The postcolonial compulsions to grapple with or outgrow the memories and legacies of colonialism have produced a teasingly rich body of writings. If colonial experience called for negotiations and repudiations, their postcolonial interrogations have re-visited those sites for new answers and new fulfillments.
Women of India is an important volume, not only because as editor Bharati Ray has to gathered in one place essays by almost all the important gender studies scholars in India, but also because it seeks to put into one text all the imaginable aspects of the history of women in modern India.
Razia Grover’s Mosques is a generalist’s introduction to the subject, but in the serious tradition of illustrated surveys of art and architecture. Written more for the lay reader than the specialist of Islamic architecture,
This book is beautifully produced with wonderful photographs not only of Alexander’s head and face, but also of the paraphernalia of art and jewellery and coins and maps and manuscripts that archaelogists love to work with. The debates themselves are very technical, but given the offices of the worldwide web in enhancing knowledge,
This is the third in a spate of books dealing with colonial archaeologists, following on the heels of those which concentrated on Alexander Cunningham and John Marshall.
You have to be a reviewer to read this book to the end, and a conscientious one at that! David Davidar has come up with one of the more tedious Indian English novels, one that does not reward the reader with new insights or the pleasure of enjoying accomplished use of language but perhaps affords only with a sense of virtue that one has actually read a book from beginning to end even though it has only very very occasional sparks—it is only sometimes that the language works, only sometimes that you think that the book may contain anything at all (only to be disappointed).