By Partha Chatterjee , Sudipta Kaviraj, Nivedita Menon, Sanjay Ruparelia

Critique is essential to the healthy existence of a society. From its inception as an independent nation to its functioning for more than seven decades there have been many critiques of the dominant ideas that shape Indian society and its daily life. One of the most pervasive ideologies that Indian society is inflicted with is the ‘mahatma-ness’ of Gandhi and the dazzling statesmanship of Nehru. It is normally perpetrated through the medium of text-books and other state apparatuses upon the people’s life. It is not the purpose of this review to argue that Gandhi and Nehru were not great men but to show and acknowledge the existence of an ideological apparatus that profits from maintaining the projection of the extraordinary greatness of these personalities.


Reviewed by: Krishna Swamy Dara
Saitya Brata Das and Soumyabrata Choudhury

The book under review, an edited volume by Saitya Brata Das and Soumyabrata Choudhury, comprising fifteen articles divided into two sections, is one of the important epistemic interventions concerning violence and its metaphysics. Besides addressing aforesaid questions in different ways, the book surprisingly and illuminatingly underlines the question of violence or violence theory in those thinkers/philosophers (Rene Girard, Sigmund Freud, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Schelling, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Musil, Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin) who are otherwise known for their different impactful and consequential works. Identified realms of weight of violence are religion, language and politics.


Reviewed by: Dhananjay Rai
Romila Thapar

In his obituary to Benedict Anderson, historian Ramchandra Guha recollects a letter from him in which he asked, ‘How many public intellectuals are there in India? In Southeast Asia they are dying, replaced by professors and bureaucrats to whom not many ordinary people pay any attention… I guess your Gandhi was a public intellectual, but probably Nehru not???????’The worry about the disappearance of the institution of public intellectual is widespread. Romila Thapar expressed her own anxiety about the decreasing tribe of public intellectuals in the annual Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture in 2014 titled To Question or Not to Question


Reviewed by: Apoorvanand
Varun Oberoi and Tariq Modood,

To those who describe Bhikhu Parekh as the leading political theorist of Indian origin, essays in this volume will show that such parochial frames of representation do not do justice to his ideas. He is, and must be viewed as an eminent political theorist of our time, whose work has contributed enormously to our thinking about political concepts that we use to analyse the modern world and confront the challenges of our time.


Reviewed by: Gurpreet Mahajan

It is perhaps a cliché to argue that South Asia is a potpourri of different influencing societies, nationalities, ethnic traditions and cultural heritages. South Asian culture is rich and varied underlining the complex relationship between its myriad common traditional cultures. The nations share an ethnic background and most of the territorial divisions have come up only in the recent past.


Reviewed by: Editors

I have just read the 40 years of the Book Review. Wonderful, if you have not read it, well need I say you should! One of the editors is close to me, in many ways. I think she wanted to render homage to the words and books which, nurtured us, accompanied us. We grew up in a home, I say home not house for therein lies the difference, for words meant a lot to us, in a home I was saying, where the walls were lined with books which murmured wherever we moved, whatever we did. This constant presence never did quieten, throughout our lives the ‘emanating words, words from the walls words from the air’


Editorial