The Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea which concluded its eleventh and final session in April last year, ranks in the history of the United Nations as the longest and most widely represented conference. The ‘III UNCLOS’ adopted the new convention on the Law of the Sea, which was formally opened for signature at Montego Bay, Jamaica in December 1982.
This collection of papers re¬presents an attempt by Marxist groups to understand the signi¬ficance of the nationalist up¬surges which are taking place in different parts of the coun¬try, as well as to evolve a strategy towards them. The seminar at which they were presented in Madras in 1981 was attended by a large number of political activists and radical youth groups from different states, and their ex¬perience and concern is reflect¬ed in the articles. This adds considerably to the interest of the book and also accounts for a degree of oversimplification which is present in some of the papers.
Most historians are agreed that the British Raj in India terminated in 1947. However, many publishers in England as well as in India are aware that an Indian Raj rules in Britain these days. It began in the early 1970s, probably with the BBC Radio 4 series entitled Plain Tales from the Raj, and the published evi¬dence of this post-occupation shows no sign of abating.
From what I am able to gather, American scholarship on India, which blossomed in a big way in the enthusias¬tic 1950s, has gone through an interesting change during the 1970s. The earlier concern with the sociology and politics of contemporary India has declined somewhat, and more and more scholars are turning to religion, literature, folklore, the performing arts, tradi¬tional cognitive systems, etc.
An English MP of the last century is once supposed to have sneered at ‘the noble Lord opposite, who has spent his life in writing books about books’, while he himself, hav¬ing been a district officer in India, had ‘played upon that harp whose strings are the hearts of men’. What would our MP have said about those of us who have added one more link to the chain, and are occupied in writing articles about books about books.
Ideas have a role in ordering cognition of our experiences. While studying a literate soci-ety as opposed to a primitive one (where one does not expect to encounter a great deal of reflective tradition and the superimposition of ideas of further reflection over the tradition), it is a challenging task to sort out a coherent and at the same time accept¬able grammar of both persis¬tent and syntagmatic struc¬tures. In the sphere of religion there is often a gap between the ideas of higher philo¬sophies and the religious prin¬ciples which guide the laity.