In his own way, though, he was defying stereotypes associated with pracharaks. He had little by way of a formal education’ (p. 324). It was Advani who persuaded Vajpayee to send this pracharak from a little room of the Party office in New Delhi as Chief Minister of Gujarat. Second, the author’s narrative of Vajpayee’s indifference towards the Ayodhya issue, even with the ongoing Allahabad Kumbh Mela.
In these four decades plus, the country has experimented with democracy which was short-lived. It ‘remains a grey zone of uncertainty’. The ‘people deserve a better future’. Will that ever come to pass, wonders the author. Korea appears to be the author’s soft spot. Again, with good reason. Unlike Myanmar, South Korea has moved, in around the same time period, from being a despised dictatorship to a robust democracy. In 1983, in an infamous attempted assassination of the then President, the Korean Foreign Minister who had earlier been Ambassador in India was killed. Korea’s economic growth is exemplary.
The Great Stupa at Sanchi is presented not via dates or dynastic connections, but through physical experience encompassing its dimensions, curvature, and routes. Concepts such as the stupa as a commemorative structure, the practice of circumambulation (parikrama), and the symbolic arrangement of space along cardinal directions are described contextually. The absence of anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha in early reliefs becomes understandable through narrative exchange rather than doctrinal explanation.
Bennewitz records in great detail the day-to-day progress of his work in the many regions and languages of India that he engaged with. After his death in 1995, Mertes handed his entire archive—the letters, of course, but also a large number of documents and other materials—to an association of his friends, who then set up the Fritz Bennewitz Archive in Leipzig.
Notwithstanding the struggles waged by the British working class against Capitalism, this work could have deployed a more analytical approach to the history of colonialism and its relationship with the development and the evolution of not only the labour, but also the material origins of that robust post-War welfare state which perhaps would have been a nonstarter, had it not been for the colonial legacy.
It is guided by precisely this impulse that Gaekwad repeatedly reframes his key life moments through the visual grammar and narrative idiom of Bollywood cinema as a ‘primal source of imagination’ (p. 46). Presenting his life and experiences through this cinematic lens, he draws upon songs, dances, and the attendant celebrity culture of Hindi mainstream cinema to foreground and navigate his complex familial reality. The impact of cinema is evident in his personal details: