To live naturally with nature
Communities and Conservation: Natural Resource Management in South and Central Asia edited by Ashish Kothari, Neema Pathak, R.V. Anuradha and Bansuri Taneja. Sage Publications, New Delhi. Pp. 506. Rs 325.
Reviewed by Harjinder Singh

Gita, yet another version
Madhusudana Sarasvati’s Bhagwad Gita with annotation Gudhartha Dipika, translated by Swami Gambhirananda. Published by Advaita Ashrama, Calcutta. Pp. 1038. Rs 160.
Reviewed by P. D. Shastri

A lesson in what not to publish
Consumerism, Crime and Corruption by M.G. Chitkara. APH Publishing Corporation, New Delhi. Pp. xv + 373 Rs 700/-
Reviewed by Randeep Wadehra

Hindi verses in English
An Anthology of Modern Hindi Poetry compiled and edited by Kailash Vajpayi. Rupa & Co, New Delhi. Pp. 313 Rs 390.
Reviewed by J. N. Puri

To live naturally with nature

Communities and Conservation: Natural Resource Management in South and Central Asia edited by Ashish Kothari, Neema Pathak, R.V. Anuradha and Bansuri Taneja. Sage Publications, New Delhi. Pp. 506. Rs 325.

MAN’S control over nature by technological means has been questioned ever since people started thinking on the consequences of indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources. Since the beginning of this century, organised efforts to raise awareness on environmental issues and compile information to enhance the knowledge-base became more intense. Meetings of activists and scholars take place all over the world these days to share experience and knowledge in the trends in conservation of natural resources. People’s participation in conservation efforts either because of traditional life-styles or due to enhanced awareness is a major aspect of these discussions.

Ashish Kothari and his team of editors are well known as pioneers in the discourse on environmental issues in our country. The present book is a compilation of papers presented at a regional workshop on community-based conservation in New Delhi in early 1997 with the focus on the countries of South and Central Asia. The book is divided into four parts. After two introductory chapters in the first part, an overview of conservation in India, the Maldives, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka is presented in six papers in part 2. Emerging issues and specific case studies are presented in the next two parts of the book. The conference was part of UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere programme.

The essential focus in the book is on the realisation that community-based conservation (CBC) is an efficient and effective way to launch programmes to protect the environment. Like most centralised programms, a government-initiated conservation programme is often not as effective, in spite of the best of intentions. Bureaucratic problems, inconsistency in will and lack of vision in leadership, corruption and influence of vested interests are some of the reasons why centralised, top-heavy programmes do not often work. CBC, on the other hand, means decentralised local efforts, that are more likely to work because the community in question knows what is their stake in the environmental changes and how important the local natural resources are for them.

Technological means to replace eco-based self-sustaining socio-economic resource systems have been exposed too well and for centuries now, for the common man to question them. Every citizen has become aware of the hazards of using pesticides, indiscriminate deforestation and destruction of wild life. Traditional knowledge is being re-evaluated positively by the expert and the commoner alike. In the process, other than a greater awareness on how to work against habitat destruction, there is a tremendous boost to democratic values at the grassroots as communities become more empowered.

There is a politics of the environment, and conservation is a political struggle. People learn this in working together at local levels with many NGO workers as well as a number of government officials helping them to comprehend the complexity of conservation. Thus conservation acquires a far more important role as it contributes to the networking of people’s movements towards a better society.

In India, the government has been reasonably progressive on paper and fairly radical laws have been enacted to enforce conservation. Unfortunately, other than real limitations of the laws, practical implementation has not been always so good. The underprivileged, the tribals, have been always at the receiving end of these policies, often at the cost of the timber merchants or the urban populace, most of whom are quite insensitive to the idea of conservation. Arvind Khare’s paper gives details on many of these aspects with ample data to support his arguments.

Madhav Gadgil, the soft-spoken and inspiring professor-fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research at Bangalore, writes on “Grassroots conservation practices: Revitalising the traditions”. Gadgil has been a pioneer in sensitising the otherwise mediocre and rootless scientific community in India on issues of environment. For many years he has worked with science teachers of North Karnataka on the native flora and fauna. He has been a great influence on many of the ecology researchers in India. An interesting fact they emphasise is that “biodiversity elements of value are by no means confined to extensive tracts of pristine ecosystems; they occur even in the midst of extensively humanised landscapes.”

Environment affects everyone, but there is a gender aspect to it. Women in villages need fuelwood for domestic cooking and other purposes, they are the ones who get water for the family. Naturally, fuelwood and water conservation are matters of life and death to women. Women’s participation in numerous movements in India, from Chipko to Narmada and many others, has been greatly inspiring and is a reason for hope. Madhu Sarin and her colleagues point out with supporting data, the changes in the gender scenario and the participation of adivasis in forest management over the years and discuss strategies for empowering women to participate in their article titled “Gender and equity concerns in joint forest management”.

Contributions from the authors of neighbouring countries are a valuable addition in the book. The subcontinent is politically divided into many units, but ecologically it is an integral whole with diversity within. In fact, there is a strong coupling in any two parts of the planet and the consequences of this are observed quite commonly as, for instance, in the occurrence of the El Nino and other climatic phenomena. The migration of birds and other life forms also shows how the entire world is one big habitat for the collective “us”. Thus, a set of articles from the subcontinent put together is certainly welcome.

One surprising absentee from this collection is Vandana Shiva, who is a prolific writer on CBC and is internationally known for her contributions. Another lacuna that remains is a lack of proper indexing. For publishers like Sage, this is not pardonable. With the kind of computer technology available today, absence of proper indexing is simply poor production.

Nonetheless, this book is a must for every conscious citizen of our planet. Ironically, the English reading elite in this country is more a cause than a medium to raise awareness in matters like the destruction of environment. Most readers of this review or the book will be people who are either participants in various forms of pollution in cities (specially noise, vehicular emission and increasing replacement of nature by reinforced concrete) or simply indifferent observers. In such a situation, one hopes that those who belong to the small group that dares to question, will make the best of this book.

— Harjinder Singh

Insidious cultural impact of popular cinema

The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema & Space in the World System by Frederic Jameson. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Pp. XVI+220. $15.95.

Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction by M. Madhava Prasad. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. XII+258. Rs 425.

I AM a cinema buff, have been one for all my adult life. Relieved of my professional obligations to be prim and proper and not to sound frivolous in the class room, I can now confess my secret passion for popular Hollywood and Hindi cinema. I have previously “discoursed” on art cinema, held forth on Ray, Bergman, Fellini and more recently, Krzysztof Kieslowski but have always returned to popular cinema as my adrenalin.

Neither of the above books tells me why, oh! why, we used to model our cheap college wear on Raj Kapoor’s Chaplinesque trousers and sing “awara hoon” to the visible discomfiture of our co-ed classmates. Or, why our children and grandchildren today gyrate to the ear-splitting blasts of the current crop of films from the Bollywood treadmill. Or why Arnold Schwarznegger, Sylvester Stallone, Amitabh Bachchan and now Sunil Shetty and Akshay Kumar disturb the lascivious dreams of the teeny-bopper generation.

“Desire” is the word that bobs up and down the streams of commentary on films and the media, gathering occasional dollops of theoretical mucilage from the likes of Lacan, Metz and Andre Bazin. But we are none the wiser for all their exertions to explain why cinema, and particularly popular cinema, has us in thrall.

In his “Signatures of the Visible” Frederic Jameson says that the visual is “essentially pornographic” and the “pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body”. Although it does not go all the way to explain our fascination with the cinematic image, voyeurism does partly account for our bent.

It is true that for the most part our relationship to the cinematic image is that of a peeping Tom, but it would be absurd to suggest that there are no other urges or compulsions to draw us to the art in general. The sense of justice for one is a prominent theme which the contemporary Hindi film highlights, as Madhava Prasad says in his otherwise jargon-riddled book. Or ideology, as both Jameson and Prasad believe.

In “Geopolitical Aesthetic”, Jameson analysis crime and detective films from the point of view of the ideology of “Conspiracy plot”, which could be accepted as an extention of the urge to see “beyond” the surface. In Jameson’s work there is a tendency to read allegorical meanings in literary and historical texts, and these meanings extend to the formal structures as well. Here the conspiracy plot is an allegory for what he calls the social totality of North American culture in the present phase of post-modernism.

Since post-modernism with Jameson is as much a cultural phenomenon as a socio-economic one, he tries to establish a link between cultural expression — in this case, the film — and its wider roots in the general social totality: “The perpetual present of the post-modern, its caricatural fulfilment of the old idea of human life as sheer unrelenting activity: all this is what it would be better not to call a new theme, but rather a new content for literary or cultural expression.”

Shorn of its dense, opaque, forbidding and ultimately frustrating verbiage, the argument of the book is this: Cinema is a mass cultural product (Prasad would agree). Its technical innovations allow it to capture a wider cultural space; and the conspiracy plot is emblematic of fissures in social totality, defined in another work, “Late Marxism”, as “a socio economic mechanism of domination and exploitation — which escapes representation by the individual thinker or the individual thought”. It exploits the latest technology of crime detection and minimises the role of the detective or the guardians of social peace. It is a perfect cultural expression of that stage of post-modernism, the present, where gadgetry and simulation give the illusion of the real.

The two themes of space and mass cultural nature of cinema are brought out in what seems to me a highly sophisticated analysis of Pakula’s films, “The Parallax View”, and “All the President’s Men” and Cronenberg’s “Videodrome”. Unlike several other Marxist cultural critics, Jameson possesses a neat sense of detail, of the minute particular in the ensemble, as well as a wide-angle grasp of the apt literary allusion ranging from Conrad to the recent Soviet science fiction. This enables him to attend to the text in hand, particularly a film text in which it is ordinarily difficult to recapture fleeting images. Just to emphasise the relevance of each image, he reproduces a variety of frames of these films for the reader to judge for himself.

What interests me in his analysis is the way in which he sees a close correspondence between technical glossiness and sleazy content, something Prasad fails to discuss in his references to the gratuitous violence and horror in the popular Hindi film. Here is Jameson: “The ideologeme of elegance and glossiness, expensive form, in post-modernism, was also dialectically at one with its opposite number in sleaze, punk, trash, and garbage art of all kinds.” Though this remark is specifically about “Videodrome”, a film which reflects Canada’s subordinate position to the USA, it tells something about post-modernism’s prurient involvement with the underside of social reality, its wallowing in patently disreputable aspects of political manipulation in late capitalism.

That technological slickness can mould the seamiest of contents into a visually appealing film speaks of post-modernism’s conquest of geopolitical space, its reduction of all social reality into a simulacrum.

As a believer in the integral aspiration of a utopian vision, Jameson can only despair at the outcome, but he is too honest not to register the new phenomena of the appropriation of filmic space by technological progress. This is why he seems to me to misread even an all-out utopian filmmaker like Tarkovsky when he suggests that technology alone enables the Russia master to present unspoilt nature in films like “Nostalgia” and “Sacrifice”. As an ardent fan of Tarkovsky’s films which I see again and again everytime I get an opportunity, I always felt that he was genuinely seeking to present the Russian landscape both as a stage and as a chorus for the human concerns of his protagonists by creating a simultaneity of levels of perception. Such is outer space in “Solaris” and the raw Russian vastness in “Ivan’s childhood.”

One of the key terms in Jameson’s cultural criticism is “cognitive mapping”, a term derived from Kevin Lynch and enabling people to make sense of their urban space. What he offers in the present book is an illustration of how cinema helps in mapping out an individual’s space within his/her social order, and how it can accommodate global processes, cinema itself being a global art. Madhava Prasad, despite his cumbersome, dragged-out style and despite the tutelary ghost of Jameson hovering over his formulations, makes a bold attempt to see the process of cognitive mapping in popular Hindi film. In fact his project is designed to make out how subjectivities are related to the changing cinematic style.

Popular Hindi cinema differs from the Hollywood model in that we do not have the same director-producer system which is the hallmark of Hollywood. The blend of talents such as Selznick, Zanuck, Goldwyn, de Mille and others simply did not exist in India. Nor did we have charismatic figures like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford. In the first section of his book — begotten of a thesis and carrying all the warts of a heavily annotated bookishness — mostly a theoretical analysis of the economics of ideology of the Hindi film, Prasad bypasses this lacuna, though he does throw useful light on Phalke, Sohrab Modi and V. Shantaram and their efforts towards establishing the Hindi film as a commercial venture.

Like Jameson, Prasad also suggests to role of new technology, but is more interested in the theoretical aspects of what he calls “the image-spectator relations”: “This combination of codes, old and new, also signifies a combination of narrative movement, and spectacle as that which arrests the gaze.” Indeed “gaze” is ubiquitous in Prasad’s lexicon of theoretical argot. From the male gaze to the statist gaze, the range of operation of the technique of surveillance is quite extensive.

Thus the archetypal pattern of the family romance is reproduced with infinite variations of the feudal gaze. The “gaze” wears different disguises with matrilinear elements assuming important positions, as in the Bachchan films, “Deevar” and “Zanjeer”. Or it can be the state’s overseeing eye appropriating the family romance as in Mani Ratnam’s “Roja” and “Bombay”.

Prasad’s reading of these films is particularly interesting, as is his reading of “Sholay” in that he manages to see “the individual subject’s position within different political orders and the corresponding constraints and protocols of spectatorship”. In other words, he looks for and finds in these films different versions of the ideological construction of individuals and communities.

Although the first part of the book is a welter of formulations on concepts like narrative realism, melodrama and ideological placement, it is useful in singling out the distinctive qualities of the popular Hindi film. It is in the second section, however, when Prasad gives up many of his theoretical crutches that he presents some extremely valuable interpretations of individual films.

In charting the growth of the Hindi film through “the aesthetic of mobilisation”, “middle class cinema” and “development aesthetic”, Prasad’s major concern is about how personal and national identities are fashioned when the state’s own cultural project is directed at creating a definite socio-economic ideal for the newly independent country. In the fifties, sixties and the seventies the Nehruvian ideal of modern, secular India remained dominant. The role of the Film Development Corporation and the Film Finance Corporation is crucial in encouraging a particular kind of conformity, even though these institutions have also funded some unconventional films like Sayeed Mirza’s “Saleem Langde Ko Mat Maro”.

By and large the statist gaze has driven the cinematic narrative towards a forced closure and completion as in all blood-and-thunder films which end with the defeat of the villain and recovery of lost domestic space. To imply, as Prasad does, that this completion, these happy closures, are a response to the state’s need for a national cultural identity is to neglect the factor of individual craving for order.

The psychology of mass entertainment remains unexplored in Parsad’s compendious volume. That is because Prasad, unlike Jameson, blurs the distinction between mass and popular cultures. He could certainly have profited from the latter’s 1979 essay, “Reification & Utopia in mass culture” available in “Signatures of the Visible”. The desire for formal completion in cinematic texts is as much the result of a mass craving for order fed by the technicolour seductions of consumerist entertainment as by any supposed aesthetic considerations, which just don’t weigh in mass cultural products.

By the very nature of his brief, Prasad could not have dwelt upon the other cinema which, as Govind Nihalani predicts, is dead and gone. Part of the reason could be the lack of film literacy both in our middle classes and in the real consumers of the popular film, the lumpen elements of society. It does require a peculiar sensitivity to grasp the fine point in the repetition of a particular musical note at crucial moments in “Pather Panchali” or the recurrence of the desert in “Bhuvan Shome”, or the biblical symbolism in Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries”, or the dripping tap in “Maya Darpan”.

But Prasad sees in Shyam Benegal the nearest approximation to a politically conscious auteur who yet works with subtle indirections as in “Ankur”, “Trikal” and “Nishant”. Prasad’s close reading of “Ankur” and “Nishant” in the last section redeem the book marred as it otherwise is by verbosity and wishy-washy conceptualisations of narrative realism and melodrama. Although still under the male gaze, Lakshmi in “Ankur” manages to lift herself out of her traditional conditioning and establish a strong feminist presence (what is one to make of her narcissistic recourse to the mirror?)

The frontality of which Prasad speaks in the early chapters is achieved in the last but one scene of the film when she raises her gaze to meet the frightened gaze of her landlord lover. The pelting of a stone by the village urchin in the very last frame signals for Benegal the alteration of the political-economic equations — a confirmation of the filmmaker’s attempt to confront issues squarely.

Although heavy going for the most part, I would still recommend Prasad as a shrewd reader of films. At the present juncture there aren’t many such hereabouts.

— M.L. Raina

Gita, yet another version

Madhusudana Sarasvati’s Bhagwad Gita with annotation Gudhartha Dipika, translated by Swami Gambhirananda. Published by Advaita Ashrama, Calcutta. Pp. 1038. Rs 160.

THE Gita is the most universally read and heard work. The present one is the English translation of Madhusudan Sarasvati’s classic “Gudhartha Dipika”, which means an annotated version throwing light on the hidden meaning or the deeper implications of the Gita.

The translation was done by Swami Gambhirananda, who took 12 long years to complete this voluminous work in 1988. Another decade was spent in revision and vetting. It is truly a monumental labour of love and devotion. It has been published by Advaita Ashrama, Calcutta (a unit of the Ramakrishna Paramhansa Organisation). This great work gives an Advaita Vedantist interpretation of the Gita.

The greatest work in this line is Shankaracharya’s (788-820 AD), who is regarded as the pioneer — at any rate, the greatest protagonist — of Advaita Vedanta philosophy. The present work is claimed to be the second (greatest) in the field, next only to Shankaracharya’s commentary on the Gita.

All the six systems of philosophy — Sankhya, Yoga, Vedanta (with all their subdivisions) read their own meaning into the message of the Gita. In the 19th century, Bal Gangadhar Tilak gave a new turn to it, and popularised the Gita as the scripture of “karma yoga” or full-blooded action without expecting any particular benefit.

Tilak’s interpretation has been followed by all modern translators of the Gita such as Gandhi, Radhakrishnan, Vinoba Bhave, Morarji Desai and adopted by leaders like Nehru. Scholars may study the Vedas and the Upanishads, but the Gita (as indeed the Ramayana) is the Gospel of the vast masses. Its message is accepted all over the globe.

The Gita is the most translated book in the world (second only to the Bible), into 75 major languages of the world, including Hindi, English, Latin, Greek, Swedish, Portugese, and Persian. There is a version by Aurangzeb’s elder brother Dara Shikoh. There are 2000 standard translations of the Gita; besides, every sadhu or mahatma publishes his own and their number is countless. The Bible has more translations, but then it had the patronage of and unlimited funds from imperial powers like England, France and Germany; the missionary, with the Bible in hand, was the forerunner of the Empire.

The Gita’s record number of translations in all important languages of the world in the absence of any official patronage is due entirely to the innate appeal of its message. Gandhi (and his ashramites) practised it for 40 years and he called it “The Mother” and a dictionary of all moral concepts.

The present work’s importance lies in its Advaita Vedantist interpretation. Even an agnostic like Nehru expressed his appreciation of Advaita Vedanta, India’s highest philosophical contribution to world thought.

The Gita has 18 chapters and 700 verses. These can be read in less than two hours; yet even a whole life time is not enough to fully understand all aspects of the Gita. Gandhi read it every day and found a new meaning in the same text.

Many things in the scriptures of all religions become outdated with the swift march of time. The velocity of history was never such as in the present age. Hinduism’s saving grace is that every age produces its own scriptual texts or comes out with an interpretation that suits the age. The religion is not inhibited by old interpretations which had been proclaimed as timeless, eternal and unchanging.

To the Vedantists, the present work is the most important.

Tilak considered the following shloka as central to the Gita: Your concern is only with the action, never with the fruit thereof. Never let your action be fruit-oriented; also never take to inaction.

Our author’s translation is: For you let there be the idea “this is my duty”, only with regard to the action, not with regard to its results under any condition whatsoever. Do not become the producer of the result of your action. Let there be no attachment in you to inaction.

The difference is only of emphasis or a slight shift in viewpoint.

The Gita wants the man of equanimity to take the opposites with the same attitude, to regard as equal both victory and defeat, success and failure, honour and censure, friend and foe, heat and cold (of the seasons).

A person who practises this doctrine is never disappointed or disheartened; he enjoys peace of mind (even emperors envy my peace of mind, said Gandhi), steadiness and happiness in life and bliss in the hereafter. Indifference to success or failure does not mean unwillingness to perform action or run away from duty. Rather he performs his duty with great gusto. As Gandhi says, he who is always pondering over the result of his action, loses the nerve to do it to the best of his capacity.

And again, one who foresakes the thought of the fruit (or result) reaps a thousandfold while he who is always harping on the desired fruit, loses it.

To take one example. Batsmen get out at the score of 91, 94, 96, 98 or 99 runs. Till the nineties, their 100 per cent concentration is on batting: after crossing 90, they begin to think of scoring a century, the thought of fruit weakens their concentration and they lose the wicket. He who has no thought of fruit is steady and develops nerves of steel and comes on top.

The chapter headings given by the author are intelligent and telling; for instance, his second chapter’s heading is, “Aphoristic presentation of Gita as a whole”; the conventional heading is, “Discourse on Sankhya Yoga”. And so on with other chapters.

The first chapter is “Melancholy of Arjuna” (Vishada Yoga). The Gita is Krishna’s sermon on the battlefield. According to Gandhi, this is not a war between two armies, but a fight between the good (the Pandavas) and evil (the Kauravas) that daily goes on in everyman’s life. The Gita expounds all systems of philosophy, talks of Sankhya, Yoga and Sanyasa — all these things would be irrelevant to the soldier’s purpose of fighting.

But according to common belief, the Gita was spoken on the first day’s morning (the Mahabharata gives a separate account of the morning and afternoon battles on each day of the 18-day-long war).

The memorable heading of the eleventh chapter is, “Revelation of the cosmic form”. “Show me God,” asked Arjuna. Krishna’s reply is: “I give you a divine view, you can’t see God with the ordinary eyes of flesh.” Arjuna said, “I see you as possessed of numerous arms, bellies, mouths and eyes. O cosmic person, I see not your limit, nor the middle, nor again the beginning.”

It means that the vast humanity that we see around us is the visible shape of God. Humanity is God; service to humanity is service to or worship of God.

Advaita means not two. Reality is not two; all persons, animals and all else are one god. Their difference of names, figures and other symbols of separateness is an illusion (maya). They are shapes of one all-pervading God. Such a philosophy binds people of all nationalities, religions and regions in a single form of God. Vasudhaiva kutumbakam. Only God is truth, the world is mithya (a creation of imagination, though it looks as real as things seen in dream. The lower reality is superseded by the higher reality that all is God and God is all). Such a philosophy would end hatred, violence, jealousy and mutual bickering and make gods of men, while a materialistic ideology lowers them into beasts, which tear each other in war or violence. This is the message of universal harmony, love and fellow feeling.

There are innumerable books on the Gita and the field seems to be saturated, with no room for more. Yet the present work with the author’s prodigious knowledge and mastery over different schools of philosophies, his penetrating vision and picturesque phrases is a class by itself and would be welcomed as a unique addition to understanding Advaita.

Swami Atmaramananda’s introduction adds to the value of this great work.

— P.D. Shastri

A lesson in what not to publish

Consumerism, Crime and Corruption by M.G. Chitkara. APH Publishing Corporation, New Delhi. Pp. xv + 373 Rs 700/-.

IS consumerism a function of economic growth, or is it the other way around? Does a symbiosis exist between consumerism, on the one hand, and crime and corruption, on the other? These and several other related questions come to mind when one reads the alluring cover of this expensively produced book. Believe me, I almost smacked my lips and rubbed my hands in glee when I got hold of this book. It was with great expectation that one opened the book to read. But alas....

Right from the foreward onwards this book has proved to be a great let-down. One did not know that a former Advocate-General and Vice-Chairman of an Administrative Tribunal could be addressed as “Shri Justice”. One did not know that a “Bharatiya voodoo” exists. How does this “Bharatiya voodoo” fit in with the book’s subject is beyond one’s comprehension. To make matters worse, all our country’s ills have been attributed to the West.

“Appreciation” by an MP in the form of a separate chapter is another avoidable ingredient of the book. Worse, there is no appreciation of the book, just a collection of homilies, cliches and political sweet-nothings that a politician spews out, no matter what the medium or the occasion is. One wonders whether any of the two worthies had actually read the manuscript. If only they had, then perhaps they would have at least pondered over the triviality of its contents and irrelevance of their own pontifications.

With such a presumptuous title as “consumerism...” one at least expects some effort at collecting empirical data to support one’s hypothesis. There is none save two tiny tables showing per capita consumption of minerals, metals and fuels and another that shows population projections and fuel consumption for 2000 AD. The source of data has not been stated. Case studies are absent. The lexicon leaves much to be desired. For example, “Consumerism is a restless and agitated competitive struggle for me... It (corruption) has benumbed the India’s farmhouse by the politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats; their life-style...” If you can make any sense out of this, hats off to you.

Time and again Chitkara refers to the Hindu way of life as a panacea for society’s ills. Yet he fails to point out what exactly is the Hindu way of life and how would it cure the myriad socio-economic ills of the present-day India. He merely quotes from Christian theology, the Bhagwadgita, etc. He also comes to the conclusion that Jainism is a more extreme form of Ahimsa than Buddhism. Though how all these ramblings help a solution to the “ills” is not clear. Was there no consumerism in ancient India? Were people really ascetic in those days? There is no concrete evidence for and against the answers to these questions.

There is a lot of pontifical verbiage too. Sample this one. “It appears that even after 50 years of attaining Independence, we the Indians have not shook our shackles (sic). Answers to our ills lie not in consumerism or over-cosumption but in contentment. And Indians are still western in their outlook.”

Before one takes up the task of writing a book, the relevant subject needs to be thoroughly researched. Primary as well as secondary data are collected, collated and analysed. This has to done without prejudice. The results of the data should form the basis of whatever the author says while propounding his hypothesis. To approach a subject with preconceived notions is to be dishonest with scholastic ethics.

Matters become worse when one has nothing to say and says it in about 400 pages. For example, on page169 the author observes: “Since society is only a number of individual men, this meant, in practice, that rulers of society were exempt from moral law... The most profoundly revolutionary achievement of the United States of America was the subordination of society to moral law... The United States was the first moral society in history...” The book is full of such inanities.

The author had quoted profusely from newspaper articles, but has failed to establish their relevance to the book’s substance: “Legislature is in worst shape. The stand-off between Congress and the United Front... led to the Speaker, Mr P.A. Sangma on November 24, 1997...” Clearly the author has done his worst to add to the book’s already considerable bulk disregarding all norms that govern the formulation of a research thesis. After devoting the best part of the book in berating the West, the author quotes from western scholars (p 203, Prof. Piet Thoenes of The Hague Institute of Social Sciences) and extols Canada as the best country in the world! He refers to Las Vegas as Laos Vegas! He translates khichdi/daliya (porridge) as “hotchpotch”!

The title of the book is a misnomer. No attempt has been made to establish any equation between crime, corruption and consumerism. It is sad that so much of precious paper has been wasted. The height of presumptuousness is astounding. No sane man would squander his hard-earned money on this book. Perhaps the government-owned and aided libraries may feel compelled to buy it. Look out for the twisted arms.

There is an Urdu adage, a line of which goes like this, “khat ka majmoon bhaamp lete hain lifafa dekh kar” (one can guess a letter’s contents by glancing at its envelope). Unfortunately one cannot say the same for the book under review. Moreover, it is a moot point whether consumerism actually promotes corruption or crime. After all during the socialist phase — that was given a quiet burial in the Soviet Union in 1991 — the Indian polity was no less corrupt or criminalised than it is in its present consumerist avatar.

Clearly the author’s postulations are the result of a befuddled approach. They are all a hotchpotch of self-righteous verbiage, hazy hypothesis, pious pontifications and confusing contradictions.

—Randeep Wadehra

Hindi verses in English

An Anthology of Modern Hindi Poetry compiled and edited by Kailash Vajpayi. Rupa & Co, New Delhi. Pp. 313 Rs 390.

THE author of this anthology, Kailash Vajpayi, is an Associate Professor of Hindi in Delhi University. He has had various assignments in different parts of the world. His writings have been widely appreciated and acknowledged all over and his poems have been published in Russian, German, Swedish and Danish anthologies. Honours have been conferred on him by the Delhi Academy of Letters and Literary Society of New York in 1997.

Hindi poetry has crossed many bridges. Nirala, the propounder of “nai kavita” (new poetry) not only lived an unusual life but also experimented with various poetic techniques which have inspired generations of Hindi poets. This anthology puts together five generations of Hindi poets whose talents have been acknowledged through several awards and citations by various literary organisations.

Suryakant Tripathi “Nirala” brought a revolution in 20th century Hindi poetry. Vajpayi, has done a herculian task by collecting, collating and putting together this anthology from out of a huge number of Hindi verses. Most of the poets in this order are radical thinkers and mystics. Hindi poetry has also powerfully changed the thought process of Indians since radical thinkers have an impact on the socio-political traditions of the country.

In the introduction it has been stated that Hindi has inherent dynamism to move across classes in the subcontinent and has shown flexibility and robustness to adapt to the needs of the times, from the discourse of the national movement to the post-Independence business of running the nation-state, to the communications revolution we are currently witnessing.

We know that apart from a majority of citizens speaking Hindi in this country, the richness and acceptability of spoken Hindi has made it the language of the largest number of popular cinema and as a result, it lays a definite claim to be termed the national language. However, as the non-Hindi-speaking groups dominated policy-making in India, it has not attained this status.

Now let us examine the question of why an anthology of Hindi poetry in English translation. English has increasingly become a global language and is being used by the peoples of different countries to communicate with one another. Today we are enlarging satellite communication and computer networking and obviously for these pressing reasons, the editor decided to bring out his anthology so that rich Hindi poetry becomes accessible to a worldwide audience.

Furthermore, Indians are living all over the planet and most of the second generation Indians are unable to understand Hindi. In view of this it is desirable to bring out this anthology in English. Of course the translation of Hindi poetry into English is a herculian task. The translators have done a great job and have given the reader a taste of the poetic wealth of Hindi. However, translated knowledge is unsatisfactory and every reader of this anthology should try to reach direct the original.

The editor has done a commendable job by bringing out such a superb collection of poems written in Hindi by a galaxy of poets.

— J.N. Puri