No Pointers
Arup R. Banerji
LAND CONTROL AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE IN INDIAN HISTORY by R.E. Frykenberg Manohar Publications, New Delhi, 1980, 277 pp., 85.00
Sept-Oct 1980, volume 5, No 9/10

The collection of papers under review was first published in 1969, five years after they first felt the heat of discussion at a seminar, at the University of Wisconsin. The continuing demand for them and the response aroused by them are the reasons offered by the editor for the second edi­tion. Unfortunately, their usefulness as in-depth studies of three areas of India in the nineteenth-century remain con­fined to the state of research on them at the time of the first publication. Design­ed to include the proceedings of a semi­nal’, their value as a re-publication could have been enormously enhanced with the addition of research effort concluded through the 1970s on Bengal, Oudh as well South India. The only additional essay is the one by Frykenberg that seems to have missed inclusion in the first edition. Of the eleven essays, two are concerned with ‘land’ and the influence of ideas on the formation of institutions related to it. Nurul Hasan’s paper is the only one devoted exclusively to the pre-colo­nial period.

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