Ideas have a role in ordering cognition of our experiences. While studying a literate soci-ety as opposed to a primitive one (where one does not expect to encounter a great deal of reflective tradition and the superimposition of ideas of further reflection over the tradition), it is a challenging task to sort out a coherent and at the same time accept¬able grammar of both persis¬tent and syntagmatic struc¬tures. In the sphere of religion there is often a gap between the ideas of higher philo¬sophies and the religious prin¬ciples which guide the laity.
Six wise men of Hindoostan set out to examine the ele¬phant. Professor Alfred de Souza has gone one better, for he has produced the six men and one wiser woman to examine urban India and its problems. The result is the little book under review.
Industrialization is be¬lieved to be an agent of econo¬mic development and modern¬ization and to bring in pat¬terns of universalistic values. Sociologists like Kerr and his associates who believe in this thesis consider industrial¬ism as ‘a leveller of cultural and ideological differences bet¬ween societies’. Some other sociologists like Moore, Bendix, Feldman and Hoselitz are also somewhat in agreement with this logic, although they have ‘disagreements over the con¬vergence of societies towards a common structural form’ at the final stage.
Mamkoottam’s study (1982) of the Tata Workers Union (TWU) in Jamshedpur is a work of considerable value. It should be made widely-known both within the country and internationally. The TWU, based on the giant Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) works, presents the image of a model trade union within a model company in a model city.
From July 8, 1979, the day when Raj Narain initiated defections from the Janata Party, till August 22, 1979, when President Neelam Sanjiva Reddy dissolved the Lok Sabha by Presidential order, the Indian constitu¬tional democracy was continu¬ally betrayed in a variety of ways by tae very persons who had desecrated Rajghat with the promise of bringing the people of India a new constitutional dawn. Some of these people, now refurnished by the very democratic processes which they wantonly debased, are again preparing to lead the nation.
This book is an important contribution to the existing literature on the social and intellectual history of Indian Muslims in the nineteenth cent¬ury. It is a sympathetic account of the temporal and spiritual concerns of the Ulama, and attempts to show how these concerns were integrated into a unified world-view.
The publishers of Fontana Paperbacks have for some time past earned the gratitude of students of European history for bringing out a highly succ¬essful series on the history of Europe written by eminent scholars, and a companion series on the economic history of Europe under the editor¬ship of CM. Cipolla. To this they have added a third string, the Fontana History of War and European Society, under the general editorship of the noted social historian Geoffrey Best.
The Pictorial Guide is the Bombay Natural History Society’s (BNHS) centenary gift to Indian birdwatchers. For several years the book most widely used for field identification has been Salim Ali’s Book of Indian Birds (now in its ninth edition); more recently, Martin Woodcock’s well-illustrated Hand Guide to the Birds of the Indian Sub¬continent has also become popular.
Janet Rizvi’s Ladakh: Cross¬roads of High Asia has been prefaced as a background and introduction to Ladakh. It is divided into three main parts: the geographical, the past and the present. The book is based on her two-year stay (1976-78) in Ladakh where her husband was the Development Commis¬sioner. One is immediately struck by the intensity of her impressions and her abiding urge to assimilate as much as possible of that stark yet capti¬vating ampitheatre.
This is an uneasy book which disconcerts the reader with the narration of the history that ultimately culminated in the election tragedy of February 1983. It is moreover, a book which is very readable and lucid to the very last page. Published a year after the State Assembly Elections in Assam, it leaves little doubt of a possible repetition of the tragic episode in the context of the General Elections ex¬pected later this year.
Debra and Gopiballavpur are two regions in the district, of Midnapore in West Bengal which shot into prominence between 1969 and 1971 when armed bands of peasant guer¬illas backed by poor and land¬less villagers under the leader¬ship of CPI (ML) killed landlords, seized guns, took possession of the properties owned by the landlords, burnt the records of debts and set up revolutionary committees as alternative power structures.
Dr. Suresh Singh is one of the very few IAS officers with a scholastic bent of mind. In Bihar he also enjoys the reputation of being an able officer. As early as 1967 he had acquitted himself with dis¬tinction during the famine which hit all of Bihar, when he had held charge of Palamau, a particularly neglected and abused tribal district.