The book under review is authored by the winner of the prestigious V.K.R.V. Rao award for social sciences this year. It is a collection of papers grouped into four parts but displaying continuity and unity of discourse because the issues under discussion relate to various dimensions linking politics and social structure.
The book under review is a collection of nine essays by a German academic of the Heidelberg University (FRG). Rothermond’s interest in social, economic and modern Indian history is an on-going affair since he has written books which include The Phases of Indian Nationalism & Other Essays, Government, Landlord and Peasant in India and Agrarian Relations under British Rule 1865-1935.
In this volume the Editors have put together a number of research papers and personal memoirs relating to ‘the various phases of the armed and militant movement in our country, aimed at the over¬throw of the system represent¬ed by the oppressive British and other vested interests.’
Dr. Sarup Singh makes it clear right from the preface to his book that in the plays he has chosen to discuss, his primary concern will lie not with structure or language or detail of craft. He says: ‘My sub¬ject is the ‘life’ that the play¬wrights treat of—certain basic human relationships as deter¬mined or influenced by the problems of larger social rela¬tions. I see the situations in these plays more or less as I would see similar situations in real life’.
The Ramayana, unlike its mighty compere, the Mahabharata, has received compara-tively less attention from critics and scholars alike. One reason might be the very nature of the epic: its being the first kavya, the conscious¬ly: literary composition, as opposed to the more oral character of the other.
Shrikant Verma has been considered a controver¬sial writer right from the beginning. He has carried out many experiments in his poetry. On the basis of his poetic diction evident in his latest poems, it can be said that Shrikant Verma has given a new idiom to Hindi poetry, which is not merely playing with words but giving a digni¬fied expression to the poetic temper in terms of language embedded with layers of meaning.