Edited by Hugo Gorringe , Roger Jeffery and Suryakant Waghmore

The process of institutionalizing radical protest politics and their demands include a swathe of dilemmas and complexities that include the possibility of de-radicalizing and blocking the political and collective sense that such politics grounds them on. Thus, radical politics on the one hand wishes to witness institutionalization and mainstreaming of their politics to redefine political landscapes, while on the other, they wish to continue as radical protest politics maintaining the fervour and the process of wedging open social narratives that had little space hitherto. It has often been witnessed that political movements that institutionalize themselves in law, policy, and formal institutions carry the anxiety of deradicalizing themselves. The protests get entangled in legal dilemmas as has happened with the sub-caste politics, where mass mobilization was replaced by technical detailing of who is or is not eligible for reservations, or as has been the case with domestic violence where with 468(a) the issue was individualized, and became a matter of accessing the judiciary,


Reviewed by: Ajay Gudavarthy
By Bhikhu Parekh

India is endowed with a rich philosophical tradition, which dates back to ancient times, a tradition which is also varied along various axes. One of the main concerns of Bhikhu Parekh is to show the richness of this tradition from the perspective of the norms and standards of argumentation within the political and philosophical discourses. His main concern is how standards were maintained when discussion and debate went antagonistic—publicly. Parekh thinks it is worthwhile to investigate this aspect because he is of the opinion that earlier studies, particularly the work of Amartya Sen is not satisfactory enough. Although he agrees with much of Sen’s work in The Argumentative Indian, he ‘departs from him in several respects’. The word ‘argumentative’ in the book is used sometimes ‘in the sense of being methodical in one’s reasoning and weighing up arguments before reaching a conclusion’ and sometimes it seems that it is being used in the negative pejorative sense and in a ‘more common and conventional sense, it refers to someone who argues for the sake of arguing.’ Moreover, Sen does not emphasize the importance of having a tradition of ‘public debate’. Sen only focuses on ‘disagreements between two individual or schools and overlooks the equally and, in some contexts, far more important public debates conducted before large audiences, having formal structure and involving a binging verdict.’ The aim of the book partly is to introduce to the reader the methods in which this public debate took in the ‘Indian tradition’.


Reviewed by: Krishna Swamy Dara
By Pavan Kumar Malreddy

Pavan Kumar Malreddy’s slim volume discusses and synthesizes three concepts with concrete examples: orientalism, terrorism and indigenism (Dalit Bahujan movements), with an involved reading of academic literature as well as the popular media. He draws from the contemporary literary studies in South Asia to discourse on orientalism and contemporary manifestations of terrorism (9/11 for example). What gets highlighted in the process are contradictions inherent in the way South Asia has viewed and comprehended postcolonialism, as analysed in the Subaltern Studies and the way the West has viewed it. The book makes an attempt to position Orientalism in a postcolonial world in transition with terrorism and identity-based cleavages occupying axis-space for discussions. The use of the work of prominent literary figures from South Asia to analyse the three concepts is an innovative analytical tool in the study.


Reviewed by: Ajay K. Mehra

In the times we live in—where, often acknowledging, tolerating and celebrating differences is seen as a sign of weakness nothing opens better the debate on gender, as this quote from Marguerite Yourcenar’s ‘With Open Eyes’ written and published in 1980: ‘… Anyway, women who say “men” and men who say “women”, usually to complain within one group as within the other, instill in me a great sense of ennui, like do those who stumble through all that is formulaic.There are virtues that are specifically ‘feminine’ which feminists seem to scorn, this does not by the way mean that these were ever the prerogative of all women : gentleness, goodness, finesse, delicacy, virtues so important that if a man did not possess them at least in small proportions, he would be considered a brute, not a man.


Editorial

A report on a book discussion held at the India International Centre on May 24, 2016, with Indu Agnihotri, CWDS, in the chair and Vidhu Varma (JNU), Kusha Tiwari (Shyam Lal College) and Baran Faoorqi (JMI) in the panel.Prostitution is about the only job in the world in which you earn the most on your first day. As the days pass, your income declines before you finally burn out within 10–15, or if you are lucky, twenty years. Prostitution consumes your body, destroying it with the abuse, insecurity and poverty that often comes with it. The bouquet of three books under discussion approaches the subject of prostitution from multiple angles. A statement that emerges with tremendous force from these three books could be, ‘Prostitution is a choice where there is no choice.’


Reviewed by: Baran Farooqi
By Rekha

Rekha’s book attempts to chart the complex terrain of women’s writing in post-Independence India, while declaredly wishing to avoid the pitfalls of the ‘generalizations’ that are attendant on both mainstream Women’s Studies methodologies and what she calls ‘Indo-centric’ approaches to the subject. Rekha also wishes to address what she considers a significant gap in the existing oeuvre of critical work on women’s writing in India: the privileging of the ‘temporal axis’ and the insufficient attention paid to the politics of space in the shaping of women’s experience, especially as reflected in the literature produced by them. In view of this, she makes what she calls a ‘representative sampling’ of women’s prose fiction from the country, choosing the work of five major writers: Krishna Sobti (Hindi, b. 1925), Mahasweta Devi (Bengali, b. 1926), Kamal Desai (Marathi, 1928–2011), Ambai (her pseudonym, she writes as C.S. Lakshmi when she writes as a critic in Tamil and English, b. 1944) and Githa Hariharan (English, b. 1954).


Reviewed by: Trina Nileena Banerjee