Should one judge a book by its cover? By its title? Indeed, one should not and I would hasten to speak out against such a superficial and disrespectful attitude towards books and the great effort that it takes to produce them.
When the dowager Maharani of Beri, my god-daughter’s grandmother, visited me for the first time, she brought me a long, narrow pen box, decorated with the curvy exfoliated scrolls characteristic of Kutchi silver.
This book has been several years in the making. Archiving and selecting the photographs by Richard Bartholomew which were exhibited recently at Photo Ink Gallery, New Delhi, must have been an arduous job, since Richard would not ever have even thought of exhibiting them.
The title of this book is extremely apt. As you thumb through this book, you can glimpse the sombre grandeur of the ruins of an imperial empire at Hampi. It is up to the reader whether he/she sees the splendour in the ruins or the ruins of what was once the splendour of Vijayanagar.
The increasing enrollment of girls in school during the past two decades has been accompanied by a less discussed but not insignificant change in the landscape of schooling in South Asia, i.e. the increased feminization of the teaching profession.
Influenced by the works of David Gellner and Eric Hirsch’s Inside Organizations at Work (Oxford, 2001), Cris Shore and Susan Wright’s The Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power (Routledge, 1997), and Susan Wright’s Anthropology of Organizations (Routledge, 1994), the editorial expedition of Devi Sridhar’s Anthropologists Inside Organizations…