Ever since the subject burst upon him in the latter half of his first novel The Foreigner (1968), Joshi has with single-minded dedica¬tion and growing artistic re¬sourcefulness been excoriating the Bitch Goddess— that implacable deity of gross material success who may serve the flesh but’ always extracts its pound of conscience and often leads to utter ruin.
This, the fourth and final volume of a series, presents in English translation a selection of contemporary verse in Assamese (20 poets; 30 poems), Gujarati (28 poets; 29 poems), Malayalam (30 poets; 60 poems), Telugu (17 poets; 23 poems), and Urdu (19 poets: 54 poems). Each section begins with an editorial introduction—by Nabakanta Barua for Assamese, Jhinabhai Desai for Gujarati, Ayyappa Paniker for Malayalam, I. Panduranga Rao for Telugu, and Gopichand Narang for Urdu—and concludes with brief biographical notes on the poets represented.
For far too long, the trans¬lation into English of Indian literature has been viewed primarily as an act of cross-cultural interpretation, a way of making India’s literary riches accessible to the West. This may well be an accurate assessment of the situation up to 1947: nearly all of the works translated into English were classical ones, mostly Sanskrit, and they were often translated by Western scholars who had Western readers in mind.
This collection of essays brings together the efforts of twenty-four Indian scholars belonging to a wide spectrum of socio-economic disciplines. They have attempted to ana¬lyse systematically the prob¬lems in the field of urban and regional planning and deve¬lopment. The selections have been carefully made to present a clear picture of emerging urban problems in India.
A couple of years ago this reviewer read and reviewed Christoph Von Furer-Haimendorf’s book on the Apa Tanis, A Himalayan Tribe—From Cattle to Cash. Another book by him on tribes of the same region following so soon excited one, but the tone of this book is quite different from the earlier one. This work deals with the tribes who surround the Apa Tanis, i.e., the Nishis and Monpas, and forms part of a comprehensive project of anthropological research among Indian tribal populations, as the author explains in the preface.
The book under review is a significant contribution to the study of Indian elections as well as Indian politics. It brings a whiff of fresh air into the hothouse atmosphere pre¬valent in the discipline of political science in this coun¬try. Mrs. Kaushik not only identifies the limitations of the election studies conducted during the last fifteen years but also offers an alternative approach for understanding the phenomenon of elections and electoral politics.