When Gerda Lerner’s Creation of Patriarchy appeared, nearly 30 years ago, in a pre-globalized era, middle class, mainly upper caste feminists teaching in colleges in Delhi (and elsewhere) read it avidly, begging, borrowing (but hopefully not doing more than that), and discussing it in the small, intense study circles that dotted the cityscape.
It was a perplexing moment when the editors of TBR asked me to comment on a book on religion that had been important in its time and continued to be so in our own. This request, I have to admit, made me more acutely aware of the distinction that ought to be made between a book on religion and about it. At least in the context of Hinduism (however debatable that term might be), a book on religion or more generally, a text motivated essentially by a religious inspiration or consciousness does not appear to have been produced in a long time.
During the 1980s, at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, structuralism was the grand theory with which we were expected to learn about the intricacies of kinship, the contradictions of myths, and the underlying meanings of all cultural transactions. Structuralism was represented, by leading faculty members, as the theory of culture and the theory of social and cultural change. But, pouring for months over Elementary Structures of Kinship and later over The Raw and the Cooked had left me disenchanted.
Reading books on cities has taught me that town-planners may intervene in landscapes, but that for all the pretentious build-up of deference to ecology and environment, the original great Planner’s wisdom is being increasingly disregarded. Landscapes of rock shaped over centuries are being destroyed, and rivers being channelled by short-sighted modern ‘planners’(as Ravish Kumar gently but forcefully reminded us on NDTV when reflecting on the Chennai floods).
When Natalie Zemon Davis wrote The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), a book just over 150 pages, it became influential in professional history circles because, its brevity notwithstanding, it cut the barbed-wire fence which separates history from storytelling. Davis’s book is unusual in being wonderful as both story and history.
For several years I taught a history course on ‘Social Formations and Cul- tural Patterns of the Ancient and Medieval World’ at Hans Raj College, University of Delhi. This was a B.A. Honours ‘survey’ course (which is still part of the syllabus, although in a modified form), intended to give to students a general understanding of the early and premodern history of humankind—including themes such as evolution, transition to food production, the Sumerian civilization, ancient Egypt, Graeco-Roman antiquity, and emergence of feudalism in early medieval Europe.