As part of a burgeoning industry in national security, defense, and terrorism studies in federal and private defense and homeland security–related circles, but also, increasingly, in certain “Western” colleges and universities, Praeger Security International (PSI) provides, according to its website, “timely material on international security, including defense and foreign policy, strategy, regional security, military history, and terrorism” (http://psi.praeger.com/). PSI links publishing to online security content through Praeger Security International Online, which bills itself as “a one-stop source for information on terrorism and security, covering regional security, humanitarian and peace operations, weapons of mass destruction, armed forces, intelligence, military history, defense and national security, and military affairs.” As such, PSI books such as Janet M. Powers's Kites over the Mango Tree: Restoring Harmony between Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat are targeted to “comprehensive collections serving serious scholars in politics and government.”

While Powers's book might be sought after by national security, defense, and terrorism studies audiences who are hungry for nationalistic Hindu and Islamic historiographies across India and Gujarat, its currency beyond these spheres might be problematic. Powers, a professor emerita of interdisciplinary and women's studies at Gettysburg College, provides valuable contemporary ethnographic accounts of nongovernmental organizations in Gujarat that have, since 1992, been working toward diffusing nationalistic and communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims. However, these worthwhile contributions seem obscured in a protracted account of historical Hindu–Muslim antipathy on the wider Asian Subcontinent.

Powers's own interests in literature, women's and peace studies, and mediation and justice activism (according to her personal website) appear, in this book, to be overshadowed by her rather stark reading of a South Asian Hindu nationalistic history as over and against an Islamic nationalistic history. While this sort of bifurcated reading might play well to many PSI devotees, it might prove dissatisfying to wider audiences seeking a more nuanced reading of Hindu–Muslim communal difficulties and successes in India, and especially in Gujarat. The book begins with a foreword by Cedric Prakash, in which he follows Powers's argument that the 2002 violence in Gujarat was not a spontaneous uprising, but was “embedded in the deep history of the Indian subcontinent” (p. ix). The foreword sets the scene for Powers as she proceeds to dissect this “deep history” of Indian and Gujarati identities, which she argues is rooted in “Hindu-Muslim encounters” (p. 26) that date not just to early peaceful exchanges between Indians and Arab traders (seventh, eighth, and ninth century), but also to military incursion after military incursion by Muslim leaders, beginning with Mahmud of Ghazni (eleventh century) as “the idol breaker,” through Alla ud-Din Khalji (thirteenth century) and Humayun (sixteenth century) to, of course, Aurangzeb (seventeenth century) and beyond. Occasional and brief obeisance is paid to canned alternative histories of what she calls “Hindu-Muslim Syncretism” (p. 31) under emperors such as Akbar (sixteenth century), but the overarching early concern for Powers remains the political difficulties between Muslims as invaders and Hindus as subjugated resistance. Employing somewhat dated historiographic methods and largely reproducing somewhat simplified politicized turns of phrase, she goes on to all too familiar arguments that see increasingly ossified Hindu and Muslim identities as having further diverged beneath hegemonic colonial rulers who, under a despised Christian aegis, made “adjustments” (p. 43) to socioeconomic and caste relationships.

All of this, for Powers, sets the scene for two camps in twentieth-century Indian communal politics: (1) those nationalists—among them Hindus such as Advani and Muslims such as Jinnah—who shaped perceived age-old ineluctable differences into partition politics, or (2) those pluralists—among them Hindus such as Gandhi and Muslims such as Azad—who shaped perceived age-old commonality into anticolonial satyagraha and Khilafat politics. Powers then advances theories of how postpartition politics became increasingly nationalistic, having bifurcated Hindu identities into various Sangh saffron movements, such as the BJP, VHPm and RSS and Muslim identities into various “Islamic Revivalist” (p. 92) movements, such as—and here Powers conflates several organizations—the Deobandis, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and others (p. 93ff.). Here Powers boldly claims that much of the funding for these nationalistic movements can be linked to Gujarati “motel and convenience store” (p. 103) business owners and VHP activities in the United States. With this nationalistic context in place, Powers finally presents her valuable ethnographic accounts of various nongovernmental organizations that are working to stem nationalistic communal violence in Gujarat and wider India. Even if it is overly reliant on essentialist historiographies initially, here, Powers's firsthand accounts shine as she describes the activities of organizations such as the Self-Employed Women's Association and the Gujarat Harmony Project, among many others. Her passionately written and valuable final two chapters, which contain her ethnographic experiences with these human rights organizations in Gujarat, one wonders, might have proven more valuable to a wider audience had this work been published through an institution beyond Praeger, whose interests might rely less on stark bifurcating nationalistic historiographies and more on Gandhi-inspired pluralistic models of Hindu–Muslim histories and cultures.