Vinita Damodaran and Rohan D’Souza

The book under review presents a crucial framework to understand environmental issues at a comprehensive and global level. It underlines that it is imperative to reconsider the centrality of the nation-state as the basic unit of studying environmental changes, and it is necessary to move beyond that as the unit of analysis. In other words, the book represents the idea of writing environmental histories as a ‘nature without borders’.


Reviewed by: Kamal Nayan Choubey
Dev Nath Pathak

Dev Nath Pathak’s In Defence of the Ordinary: Everyday Awakenings is an inordinary demonstration of a routine exercise that most sociologists, certainly in their professional lives, claim an association with: sociological imagination. Pathak too informs us about the deep connections between his personal and the public but his concerns are routed in assuringly different ways. Indulging in a polemic against himself, the author invites his readers to undertake a not-so-usual reading of politics and philosophy of knowledge.


Reviewed by: Irfanullah Farooqi
Durba Mitra

There is no gainsaying that violence has been instrumental in creating and shaping societies. Less attention has been paid to shame and guilt—emotions that rarely show up in discussions on politics and society. Durba Mitra places these ideas front and centre in her devastating explication of the history of the linkages between notions of sexuality and their impact on the evolution of social thought in colonial India.


Reviewed by: Sucharita Sengupta
Mary E. John and Meena Gopal

The question of women’s labour has been central to most women’s studies classrooms across the world.The book edited by Mary EJohn and Meena Gopal is pathbreaking because it takes the question of women’s labour out of the confines of traditional women’s studies by adopting an interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective. The book opens with a section that is almost akin to a masterclass on the issues of women and labour in India in specific, accompanied by a very exhaustive discussion of the shifting theoretical paradigms, scholarly debates and literature review. 


Reviewed by: Krishna Menon
Ronki Ram

The book under review focuses on the recent farmers movement that lasted for one and half years and ended only when the Union Government withdrew the three farm laws against which the farmers had put up a peaceful resistance, ensconced on the borders of the national capital territory of Delhi. The movement led the farmers’ unions to form their own party (Samyukt Kisan Morcha) in Punjab and enter into the electoral arena.


Reviewed by: Ashutosh Kumar
Arundhati Bhattacharya. Read by Shivani Vakil Savant

Arundhati Bhattacharya’s memoir has a literary flavour, mixing personal elements with the professional admirably. But it is distinctive in the way her experiences have been articulated from the perspective of a ‘working woman’. And this feat she accomplishes with elan, making her reflections a readable treat and compelling to empathize with.To begin with, it is a story of a girl growing up at Bhilai and Bokaro and then in Kolkata for higher studies before joining the wider world of professional banking.


Reviewed by: Amitabha Bhattacharya