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Region, Culture, and Politics in India
Ed Rajendra Vora & Anne Feldhaus. Rs 795.

In recent decades the South Asian subcontinent has seen an often-contentious nationalistic and regionalistic splintering which sometimes leads to bloody consequences. In India the process of transforming conceptual and cultural regions into administrative and political units continues to this day, with ever-more-refined regional identities becoming the basis for carving up larger states into smaller ones. For centuries, there have also been many regions in India that provide a framework for people’s cultural lives without attaining political salience.

This book presents a multidisciplinary study of the processes through which regions and regional consciousness get formed and maintained in India. The 14 essays brought together here examine various modes through which people in different parts of India express, create, and foster a sense of their area as a distinct, coherent, and significant unit to which they belong in some important way. The modes examined include language, oral and written literature, festivals, pilgrimages, everyday rituals, domestic wall-calendars, caste identity, religious identity, and political movements.

The contributors to the volume belong to a wide variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: linguistics, literature, folklore, history, religious studies, sociology, and political science. The regions they discuss range in location from Kerala to Punjab, and in size from a few square kilometres of the Sringeri area to the whole Hindi-speaking region of north-India, with two essays focusing on a single city each.

Last rights
by Barbara Nadel.
Headline. Pages 337. £2.99

October 1940: The London borough of West Ham is suffering another night of horrific bombing and undertaker Francis Hanock is caught in the chaos. A man lurches towards him through the rubble screaming about being stabbed but there is no visible wound and francis dismisses him as a mad man until the man’s body turns up at his funeral parlour, two days later. Suspecting foul play, Francis feels compelled to discover what really happened that night—but as he finds himself pitted against violent thugs, an impenetrable network of lies and his own fragile sanity, he realises that there are people who want the truth to stay dead and buried.

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