ROMILA THAPAR

Books on Indian jewellery are plentiful but this is among the first few devoted to rings. The book does not claim to be exhaustive in discussing the various categories of rings but does make the reader aware of the symbolic function of rings in certain cases other than those which are merely decorative. The illus¬trations are mainly of those which are available and this information could per¬haps have been extended by including some that have been found in excava¬tions, although admittedly the number and designs of these are extremely limited.


Reviewed by: ROMILA THAPAR
C.L. Bayly

Five years after the death of Eric Stokes, he is still greatly missed. A generous friend with an attractive sense of humour, he was also a scho¬lar of unusual gifts. As this posthumous and sadly incom¬plete book shows, his work fell out of the common rut; nor could he be labelled as be¬longing to any particular school.


Reviewed by: S. GOPAL
G. Parthasarathy

Jawaharlal Nehru was throughout his life, a teacher and an educator to others as well as to himself. From jail he wrote the letters to his daughter giving to Indira and the younger generation in India glimpses of world history. In the Indian National Congress he was the preacher of new
of socialism, secularism and internationalism. In Parliament he often functioned as a school master to the nation.


Reviewed by: K.R. NARAYANAN
Fred Halliday

Fred Halliday’s thesis is that the sources of turmoil in the ‘Arc of Crisis’—from Afgha¬nistan through Iran and the Arab Middle East to the Horn of Africa—lies as much in factors operating within these countries as they do in US provocations and interven¬tions, and less in Soviet aggres¬sive interests.


Reviewed by: Sumanta Banerji
Andre Beteille and Jose Kananaikil

The two books under review discuss, albeit differently, the age-old issues relating to equality and inequality. While the first discusses the problem in a general vein, the second deals specifically with the pro¬blems of Scheduled Castes in India.
The volume edited by Andre Beteille contains six articles by contributors belonging to different disciplines: econo¬mics, law, political science and sociology. Notwithstand¬ing this difference in orienta¬tion there is substantial over¬lapping in their arguments for and against equality.


Reviewed by: T.K. Oommen
Helen I. Safa

The book under consideration is the outcome of a panel dis¬cussion on urbanization orga¬nized in Delhi by the editor in December 1978. The first sec¬tion of the book focusses on one of the elements of the process of urbanization, viz., labour migration. The remain¬ing three sections deal with the various consequences of urbanization i.e., family and kinship in an urban setting, small scale entrepreneurs and the informal sector, and collec¬tive action and protest in the city.


Reviewed by: Pushpa Pathak