Sunday, May 4, 2003		Books

Off the shelf
Rise and fall of the British Empire in India
V. N. Datta
THREE types of British historians have written on India. One, like the famous James Mill who never visited India, nor knew any Indian language and yet produced perhaps the biggest historical work on India which Macaulay regarded as the greatest since Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two, the historian-administrator like W.W. Hunter and Vincent Smith who produced text books on Indian history for the British civil servants.

Shiv Kumar Batalvi’s death anniversary falls on May 6
Loona: An ‘umwomanly woman’ or a tragic heroine?
B. M. Bhalla
Loona, a verse-drama written by the well-known Punjabi poet, Shiv Kumar Batalvi, has achieved the status of a minor classic in modern Punjabi literature. It has already been translated into Hindi and English, and presented on the stage a number of times in India, Pakistan and England. Its theme is based on the ancient legend of Puran Bhagat and therein lies the secret of its popularity.

Bestsellers

From migrants to a social group
Sarbjit Dhaliwal
Migrant Labour and the Trade Union Movement in Punjab
by Dr Krishan Chand. CRRID, Chandigarh. Pages 173. Rs 295.
FOR the past few decades, labour from various parts, especially Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Orissa, has been migrating to Punjab, known as a land of plenty and prosperity. Though Punjab's economy is now in the doldrums, labour continues to flock to this part of the country. Obviously, the states from where migration is taking place have been performing even worse than Punjab.

American imperial posturing
Shelley Walia
Theatre of War
by Lewis Lapham. The New Press, London. Pages 202. $22.00
OPINIONS that do not favour the state do not get aired and the voices of dissent make no appearance in the mainstream media. But Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's Magazine and the author of Theatre of War, is an exception like Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and a handful of other radical thinkers who have had the courage to question the drive and feasibility, as well as the colonial posturing, of the US Administration's boundless campaign against the world's 'evildoers'.

Update on man’s journey till date
Peeyush Agnihotri
The Journey of Man — A Genetic Odyssey
by Spencer Wells. Penguin Books. Pages 224. Rs 495.
THE evolution of man has since long been an enigma. Be it the field of anthropology, paleontology, eugenics, biology, or more recently biotechnology, everything helixes down to DNA and eventually tries to solve the puzzle of evolution.

Sad or funny, but never dull!
Suresh Kohli
Bhupen Khakhar
translated by Ganesh Devy, Nushil Mehta and Bina Srinivasan. Katha, Delhi. Pages 203. Rs 200.
THESE are the works of a master craftsman, revelling in an intensity that’s almost extraordinary. The stories are simple and the narrative is underlined with an uncanny understanding of human situations. There is no seemingly conscious technique or style at work. At times these renderings seem reflections of an individual who has been observing men and women around him — observing their eccentricities as also the humdrum behaviour patterns that govern their ordinary existence.

Signs & signatures
Romance of writing letters
Darshan Singh Maini
"HE was a letter-writer if you liked natural, witty, various, vivid, playing with the idlest, lightest hand, up and down the whole scale. His easy power — his easy power: everything that brought him that."

Short takes
All that war destroys
Jaswant Singh
War and Environmental Security
by Parashu Ram Gupta. Prakash Book Depot, Bareilly. Pages 138. Rs 150.
EVERY war in this world has been more destructive than the previous one. The author, who is a teacher of defence studies, has counted 84 conflicts in different parts of the world in the past five years. These wars have seen 90 lakh deaths, 19 crore refugees and 3.9 crore persons displaced in their own countries.