Linda Ty-Casper

Both these books—one a novel, the other a collection of short stories—have been published by Readers International whose policy is to publish ‘contemporary literature of quality from Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe, featur­ing especially works that have suffered political censorship or were written in exile.’ Not surprisingly, therefore, both these books belong to the genre of the literature of protest.


Reviewed by: TEJESHWAR SINGH
Katar Singh

Rural Development and the agricultural sector, much in the fashion of socialism and empathy for the poor, has acquired any number of exponents and path-finders and people concerned enough to exhort everyone else to practise the ‘faith’—since everyone swears by it as if it were a faith in itself.


Reviewed by: ALOK SINHA
Navakala Roy and Kavery Bhatt

Part of the How it Works series, The Motor Car and The Telephone by Navakala and Subir Roy are both infor¬mative and well-illustrated. The books begin with the history of the automobile and the telephone and then move on to the working in detail (for the 10-12 age group). Each part of the working system is dealt with separately and profusely illustrated.


Reviewed by: MANU IYENGAR
Salman Rushdie

The tentative approach that Rushdie makes towards Nicaragua is noteworthy. ‘Hope: A Prologue’ can be read as a series of justifications—the degree of the writer’s familiarity with the country is limited to a chance proximity of resi¬dence with Hope Somoza; his interest in the country boils down to a chance synchronicity of dates— the indepen¬dence day of Nicaragua and his son’s birthday; his point of view, he admits apologetically is one of an offspring of the third world—not quite that simplis-tic yet almost so.


Reviewed by: ANURADHA MARWAH
Abdul Bismillah

Once upon a time, Hindi novelists parti¬cipated in the Independence struggle, craved being jailed with the political heroes, imitated the Bengali novelists in their platonic loves, and wrote indefatigably excited and grandiloquent novels about the working classes. No more.


Reviewed by: MRINAL PANDE
Richard Collins

This valuable book is an anthology of sixteen articles published in the British journal ‘Media, Culture and Society’ between 1979 and 1985. The articles fall into three parts, ‘Approaches to Culture Theory’, Intellectuals and Cultural Pro¬duction’ and ‘British Broadcasting and the Public Sphere’.


Reviewed by: P.C. CHATTERJEE
M.L. Dantwala, Ranjit Gupta, Keith C.D'Souza

This is not a book of revelations like Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate. Nevertheless, it is a gateway to Indian experience with rural development. We owe this volume to an Asian Seminar on rural develop¬ment in 1984, sponsored by the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.


Reviewed by: L.C. JAIN
Frederique-Apffel Marglin

Dr. Frederique-Apffel Marglin is a Pro¬fessor of Anthropology at Smith College, Massachussets and her book Wives of the God King is an important work of careful scholarship and penetrating insight into those shadowy regions of Hinduism that include the Devadasis of the temples of Orissa.


Reviewed by: RAGHAVA R. MENON
Leela Dube, Eleanor Leacock and Shirley Ardener

The present volume is a collection of some papers presented at the Symposia of the Tenth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences held at New Delhi in 1978. The papers in the book are organized to cover broad themes related to women with the title being reflective of the need to focus on these immediate concerns of women—‘visibility and power’.


Reviewed by: SOMA PARTHASARATHY
Sharad S. Marathe

In recent years there has been a marked shift in the terrain of discourse on India’s industrial performance. Attention has shifted from structural constraints and the underlying micro-economic relation¬ships to questions of efficiency and gov¬ernment policy. The shift is not altogether, unwarranted, provided efficiency is inter¬preted dynamically in terms of growth, since government policy is often the decisive factor governing industrial performance under all modern economic systems.


Reviewed by: SUDIPTO MUNDLE
Satish Saberwal and Romesh Thapar

For many sensitive minds India has fallen on bad days within forty years of its independence. This crisis is the grist for Saberwal and Thapar who have put in book format a number of sub-themes they have previously written or talked about at various fora.


Reviewed by: R.K. SR1VASTAVA
Arun Shourie

Shourie is the archetypal critic, cast in the mould of the 13th century Tamil savant, Seethalai Nayanar, literally “the pusshead saint”. This sobriquet he earn¬ed from his forehead being a permanently festering sore because of his habit of striking it with his stylo in exasperation over the illiterate idiocies of those around him. In his odd mixture of passion and reason, precision and prolixity, Shourie is in the robust tradition of polemicists of some centuries ago—Milton in his Latin tracts and the followers of Vedanta Desika and Appaiya Dikshitar in the South.


Reviewed by: N.S. JAGANNATHAN