India-Sri Lanka relations have witnessed a paradigm shift especially since the mid-1990s. The shift has taken place fundamentally in two key areas: politico-strategic and economic. Absence of Cold War hangovers, nonexistence of diplomatic irritants on the ethnic issue, and phenomenal growth in trade and investment ties were the principal reasons for improved bilateral relations.
This book is about empirically testing the ‘incompatibility thesis’ on democracy and Islam or Muslim societies, through the study of non-Arab, Muslim-majority, Asian countries of Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Malaysia.
Webster has written a valuable and outstanding supplement to his earlier The Christian Community and Change in Nineteenth Century North India (1976). The study of Christian communities in India, their history, culture and social structure has recently acquired an independent identity within the academia.
India’s colonial connection is paradoxical—on the one hand, we celebrate the severance of this tricentennial relationship and on the other we perpetually savour its overwhelming nostalgia. Reams of publications in Modern Indian history castigate the colonial interlude as one of a massacre of a glorious tradition,
Given the general state of our archives and the scant respect awarded to the preservation of books and manuscripts, it takes both courage and perseverance to accost and overcome the formidable obstacles put in the way of the scholar. If the scholar is seeking to look at the book itself as the object of research, her path is likely to be very thorny indeed.
In the hills of south India where I live there is a profusion of plants from temperate climates brought over by British (and European) expatriates, in order to recreate a familiar ambience of remembered colours and scents.