The book under review is the second in the series of books which form collections of articles presented at seminars in Oxford. The articles are prefaced by a very readable introduction on the history of Indian studies at Oxford.
This is a collection of papers on diverse themes drawing on Sanskrit language studies, religion, philosophy and anthro¬pology. They reflect the interests of a small group of scholars at Oxford and their students who are also trying to keep alive Indological studies at that university—a somewhat desperate attempt in view of the impending finan¬cial cuts in this area necessitated by the policies of Thatcherism. The rather cursory introduction to the history of Indian studies at Oxford, as the opening statement of the book, does little justice to what was once a major centre of research in Indian studies.
An experienced bureaucrat and field administrator with impeccable academic qualifications and scholarly inclinations, B.P. Singh, a Nehru Fellow and an IAS officer, has produced a book which ought to be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the North East—be he an administrator, a historian, a journa¬list, or just the disinterested administrator. Not for him any of the contemptible bon¬homie that the burra sahib of yore used to write of so affectionately in his memoirs.
The volume under review is neither a police manual on handling communal violence nor a mere policeman’s percep¬tion of the problem. Shri Rajagopal is a sensitive liberal who in his long and varied career never lost his sense of values, perspective and integrity when he donned the uniform of a police officer. While he was proud of his uniform and service, he never wavered in his belief that the means adopted by the police should stand the most rigorous scrutiny whatever be the ends.
This presentation in the Sage series in Neo-Corporatism is a product of the Fifth Summer School on Comparative European politics, of the European University in Florence held in June-July 1983. The subject was ‘Class Interests, Neo-Corporatism and Democracy’. This volume contains contributions by several scholars belonging to different disciplines like politics and political science, manage¬ment, industrial relations and sociology.
That the partition of the Punjab was a catastrophe for a vast multitude of the people is a familiar story. What is, how¬ever new in this well-researched work is the poignancy with which the trauma suffered by a physically broken and emo¬tionally shattered humanity has been brought out.
This book is a good example of the growing strengths and persistent weak¬nesses of South Asian thoughts on South Asia. To take the strengths first, the book adds one more to the growing list of titles of books about South Asia as a region. This list and its growth have been quite a remarkable phenomenon of the South Asian intellectual scene since the start of the 1980s.
‘Angaliyat’ in Gujarati means the child of the former husband, or more precisely, the child of the former husband who follows the mother, holding her finger (‘Angali’), when she weds another man. The title of the novel is suggestive of the love that unites the two main characters of the novel—Tiho, a weaver of a small village, Ratnapur, and Methi, a woman-of the same community from another village, Shilapur.
The politics of the newly independent African nations is typical of the post-colonial hangover worldwide. Having served as the milch cow of their colonial overlords, the impoverished countries are inextricably tangled in a web of inter¬national debt, both financial and moral. In many cases, self assertion was suppres¬sed and a neo-colonial legacy still con¬tinues.
Keki N. Daruwalla’s latest collection of poems reinforces his already substantial reputation as a poet. Containing twenty-six poems, the book takes the reader across almost as many landscapes. The descriptions of each comes with a deft mixing of the palette-hues.
This is an engaging book, and it only narrowly misses being an important one. By widening the scope of traditional ‘lit. crit’. concerns to include analyses of non-Western, non-literary, and even oral narrative forms, the contributors demonstrate how academic critics may engage in cultural politics through a process that the editors have described, simply thus: ‘(A) paper starts with theory, and spills over into life….’
1987
My earliest political education was from the poet Subrahmanya Bharati. A line of his that was for ever on my lips as a boy runs, in inadequate translation, thus:
‘You sure have heard, Oh: You wind, The stifled sobs of men and women, weary of limb and of spirit In the tea gardens of Sri Lanka.’