Book Reviews
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Fatwas and the Fabric of Law: Shariah in Practice in India
Arun Shourie’s monumental work The World of Fatwas or The Shariah in Action represents one of the most comprehensive scholarly examinations of Islamic jurisprudence in practice within the Indian subcontinent. This book, drawing from over 18,000 pages of primary source material across forty volumes of fatwa collections, provides an unprecedented window into the mechanism by which Islamic religious law operates at the grassroots level. Shourie’s work is particularly significant for its methodical analysis of five major fatwa collections spanning different Islamic schools of thought – the Barelvi Fatawa-i-Rizvia, the Deobandi Fatawa-i-Ulema Dar al-Ulum, and others. This comprehensive approach allows readers to understand not merely isolated religious pronouncements, but the systematic worldview that underpins Islamic…
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Uprooting the Beautiful Tree: Dharampal’s Rediscovery of India’s Indigenous Education System
In the landscape of Indian historiography, few interventions have been as intellectually disruptive as Dharampal’s The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century. First published in 1983, this landmark volume mounts a compelling challenge to entrenched colonial narratives that portrayed precolonial India as a civilizational void, bereft of formal education and awaiting the salvific arrival of British modernity. Drawing on archival records and administrative surveys commissioned by the British East India Company, Dharampal meticulously reconstructs an educational ecosystem that was at once decentralized, inclusive, and pedagogically rich. The source materials for Dharampal’s research include extensive data from early nineteenth-century surveys conducted in the Madras, Bombay, and Bengal Presidencies.…
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Justice or Farce? Analyzing When Anita Gets Bail by Arun Shourie
In a nation where justice is supposed to be blind but often appears blindfolded by incompetence, corruption, and callous indifference, Arun Shourie’s Anita Gets Bail emerges not as another academic treatise on judicial reform, but as a raw, deeply personal account of what happens when ordinary citizens collide with India’s labyrinthine legal system. This is judicial critique at its most human—written not from the ivory towers of legal scholarship, but from the waiting rooms of district courts where hope withers and dignity dies a slow death. The Personal Becomes Political: A Love Letter to Resilience What makes Shourie’s twenty-seventh book extraordinary is its foundation in lived experience. The narrative begins with a…
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Whose History Is She Really Telling? A Critical Look at Romila Thapar’s Marxist Lens
Romila Thapar, long revered within elite academic circles and international liberal platforms as the authoritative voice on Indian historiography, positions her work, Our History, Their History, Whose History?, as an ostensibly impartial inquiry into the political utilization of historical narratives. However, when viewed critically through an Indic right-wing lens, Thapar’s slim but ideologically dense volume emerges less as detached scholarship and more as a carefully orchestrated defense of a Nehruvian-Marxist historiographical paradigm that continues to dominate Indian academia decades after its ideological apex. Central to Thapar’s narrative is the contention that nationalism inherently distorts historical interpretation. Ironically, this critique fails to confront her own implicit nationalist biases favoring the Nehruvian…
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Where Temples Speak and Histories Whisper: A Journey with Deepa Mandlik
India’s temples have always been more than stone or ritual—they are vessels of heritage, culture, and unbroken faith. Deepa Mandlik’s Dynasties of Devotion is not just a book; it’s a journey that invites the reader to linger in the shadows of spires, decipher legends in sculpture, and experience the essence of Indian history through seven extraordinary temples stretching from Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu to the Khmer heartland of Cambodia. To a reader like me, who loves to travel and explore temples, with the recent example of the 8 Aṣtavināyaka Temples in Maharashtra, this book was like a pilgrimage in itself. The Book’s Spirit: Weaving Story With Stone Unlike most academic treatises, Mrs.…
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Swami Vigyananand’s “The Hindu Manifesto” Offers a Civilizational Roadmap
There are books that inform, repositories of facts, footnotes, and frameworks.There are books that inspire, kindling within the reader a momentary flame of idealism, a fleeting vision of something greater.And then, there exist those rare and potent texts that do more than inform or inspire, they awaken.They rouse the soul from its civilizational slumber.They summon the dormant spirit of a people long chained by forgetfulness, distortion, and disinheritance. Swami Vigyananand’s The Hindu Manifesto is one such text. It is not merely a political treatise, nor just a spiritual commentary.It is a clarion call sounded across the corridors of time, a conch blown at the cusp of epochs, awakening the memory…
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A Civilizational Manifesto: Reading Amritasya Putrah by Kanchan Banerjee
In an era marked by cultural amnesia and spiritual disorientation, Amritasya Putrah by Kanchan Banerjee arrives not merely as a book, but as a civilizational invocation, a reminder that India is not merely a geopolitical construct but a living, breathing samskriti, whose soul has been nourished for millennia by the chants of the Vedas, the wisdom of the Upanishads, and the tapasya of countless rishis. The title, drawn from the Upanishadic mahāvākya, “Shrinwantu vishwe amritasya putrah” (“Listen, O Children of Immortality”), is not a poetic flourish, but a call to reawaken the sacred identity that lies dormant beneath centuries of conquest, colonization, and confusion. Banerjee does not write as a…
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No Return Ticket: Exile of Asha and the Empire’s Silence
“Some ships don’t return. Neither do some girls.” Uma Lohray’s debut novel, The One-Way Ships, doesn’t arrive with fanfare or scream for your attention. Instead, it stays, like a low tide that never quite recedes, leaving behind salt, silt, and silence. This is not a page-turner; it’s a page-sojourner. It lingers. It leans. It listens, to the overlooked stories of Indian ayahs shipped across the seas during the British Raj. Raised to cradle colonial children, many of these women were quietly abandoned. Forgotten. If that opening line doesn’t leave a mark, wait until you live through Asha’s. Threadbare Truths, Tenderly Told Lohray dares what Indian fiction seldom attempts, she zooms…
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The Great Betrayal: Sita Ram Goel’s Exposé on India’s Secular Façade
In the grand theatre of post-independence Indian political discourse, few words enjoy as much sanctity, and as much ambiguity, as “secularism.” Brandished as a talisman of modernity, inclusivity, and national unity, secularism occupies an untouchable moral space in the republic’s ideological architecture. But what if this sacred principle has been, in practice, a mask for majoritarian disempowerment, a conduit for civilizational erasure, and a lever for political duplicity? This is the argument, indeed, the warning, laid out with clinical precision and moral courage by the late Sita Ram Goel in his seminal work, India’s Secularism: New Name for National Subversion. First published in 1993, the book remains as urgent today…
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Splendours of Royal Mysore by Vikram Sampath, the Court Chronicler of the 21st Century
When royalty needed a biographer six centuries later, Vikram Sampath rose gallantly to the occasion. Vikram Sampath, for those who don’t know, is not your average historian droning on about “subaltern agency” in a beige lecture hall. No—he is a historian with flair, drama, and the distinct sense that he may have missed his calling as a royal archivist in a parallel 18th-century Mysore. With a background in engineering, finance, and Carnatic music (because why not?), Sampath took it upon himself to exhume the largely neglected Wodeyar dynasty and give them the full ceremonial welcome history denied them. He does not merely write history; he resurrects it, applies sandalwood paste,…
