In 1921, the 10th Congress of the Bolshevik Party succeeded in choking a young voice—the voice of the Workers’ Opposition, a small group inside the party which called for direct control of workers over industries, introduction of a more egalitarian policy in wages, freedom of criticism for the workers, fight against bureaucratic party administra¬tors and recognition of the creative initiative of the proletariat.
Vikram Seth has emerged as one of the most significant authors of Indian fiction in English. He is also the most versatile – he is a poet, travel writer, playwright and novelist – and has won major awards in each category. He has a cosmopolitan identity having lived in England, California and China as a student.
Two phenomena have char¬acterized the Indian rural scene since the ’70s—peasant militancy and violence against Harijans. The Delhi University Political Science Association felt the urgency of the need to evolve a new Political Economy to meet the challenge posed by the failure of existing social science theory, both Marxist as well as non-Marxist, to satisfactorily explain the twin phenomena.
Another reviewer, Profes¬sor A.H. Wilson, has predicted that this work ‘of seasoned scholarship’ by K.M. de Silva, whom he has dubbed ‘the wizard of Peradeniya’, ‘will for many years to come be the last word on the subject’, and hoped that ‘there will be more detailed interpretation of men and affairs from so magisterial a pen’. The term has doubtless not been used in a pejorative sense, but wizardry has no place in a work of seasoned scholarship or in the repertoire of a serious historian. Sancti¬fying myth is another matter.
C.D. Narasimhaiah is more of an institu- tion than anything else. It is not easy to come across ‘a mere village shopkeeper’s son’ (p.11) going on in the 1940s for an English Tripos at Cambridge, finding F. R. Leavis as his Tutor there, getting nominated by him for a Rockefeller Fellowship to Princeton, making acquaintances with R. P. Blackmur
There is no better way in which a reviewer can introduce this book than by quoting Indira Gandhi’s observation in the foreword: ‘Subhas Kashyap’s book gives the non-specialist reader easy access to the original material and Jawaharlal Nehru’s ideas and words’. As to giving easy access to Nehru’s words, Indira Gandhi is dead right: out of 397 pages, 288 pages contain excerpts from Nehru’s writings and speeches.
If the history of science and technology in India has yet to produce a work of the stature of Joseph Needham’s writings on China, there have nevertheless been a number of recent publications, each taking re¬search on the theme a step forward: P.K. Gode’s three volumes on Studies in Indian Cultural History, published between 1961 and 1969, the Indian National Science Academy’s A Concise History of Science and India (New Delhi, 1971), M.G. Dikshit’s History of Indian Glass, (Bombay, 1968), and somewhat more re¬cently, Claude Alvares’ Homo Faber: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West, 1500-1972 (New Delhi, 1979), to name only a few.
The theme of this book is essentially a discussion of what is often referred to as the second urbanization of India, the first being the rise of the cities of the Indus valley and its environs in the third millennium B.C. Thakur’s study is substantially that of the Ganges valley and covers a period of about a thousand years, from the mid-first millennium B.C. to the latter half of the first millen¬nium A.D. There is little of substance on the contemporary cities of the far north or of the south of the subcontinent.
I heard someone at a party remark of this book, ‘It is superb as long as Mulk keeps himself out of it.’ On reading it, I find I don’t agree at all: Dr. Anand has nothing to add to, and no fresh insights to bring to our considerable knowledge of the Bloomsbury Group, gleaned from their voluminous diaries, journals, letters and biographies; there is probably no other period in the history of English litera¬ture so thoroughly documented or so well served by its biogra¬phers and editors.