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SOCIAL SCIENCES AND TRADE

REVIEW BULLETIN
December 2007
Film Studies
Tinsel and the Tapori
Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City
Ranjani Mazumdar

‘Ranjani Mazumdar’s Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City situates the cinematic city
in Bombay films within a metaphor of “urban delirium”. Bombay, the favoured
metropolis of representation for most of Hindi cinema till the late Nineties, becomes a
“terrain of urban experience”, with people from all over India coming here and
collectively scripting a narrative of modernity. Bombay Cinema’s larger scope is to
investigate this cultural amalgamation and its intersection with Hindi cinema, wherein,
Mazumdar argues, cinema integrates knowledge — philosophical, political, and historical
— to become “the most innovative archive of the city in India”. Mazumdar takes certain
key representational figures and conceits used in Hindi films and locate the city in
Bombay cinema through an examination of them.

Bombay Cinema is a heavily researched and valuable book that fulfils the scope of its
announced intentions. Undoubtedly, Mazumdar’s book will serve as a reference text for
students of Hindi cinema, but for the average film aficionado, Bombay Cinema comes
across as hard and academic, with no sensuous engagement with the cinematic city,
which is fluid and has a magical life of its own.’
Rohini Chaki
THE TELEGRAPH, 26 October 2007

History/Sociology
The rise and fall of a state
Hyderabad: The Social Context of Industrialisation
C.V.Subba Rao

‘The charming city of Hyderabad under the Nizam’s rule evokes powerful romantic
images but efforts to explore its economic and industrial development have been few and
far between. C V Subba Rao’s Hyderabad: The Social Context of Industrialisation is one
such attempt, which is far from being “an arid account,” as the author feared.
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Rao seeks to underline the fact that the political separateness of a princely state and the
particular autonomy of Hyderabad state become important explanatory variables in the
analysis of industrial development of Hyderabad. In the end, the autocratic political
structure, based on the feudal social organization, remained impervious to changes from
both above and below, and resulted in deterioration of the state’s economy. Rao’s
rigorous study, the result of a two-year project financed by the Indian Council for Social
Science Research (ICSSR), is a valuable addition for understanding the economic history
of the Hyderabad state.’
Ramesh Kandula
THE TRIBUNE, 4 November 2007
Development Studies
Flawed market mantra
State, Markets and Inequalities: Human Development in Rural India
Edited by Abusaleh Shariff and Maithreyi Krishnaraj

‘The book under review makes a critical assessment of growth with equity and social
justice in rural India. Experts in the field have come together to work on a range of social
and economic development issues using the NCAER-HDI data for rural India. What is
the extent of deprivation across states among social groups? What explains such
deprivation—wrong policy priorities, inadequate allocation of resources, poor
identification of beneficiaries, poor delivery etc? It also addresses the criticality of
education, gender disparity and a whole range of issues to the success of a host of
programmes and schemes.

The book is a valuable addition to the existing literature. Policy planners, social sector
planners in particular, researchers and those interested in human development will find it
extremely useful. It is strong both on data and analysis.’
Ash Narain Roy
THE TRIBUNE, November 18 2007

New Perspectives in South Asian History

History/Culture Studies
Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World
Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy

‘This is a thought-provoking book exploring ‘the boundaries conventionally drawn

between imperial metropole and colonial periphery’. Each of its chapters demonstrates
the complexity of the colonial encounter, reinforcing in particular the limitations of
imperial scholarship which posits the relationship between Britain and its colonies as
somehow operating within a ‘closed, bilateral circuit’. Instead its authors argue that
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British imperialism unleashed a series of processes and exchanges involving commodities
and ideas that extended well beyond the territories of the British Empire. As the Editors
note, colonial authorities were never entirely in control of the processes and exchanges
that rapidly took on their own dynamism among the different colonies and between
Britain and its colonies.

Decentring Empire is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of work on comparative

and trans-national histories, and should appeal to a broad readership interested in
imperialism. It is also useful in opening up future directions of research, most notably in
teasing out the subtle inter-connections and divergences between, within and beyond the
British Empire especially in relation to globalization.’
James Beattie
New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 9, No.2, December 2007

Expunging Variola: The Control and Eradication of Smallpox in India,

1947–1977
Sanjoy Bhattacharya

‘Based on previous unused archival and private papers, this book eschews simplistic
accounts of the WHO eradication campaigns and exposes the full complexity of the
processes of decision-making and policy implementation. Its emphasis on the
significance of vaccination technology is long overdue. In its unravelling of the
complexities of the eradication programmes, it serves as a model for historical analysis. It
could also be read with profit by those now actively engaged in such ventures. It
illustrates perfectly the futility of trying to impose overarching structures on human
agency, whether attempted by historians or by those they write about.’
Margaret Jones
MEDICAL HISTORY, October 2007 51(4)

Old Potions, New Bottles: Recasting Indigenous Medicine in Colonial

Punjab 1850–1940
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan

‘This book offers a crucial sharpening of historical perspective on the modernization of

indigenous South Asian Medicine. While there has been abundant study of the way that
indigenous practitioners responded to the universalist claims of European medicine by
developing professional identities and institutional entities compatible with a nationalist
frame, too little attention has been given to the entanglement of this process in linguistic
and communalist projects. Kavita Sivaramakrishnan’s erudite and careful study remedies
the neglect. Focusing on the colonial Punjab, Sivaramakrishnan makes visible the
relationships among the establishment of professional medical associations and colleges,
the development of vernacular print media, and the realignments among Unani and
Ayurvedic practitioners along lines of religion and language.
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She describes how colonial policies that reified Muslim and Hindu communities
influenced budding prenationalist administrations to encourage the coalescence of
indigenous medicine around religious identities. This book makes an important
contribution to the history of indigenous South Asian medicine.’
Jean M. Langford
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, October 2007

The Trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar

Edited by Pramod K. Nayar

‘POET-KING Bahadur Shah Zafar was catapulted to the limelight when the mutineers
from Meerut arrived in Delhi in 1857. After the fare up died down the “last of the great
moguls” went on trial for aiding and abetting the mutineers. The British administration
produced dozens of witnesses to prove the emperor’s complicity in India’s first war of
independence. He was found guilty and was deported to Burma where he died years later.
Though the proceedings of this historic trial were first published in 1858 it has remained
largely absent from the studies and histories of colonial India. The current edition
reproduces the day-to-day accounts of the trial and captures the theatre, the drama, the
betrayals and British anger. The lengthy introduction places the “mutiny” in its proper
historical perspective and places the important trial in the context of the colonial state and
its ideological apparatuses.’
THE STATESMAN, 21 October 2007

Rethinking 1857
Edited by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya
‘The book includes 15 essays divided into four thematic parts. The first theme is the
questioning of the conventional historiography of 1857. The second part is the impact of
1857 on tribal and Dalit communities. The third group considers uprisings in regions
beyond the north Indian Gangetic heartland. Finally, the last theme is the alternate polity
that was posited, briefly and without success, during the uprising of 1857.’
THE PIONEER, 25 November

The Burden of Refuge: The Sindhi Hindus of Gujarat

Rita Kothari

‘Rita Kothari wishes to add to the narratives on partition of the subcontinent and the
experience of being a partition refugee in India. Her study has grown out of her personal
experience of growing up in a Sindhi family and living in Gujarat. Based on qualitative
and historical data, her focus is mainly the Sindhi communities of Gujarat in India where
nearly one-third of all the Sindhi speaking population in the country resides. Apart from
working with the migrants currently living in Gujarat, she also conducted some of her
interviews in the Sindh, Pakistan.
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The book provides us with an interesting ethnography and a touching account of the
everyday life of Sindhis in Gujarat.’
Surinder S. Jodhka
SEMINAR, December 2007

The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India
Company Shaped the Modern Multinational
Nick Robins
The book under review seeks to examine the meaning of the company’s legacy for the
global economy of the 21st century. Starting from the age of enlightenment the author
establishes a familiarity of this institution with the modern world of trade.
It is an interdisciplinary, elegantly written, magnificently presented book on East India
Company making a powerful analysis, perhaps for the first time, of its violence,
corruption, rivalry, war, famine, speculation- the rise and fall of the company. The author
brings out the fact that globalization process of Indian economy had actually started with
the set up of the East India Company and the lessons learnt almost one and half centuries
ago need to be revived to ensure the accountability of today’s global business. Therefore,
the volume at hand needs to be read by business, policy makers, social scientists and all
others who are encountering globalization of modern times.

GURU NANAK JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Amritsar

Literature in Translation
Government Brahmana
Arvind Malagatii

‘The book under review is the autobiographical account of a well-known Kannada

folklore scholar, poet and fiction writer. Even as a translated work the language of the
book is lyrical and makes it an interesting reading. Malagatti, through the narration of his
life as he lived in a Karnataka village, provides the scaffolding to have the glimpse of the
life story of any dalit in that setting. The difference is that the narrator comes out of his
existential conditions and becomes one of the noted poets in Kannada. The narrative is of
a life lived ordinarily, but with certain differences though in certain situation this
differences are extraordinary.
The book is written with rich metaphors highlighting the conditions of the dalits and
suggesting the way out. The style and method of presentation gives the book a unique
status in this genre of literature. Most of the autobiographies that have appeared have
many limitations in terms of modes of narrative. The book under review is the only work
that excels in every aspect of such kind of literature. It is a must reading for the students
of literature, dalit studies and sociology.’
GURU NANAK JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Amritsar