Ravi Agrawal

There is something to be said about the way digital technologies have captured policy and popular media attention in world capitals. From Washington DC to Berlin, from Ankara to Delhi, there is a growing sense of foreboding, desperation even, to respond to the rise of online networks and various social media platforms. Leaders world over are trying to fit the networks into existing frameworks of public policy and with every passing year the task seems more and more arduous.


Reviewed by: Aasim Khan
Alf Gunvald Nilsen

The book under review is a critical analysis of subalternity in India, which is in contrast to both the postcolonial and postmodern approaches that have dominated academia for the last three decades or so. The author is critical of the postcolonial studies, represented by the Subaltern Studies project, for drawing untenable boundaries between liberal-constitutional modernity and subaltern `ethnicization`.


Reviewed by: Ajay Gudavarthy
Greta Rana

Greta Rana’s Hostage is both a political and personal story of displacement and violence that puts the reader in the thick of a migrant’s turbulent and unpredictable life. Unlike an academic study that structurally locates migration within specific national projects, Rana’s book, based on true stories of Nepali migrants, offers a critical humane perspective from the other side.


Reviewed by: Angshuman Choudhury
Sudeep Basu

Since the middle of the 20th century, one of the definitive figures of political life has been the refugee. Whether we look at writings about minorities, the stateless and unwanted people, or we look to large-scale violent dislocations of populations during the Partition of India, or to the large-scale displacement of Palestinians with the establishment of Israel, the refugee is a figure that marks the modern world.


Reviewed by: Ankur Datta
Milinda Banerjee

Milinda Banerjee’s The Mortal God is an interesting and incisive intervention on the issue of Indian attitudes towards power and conceptualizations of rule. It explores the issue of ‘Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India’ through a wide lens, managing to adroitly bring the readers’ attention to notions of sovereign figures and sovereignty at various levels of Indian society, from the British colonial thinkers, to Indian elite among the nationalists, as well as popular conceptions among the subaltern figures of the peasant and the tribal.


Reviewed by: TCA Achintya