School, Society, Nation – Popular Essays on Education

Language and communication are something that children learn by taking to one another. But schools consider this an act of indiscipline. Instead we have a special grammar class to learn language! One educationist remarked, 'It is nice that children spend just a few hours at school. If they spend all 24 hours in school, they will turn out to be dumb!' In most schools, teachers talk, children listen. The same is true for other skills also. Children learn a great deal without being taught, by tinkering and pottering on their own. >>>

THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF WATER — Naturalising Scarcity in Western India

This book grew out of a doctoral thesis, but one quickly forgets that origin and loses oneself in the experience of immersion in a fascinating book. The book has several strands: the history of Kutch as a unique area with special ecological characteristics, and also as exemplifying the category of dry lands; the wound inflicted on it at the time of the Partition by the severance of its vital riparian links to the Indus Basin (which were ignored in the Indus Treaty negotiations); the changes in the attitudes to water management that came about with the transition from its erstwhile status as a small princely state to its merger with the Indian Union; caste, socio-economic power and ritual relations in Kutch; divergent perceptions of and responses to water `scarcity' at different levels and among different groups (within Kutch, at the popular level in the State as a whole, and at the State Government level); the relationship between Kutch and the Sardar Sarovar Project; and the kind of thinking that underlies water policy and planning in general. A brief review cannot do justice to the richness and complexity of the book. >>>

Nature's Government - Science, Imperial Britain, and the Improvement of the World

Nature’s Government is a daring attempt to juxtapose the histories of Britain, western science, and imperialism. It shows how colonial expansion, from the age of Alexander the Great to the twentieth century, led to complex kinds of knowledge. Science, and botany in particular, was fed by information culled from the exploration of the globe. At the same time science was useful to imperialism: it guided the exploitation of exotic environments and made conquest seem necessary, legitimate, and beneficial.

Drayton traces the history of his idea of improvement, from its Christian agrarian origins in the sixteenth century to its inclusion in theories of enlightened despotism. It was as providers of legitimacy, as much as of universal knowledge, aesthetic perfection, and agricultural plenty, he argues, that botanic gardens became instruments of government, first in Continental Europe, and by the late eighteenth century, in Britain and the British Empire. >>>

A Selected Bibliography/Videography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Libraries

South Indian Cinema

Books

Das Gupta, Chidananda.
Talking About Films / Chidananda Das Gupta. New Delhi: Orient Longman, c1981.
--UCB Main PN1993.5.I8 D27

Hood, John W.
The essential mystery : the major filmmakers of Indian art cinema / John W. Hood. Hyderabad, India : Orient Longman, 2000.
--Main Stack PN1993.5.I8.H66 2000

Valicha, Kishore.
The Moving Image: A Study of Indian Cinema / Kishore Valicha. Bombay: Orient Longman, c1988.

Hood, John W.
"Satyajit Ray." In: The essential mystery : the major filmmakers of Indian art cinema / John W. Hood. Hyderabad, India : Orient Longman, 2000.
--Main Stack PN1993.5.I8.H66 2000

Power Play, by Abhay Mehta

Over the last five years, private investment in infrastructure development and management has been in the news in one form or another. In particular the power sector has been the focus of much media attention and academic analysis. In the process a series of myths have sprung up around the sector ranging from power shortages - (not that shortages don't exist, but the nature of the shortages remains largely misunderstood) to the absolute necessity for foreign investment in the power sector.

This book takes up for study the first - and arguably the most controversial - private power project in India since 1991. The project is being set up by Enron Corporation in Maharashtra. The progress of events relating to this project is one of the most interesting chapters in the history of post-independence India. The saga is still in progress and the last word in the chapter is yet to be written. >>>

Language in the Law/edited by John Gibbons, V. Prakasam, K.V. Tirumalesh and Hemalatha Nagarajan

"This set of eight papers in this volume form part of the proceedings of an international conference on grammar held at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, Indian in 1999. The book is a record of modes and practices in the use of language within the context of law. The papers not only examine the different situations that arise in legal processes, but they also unveil the inherent problems and impact of ambiguity and distortion in the uses of legal language, the consequences of cultural constraints on translation of legal texts, the power of interpreters in legal testimony and sources of complexity in legal register. Some of the papers deal with the teaching of the language of the law and the comprehension of particular legal norms, legal records and legal codes. The book examines the nexus between language and the law in various countries and cultures."
>>>

Jharkhand: Politics of Development and Identity, The Sunday Tribune 13-Oct-02

THE publication of the book could hardly have been more timely, with the newly created state of Jharkhand receiving the attention of the civil society as the domicile issue hangs fire, igniting ethnic violence. The book enables us to understand this simmering identity politics, often articulated in the form of radicalism, by analysing the evolution and transformation of the Jharkhandi identity over the past half century. >>>