Sunday, January 19, 2003		Books

Marginalising the marginalised
Shelley Walia
Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture.
by Ziauddin Sardar. Pluto, London. Pages 345. £ 15.99.
POSTMODERNISM has been seen as a theory of liberation that promotes alterity or pluralism, thereby bestowing a broad representation to the minorities/marginalised. But is postmodernism also not manipulative? Ziauddin Sardar in his recent book argues that far from being a new theory of liberation, postmodernism, particularly from the perspective of the other, the non-western cultures, is "simply a new wave of domination riding on the crest of colonialism and modernity."

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Poetry doesn’t fit publishers’ purse
Suresh Kohli
IN this age of the novel and the novelist, even though one keeps hearing the occasional shriek bemoaning the death of the genre, poetry and poets everywhere have literally been put on the backburner. In India, the sole promoter, the Writers' Workshop, has been like a terminally-ill patient. Almost everything appearing from P. Lal's rusted, obsolete printing mill has been doing greater damage than the situation warranted.

Vibrant account of great games superpowers played
Parshotam Mehra
Tournament of Shadows: the Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia,
by Karl E Meyer & Shareen Blair Brysac, Counterpoint, WashingtonDC, 1999, Paperback, pp. xxv + 646.
FROM the last quarter of the 18th century to the opening decade of the 2Oth, the Tsarist empire was steadily, if surely, expanding towards the south, embracing large swathes of then relatively empty, if predominantly Muslim, territory.

Narrow shot of a big man
M. L. Raina
The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Modernity
by Darius Cooper. Cambridge University Press, New York. Pages xii+260. $22.95
YEARS ago when I taught a course on fiction and film at an American university, I was often hauled up for ignoring what Ray’s western critics called his "sentimentality and nostalgia." At that time there were no Andrew Robinson and Darius Cooper commentaries to guide me. My principal objective was to assert Ray’s superiority over all other Indian filmmakers and to express renewed faith in the vanishing genre of art cinema in India and the Third World.

Useful facts and figures
D.S. Cheema
Market Forecasts and Indicators
by Industrial Techno-Economic Service P. Ltd in association with Centre for Industrial and Economic Research, New Delhi. Page 798. Rs 9600.
NEARLY two decades ago, Arthur P. Felton wrote a landmark article on marketing, "Conditions of Marketing Leadership," in which he said what all marketing men have learnt from bitter experience at one time or the other, "the marketing man is going to have to be very" right or else he may have nothing to eat but a stream of unsaleable product. Marketing forecasts have always been a great challenge for manufacturers and traders.

Looking ahead through JP lectures
Harbans Singh
India Looks Ahead
edited by B. Vivekanandan. Lancer’s Books, New Delhi. Pages 220. Rs 430.
JAYAPRAKASH Narayan had yearned for a "society which made possible for all men and women, irrespective of their socio-economic background, to lead a life worth living." After his death, the Jayaprakash Foundation has since 1980 held a series of JP Memorial Lectures to illuminate the contemporary world not only with his idealism but also with the answers that some of the eminent people have to the vexing issues that are a hindrance in achieving the desired and shared goals of all humanity.