Recent academic works have increasingly sought to critically engage with the complex and contested process of tribal identity formation in India. Much of this discourse locates the origins of such identity constructions in colonial epistemological and administrative frameworks. Early colonial representation depicted tribal communities as primitive, uncivilized, and as vestiges of a pre-Aryan, non-Vedic past.…
There are a few chapters in the book which present a systematic study on issues which have been rarely discussed in the academic discourse of electoral politics in India. For example, Ashutosh Kumar’s ‘Election Economy in India’ is one of the most crucial chapters in this volume, which discusses the advancement and working of election economy in India after Independence.
This is seen clearly in one of the most interesting essays: Suryanandini Narain’s ‘Yatra Chitra/Parivar Chitra: Mrs Gupta’s Photographic Record of a Family amidst a Changing Nation’. Mrs Gupta lived in Brindavan with her husband, the Principal of a local college, and their three children—Guddu, Guddi and Dabloo. Her photo albums of her family’s holidays in the 1960s to historical places of interest show the historic/tourist sites plus the whole family, which, according to Narain, ‘frame Mrs Gupta’s aspirations of looking at the family and nation as part of the same continued trajectory…’.
Organized in six incisive chapters, the book draws on concepts and methods from new critical close reading, deconstruction, and semiotic as well as discourse analysis to generate important insights into Hindi cinema. The opening chapter titled ‘From “History” to Circus: Politics of Genre and Muslims’ Representation in Hindi Films’, examines the representation of Muslims in historical films, war narratives, and biopics of Urdu literary figures. It contrasts the inclusive vision once embodied in films such as Mughal-e-Azam (1960), with more recent works that employ history to promote a Hindutva-oriented perspective wherein Muslims are depicted as ‘the other’.
In Rule 3 titled ‘Hear the Atypicals’, the author highlights the importance of how activities and products are ‘Designed’, which in turn will decide for whom the ‘design’ is suitable and/or how inclusive it is. The author provides an interesting chart (spread over pages 120 to 124) that lists industries in one column, the externalities that are specific to that industry in the second column,
Based on this event, Kokas lays out her premise with clinical clarity. The global movement of data constitutes more than a privacy concern. American firms, driven by profit and often blind to the policy implications of their actions, have enabled Chinese regulators to assert digital sovereignty far beyond their borders. In the process, user data becomes not just a commercial asset, but a tool of statecraft.