Sudha Pai and Sajjan Kumar

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.


Reviewed by: Jagpal Singh
Matthew Mutter

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).


Reviewed by: Asma Rasheed
Peter Ronald DeSouza

At a time when trolls act as gate-keepers to power and a motley group of hecklers, vigilantes, and vandals define what is permissible to speak, eat, dress, and consociate, definitions and redefinitions of democracy, even if qualified as Indian democracy, are required.


Reviewed by: AR Vasavi
K.C. Dutt

Those who partake of Sahitya Akademi’s frequent hospitality at the India International Centre in Delhi may not as frequently find use for the Akademi Library. And those who do use the Library may not know of the various bibliographic aids prepared or published from time to time by the Akademi.


Reviewed by: SUJIT MUKHERJEE
Projesh Banerjee

Thumri’s relationship with dance is evi¬dent even in its name which many musicians consider to derive from the word ‘thumak’—roughly translatable as the gait of the dancer, at once graceful, coquettish, sensuous. And almost all thumri singers will also say that thumri is (gale se bhav batana, gale se nirat karnd), showing bhav, dancing with the voice. So at the very deepest, inmost level, in its essence, thumri is dance.


Reviewed by: VIDYA RAO