Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

When Indu Jain published her first collection of poems, titled 64 Poems, I had reviewed it in Hindi and remember to have said that she is a new poetess with promise. Her second collection is now available. I am glad that the promise is fulfilled. She has matured in her expression.

Kipling’s caricature of the hill-station memsahib is the one that has endured—­frivolous, vain, sometimes adulterous, ‘a heartless bitch with an ever tinkling laugh’.

As the old song does not have it, old soldiers never die nor fade away, but write memoirs. But let us grant it to them, they usually make a much better job of it than old civil servants.

It is seldom that one finds genuine pleasure in reviewing a book, but involve­ment in its theme can make the exercise rewarding. Ram K. Vepa belongs to the Indian Administrative service.

Based mainly on Sanskrit, Prakrit and Apabhramsha texts, the present work is a sequel to P.C Jain’s Labour in Ancient India (1971). Divided into six chapters, it seeks to study the social and economic condition of various categories of Indian labour and the state of guild organizations in early medieval India.

According to Dr. S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru’s involvement with the kisan struggles in eastern U.P. in the early twenties had a greater impact on him than his ‘unformative years’ at Cambridge and in London when he was exposed to the influence of Fabianism.

Most seminars based on a broad theme shed some light and create some obscu­rity. This one is no exception. Planned as an open-ended discussion, it studies movements of protest and reform in India over the centuries, directed against things as disparate as ‘slavery, untouch­ability and colonialism’ (in the words of a participant). The essays are arranged chronologically, but can be grouped under four broad categories—protest by social groups or classes, dissent or reform expressed through the medium of the arts, protests in the sphere of religion, and Gandhi, who is sui generis.