kriticulture

http://www.countercurrents.org/rsharma070113.htm Book Review  By Rajesh Sharma  07 January, 2013 Countercurrents.org    The Indian Ideology By Perry Anderson Three Essays Collective (Gurgaon), 2012 Pages vi+184 Rs. 350  T he celebrated New Left historian and political essayist Perry Anderson's latest book The Indian Ideology (2012) appears at a time when several mainstream publishers with their assorted wares are proclaiming India 's arrival on the stage of world history. Many of these are truncated histories of the so-called arrival which, interestingly, do not go back beyond the 1990s. The self-defined limits are convenient as they sustain faith in the Indian ‘miracle'. Anderson , however, digs farther back, beginning with the country's anti-colonial struggle under Gandhi's leadership. His objective is to force into light the historical unconscious of the Indian polity. In the process, he offers quite a few r...

Mainstream, VOL LI, No 1, December 22, 2012 [Annual 2012] Critical History of Our Times Rajesh Kumar Sharma BOOK REVIEW The Underside of Things: India and the World: A Citizen’s Miscellany, 2006-2011  by Badri Raina;  Three Essays Collective; 2012;  Pages: xxii+758;  Paperback Rs 850.   Badri Raina is like an all-season fruit-bearing tree. And the more he ages the mellower gets the fruit he bears. The 134 essays gathered between the covers of this book and written for Z-net over six years between 2006 and 2011 are ample testimony to his engaged critical productivity. Each essay is a timely, more than instantaneous, response to some pressing issue—be it embodied in an event, a pronouncement, a person, a law, a policy, a report, or a possibility crying imperatively to be cast into action. But beyond this, the essays also transcend the contingency of their moment under the force and lucidity of Raina’s reason which, aided by a rea...