NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE 288 South Asia Research Vol. 36 (2): 278–297 home guards and midwives. Till now, there is not much literature in South Asia on the experience and learning of these categories of women in such public positions. Notably, Obeng does not restrict his observations to formal appointments alone. In both these chapters substantial portions are dedicated to understanding how women pursuing very informal (and hence normally invisible) roles also exercise notions of power. In these sections, case studies from Pakistan and Bangladesh bring to the fore the creative ways in which women from fairly conservative rural communities are exercising agency in order to embrace the values of gender equality. Although the chapters are exhaustive in terms of highlighting several domains where women’s shakti is pronounced, in many instances readers are led unto the periphery of comprehensive understanding but no more, leaving them with a sense of incompleteness. We clearly need to know more still, and there is much work to be done in this field. This book is an important contribution for the insight it provides into the veritable manner in which power plays out, placing in context the theories surrounding the concept of power. The nature of translations in the book reveals that possibly a translator or interpreter was used at the time of interviews. Although in no position to say anything about the translations from Kannada, being a native speaker of Marathi, I noticed that a fair number of the quotes for which the original Marathi was provided were inaccurate, though not completely off the mark, providing more or less a gist of what respondents actually said in their mother tongue. However, the limitations of data gathered with the use of translators and interpreters are appropriately understood, I believe, by the relevant audience of this book, namely, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists. This book would, however, also be a useful resource for those involved in development work, as the case studies effectively outline the extent and nature of impact of interventions that aim to increase the visibility of women in public spaces. Kalindi Kokal Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (London: Hurst & Company, 2013), viii + 278 pp. DOI: 10.1177/0262728016638622 In today’s world of nation states, the distinct pedigrees of independent polities are often organised into two foundational trajectories: states whose traditions of collective belonging are derived from, or adjusted to, the conventional mythology of European nationalism, with its focus on (the presumed bonds of ) ‘blood and soil’, and states, such as settler societies, that somehow diverge from it. In Muslim Zion, Devji provides a seething analysis of Pakistan’s foundational narratives, guided by a bold claim that this state was founded on a radical, and quintessentially modern, demand for ‘the forcible exclusion of blood and soil in the making of a new homeland for India’s diverse and