In his memoirs, In the Afternoon of Time, the veteran Hindi writer, Harivansh Rai Bacchan expressed a strong preference for the way the Hindi language ought to evolve in the public sphere. Hindi words, he wrote, should constitute the main body of a text, but they should be laced with Urdu and Persian. This would add to the beauty of the prose but not detract from its own distinctive attractions.
Profusely footnoted, elaborately indexed and extensively researched, this volume is a valuable contribution to the on-going debate on the merits and demerits of high dams to meet India’s growing needs for irrigation, hydropower and drinking water.
Is sati a burning issue or a burnt out issue? The theme of sati has been thrashed out threadbare in the last decade with both western and Indian scholarship converging on this crucial area of social history and societal practice.
The task of a historian is not only to go through already identified paths and throw new light on well known events but also constantly look into sources and archival material, and identify moments which have played an important role in social dynamics.
Dalley begins with the best of intentions. Debunking myths, demonstrating how the practices of history writing and representation implicitly and explicitly make and unmake myths and understanding within this how and why the story of the Black Hole of Calcutta (1756) became so central to the formation of the British Empire are his overall concerns. Unfortunately,
Democracy is the most ambitious political project of the last century and Indian democracy with a vigorous free press, apolitical military, regular and competitive elections, and a functional overburdened judiciary is one of the good examples of a formal democracy.