By Avinash Shrestha. Translated from the original Nepali by Rohan Chhetri

Shrestha’s lament on state sponsored violence intermingles with his inability to fall in love. In ‘Of Some Unidentified Village, Nayantara Barua’, violence is described sans metaphors: ‘The cities are being torched, the villages blazing’ (p. 71); ‘Homes uprooted, villages are torn’ (p. 73); ‘…they find Malati’s raped body left for dead’ (p. 73). The absence of metaphors evokes another sense of loss—the loss of poetry amidst brutality.


Reviewed by: Shamayita Sen
By Gopalkrishna Gandhi

Gopal Gandhi’s account of all these changes is embedded throughout in a larger story of India and, to some extent, India’s interface with the world. His candour and even-handed descriptions remain but one misses in these somewhat dense with politics and geopolitics chapters, the eye for the quirks and curiosities of history which had made the earlier parts of this book such a compelling read.


Reviewed by: TCA Raghavan
By Aditya Mukherjee

The legacy of Nehru in the economic sphere is being reversed and the poor are no longer on the radar. The rapid privatization of national assets, withdrawal of the state from education and health to benefit the rapacious private sector, the rapid informalization of labour with no trade union rights are pointers to the backslide. In the Global Hunger Index, India is ranked 111 out of 125 countries.


Reviewed by: Suhas Borker
By Sam Dalrymple

While most of the issues concerning partitions of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have been examined extensively, it is the detailed study of the lesser-known separations of Burma and the Arabian Peninsula that makes the present work important. In a lengthy portion, the author outlines not only the socio-political conditions which led to the separation of Burma from the Indian Empire, but also highlights fascinating details pertaining to the inauguration of the new state. The challenges that emerged in the wake of this partition have been examined thoroughly in the present book


Reviewed by: Amol Saghar
By Afshin Marashi

The consolidation of British power in western India in the eighteenth century and the emergence of Bombay as the preeminent urban centre of the west coast created favourable conditions for the growth of Parsi enterprise towards the end of the century. A section of Parsis, largely based in Bombay, achieved great success in commerce, industry, finance and shipping, thereby also contributing to the development of the city.


Reviewed by: Amar Farooqui
By Michael O’Sullivan

How different these Jamaats were from other entities such as the Parsi panchayat or Armenian network structured around law and custom is not very clear. The question is raised once in a while but never really fleshed out. The comparison seems warranted and even inevitable given that Parsis and Armenians also represented the ‘middle power’ that Sullivan talks about in explaining the extraordinary rise and success of these merchant communities. By middle power Sullivan means the co-functioning of the Sarkar and the Jamaat of which the communities were prime beneficiaries.


Reviewed by: Lakshmi Subramanian