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Neera Chandhoke I first came to know of Sudha Bharadwaj in the early 1990s, when our research team in Delhi University began working on the two social movements that had made waves: the Narmada Bachao Andolan and the Chhattisgarh...

Manoj Joshi  This slim volume is an outsized contribution to the discourse on India’s national security challenges. The editor, former Jammu and Kashmir Governor NN Vohra, has been one of the country’s most experienced civil servants on issues of...

Gurpreet Kaur Deo Former top cop Meeran Chadha Borwankar’s refreshingly candid account, ‘Madam Commissioner’, is a compelling read. For a girl whose early education was in government schools in Punjab where her father was posted in the BSF, she went...

Rajesh Sharma These are Ajeet Cour’s stories translated from Punjabi. She was born in Lahore in 1934. Since 1947, Delhi has been her home, muse and battlefield. In 1986, she received the Sahitya Akademi Award for her autobiography. In 2006,...

Sandeep Dikshit Considering the tight ship that the Modi government runs, with a premium on secrecy in policy-making, we shall never get to know if this exercise in other wings of the government is as chaotic and prone to misadventures,...

Salil Misra Emperor Ashoka lived many lives. Most of them were constructed by different sources. In Buddhist records, he has been portrayed as a great follower of Buddhism who gave up violence after witnessing the bloodshed at the battle of...

Tribune News Service For decades, Ram Chandra Kak, the Kashmiri Pandit prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir, and his English wife Margaret Kak’s original documents and writings languished in a dark attic. There were anecdotes, family history dating back a...

Ira Pande Whether he writes a novel, a play, a newspaper column or a memoir, the core of Gurcharan Das’ work is the self and his own life experiences. From his earliest memories of Lyallpur in Pakistan, where he lived...

Satya Prakash Often described as the most powerful Supreme Court in the world, the Supreme Court of India has been generally hailed as an institution that has satisfactorily performed its role as the final arbiter and protector of fundamental rights...

Raja Sekhar Vundru INDIA, the world’s largest democracy, has come to a stage where people have an uncanny belief that democracy means elections and that electoral expression is the only way of democratic expression. SY Quraishi’s book tries to understand,...

Rescuing a River Breeze by Mrinalini Harchandrai. Bloomsbury. Pages 304. Rs 599 Longlisted for the McKitterrick Prize 2021, ‘Rescuing a River Breeze’ by Mrinalini Harchandrai is the tale of a girl on the cusp of womanhood. The book is set...

Shelley Walia To grasp the nuances of critical events in the area of international politics, it becomes relevant to fall back upon the theory of classical realism. Jonathan Kirshner, Professor Emeritus at Cornell, explains how classical realism has been lately...

GJV Prasad This is an interesting book, one which would have alerted us that we are reading a good writer in the making, if it were not for the fact that Omair Ahmad has already written two well-received books, the...

Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr This book has a bagful of pleasant surprises. It makes what is apparently a soporific subject of Indian village and rural countryside a most interesting read. The style is informal, an extremely rare feature for a...

Vikramdeep Johal More than a century and a half before the Central Government launched the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme with the objective of empowering the girl child, social reformers Jyotirao Phule and his wife Savitribai Phule set up India’s...

From Sylhet to Shillongby Bijoya Sawian.Speaking Tiger. Pages 200. Rs 599 THIS book chronicles the life story of Lala Bimalendu Kumar Dey, the last Inspector General of Police of undivided Assam. From Sylhet in East Pakistan to Shillong, he bore...

THE first images of the Buddha appeared hundreds of years after his death. This early phase of Buddhist art didn’t depict the historical Buddha as a physical being but hinted at his presence through symbols and objects — such as...

Maninder Sidhu GRAND colonial houses, with their awe-inspiring architectural splendour, cemented in the social and cultural practices of a period, have the potential to become evocative metaphors that string together diverse, asymmetrical human stories. As history goes, ‘Naulakhi Kothi’ and...

Lallan Baghel IT is always a delight to read a new book on Kabir, the poet-philosopher of early modern India. Kabir provides us with an opportunity to critically engage with the nature of self and self-awareness. Here the experiences of...

Salil Misra ONE important and somewhat unrecognised feature of India’s struggle for Independence was that a significant part of it was fought from outside the Indian borders. The Ghadar Party in USA, India League in London and the Indian National...

Translator Kavitha Muralidharan says Perumal Murugan’s writing offers deep immersion into the lives of the people but without embellishment. The characters in these short stories revel in the ordinariness of life. He marries absurdity and pathos as he returns to...

Aradhika Sharma This book, by Tamil author Imayam, is a translation of ‘Selladha Panam’, which won the 2020 Sahitya Akademi Award. ‘A Woman Burnt’ is mainly situated in and outside the ICU dedicated to the medical care of burns victims...

Harish Trivedi Usha Priyamvada (officially Usha Nilsson) made a name for herself as a fiction writer in Hindi in the 1960s, at the same time as writers like Mannu Bhandari and Krishna Sobti. She taught English in Allahabad and Delhi,...

Manisha Gangahar A profound sense of ambivalence, a mosaic of voices, convoluted emotions, and poignant dilemmas — Hari Krishna Kaul thus constructs compelling story arcs. A prominent Kashmiri writer, Kaul initially wrote in Hindi before beginning to pen in his...