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Two central features mark the nature of socio-political life in India today, in relation to which everything else pales into insignificance: the over¬whelming poverty of the majority of the population, and the increasing hostility between central and state governments on the one side and the same dispossessed majority on the other.

Profiles in Female Poverty is part of the series ‘Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology’ edited by Prof M.N. Srinivas. I have no idea if the other titles in this series adopt an approach similar to the book under review. My impression from this book is that a wider readership could be reached if more academic studies were written in the evocative style which is a striking feature of Leela Gulati’s book.

This new Indian textbook on industrial labour and labour relations is divided into nine independent chapters: labour recruitment; labour commit¬ment; industrialization; union theory; Indian unions; indus¬trial conflict theory; collective bargaining theory; Indian industrial relations; and the theory and practice of workers’ participation and control.

Travel accounts—day to day recordings of the factors of the European East India Companies during their stay in India—have constituted an invaluable source of in-formation tor researchers working on India’s trade his¬tory in the 17th and 18th cen-turies. The Memoirs of Francois Martin, an employee of the French East India Com-pany, whose sojourn in India covered about thirty-seven years (1669-1705), is no ex¬ception to this rule.

Maulana Mohamed Ali’s is the most controversial per¬sonality in pre-Independence Muslim politics. He rose to eminence as one of the top leaders of the Khilafat agita-tion—itself a subject of great controversy among historians of the independence move¬ment—and was its most pas¬sionate champion. There are different views about Moha¬med Ali’s sincerity in taking up this cause.