Virtually all readers of this collection will recognize the many themes in these poems that tie into the well-known stories told about Krishna such as his childhood playfulness, his love for Radha, and the philosophical wisdom shared with Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. This poem builds on the boundless love of the Gopis,
Gendered populism, as discussed in the third section, is masculine in its very essence and is often a key element of Right-Wing populist movements. It relies heavily on the politics of exclusion and ‘othering’; and governments use it to moralize political conflicts, demonize their political opponents, thereby mobilizing the masses. The final section, ‘Militarism and Militarisation’,
Recent academic works have increasingly sought to critically engage with the complex and contested process of tribal identity formation in India. Much of this discourse locates the origins of such identity constructions in colonial epistemological and administrative frameworks. Early colonial representation depicted tribal communities as primitive, uncivilized, and as vestiges of a pre-Aryan, non-Vedic past.…
There are a few chapters in the book which present a systematic study on issues which have been rarely discussed in the academic discourse of electoral politics in India. For example, Ashutosh Kumar’s ‘Election Economy in India’ is one of the most crucial chapters in this volume, which discusses the advancement and working of election economy in India after Independence.
This is seen clearly in one of the most interesting essays: Suryanandini Narain’s ‘Yatra Chitra/Parivar Chitra: Mrs Gupta’s Photographic Record of a Family amidst a Changing Nation’. Mrs Gupta lived in Brindavan with her husband, the Principal of a local college, and their three children—Guddu, Guddi and Dabloo. Her photo albums of her family’s holidays in the 1960s to historical places of interest show the historic/tourist sites plus the whole family, which, according to Narain, ‘frame Mrs Gupta’s aspirations of looking at the family and nation as part of the same continued trajectory…’.
Organized in six incisive chapters, the book draws on concepts and methods from new critical close reading, deconstruction, and semiotic as well as discourse analysis to generate important insights into Hindi cinema. The opening chapter titled ‘From “History” to Circus: Politics of Genre and Muslims’ Representation in Hindi Films’, examines the representation of Muslims in historical films, war narratives, and biopics of Urdu literary figures. It contrasts the inclusive vision once embodied in films such as Mughal-e-Azam (1960), with more recent works that employ history to promote a Hindutva-oriented perspective wherein Muslims are depicted as ‘the other’.