Hermann Kulke, History of Precolonial India: Issues and Debates, English edition revised and edited by Bharabi Prasad Sahu, New Delhi : OxfordUniversity Press, 2018, 383 pages, Rs 1195 The book was originally published in the year 2005 as a volume…
Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text, Penguin India, Gurgaon, 2016, xvii+305 pages, Rs 599. The historiography on militant and revolutionary anti-colonialism in India is witnessing a dawn of a new era. For decades,…
Smita Sahgal, Niyoga Alternative Mechanism to Lineage Perpetuation in Early India A Socio-Historical Enquiry Delhi: Primus Books, 2017, 242 pages, Rs 995 Submission has been held to be an appropriate virtue of women. It was supposed that a woman submits…
Anand Chakravarti, Is This Azaadi? Everyday Lives of Dalit Agricultural Labourers in a Bihar Village, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2018, (xiv+266) 280 pages, Rs 750. This book is a major contribution to the ongoing research in the academic sphere on…
I must have been no more than four years old. A hired Omni Van used to ferry all the neighbourhood kids to our preparatory school. One day, the driver of the Van relayed to my mother - either bemused or…
The Hindu History Series: K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, Writings in The Hindu, THG Publishing Private Limited, Chennai, 2018, 224 pages, Rs 299. K.A. Nilakanta Sastri was one of the doyens of south Indian history. Although specialising in pre-colonial history of the…
Guru Rao Bapat and Lata Singh, eds., Performing Arts in India: Performances of/and Violence, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2016, 242, pages, Rs. 300. In a troubled time of ours when intolerance and bigotry of almost all sorts are…
Projit Bihari Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies and Braided Sciences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, xii+374 pages, price not stated. Much before the Chopra Report (viz. Report of the Committee on Indigenous Systems of Medicine, authored under the…
Book Reviews Deepak Kumar, The Trishanku Nation: Memory, Self, and Society in Contemporary India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016, 211 pages, Rs 495. Intellectuals always struggle with the question of relevance of their work in the face of the…
Recent studies of the contemporary situation of labour in neoliberal economies and of labour movements have emphasized a ‘decline of trade unionism’. This assessment is widespread and holds true for India, especially when we consider that the period following large-scale…