Arnold Zeitlin is managing director of Editorial Research & Reporting Associates (ERRA). He was a senior reporter for the Associated Press as well as Asia vice president for United Press International, and Asia center director for the Freedom Forum. He is an Advisory Board Member of South Asia Journal.
Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2019 Paperback, 245 PPS, $28, ISBN: 978 1 5036 0947-1 by Arnold Zeitlin 20 July 2020 Exploring the impact of the crowd on politics, especially in Bangladesh, where crowds are part of everyday life, is a dandy idea. Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury, who comes from Bangladesh and is an assistant
READ MOREBloomsburg Publishing, New York City 2019,Hardcover, 522 pgs, $35, ISBN: 978-1-63557-395-4 by Arnold Zeitlin 7 July 2020 Author William Dalrymple targets the British East India Company for its evil over two centuries in India. In the process, he unmasks a passel of crude, extravagant, feckless, greedy, reprobate rascals — the so-called indigenous rulers over
READ MOREThe Argumentative Indian: Writing on Indian History,Culture and Identity, by Amartya Sen, Farrar, Strass and Giroux, New York, 2005, 409 pp, Hardcover, $6.61 on Amazon, ISBN: 978-0-374-10583-9 by Arnold Zeitlin 6 July 2020 Polymath economist and Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen’s sentiments, written more than two decades ago about the land of his birth
READ MOREISBN-13: 978-1503611986 ISBN-10: 1503611981 by Maria Rashid Stanford University Press, Stanford California, paperback, 267 pgs. $28 by Arnold Zeitlin 30 June 2020 Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army, by Maria Rashid, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, paperback, 267 pgs. $28, ISBN: 978-1-5036-1198-6 Psychologist Maria Rashid has produced
READ MOREThant Myint-U November 12, 2019W. W. Norton & Company2020, 285 pp, Hardcover, $27.95 ISBN:9781324003304 by Arnold Zeitlin 20 June 2020 The Hidden History of Burma comes across more like the unhidden history of its author, Thant Myint-U. He pops up like Woody Allen’s cinematic human chameleon, Zelig, in many episodes in his country’s history since
READ MOREby Arnold Zeitlin 8 June 2020 Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, by Sarmila Bose, 240 pp, Hurst Publishers, London, April 2011, ISBN-13978 818 490 495 I first read Dead Reckoning in proof in March 2011, before its publication in April of that year in preparation for the launch of the book
READ MOREby Arnold Zeitlin 2 June 2020 The book, a compilation of essays by five writers and the poetry of one, serves as a reminder of how tragic the story of Kashmir has become since the book was published a decade ago. The Kashmir epic, for more than 70 years, a running sore between India
READ MOREby Arnold Zeitlin 11 May 2020 The profanity-laced conversations described in The Blood Telegram between a deeply prejudiced, obdurate President Richard Nixon and his remarkably sycophantic national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, as they coped with the events leading to the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, lead also to speculation about the conversations these days between
READ MOREby Arnold Zeitlin 15 April 2020 Reading Midnight’s Furies account of the 1947 partition of India through the prism of the year 2020 and the widening Hinduization of Narendra Modi’s India, one can summon sympathy for the obstinate villain of author Nisid Hajari’s piece — Muhammed Ali Jinnah. Jinnah, the revered Quad-i-Azam (Great
READ MOREIn his provocative, detailed description of the events that led to the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, author Srinath Ragavan is intent in upending myths and conventional and perceived wisdom. Early in his narrative of the state India found itself in after the Pakistan army cracked down in East Pakistan in March 1971,
READ MOREby Arnold Zetlin 1 April 2020 When Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India, and Ayub Khan, the president of Pakistan, signed the Indus Water Treaty in 1960, the agreement was hailed as a diplomatic triumph. The neighboring, hostile states, between two wars, one in 1948, the other in 1965, agreed on the management
READ MOREby Arnold Zeitlin 23 March 2020 The value of Saghir Iqbal’s brief thesis is its reflection of the Pakistan view of its nuclear arms competition with India. In this view, India went nuclear because “China is perceived as a long-term threat. Secondary to this threat perception is India’s ambition to achieve regional hegemony and global
READ MOREby Arnold Zeitlin 23 March 2020 Anonymous authors take the reader on a brisk 54-page journey focussed on the Punjab against the broader context from the Indus Valley or Harappan Civilization dating back to 3300 BCE to the region’s modern state divided between India and Pakistan. Along the way, we meet Alexander the Great who
READ MOREby Arnold Zetlin 23 March 2020 Author Harold A. Gould, whose long career as an anthropologist and student of India has spanned the independence of India and Pakistan and the first 60 years of their relationship with the United States, doesn’t think much of the intellectual capabilities of the men who shaped American policy toward
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