Book Reviews

Published January 9, 2016 by priyanikomal Quote for this Book :- The Only Thing that the society has done for them(sex workers) is to label... Read More

INTIMACY UNDONE: Marriage, Divorce and Family Law in India by Malavika Rajkotia. Speaking Tiger Books, Delhi, 2017 – Book Review MATRIMONIAL litigation has an emotive... Read More

Written by: Meena Kandaswamy Publication: Juggernaut Pages: 231 pages How does one tell a story of a 26-year-old intelligent, educated woman being battered by four... Read More

Interfaith Marriage: Share & Respect with Equality Book Launch To guide youths in interfaith love, the author Dr. Dilip Amin established a non-profit forum, www.InterfaithShaadi.org ... Read More

LAST June Facebook announced a change to its newsfeed. Henceforth it would rejig the way stories were ranked to ensure that people saw “the stories... Read More

ALL politicians are crooks. At least, that is what a lot of people think in a lot of countries. One assumes it is a reproach.... Read More

Disability and the Media forms part of the ‘Key Concerns in Media Studies’ series edited by Andrew Crisell and is aimed primarily at students and teachers of... Read More

Uncovering exclusion in India is akin to the child shouting out the visible truth. Exclusion and discrimination in India is as old as the country’s history. It... Read More

Woodsmoke and Leaf Cups: Autobiographical Footnotes to the Anthropology of the Durwa by Madhu Ramnath; Delhi: Harper Litmis, 2015; pp 324, ₹399. Sarkar teen parkar—adei thindana, narpitana, auru jiyam noipitana (The three qualities of government—to beg, to terrify, and to make the heart ache)  This is the essence of a reverse anthropology—an Adivasi view of the mainstream, literate world and its power structures—of how a tribal people in south Chhattisgarh perceive the behaviour of government people and their system, in their own language, Durwa—a language we have probably never heard of. As such, these words contain the essence of the hellish situation that has developed in the region during the last few years. Many books have been written about the civil war situation in Bastar. Many have analysed the Maoist conflict and the Maoist system of governance. Some are based on interviews and interactions with Maoists. This book goes deeper, in the sense that it presents us with the cultural system that was there before Maoists came on the scene, and the interactions with forest guards and other small-time exploiters who have long plagued Adivasi villagers. Presented not academically, journalistically, or governmentally, but in an Adivasi idiom of storytelling and anecdotes, spiced with a wild, vivid sense of humour. Beating Heart of Tribal India Over the last few years, people have viewed Bast—meaning the old district of Bastar that equals south Chhattisgarh, since what was Bastar has been increasingly subdivided into an ever-rising number of new districts (presently seve—through the lens of appalling human rights abuses, as epicentre of India’s Maoist conflict. People who have known Bastar longer feel intense anguish about the violent tragedy engulfing a region that used to be the beating heart of tribal India. Adivasi cultures existed here with maximum confidence and least disturbance until 2005, when that slippery entity SalwaJudum burst onto the scene. Reviewing this extraordinary book properly would have to begin with an aside on terminology, to wake us up to some fundamental questions. What is Bastar? What was Bastar? What has happened to the extraordinary wild forestland that was Bastar? This is a landscape that speaks, or spoke, Gondi, Durwa, and other ancient languages that most of us in cities are quite ignorant of. Extremely beautiful, expressive languages, that have a very different form “modern” languages such as Hindi and English, which formed through military campaigns of conquest across cultures. Which is a significant connection? There is a definite continuity between the military forces that rampaged to and fro between Hindustan and Afghanistan, where Hindustani formed as a language of commerce and command, and the camps of security forces proliferating across Bastar, where shouted commands mix Hindi, English, Halbi and Gondi, for those enlisted Adivasis who serve in the Koya commandos and other such units. Anthropology of Power Abuse This is a book of “deep anthropology,” giving what anthropology promises yet rarely delivers. It is an... Read More

Sarah Pinto.  Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India.  Contemporary Ethnography Series. Philadelphia  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.  296 pp.  $59.95 (cloth), ISBN... Read More