A delightful if apocryphal story involves the legendary Hindustani vocalist Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan switching off the radio halfway through a Lata Mangeshkar broadcast, muttering to himself ‘Kambakht ladki besur hoti hi nahin hai!’ (The accursed girl doesn’t strike a single false note anywhere!). This facile technical perfection was in a sense deceptive. It…
In The Violence in Our Bones: Mapping the Deadly Fault Lines Within Indian Society, Professor Neera Chandhoke compels us to deliberate on violence in its many manifestations in India and suggests how we may extricate ourselves from this abyss by inventively imagining participatory democracy. The treatment of violence in the social sciences often diminishes the starkness of human tragedy, when reduced to mere statistics. While recognizing that violent urges might lie dormant in our psyche, Chandhoke is concerned with stalling the eruption of these violent urges onto the socio-political arena.
Contemporary buzz on Indian democracy (Roy Chowdhury and Keane, 2021; Yadav, 2020; Nielsen and Nielsen, 2019; Rudolph and Rudolph, 2014) analyses its evolving features. The book under review, written in memory of Professor Kalyan Bhattacharya (a faculty of Political Science in Vivekananda Mahavidyalay under the University of Burdwan, 1966-1994), probes into the making of the democracy discourse in India.
15 December 2019 was the darkest day of my life. On this day, the Delhi police entered our campus and beat us like animals.’ These lines from the introduction of Nehal Ahmed’s new book Nothing will be Forgotten transport our minds to the day when the University campus was turned into a warzone. Students were labelled terrorists. Gory visuals still refuse to leave our minds. A peaceful protest culminating in students running for their lives. Police rampaging through reading rooms and libraries, hunting for students like a pack of wolves.
The central questions that historian Sanjukta Sunderason asks in her book are these: What does ‘partisan aesthetics’ connote as a conceptual frame? What historical work can it do with the artistic field of mid-twentieth century India as archive, and what does it lend methodologically to the field of global and transnational art histories of this period? (p. 4).
Mutinies for Equality: Contemporary Developments in Law and Gender in India edited by Tanja Herklotz and Siddharth Peter de Souza is an attempt to examine gender inequality in India on the basis of doctrinal and empirical research in multiple sites. Titling the volume ‘Mutinies for Equality’, the editors argue, is a ‘recognition of the many battles that have been and continue to be fought to bring out greater gender equality in India and their implications for wider systemic transformations’ (p. 3).