Krishna Chaitanya’s book is the first of a series on different aspects of Indian cul¬ture being put out by the India Library. The book is a broad survey that includes material from our religions, literature and the arts. It can be considered a book of ideas; each idea is examined for its contribution to the meaning and texture of our life-style and world-view.
During the past two deca¬des there has been a greater emphasis on the in-depth study of ‘regional history’. It has been observed that the general tendencies in history apparently found over a vast geo-political reality take differ¬ent forms in diverse situations. Like most other regions, Gujarat assumes some peculiar features which are reflected throughout its history. Being a coastal area, it has been open to the outer world for centuries—mainly for merc¬antile transactions.
This book is one of the pro¬ducts of a two-year travail undertaken by a committed European socialist social his¬torian to understand trade unionism among Nigerian port and dock workers and to interpret its implications for them. With disarming frank¬ness, the author reminds us of ‘the 150-year old tradition in the literature on the working class which holds that socia¬lism is necessary in order to overcome capitalist exploita¬tion, oppression, anarchy and waste’ and that ‘the force to bring about the overthrow of capitalism is the working class’.
Mushirul Hasan’s edited, volume deals with the 47 years before Independence in which there was an upsurge of poli¬tical activity both in the Hindu and Muslim communities. This series of nineteen articles deals with two correlated develop¬ments over this period, the politicization of the Muslims through the Khilafat move¬ment which was pegged on a pan-Islamic concept —the reinstatement of the Turkish Khalif, a titular custodian and defender of Islamic holy places after his displacement by the British in 1919—and on communalism and its political usage.
This first volume of a projec¬ted series follows generally the pattern established in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Selected Works, which is a project of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memo¬rial Fund. This volume covers the period upto 1918 when Motilal was poised to emerge on the national scene as a close colleague of Gandhiji during the first Satyagraha Move¬ment.
In this latest publication, Professor Amartya Sen sets out to debunk an accepted doctrine in national and international food policy with his well-known talent for logical ana¬lysis, factual home-work and clarity of exposition.