Rajesh Kasturirangan

Rajesh Kasturirangan’s book Who Are We? sets out to play with the oft deliberated, debated, dissected and derived idea of what makes the Indian way of being and more specifically as the author states, the Indian way of thinking. Culture impacts the way we perceive, feel and think—as stated by cultural psychologist Richard Nisbett, and also leads to different self construals (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Kasturirangan appropriates and reappropriates the place of this book and his ‘theory’ on the vast canvas of many other such writings and clarifies right at the beginning of the book its aim and purpose, ‘I am less interested in a culturally encoded storehouse of thoughts and feelings and more interested in how cognitive schemas change over time, how new ideas emerge and are layered on top of the old. I will focus on mind in motion.’


Reviewed by: Surabhika Maheshwari
Veena Das

The ethnographic desire to render the textures of the ordinary is contingent on the close attention to detail that the anthropologist can command. But the question is—what kind of detail and how much detail?  Detailing the ordinary plugs, the centre of this intense text marks the crucial meeting points of anthropology and philosophy. A critical question that anthropologists must settle on is ‘what kind of information can be counted as knowledge?’ Ethnographic practices involve a wide range of activities in the form of gathering data by conducting surveys, drawing figures and maps, engaging in conversations and discussions, exploring the micro-geographies of localities, tracing local histories and so on.


Reviewed by: Ratheesh Kumar
Mohita Bhatia

It is well known to students of political science and modern history that the Kashmir dispute has two dimensions—external and internal. The external dimension involves India, Pakistan and the UN. The involvement of the latter was sought by India under Jawaharlal Nehru to resolve the mutually opposite claims of India and Pakistan over J&K’s political future. Besides internationalizing the Kashmir dispute, the external context led to wars between India and Pakistan, as well as constant instability in J&K. 


Reviewed by: Aijaz Ashraf Wani
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