By Chitralekha Zutshi By Chitralekha Zutshi

I have always viewed Kashmir as a palimpsest on which there are several overlapping discourses, most of which have valid historical and theoretical contexts. Several academics and scholars are contemplating the study of the ancient and modern history of the Kashmir region as a discrete political and cultural entity, as well as its unique and crucial role in global and South Asian politics and culture. Chitralekha Zutshi’s book, Kashmir’s Contested Past, is one such commendable attempt to provide a layered understanding of Kashmir, undercutting, in the process, a unitary ideological and political position. I read this book as a postcolonialist trained to question the infallibility of an ‘objective’ opinion. Chitralekha Zutshi’s book defies the linearity and teleology of the grand historical narrative of Kashmir. Somewhere along the way the rich historical trajectory and multilingual narrative tradition of Kashmir have been relegated to the realm of oblivion by colonial, orientalist, and nationalist, some ultra Right-Wing, productions of history.


Reviewed by: Nyla Ali Khan
A Project of Julia Keay

The latter half of the eighteenth century was the golden era of private armies in India. A large number of these armies, each comprising a few thousand men, were officered by Europeans who are frequently referred to as ‘mercenaries’ or ‘adventurers’. These were professional soldiers who could change sides quite often, even though there were many who had a strong sense of loyalty and commitment. With the decline of the Mughal empire most States of the eighteenth century lacked the resources to maintain large standing armies.


Reviewed by: Amar Farooqui
Sarita Mandanna

The author has to be admired not only for the formidable amount of painstaking research she has done for this book, grounded as it is on facts, but for her ability to marshal her research into a story that covers World War I and the entry of the United States into World War II, with the attack on Pearl Harbor. The story has been woven, obviously with care, around the First World War almost entirely and its aftermath in the US.


Reviewed by: Bhaskar Ghose
By Yigal Bronner Edited by Yigal Bronner, Whitney Cox, Lawrence McCrea

Originally published in 2011, and now available in an excellent Indian edition, this set of essays in honour of and in dialogue with the ideas and writings of one of the most challenging and demanding scholars of our times is exciting, at times difficult and even arcane, and almost invariably thought provoking. Organized around five themes that have been central to Sheldon Pollock’s prolific and profound scholarship, the essays range from the densely and often dauntingly specific to more broad and general explorations, offering something for almost any scholar interested in the relationship between the past and the present, between literary cultures and the worlds in which they circulate as well as the worlds they construct, between linguistic, scholarly and literary traditions and realms of power.


Reviewed by: Kumkum Roy
By Shereen Ratnagar

An enormous amount of scholarly writing exists on the Harappan civilization. Shereen Ratnagar herself has produced a number of important books on the subject. So why another one? For one thing, the information on South Asia’s oldest civilization continues to grow steadily, and new evidence requires rethinking. Further, as Ratnagar tells us in the Preface, it is time ‘to put the pieces together and to conceive of the entirety of Harappan archaeological remains in terms of a mode of cultural organization, a kind of society, and a set of economic patterns, thereby putting some flesh on the bones.’ Ratnagar’s is not a routine overview. Apart from rich empirical detail, a lively critical perspective runs through the book, one which reflects on archaeological method and interpretation in order to question several hypotheses and stereotypes, not only about the Harappan civilization, but also about the larger Indian past.


Reviewed by: Upinder Singh