Since the early 50s, coinciding with the setting up of the ‘national’ governments in many of the Third World countries, and perhaps consequent to it, several thousand intensive surveys have been made of single villages in those countries. This concern of academics in the ‘developing’ nations with rural realities…
The advent of the Janata Party was not foreseen when Bepin Behari published his book, but the Party’s emphasis since it came to power on what can be identified as a Gandhian approach to the problem of rural poverty in India makes the book topical. He quotes Gandhi: ‘I would favour the use…
Excesses of the Emergency is a much¬ battered cliche, but a post-Emergency excess—in both senses of the word—for which no Shah Commission is possible is the flood of books on it. These have come in all shapes and sizes and they do not please, as Keats said poetry should, ‘by a fine excess’…
Oscar Wilde said of Hall Caine that the latter always wrote at the top of his voice. This is a charge which can never be made against K.P.S. Menon. He does not create any problems of decibel tolerance to his readers. His own style of writing is perfectly modulated, controlled and decorous…
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…
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…