Both these books focus on the situation of poor women. Emphasizing oppression within the household, they highlight the trivialization and invisible status of women’s intrahousehold work. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the two books cover some ground in common.
This is a doctoral dissertation for which the author, now settled abroad, got her doctorate from Oxford some six years ago. It is on an important subject, whose consequences are still with us, written by someone born after the horri¬ble days of communal rioting and parti¬tion, belonging to a different generation than the reviewer whose province, like hers, was partitioned, along with the partition of the sub-continent.
The historiography of medieval India saw its most significant break in the 1920’s when W.H. Moreland published his three major works: India at the Death of Akbar, From Akbar to Aurangzeb, and the Agrarian System of Moslem India. More-land had sought to understand the work¬ing of medieval, specially Mughal Indian economy in all its various aspects—the systems of agricultural and non-agricultural production, internal and external trade, patterns of social consumption, famines, size of population, revenue administration, standards of living of different social strata and so forth.
The book under review is the second in the series of books which form collections of articles presented at seminars in Oxford. The articles are prefaced by a very readable introduction on the history of Indian studies at Oxford.
This is a collection of papers on diverse themes drawing on Sanskrit language studies, religion, philosophy and anthro¬pology. They reflect the interests of a small group of scholars at Oxford and their students who are also trying to keep alive Indological studies at that university—a somewhat desperate attempt in view of the impending finan¬cial cuts in this area necessitated by the policies of Thatcherism. The rather cursory introduction to the history of Indian studies at Oxford, as the opening statement of the book, does little justice to what was once a major centre of research in Indian studies.
An experienced bureaucrat and field administrator with impeccable academic qualifications and scholarly inclinations, B.P. Singh, a Nehru Fellow and an IAS officer, has produced a book which ought to be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the North East—be he an administrator, a historian, a journa¬list, or just the disinterested administrator. Not for him any of the contemptible bon¬homie that the burra sahib of yore used to write of so affectionately in his memoirs.