This collection of essays on changing perspectives in Indian art history is based on the proceedings of a seminar on ‘Historiography of Indian Art: Emergent Methodological Concerns,’ organized by the National Museum, Institute of History of Art, Conservation and Museology, New Delhi in 2006…
‘But life itself is poetry; it is the most living poetry, and with us there are no clear limits between life and poetry.’ So says To Huu, the poet of modern Vietnam, in one of the interviews with which this slender volume of selections from his poetry are interspersed—interviews in which he speaks about his life…
This book by Lee Siegel has been sponsored by the Inter-Faculty Committee for South-Asian Studies, University of Oxford. On the first page is a verse which ends with the lines: ‘Sacred is this state of human fulfilment, which we find if ever.’ The Gitagovinda does not deal with the aspect of practical-cum-material fulfilment…
The presumed anonymity of the artist in pre-modern India remained for long a scarcely challenged premise in Indian art historiography. In the middle decades of the 20th century, this assumption of anonymity was nurtured by an overarching emphasis on the metaphysical…
No book could be more concise, vehement, avid and well researched on the mosques of Cochin. No scholar has taken interest in researching this important architectural heritage, and updating the required information in this context and bringing it to public domain…
Right at the beginning of this slim volume (the text, excluding notes,is ninety-five pages) based on lectures delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 2008, Judith Brown explains her two primary objectives. The first is to communicate with a wider public that is interested…
This book by a German scholar seeks to examine political viewpoints on the writing of the history of India, in promoting different ideas of what constitutes India as a nation, both in the context of what constituted a nation state in Europe and what could become the definition of a nation in a world of globalization…
The work under review is a translation of a hugely popular work, originally written in Bengali, by the well known novelist, Mani Sankar Mukherji (alias, Sankar). Achena Ajana Vivekananda, first published in 2003, is a book that I have always wanted to read but somehow could not in all these years. Ironically enough, reading the work in English translation makes this urge even stronger…
This is a source-book for those who wish to obtain specialized information regarding the material culture of Akbar’s times. It is not a book that one expects to complete at one reading, but is more in the nature of a reference book, aiding such of us as would wish to verify whether, for example, a kettle-drum of a particular type was known in Akbar’s days or if flutes of a specific variety were then in vogue…
In An Indian Political Life: Charan Singh and Congress Politics, 1937 to 1961, Paul Brass has launched a multi-volume study of Charan Singh whom he regards as a neglected leader of post-Independence India. He seems to write with the expectation that careful scholarship will win Charan Singh a place in the pantheon of modern India’s greats…
Abasic existential question would virtually leap out at the reader, a few pages into this volume. Does India’s first Prime Minister deserve another celebratory volume? Jawaharlal Nehru is acknowledged as an epochal figure in the struggle against colonialism, with perhaps the most successful record among the leaders of national libe-ration, in building a polity that functions by basic norms of democracy.
Readers may form a misleading impression that this book is yet another biography of Maulana Azad. At the very outset, therefore, it needs to be clarified that it is less a biography of an individual (Maulana Azad), and more a story of the political processes of late colonial India underlining those aspects of Congress politics which could gain only limited success so far as enlisting the support of the Muslim communities to the cause of freedom was concerned…
It is not an easy task to decide on a representative collection from the vast literature on Partition. Kaushik Roy has judiciously selected eleven essays which together flag some of the major issues in the historiographical debate on Partition…
In the field of film writing, in India more verbiage has been devoted to discussing film censorship than perhaps any other topic except for the private lives of film stars. Acts, reports and other connected official documents have been briefly discussed, filed, put, and sometimes not put, before the public, thereafter, reactions…
This book is the report of an International Seminar held at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex in 1977, of Academics and Practical Administrators to seek ‘practical solutions’ to the problems of rural women. The book is divided into three parts: the first part covers three task force reports…
This book introduces us to the idea of Partition in an unconventional way. Problematizing the established view that the Partition of British India (or for that matter partition of the Punjab) was an inevitable outcome of communal politics, the book explores various conflicting meanings of the term ‘partition’, which actually grew out of the intricacies of Punjab politics in the first half of 20th century…
The book under review discusses the important western border region of Kachchh, a region that, in a contested fashion is contiguous with all manner of local, state as well as national boundaries. Relatively little scholarship has explored this border in the present…
The question of the spread of Islam into areas far away from its place of origin continues to invite inquiries and curiosities. Multiple explanations offer how a religion starting off with a small tribal community in the lands of Arabia, expanded across the globe and eventually turned out to be the world’s second most followed religion and by some estimates the world’s fastest growing religion today…
Man’s cruelty to man is unbelievable. But believe one has to, when details come out one after another, of what people undergo in our prisons, where they are supposed to be reformed. After spending ages in prison, they come out· hardened, their hearts darkened more than ever with evil…
The collection of eight essays in this slim volume follows from a conference on the theme held in 2009 at Oxford. A strong running thread binds the volume together even as there is mercifully no overarching uniformity. The thread that runs through it places the various…