The writing of social history in India has come full circle since Dr. Tapan Raychaudhuri’s pioneering Bengal Under Akbar and Jahangir (1953). In his Preface Dr. Raychaudhuri had defined the scope of social history, after G.M. Trevelyan, as ‘history with the politics left out’. In the 1969 edition of his book the author set aside Trevelyan’s ‘incorrect defini¬tion’ and replaced it with an ‘investigation of historical communities by the methods of social anthropology and sociology’.
The period between the end of the Second World War and the achievement of indepen¬dence by India has not so far received the attention of historians to the extent that it deserves. Both in terms of British imperial policy in India and of the Indian peoples’ struggle for freedom, these last two years before independence are of great importance.
‘India within the Ganges’ was the beautiful name Euro¬peans gave to our India to distinguish it from various other Indias, vague and unknown, lying somewhere yonder in their conception. It is the slow, long drawn-out process of focussing on this India on map-sheets and of bringing the representation of the earth and soil of this region into approximation with reality that Susan Gole has reconstructed with remarkable facility. Cartography can hard¬ly be a subject holding a non¬technical readership in thrall.
The Renaissance deified man. The development that divested God of his powers also endow¬ed the individual with god¬like attributes. An ideal emerged of the individual-as-hero, a man self-sufficient, and unfettered by obligations that formally bound the man of the middle ages to his society and to his representatives. In reality of course, only a sec¬tion of society could aspire to realize the grandiose ideal.
Works on Marxism are legion; those on Marxism and philosophy only somewhat less so. Does Callinicos have anything new to say on the subject or any interesting or illuminating interpretation to offer. That this is not only possible but necessary has to be asserted against all those who see no point in what they consider canonical exegesis. Marxism is not yet a spent force and new conditions of existence allow and necessitate different vantage points from which to applause the past.
‘Ivan Turgenevs whole aspect and temperament was of a larger and manlier kind than I have ever yet encounter¬ed in a scribbler’, Henry James reported to his aunt. These qualities shine forth in A.V. Knowles’s new edition of Turgenev’s letters. Turgenev was attacked by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky for his liberal humanist views, condemned for decades to a frustrating liaison with a married woman, and exiled to his estate by the capricious edicts of the Tsar.