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The blood-strewn saga of the Bhutto clan exemplifies the tortuous political history of Pakistan. The books under review are political biographies of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his equally illustrious daughter, Benazir Bhutto, by an Indian and a Pakistani author respectively. Benazir became Pakistan’s as well as the Muslim world’s first female Prime Minister at the dramatically young age of 35 in 1988, within a decade after the brutal hanging of her father in 1979.

Mehr Tarar’s book Do We Not Bleed? Reflections of a 21st-Century Pakistani in several ways breaks the pattern and monotony prevalent in the post- 9/11 discourse on Pakistan. The book is a digression as this narrative is not solely tangled in the hard-core security paradigm on which most of the recent published works on Pakistan are modelled.

The ten member-states of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) is, at times, an inspiration and, at other times, a house divided. That is how most outsiders would invariably react to the organization. Criticisms fly high when the grouping seems ineffective in handling regional issues such as human rights atrocities perpetrated by regimes from within the regional bloc.

This is a documentary study—compilation of 2523 documents spread over five volumes—introduced and edited by Avtar Singh Bhasin, formerly of the Historical Division of the Ministry of External Affairs. The 60-page introduction recapitulates the relationship covered by the documentation.

This book is about three riots—two in eastern UP, one each in Mau (2005) and Gorakhpur (2007) districts, and the third one in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli (2013) districts in western UP. It largely draws upon secondary sources, interviews, discussions and field work, and attempts to address changes in political economy and communal mobilization in eastern and western UP, the former in the urban and the latter in rural settings.

Matthew Mutter’s book examines four literary writers—Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, WB Yeats and WH Auden—for the intricacies of modernist relations to secularism in this erudite and well-researched work. He argues, following Charles Taylor’s ‘subtraction theory’, that these writers constructed ‘new imaginaries’ to modify, redistribute, and privatize religious ideas in a ‘new, secular cosmology’
(p. 8).