Jammu and Kashmir today is a house divided. In 2008 as I write this review, there are processions in favour of land for Amarnath Yatris, being taken out in Jammu and counter-processions in Kashmir by Muslims. The shadow of violence has now been hanging over the Kashmir valley for nearly five decades.
For those who read ‘The Toda Tiger- Debates on Custom, Utility and Rights in Nature, South India 1820- 1843’ by Gunnel Cederlof in the 2005 publication called Ecological Nationalisms, this new book offers a more detailed and valuable narration of the establishment of colonial rule in the Nilgiri hills by a complex and simultaneous process of law making related to land rights and settlement of land claims.
This book brings together within its beautiful covers ten extremely relevant and timely articles written by world renowned scholars from multiple disciplines working on the conceptualizations of and contestations over ‘natural’ resources. The term is put within quotation marks here because the labelling suggests the existence of these resources outside of culture, something that is not of human-construction.
The centrality of the dynamics of the colonial family, a product of the inter¬racial sexual contact between European men and ‘native’ women, in the shaping of imperial policy during the company rule has received scant attention from scholars.
In this study Salahuddin Malik looks at the 1857 Revolt as viewed from Britain, helping us to make sense of the bewildering variety of perspectives discernible in the flood of contemporary books, pamphlets, sermons, newspaper reports and articles about the Revolt published in the metropolis.
The Centre for Studies in Social Sci¬ences, Calcutta has been trying to take stock of the place of history as an academic discipline and also looking for alternatives to ‘academic’ histories. An earlier volume, based on presentations at a conference held in 1999 was edited and published under the title History and the Present.