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The ‘Insider’ versus the ‘Outsider’ debate is not new in social science research. Indian sociology, in fact, has largely privileged the Outsider. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is that the late 18th and mid 19th century Orientalists were convinced that Outsiders like themselves were more capable than Natives of obtaining authentic knowledge, because of their guiding principles of ‘objectivity’ and ‘scientific rigour’. Even after Indian Independence, many sociologists believed that emotional and intellectual detachment was possible by studying a social group very different from one’s own.

Destination India: From London Overland to India is the last co-authored book of Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph—the intellectual stalwarts and eminent scholars of modern India. The book under review is an intellectual biographical account of their joint academic journey of six and half decades revealing the historical trajectory of their writings. The book is neatly divided into three essays in a compact and small size with an attractive lay out.

The US Presidential elections are upon us and what better time to read political memoirs of the leading Presidential candidates than this? Bernie Sanders is junior Senator from Vermont and was the first Independent elected to the US House of Representatives in forty years. He is the longest serving Independent in the history of the US Congress and is the co-founder of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest caucus in Congress. He joined the Democratic Party in 2015 and is currently fighting for the nomination of the party.

Those with some knowledge of the rise and expansion of social welfare states in the West post-Second World War know that social welfare for the socially and economically underprivileged and needy was necessitated for the sake of capitalism in order to mitigate many social and economic tensions. It proved functional for a considerable length of time until about the 1980s when the new Right political philosophy and political economy came out with a virulent assault on social welfare and the public institutional structures built around it.

India Since 2002 is a collection of critical reflections by Mukul Dube on the socio-political happenings in India in the aftermath of the Gujarat genocide of 2002, previously published in the weekly Mainstream between 2002 and 2015. Dube’s principal focus in this anthology is the depredations of the Sangh Parivar, the torch bearer of the ‘Vedic Taliban’ and Hindu fundamentalism.

In 1987, Doordarshan, the state-controlled television network, began to air Ramanand Sagar’s popular show based on the epic Ramayana. Its broadcast was a remarkable departure for a government institution like Doordarshan from the Nehruvian mandate to uphold a secular and modern character and eschew tradition, especially when invoked in the context of religion. The televisual retelling of the epic achieved unprecedented popularity.