There are occasions when you feel a kind of bliss when you read a book that is able to deal with things that are dear to your heart. Here is such a publication: an anthology that collects writing by Gujarati women over a century.
Anglophilia has long afflicted the average educated Indian Parsi. It was so in the Victorian era. It is so now. Cornelia Sorabji was no exception. Though only half a Parsi, she did not do things by halves.
About five decades ago, Louis Dumont (1911-1998) a French scholar of international repute, set the tone and tenor of the academic discourse in anthropology and sociology about the nature of Indian society. Dumont was a ‘pupil’ of Marcel Mauss; and he learnt Sanskrit when he was imprisoned in Hamburg during the Second World War.
The politics of Tamil Nadu has been pioneering in many ways. The non-brahmin movement which is now more than eighty years old is often considered as the forerunner of social justice in India. The Dravidian movement’s empowerment however has left the dalits who constitute 19 percent of the population untouched.
The book under review is a comprehensive exploration of the lives of artisans in early modern Rajasthan and associated complexities. An intricate web of relationships among a highly heterogeneous community/class called ‘artisans’ in the ever-changing dynamics of early modern Period in Rajasthan has been successfully nuanced.
The authors should be commended for producing what will now be a compulsory text for all those interested in a serious academic discussion on human security, especially as it connects to debates and theories in International Relations (IR). That this book has been brought out as part of Routledge’s prestigious series on ‘Advances in International Relations and Global Politics’ is already confirmation of this status.