The book under review is a monographic study of the madad-i-ma’ash grant holders in Awadh during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Literally meaning, “aid for subsistence”, the term was applied to the land granted by the state, in which it alienated its right to collect revenue.
This volume is an anthology of valuable essays by Professor Satish Chandra, published earlier in different journals and books. Since the earliest of these essays was written in 1946, the shape and direction of history writing have undergone a tremendous change. The essays in this collection reflect – and have also been responsible for determining – new currents in history writing over the last five decades.
This up-dated and significantly expanded edition of Thapar’s most widely read book, Early India, is now available in paperback. Incorporating the essentials of new data and fresh explanations besides retaining the relevant among older arguments, the book is yet structured mostly within the original edition’s framework of worldwide recognition.
Alvin Toffler, Bucky Fuller, Ivan Illich, Sham Lai, Edward Goldsmith and Orville Freeman are some of the names dropped at the com¬mencement of Kapur’s book. Strange bed-fellows, politically disharmonious, intellectually at variance: put together at a tea party they would scratch one another’s eyes out. Ima¬gine, for example, Illich and Freeman strolling side by side in soulful chat.
The book under review, as the author states in the Epilo¬gue, was completed in mid-1979 and therefore could not take into account ‘governmen¬tal lawlessness’, for instance, the Bhagalpur blindings of undertrials, the revival of sati in certain parts of India, the scandalous and barbaric treatment of inmates of the Protective Home for Women in Agra, the harrowing tales of inhuman exploitation of bonded labour in Punjab and Haryana, and the count¬less more recent examples of custodial brutality and violence within the Indian Police and some ‘correctional organizations’.
The international press has not taken kindly to the debate regarding itself which has been rumbling in the genteel con¬ference rooms of UNESCO, off and on, since 1972. It was in 1972 that the General Conference of UNESCO first aired the possibility that the media of the richer nations might be a means towards ‘the domination of world public opinion or a source of moral and cultural pollution’.