International developments have been unfolding with such rapidity in the second half of the present century that any attempt to survey them is in danger of being outdated between the time of its writing and its presentation to the reader.This is particularly true of the Third World in which phenomenal changes…
A Tale of Things Timeless is a tale of a life lived in pain and perishing. It does not begin from the beginning but from the end in an act of artful retrieval of a life lost in the process of living.
A Grief to Bury: Memories of Love, Work and Loss is a series of conversations with twelve Indian women who reflect upon the internal dynamics of their long enduring relationship with their spouses. They also share their individual coping strategies at the traumatic loss of their loved one, either suddenly or after a prolonged illness.
All journalists carry many notebooks, either literally or in their heads. That is because what they manage to bring out through their channels, whether print or television, is just the tip of the iceberg of the story.
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…
1976
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…
1976
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.