Vol. VIII No. 4, Jan/Feb 1983

Publication of books and papers is often taken as an indicator of the popularity of a subject. In recent years, interest in the study of orga¬nization and management has been on the increase. Of course, growing/ popularity also attracts people to the bandwagon. The book under review represents a situation of this kind. Either the author is not clear about the scope of his subject, or he wants to use a popular label to sell something which by now is quite conventional and even unexciting. This issue hits the reader in the very first para of the first chapter.

The present volume is the record of an experiment in interdisciplinary study and dis¬cussion conducted under the joint sponsorship of the ICSSR and the Madras Insti¬tute of Development Studies. The participants in three workshops consisted of social scientists drawn from different disciplines and from various universities and research insti¬tutions, mainly from southern India. The theme of poverty, a problem of great social con¬cern and relevance, was chosen for discussion because it lends itself to interdisciplinary inves¬tigation.

It is the forte of political theo¬rists to look life in the eye, as a Russian saying goes, with¬out flinching and as far as possible by keeping away from the coloured filters of those who argue in a different vein. In any political speculation there is always a lot of room for conjecture; but Papworth dabbles feverishly in all the concepts evolved since Plato’s celebrated city state, only to write them off as the brain children of dreamy idealists.

In this book Dilip Kumar Roy pays tribute to six ‘illu¬minates’ of modern India—Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Mahatma Gandhi, Sant Gulab Singh and Mahayogi Anirvan. Some of these men he has written about in his earlier, more interesting book, Among the Great.

The volume under review is a collection of Schumacher’s writings and speeches, pains¬takingly compiled and edited by a colleague. Schumacher was deeply involved in two areas during his life: these were energy and management control of a large corporate body. The first four chapters of the book deal with the energy crisis and the last two with the question of public ownership and controls.

Hot Water Man is a story set in Karachi during Bhutto’s rule. But like most British writing on the subject of the jewel in the British crown, it is the story of a search for a lost kingdom—the Raj. And Bhutto figures only marginally, as does the real Pakistan. Where the authors of these works are not writing of the actual period, as Paul Scott did so successfully, they are trying to trace its remnants.

Portuguese imperialism sought to present itself as the embodiment of a divine Caesar and thereby to absolve itself from the obligation of render¬ing the spoils either unto God or unto Caesar. Rapine became thus an essential part of the crusade. The Portuguese could thus evolve a curious blend of lust for gold and souls. Its numismatic expres¬sion was the Cruzado.

Among the Western inter¬preters of Indian art, Alice Bonar was remarkable in that she was not only an art his¬torian but also an artist her¬self with the deep insight and vision which only a practising artist can possess. Born in Switzerland, she studied art in Brussels, Munich and Basle and set up her own studio, first in her native country and later in Paris.

This book, a revised version of the author’s Ph.D. thesis, seeks to ‘highlight processes of socio-religious transforma¬tion within a specific region and cultural context into which iconography provides useful and interesting insights’. The author believes that this approach will fulfill a long-felt need for a meaningful analysis of the evolution of iconographic concepts and their im-pact on socio-cultural groups and religious systems.

Krishna Chaitanya’s book is the first of a series on different aspects of Indian cul¬ture being put out by the India Library. The book is a broad survey that includes material from our religions, literature and the arts. It can be considered a book of ideas; each idea is examined for its contribution to the meaning and texture of our life-style and world-view.

During the past two deca¬des there has been a greater emphasis on the in-depth study of ‘regional history’. It has been observed that the general tendencies in history apparently found over a vast geo-political reality take differ¬ent forms in diverse situations. Like most other regions, Gujarat assumes some peculiar features which are reflected throughout its history. Being a coastal area, it has been open to the outer world for centuries—mainly for merc¬antile transactions.

This book is one of the pro¬ducts of a two-year travail undertaken by a committed European socialist social his¬torian to understand trade unionism among Nigerian port and dock workers and to interpret its implications for them. With disarming frank¬ness, the author reminds us of ‘the 150-year old tradition in the literature on the working class which holds that socia¬lism is necessary in order to overcome capitalist exploita¬tion, oppression, anarchy and waste’ and that ‘the force to bring about the overthrow of capitalism is the working class’.

Mushirul Hasan’s edited, volume deals with the 47 years before Independence in which there was an upsurge of poli¬tical activity both in the Hindu and Muslim communities. This series of nineteen articles deals with two correlated develop¬ments over this period, the politicization of the Muslims through the Khilafat move¬ment which was pegged on a pan-Islamic concept —the reinstatement of the Turkish Khalif, a titular custodian and defender of Islamic holy places after his displacement by the British in 1919—and on communalism and its political usage.

This first volume of a projec¬ted series follows generally the pattern established in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Selected Works, which is a project of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memo¬rial Fund. This volume covers the period upto 1918 when Motilal was poised to emerge on the national scene as a close colleague of Gandhiji during the first Satyagraha Move¬ment.

In this latest publication, Professor Amartya Sen sets out to debunk an accepted doctrine in national and international food policy with his well-known talent for logical ana¬lysis, factual home-work and clarity of exposition.

In February 1962 there ap¬peared a document at the Oberhausen Festival known in film history as the ‘Oberhausen Manifesto’. Twenty-six young signatories documented their frustration with German Cinema and their will to change it. The ‘Manifesto’ noted the collapse of the con¬ventional German Cinema and declared that the new cinema needed

With a Newground publi¬cation, there is no need for the embarrassed wariness with which one normally confronts the Slim First Collection. Newground is a group of young poet-publishers who are careful about what they com¬mit to print. Like other poets they have published (Santan Rodrigues, Eunice de Souza, Saleem Peeradina), Manohar Shetty makes poems seriously, and has honed away at his productions for six years before offering up this spare collection.