and healthcare practices, and even food and other articles of consumption and new forms of entertainment, had unsettled a traditional social order. The Odiya literati responded to this crisis in several ways.


Reviewed by: Anirban Bandyopadhyay
Satish Chandra

There are certain books that never lose their charm and value despite the passage of time. It is mainly because of the intellectual stimulation their contents give us and the variety of academic debates they initiate. One of such works is Essays in Medieval Indian Economic History edited by Satish Chandra. This volume being a collection of representative articles taken out of the Proceedings of the Indian History Congress (1935–1986) and originally published in 1987 as a part of the Golden Jubilee Celebrations of the Indian History Congress,


Reviewed by: Pius Malekandathil
Meenakshi Thapan

The volume under review is a compilation of much that has been published as research papers on Indian education since 2000. They have a very contemporary location in terms of the importance of ideas being discussed, and also the academic relevance of what has been included. Although put together as a reading in the disciplines of Sociology and Social Anthropology, much of the discussion in the introduction as well as in a variety of papers transcends disciplinary boundaries, and poses therefore the challenge of what the integrating framework should be like.


Reviewed by: Manisha Priyam
by Iffat Fatima and Syeda Saidain Hameed

Khwaja Ahmed Abbas donned many hats in his lifetime which includes writing poetry, short stories, novels and making films. For the uninitiated, K.A. Abbas was an active member of PWA and one of the founding members of IPTA. With the corpus of 74 books, 40 films, 89 short stories and 3,000 or so from his column writings, Abbas Sahab’s writings constitute a treasure-trove of information on the evolution of the idea of India. At the time of writing one of his last columns for the Blitz, Abbas Sahab makes an important observation about the then budding journalist P. Sainath—the proof of his astute reading of the media in general and politics in particular.


Reviewed by: Moggallan Bharti
By Shafey Kidwai

Shafey Kidwai’s book is true to its title and it delivers what it promises. The chapters in this book may have been written over a long period of time but probably the book was waiting for a time when the distinction between literature and nonliterature (read journalism) is not so sharp. A different context would make earlier journalistic writings appear as literature. How do we read the essays of Addison, Matthew Arnold or Sir Syed Ahmad Khan today if not as literature? The two components of the book, literature and journalism, are defined by their textuality, a major point of debate in critical theory today.


Reviewed by: Mohammad Asim Siddiqu