Priya Alika Elias

Besharam: Of Love and Other Bad Behaviours by Priya Alika Elias is a guidebook about what it means to young Indian women and how actually to be one. The author writes it from her perspective of having lived across various countries and how multiple locations for an Indian woman actually don’t simplify the expectations around her. The book has been divided into eight sections demarcated over sex, ugliness, love, hurt, culture, failure, judgement and independence.


Reviewed by: Arshi Javid
Saiyma Aslam

Aslam’s book is an exploration of how the lives of Arab Muslim women are influenced by culture, law, religion, patriarchy, contingencies of global restructuring and its accompanying socio- economic shifts. She employs feminism and travelling theory to challenge the (re)Orientalist myths about Arab women’s supposedly exotic lives as well as indigenous structures of patriarchal domination. She argues that the lives of Arab women are marked by heterogeneity…


Reviewed by: Ambar Ahmad
Mathew Joseph C

This book is a much delayed compilation of papers presented at a seminar conducted by the Centre for Pakistan Studies, Academy of International Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, in March, 2012. Seven years in the making, perhaps the Editor’s ennui in goading the authors to submit papers in time reflects in errors, spelling ‘grateful’ as ‘greatful’ in acknowledgements, which stare glaringly at the reader in the very first page!


Reviewed by: Rana Banerji
Santanu Das

So much has already been written on the history of the First World War—its cause, spread and consequences—that an addition to the corpus of existing literature, expanded substantially in the last few years on the occasion of the war’s centenary, is unlikely to cause much of a stir. Yet the book by Santanu Das that seeks to be ‘the first cultural and literary history of India and the First World War, though it necessarily engages with the social and the political’ has turned out to be a definitive exercise that enriches our understanding like few others before.


Reviewed by: Amitabha Bhattacharya
Torill Kornfeldt

Reading Torill Kornfeldt’s book The Re-Origin of Species: A Second Chance for Extinct Animals feels a little odd. Part of that is to do with its translatedness. Make no mistake about it; Fiona Graham has done an excellent job, barring an occasional infelicity such as nanny goats ‘falling pregnant’ (and there are quite a few avoidable errors of copy editing).


Reviewed by: Satyajit Rath
Sejuti Das Gupta

Class, Politics, and Agrarian Policies in Post-Liberalisation India by Sejuti Das Gupta is a valuable and timely contribution to a political economy analysis of state and agrarian policies in India during the period of neo-liberal economic reforms. That Indian agriculture has slipped into some kind of a persistent crisis, leading to rural distress since the late nineties is something that has been amply written about and recognized.


Reviewed by: Arindam Banerjee