Nathalie Etoke. Translated from the original French by Gila Walker

‘To assert that “Black Lives Matter” is to admit that they do not matter while maintaining that they should.’Nathalie Etoke, born in Paris to Cameroonian parents, and who has lived in France and later in the United States, occupies a unique position which allows her to deal with questions of race as also to argue against a tendency which ends up reducing the historical, political, cultural and social differences…


Reviewed by: Simi Malhotra
Tara Kaushal

Tara Kaushal set out on a journalistic journey, interviewing nine men accused of rape and gang rape to analyse the psychological temperament of the rapist. The book is the roller coaster of emotions and a mentally intertwined journey on ‘Why Men Rape’. The commonly evident documentation of patriarchy…


Reviewed by: Azeemah Saleem
Rama Srinivasan

Courting Desire: Litigating for Love in North India is a book that attempts very successfully to capture the nuances of change and contestations in Haryana through the lens of youthful desire and love that transgresses caste/gotra/religion and courts the legal process to gain societal acceptance and legitimacy…


Reviewed by: Krishna Menon
Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen

In contemporary Indian and Pakistani societies, the question of the role of the woman in the nationalist scenario remains a vexed one. Ann McClintock observes about the role of the woman in the developing world, ‘Excluded from direct action as national citizens, women are subsumed symbolically into the national body politic as its boundary and metaphoric limit.’


Reviewed by: Nyla Ali Khan
Samrat Choudhury

The Braided River is an ambitious project, an account of the journey that the journalist took tracing the river Brahmaputra from its Indian origin in Arunachal to Bangladesh where it takes a new name and merges with the Ganga.Divided into three broad sections, the book gives a detailed account of not only the route that the longest river of India follows, but also the lives it makes and breaks…


Reviewed by: Parvin Sultana