Books
Three Decades of India: The Mandate of a Media Man
I was wondering what Vir Sanghvi had been doing after that ignominious Nira Radia episode. A pleasant face among Indian journalists, Vir had/has to his credit many delectable columns on Indian politics and Indian cuisine as well as several TV productions and interviews along similar lines. Unlike many journalists in his generation, he knows what […]
Political Imaginations of Muhammad Iqbal
Muhammad Iqbal (d.1938) was one of the significant Muslim intellectuals in the colonial India. He was an orator, writer, poet, campaigner and philosopher. The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal: Islam and Nationalism in Late Colonial India, a new study on the poet-philosopher by Iqbal Singh Sevea analyses the political dimension of the Iqbal’s philosophy. Sevea develops […]
Hisham Matar: The Politics of Oedipal Fears
I chanced upon Hisham Matar as an implied reader of Borges. An implied reader, as Wolfgang Iser defines, is the real reader that a literary work requires, whom the author expects and who meets the expectations of the work. When Hisham reads Borges’ ‘short story’ Shakespeare’s Memory for the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, I imagine […]
Politics for Future to Come
Books The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament By Wael Hallaq Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonisation and World Order By Salman Sayyid On the heels of Francis Fukuyama’s two books about political order, which maintains, even after the renowned author’s so-called spurning of neo-conservatism, that a strong, modern political order can ensure stability and […]
‘Guantanamo Diary’: An Account of Justice Detained
Casualties in the wake of war on terror and blind apprehensions in the name of detaining ‘terrorists’ have started to come out in the form of first person narratives. What makes Mohammsdou Ould Slahi’s Guantanamo Diary stand out from similar titles like My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me (2008) is […]
The legacy of Kufa
A’lamuKufa, (Masters of Kufa), an encyclopedic work by Iraqi historian Sayyid Mudar Al Hulw, covers a long sweep of history from the early seventh century, when the city became a bustling encampment town under the sway of the burgeoning Islamic Caliphate to its more recent history under the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century […]
Of Mortality and the Limits of Medicine
We are struggling to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells, flesh and bones. Medical science has remarkable power to push against these limits. But still, its power is finite. Medicine can improve our life and it has done a lot of things in life; it reduced […]
Life of ‘the Poet Laureate of Asia’
Allama Mohamed Iqbal, one of Indian subcontinent’s most versatile and controversial figures in the 20th century, defies easy categorizations. The myriad ironies and contradictions that defined colonial India converged in the life and works of Iqbal to such an extent that the exact opposite of anything ever said of him could equally be true! A […]
Books in 2015: A look-ahead
Clear space on your shelves or fire up your e-readers for the publishing highlights of 2015. A new novel from Kazuo Ishiguro, his first in 10 years, is arguably the literary event of the year. Ishiguro is one of a select band of authors who enjoys widespread critical acclaim as well as huge commercial success. […]
Books of the Year: Our Picks
1: Do Muslim Women Need Saving?- Laila Abu-Lugodh The author argues that in the aftermath of the 9\11, the paradigm of rescuing Muslim women from the ‘oppressive’, ‘unprogressive’ and ‘pre-modern’ Muslim lands has procured momentum as an undeniable necessity. This well-researched work is the result of Laila’s encounters as an ethnographer, of her interaction with […]
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