By Shania Sarup

The Holocaust has undoubtedly birthed the most harrowing stories but Silana’s journey across countries, fleeing an infernal homeland to reach a safe haven in India doesn’t leave an impact. The Maharaja frets over British disapproval of his mission of saving several Jewish children and the need to keep their work secretive, yet it’s unrealistic how several foreign children lodged in his summer palace escape the attention of the Britishers. For a novel largely set in India, the WWII years that mark a crucial phase in the struggle for Indian Independence make a measly appearance. Even though the story has its heart in the right place, the writing is too dandified.


Reviewed by: Divya Shankar
Edited by Sanjukta Sunderason & Lotte Hoek

The essay explores at length the close relations between the workings of the PWA and AAWA. Besides deliberating upon the evolution and checkered history of the PWA in India and Pakistan, Ramnath also makes an attempt at studying the socio-political and cultural scenario in which the journal Lotus emerged. AAWA provided a common platform for the reunion of Progressive Writers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. While the journal Lotus ceased soon after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, attempts at forging an alliance between Africa and South Asia have continued unhindered.


Reviewed by: Amol Saghar
Edited by Anshu Malhotra O

Purnima Dhavan’s ‘A Feast for the Heart and Mind: Print Culture, Polemics and Religious Debate in Punjab in the 1870s’ discusses the evolution of Islamic literature after the arrival of print in late-nineteenth century Punjab focusing on the Baran Anva, a lengthy seventeenth-century text, and Pakki Roti, a short booklet written in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Muslim Punjabis, Dhavan uses these texts to discuss printing enterprises, script, language and education in the 1870s. Going against the grain, she argues that Punjabi Muslims learnt about Islam not from Arabic or Persian, but through texts in Shahmukhi script that were in Punjabi and occasionally Urdu.


Reviewed by: Vikas Rathee
By Anna Sailer

They were also not fixed in time but products of historical circumstances. Thus, the author points out, during the 1870s this system was used by the employers to maintain a ‘reserve army of labour, in a context of recurring labour shortages’. But during the 1890s, the multiple-shift system represented ‘a qualitatively new development’ in which the managers tried to control deployment of labour in certain crucial departments of jute industry in the name of standardization and rationalization. The process of control intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century and finally the multiple-shift system and work gangs were abolished by the early 1930s. Single-shift system was now imposed in many mills with increasing managerial control over the work process.


Reviewed by: Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay
By Pratap Padode

The urban disposition they have conceived is a triad, a three-legged stool, which must ‘articulate normatively where it begins and what motivates it, be able to think analytically about how cities actually work as well as about the nature of complex urban problems and move operationally to point to how one could get to different desired ends’. It is not a new urban theory or paradigm, but a process to engage with the problems of cities in order to produce new knowledge towards change that one desires, but crucially, it is never fully predetermined or a priori.


Reviewed by: AG Krishna Menon
By Amrita Saikia

The section on research methodology and methods is particularly engaging and insightful. Saikia has elaborately articulated how she accessed the field, which is far removed from her world. To inform herself about the Tibetans in exile before conducting her research, she referred to books, research articles, documentaries, and newspaper articles. She also identified and joined a week-long programme in Dharamshala (her field) to gain access to the community. This programme was run by a Tibetan NGO called Students for a Free Tibet (SFT).


Reviewed by: Juanita Kakoty