In her book under review anthropologist Subhadra Mitra Channa provides a generalized model of the ‘Devi and the Dasi’ to understand what it means to be a woman in South Asia. For a book that has South Asia in its title, the focus is very narrowly on India. She justifies this by saying, in a footnote…
Safar was about the inner journey of the heart and mind that revealed the truth of one to oneself, and took one closer to that state known variously as enlightenment, self-realization, self-knowledge, satori, fana- …My safar to places of my past led me to intimacy with myself. Revealed who I am to me.
The topic of NGOs, especially those which are rights-based, in Pakistan is an intriguing and polarizing case in media discussions, always instigating hype by the critics over alleged negative roles and pushing the western agenda or by the proponents who appreciate NGOs’ capacity to challenge the authoritarian status quo.
The volume under review is remarkable for many reasons. The painstaking empirical research and the rigorous analysis of the same from a feminist perspective will make this book a very important source of reference to understand the lives, work and struggles of women in Asia.
A chronological political history of Punjab—the title is self-explanatory—Rajmohan Gandhi began the journey of writing this book at the point of its denouement, Partition. It was the need to understand the painful birthing of two nations, of why the father of the Indian nation…
2014
In 1976, within a year of its publication, Wendy Doniger’s Hindu Myths met with a bad press. ‘The title (of the book) is offensive’, a reviewer of Indian origin wrote, ‘to the Hindu, the stories of his sacred literature are not myths: they are as much reality and are as sacred as are the stories of the miracles of Christ or of Adam and Eve or Noah to the Christians…
Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857 is a seven-volume series that has emerged from a research project based at the University of Edinburgh involving collaborative research and international conferences beginning in the 150th year marking the revolt.