The book is a rich multi-site ethnography that spans continents, tracing histories and movements of people of Hyderabadi origin. The fieldwork was done over a period of ten years from 1990 to 2000 in Hyderabad, the United Kingdom,
The birds flying home in pairs Through the soft mountain air of dusk- In these things there is deep meaning, But when we are about to express it, We suddenly forget the words.
The text vs the field, the classical vs the folk, the occasional vs the quotidian. These have been some of the key oppositional categories through which sociology of India, particularly understandings of Hindu life and culture have been articulated and debated.
I would like to begin this review in Jackson’s own words: ‘It is true that the border crosser who writes about another culture is part beggar, part stenographer, part Sherlock Holmes, part patchwork quilt maker’ (p. 309).
Authority and Kingship under the Sultans of Delhi is rather complex in the sense that it begins on a promising note but does not achieve all. Reinforcing the thesis of centralization, the main crux of the argument—the Sultanate represented a centralized polity that was further embarked upon with a vengeance in the sixteenth century
Prathama Banerjee’s rigorously argued book Politics of Time is both a meditation on questions central to contemporary theoretical concerns—namely modernity, subjectivity and agency—as also an exegesis on the colonial Bengali preoccupation with the past.