Book Reviews

Abstract

102 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXIV, No.4, Summer 2011 Book Reviews Edited by Nadia Barsoum SOUTH ASIA AND THE MIDDLE EAST RELIGION, CASTE AND POLITICS IN INDIA by Christophe Jaffrelot, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011, pp.802. Jaffrelot traces the transformation of India throughout the latter half of the 20th century, particularly in 1980 and 1990s. The traditional Nehruvian system is giving way to a less cohesive though more active India, a country that has become what it is against all odds. The author maps this tumultuous journey, exploring the role of religion, caste, and politics in determining the fabric of a modern demographic state. DOES THE ELEPHANT DANCE? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy by David M. Malone, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, pp.425. Malone seeks to survey the main features of contemporary Indian foreign policy. It identifies elements of Indian history relevant to the topic; examines the role therein of domestic politics and internal and external security challenges, and of domestic and international economic factors and in successive chapters delves into the specifics of India’s policy within its South Asian neighborhood, and with respect to china, the USA, West Asia (the Middle East), East Asia, Europe and Russia, and multilateral diplomacy. THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO GANDHI edited by Judith M. Brown and Anthony Parel, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011, pp. 273. Even today, six decades after his assassination in January 1948. Gandhi is still revered as the father of the Indian nation. This volume comprising essays by leading scholars in the field, traces his extraordinary story. The first part explores Gandhi’s transformation from a small-town lawyer into a skilled leader of civil resistance while the second section is devoted to his writings and his thinking. The final part reflects on Gandhi’s imageand on his legacy in India, the West and beyond. NIMOS’S WAR, EMMA’S WAR: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War by Cynthia Enloe, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2010 pp. 320. Enloe looks closely at the lives of eight women, four Iraquis and four Americans, during the war of Iraq. JAINS in the WORLD: Religious Values and Ideology in India by John E. Cort, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, pp.267 This book presents a detailed fieldwork-based study of the ancient Indian religion of Jainism. Drawing on field research in Northern Gujarat and on the study of both ancient Sanskrit and Prakrit and modern vernacular Jain religious literature, John Cort provides a rounded portrait of the religion as it is practiced today. SECULARIZING ISLAMISTS? Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-Da’wain Urban Pakistan by Humeira Iqtidar University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011 pp. 216. This work provides in-depth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama’at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama’at-ud-Da’wain , widely blamed for the November terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing her findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore. Iqtidar proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently opposed secularism. CONCEIVING CITIZENS: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, pp.306, Kashani-Sabet illustrates how debates over hygiene, reproductive politics, and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries explained demographic trends and put women at the center of nationalist debates. Exploring women’s lives under successive regime, she chronicles the hygiene campaigns that cast mothers as a custodians oh a healthy civilization ; debates over female education, employment, and political rights, government policies on contraception and population control; and tensions between religion and secularism. THE MAKING OF A MODERN KINGDOM: Globalization and Change in Saudi Arabia by Ann T. Jordan, Waveland Press Inc, Illinois 2011, pp. 190. This timely and relevant case study presents an unparalleled anthropological overview of Saudi Arabia, a nation state of prime importance , while it builds a vital understanding of globalization –The connectedness of the world. Jordan describes how a country with no modern education system and no modern technology or infrastructure developed all of these and became...