Skip to main content

THE BOOK THAT MADE SOME MEN VERY ANGRY


THE UGLINESS OF THE INDIAN MALE AND OTHER PROPOSITIONS
by Mukul Kesavan


A dazzling collection of Mukul Kesavan’s essays on cinema, writing, travel, the media, politics.


‘Whatever [Kesavan] writes about carries within it the germ of his political beliefs which include, of course, the notion that it is right and proper for writers to express their opinions vigorously and fearlessly; that this has not yet ceased to be a nation where it is possible to do so without being fearful about the consequences.’ Manjula Padmanabhan, Outlook

‘Kesavan’s knowledge of the Hindi film is deep, and deeply felt....The essay on the Urdu connection with the Hindi film is fascinating. His travel writing and political commentary is acute and compelling.’ Keshav Desiraju, The Hindu

‘... whether its Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, or Konkana Sen’s latest role, there is an unmasking of a false cosmopolitanism and an improving upon of the public notions of secularism and pluralism.’ Rehan Ansari, DNA

ISBN 81-7824-252-4 / 312pp / Rs 295/ BLACK KITE / Paperback / Published February 2009

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Romila Thapar remembers an old friend

A few weeks before he passed away, Eric Hobsbawm   and his wife invited Romila Thapar to the historian’s 95 th birthday party in London. John Williams played the guitar. The gathered companions drank to the great man’s health. He was convivial and had all his wits about him—as seems evident in the pictures below. A century seemed possible ... In her obituary below, Romila Thapar recounts what Hobsbawm’s work meant to her, and its intellectual legacy more broadly.        REMEMBERING ERIC HOBSBAWM             Romila Thapar Eric Hobsbawm was the kind of historian whose work, although largely on the last three centuries of European history, was relevant even to those of us who work on a different space and time. The process of historical investigation for him was not restricted to a narrow engagement with a specific subject, but with having to situate it in an extensive ...

THE BOOK OF INDIAN ESSAYS

Indians have been writing prose for 200 years, and yet when we think of literary prose we think of the novel. The “essay”   brings only the school essay to mind. Those of us who read and write English in India might find it hard to name an essay even by someone like R.K. Narayan as easily as we would one of his novels, say Swami and Friends or The Guide . Our inability to recall essays is largely due to the strange paradox that while the form itself remains invisible, it is everywhere present. The paradox becomes even more strange when we realise that some of our finest writers of English prose  did not write novels at all, they wrote essays. The anthology is an attempt at making what has always been present also permanently visible. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra   • A collection of the finest essays written in English by Indians over the past two hundred years. • The Book of Indian Essays is a wide-ranging historical anthology of the Indian essay in E...

THE GREAT AGRARIAN CONQUEST by NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA

BUY THE PAPERBACK       FROM THE REVIEWS   Review in SOCIAL HISTORY, USA by Benjamin Siegel The Great Agrarian Conquest represents a massive intervention into the contemporary historiography of South Asia, elaborating upon some conventional wisdom but upending a great deal more of it. Readers might well place this book in conversation with works like Ranajit Guha ’ s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and Bernard Cohn ’ s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (1997), to which The Great Agrarian Conquest owes some preliminary inspiration. Yet what Bhattacharya o ff ers is a wholly original account of the transformation to agrarian colonialism . . .   Few volumes in South Asian history have been more awaited than this monograph, Neeladri Bhattacharya ’ s fi rst. One of the most celebrated mentors and researchers at New Delhi ’ s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Bhattacharya retired in 2017 after a decades-long career. His formal scholarl...