Wim Van Der Meer’s book is an interesting study and a significant addition to the already existing works on the subject. It has been said that one must live a millenium to understand the subtleties of Hindustani music.
A new translation and com¬mentary on the Gita always arouses curiosity as to what fresh insight has been found in this much-translated and exhaustively commented upon corner-stone of Hindu philo¬sophy. What is important in studying the Gita is not to lose sight of the matrix from which it evolved: the Mahabharata.
Stella Kramrisch has spent more than half a century studying Indian art. She has authored more than half a dozen definitive studies on Indian architecture, sculpture and painting. Her insights into the mysteries of Indian meta¬physics, literature (Vedic and Puranic), and architectural and sculptural texts have been couched in a style which has lent new dimensions to critical studies relating to the arts of India.
One might be tempted to treat Dances of the Golden Hall as yet another coffee-table ‘glossy’ on the glories of Indian art, glance through the photographs and put it aside. This would be a mistake for this joint tribute by Ashoke Chatterjee and Sunil Janah to an illustrious dancer and her art is a work of ori¬ginality and brings something entirely new, surprising and refreshing into the world of art books.
This volume of selected poems by Bertolt Brecht trans¬lated into English brings into focus an aspect of Brecht’s creative writing which for a long time was not given its due importance. Brecht has gained world-wide fame as a drama¬tist, as the innovator of the epic theatre and of the ‘alie¬nation technique’ (V-Effekt).
This book is a collection of four lectures delivered at the University of Rajasthan in 1972 in the newly, instituted lecture chair named after Dr. A.G. Stock. The first three lectures were originally deli¬vered in English, and the fourth in Hindi. A very brief fifth chapter, ‘Times Hunt’, a translated section from the Hindi book Samvatsara ap-pears at the end to exemplify and wind up the issue discus¬sed.
Foreigners’’ writings about India do not easily fall into set categories. Undoubtedly the openness and hospitality of Indians—the authorities as well as the common people— makes our country a happy hunting ground for those in search of experience. It seems a pity that the reportage-fiction genre of writing by foreigners absolves its prac¬titioners from the discipline of true literature—especially the great novel—through which the mind and the world-view of the writer communi¬cates to the reader its deep encounter with the ‘lived-in’ and ‘thought-of reality of the world.
Service memoirs, if well-written, are perennial draws. They bulge with ‘inside’ stories, they are written by men who have been at the top, privy to intrigue and decision, and they also seem to termi¬nate the service man’s code of silence. The memoirs often, contain analysis and opinion that comes easier with hind¬sight. There has, therefore, been a number of such memoirs recently, mostly writ¬ten by ex-Army men.
Marion Woolfson, a journalist, has ploughed through mountains of docu¬ments to show that Zionists will stoop to any depth in order to populate Eretz Israel, their land of destiny. They will kill, torture, lie, and bomb, as long as Jews flock to Israel. They will also spread misinformation, terro¬rize innocent civilians, alter facts of history and send letter bombs to blast scientists work¬ing for their enemies.
Basic to the concept of growing talent are the effec¬tiveness standards associated with every managerial job. Indeed, effectiveness is not a quality that a manager brings to a situation. It is something he produces from a given situation. What matters is not what a manager does but what he achieves. Interestingly enough, even if both input and output are low, a manager could easily be hundred per cent efficient but zero per cent effective.
Culture and Morality is a collection of essays written in honour of Christoph von Furer Haimendorf. Its arrival into the world of books should be sincerely welcomed by stu¬dents and scholars of anthro¬pology. The introduction gives us a detailed account of Haimendorf’s career and it includes references to his pub¬lished works. Contributors to this book have focussed on the theme of morality dealt with by Haimendorf in Morals and Merit (1967).
This study of religion and society in Thailand focusses on the Hindu cultural in-fluences that exist in Thailand. It is always interesting to see how the values, ideas and spirit of Indian society work after coming into contact with other cultures. Santosh Desai identifies and studies how the Indian values and customs have been transformed in their passage from one cultural region to another and how they have been assimilated into a different society.
The late Professor Moham¬mad Habib’s writings com¬prise all that was best in the work of a whole brilliant generation of Indian his¬torians. The thinking of this generation had been moulded by the concluding phase of India’s struggle for indepen¬dence—a phase that inspired a great deal of idealism, raised the moral stature of men and created fellow-feeling even in the midst of tensions and con¬flicts of truly continental dimensions. It is this essential humanism that makes many of the historical works of the late 1920’s down to the first decade of India’s independence valuable.
Except for some well-known concepts such as Gundar Frank’s development of under¬development the actual prob¬lems of development and poli¬tical change in Latin America are still relatively unfamiliar on this side of the world. For this reason the author’s stated aim of encouraging ‘scholarly South-South exchange’ is to be applauded as well as an Indian publisher’s willingness to assist.
W.W. Rostow identified the central fact about the eco¬nomy of a traditional society to be—
… that a ceiling existed on the level of attainable out¬put per head. This ceiling resulted from the fact that the potentialities which flow from modern science and technology were either not available or not regularly and systematically applied … But in agriculture, the level of productivity was limited by the inaccessibility of modern science, its appli¬cation, and its frame of mind.
During the past one decade or so there has been a drama¬tic shift in perceptions of deve¬lopment possibilities in nation¬al economies. Moved by the substantial deterioration in the living standards of the majo¬rity of the population despite improvements at a purely aggregate level, decision¬-makers, both at international and national forums, have started concentrating on change in the structure of the economy with a view to identi¬fying the potential beneficiar¬ies of alternative development scenarios.
M.S. Rajan and Shivaji Ganguly have done a com¬mendable labour of love in bringing together writings of Sisir Gupta on wide and vari¬ed aspects of international relations in contemporary times. The volume is dedicat¬ed to the memory of Professor Sisir Gupta.
The ancient Sanskrit texts have many references to the practice of fine arts in India. But not many of the fine arts have survived through the ages. How¬ever, what was regarded as fine arts in ancient India cannot be included in the present day meaning of the term. There were sixty-four fine arts that in¬cluded physical culture, use of weapons, elephant riding, instrumental music, dancing, painting, body decoration, astronomy, magic, wood-craft etc.
R. Parthasarathy, returning from ‘exile’, wrote ‘My tongue in English chains/I return, after a generation, to you.’ Taking this poem as a paradigm of Indo-English poetry, M. Sivaram¬krishna says in his introduction to this collection of critical essays on the work of eleven poets, ‘It is in terms of this triadic frame of reference…the transcen¬dence of Anglo-mania through an assertion of the Indian identity, the discovery of a ‘viable’ past and the residue of linguistic significance—that the following pages try to map out the features of the unchained tongue, that is Indo-English poetry today.’
This attempt to ascertain the worth of Saleem Peeradina’s poems must, neces¬sarily, be made in the context of recent Indian English poetry. Let me begin, therefore, by quoting from Chirantan Kulshrestha’s introductory essay to the critical anthology Contemporary Indian English Verse (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1980).