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Tag Archives: Sociology and Anthropology

Sociology and Anthropology


Sangeeta Dasgupta
REORDERING ADIVASI WORLDS: REPRESENTATION, RESISTANCE, MEMORY
2022

The debates on colonial construction of tribal identity and the need to revisit the concept are gathering space in academic discourse in recent years. Dasgupta stretches this debate a little further from her previous work. Tribal identity is similar to caste used extensively by colonial ethnographers, anthropologists, and census enumerators to fix identities of the numerous communities living in India.


Reviewed by: L David Lal

Ranjana Padhi and Nigamananda Sadangi
RESISTING DISPOSSESSION: THE ODISHA STORY
2020

No story has ever been fully told, it is said, because no story can ever be fully told. However, as Ranjana Padhi and Nigamananda Sadangi tell us in Resisting Dispossession: The Odisha Story, all stories are only half told. That said, it ought to be conceded that this book, which sets out to tell the story of development and its discontents in Odisha from 1948 to the present, tells it remarkably well.


Reviewed by: Bijay K Danta

Monoj Kumar Nath
THE MUSLIM QUESTION IN ASSAM AND NORTHEAST INDIA
2022

Muslims in Assam comprise one-third of its population. Since Independence, the politics of Assam has been shaped by the question of alleged illegal immigration from erstwhile East Pakistan. The spectre of an illegal immigrant minoritizing the ‘khilonjia’(original inhabitants) of Assam has been a constant in the popular as well as political discourse.


Reviewed by: Parvin Sultana

Sudeep Chakravarti
THE EASTERN GATE: WAR AND PEACE IN NAGALAND, MANIPUR AND INDIA’S FAR EAST
2022

Located in a remote corner of India and, regrettably, the minds of most ‘mainland’ Indians, the North Eastern region has never been an easy site and space to think of, let alone write about. Immensely complex in terms of geography (territory), history, immigration and ethnic composition, economics and politics, the North East, which Sudeep Chakravarti quite correctly rechristens as (India’s) Far East, emerged out of the subcontinental decolonization process


Reviewed by: Nabanipa Bhattacharjee

Dev Nath Pathak
IN DEFENCE OF THE ORDINARY: EVERYDAY AWAKENINGS
2021

Dev Nath Pathak’s In Defence of the Ordinary: Everyday Awakenings is an inordinary demonstration of a routine exercise that most sociologists, certainly in their professional lives, claim an association with: sociological imagination. Pathak too informs us about the deep connections between his personal and the public but his concerns are routed in assuringly different ways. Indulging in a polemic against himself, the author invites his readers to undertake a not-so-usual reading of politics and philosophy of knowledge.


Reviewed by: Irfanullah Farooqi

Juned Shaikh
OUTCASTE BOMBAY: CITY MAKING AND THE POLITICS OF THE POOR
202

For the political elites of the modern nation, new cities like Mumbai and Calcutta were the ‘liberated space’. They were hopeful that with growing industrial capitalist advancement, the erstwhile caste hierarchies and feudal control would be broken and a cosmopolitan secular milieu can emerge. Babasaheb Ambedkar thought that migration to cities would help the Dalits to escape the feudal-Brahmanical servitude whereas the Communists imagined that urbanization would make caste redundant (p. 5) and foster a robust working-class unity to bring revolutionary transformation. Juned Shaikh’s work examines the failure of such modernist hopes in the colonial city of Bombay.


Reviewed by: Harish Wankhede

Robyn Andrews and Anjali Gera Roy
BEYOND THE METROS: ANGLO-INDIANS IN INDIA’S SMALLER TOWNS AND CITIES
2021

The book Beyond the Metros: Anglo-Indians in India’s Smaller Towns and Cities is a tremendously fascinating analysis and depiction of the Anglo-Indian identity, its representations and nuances. It thereby deconstructs the monolithic image that the term carries. The book’s deliberate focus is upon the non-metropolitan spaces, as it intends to make a clear distinction from the modern, urban spaces of cities. Cities are usually seen as a site of assimilation of different identities that may account for acculturation, often due to modernization and urbanization.


Reviewed by: Jennifer Monteiro

Yatindra Singh Sisodia and Tapas Kumar Dalapati
STRATEGIES FOR HUMAN DEVELOPMENT AND PEOPLE’S PARTICIPATION IN RURAL INDIA
2020

As India inches close to 75th anniversary of Independence, self-introspection about hurdles it has to overcome in policy and implementation domain needs to be debated. The book under review brings together fourteen well-researched papers based on field-level experiences of States across the country, interrogating critical dimensions of rural human development in contemporary India that need attention for percolation of developmental benefits to every corner of India.


Reviewed by: Pratip Chattopadhyay

Madhusudan Datta
REFORM AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE INDIAN ECONOMY: OUTPUT-VALUE ADDED SYMBIOSIS
2020

The Indian growth story attracted global attention first, on account of the spurt in growth from the 1990s, and second, on account of its deviation from one of the most widely replicated patterns of the evolution of sectoral shares of agriculture, manufacturing and services in the gross domestic product (GDP) over time.  This thumb rule, stylized by Kuznets, Chenery and Taylor (KCT), was found to closely fit the evidence gathered from advanced countries and also developing ones outside the socialist bloc, over two whole centuries.


Reviewed by: Alok Sheel and Vrinda Saxena

Ghazala Jamil
WOMEN IN SOCIAL CHANGE: VISIONS, STRUGGLES AND PERSISTING CONCERNS—SOCIAL CHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA, VOL. IV
2021

The three books under review critically contribute to our understanding of Gender, Inclusion, Violence and Social Justice. They capture several evidences of gender inequality, violence and exclusion across all levels; but they also show how gender issues in India can be read through different lenses of justice; how scholars, advocates and activists addressing these issues have brought different dimensions to the table, even conflicting at times.  


Reviewed by: Juanita Kakoty

Achla Pritam Tandon, Gopi Devdutt Tripathy and Rashi Bhargava
SOCIAL SCIENTIST IN SOUTH ASIA: PERSONAL NARRATIVES, SOCIAL FORCES AND NEGOTIATIONS
2021

Social Scientist in South Asia: Personal Narratives, Social Forces and Negotiations is an important recent publication from Routledge. Along with an Introduction, the book comprises a collection of nineteen essays, divided into two parts. Part I, themed ‘Engagement with Disciplinary Prisms: Expanding Horizons’ has essays by Imrana Qadeer, Ghazala Jamil, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Savyasaachi, Maitrayee Choudhury, SS Sivakumar, Gargi Chakravarty, N Sukumar and Sukrita Paul Kumar. Part II, themed ‘Reflections on Disciplinary Practices: Pedagogy and Research’ has essays by Chandan Kumar Sarma, Manosh Chowdhury, Mohammad Talib, Nirmal Kumar, Kavita A Sharma, Nirmal Kirmani, Shonaleeka Kaul and Vinay Kumar Srivastava.


Reviewed by: Manjeet Baruah

Rajesh Kasturirangan
WHO ARE WE? AN ENQUIRY INTO THE INDIAN MIND AND HOW WE CAME TO BE WHO WE ARE
2021

Rajesh Kasturirangan’s book Who Are We? sets out to play with the oft deliberated, debated, dissected and derived idea of what makes the Indian way of being and more specifically as the author states, the Indian way of thinking. Culture impacts the way we perceive, feel and think—as stated by cultural psychologist Richard Nisbett, and also leads to different self construals (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Kasturirangan appropriates and reappropriates the place of this book and his ‘theory’ on the vast canvas of many other such writings and clarifies right at the beginning of the book its aim and purpose, ‘I am less interested in a culturally encoded storehouse of thoughts and feelings and more interested in how cognitive schemas change over time, how new ideas emerge and are layered on top of the old. I will focus on mind in motion.’


Reviewed by: Surabhika Maheshwari

Veena Das
TEXTURES OF THE ORDINARY: DOING ANTHROPOLOGY AFTER WITTGENSTEIN
2020

The ethnographic desire to render the textures of the ordinary is contingent on the close attention to detail that the anthropologist can command. But the question is—what kind of detail and how much detail?  Detailing the ordinary plugs, the centre of this intense text marks the crucial meeting points of anthropology and philosophy. A critical question that anthropologists must settle on is ‘what kind of information can be counted as knowledge?’ Ethnographic practices involve a wide range of activities in the form of gathering data by conducting surveys, drawing figures and maps, engaging in conversations and discussions, exploring the micro-geographies of localities, tracing local histories and so on.


Reviewed by: Ratheesh Kumar

Nathalie Etoke. Translated from the original French by Gila Walker
SHADES OF BLACK: QUILOMBOLA! (NUANCES DU NOIR)
2021

‘To assert that “Black Lives Matter” is to admit that they do not matter while maintaining that they should.’Nathalie Etoke, born in Paris to Cameroonian parents, and who has lived in France and later in the United States, occupies a unique position which allows her to deal with questions of race as also to argue against a tendency which ends up reducing the historical, political, cultural and social differences…


Reviewed by: Simi Malhotra

Tara Kaushal
WHY MEN RAPE: AN INDIAN UNDERCOVER INVESTIGATION
2020

Tara Kaushal set out on a journalistic journey, interviewing nine men accused of rape and gang rape to analyse the psychological temperament of the rapist. The book is the roller coaster of emotions and a mentally intertwined journey on ‘Why Men Rape’. The commonly evident documentation of patriarchy…


Reviewed by: Azeemah Saleem

Dolly Kikon and Duncan McDuie-Ra
CEASEFIRE CITY: MILITARISM, CAPITALISM, AND URBANISM IN DIMAPUR
2021

Popular and academic discourses on Northeast India have for long been centred around the themes of conflicts, ethnicity and insurgency. This is not surprising given that the region has been seen as a ‘troubled periphery’ marked by ‘durable disorder’. Seen against this backdrop, the book under review marks a significant…f


Reviewed by: Kham Khan Suan Hausing

Ghazala Wahab
BORN A MUSLIM: SOME TRUTHS ABOUT ISLAM IN INDIA
2021

Narratives about lives popularly regarded as successful or marked by significant achievements, written by celebrities or eminent public figures, have always been eagerly received by a wider reading public. However, writings by those at the margins have visibly toppled the conventions of this genre in the twentieth century…


Reviewed by: Asma Rasheed

Sherali Tareen, with a Foreword by Margrit Pernau
DEFENDING MUHAMMAD IN MODERNITY
2020

Reverence for the Prophet of Islam through an affirmation of his exceptionality has a contested legacy and an emotional salience that has captured the imagination of the political landscape of South Asia. Recently, the National Assembly of Pakistan was pressed to debate its infamous blasphemous laws in the context of the demand…


Reviewed by: Soheb Niazi

Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe Translated from the original German by Caroline Waight
A SHORT HISTORY OF HUMANITY: HOW MIGRATION MADE US WHO WE ARE
2021

Abiochemist and a health journalist come together to write about what happens when biology and history come together—the field of archaeogenetics opens up and lets the human story unfold in exciting new ways. In fact, the authors state that genetics must become an essential element of historical writing…


Reviewed by: Manu Mehrotra & Ambika Mohan

Debal K. SinghaRoy
IDENTITY, SOCIETY AND TRANSFORMATIVE SOCIAL CATEGORIES: DYNAMICS OF CONSTRUCTION, CONFIGURATION AND CONTESTATION
2021

The book by Debal K SinghaRoy provides an exquisite illustration of the situational reconstruction of new, fluid and layered identities in collective mobilizations, along the axis of caste, class, tribe, nationality, ethnicity, citizenship and social movements, resulting from the unprecedented social transformation caused by the spread…


Reviewed by: Sristi Mondal
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