Nasreen Chowdhory and Biswajit Mohanty

This book is an important academic intervention. It unpacks the political complexities associated with the much debatable refugee status of Rohingya community in South Asia. The vast empirical data/information is systematically organized to evolve an innovating theoretical framework. As a result, one finds an interesting sequence that links different individual essays to produce a highly engaging intellectual commentary on complex ideas such as nationalism and citizenship.


Reviewed by: Nazima Parveen
Partha Chatterjee

The problems that confront us now—the pandemic, a warming planet—require concerted action, yet what we hear constantly is loud voices pitting ‘us’ against ‘them’. In this context, should we rescue nationalism through our usual binaries of civic versus ethnic nationalisms, or liberal versus illiberal nationalisms? This is Partha Chatterjee’s concern as well, as he attempts to separate the truths of nationalism from its lies, through this manuscript which he says was left at his doorstep during the pandemic, with the inscription that the narrator was Charvak: ‘the first page began with a heading in two words—Carvaka uvaca’ (p. vii). As the manuscript seemed to be about the ‘principles of a new concept of Indian nationalism’ (p. viii), Chatterjee felt that it must reach a wider audience and decided to translate it into English.


Reviewed by: Shefali Jha
Ramin Jahanbegloo

Ramin Jahanbegloo’s new book titled Pedagogy of Dissent has a cover design depicting the iconic event of ‘The Death of Socrates’. This image contextualizes the urgency behind writing this book as it acts as an apt metaphor for capturing the continuing onslaught against dissent in our times.


Reviewed by: Suraj Thube
Jyotirmaya Sharma

This book is the fourth and last volume in a quartet by Professor Jyotirmaya Sharma, examining the restatement of Hinduism by some of its most influential exponents and thinkers. The first book Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism discusses the thought of Dayanand Saraswati, Sri Aurobindo, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Swami Vivekananda, all of whom sought to marshal Hindu identity in the service of nationalism. The subsequent volumes focus on the thought and writings of Golwalkar and Vivekananda. The series is an attempt to look at the question of Hindu identity and the restatement of Hinduism in the late 19th and early 20th century.


Reviewed by: Madhav Nayar
Kira Schmidt Stiedenroth

Social history of South Asia’s indigenous medical traditions and practices and their troubled relationship with western medicine during the colonial period, marked a fundamental shift from the conventional descriptive accounts of these medical traditions. Such social histories of South Asian indigenous medical traditions, and their encounter and exchanges with western medicine were marked by two features: firstly, they were predominantly based on colonial records; secondly, they were primarily focused on the Ayurvedic system of medicine, not only because of Ayurveda’s projected overwhelming presence but also due to the prevailing dominant political and ideological atmosphere particularly since the late nineteenth-century, that was aggravated after 1947.


Reviewed by: Neshat Quaiser
Mytheli Sreenivas

Politically correct, influential people in policy making circles in the West do not talk any more of the yellow peril, or use phrases such as population explosion, or metaphors like the population bomb. At the same time, partly due to the very reach and influence of such doomsday demographic discourses emanating from the West in the past, and the modified ones today, the elites and the middle classes in much of the Third World remain convinced that the cause of social and economic problems in their own countries stem primarily, if not only, from population growth.


Reviewed by: Mohan Rao