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In the year 1996 during an election rally in Lucknow when Atal Bihari Vajpayee stepped on the stage the excited crowd chanted, ‘Hamara PM kaisa ho, Atal Bihari Jaisa ho’. Vajpayee retorted in his characteristic style, ‘Arre PM chodo, pahle MP to banao’. What followed was another round of applause and cheers. Such rallies became Vajpayee’s trademark where he used wit and humour to strike a chord with his listeners instead of empty promises.In his sixties, Vajpayee had a huge following of youngsters who had been brought up in Uttar Pradesh and other States of the Hindi heartland of 1990s and had grown up listening to his poems and anecdotes.

Since the days of her research under the late Professor Bipan Chandra in the 1980s to the publication of Patel, Prasad and Rajaji: Myth of the Indian Right, Delhi University historian Neerja Singh has been engaging with the ‘right-wing politics in the Congress’. Critiquing the ‘Left’ historiography for clubbing Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Rajagopalachari under the Right Wing fold of the Congress, she offers the argument that these three key leaders of the Congress.

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.

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,

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.