This is an uneasy book which disconcerts the reader with the narration of the history that ultimately culminated in the election tragedy of February 1983. It is moreover, a book which is very readable and lucid to the very last page. Published a year after the State Assembly Elections in Assam, it leaves little doubt of a possible repetition of the tragic episode in the context of the General Elections ex¬pected later this year.
Debra and Gopiballavpur are two regions in the district, of Midnapore in West Bengal which shot into prominence between 1969 and 1971 when armed bands of peasant guer¬illas backed by poor and land¬less villagers under the leader¬ship of CPI (ML) killed landlords, seized guns, took possession of the properties owned by the landlords, burnt the records of debts and set up revolutionary committees as alternative power structures.
Dr. Suresh Singh is one of the very few IAS officers with a scholastic bent of mind. In Bihar he also enjoys the reputation of being an able officer. As early as 1967 he had acquitted himself with dis¬tinction during the famine which hit all of Bihar, when he had held charge of Palamau, a particularly neglected and abused tribal district.
The writing of social history in India has come full circle since Dr. Tapan Raychaudhuri’s pioneering Bengal Under Akbar and Jahangir (1953). In his Preface Dr. Raychaudhuri had defined the scope of social history, after G.M. Trevelyan, as ‘history with the politics left out’. In the 1969 edition of his book the author set aside Trevelyan’s ‘incorrect defini¬tion’ and replaced it with an ‘investigation of historical communities by the methods of social anthropology and sociology’.
The period between the end of the Second World War and the achievement of indepen¬dence by India has not so far received the attention of historians to the extent that it deserves. Both in terms of British imperial policy in India and of the Indian peoples’ struggle for freedom, these last two years before independence are of great importance.
‘India within the Ganges’ was the beautiful name Euro¬peans gave to our India to distinguish it from various other Indias, vague and unknown, lying somewhere yonder in their conception. It is the slow, long drawn-out process of focussing on this India on map-sheets and of bringing the representation of the earth and soil of this region into approximation with reality that Susan Gole has reconstructed with remarkable facility. Cartography can hard¬ly be a subject holding a non¬technical readership in thrall.