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…
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.’
First, a statement of conflict of interest: the author was my student during his MPhil programme at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where I taught for more than three decades. I was not his PhD supervisor, but have been in touch with him, as all teachers do with their bright students…
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…
Climate change is one of the most pressing crises facing humanity today, regardless of geographical boundaries. While the science of the crisis has been proliferating in journals and public forums for several decades now, it is only recently that scholars have begun to pay serious attention to the implications of this crisis for social sciences and humanities…
Essays collected in the volume under review underscore the seminal role of Ranabir Chakravarti’s scholarship in the study of the maritime history of Indian littorals in the pre-1500 CE period. His numerous research articles and lectures over the last few decades have brought the relatively neglected pre-1500…