Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

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.