Some of the questions that Omar Khalidi has raised in his latest book relate to the economic condition of Muslims in India in the beginning of the new millennium. He compares their present condition with the not so distant past. He then goes on to document the record of colonial and post colonial policies vis-à-vis Muslims and their economic profile as compared with the majority community and other minority communities.
This is an interesting and valuable book, though the choice of the word nationalism seems a little loose. I suspect the word “national- isms” for a decade and more, has had such currency, that people are unwilling to let go of it, even though globalization has undercut the view on nationalism more severely than one had imagined. Kathleen Morrison analyses the relationship between the tribals as foragers and the spice trade for the Western Ghats.
Successful management of irrigation goes well beyond the manage- ment of the infrastructure, by encompassing management of human relations, institutional and organizational dimensions and irrigation policies. The recent three decades have also seen sweeping socio-economic and environmental challenges that have significant impact on irrigated agriculture and the management of irrigation systems in Asia.
This is Dr. Sonjoy Dutta Roy’s second volume of poems. If his earlier work The Absent Words was good, delightful poetry, the present one is more so. It is maturer, sadder, more intimate, more lyrical. The poet who teaches at the department of English, University of Allahabad, has used myth, legend and fable, weaving them into a beautiful mosaic which give his work an epic dimension.
Even at the height of the boom in Indian writing, it is strange how the detective novel or thriller has remained an unexplored genre. In the West, the detective novel attracted some of the best minds and eminent writers (T.S. Eliot and George Orwell, to name just two) to write brilliant essays on this genre to give it the academic respectability it so richly deserves.
This volume on Chinua Achebe is part of a series of literary encyclopedias on a wide range of writers ranging from Emily Dickson to William Faulkner, to Toni Morrison. In his preface to the volume, Keith Booker acknowledges the life long role that the veteran Nigerian writer has played in the “rise of the African novel as a global cultural phenomenon” (xvii). Africanist Professor Simon Gikwandi further elaborates upon the ‘transformative nature’ of Achebe’s creative genius in a concise foreword.