Benoy Ghosh

No city in India commands a greater mystique than Calcutta. No city except Varanasi has so doggedly clung to its ‘character’ as has the city of Calcutta. It fascinates as well as horrifies visitors from abroad; it inspires hatred as well as love. Till today it is man’s most unplanned metropolis; it has more people…


Reviewed by: Chanakya Sen
Janet Goldwasser and Stuart Dowty

Even though there has been a slight slump in the flow of American visitors to China in recent months, the travel accounts of the period of the ‘China Rush’ from 1971 till 1973 continue to pour out. One type of account coming from the American radicals of the anti-war campaigns seems to show their radical utopia emerging in China…


Reviewed by: Manoranjan Mohanty
Ursula Hicks

A relatively late arrival in the sphere of applied economics, the new branch of urban economics has grown at a phenomenal rate—at least in terms of the volume of literature. But unfortunately not many among the growing number of new volumes on urban economics have much to say…


Reviewed by: Sudipto Mundle
Dr. Shivarama Karanth

Books on the fine arts are few in Kannada, and most of these offer a few general remarks on the growth of these arts in India—such as that the arts have been wedded to religion in this country for centuries—and then proceed to introduce the differ­ent schools of a particular art. Dr. Karanth’s…


Reviewed by: L.S. Sheshagiri Rao
Charles Fabri

Hungarian by birth, Charles Louis Fabri (1899­1968) became in later life as much an Indian as an Indologist. He was a member of Aurel Stein’s arch­aeological expedition into the heartland of Asia in the thirties, taught at Santiniketan, was curator of the Lahore Museum, and spent the last two decad­es of his life in Delhi…


Reviewed by: Krishna Chaitanya
Aruna Sitesh

Doctoral dissertations, especially in our time, have a strange habit of finding their way into print. Most of these do not seem to have serious academic value; many of them are not read anyway and are really the products of extra-academic compulsions (one of which is the famous, no longer transatlantic ‘publish or perish’)…


Reviewed by: Nikhilesh Banerjee