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One of the protracted conflicts of present times, involving three nuclear powered states, is in the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir. Both India and Pakistan claim it as part of their larger territorial ambitions and national imaginations. Thus the national projects that assume the task of incorporating the territory do not only rely on explicit political aspects but other subtle, more ideologically driven, aspects negotiate such projects.

As a new imagery South Asia straddles the two competing conceptions of her own particularity, one as an invented abstraction, perhaps more theoretical and nomothetic, and the other as an existing reality, quite empirical and ideographic. As an abstraction it seamlessly weaves herself into a Wallersteinian classic of ‘sub-periphery’ situated in the global to catch up with the core, and as a concrete reality assiduously struggling to experiment the democratic project by some sort of venial state and a truncated civil society.

The Quotidian Revolution is an effort at delineating and illuminating the moment in Indian history when literary writings became manifest in vernacular languages. The book addresses the particular case of the literarization of Marathi in the thirteenth century.

Jesus in Asia is a significant contribution from an Asian perspective to Christology, the author being a Professor of Biblical Hermeneutics in the University of Birmingham. It comes as a corrective intervention in the cultural adaptation and appropriation of Jesus of Nazareth by western academic theologians. The genius of the West to freeboot on the treasures of Asia was aided and abetted by the advantages of colonialism.

Indian Nationalism: The Essential Writings edited by S Irfan Habib is a timely intervention in the cantankerous debate on nationalism that has been raging unabated in the country for some time, especially since the Modi regime came to power in Delhi.