Benjamin Cohen

In the Club is a welcome addition to the study of colonialism and colonial bourgeois sociality in South Asia. The book is not so much a history of clubs as it is a study of the formation and articulation of social relations in clubs. Though the network of clubs played a significant role in the unfolding of colonialism in South Asia, it is still a relatively ignored area in the historiography of colonial encounters. In fact, this is the first book-length survey of clubs in this part of the world. It is not dedicated to a particular city.


Reviewed by: Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay
Kalyan Kundu

Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to Italy in 1925, and especially the controversial tour of Italy in 1926 at the invitation of Benito Mussolini, has been a matter of interest to Tagore scholars for a long time. The acceptance of an invitation from a Fascist dictator by a great humanist baffled the international community of that time. The encounter also aroused a good deal of media interest both within and outside Italy.


Reviewed by: Kunal Chakrabarti
P. Sanal Mohan

As the title suggests, P. Sanal Mohan’s Modernity of Slavery, employs a multidisciplinary approach and marks a significant contribution towards understanding the history of oppression within the story of modernity. By exploring the hitherto neglected histories of slave caste populations in colonial Kerala, he makes a passionate attempt to recover lost voices.


Reviewed by: Divya Kannan
Edited by Vandana Shiva

A representative from Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company that today controls 65% of the global seed market for maize and more than a quarter of the world’s commercial seed market, is on record to have defined the problem to securing a Global Intellectual Property Rights Agreement as: ‘Farmers save seeds’—and thus they offered a solution: ‘Seed saving should be made illegal’.


Reviewed by: Sagari R. Ramdas
Edited by Subhadra Mitra Channa and Marilyn Porter. Foreword by Joan P. Mencher

The edited volume under review by anthropologist Subhadra Mitra Channa and sociologist Marilyn Porter focuses on a wide range of case studies from across the world related to ways in which women manage environmental resources. The book is a product of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) meeting held in China in 2009. The contributors to the volume show the connections between increasing poverty and global capitalist exploitation that negatively affects women’s access to resources. As recognized by the UN Security Council, since the 1990s, most conflicts around the world are related to disputes over natural resources, whether they are over oil, water, mining or access to land to grow crops. Women have played an important role in the peace processes.


Reviewed by: Manisha Rao
Anuradha Roy

2014

This book as the author claims ‘draws upon her PhD dissertation written more than a quarter of a century ago’. She fears that the definition of ‘cultural history at that time was rather narrow and the broad spectrum that is attached today to this branch of historical study was unknown those days’. She apologizes for the narrative style of her compendium which she admits is ‘overburdened with data’ and is apprehensive about the ‘readability of the book’ because she admits that her ‘youthful enthusiasm as a researcher’ led to a kind of ‘data fetishism’.


Reviewed by: Uttara Chakraborty