Vijay Agnew

One of the indicators given importance in assessing the status of women in a nation is the presence of women in the political arena. Percentages are given against total membership in representative councils or politburos or political parties and the higher the percentage the more the marks given to the country for having moved women up the ladder.


Reviewed by: Devaki Jain
Bruce Grant

Refugees are the forgotten people. Witness, for instance, the festering Pale¬stinian issue, which remains after three decades. Essentially, the refugee seeks escape from intolerable persecution within his own country. But, he presents a pro¬blem to the international community.


Reviewed by: No Reviewer
John Updike

This is a terribly disappointing novel. Updike has carved a niche for himself in the hall of literary fame as the map¬maker, non-pareil, of the peaks, valleys and uncharted fissures of suburban/middle¬class America.


Reviewed by: Tejeshwar Singh
R.H. Morrison

Another clutch of Redbirds from the Writers’ Workshop aviary, this time trans¬lations of foreign poets, or ‘transcreations’ as P. Lal prefers to call them. The check¬list at the back of each ‘Birdbook’ shows a cartoon of a pair of eyes struggling to remain above a line, and the note ‘Simply submerged’.


Reviewed by: Julian Birkett
H.K. Kaul

India! Down the ages, travellers of every description, monks and missiona­ries, traders and merchants, poets and novelists; soldiers and administrators, plenipotentiaries and proconsuls have sought to describe something of the beauty and the pity, the squalor and the splen­dour of this country.


Reviewed by: Srinivasa Rao Adige
A.D.D. Gordon

A national movement requires organi¬zation, funds, leadership and popular support. If one or the other is lacking or weak, the movement becomes not only lop-sided but ineffective. It was Gandhi’s great achievement in India that he ensured all four basic elements, even though he left to others the reconciling of the contradiction in the manner in which he provided these essential ingredients.


Reviewed by: S. Gopal
Devaki Jain

Through the pages of this book which number about two hundred and seventy, Devaki Jain and her associates Nalini Singh and Malini Chand describe to us five different endeavours in which women have an important role. They are mainly in western and eastern India.


Reviewed by: K. Saradamoni
Vijay Agnew

One of the indicators given importance in assessing the status of women in a nation is the presence of women in the politica arena. Percentages are given against total membership in representative councils or politburos or political parties and the higher the percentage the more the marks given to the country for having moved women up the ladder.


Reviewed by: Devaki Jain
Walter Wangerin, Jr.

The Book of the Dun Cow is another addition to the many novels in the genre of fantasy narratives like Watership Down and Lord of the Rings. Not perhaps as utterly captivating as these classics, it nevertheless has its own intrinsic magic.


Reviewed by: Veena Devasheer
Arup Kumar Datta

The Kaziranga Trail has been awarded the Shankar’s Gold Medal for the best book written for children. Conscious writ­ing for the young is a fairly recent deve­lopment in India.


Reviewed by: Uma Iyengar
Tara Ali Baig

The International Year of the Child provided an opportunity for national and international reviews of the needs of children and of the impact of the pro­grammes taken up for them in the past.


Reviewed by: Nirmala Buch
Siddiq Salik

Siddiq Salik, one time lecturer and journalist joined the Pakistan Army as Public Relations Officer and his tour of duty got him to Dacca in January 1970. He remained there until taken as a prisoner of war to India where he spent two years mulling over the fiasco that his bosses had so callously brought about.


Reviewed by: C. Vithal
Prabhat Mukherjee

The words and names Orissa, Jagga­natha and Chaitanya are synonymous. Prabhat Mukherjee says in the Preface of his book, ‘Chitanya’s influence on the religious history of Orissa was profound. Chaitanya is probably the only Hindu saint who was deified during his lifetime.


Reviewed by: Monika Varma
Satish Grover

Although Cunningham, Fergusson and Marshall had drawn the world’s attention to the tradition of’ great architecture in the Indian subcontinent, it was left to Havell to identify the concepts which con­stituted the basis of the architectural plans.


Reviewed by: Kapila Vatsyayan
Mohammed Yunus

Though of recent origin, political pornography is a well-established literary genre in India today thriving on what Yunus rightly describes as the ‘prevailing mood of our high-minded intellectuals to read gossip.’ What began as a mild stimulant following the news-starved years of Emergency became in the permissive milieu of Janata rule full scale pandering to political prurience.


Reviewed by: N.S. Jagannathan
George L. Hart III

Tamil is the oldest surviving classical language of India, and Tamil literature goes back to the early centuries of the Christian era. The old heroic and roman­tic literature, the devotional hymns of the Saiva and Vaishnava saints and narrative literature form the glory of Tamil.


Reviewed by: R. Parthasarathy
Mary Ann Dasgupta

An anthology offered under the label Indian Perspectives, ought to have two things: an Introduction—preferably a strong one; and a Selection that is discriminating—and therefore strong. Hers has no introduction and may be half a dozen real poets out of its presentation of thirty.


Reviewed by: Saleem Peeradina
Mushirul Hasan

The first book is a collection of letters to and from Dr. M.A. Ansari; it also con­tains some statements issued by Dr. Ansari in his long political career and his addresses as chairman of the reception committee for the Delhi session of the Muslim League in 1918, president of the Indian National Congress at its Madras session in 1927, and chairman of the all-­parties Muslim National Convention at Calcutta in 1928.


Reviewed by: Girish Mathur
M. Peissel

Zanskar was opened to foreigners in the late 1970’s and this is among the first of the travel books which can be expected to follow from the opening of the area. Peissel is well known to those familiar with the travel literature on the Himalayas and his account of a visit to the kingdom of Mustang, remains interesting reading for those concerned with western Nepal and its vicinity.


Reviewed by: Romila Thapar
Brenda E.F. Beck

The present volume, of which Brenda Beck is the editor as well as main contri­butor, is an interesting collection of seven essays on social anthropology, physical geography, demography and urban deve­lopment.


Reviewed by: Malvika Maheshwari
Krishna Kumar Tummala

It will remain for a long time one of the much debated issues in Indian Ad­ministration: whether Jawaharlal Nehru did the right thing in 1947 in opting (deli­berately or otherwise) for a policy of ‘gradualism’ rather than making a clean break with the past.


Reviewed by: Ram K. Vepa
S.C. Dube

The adequacy of public services in the democratic context and environment of rapid change is a matter of continuing concern. As the residuary of authority there is a continuing love-hate relationship between the public and governmental ser­vices for, the latter is supposed to serve the former.


Reviewed by: T.N. Chaturvedi
Govind Kelkar

Between Govind Kelkar’s visit to China in April-May 1978 and mine in May-June 1979 there was a year full of rapid policy changes. She travelled in China when the Chinese leadership was inclined to retain the overall orientation of the Cultural Revolution and integrate it with a programme of four modernizations while denouncing the extremism of the Gang of Four.


Reviewed by: Manoranjan Mohanty
Ross Terrill

Nobody ever thinks of writing a book on ‘America After Carter’ or ‘Britain After Margaret Thatcher’. But books ·and articles on ‘Post-Nehru India’, and ‘China After Mao’ abound. Why? Is it that America and Britain are crisis-free societies? Obviously not; they have been visibly moving from crisis to crisis.


Reviewed by: G.D. Deshingkar