‘Rape and domestic violence are forms of punishment’, says the author,
for women who have step¬ped out of line, and attempts to re-impose patriarchal dis¬cipline in a society which is no longer patriarchal.
Prehistoric rock painting is one of the more recent arrivals on the Indian archaeo¬logical scene. The present work attempts to synthesize the available information and present a composite picture. The author has visited most of the sites and also had the advantage, as he mentions, of intensive discussions with scholars like Mathapal, Misra and Wakankar who have been active in this particular field for quite some time now.
We love the city of our birth for the same reason for which we hate it. And we hate it precisely because it is the city of our birth. I was born in Delhi and I hope I never grow so indifferent towards it as to come to love it.
This is Shashi Deshpande’s first novel, but it has been published after two others, The Dark Holds No Terrors and Come Up and be Dead which is a mystery thriller. For a reader who is familiar with The Dark Holds No Terrors, this new novel is of interest as having a similar theme and similar strengths but containing flaws which the author had obvi¬ously managed to outgrow by the time she wrote The Dark.
In the last two lines of Mahapatra’s final poem (‘In the Fields of Desolate Rice’) he tells us:
In the end
I come back to the day and to the rain.
This publication is part of the Oxford Series on India-China Studies which aims to develop interdisciplinary research on historical and contemporary relations between the two countries. In so far as the effort is to bring to light scholarship beyond the current preoccupation with geopolitical issues, Thakur Gadhadhar Singh’s self-published travelogue from 1902 seems, at first glance, an excellent choice.