English Non-Fiction
By Mrinal Pande
Journalism is an ever-evolving chaos because its umbilical cord is attached to the socio-cultural-political movements of a society that needn’t necessarily have any design, formulae or pattern. It is an institution of discourses that are formed on shared beliefs, anomalies, conflicts, power dynamics and confluences. In India, the global and local practices of journalism merge to create a unique communication system that underlines her contemporary socio-cultural-political spectrum.
It is not every day that one comes across a revolutionary’s biography. Even though Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo, Ahmed Kathrada and Walter Sisulu, all have a memoir to their name, the majority of revolutionaries are, nevertheless, reticent when it comes to sharing their experiences and anecdotes of their adventurous life.
By G.N. Devy
Devy covers an extensive expanse from genetics (David Reich’s Who We are and How We Got Here) to linguistics (David Anthony’s The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, Maheswar Neog’s Essays on Assamese Literatures) to literary theory. For him, Indo-Iranians entered the subcontinent with the horse-and-chariot and mingled with Out-of-Africa southerners producing the Mahabharata culture, shifting from pastoral to agrarian, urban and feudal society.
Edited by Gopalkrishna Gandhi and Tridip Suhrud
Gandhi is possibly the greatest Indian to have lived since the Buddha. His greatness, however, lies not in his invulnerability—but rather, in his struggle to overcome his many frailties. Gandhi’s story is an alluring, yet rare, tale of the triumph of human will over seemingly insurmountable odds. One is reminded of Albert Einstein’s famous phrase describing Gandhi, ‘Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.’
By Mohammad Nasir and Samreen Ahmed
Syed Mahmood could have become a public figure as eminent as his father Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the educationist and social reformer who founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College (later the Aligarh Muslim University).