Book Reviews

Provides fresh and fascinating insights that can be inspirational and valuable for a wide range of audience “Kamala Harris and the Rise of Indian Americans,” edited by Tarun Basu, is an evocative collection of essays which try to capture the rise of Indian Americans across a wide range of domains from politics to administration, entrepreneurship […]

She is 39. He is 37. Keteki and Ved, the protagonists of Anjali Joseph’s new book, Keeping in Touch, meet at Heathrow Airport. She is returning home to Assam and he is on his way to Bombay. Such a beginning is liable to give an impression of entering the far-too-familiar landscape of a boy-meets-girl-at-airport-they-fall-in-love kind of

Foothills. Such a lovely word. It signals an elusive geography—neither high-altitude mountains, nor flatlands or plains. As we learned from postcolonial theorists like Homi K Bhabha and Edward Said, foothills have that quality of the creative in-between space where differences can flourish. In anthro­pologist Dolly Kikon’s masterly crafted book Living with Oil & Coal: Resource Politics

Wandana Sonalkar is a self-proclaimed atheist and in this autobiographical account titled ‘Why I am not a Hindu Woman’, Sonalkar critically reflects on her position on why she has chosen to renounce her religion. This work adds to the list of works where authors are writing to declare their religious positions like Kancha Illaiah’s ‘Why

In Singing Gandhi’s India, historian Lakshmi Subramanian examines Gandhi’s relationship with music through his letters, significant events and other documents. Leaning on bhajans Subramanian begins by introducing the reader to the early nationalisation project aimed at collating and creating a new ‘classical’ tradition of Indian music: Hindustani classical in the north and Carnatic in the south.

India’s farmers have sustained the largest protests in modern Indian history since Mahatma Gandhi and the independence movement. While Gandhi’s khadi dhoti appeared in media worldwide, the farmers received relatively scant attention until cultural stars like Rihanna and Greta Thunberg tweeted and Disha Ravi, the granddaughter of a farmer, was arrested. Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: