Bakhtiar Dadabhoy’s political biography of Salar Jung I, the administrator most often credited with engineering Hyderabad’s turn to modern times is a welcome addition to the field of Hyderabad studies. It tracks the life and times of a man widely acknowledged.
Divided into four sections, the fifteen essays in Nine Nights of the Goddess are a coming together of disciplines, methodologies, sources and places on traditions of the nine-day Navratri celebrations, also known as Navaratra, Mahanavmi, Durga Puja, Dasara or Dassain throughout South Asia.
Gautam Bhatia’s books on architecture in India are, by and large, autobiographical. They are thoughtful reflections of a sensitive and idealistic practitioner at odds with the quotidian values of the profession. As he sees it, it is a profession that actually.
In the abundant literature on secularism that is now at hand, the range of comparative work on distinctive projects of secularism, in different parts of the world, has widened significantly, moving away from earlier binary classifications. The literature shows.
The tenor of Amandeep Sandhu’s Panjab: Journeys Through Fault Lines is established in the very first chapter titled Satt–Wound. The author, born in Rourkela, admits to only a fragile link with Punjab (spelt Panjab)–his family once belonged to the State. He then provides images that are intimate and distant, uniquely personal and universally familiar all at once: brass vessels.
Colonial stereotypical portrayal of the myriad hill-tribes of India’s North East as, inter alia, demoniacal, relics of the past and uncivilized—abstract principles intended to rationalize the imperial project—has undergirded much of the dominant understandings about the region.