The book foregrounds the ‘multitudinous dialectics’ (p. 215) at the core of the political, defying borders and hierarchies of disciplines and minds, and most fabulously, replete with the volumes of counterintuitive ideas. The book delivers in text as well as subtext…
This book is a romantic narrative about overcoming the centrifugal forces unleashed by various Indian Princely States during the tumultuous years leading up to and shortly after Independence. Like all romantic narratives, the tone of the book is heroic…
Stretching her observations across some 200 pages, Naomi Appleton has managed, in her book, to fence in a scholarly enclosure into which she has herded not only the three major dharmas of the subcontinent but also some of their most important deities and heroes…
Litigating the past in the manner of the British created a new reality for India. It gave shape to religion and provided the bases for many a confrontation between religions and the religious-minded in this country of hundreds of personalized religions…
Vinay Sitapati’s Jugalbandi is an absorbing account of the growth and development of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) before 2004. The story is about the Party when it was on the fringes, nowhere near capturing a plurality of the votes, and had no realistic chance of becoming the ruling party on its own…
Books such as Making India Great Again: Learning from Our History are meant to have a long life. However, books are also reflective of a particular time and a milieu. Context does have an influence on what is written and when it is written…