Rabindranath Tagore
GORA
2010

One of Rabindranath Tagore’s widely discussed novels, Gora, is set in Kolkata some three decades prior to the date of its publication, 1904, and narrates the interactions, intimacies, incompatibilities and introspections within a community of Hindu and Brahmo educated elite of that period…


Reviewed by: Nivedita Sen
Kamini Mathai

What is the best way to write a biography of a reticent, reclusive, shy man? You get the others, more willing to speak, to speak. And in this, Kamini Mathai, the author has excelled.


Reviewed by: Safeeq Valanchery
S.V. Srinivas

Here then is a short description of Telugu cinema: it is a cinema in the Telugu language made with borrowed plots, for ten crore speakers of the language, by an industry that makes politicians because it cannot make profits.’ This is how Srinivas concludes his book on the megastar Chiranjeevi. It is a ‘conclusion’ that sums…


Reviewed by: C.S. Venkiteswaran
Aparna Basu

The road much travelled by women who lived in the earlier part of the twentieth century was a road paved with an earnest search for meanings, an eager attempt to grasp the new worlds that education and independence opened up for them in its entirety and the consistent attempt to bridge the gap dividing…


Reviewed by: Vasanth Kannabiran
Ashwini Tambe

Codes of Misconduct tells us the story of how through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the colonial government in Bombay city passed a series of laws against prostitution. Many of these laws, strangely, were repetitive and seemed to cover the same ground over and over again…


Reviewed by: Prathama Banerjee
Vinod Pavarala

The context of Community Radio differs from country to country and the communities therein. In the West it started as political propaganda machine and this was called pirate radio, since airwaves were considered government property or state property. Even in the twenty-first century it is not public property in the true sense.


Reviewed by: Haricharan Verma