Saturday, March 20, 2021

Fwd: PPR'S REVIEW OF THE BOOK " REBEL SULTANS" BY MANU.S.PILLAI

         REBEL SULTANS BY MANU.S.PILLAI;PUBLISHED BY JUGGERNAUT;PAGES 299 ; PRICE R699/-


                         **************************

Who is Manu Pillai?.

The following story could be apocryphal but has all the trappings of truth!.

Manu Pillai was the blue-eyed boy and Chief of Staff of Shashi Tharoor. Once he put up a note to his boss on "Boating on the River Oxus" which included a dozen sesquipedelian words---            the Boss Shashi had not heard and that was the last Pillai was heard of in Shashi's Office. 

Three years ago, Manu Pillai wrote an outstanding book--"The Ivory Throne" a fascinating feast of contemporary history.It is a remarkable amalgam  of history and anecdotage  about Kerala society over three centuries .This book fetched for him the coveted Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar.

Pillai is back with another explosive bang !

His latest book is "Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji".The volume catapults

Deccan to the centre of our attention – where it belongs.

Pillai begins the book by alluding to the Deccan as a cosmopolitan space: 'Fine horses bred in Iraq trotted along the Deccan's roads, even as the region's elite succumbed to the sartorial fancies of their friends in Iran. Travellers from lands as diverse as Burma and France descended upon the Deccan's dusty plains'.

Pillai highlights the Deccan as important not only because its dynasties predate the ascension of the Mughals and the Marathas, but also because its court cultures force us to recalibrate our understanding of the early modern world.

Pillai presents a history of the five Deccani Sultanates, together with the Vijayanagar Empire, the Marathas, the Mughals and other dynasties with which they came into contact. He weaves a thrilling account of a historically significant and somewhat ignored area and arena in the history of South Asia . He goes beyond recounting a bland narrative of peaceful coexistence and cultural interchange between Hindus and Muslims. Concentrating on Persian and European encounters with the Sultanates, Pillai amply proves the commanding and cultural significance of the region in the early modern world.

Pillai throws a flood of light on the lacuna in the pre-Maratha histories of the Deccan. His area of study is from Alauddin Khilji's victory over the Yadavas in 1296 to the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. 

The book concentrates on the four most significant Sultanates—the Bahmanis, Adil Shahis, Nizam Shahis and Qutb Shahis. We have an analysis of the origin of the Bahmani Sultanate and its rivals. Pillai explores the role of the Bahmani and Vijayanagar kingdoms capping it with a recounting of the Sultanates' collective defeat of the Vijayanagar Empire. The focus shifts thereafter to the Adil Shahi, Nizam Shahi and Qutb Shahi kingdoms, portraying the impressive players in the drama—such as : Ibrahim Adil Shah II, Malik Ambar and several of the Qutb Shahs.

Pillai does not fail to portray the cultural and religious segment of the region's history . Eloquent is the chapter 'Saraswati's Son', which focuses on Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur. Pillai is the master of  the comprehensive arena of secondary literature.

Considerable importance has been given by Pillai to Hindu–Muslim relations in the Deccan, an important wing of Deccan's tortuous history. According to him while Hindu–Muslim rivalries existed, 'the world was really not perceived in terms of religious or communal divide'. Pillai not only mentions shared styles of art, architecture and dress between Hindu and Muslim dynasties but also highlights less appreciated areas of exchange between religious communities such as the shared Sufi and Virashaiva devotional site at Ahmad Shah's tomb. Pillai displays perfect comprehension the early modern Deccan as a region where interreligious differences hardly appeared as unalloyed Hindu–Muslim divide. He interprets an inscription commissioned by the Vijayanagar King, Bukka Raya, which lists 'the Turks' alongside other adversaries such as the Hindu rulers of Orissa and the Tamil Colas. He notes that the inscription depicts the Sultans 'as respected political rivals (of Vijayanagar), just like the other Hindu powers of the peninsula'. Pillai's analysis of tensions between Jains and Sri Vaishnavas at Bukka Raya's court also highlights that major religious disputes did not take always place between Hindus and Muslims.

Persian and European encounters with the Deccan had a lot of influence on the cultural and political importance of the region.

While the names of Muhammad Qutb Shah and Ibrahim Adil Shah have slipped into oblivion, at the turn of the seventeenth century, the courts of Golconda and Bijapur attracted the attention of travellers from around the world. Pillai emphasizes the cosmopolitan culture of the Deccan in every chapter of the book, from Ibrahim Adil Shah II's coveted collection of Chinese porcelain to Tavernier's likening of Qutb Shahi Golconda to Paris. The book underscores the need to turn our attention to the Deccani Sultanates not merely as predecessors of the Mughals and Marathas, but as important cultural and historical actors in their own right.

Pillai's use of scholarship from a range of fields and his inclusion of many sources from the last ten years gives the work a distinct calibre. The book is an outstanding contribution to the literature on an important and understudied period in South Asian history from which many will benefit.

His bibliography is extensive and sophisticated, and the book is simply un-putdownable.It lists almost  150 books along with  50 articles, and the author humbly declares  that like Sir Isaac Newton that he "stands on the shoulders of many generations of scholars."

According to Pillai "To know India, then, we must know the Deccan. But to tell all its tales together is a daunting proposition – the land is rich, and a thousand pages would not suffice." Instead, we get a fast-paced roller-coaster ride, exploding with "remarkable men and women who all claimed for themselves the esteem of posterity."

The  praiseworthy portion of the book is the opening chapters that chronicle the Bahmani and Vijayanagar kingdoms – which has in popular lore been recast as India's holy crusade between Hinduism and Islam. There are three points here. The first is that what we today call Hindu was often recorded and recognised as "Brahmin" in those times– reflecting not just the near-hegemony of a community with control over textual records but also how underlining which communities we subconsciously refer to when we use the composite category of Hindu today.

The second is the nature of Hindu-Muslim conflict. Pillai narrates several instances where there was no so-called Hindu unity in favour of Vijayanagar, or when the Muslim rulers of Bahmani allied with Hindu kings in Andhra and Odisha. The book, however, admits some Muslim rulers did desecrate temples, and the barbarism of Hindu kings triggered wars with Muslim rulers, acknowledging that it is possible to cherry pick these incidents to re-construct a narrative of religious crusade.

The third lies in the choice of the kingdom we use to represent Hinduism today. Why does the modern right-wing use the Vijayanagar kingdom, where Brahmins had near-outright grip on power, as a example of Hindu power, but not the older and equally remarkable Kakatiya kingdom that drew its rulers from diverse communities, many of whom hailed from lower castes and called themselves sons of the soil? How different would Hinduism look today if the Kakatiyas became the model instead of the Brahmin power?

Rebel Sultans is a remarkable, daring book,  worth reading again and again.

PPR

24/03/2021.


Saturday, March 13, 2021

Fwd: PPR'S REVIEW OF THE BOOK " THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM IN INDIA" BY H.R.BHARDWAJ


The Criminal Justice System in India by

 H.R.Bhardwaj ; Published by Konark Publishers

     Pvt Ltd ; 234 ; Price Rs. 500/-

********************************


The author of the book under review Shri H.R. Bharadwaj was the Governor of Karnataka and Kerala . He had the second longest tenure in Law Ministry since independence. He introduced the concept of rural courts. He was a crusader for improvement in judicial infrastructure and computerisation of law courts. He introduced wide-ranging reforms in the field of legal aid, legal education and improvement in service conditions of Supreme Court and High Court judges.


Bhardwaj's zest for civil liberties and human rights found expression when he was senior counsel of the Supreme Court of India and earlier as a counsel for Uttar Pradesh. He served as Minister of State in the Ministry of Law and Justice from five years . He became Minister of State in the Ministry of Planning and Programme Implementation and Minister of State in the Ministry of Law, Justice and Company Affairs . He he served as Union Cabinet Minister of Law and Justice.


It is universally observed that crimes occur in every society. The litmus test of a society lies in the way its criminal justice system functions. Unfortunately, the standards of criminal justice system have been on a decline in India and efforts have been made for upholding the values cherished by the country's judicial system.


The Criminal Justice System in our country underscores the fact that the judges and lawyers have a duty towards society and their integrity and legal acumen determine the quality of justice. The State has a right to do what is fair and just while ensuring the rightful claims of citizens .


This book has thoroughly analysed the various arms of judiciary and presented the criminal justice system in a refreshingly new perspective with focus on human rights and civil liberties.


India is going through testing times with its criminal justice system. Due to some of the redundant provisions in the judicial system, human rights are gravely compromised in the country. Bhardwaj's book gives an insight into what led to the present scenario and he argues why the legitimate claims of citizens cannot be overlooked in a democratic nation. He also focuses on the role played by judges and lawyers in upholding the highest standards of the judiciary.


As Law Minister, he introduced gram 'nyayalayas', or rural courts, but it was his political handling of certain other cases such as de-freezing of Ottavio Quattrochi's bank accounts, made famous in the Bofors case, that made the headlines.

The Supreme Court of India gave the meaning to Life and Liberty during the last 75 years of Independence. However, penal laws, arbitrary arrests, faulty and biased investigations, illegal confessions continue unabated. The criminal justice is at a considerably low ebb.

Justices Bhagwati and Krishna Iyer invested new meaning to law. According to them, "Bail is the rule and refusal is an exception". The rule has been diluted and no bail has become the rule.

The book is a classic review of several connected topics such as the working of the police, the public prosecutor, the magistrates and other courts, the condition of prisons and the remand homes.

The legal profession will have to play a more dynamic role in the shaping of a modern legal and judicial system.

Bhardwaj provides a historical analysis of Justice according to Dharma, the Islamic system of Justice which came to India in the eighth century, the British system of Law, the Indian Penal Codes and the Constitution of India.

The book teems with case laws and quotes from several legal luminaries like M.C.Setalvad—who believed that the system is workable with suitable amendments. 

Bhardwaj  calls for a radical restructuring of the the three pillars of the judicial systems,---

1).The Laws—substantive and procedural.

2).Police,Prosecutors, Courts, Prisons.

3).Lawyers, Judges and Probation Officers. 

The major problems of criminal justice arise out of the faulty investigations. Reasons for this are lack of proper investigation by the police, lack of public co-operation. The legal profession also has an important part to play in ensuring criminal justice.


A brief history of the Police in India is given---analysing the several police commissions, the Law Commissions. A cogent analysis is given of the crucial role of Public Prosecutors and Attorney Generals.

The Courts are established to provide redress for grievances and to satisfy the demands of justice. They are the arbiters of disputes between private parties and between the State and the citizens.

Bhardwaj emphasises that reporting by the Press of judgements and sentences should be fair and accurate.

Discussing the subject of Bail Bhardwaj says—Law relating to bail has not progressed much in India and it remains a matter of judicial discretion.

Criminal justice in a welfare society must be speedy and inexpensive. Judgements of Supreme Court point out that they fail to provide the desired assistance to courts in dispensation of criminal justice.

A new jurisprudence of human rights is being evolved in India slowly but steadily. It is now recognised that human rights are fundamental values, which are being incorporated in the laws of democratic countries.

This book is a very valuable guide to all students of law, members of the legal fraternity—even the common man interested in the nation's progress.

P.P.Ramachandran.

14/03/2021.




Saturday, March 6, 2021

Fwd: PPR'S REVIEW OF THE BOOK "THE EVERYTHING STORE" BY BRAD STONE



          

The Everything Store—Jeff Bezo and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone ; Published by Tranworld Publishers ; Pages 464; Price Rs,499/---

                        *************************

Jeff Bezos is the man who turned a crazy-at-the-time idea to sell books over the Internet into a $ 1.67 trillion behemoth.

Bezos announced recently that he will step down as CEO of Amazon. His move will enable him to spend more time on other interests and find ways to spend a personal fortune that thanks to Amazon's booming stock price is now about 195 billion.

Bezos is called The Gilded Age Moghul. What makes Bezos tick is graphically revealed in the book under review written by Brad Stone.

It is the definitive story of Amazon.com, one of the most successful companies in the world, and of its driver, brilliant founder, Jeff Bezos.

 Amazon.com began by delivering books through the mail. But the visionary founder, was not happy with being a mere bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the Everything Store, offering unlimited choice and attractive convenience at potentially disruptive low prices. For achieving this , he created a corporate culture of reckless ambition and utmost secrecy .

The author of the book Brad Stone was guaranteed access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth account of life at Amazon. Compared to competitor innovators -- Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg -- Bezos is an essentially private man. But he rests on his restless pursuit of new markets, pushing Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionised manufacturing. The Everything Store is the  revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we buy and read.

In the summer of 1955, Bezos was working in a basement alongside his wife, packing paperbacks into boxes. Today, he is perhaps the 21st century's most important tycoon: one who finances space missions and newspapers for fun, and receives adulation from Warren Buffett and abuse from Donald Trump. Amazon, his firm, is not merely a bookseller but a digital conglomerate worth $1.3trn that consumers love, politicians love to hate, and investors and rivals have learned never to bet against. Now the pandemic has fuelled a digital surge that shows how important Amazon is to ordinary life in America and Europe, because of its crucial role in e-commerce, logistics and cloud computing . In response to the crisis, Bezos has returned to day-to-day management. However the world's fourth-most valuable firm faces many problems: a fraying social contract, financial bloating and re-energised competition. The digital surge began with online "pantry-loading" as consumers bulk-ordered toilet rolls and pasta. Amazon's first-quarter sales rose by 26% year on year. When stimulus cheques arrived in mid-April Americans let rip on a broader range of goods. Two rivals, eBay and Costco, say online activity accelerated in May. There has been a scramble to meet demand, with Bezos doing daily inventory checks once again. Amazon has hired 175,000 staff, equipped its people with 34m gloves, and leased 12 new cargo aircraft, bringing its fleet to 82. Undergirding the e-commerce surge is an infrastructure of cloud computing and payments systems. Amazon owns a chunk of that, too, through AWS, its cloud arm, which saw first-quarter sales rise by 33%. One question is whether the digital surge will subside. Shops are reopening. Yet the signs are that some of the boom will last, because it has involved not just the same people doing more of the same. In America "silver" customers in their 60s have set up digital-payment accounts. Many physical retailers have suffered fatal damage. Dozens have defaulted or are on the brink. In the past year the shares of warehousing firms, which thrive on e-commerce, have outperformed those of shopping-mall landlords by 48 percentage points. All this might appear to fit the script Bezos has written over the years in his letters to shareholders, which are now pored over by investors as meticulously as those of Buffett. He argues that Amazon is in a perpetual virtuous circle in which it spends money to win market share and expands into adjacent industries. From books it leapt to e-commerce, then opened its cloud and logistics arms to third-party retailers, making them vast new businesses in their own right. Customers are kept loyal by perks such as Prime, a subscription service, and Alexa, a voice-assistant. By this account, the new digital surge confirms Amazon's inevitable rise. That is the view on Wall Street, where Amazon's shares reached an all-time high on June 17th. Yet from his ranch in west Texas, Bezos has to wrestle with those tricky problems. Some common criticisms of Amazon are simply misguided. Unlike Google it is not a monopoly. Last year Amazon had a 40% share of American e-commerce and 6% of all retail sales. There is little evidence that it kills jobs. Studies of the "Amazon effect" suggest that new warehouse and delivery jobs offset the decline in shop assistants, and the firm's minimum hourly wage of $15 in America is above the median for the retail trade.

Amazon's second problem is bloating. As Bezos has expanded into industry after industry, his firm has gone from being asset-light to having a heavy balance. Today it has $104bn of plant, including leased assets, not far off the $119bn of its old-economy rival, Walmart. As a result, returns excluding AWS are puny and the pandemic is squeezing margins in e-commerce further. Bezos says the firm can become more than the sum of its parts by harvesting data and selling ads and subscriptions. So far investors have taken this on trust. But the weak e commerce margins make it harder for Amazon to spin off AWS. This would get regulators off its back and liberate AWS, but would deprive Amazon of the money-machine that funds everything else. Bezos's last worry is competition. He has long said that he watches customers, not competitors, but he must have noticed how his rivals have been energised by the pandemic. Digital sales at Walmart, Target and Costco probably doubled or more in April, year on year. Independent digital firms are thriving. If you create a stock market clone of Amazon lookalikes, including Shopify, Netflix and ups, it has outperformed Amazon this year. In much of the world regional competitors rule, not Amazon; among them are Mercado Libre in Latin America, Jio in India and Shopee in South-East Asia. China is dominated by Alibaba,jd.com and brash new contenders like Pinduoduo. Imitation is the sincerest form of capitalism. Bezos's vision of a world that shops, watches and reads online is coming true faster than ever. But the job of running Amazon has become no easier, even if it no longer involves packing boxes.

The book is based on 300 interviews, as well as the author's fifteen years of reporting for Newsweek, the New York Times,  and Businessweek.It is at once a deftly crafted biography of both Amazon, the company, and Jeff Bezos, the man. Stone's book takes the story forward and he enriches what is known with new details and testimony, weaving together an immense amount of material into a readable, compelling account of a complex, dynamic company and its inspired founder.

                                       

                                                          

   P.P.Ramachandran.

7/3/2021.



Saturday, February 27, 2021

Fwd: PPR'S REVIEW OF THE BOOK----TRIALS,TRIBULATIONS AND TRIUMPHS T.K.OOMMEN



       I have pleasure in forwarding my review of the  book " Trials,Tribulations and Triumphs " by T.K.Oommen.

Do read and respond.

P.P.Ramachandran.

28/02/2021.

*********************************************************

                                     


Trials, Tribulations and Triumphs by T.K.Oommen;

 Published by Konark Publications ;Pages 304 ; 

Price Rs.695/-

                               *******************

A popular Sanskrit verse enumerates the Best of

 Flowers, Cities, Deities and Men as follows.

Pushpeshu Champa -Nagareshu Lanka 

Purusheshu Vishnu - Nrupareshu Rama .


If one were to include the Best of Sociologists 

the verse would read as under---

Pushpeshu Champa -Nagareshu Lanka 

Purusheshu Vishnu - Nrupareshu Rama-

Samajashastre--Nipuna--Oommen Mahodayaha.


Oommen is recognised both in India and abroad as an outstanding sociologist. He is an author, educationist and Professor Emeritus at the Centre

 for the Study of Social Systems, J N U. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan for his services to

 the fields of education and literature. He has authored twenty books and edited ten books.


He took an M A in Sociology from Pune University and later he obtained PhD .

Oommen began his career as a lecturer in Social Sciences at Delhi University where he was the Reader in Sociology . He then moved to the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), JNU as Associate Professor and became the Professor of Sociology .

Oommen received many awards for his services to the social milieu which included Padma Bhushan.

The book under review--Trials, Tribulations and Triumphs is not exactly an autobiography but 

a work-o-graphy as it recapitulates the life of 

India's highly respected sociologists and 

recounts his professional journey. He was stigmatized in JNU because of his neutral political position. He was elected as the President of International Sociological Association, the only sociologist to occupy this position so far from

 Asia and Africa. His doctoral thesis demanded intense fieldwork carried out in several villages

 in Rajasthan. His monograph Doctors and Nurses: A Study in Occupational Role Structures, also 

involved fieldwork which was conducted during summer breaks for over six years. His pioneering fieldwork and methods of amassing data were valuable additions to social sciences in general

 and sociology in particular. His work on the  agrarian crises in Kerala—which transformed 

him into a 'reactionary' for Leftist intellectuals— encouraged him to generate primary data from the field. Oommen did outstanding work for his memorable book "From Mobilization to Institutionalization: The Dynamics of Agrarian Movement in 20th Century Kerala."

He adopted a 'clinical' approach and one that dispassionately studies 'social facts'.

This memoir is divided into three major sections, encompassing 23 chapters and five appendices

The first section, 'Torments of Sociology' with 12 chapters, recounts Oommen's adopting a new discipline and his crucial role in building the

 Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS)

 at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), his experience as a member of international 

sociological bodies, his academic accolades,

 his frustrating deal with the Indian Sociological Society and its administrative apparatus, and

 also the world of publishing. For many, great institutions are established through people's sacrifice and exemplary hard work. How political parties, faculties and student organisations 

affiliated to political parties subvert the democratic character of our academic institutions is well 

known. Student politics ipso facto need not be progressive. JNU has often been depicted as the campus with incredible, revolutionary, progressive student politics; however, it has had its own moments of unethical political acrobatics. 

Oommen points out,

By the 1990s, student politics became qualitatively different in JNU—the direct intervention of political parties in students' admissions became almost negligible. The emergence of a highly competitive political atmosphere within left politics in a way delegitimised and stigmatised such party interventions in student admissions .Highly 

inflated egos and vindictive personalities have damaged institutions significantly.

Our dream to bring in socialism has ended up strengthening bureaucratic regimentation and our desperation to establish a capitalist order has ushered in crony capitalism. Our institutions have unfortunately ended up promoting loyal disciples and replicating quasi-feudal values. It becomes abundantly clear that 'modern' institutions could

 not make us modern. This is certainly a more significant sociological problem than some of the manufactured crises.

Well known is the plight of students from 

vernacular medium and rural backgrounds in 

some of the highly elitist academic institutions .


The author's candid confessions and his own 

highly strenuous journey in these areas throws a flood of light on the mercilessly competitive world.

One chapter gives an insider's view of the 

progress of CESS over the years. The chapters 

on the World Congress of Sociology, provide interesting accounts of the author's role in them.

 The author recounts the inevitable contretemps

 and tensions . A few harsh comments of Oommen are worth recalling. "It is not uncommon in India

 that people relegate to the background a person's

achievements, if he or she has the requisite connections; "It seems to me that in India there

 are gurus and disciples, patrons and clients but

 not professionals and colleagues"

'Beyond Sociology'--the Second part--, deals with

 his other assignments. All the chapters will be useful for students of social sciences. The chapter on the global studies programme, offers a 

template as to how to develop a collaborative academic programme with overseas universities/institutions. This programme had 

great potential. A laudable contribution of 

Oommen is his commendable role in the Prime Minister's High-Level Committee or what is called 'Sachar Committee'. This committee's recommendations will be remembered for 

its long-term implications. The Sachar Committee report will remain a vital document for promoting 

the welfare of the largest religious minority—Muslims—in India. Similarly, the author's contributions in the Gujarat Harmony project and forays into social security studies would help 

young academics to conceptualise new ways of looking at socio-political crises of our times.

The third and final section of the volume contains four important speeches delivered by Oommen 

along with a list of his books, monographs and reports.

This memoir of an eminent Indian sociologist is

 not only a personal narration of his eventful academic journey, it also helps us understand 

some dimensions of the highly chequered 

trajectory of our higher education system, 

especially with regard to sociology. Establishing institutions requires a long-term vision with a missionary commitment coupled with profound scholarship in the chosen field. Oommen has

 always been an institution builder and a solid organisational man. This memoir, with its wide canvas, brings to the fore the story of a 

Nehruvian-liberal social scientist and his commitment towards building modern institutions. More importantly, it highlights how a man from a humble background from the southern tip of India with vernacular schooling ended up scaling the peaks of his chosen field. The book is a powerful political statement that people from the periphery

 too can make an enduring positive impact in 

India's ruthless hierarchical academia.

Pprof Damle wrote-- " I would not hesitate to call

 him 'Charvak of Indian Sociology'.He has been 

one of the most prolific,prodigious and productive scholars perhaps next only to Prof.G.S.Ghurye."

Bursting with racy anecdotes, the book provides insights into the functioning of the academic world 

through the discipline of sociology not only nationally but even globally. A world in which knowledge production and dissemination are becoming increasingly critical, the book also discusses the larger social and political context

 in which these activities are undertaken.

Written in a very lucid way, this book will be of interest to social scientists, scholars of media studies and general readers.

P.P.Ramachandran.

28/02/2021.