Elements of an ideal India

Although drawn from different disciplines, the authors share the conviction that democracy and development must go hand in hand

This is a collection of 10 essays that have originated from the lectures delivered annually at the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS), New Delhi, under an endowment instituted in commemoration of the well-known economist D.T. Lakdawala, the ISS's first chairman.

A multi-faceted personality, Lakdawala had an illustrious teaching career at the Bombay School of Economics and made a mark as the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. In the words of Ashis Nandy, who has written the foreword, the lectures are “a collective effort to project ... elements of a plural [and] futuristic vision of a desirable society.”

The lectures cover a diverse range of topics, and they include: primary education; poverty alleviation; virtues of self-employment; human development paradigm; Apartheid regime; multiculturalism vis-à-vis solidarity of a nation; Hindutva and its ideological implications; and globalisation versus nationalism. Yet, they have a common thread running through it, namely a profound concern for humanity.

Full report here Hindu

The commodity frontiers

Karl Marx was not an agronomist, but he used the word ‘metabolism’ to describe how capitalist agriculture promoted exports that deprived the soil of nutrients. He had read German chemist Justus von Liebig’s agricultural chemistry. The solution that Liebig proposed for the day when guano from Peru would run out, was industrial fertilisers. In the 1980s, the word ‘metabolism’ was re-introduced into economics by Robert Ayres and Marina Fischer-Kowalski. Accounts of material flows show that an average citizen of the European Union uses per year (not counting water) about 15 tonnes of materials (biomass, material for metals, materials for building and fossil fuels). What comes in accumulates as stock (in buildings, for instance) or comes out as exports or waste.

Out Of This Earth: East
India Adivasis and the
Aluminium Cartel
Felix Padel, Samarendra Das
Orient BlackSwan
Rs 895; Pp 752

Export of materials per capita from the EU amount to about one tonne per year, while imports are four tonne or more. This is in contrast to countries specialising in the export of raw materials. In many Latin American countries, exports exceed imports (in tonnage) by 6:1. As in south and western Africa, in Orissa and other mining states of India, they follow what some Colombians call “the rule of San Garabato, compre caro y venda barato”; buy expensive and sell cheap. Saint Garabato did not care about the declining terms of trade, the resource curse, or the depletion of natural capital.

We are near peak oil in the Hubbert curve. Hence, the search for oil in “commodity frontiers” such as the Niger Delta, the Amazon of Peru and Ecuador, the Alberta oil sands and the deep bottom of the sea in the Gulf of Mexico or Brazil. The search for oil, gas, and for coal (which is plentiful still) reaches the most inconvenient places. Even an economy without growth, a steady-state economy, if based on fossil fuels, would need fresh supplies of energy as energy is dissipated and cannot be used twice.

Full review here Businessworld

Flying over the cuckoo’s nest

Left Politics In Bengal 
Monobina Gupta
Orient Blackswan; Rs 195; Pp 272

There are broadly two kinds of former communists — those who are expelled from the party or are made to leave it due to differences with party bureaucrats, and those who get disillusioned with the very
ideology of communism. The latter community isn’t much visible in India, though there are plenty of them in America. However, there are quite a few of the former kind in India who, after being shown the door by the party, have claimed to be morally superior to the its bosses, if not ‘better communists’. Some of them have ended up forming leftist-sounding fringe parties. Others have written ponderous and self-justifying books.

Monobina Gupta, author of this somewhat dishevelled but timely book on the CPI(M), is too low-profile a person to resort to bombast. It’s only in one place in this slim volume that she claims having joined the party in the early 1980s. But considering the absence of any reference to her subsequent status in the party, it may be presumed that she dropped off at some stage. Interestingly, the book offers no clue to what drove her to quit. That could have made it an interesting first-hand account of the ‘cuckoo’s nest’. Gupta focuses on the rot that set in the CPI(M) after it became the ‘ruling’ party in Bengal.

Full review here Hindustan Times

Between people and power

Monobina Gupta draws from her personal association with the CPI-M and her long journalistic experience to churn out Left Politics in Bengal

That the Left Front Government in West Bengal has remained in the saddle for over three decades has been a telling evidence of its pro-people rule. Journalist-author Monobina Gupta adds her bit, “Compared to other political parties, its corruption level even after being in power for so long is far less…its leaders are nowhere near those of other parties.” Being a part of CPI-M during her SFI days in Calcutta and then reporting on the party in Delhi for various publications for a long time, Monobina has “seen quite closely how the party works.” Of late, this seasoned scribe has run a thread through all her experiences of the party — personal and journalistic, to put together 272 pages of an insightful book titled Left Politics in Bengal — Time Travels Among Bhadralok Marxists.

On its pages — an Orient BlackSwan publication, she outlines the party from how it came to power in the wake of Emergency, how “Jyoti Basu had inherited a badly messed up State from his Congress predecessor, which had to be cleaned up fast”, to a time when “a Communist almost became India's Prime Minister”, to where the party stands today. Her pen also strokes defining phases of the rise of Left in Bengal such as “the armed insurrection of peasants” in Naxalbari.

Full report here Hindu

India exporting English to China

Beijing's publishers are lining up to check if books by Indian authors could teach Chinese students and call-centre employees better English than American textbooks. At a time when bilateral ties are strained, the neighbours are finding common ground over a foreign language. India is the country of honour at the 58-nation Beijing International Book Fair that opened on Monday with 27 Indian publishers showcasing 3,500 titles.

“The Chinese are greatly interested in copyright and translation rights for books to learn call-centre English," Sanjiv Chawla, manager of exports at the Delhi-based Orient BlackSwan told HT at the fair. “The Chinese have a fixed idea that English is best taught by the Americans and British, so we have to explain that English is like a second-language for Indians.’’

Books on Buddhism, Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru are the centrepiece of India’s pavilion so that past cultural linkages strike a bond with China. But the Chinese publishers are mainly interested in India’s legacy of English education, to see if the books could be adapted to modernise Chinese teaching.

Full report here Hindustan Times

REVIEW: Reading Children

review

Reading Children: Essays on Children's Literature
Rimi B. Chatterjee and Nilanjana Gupta
Orient Blackswan
Rs 395
Pp 216
ISBN: 978-81-250-3700-2
Hardback

About the book

Children’s literature as a genre has not received much attention from the academic world in India up till now. This collection of essays and articles, is an attempt to look at the shape of writing for children from the nineteenth century onwards, and to question the political and cultural context in which it took place. Crucial questions include the conundrum of whether (and how) childhood and its books have been ‘invented’ by publishers and writers, and how and from what sources literature of the child has been produced and presented.

This includes the vexed question of textbooks and their relationship to the State, the imperial context and the creation of the categories of subject and ruler in child readers, the marketing of literature through journals and other media, questions of gender and gendered reading, and the complex interplay between real and fictional children.

Focusing on India but ranging all over the world, these essays create a foundation and a starting point for discussion on this subject in academic contexts in India. Written by experts in their various fields, the essays cover subjects as diverse as the philosophy behind the Amar Chitra Katha comic books from the 1960s onwards in India, the writings of Lila Majumdar, a pioneer writer for girls in Bengali, Rudyard Kipling and his imperial animal kingdom, Dhan Gopal Mukerji, winner of the Newbery Prize for children’s fiction in 1928, Winnie the Pooh as a version of the pastoral, and secret readers of the Boy’s Own Paper. The introduction pulls together the various critical strands implicit in the book and situates Indian scholarship on the map of genre theory, providing students with a handy point of reference.

Now that teaching and research in India is becoming interested in popular genres, and syllabi are broadening to include non-canonical literature, this book will fill a need for critical work on literature for children.

Review

A varied tapestry Hindu
Can literature for the young be analysed as an exclusively academic exercise? To engage with the genre, critical perspectives are as important as a sense of fun…

Children's literature is at the intersection of at least three major areas of experience – that of the readers – children, the writers who are, most of the time, adults, and academics, who are adults too. Does this make it an area which is too heavily populated by protagonists who end up not being the central players? It is indeed a peculiarity of the field that both the creators and the analysers are not active participants of childhood, and therefore, can have only a slightly removed engagement with it – through memories of their own childhood, and through observation. This is a paradox that Reading Children recognises in its introduction itself, and reveals a self-reflexivity about its subject: children's literature reveals much more “about adult preoccupations and fears than about adults themselves.” The lenses through which the studies are carried out are primarily historical, sociological, feminist, and on occasion biographical, (although of course there are intersections between these fields) and the sense of self-reflexivity is carried on into each article in the book.

English translation of Panchlight launched

Panchlight & Other Stories, eminent writer Rakhshanda Jalil’s English translation of a collection of short stories by one of Hindi’s foremost writer Phanishwar Nath Renu, was released by Jawahar Sircar, Secretary, Union Ministry of Culture, on  February 17 at India International Centre, in the presence of a galaxy of noted writers including Harish Trivedi, Sudhir Chandra and Mushirul Hassan.

The stories in this collection are set in rural Bihar, a world of poverty, ignorance, helplessness, superstition and exploitation. The characters are the landless, the disenfranchised and the marginalized.

Phanishwar Nath Renu wrote of passions spent, hurts unresolved, dreams unfulfilled, in the context of a changing world and a crumbling social order, thus making the appeal of the stories universal.

Full report here TwoCircles.net

Related stories
Panchlight and Other Stories Jahane Rumi
Bihar in translation Hindustan Times (Khushwant Singh)