By Santhosh Kumar . Translated by P.N. Venugopal

Reading Island of Lost Shadows takes one compulsively back to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A century and a half after the publication of Conrad’s masterpiece, here is another novel, set in Kerala, a continent away from Conrad’s Africa, that probes the ability of power to corrode the human soul. A boat journey across a river, a headless trunk of a pig washed down the stream, the mysterious figure of Karadi Papa (more a myth than a man), the impaled head on the gates of the Meledathu tharavadu, the tribal Paniyas with their chants, songs, and rituals—all bring to mind a Conradian world of darkness, mystery and, more than anything else, horror.


Reviewed by: K. Latha
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay

The wounds may have healed to an extent but the suffering is relived and borne again and again by the affected families and through them, by their younger generations. The Sikhs who faced the terror and shame of the 1984 riots have found a voice in this book which Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a well-known journalist and political commentator, has written almost three decades after the horrifying event. This is no fiction! Even the people whose stories he narrates have not been given any fictional names.


Reviewed by: Jaskiran Chopra
Kingshuk Nag

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.


Reviewed by: Swadesh Singh
Neerja Singh

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.


Reviewed by: Abhay Kumar
Yasmin Khan

2015

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.


Reviewed by: Parvez Alam
By Sachidananda Mohanty

Odisha and Odiya language faced a crisis in the second half of the nineteenth century. Institutions and dispositions introduced by colonial modernity had produced a crisis of survival and autonomy before the Odiya speaking gentry. The new system of education, style of governance, use of technology, maritime trade, new revenue regulations, modern science and healthcare practices, and even food and other articles of consumption and new forms of entertainment, had unsettled a traditional social order. The Odiya literati responded to this crisis in several ways.


Reviewed by: Anirban Bandyopadhyay