News

The principal author of this book, David Holden, who was the chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Times, was shot dead in Cairo in November 1977 when he was barely half¬way through the book. To this day the mystery surround¬ing his murder has not been unravelled. His co-author, who completed the book, feels that this summary departure had nothing to do with his researches into the House of Saud and assures us that Holden was not a part of the paranoid world of intel¬ligence and subterfuge. But the story of the House of Saud as it unfolds contains so much intrigue and violence that one may be forgiven for doubting this.

A student of business history faces one big problem: lack of information on the growth of business houses. This problem is a function of the secrecy surrounding the growth of business houses in India, a sec¬recy deliberately nurtured and propagated by the business houses themselves. The publi¬cation of this book is thus an important event. For the first time, we are provided with data on the origin, growth and expansion of Gujarat’s premier business house, that of Lal¬bhai.

What makes Ardhakathanaka fascinating and important is the fact that it is perhaps the first autobiography in an Indian language. Originally written in 1641 A.D., and in verse, using a colloquial mix¬ture of Brajabhasha and the eastern dialects of Hindi, it is the self-revelation of a Jain merchant-poet, Banarasidas, who lived in the heyday of the Mughal rule.

The editors of this anthology have stated that their aim was ‘to represent only such (poets) as embody in effective idiom the native sensibility’. One can, indeed, discern in all the poets, from old stalwarts to new voices, the milieu in which Indo-English poetry is being written today. They all reflect, in one way or another, the dilemma of the Indian ethos into which they have been born, and the contemporary Western philosophical influ¬ences, particularly Sartrean Existentialism, to which they are prone.

Marilyn French is one of a new breed of critics, per¬haps not yet fully accepted in the conventional circles of literary criticism, because of her very specific (and all-pervading) bias. As a feminist critic of literature, she en¬visions part of her function as that of reinterpreting the pil¬lars of Western literature. Shakespeare is of course one of these. Shakespeare created a large stageful of women characters, ranging from fiery Margaret and Lady Macbeth to clever Portia and waif-like Ophelia.

Alexander Blok was born in 1880 in St. Petersburg and died there in 1921. The dates are as important as the country in which was born. His life spanned the four most tur-bulent and cataclysmic decades in Russian history—the years of terror and sedition let loose by the angry young rebels, the suffocating years when ‘Pobedonostsev…