Stuart Blackburn and A.K. Ramanujan

This collection of essays is a result of a series of conferences held on folklore in Indian society. It may be regarded primarily as reflecting American scholarship on South Asia and therefore provides an opportunity to discuss both its dynamism and its limits.

Folklore as a discipline was long domi¬nated by a conceptual framework with emphasis on the recording of disappearing forms of narratives, riddles, performances and other ‘lore’ of the ‘folk’.


Reviewed by: VEENA DAS
A K Das Gupta

What has economics been concerned with? A question to which a reasonable answer should be available, one suspects, but it is almost startling to confront the diffe¬rences of opinion on how those concerns either relate to each other or to the history and times when they were in the focus of attention. In a sense the enquiry can be frustrating. Why should one worry with why Adam Smith worried with the wealth of nations? Historiogra¬phy must lend one some extra mileage somewhere in understanding and analys¬ing the present situation.


Reviewed by: BADAL MUKHERJI
Navakala Roy and Kavery Bhatt

Part of the How it Works series, The Motor Car and The Telephone by Navakala and Subir Roy are both infor¬mative and well-illustrated. The books begin with the history of the automobile and the telephone and then move on to the working in detail (for the 10-12 age group). Each part of the working system is dealt with separately and profusely illustrated.


Reviewed by: MANU IYENGAR
Salman Rushdie

The tentative approach that Rushdie makes towards Nicaragua is noteworthy. ‘Hope: A Prologue’ can be read as a series of justifications—the degree of the writer’s familiarity with the country is limited to a chance proximity of resi¬dence with Hope Somoza; his interest in the country boils down to a chance synchronicity of dates— the indepen¬dence day of Nicaragua and his son’s birthday; his point of view, he admits apologetically is one of an offspring of the third world—not quite that simplis-tic yet almost so.


Reviewed by: ANURADHA MARWAH
Abdul Bismillah

Once upon a time, Hindi novelists parti¬cipated in the Independence struggle, craved being jailed with the political heroes, imitated the Bengali novelists in their platonic loves, and wrote indefatigably excited and grandiloquent novels about the working classes. No more.


Reviewed by: MRINAL PANDE
Richard Collins

This valuable book is an anthology of sixteen articles published in the British journal ‘Media, Culture and Society’ between 1979 and 1985. The articles fall into three parts, ‘Approaches to Culture Theory’, Intellectuals and Cultural Pro¬duction’ and ‘British Broadcasting and the Public Sphere’.


Reviewed by: P.C. CHATTERJEE