Rajen Harshe

The  Gypsy in the World of Ideas by Rajen Harshe is a successful attempt at addressing the issues of Indian society, politics, intellectual history and institutions through the perspective that developed consequent upon Harshe’s longstanding experiences as an academician and institution builder. We can find here idea and praxis mixed together creating thoughtful reading for the readers. Breaking the conventional formats it ardently depends on the use of metaphors and poetic symbols.


Reviewed by: Badri Narayan
By Rajib Dasgupta

Let me introduce the book to the readers with an anecdote concerning the subject matter of the book. I joined as a medical undergraduate student at the Delhi’s University College of Medical Sciences (UCMS) in 1986, which by that time had shifted just adjacent to Shahdara in eastern Delhi, within the newly constructed campus of Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital (GTB). Having passed through the humdrum of Shahdara or other crowded and maddeningly chaotic localities of East Delhi to reach the GTB campus, its spacious locale and high rise buildings of the campus were bound to make an impression on any visitor.


Reviewed by: Vikas Bajpai
Amartya Sen

This is a recent offering by Amartya Sen, who currently teaches economics and philosophy at Harvard University. He was earlier Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and is a Nobel prize winner.The book contains 13 essays, selected and organized by the editors of The Little Magazine, (TLM) who have resisted the urge to make them ‘contemporary’. They are presented in a chronological manner, covering the broad fields of culture, society and policy. An intimately warm, yet gently provocative, foreword by Gopalkrishna


Reviewed by: T.C.A. Ranganathan
By Bianca Brijnath

Unforgotten is the product of Bianca Brijnath’s doctoral research at Monash University. It can be considered as a significant contribution to anthropological literature on ageing, dementia and its care in India. Though her research is limited to urban middle class (which she acknowledges as a limitation), it is truly revealing in terms of the confined participants and their lived experience with dementia and sevâ. Sevâ a concept which Brijnath explores in all its forms and layers as care work is shaped in everyday family life centred on cooking, feeding and eating; in doctor shopping and looking for an ilâj or cure; and bearing the attended expenses.


Reviewed by: Anindya Das
by Sudhir Mahadevan

The picture on the cover of Sudhir Mahadevan’s book is a Bioscope; a techno-material ‘assemblage’ that he will argue is emblematic of film cultures in India. Writes Mahedevan: The Bioscope is the combination of the past and the present. It represents the key symbol of early cinema brushing against new and not so new media. It is the refashioning of an ‘optical device’ of still pictures predating the cinema in the 19th Century, into a source of moving images with the help of home viewing technology and digital formats.


Reviewed by: Shohini Ghosh
By Hema Devare

As stated by Kapila Vatsyayan, Chairperson, IIC Asia Project in her Foreword, the book is the author’s ‘personal voyage or certainly a journey of exploring and identifying the many levels of communications between India and countries of South East Asia over a long period of history.’ The journey has been lucidly captured in the text that illustrates the large number of colour visuals in the book. Many of these have been sourced from museums in countries of South East Asia during the author’s long sojourns in the region.


Reviewed by: Himanshu Prabha Ray