Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Shiv K. Kumar made his name in the Indian literary world as a poet. He is also a highly successful member of academe as can be seen from the impres­sive string of appointments listed in the biographical note on the back jacket of his collection of short stories.

This book won considerable acclaim when it was first published (by Virago) in 1978 for its exposure of the terrible condition of Asian Women workers in Britain. This book is more a political document than a sociological monograph—while it is based on a series of inter­views with Asian Women it is not so much a survey of conditions as demons­tration of their nascent political unity.

This volume of Nehru’s selected works, edited by Aditya and Mridula Mukherjee covers the period of three months from April to June 1958. Like earlier volumes, it gives us a flavour of the times. It offers an overview of the major problems confronted by India in the 1950s, and how Nehru coped with them…

The literature available on Munshi Premchand, regarded as the father of the modern Hindi novel, is scanty. Hansraj Rahbar’s book on Premchand (1958) is extensive thematically but marred by chronological inaccuracies.

Nobody may dispute that Jayaprakash Narayan, popularly called JP, has been an important factor in Indian polity for about half a century. Starting as a Marxist (while a student in the United States of America!), he became a votary of non-violence under Gandhi’s influence and took part in the various satyagraha movements launched by the Mahatma for the country’s freedom.

In March of 1948—the austere white dust jacket would have us know – a group of Gandhi’s closest associates met at Sabarmati Ashram to reflect on his assassination. The group included Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, J.B. Kripalani, and Jayaprakash Narayan, among others. ‘Sixty years later,’ continues the blurb, on 30 January 2008…

The collection of papers under review was first published in 1969, five years after they first felt the heat of discussion at a seminar, at the University of Wisconsin. The continuing demand for them and the response aroused by them are the reasons offered by the editor for the second edi­tion.

In the tradition of an earlier genera­tion of pioneering Soviet studies of economic development in modern India by Reisner, Pavlov, Goldberg, Levkovsky, Melman and other Soviet scholars, the book under review provides a bold and interesting attempt at elaborating the line that originated in the 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U. in 1956.

The work under review was originally a Ph. D. dissertation. It assembles a lot of material which is useful for a study of India’s economic relations with other countries after Independence, more espe­cially with the countries of the Third World. But it gets lost in details and the essential thrust of the thesis is weak­ened in the process. The attempt at scholarship is somewhat pedantic and lacks spontaneity.

South Asia comprises of India, Pakis­tan, Bangladesh, the landlocked Hima­layan Kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan and the island Sri Lanka. A sizeable chunk of world population subsisting below the poverty line or just above it inhabit the region. These nations have political structures varying from democracy to military dictatorship.

‘Identity and Adulthood’ is the pro­duct of a month-long seminar organized by the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research in the year 1978, when experts such as Erik Erikson, basically a psycho-analyst was called upon to lead the dis­cussion. Sudhir Kakar as the editor has attempted to bring together in this volume the views of experts from different fields on the growing up process in the Indian context.

Sugar has produced magnates, bosses, operators and lobbies. These have held the country to ransom. The phenomenon will make V.L. Mehta and D.R. Gadgil turn in their graves. The former, Minister of Finance and Co-operation in post­-Independence Bombay state, had encou­raged the growth of co-operative sugar factories with great enthusiasm.

Crime and Sex in Ancient India deals with the crimes and sexual aberrations prevalent in ancient India and the punish­ments meted out. The title is rather a misnomer as the volume does not relate crime and sex to each other even though one can gather when sex became criminal to our ancients.

In 1980 two outstanding books have appeared on South Indian History or more specifically Cola history. One is of course by Burton Stein, the veteran Indologist (‘Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India’, Oxford Univer­sity Press, 1980). The other is the book under review. The traditional approach has been to study the so-called ‘village republics’ and the Chola ‘Byzantine’ State at two different levels without sufficient conceptualization thereby overlooking the obvious contradiction.

It is given to few to sow new seeds in their field of academic specialization and to even fewer to do so beyond the narrow confines of the groves of academe. Daniel Thorner was one of them. He’ did this with the generosity of effortless fecundity, perhaps with a fine careless­ness and no thoughts to the profits of harvesting scattered pieces in the shape of such volumes as lesser academics pro­duce.

Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho encouraged me to take cinema seriously as an art form with its own methods and a visual language distinct from the words being spoken by the characters on screen writes Jai Arjun Singh in Monsters I Have Known an engaging and expansive essay on the horror films that spoke to him in ways no film scholar could understand…

In his latest book, R.J. Moore traces the complicated course of the war-time efforts of Stafford Cripps to bring the Indian leaders into the Government and thereby behind the war effort.

Daisy Hasans deeply atmospheric novel is set in Shillong in the North East. The central motif that runs like a thread in the novel is the attempt on the part of the characters to retrieve the sense of belonging to a place. Mas search for the elusive lover is also the search for ones homeland. A deep sense of betrayal haunts both the searches…

Pick up a travel guide to India. Look for any of the followingKakur Naichanpur Ikhar Davangere Azamgarh. Youd be lucky to find them mentioned in any detail. Even in cricket-centered talk these places dont ring a bell. A whole generation of cricket lovers have wallowed in the fandom of cricketing stars like Sachin Tendulkar from Mumbai…

Performance studies in India should be very pleased with the intervention made by Bishnupriya Dutt and Urmimala Sarkar Munsi. Taking the elements of search as well as identity quite seriously, the authors have managed to keep their work and explorations away from the theoretical closure that often accompanies such endeavours…