This is the autobiography of Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize and the creator of the Grameen Bank, the micro-finance institution that revolutionized lending to the poor. Naturally, perhaps, the book focuses on the Grameen Bank and how it came into being, ignoring, some may cavil, more personal aspects of Professor Yunus’s life.
This book, based on a significant Ph.D work in an area where academic work is sparse, has been brought to our attention through its belated publication by the Pakistani Branch of the Oxford University Press. Despite the fact that it deals with events which took place 35 years ago, it is not cast as an exercise in social history (more on this later).
2007
This book is a compendious account of the situation in respect of water resources in Pakistan. It packs an impressive amount of material into 126 pages, and both the presentation of information and the discussion of issues are lucid and highly readable. It is an extremely useful book.
The book under review looks at the South Asian Cooperation and India-Pakistan relations through the prism of the relationship between Indian-Punjab and Pakistan-Punjab. Maini belongs to the post-India—Pakistan partition generation and, therefore, does not carry the mindset of hate of the pre-partition generation and hence his perspective, is important.
2007
‘The corrosive effects of authoritarianism, on people and countries and in particular on those who perpetrate it needs constant attention.’ It was this need for constant attention that propelled the author to bring out this book, which is an updated version of his earlier two books. The underlying theme of the book is to answer the key question: what exacerbated violence in Sri Lanka?
2007
Americans would have you believe that America is exceptional. Its aims are unlike those of lesser countries. Its foreign policy, for example, is rarely about pragmatic material interests. It is more of a mission, even a moral crusade. America fought the costly
For those who may not realize that the lengthy title of this book means more than what it says, Critical Economic Theory is a Marxist addition to the critique of political economy. Today, of course not all adherents to the theory are Marxist.
2007
The Pakistani military—or the ‘fauj’ as it is better-known in Urdu—has a very distinctive place in the 60 year old tragedy- scarred history of that nation and alas, this institution has contributed in no small measure to this trajectory.
For the Oxford University Press to publish in 2007, a nearly 600- page diary of Field Marshall Ayub Khan, covering only the period 1966-72, evokes suspicions of fulfilling a promise to his expired son Gohar. However, the Press managed to persuade Professor C.E. Baxter to edit the dated diary.
‘Conversion is a complex and emotionally charged issue. Fundamentalists exploit it, liberals complicate it, many do not comprehend what the fuss is about, and others shy away from getting involved’.
The Lal Masjid episode in the first week of July this year in Islamabad is the culmination of the policies pursued by the establishment in Pakistan during the last several decades and they are the subject of the book under review.
South Asian Islam has a unique and fascinating history. Quite unlike many other places in the globe that came under Islamic influences the multicultural and plurilinguistic tapestry of South Asia made it necessary for Islam to negotiate and often cohabit with a host of local customs and traditions which gave the religion a special complexion and a special flavour.
Of late, there has indeed been a discernible intellectual ques- tioning of certitudes and the present work, it is only fair to say, contributes quite splendidly to that project. Its first intention is to cast doubt upon commonly accepted constructs like ‘Eastern Philosophy’ for, arguably, there is no one such thing that would qualify as such.
Abeysekera has given us a cogent political anthropological study of postcolonial ideological formations in the guise of an anthropology of religion in Sri Lanka. He explores these formations in chapters on the relation of theories of religion
Contemporary writings have enormously widened and enriched the field of ‘Partition Studies’, shifting the focus away from the politics of the ‘high table’ to subaltern perspectives, from meta-narratives to the regions partitioned and from attention to the causes of partition to concern about its human consequences.
Seven of the nine contributions to this collection of essays were presented as papers at a workshop held in Oxford in 2004, sponsored by the Coventry University South Asian Studies Centre and Balliol College, University of Oxford. Editor Ian Talbot
Anthony Low in dramatic syntax announces in his fore- word that the academic world of post-1947 Indian subconti- nent was dominated by political ‘scientists’, while historians only dealt with events happening prior to that year.
The Muslims after the Indian Mutiny ceased to be the country’s ruling class and became one of the many minority communities. It was not only a change of status in political and social standing but the new rulers of the country also distrusted the community under the mistaken belief of it being the perpetrator of the armed convulsions in 1857 against the growing might of the East India Company.
If you want to understand the background to the recent brouhaha over the admission policy of St Stephen’s College, here is the book for you. Contributors to this volume—all eminent legal experts, scholars, judges, administrators, and educationists—weigh in with their analyses of what plagues minority education in South Asia.
More than three decades back feminist historio- graphy had suggested that the devaluation of women in mainstream writings was connected to their exclusion from the public sphere and their identification with the domestic.