The nature of poetry has always been held to be fictive. That is, it doesn’t record or report facts; and even if it is recording or reporting facts, the poet’s creative imagination works on them in such a way that the quality of factualness recedes into the background. Hence, Shelley’s famous observation in his A Defense of Poetry…
This work is a collection of essays written over the past decade exploring the issue of disability, culture and society in the Indian context. The author is a sociologist working in one of the leading universities in the country giving the area of social science research and writing on disability an academic respectability…
The back page write up on this book reads thus: ‘A compendium in Prose and Verse of Crimes perpetrated after office hours on sundry aspects of economy and society by a lapsed social scientist in the cause of expanding the horizons and shaping the values of young and unpromising scholars.’
2014
The book under review opens with a con- ceptual framework for understanding local governance as it flows through the regions of good governance, decentralization and reforms in India. He has reiterated the fact that there is a vital need to shift the focus from ‘government’ to ‘governance’, there-by, emphasizing decentralization rather than delegation.
The book under review is fascinating and disappointing at the same time. It is a masterly survey of the developmental and economic history literature on the significant changes that have taken place in the global economy over a long historical period stretching into many centuries.
Long before the city became trendy, there was the Indian city. It existed in our colourful and incredible mythology. It existed when the first of human civilization took root on the subcontinent. It was central to the multiple kingdoms that flourished from corner to corner in this vast land for centuries.
Among the recent works on Bihar, men- tion may be made of Vinita Damodaran (Broken Promises, 1992), Papiya Ghosh (Community and Nation, 2008), Hitendra Patel (Communalism and the Intelligentsia, 2011), Narendra Jha (The Making of Bihar, 2012), Lata Singh (Popular Translations of Nationalism, 2012).
The postmodernist invasion has not only pushed certain traditional histories out of circulation but also relegated the extremely useful analysis of class and movements that Indian history was used to.
The book under review discusses the cul- tural contours of North East India in three key areas: the integrated approach to the understanding of history using folk materials; tradition and change in folk culture; and the pan-Indian connections of religion, epics, arts and crafts.
The question of identity vis-à-vis migra- tion in Assam is a much debated, highly complex, thoroughly contested issue. The issue is enmeshed in the cauldron of contending views and is delivered differently by intellectuals, administrators, media, and various elements of the Assamese social structure, including individuals both natives and the migrants.
The book under review seeks to critically analyse the factors, circumstances and processes that underlined the tumultuous and painful march towards the creation of the State of Telangana as the twenty-ninth State of the Indian Union marking the conclusion of a long-drawn struggle of the people of Telangana seeking separate Statehood for their region.