Orient Longman

SOCIAL SCIENCES AND TRADE

REVIEW BULLETIN
November 2007

New Perspectives in South Asian History

History/Culture Studies
Contested Traditions

Old Potions, New Bottles: Recasting Indigenous Medicine in Colonial

Punjab 1850–1940
Kavita 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 Harrison
BIBILIO, September-October 2007
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History/Culture Studies
Image Cultures of Modern India

Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India

Edited 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-Thakurta
THE BOOK REVIEW, October 2007

Sociology/Politics
Challenging Metaphysical Truth Claims

The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future

Martha 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.’
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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 Kapur
THE BOOK REVIEW, October 2007

Sociology/Politics
The Crisis of Secularism in India
Edited 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 Kapur
THE BOOK REVIEW, October 2007
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Sociology/Politics/History/Religion

Contestations over Indian Nationalism

Hindu Nationalism: A Reader

Christophe 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 Khare
THE BOOK REVIEW, October 2007

Literature in Translation

A Bitter Cup of Tea

Mirage
Kokilam 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.’
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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. Prasad
THE BOOK REVIEW, October 2007

Gandhi Studies

In the Tracks of the Mahatma: The Making of a Documentary

A.K. Chettiar; Editor: A.R. Venkatachalapathy

In the Name of the Son

‘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 XII
Edited 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.
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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 Seth
THE INDIAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY REVIEW, 44, 383-405 2007

International Relations/History/South Asian Studies

Prospects for Peace in South Asia

Edited 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 Budania
INDIAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS JOURNAL, Vol. 2, 120-132, July-September 2007

History/Regional Studies/Literature

The Political Evolution of Muslim in Tamil Nadu and Madras

J. 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 Nadu
J. 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