Volume 18, Number 5 · March 23, 1972
A Passage to Pakistan
By Neville Maxwell
Pakistan Crisis
by David Loshak
McGraw-Hill, 152 pp., $6.95
Calcutta
by Geoffrey Moorhouse
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 376 pp., $8.95
India's Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs
by Francine R. Frankel
Princeton University Press, 232 pp., $7.50
The Government and Politics of India
by W.H. Morris-Jones
Hutchinson (distributed by Hillary House), 280 pp., $2.50 (paper)
Soft State
by Bernard D. Nossiter
Harper & Row, 185 pp., $5.95
Under Two Masters
by N.B. Bonarjee
Oxford University Press, 332 pp., $4.00
The second act in the classic drama of post-imperial dissolution in south Asia has been as turbulent and destructive as the first. Act One, on which the curtain went up as the British flag went down in August, 1947, saw what the British had ruled as India split—politically into two parts, physically into three. The centrifugal pull between the two widely separated and culturally diverse territories of East and West Pakistan seemed bound to cause the next break in what promises to be the progressive reversion of the subcontinent into the components from which the British constructed their India. For, as the servants of the Raj themselves saw, and one of them wrote at the turn of the century, 'There is not, and never was, an India, or even any country of India, possessing—according to European ideas—any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious: no Indian nation, no 'people of India.' ' The working out of that truth began in 1947 and seems likely to inform political developments on the subcontinent for the rest of this century.
Review, 5021 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |