If one did not read the preface quite carefully, one is not likely to realize that the volume under review contains articles published over a span of thirty years. (The essay on the ‘Sur tradition’ was first published in 1979).
Zindapir, so called because he was still alive when he was respected as a Sufi master, makes an unusual case study for anthropologist Pnina Werbner. Since so much is written about the Talibanization of the ranks of the Pakistan army, it should not be so surprising that other Islamic trends grew from there too.
The first impression of this book – the title, the cover, colored plates, diagrams and illustrations – is fascinating. It is a description of the private lives of the Mughal emperors but only of a few i.e. Akbar to Shahjahan, with a line or two on Aurangzeb. Although Nath promises to tell us a story for the period 1526-1803, there are rarely any references to the period subsequent to the reign of Shahjahan.
Sumati Ramaswamy has written a brilliant book. It has a breathtaking sweep and a pace that is most unusual for a scholarly work. The book is about Lemuria – a lost place from a lost time. Human preoccupations with lost continents look back as well as forward.
“But life itself is poetry; it is the most living poetry, and with us there are no clear limits between life and poetry.” So says To Huu, the poet of modern Vietnam, in one of the interviews with which this slender volume of selections from his poetry are interspersed—interviews in which he speaks about his life,
Written by Stuart Gillespie and Lawrence J. Haddad of the International Food Policy Research Institute and published in the year 2003, this book attempts to deal with a major problem of “the double burden of malnutrition in Asia’. The publishers have made a genuine attempt to make it accessibile by pricing it at Rs. 235.00, a level almost unknown for academic publications these days.