‘THE Forgotten Empire’ (Robert Sewell—London, 1900) is at present one of the most researched areas of South Indian history with Western and Indian scholars converging upon it. If at one end of the academic spectrum there is the grand
theoretician Burton Stein, one could locate M.H. Rama Sharma right at the other end of it.
THIS well researched book seeks to fill a gap in the historiography of religious movements and their leaders in modern India. Jordens uses all the known writ¬ings of Shraddhananda and a variety of other sources to paint a fresh and sym¬pathetic life of the Swami.
THIS book is a contribution to the grow¬ing literature of analyses of the Indian economic experience and attempts to explain the deceleration in growth since the mid-1960s. The author proceeds from a self-avowedly Marxist position, and is to be credited with offering theoretical explanations for different economic pro¬cesses, rather than mere descriptions.
The question why the rate of investment in the Indian economy has declined since the mid ’60s, and why it is not picking up are matters of considerable concern to policy makers. Successive Finance Ministers (including the one in the short-¬lived Janata Government) have been pro¬viding various incentives so as to encou¬rage investment in the private sector. But this appears to have had little impact.
The book under review is an examina¬tion of the situation and struggles of women in Maharashtra, the most ‘Latin American’ of Indian states, in the mid-1970s. Although Maharashtra, the state surrounding Bombay, is the most indus¬trialized and capitalist in India, the position of women there reveals all the problems typical of the country: exploita¬tion and oppression based on caste, religion, feudal tradition and race (the adivasis are India’s Indians) add to the universal problem of women under peripheral capitalist development.
Publication of books and papers is often taken as an indicator of the popularity of a subject. In recent years, interest in the study of orga¬nization and management has been on the increase. Of course, growing/ popularity also attracts people to the bandwagon. The book under review represents a situation of this kind. Either the author is not clear about the scope of his subject, or he wants to use a popular label to sell something which by now is quite conventional and even unexciting. This issue hits the reader in the very first para of the first chapter.