John Thomas

Evangelising the Nation by John Thomas is an important study on the making of the Naga nation, and especially its relation with the (Baptist) Church. There are few works which have critically engaged with this relationship. The book covers the period from the late nineteenth century to the last decades of the twentieth century in five chapters. Broadly, there are two inter-related processes which the book deals with. What is equally notable, as the book shows, is that the two processes emerged almost around the same time.


Reviewed by: Manjeet Baruah
By Govardhanram Madhavram Tripathi . Translated from the original Gujarati by Tridip Suhrud

Hailed as a landmark literary work, a milestone in the literary history of Gujarat, Sarasvatichandra, Govardhanram Tripathi’s magnum opus is now available in English translation (coincidentally, all the four parts of the novel have been translated into Hindi at this juncture), after 128 years of its publication in Gujarati. It is but natural for the discerning reader to wonder why it was not translated for these many years.


Reviewed by: Rupalee Burke
By Santhosh Kumar . Translated by P.N. Venugopal

Reading Island of Lost Shadows takes one compulsively back to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A century and a half after the publication of Conrad’s masterpiece, here is another novel, set in Kerala, a continent away from Conrad’s Africa, that probes the ability of power to corrode the human soul. A boat journey across a river, a headless trunk of a pig washed down the stream, the mysterious figure of Karadi Papa (more a myth than a man), the impaled head on the gates of the Meledathu tharavadu, the tribal Paniyas with their chants, songs, and rituals—all bring to mind a Conradian world of darkness, mystery and, more than anything else, horror.


Reviewed by: K. Latha
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay

The wounds may have healed to an extent but the suffering is relived and borne again and again by the affected families and through them, by their younger generations. The Sikhs who faced the terror and shame of the 1984 riots have found a voice in this book which Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a well-known journalist and political commentator, has written almost three decades after the horrifying event. This is no fiction! Even the people whose stories he narrates have not been given any fictional names.


Reviewed by: Jaskiran Chopra
Kingshuk Nag

In the year 1996 during an election rally in Lucknow when Atal Bihari Vajpayee stepped on the stage the excited crowd chanted, ‘Hamara PM kaisa ho, Atal Bihari Jaisa ho’. Vajpayee retorted in his characteristic style, ‘Arre PM chodo, pahle MP to banao’. What followed was another round of applause and cheers. Such rallies became Vajpayee’s trademark where he used wit and humour to strike a chord with his listeners instead of empty promises.In his sixties, Vajpayee had a huge following of youngsters who had been brought up in Uttar Pradesh and other States of the Hindi heartland of 1990s and had grown up listening to his poems and anecdotes.


Reviewed by: Swadesh Singh
Neerja Singh

Since the days of her research under the late Professor Bipan Chandra in the 1980s to the publication of Patel, Prasad and Rajaji: Myth of the Indian Right, Delhi University historian Neerja Singh has been engaging with the ‘right-wing politics in the Congress’. Critiquing the ‘Left’ historiography for clubbing Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Rajagopalachari under the Right Wing fold of the Congress, she offers the argument that these three key leaders of the Congress.


Reviewed by: Abhay Kumar