Art has historical roots that lie outside it, and it has his¬torical consequences that again lie outside it the work of art closest to perfection is both most profoundly determined by its time and goes furthest be¬yond it into timelessness, while the imperfect work of art re¬mains caught in the spatial and temporal conditions precisely because it has been touched by them most superficially.
In the long tussle for supre¬macy among the main gods of the Hindu pantheon (certain¬ly not instigated by the divine personages but by their followers and worshippers), Vishnu and Siva have finally emerged as the two top con¬tenders to assume the role of the Refuge. Vishnu comes to us either as Himself with his conch and discus or in the form of Krishna and Rama. Siva remains aloof, keeping his distance as a destroyer but assuring us of a renewal of life through decay and death.
Though this book is a collection of papers, including some book reviews, it has a continuity and unity of dis¬course because all the issues discussed are facets of the same fundamental problem: the predicament of man who finds the bright dreams of progress— which the Renais¬sance painted in roseate colours, the Enlightenment assumed to be inevitable, even automatic, and the industrial revolution in its first phases seemed to indicate to be just round the corner—thoroughly shattered.
Literary critics, especially the American ‘lemon squee¬zers’, have made nimbu pani out of everything from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Much of the terrain between Virginia Woolf and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf has similarly been squeezed—often so hard that dribbles of lemon rind have made the result pretty un-swallowable.
The book under review pro¬vides a series of interesting vignettes on witchcraft in Western India, mainly the coastal region stretching through Maharashtra, Goa, Kerala and Karnataka. Kapur, a journalist by profession, undertook investigative visits to various places in this region during 1978. For her it must have been a journey of adven¬ture—exciting as well as appalling.
With the contemporary infor¬mation explosion, and in view of the growth of literacy rates around the world, the organization and dissemination of knowledge are going to be the basic functions of information scientists and librarians in the years to come. These person¬nel, otherwise generally well trained in the organi-zation of knowledge, have yet to bridge the gap between the inform¬ation in store and its ideal use by the users.