This is not a book of revelations like Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate. Nevertheless, it is a gateway to Indian experience with rural development. We owe this volume to an Asian Seminar on rural develop¬ment in 1984, sponsored by the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.
Dr. Frederique-Apffel Marglin is a Pro¬fessor of Anthropology at Smith College, Massachussets and her book Wives of the God King is an important work of careful scholarship and penetrating insight into those shadowy regions of Hinduism that include the Devadasis of the temples of Orissa.
The present volume is a collection of some papers presented at the Symposia of the Tenth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences held at New Delhi in 1978. The papers in the book are organized to cover broad themes related to women with the title being reflective of the need to focus on these immediate concerns of women—‘visibility and power’.
In recent years there has been a marked shift in the terrain of discourse on India’s industrial performance. Attention has shifted from structural constraints and the underlying micro-economic relation¬ships to questions of efficiency and gov¬ernment policy. The shift is not altogether, unwarranted, provided efficiency is inter¬preted dynamically in terms of growth, since government policy is often the decisive factor governing industrial performance under all modern economic systems.
For many sensitive minds India has fallen on bad days within forty years of its independence. This crisis is the grist for Saberwal and Thapar who have put in book format a number of sub-themes they have previously written or talked about at various fora.
Shourie is the archetypal critic, cast in the mould of the 13th century Tamil savant, Seethalai Nayanar, literally “the pusshead saint”. This sobriquet he earn¬ed from his forehead being a permanently festering sore because of his habit of striking it with his stylo in exasperation over the illiterate idiocies of those around him. In his odd mixture of passion and reason, precision and prolixity, Shourie is in the robust tradition of polemicists of some centuries ago—Milton in his Latin tracts and the followers of Vedanta Desika and Appaiya Dikshitar in the South.