Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

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. One can be certain that more—many more—books have been pub¬lished, more papers have been written, and more seminars held in the 80’s with the phrase South Asia incorporated in them in one’ way or another than had been produced in all the preceding years.

‘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. Though Tiho and Methi never marry, Gokal, Methi’s son, is known as an ‘angaliyat’. Gokal not only uses Tiho’s name as his father but also begins to acquire, towards the end of the novel, the strength of Tiho’s character and thus becomes in a way his true heir. But what is more important perhaps is the social and political backdrop against which the story of Tiho and Methi unfolds.

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….’

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.’