By Vinay Sitapati

How do you judge a good biography, especially in a country where the tradition of writing them is virtually nonexistent and where even the few that do get written, tend to be hagiographies? It is hard to say but Vinay Sitapati’s biography of P.V. Narasimha Rao, a former Prime Minister of India, fulfils the five criteria that could be applied, namely, length, style, research, new information and novel interpretation.Last year, Daman Singh, Manmohan Singh’s daughter wrote her father’s biography but it failed on three of the above five counts: research, new information and novel interpretation. It was an interesting read but added little to what was not already known.


Reviewed by: T.C.A. Srinivasa Raghavan
By Vasant Kaiwar

Postcolonial Studies (PCS) is widely seen as intellectually avant garde and politically radical and progressive. There is a small but growing literature, to which this book is a valuable contribution that critiques PCS on both counts; in these respects seeing its claims to going beyond the supposed limitations of Marxism, as mistaken and dangerous. PCS is more a retreat and a bad detour, not a rich and promising new path of exploration. Or, as the author Kaiwar puts it, ‘Postcolonial studies with its poststructuralist and post-modernist imbrications does not have the same value or valences as Marxism … [which] is also the “anticipatory expression of a future society”.’ The object of critique here is not the vast body of historical and sociological writings done in the name of Subaltern Studies (SS) or PCS which have their merits and insights as specific case studies but of their theoretical pretensions and claims.


Reviewed by: Achin Vanaik
By Siri Hettige, and Eva Gerharz

Three essential elements of social experience, namely, governance, development and conflict, are intimately intertwined.Sometimes confusion arises because we are confronted with situations when apparently developed situations too lead to conflicts as was seen in the Khalistan movement in India’s Punjab province in the late seventies and early eighties, or what, has been happening in Kashmir. Punjab was one of the traditionally prosperous States of India, and so far as Kashmir is concerned, it is one the biggest recipients of central assistance. It is, therefore, not always simply that economic hardship alone leads to societal conflicts. The relationship is much more complex, and that is what the present book under review underscores.


Reviewed by: Partha S. Ghosh
By Lisa Bjorkman

A multiplicity of sources—whether it be lived experience, popular discourse or scholarly work—seem to suggest a rather dim view about the state of urban planning in India’s burgeoning cities. Lisa Björkman’s book is a thoroughly researched and carefully crafted work that provides further evidence and perspective on this sorry state of affairs. The innovation of the book is the smart way through which it sets up and pursues the subject. Rather than provide an overall commentary on the state of urban planning and infrastructure, Bjorkman approaches the topic by focusing on just one aspect of the urban civic infrastructure—the complex infrastructural and informational network required to provide daily water to residents of a large and expanding city.


Reviewed by: Abhinash Borah
By Taylor C. Sherman

Taylor Sherman’s book marks an important intervention in con-temporary debates over citizenship, belonging, democracy and nationalism. Today, it would be difficult to deny the differential access/exercise of citizenship rights, based on the social, cultural, communitarian, economic or political capital groups or individuals are able to leverage. It is also acknowledged that the formal regime of universal citizenship deftly masks systemic inequalities. Sherman teases out these nuances of citizenship-in-practice in Hyderabad, immediately after the invasion of 1948, to examine the different interpretations of belonging that shaped contemporary understandings of being Muslim and being Indian.


Reviewed by: Asma Rasheed
By Gautam Bhan

In urban areas like Delhi, the poor face an acute problem of space for their survival.  Most of them are compelled to live with the tag of ‘encroacher’ and face a perpetual threat of eviction from their ‘residence’. The book under review presents a meticulous ethnographic study of the lives of those citizens of Delhi who were living ‘illegally’ and faced eviction due to the emergence of ‘judicial urbanism’. The book explores the complex aspects related to urabn planning, changing nature of Public Interest Litigations (PILs) and definitions of public interest, evictions and relocation/resettlement of different ‘illegal’ bastis, social movements in bastis and their strategies to counter the evictions etc., in Delhi. In other words, it focuses on the dilemma of the marginalized sections of citizens and their social movements regarding the judicialization of urban governance because they cannot deal with judiciary with the same strategies as they have been dealing with their elected representatives and the government officials.


Reviewed by: Kamal Nayan Choubey