Mridula Ramanna

Historical literature on public health in colonial Bombay has been vast in depth and scale. We have seen how the city fought the plague, saw questions of sovereignty arise from the medical and moral disaster it inflicted on the city over the years.  While the racialized segregated structures of the Presidency have been studied, there is need for a detailed description of the health policies and their intended subjects. Mridula Ramanna undertakes this project in yet another rigorous and meticulous volume on public health governance in Bombay of the late colonial period.


Reviewed by: Aprajita Sarcar
Pamela Malhotra

As we live on the brink of climate collapse, one may chafe at the lack of personal agency as we watch governing bodies and corporate entities make disastrous decisions. This book is a personal rendition of one woman’s awakening to the myriad of issues the world faces and her quest to do something about it along with her partner, culminating in their endeavour to set up a private sanctuary in India. The author hopes to enlighten her readers by interspersing this tale with snapshots and brief explanations of key environmental events and issues from around the world, spanning centuries.


Reviewed by: Ayesha Anna Ninan
Alok Kumar Kanungo

As a child holidaying in Hyderabad with my grandparents, I was mesmerized by the exquisite Mughal glass collections in the Salarjung Museum—cut glass, crystal and blown glass goblets, hookah bases, bowls, bottles, platters and jugs, even spittoons—beautifully curved, with delicate swanlike necks. Beautiful translucent reds, blues and greens in jewel shades, etched, inlaid and enamelled with gold, fluted and melon shaped, with spirals, chevrons, and trifoliated designs and sprays of flowers running up their sides.  Their beauty and delicacy enchanted me.


Reviewed by: Laila Tyabji
Ruben Banerjee

The average viewer of television news or reader of newspapers is clueless about what really goes on within media organizations, how decisions are made on stories, what are the filters placed on the flow of information, or how news is shaped by shadowy players, whether they happen to be proprietors, advertisers, or governments. The value of this rather slight book lies in providing a chink that allows a little daylight to penetrate the dark innards of the Indian newsroom.


Reviewed by: Pamela Philipose
Rakhshanda Jalil and Debjani Sengupta

This volume puts together literary writings in Urdu and Bangla on the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. The crop is by no means as plentiful as the writings on Partition, but nevertheless quite appreciable, particularly in Bangla. The great advantage of the volume is that it tries to gather the harvest from both the Eastern and the Western wing of Pakistan, in an effort to provide a holistic perspective. Sadly, the writings in Urdu on 1971, except for a few honourable exceptions, are abstract, inane and escapist.


Reviewed by: M Asaduddin
by V. Ramaswamy & Shahroza Nahrin

The written word is a silent medium—we can only see the words on the pages of a book, cannot hear their sounds. We create those sounds in our minds while reading the book. As we slowly move from one word to another, one sentence to another, one paragraph to another, we gradually grow accustomed to listening to the words in our mind. Loud, shrill, gruffy, with different accents—we assign voices to characters, and sounds that we have created while reading assume texture.


Reviewed by: Aratrika Das