Social history as an academic specialization is quite recent and in India it is still a largely unexplored field. While in the last few years some critical re-examination has been done of the role of Raja Rammohan Roy as a modernizer…
This is a study of British and Indian policy-makers in the penultimate years of the raj. The British, both in London and Delhi, could not see that the days of British rule were numbered and planned on the basis of staying on in India indefinitely by utilizing the Princes and the Muslim communal elements against…
Delia Davin’s study of the rise of the working woman in China is a sober, factual, historical account giving insights of special interest to us in India of an almost identical system of social constraints upon women, but in a wholly different social setting. We never had bound feet to cripple a woman’s usefulness and productivity…
The Remembered Village illustrates most persuasively M.N. Srinivas’s central concerns. First, a healthy respect for the rural person, his life style, his know¬ledge. While social scientists and ad-ministrators are constantly figuring out programmes for rural folk on the assumption that they…
Some years back, I found myself attending the farewell function of a sarkaari officer, a bureaucrat. The usual white-cloth covered chairs, the podium with a small shaky wood table, a vase of short stemmed officious looking desi roses and a red carpet on the stage. Like the tradition of speech delivery goes, the speeches started from the junior-most officers and slowly moved upwards, in peculiar babu English.
The two volumes of Sahitya Akademi’s publication The Best of Indian Literature 1957-2007 is a must have collection for any connoisseur or even someone who is interested in Indian literature of the post-Independence period.