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Poets are always best at their craft when they leap to the magical imagination to elevate readers to new perceptions and milieu related to meaning and experience. Like the publisher-poet of this book, Jamie McGarry, I found the poem ‘The Lesson’, more akin to an opening overture of this collection, candidly meeting this benchmark. Through this poem, Saleem Peeradina’s savoir-faire as a poet successfully takes us on that enchanted journey to deliver us to the experience of things beyond a materialistic tuning.Take a sheet of paper the size of a drawing pad. The universe,as we perceive it, must be accommodated within the borders of this rectangle.

There are different ways of getting familiar with a city, and perhaps the descriptions of its monuments are among the most popular ways of doing so. Tourist guides and brochures of every major city in the world are replete with pictures and descriptions of its most visited and iconic monuments and buildings, more often than not, a newcomer to a city gets acquainted with it through its monuments, and therefore, a proper understanding of a city’s monuments and buildings is the crucial first step of getting acquainted with a city. The Great Houses of Calcutta by Joanne Taylor and Jon Lang attempts to familiarize a wide audience with the city of Calcutta, its socio-political and economic history and the lives of its people in an era gone by through a detailed analysis of some of the mansions of the local Bengali elites of colonial Calcutta.

Maharajakrishna Rasgotra was a career diplomat who served India with great distinction for almost forty years (1949–1990), often working closely with Pandit Nehru, and later, Indira Gandhi. He was born in a humble (though aspirational) family and was, therefore, largely a self-made man. Any book written by him would be of interest. A Life in Diplomacy is specially so because it is the story of India and the world which the author saw— and tried to shape—in his long years in the world of diplomacy. (The book contains a few finely drawn vignettes from the author’s personal life—his early years, his poetry, his marriage, the tragic loss of a child, his spiritual awakening later in life . . . but, as is made clear by the author, the book is not an autobiography.)

Pakistan lies dead and buried under a mountain of corpses. Tajuddin Ahmed in the Proclamation of Independence after his swearing-in as PM of the Interim Government of Bangladesh at Kushtia, 17 April 1971.The idea of a pre-planned Indian conspiracy to break-up Pakistan appeared to us, from our direct exposure to the responses of those in authority in India, to be a figment of the Pakistani imagination. Sobhan, p. 362.

‘The postcolonial North East India represents a land of claimed multiple sovereignties. With fractured histories, multiplicity of ethnicities and peculiar geographical location, the region has been grappling with multiple political crises—from ethno-nationalism to the demand for territorial sovereign homeland.’ The editor’s introduction is an apt description of the contemporary political situation in North East India. With so many sovereignty movements around it is obvious that the region throw up new discourses and debates on the prime concern: sovereignty. Throughout the nineteenth century, Indian political thinkers discussed and debated the form of polity, nature of sovereignty, modes of people’s participation in the polity. On the eve of Indian Independence these debates took a serious turn with multiple sovereignty demands from separatist groups like the Pakistan movements, Azad Punjab movement, Akhand Hindusthan movement, Isolationist Princely States as well as smaller communities who wanted a sovereign existence outside Independent India.

This classic nursery rhyme in many ways sums up the story of the ‘thirdfront’, the protagonist of Sanjay Ruparelia’s engaging narrative, Divided We Govern: Coalition Politics in Modern India. The pioneers in the art of coalition politics at the federal level, the components of the third-front have today gone in different directions and often come together only to separate immediately after that. In this study, Ruparelia explores in elaborate detail the coming together, performance in government and also the unravelling of three third-front federal coalitions, namely the Janata experiment (1977–78), National Front (1989– 1990) and the United Front (1996–98). In each of these coalition formations, the ‘broader Indian Left’ as he prefers to call them played a dominant role in reducing the two polity-wide parties, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to side actors.