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SOCIAL SCIENCES AND TRADE

REVIEW BULLETINNovember 2007

New Perspectives in South Asian History

History/Culture Studies

Old Potions, New Bottles: Recasting Indigenous Medicine in Colonial Punjab 1850–1940Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

‘This book stands in contrast to much of the historical literature on medicine in British India, in which the actions of the State form the main object of analysis. It enables us to see the colonial state from the perspective of Indian practitioners. Sivaramakrishnan’s analysis of colonial medical history is one of the most sophisticated that has yet appeared, eschewing the essentialist binary dichotomies between western and Indian cultures that mar much of the earlier literature.

As might be expected from its focus on vaids and their representations, the book is based chiefly on vernacular sources─ particularly medical journals and general newspapers─ in which these practitioners fashioned their identity. The author has consulted a very impressive number of journals in Hindi, Gurmurkhi and Urdu, as well as monographs in these languages, and has also conducted a number of interviews with the descendents of Ayurvedic practitioners. Sivaramakrishnan has a firm grasp of her material and of the political context in which vaids were operating; her analysis is both insightful and discriminating. The book’s principal conclusions concerning the heterogeneity of Ayurveda in the Punjab are thus extremely persuasive.’

Mark HarrisonBIBILIO, September-October 2007

Contested Traditions

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History/Culture Studies

Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern IndiaEdited by Richard Davis

‘This book belongs to an emergent genre of scholarship that has come to represent the latest, most prominent face of South Asian cultural studies. The main concern of the genre has been with the popular public cultures that have shaped the complex histories of modernity and nationalism in the 19th and 20th century India, tracking a variety of representations and practices that make up this cultural field. This volume of essays edited by Richard Davis confidently takes its place within the celebrated ‘visual turn’ in the modern Indian studies, to show how visual iconographies have played a fundamental role in the imagining of nationhood across diverse official, non-official, pictorial, architectural and performative spheres. In tune with a number of other books of this genre, it wishes to shift the ground from the primacy of written sources to make a case for visual practices as forming not a supplementary but a constitutively different site of knowledge, yielding their own different histories of Indian modernity and nationalism. And it carves out a discrete field of study – of popular visual culture – that stands apart from the disciplines of art history, film or television studies, even as it leans heavily on their analytical apparatus.’

Tapati Guha-ThakurtaTHE BOOK REVIEW, October 2007

Sociology/Politics

The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s FutureMartha C. Nussbaum

‘The book challenges the dominant belief that religious extremism emanates from Muslim terrorists and largely emerges from non-democratic contexts. India is an explicit example of a postcolonial democratic state that produced a coalition lead by the BJP, which held power at the centre for nearly five years. She points out that India is hot to the third largest Muslim population in the world and that Huntington’s thesis about the clash of civilizations does not bear out in this context. She argues that the real clash lies within, ‘between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the … domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition.’

Image Cultures of Modern India

Challenging Metaphysical Truth Claims

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Nussbaum’s book covers a broad range of issues to illustrate the tension between democracies, the rise of religious fundamentalism and competing ideas about the role of religion. She interviews various political elements in the Sangh Parivar, provides a brief overview of Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore and their contribution to democratic institution building, the secular project and critical learning, the role of the Hindu right in the contemporary period, the contests over the writing of history by the hegemonic forces of the Right an those committed to ideas of pluralism and diversity, and the role of the Diaspora in supporting the Hindu right in India.’

Ratna KapurTHE BOOK REVIEW, October 2007

Sociology/Politics

The Crisis of Secularism in IndiaEdited by Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

‘The editors seek to address a series of challenging questions in the collection, including, whether secularism in India has been defeated. Is secularism an ideological phenomenon or has it failed to achieve its ideals? Is the problem with secularism primarily a problem concerning the rise of Islamism? Is the West secular? Is religion an integral part of national identity forged in the anti-colonial resistance of nationalist movements? Or is it primarily about the protection of the rights of minorities, where majoritarianism has run rampant over these rights? Is secularism a panacea to gender discrimination and subordination and a major plank for gender justice? Are all religions incapable of facilitating women's rights? These questions are extremely important within the contemporary global context.

The essays in this collection indicate how secularism within the context of postcolonial India has not been a long steady march towards the separation of religion and the state. But rather, it has been a messy history, replete with contradictions, reflecting not only the dialectical terrain of the Indian polity but also how secularism is open to more than one interpretation and meaning, both here and there.’

Ratna KapurTHE BOOK REVIEW, October 2007

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Sociology/Politics/History/Religion

Hindu Nationalism: A ReaderChristophe Jaffrelot

‘Christophe Jafferlot’s Hindu Nationalism: A Reader draws our attention to various aspects of the stand-off between the secular, liberal, territorial and constitutional nationalism, on the one hand and a Hinduite insistence on defining nationalism, patriotism, and even citizenship in terms of religion.

The volume puts together a very useful collection of views and thinking that sought to construct an interpretation of Indian nationalism that could rival the one being shaped, mostly, by the leaders of the Indian National Congress. Jafferlot’s purpose is to give the reader an idea of the 'continuities, recurrences, and discrepancies’ of Hindu nationalism, also as a response to the West and Islam.'

Harish KhareTHE BOOK REVIEW, October 2007

Literature in Translation

MirageKokilam Subbiah

‘Mirage first published in 1964 as Thoorathu Pachai (the Green of the other side/ Distant Green) in Tamil has now found its English avatar. The attempt in this novel is ‘to bring to the fore the unchronicled, unvoiced lives of the indentured labourers from India working on the tea plantations of Sri Lanka’, and this means that the book is ‘social history in the form of fiction.’ The daughter of a civil servant, Kokilam Subbaih came into contact with the lives of Tamil labourers after her marriage to the MP who represented the plantation workers, Subbaiah. Kokilam Subbiah organized a women’s movement on the estates and eventually recorded the lives of women workers in order to understand their life and history. The incidents narrated in Mirage are thus ‘culled from real-life stories and are not figments of imagination.’

Contestations over Indian Nationalism

A Bitter Cup of Tea

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I am certain that Mirage will find its place on the bookshelf of everyone and be a great introduction to those of us who still wonder where it all began and why things are the way they are in Sri Lanka.’

G. J. V. PrasadTHE BOOK REVIEW, October 2007

Gandhi Studies

In the Tracks of the Mahatma: The Making of a DocumentaryA.K. Chettiar; Editor: A.R. Venkatachalapathy

‘While Gandhi destroyed most of the letters Harilal wrote to him, this one survives—and appears in Chandulal Bhagubhai Dalal’s Gujarati biography of Harilal, which has been translated into English by Tridip Suhrud. Harilal Gandhi: A Life is a slim volume, the biography running into 120-odd pages, the language sparse, almost Gandhian, as it sticks to facts and skips adjectives. In the age of flamboyant biographies and embellished histories, Dalal’s s is a pleasant anachronism. Dalal’s book, published 30 years ago, could be called the original provocateur, beginning the intense humanisation of the Mahatma, recently attempted in the biography Mohandas by Rajmohan Gandhi and the film Gandhi My Father, which was loosely based on the book under review.’

Charmy H.THE INDIAN EXPRESS, 28 October 2007

Subaltern Studies

Subaltern Studies XIIEdited by Shail Mayaram

‘Subaltern Studies XII continues the project initiated by Ranajit Guha and his collaborators three decades ago, the present volume being edited by three of the newer and younger members of the editorial collective. Consisting of eight essays, the volume is consistently interesting and of high quality. Many of the essays address the question of historiography. They draw upon popular sources, written and sometimes oral, for constructing complex historical accounts which practice history-writing in an exemplary fashion while also calling the epistemological certitudes of historiography into question.

In the Name of the Son

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These are significant additions to the historiography of India, as well as being thoughtful and sometimes incisive reflections upon the very nature and status of the enterprise of writing history.’

Sanjay SethTHE INDIAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY REVIEW, 44, 383-405 2007

International Relations/History/South Asian Studies

Prospects for Peace in South AsiaEdited by Rafiq Dossani and Henry S. Rower

‘Rafiq Dossani and Henry S. Rower in their edited book Prospects for Peace in South Asia deal with conflict between India and Pakistan, taking into consideration politics in both countries over the issue of Kashmir and the nuclear stakes. The book paints a mixed picture on the prospects for peace in South Asia. It is argued that religious radicalism in both India and Pakistan is on the rise and it will hamper the peace process and resolution of conflicts. Articles are well-written and would be useful to policy-makers, academics and researchers.’

Rajpal BudaniaINDIAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS JOURNAL, Vol. 2, 120-132, July-September 2007

History/Regional Studies/Literature

The Political Evolution of Muslim in Tamil Nadu and MadrasJ. B. P. More

‘J. B. P. More’s The Political Evolution of Muslims in Tamilnadu and madras, 1930–1947 deals with a major historical topic which hitherto has been untouched both by amateur and professional historians. In the absence of communal politics, studies concerning the interrelation between religious communities did not attract scholarly attention.

Divided into eight main chapters, the book offers an engaging political history of Tamil Muslims in the modern period, tracing their root from the late eighth century C.E. Islam came to southern India through a Tamil-Arab trade in about the eight century, making inroads into the coastal hamlets. The central concern of this book is to demonstrate how the Tamil-speaking Muslims emerged as a powerful social group with their economic enterprise in the 1930s and 1940s.

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They successfully wrested political power from the hands of Urdu-speaking Muslims without overtly displaying their linguistic differences, while committing themselves to the fundamental values of the Islamic tradition. J. B. P. More tries to locate the political success of Tamil Muslims in a particular temporal, historical context.’

A.Gangatharan THE INDIAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY REVIEW, 44, 383-405 2007

History/Regional Studies/Literature

Muslim Identity, Print Culture and the Dravidian Factor in Tamil NaduJ. B. P. More

‘More has taken up the question of Tamil Muslims’ loyalty to religion and language through meticulous research in his well-documented work, Muslim Identity, Print Culture and the Dravidian Factor in Tamil Nadu. Tamil Muslims, including Marakkayars, Lebbais and Ravuttars, remained faithful to their Islamic tradition while conforming to the local linguistic cultural practice. In fact, Tamil was put to good use for the construction of a language–based religious identity, which was accentuated with the expansion of election-oriented politics in the 1930s.’

A.Gangatharan THE INDIAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY REVIEW, 44, 383-405 2007