About Us
With the launch of its monthly review, the New Delhi Review of Books intends to revive the lost art of reviewing books. The New Delhi Review of Books began with this plain problem: India produces formidable work on her history, her constitution, her economy, her courts and her politics. Much of that work is met with reviews that restate the contents, commend the author’s diligence, and stop. Whether the argument holds is left for somebody else to ask. Usually nobody does. We ask that question and go beyond.
What We Publish
There is no defined number of reviews each month; we would rather run a single piece worth reading than pad an issue to look full. Every piece joins the archive on our website and is followed by a whole issue.
To sustain such conversations, we read across politics, history, economics, law, literature, and culture, and across centuries as readily as across seasons. A book published forty years ago can matter more to an argument now than one published last month. What we look for is a work with something at stake in it for understanding and building India.
What a Review Must Do
Every piece we publish is asked to do three things. First, identify what the book is fundamentally arguing, stripped of the author’s framing. Second, assess whether that argument holds, whether its evidence bears the weight placed on it, whether its premises are honestly stated. And third, locate the work within the wider intellectual and political landscape of India.
Our readers are people who make decisions and people who study them. We write for readers who will follow a developed argument to its end, who are not flattered with summary.
Why a Review of Books
An archive of serious reading accumulates into something larger than the sum of its issues. Frameworks and vocabularies enter common use because somebody applied them rigorously and kept applying them. Reviewers learn to read closely, which is rarer than it sounds and stays with a person for life. Over years, a review of books becomes the record of how India argued with herself.
New Delhi Review of Books is an initiative of the Centre for Studies in Indian Social Systems (CSISS), hosted at the Nation First Policy Research and Change (NFPRC) Foundation. Its editorial operations and decisions remain entirely independent of the Foundation.
