Mamang Dai, the Sahitya Akademi Award winning author is one of the most prolific voices from Arunachal Pradesh as well as the region of the North East. Her works have delved deeply into the transitions that the State of Arunachal Pradesh has gone through from time to time, including the administrative changes which first treated the region as a ‘frontier’ in the wilderness and then a resourceful unexplored area waiting to be ‘harnessed’.
Emerging scholarship on urban studies in South Asia poses a critique of the application of Eurocentric models to capture urban processes in the global South. South Asian scholars, while arguing that urbanization is not uniform, argue for a contextual understanding of urban shifts. In addition to examining urban patterns concerning colonial history, and the roles of the state and the market, studies on urban processes also bring under their purview other categories such as gender, caste, kinship, ethnicity and culture.
Well-known Gandhian scholar Sudhir Chandra has poignantly noted in one of his essays, ‘Gandhi’s Sorrows’, that while in the thirty-two years that he spent resisting colonial rule Gandhiji was never once harmed, Independent India was able to keep this apostle of peace alive only for a mere five and a half months. This has remained a shameful blot on the otherwise glorious history of India’s struggle for Independence. Ashok Kumar Pandey’s Why They Killed Gandhi: Unmasking the Ideology and the Conspiracy and Appu Esthose Suresh and Priyanka Kotamraju authored The Murderer, The Monarch and The Fakir: A New Investigation of Mahatma Gandhi’s Assassination provide fresh perspectives to one of the most hotly contested political developments in Independent India
Venugopal Maddipati’s book opens with a charming anecdote of Charles Correa toppling over a model of a high-rise block strategically placed by his side during a lecture to architecture students at School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi. Correa’s performance was meant to demonstrate that low-rise, medium density housing could easily create more humane and economical solutions for living (than in a high-rise), and therefore possibly more suitable to India’s climate and cultural context.
Reading Gandhi: Perspectives in the 21st Century as the acknowledgement page states is an outcome of a one-day conference held in the Department of English at Lucknow University in 2019. Structurally divided into an introduction and fourteen chapters, the anthology captures several interesting and less considered aspects of Gandhi’s life written by scholars drawn from diverse regions. The book is designed to present Gandhi’s thoughts navigating from his politics to principles and code of life. It helps us understand the Mahatma’s legacy and his philosophy which has always been a topic of discussion, especially in the contemporary world.
The eight-week Champaran Satyagraha, the scene of the first triumph of Gandhian technique in India was a striking example of protest action and mustering support for that from the urban nationalist leadership through the initiatives of local peasants. Since his South African days, it had been Gandhi’s wish to invoke passive resistance or Satyagraha, as he preferred to call it, in his own country. He considered Satyagraha a panacea for all ills of the country.