Theatre has been the oldest art form known to humankind—an art form that surpasses class barriers to facilitate an egalitarian representation of community’s aspirations, ideas and responses. In fact it is an evocative medium that articulates the identities of societies all over the world. As Monica Mottin remarks, her intent is to probe how reflectivity and ambiguity can allow for the aesthetic space to become a transformative space.
Trying to understand Indian urbanism is like the proverbial story of the blind men trying to describe the elephant. Scholars, professionals and engaged commentators who have written about the phenomenon and consequences of postcolonial urban development in India have provided partial insights into the nature of the beast they have ‘touched’, but in sum, its complexities have eluded the kind of understanding that would have enabled any agency, state or market, to effectively engage with its welfare and maladies.
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.
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`.
This is a rather bulky book…
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.