Monthly Archives: May 2018

The ice free Indian Ocean on which 3 continents abut occupies approximately 28 millions square miles which is l/5th of the world sea area and cradles the peri¬pheries of Africa and the Orient in two separate geo-political horse-shoes in which l/4th of the world’s population live and operate at different levels of political consciousness ranging from military dictatorships and monarchies to commu¬nism, tribalism, fundamentalism, and the world’s largest practising democracy.

One would certainly want to forget the memories of the three days when the nation was cantilevered on a slope. But time, this time, has not played its usual lenitive role and healed old wounds. The victims of the massacre following Mrs. Gandhi’s death may have now reconciled themselves to not seeing a loved face, or hearing a familiar voice, or feeling that reassuring presence but there is no numb¬ness there; instead there is mounting anger and humiliation.

The book is a collection of essays evolved during 1978-84 and carries a Foreword by Roger Garaudy.
Garaudy says science has been separated from wisdom and means have become independent of concern for the ends. There has been hypertrophy in the use of reason in relation to cause and effect, and atrophy in its use ‘from ends to ends, from intermediate ends to higher ends’ which gave direction to life.

Bonnie C. Wade is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California at Berkeley. She is also a member of the Council of the American Musicology Society. She is the author of several monographs and articles on Indian Music.

Manoj Das has to his credit, in more than one sense of that term, several col¬lections of short stories, published in England and the United States, and much acclaimed there. He won prizes for litera¬ture, not only in his state, Orissa, but also in the wider context of India—a Sahitya Akademi award as far back as 1972. One turns to his first novel therefore with great expectations, and one is not disap¬pointed.

Udayon Misra’s The Raj in Fiction: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Atti¬tudes Towards India is a study of Anglo-Indian literature of the years 1820 to 1870 in the light of prevailing British attitudes to India. It comes as the latest addition to a small but growing collection of studies on 19th century Anglo-Indian literature. Indeed there is today a serious interest in the literary discourse generated by the British colonization of India not only in the discourse of the present century but also in the obscure and for¬gotten literary texts of the 19th century in the works of writers like Captain Meadows Taylor, W.D. Arnold, Flora Annie Steel and Maud Diver.

The most important fact about this book is that it is the first comprehensive study of the subject. And its importance to the critical canon (a term King seems fond of) may remain just that. Which is a pity since King does not lack insights or an awareness of the situation in Indian English poetry. But after some meticulous research, King seems to have been forced to put together a book anyhow—and a book which would reflect the amount of research he had done. So we have a book where the ‘approach is historical, cul¬tural, sociological and literary’ as the author himself claims.

This is, by any definition, a rather remarkable book. It is part biography, part compendium, part chronology and part eulogy. It has been put together by a young swami after more than a decade of patient work during which he must have scoured every journal that had written anything about Swami Vivekananda during the days of his ascendance.

Both these books focus on the situation of poor women. Emphasizing oppression within the household, they highlight the trivialization and invisible status of women’s intrahousehold work. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the two books cover some ground in common.

This is a doctoral dissertation for which the author, now settled abroad, got her doctorate from Oxford some six years ago. It is on an important subject, whose consequences are still with us, written by someone born after the horri¬ble days of communal rioting and parti¬tion, belonging to a different generation than the reviewer whose province, like hers, was partitioned, along with the partition of the sub-continent.

The historiography of medieval India saw its most significant break in the 1920’s when W.H. Moreland published his three major works: India at the Death of Akbar, From Akbar to Aurangzeb, and the Agrarian System of Moslem India. More-land had sought to understand the work¬ing of medieval, specially Mughal Indian economy in all its various aspects—the systems of agricultural and non-agricultural production, internal and external trade, patterns of social consumption, famines, size of population, revenue administration, standards of living of different social strata and so forth.

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.