Six wise men of Hindoostan set out to examine the ele¬phant. Professor Alfred de Souza has gone one better, for he has produced the six men and one wiser woman to examine urban India and its problems. The result is the little book under review.
Industrialization is be¬lieved to be an agent of econo¬mic development and modern¬ization and to bring in pat¬terns of universalistic values. Sociologists like Kerr and his associates who believe in this thesis consider industrial¬ism as ‘a leveller of cultural and ideological differences bet¬ween societies’. Some other sociologists like Moore, Bendix, Feldman and Hoselitz are also somewhat in agreement with this logic, although they have ‘disagreements over the con¬vergence of societies towards a common structural form’ at the final stage.
Mamkoottam’s study (1982) of the Tata Workers Union (TWU) in Jamshedpur is a work of considerable value. It should be made widely-known both within the country and internationally. The TWU, based on the giant Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) works, presents the image of a model trade union within a model company in a model city.
From July 8, 1979, the day when Raj Narain initiated defections from the Janata Party, till August 22, 1979, when President Neelam Sanjiva Reddy dissolved the Lok Sabha by Presidential order, the Indian constitu¬tional democracy was continu¬ally betrayed in a variety of ways by tae very persons who had desecrated Rajghat with the promise of bringing the people of India a new constitutional dawn. Some of these people, now refurnished by the very democratic processes which they wantonly debased, are again preparing to lead the nation.
This book is an important contribution to the existing literature on the social and intellectual history of Indian Muslims in the nineteenth cent¬ury. It is a sympathetic account of the temporal and spiritual concerns of the Ulama, and attempts to show how these concerns were integrated into a unified world-view.
The publishers of Fontana Paperbacks have for some time past earned the gratitude of students of European history for bringing out a highly succ¬essful series on the history of Europe written by eminent scholars, and a companion series on the economic history of Europe under the editor¬ship of CM. Cipolla. To this they have added a third string, the Fontana History of War and European Society, under the general editorship of the noted social historian Geoffrey Best.