K.S. Dhindsa

This volume is a revised ver¬sion of the author’s doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of London in 1975. The study covers the period 1950-77 and is based on secondary published sources.


Reviewed by: Indra Nath Mukherji
Hakeem Abdul Hameed

As a religion Islam is under¬stood by few and misunder¬stood by many. It is indeed tragic that the intellectual con¬tent of Islamic ideology is being ignored, although Islam expects its followers to be well-informed and knowledgeable. The followers of Islam appear to be ensnared by the ritualis¬tic part of their faith rather than the ideals so beautifully expressed in the Quranic text.


Reviewed by: Syed Iqbal
A.V. Esaoulov

Man is ultimately alone—and defeated. Through a dense particularity of circumstance this novel breathes a loneliness that imperceptibly takes the shape of universal human ex¬perience. The narrator is a Russian, exiled in India. He is without family, having lost his first wife and child in an acci¬dent and his second, an Indian, through divorce; without friends, having deliberately warded off friendship in an at-tempt to preserve his identity from being swallowed up by the land of exile.


Reviewed by: Zakia Pathak
Trilochan

The name of Trilochan and the sonnet form are synony¬mous in contemporary Hindi poetry. He has few peers in this realm, partly because not many have ventured there. In other Indian languages, too, there have been protagonists of the sonnet, but none of them seem to have staked their poetic career upon it.


Reviewed by: Girdhar Rathi
Samiran Nundy

Seventeen years ago David Werner was a 30 year old biology teacher in the United States interested in the birds and plants of mountain areas. His travels took him to the mountains of Western Mexico where he came to know and love the mountain people.


Reviewed by: Samiran Nundy
Shere Hite

For someone sympathetic to hedonism, the cultural pro¬ducts of a society where hedone is an honoured goddess are endlessly fascinating. To me, the United States of America since the early sixties is one such society. Here the impact of hedonism has been greater than that of most other ‘isms’ which propel human lives.


Reviewed by: Sudhir Kakar
Shanti Sadiq Ali and R.R. Ramchandani

Very seldom do intellectuals run ahead of political actors, particularly in the sphere of international cooperation. Problems of regional cooper¬ation among countries located in the Indian Ocean littoral have received scant scholarly attention so far, largely be¬cause the political leaders of these countries have not pro¬ceeded beyond rhetorics to put together an infrastructure of regional cooperation.


Reviewed by: Bhabani Sen Gupta
Gordon Winter

Gordon Winter is a self-confessed criminal and spy. He was a BOSS agent par excellence, a journalist by trade and a spy by profession. In May 1979, Winter defected and left South Africa with his wife and two children. The revelations of Winter regarding BOSS (Bureau of State Security) confirm and underline the fact that South Africa is a police State and in a state of siege. In response to its growing international isolation and the ever increas¬ing militancy of its oppressed black majority, the Apartheid State embarked upon a clan¬destine and aggressive propa¬ganda campaign on all fronts.


Reviewed by: Donald Peter Chimanikire
Institute of Economic Growth

Two central features mark the nature of socio-political life in India today, in relation to which everything else pales into insignificance: the over¬whelming poverty of the majority of the population, and the increasing hostility between central and state governments on the one side and the same dispossessed majority on the other.


Reviewed by: Claude Alvares
Leela Gulati

Profiles in Female Poverty is part of the series ‘Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology’ edited by Prof M.N. Srinivas. I have no idea if the other titles in this series adopt an approach similar to the book under review. My impression from this book is that a wider readership could be reached if more academic studies were written in the evocative style which is a striking feature of Leela Gulati’s book.


Reviewed by: Vimal Balasubrahmanyan
E.A. Ramaswamy and Uma Ramaswamy

This new Indian textbook on industrial labour and labour relations is divided into nine independent chapters: labour recruitment; labour commit¬ment; industrialization; union theory; Indian unions; indus¬trial conflict theory; collective bargaining theory; Indian industrial relations; and the theory and practice of workers’ participation and control.


Reviewed by: Peter Waterman
Lotika Vardarajan

Travel accounts—day to day recordings of the factors of the European East India Companies during their stay in India—have constituted an invaluable source of in-formation tor researchers working on India’s trade his¬tory in the 17th and 18th cen-turies. The Memoirs of Francois Martin, an employee of the French East India Com-pany, whose sojourn in India covered about thirty-seven years (1669-1705), is no ex¬ception to this rule.


Reviewed by: Lakshmi Subramaniam
Mushirul Hasan

Maulana Mohamed Ali’s is the most controversial per¬sonality in pre-Independence Muslim politics. He rose to eminence as one of the top leaders of the Khilafat agita-tion—itself a subject of great controversy among historians of the independence move¬ment—and was its most pas¬sionate champion. There are different views about Moha¬med Ali’s sincerity in taking up this cause.


Reviewed by: Asghar Ali Engineer
Robert Lacey

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has emerged as a curiosity for the western world ever since it got the indus¬trialized economies over a barrel. For centuries the nomadic tribes in that obscure peninsula were left to settle scores among themselves. The house of Al Saud, which even¬tually established its ascen¬dancy through the epic efforts of the redoubtable Abdul Aziz, compelled recognition of his control of the greater part of the land mass by the great powers, with the Soviet Union, ironically enough, leading the way.


Reviewed by: Kamalesh Sharma
Maj. Gen. Niranjan Prasad

They sell their lives as dearly in peace as they should do in war—so the plaint of one reviewer in the years after the Second World War, when the generals on the Allied side flooded the market with memoirs written by or for them, proving how each of them had outwitted all others and would, if permitted, have won the war single-handed.


Reviewed by: Sarvepalli Gopal