‘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.
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.
Crime and Sex in Ancient India deals with the crimes and sexual aberrations prevalent in ancient India and the punishments meted out. The title is rather a misnomer as the volume does not relate crime and sex to each other even though one can gather when sex became criminal to our ancients.
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.
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.
Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho encouraged me to take cinema seriously as an art form with its own methods and a visual language distinct from the words being spoken by the characters on screen writes Jai Arjun Singh in Monsters I Have Known an engaging and expansive essay on the horror films that spoke to him in ways no film scholar could understand…