Asoka Raina

The introductory chapter of this book starts with a comparison—no other intelligence organization has been subject­ed to such tumultous criticism as RAW in such a short span of its existence.


Reviewed by: R. Sreekumar
Nandini Nopany

Translation, like criticism, must be perpetually re-undertaken. Art, prover­bially, is long, so that translation, in so far as it is an art, should also be timeless, persistently reappearing as an inevitable response to stimuli felt by succeeding generations.


Reviewed by: Sara Rai
J. Bandyopadhyaya

First published in 1970, the book has been revised and updated to cover deve­lopments up to the first year of the Janata government to serve as a textbook for studying the determinants, institu­tions, and processes involved in foreign policy making.


Reviewed by: Girish Mathur
A.N. Shah

The articles in this book are written by various authors who deal with nume­rous aspects of the Government National Adult Education Programme of 1978. The book reads as though a group of people are discussing the means of trans­porting a doctor, some suggest that the doctor should be brought by road or by air and yet others are talking of the financial implications.


Reviewed by: Shobita Punja
P.S. Mathur

There is a common belief that books published by government departments are not worthy of serious evaluation because of the lackadaisical treatment they generally receive from their publi­shers. But exceptions are there and this book under review happens to be one.


Reviewed by: Sandhya
Jan Breman

When Jan Breman’s book was first published in 1974, Rural Sociology and Anthropology was going through an in­trospection: community development and Panchayat Raj had failed to bring about the peaceful revolution which would end .­inequality and’ poverty.


Reviewed by: Sujata Patel
Sankar Ghose

An understanding of the period from 1830 when Raja Rammohan Roy took first faltering steps on the road to what later came to be known as the Indian Renaissance, to 1947, the year which became the culmination point for various socio-political processes, is essential for a correct appraisal of our present predica­ment.


Reviewed by: Mukesh Vatsyayana
V.S. Naravane

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.


Reviewed by: Manohar Bandopadhyay
G.K. Shirokov

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.


Reviewed by: Anil Rai
Dewan C. Vohra

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.


Reviewed by: Balraj Mehta
D.D. Khanna

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.


Reviewed by: C.R. Krishna Murti
Sudhir Kakar

‘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.


Reviewed by: V. Veeraraghavan
B.S. Baviskar

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.


Reviewed by: Ganesh Prashad
Kenneth R. Hall

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.


Reviewed by: Vijaya Ramaswamy
Daniel Thorner

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.


Reviewed by: S. Bhattacharya