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As a subject of study, Pakistan is primarily evocative of volatility, disarray, long held as a country that serves as physical sanctuary for violent extremist forces. Jamsheed Marker’s Cover Point: Impressions of Leadership in Pakistan does not follow a set pattern, it rather breaks away from treading the beaten track. It neither presents Pakistan’s chequered political history in pure conventional theoretical terms nor puts it across within the confines of excess security focus. Instead, Marker innovatively approaches the complex political trajectory of Pakistan in a lucid, reader-friendly account embellished with interesting anecdotes, that are quite suggestive of the author’s diplomatic acumen honed during a wide-ranging public service career.

That Indians lack a strategic culture is an oft quoted and universally expressed truism. An aspect exemplifying this not-so-flattering a reality was the non-availability of military history books especially of India’s participation in wars and military campaigns of the last hundred years or so. However, this trend is changing fast and dozens of books on recent military exploits of the Indian Armed Forces have been hitting the bookshelves especially as regards military conflicts in post-Independence India. A fair number of books on the first Kashmir War(1947–48), India’s China War (1962), India-Pak War of 1965, the 1971 War leading to the liberation of Bangladesh and even the Kargil operations in 1999 have been well published by authors, both military and civilian, in India.

How do you judge a good biography, especially in a country where the tradition of writing them is virtually nonexistent and where even the few that do get written, tend to be hagiographies? It is hard to say but Vinay Sitapati’s biography of P.V. Narasimha Rao, a former Prime Minister of India, fulfils the five criteria that could be applied, namely, length, style, research, new information and novel interpretation.Last year, Daman Singh, Manmohan Singh’s daughter wrote her father’s biography but it failed on three of the above five counts: research, new information and novel interpretation. It was an interesting read but added little to what was not already known.

Postcolonial Studies (PCS) is widely seen as intellectually avant garde and politically radical and progressive. There is a small but growing literature, to which this book is a valuable contribution that critiques PCS on both counts; in these respects seeing its claims to going beyond the supposed limitations of Marxism, as mistaken and dangerous. PCS is more a retreat and a bad detour, not a rich and promising new path of exploration. Or, as the author Kaiwar puts it, ‘Postcolonial studies with its poststructuralist and post-modernist imbrications does not have the same value or valences as Marxism … [which] is also the “anticipatory expression of a future society”.’ The object of critique here is not the vast body of historical and sociological writings done in the name of Subaltern Studies (SS) or PCS which have their merits and insights as specific case studies but of their theoretical pretensions and claims.