Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The Architecture of Shivdatt Sharma by Vikramaditya Prakash is the first in a series planned to unravel the ‘story of Modernism’ in India.

It was perhaps too much to hope that under this grandiose title, M.R.P. would publish material of serious historico-analytic worth. Be that as it may, the Boggs have merely offered the world yet another example of the populist moral science that charact­erizes much of American radicalism today…

Ernst Fischer is best known to English-speaking readers for his brilliant study in Marxist aesthetics­ The Necessity of Art. This book, an autobiography covering the first forty-five years of his life, is con­cerned mainly with his political activities. But the book is much more than an autobiography…

At a time when sociology has come to be domi­nated either by convoluted ways of stating the obvious or tortuous and pseudo-mathematical elabora­tions of dubious methodologies—often, indeed, by excruciating combinations of the two—Peter Ber­ger’s book is to be lauded as an attempted return to sanity…

This study far surpasses the modestly expressed aspirations of the authors of being mainly designed to cater to the needs and requirements of ‘initiates in Library Science’. It should prove equally useful to many others interested in the techniques of infor­mation retrieval.As was evidently expected…

It is not a ‘scholarly’ book. It is not a ‘profound’ book. But it is a book which makes you want to meet the writer and talk to him. It has a pleasant, straight-from-the-shoulder manner, and the rat-tat-­tat of the sentences, without nagging you, holds your interest. What is more, the down-to-earth locales…

With the exception of a few brief intermissions, throughout the British rule in India severe controls were put on the growth of public opinion and on the literature of nationalism or self rule…

Bhisma Sawhney is known for his progressive views in literature and for stories and novels which provide pleasant reading material. His recent novel with the significant title Tamas (The Darkness) is primarily concerned with the human tragedy of communal frenzy, a social phenomenon that has always engulfed the society…

Mulk Raj Anand is one of the pioneers of the modern Indo-Anglian novel. Since his first novels were written and published abroad he has added to his reputation as a humanist, as an art critic, as a committee man who has served in various capaci­ties and as one known to people who are worth being known to…

The authors have tried to analyse the basic con­straints in implementation of programmes designed for the improvement of the socio-economic condi­tions of the deprived sections of our population.

Marxism has been described by one of its lead­ing contemporary critics as ‘equivocal and inexhaustible’. Generations of scholars, with varying degrees of seriousness and sympathy…

The task of attempting a study on the population geography of Muslim Indians, assessing the present in the historical context, as Dr. Siddiqui has done, is a particularly hazardous task since India today has only about a third of the Muslims who inhabit the sub-continent. It should, however, have been possible…

The democratic process has frail roots in Pakis­tan and the system seems destined to preserve in­herited privilege.

Howard Spodek is an old Gujarat hand, having written authoritative books on the modern history of Saurashtra, including Rulers, Merchants and Other Groups in the City-States of Saurashtra: India, Around 1800 (Philadelphia: Center for the Study of Federalism, Temple University, 1974/77).

Raminder Kaur’s book primarily traces the history of nuclear power in India from 1945 which was marked by the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki until 2008 when India signed a treaty with the United States for increased nuclear cooperation.

One of the curious paradoxes of the sociology of science concerns the flowering of world class science in India in the early decades of the 20th century. With very little government support, working with improvised, in some cases discarded equipment, without much access to international journals, Indian scientists did some very high quality science—C.V.

Much to the chagrin of their leftist sympathizers in the outside world more and more Soviet dissidents refuse to subscribe to any shade of socialist the­ory and practice. Unlike a growing number of socialists in, say, France or Italy, they seem to be convinced that socialism cannot rhyme either with freedom…

With stabbings and race riots, the relationship between India and Britain is today much in the news. To most of us, especially those in and across middle age, that relationship is overlaid with a large number of historical hang-ups, We have known the best and the worst of this contact; and in l947…

Speeding Financial Inclusion by Sameer Kochhar is based on the first ever nationwide multi-stakeholder study entitled ‘National Study on Speeding Financial Inclusion’ which was undertaken by the Skoch Development Foundation.

The study of myth has undergone a sea-change since the mid-nineteenth century when it came into vogue. Between Freud and Levi-Strauss it is now open to a vast span of interpretation. Not all the points along this span have as yet encroached on to the study of Indian mythology…