Vijaypat Singhania

Adventures beckon those with pockets deep, despite the fact that being an adventurer entails sacrifice of the very luxuries millionaires may be accustomed to. When Dennis Tito paid $20 million or so to the Russian space agency, he was tapping into a fast growing trend—spending big bucks to experience adventures that remain out of bounds for the vast majority.


Reviewed by: Anoop Verma
Nergis Dalal

This book made such compulsive reading that I found myself reading it in bed by torchlight when the power went off. For many years I had not identified so much with a character that was, after all, fictional. All those who are “plump and plain”, branded as “the brains”, and taught to seek comfort in the idea that beauty is only skin deep, will empathize with Naaz Jussawalla, the heroine of this autobiographical novel.


Reviewed by: Dipavali Debroy
Anoop Verma

Three people are enmeshed in a story with a varied background. The hero, Anirudh Shukla is just seven years old when he runs away with a Naga Sadhu who calls himself Jungali baba.The boy’s mother has died suddenly, leaving him to the wiles of his cousins, Hari and Jhankana, older than Anirudh, yet not old enough to discount fairy-tale versions of a wicked stepmother in the offing.


Reviewed by: Usha Hemmadi
Namit Arora

It is difficult for certain writers to outgrow the reputation associated with their first novel. They go back to their first tale in each of their subsequent tales and write newer versions of the same. Some of them do it in pursuit of a quest — spiritual or literary. Some others perhaps end up doing so as they do not wish to grow out of their earlier image. A reading of Namita Gokhale’s Shakuntala raises a strong suspicion that the writer has Sanskritized Paro and named her Shakuntala.


Reviewed by: B. Mangalam
Sunil Gangopadhyay

The publishing industry in India these days is exhibiting a remarkable interest in publishing translated texts and there is every reason to be happy about the attention they are bestowing on regional language literatures. Though there is no doubt that the translation is always between one Indian language and English, at least the urge to translate into another language (which happens to rule the world!) certainly exhibits the pressure from below.


Reviewed by: Mahasweta Sengupta
Bibek Debroy

Both these books are fresh presentations of famous Sanskrit works for the English-reading public. The two writers, distinguished academics who are also husband and wife, had in the past jointly authored abridged translations of the Vedas and selected Upanishads and Puranas. Drawing further from the ancient language’s treasure trove, they have now dealt separately with the best known of its scriptures and some classics from its literature.


Reviewed by: A.N.D. Haksar
Prem Chand

Delivering the Presidential Address at the First Progressive Writers’ Conference in Lucknow on 9 April 1936, Premchand said, “There have been many definitions of literature, but in my opinion the best definition of it is – ‘the criticism of life’. Whether in the form of an essay or a poem, literature should criticise and explain life.”


Reviewed by: Rakhshanda Jalil
Geetanjali Shree

Geetanjali Shree breaks new ground with her novel Khali Jagah or The Empty Space. And not only in the context of her own writing that has over the years traversed much terrain, finding paths adventurous and often surprising. There is little, yet, in Hindi writing that has dealt with the shadow that looms over our modern lives, the fear of bombs and all that they bring in tow; the pain, the confusion, the fracturing of lived reality,


Reviewed by: Sara Rai
Eunice de Souza

Eunice de Souza concludes her remarks in the introduction to Early Indian Poetry in English with a telling comment taken from a letter written by the Canadian novelist, Shauna Singh Baldwin. In the letter, the writer recounts being given, as a punishment for some misdemeanour, a long poem by Michael Madhusudan Dutt on Alexander to memorize and recite.


Reviewed by: Rosinka Chaudhuri
Chinmaya R. Gharekhan

There is a perfect fit between the author and the theme he has chosen to write on. Chinmaya Gharekhan of the 1958 batch of the Indian Foreign Service has established a well deserved reputation for his professional competence, integrity, and superb navigational skills in the often treacherous waters of diplomacy. As India’s Permanent Representative to the U N in New York for six years, he has presided over the Security Council twice. Each presidency lasts a month.


Reviewed by: K.P. Fabian
Shri Krishan

The volume under review is the seventh in a series on modern Indian history, edited by well known historian Professor Bipan Chandra and two of his illustrious former students, Mridula and Aditya Mukherjee. Between them they represent what was once the unchallenged school of nationalist historiography and have acquired the formidable reputation of crusaders on behalf of that particular way of understanding modern Indian history.


Reviewed by: Aditya Nigam
Vidyut Bhagwat

Feminist Social Thought brings together a set of introductory essays on the work of six of the best-known feminist ideologues of the twentieth century. The attempt is to summarize in some detail the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Juliet Mitchell and Sheila Rowbotham.


Reviewed by: Shefali Jha
Ratna Kapur

Ratna Kapur’s objective to outline a postcolonial feminist framework takes seriously, the emergence and legal regulation of what she terms the new sexual subaltern and of the new images of sex in contemporary Indian society. Telling the stories of law then is to interrogate the implication of law in the contemporary reformulations of culture and sexuality.


Reviewed by: Pratiksha Baxi
Indira Jaising

Constitutionalism and gender justice in South Asia is underwritten by the colonial legacy of each of the countries in this region, that put in place plural legal systems ensuring the troubled coexistence of religious with secular/public laws, each with its own institutional apparatuses.


Reviewed by: Kalpana Kannabiran
Indra Deva

Published in 2005, the book under review is an eclectic collection of papers with contributions by prominent law teachers and sociologists covering broad areas including ‘Functioning of the Legal System’, ‘Legal Profession’, ‘Law and Religious Identity’, ‘Law and the Disadvantaged Groups’, ‘Societal Role of Judiciary’ and ‘Law and Social Change’.


Reviewed by: Bikram Jeet Batra
Richard K. Wolf

The Kotas are a group of indigenous people who have shared their upper Nilgiri homeland in South India, with the Todas since ancient times. They occupy seven villages and number just over 1500 persons.


Reviewed by: Tarun Chhabra
Stephen Knapp

Spirituality, unlike religion with its collective proscriptions, connotes an essentially free, solitary state, immaculate in being beyond belief, expression and morality. Neither of the two books under review entirely avoid the trap of endorsing the popular belief that the Himalaya and Ganga are suitable symbols of the spiritual state because of their majestic and aloof grandeur.


Reviewed by: Bill Aitken
Pnina Werbner

Zindapir, so called because he was still alive when he was respected as a Sufi master, makes an unusual case study for anthropologist Pnina Werbner. Since so much is written about the Talibanization of the ranks of the Pakistan army, it should not be so surprising that other Islamic trends grew from there too.


Reviewed by: Gillian Wright
R. Nath

The first impression of this book – the title, the cover, colored plates, diagrams and illustrations – is fascinating. It is a description of the private lives of the Mughal emperors but only of a few i.e. Akbar to Shahjahan, with a line or two on Aurangzeb. Although Nath promises to tell us a story for the period 1526-1803, there are rarely any references to the period subsequent to the reign of Shahjahan.


Reviewed by: Meena Bhargava
Sumathi Ramaswamy

Sumati Ramaswamy has written a brilliant book. It has a breathtaking sweep and a pace that is most unusual for a scholarly work. The book is about Lemuria – a lost place from a lost time. Human preoccupations with lost continents look back as well as forward.


Reviewed by: Vijaya Ramaswamy
Mireille Gansel

“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,


Reviewed by: K.R. Narayanan