'From the Olympian heights'

ASPECTS OF INDIA - Essays on Indian Politics and Culture: Noel O'Sullivan - Editor; Ajantha Publications, Post Box No. 2192, Malkaganj, Delhi-110007. Rs. 495.

UNIVERSITY OF HULL is a minor provincial centre of education in England where one of the few institutions devoted exclusively to the study of India was established in 1985 by Professor Bhikhu Parekh and Dr. Subrata Mitra who are teaching in that university. One of the major activities of the centre was the periodical seminar given both by resident academics and other peripatetic scholars from all over the world.

This book contains some of the papers read at this seminar. The title is apt. Although the broad subject is India, there is nothing that connects the various essays.

The authors include some of the leading lights of the Indian academic establishment, NRI denizens of overseas educational centres and non-Indian scholars, specialising in Indian studies.

No two essays have a common theme and all the 13 essays discuss very different issues. Methodologically too, there is great diversity. Orthodox textual analysis jostles comfortably with post-modernist deconstruction of received ideas and contemporary institutions.

The opening essay by Bhiku Parekh is very perceptive and cogently analyses why social sciences in India - especially political philosophy - are undeveloped.

He is quite convincing when he talks about the ``official and unofficial pressure not to ask certain questions and not to say certain things, and hence much concomitant intellectual and moral self-repression.'' Another point he makes about the reason for poverty of Indian intellect, namely brain drain, is equally valid: ``They get sucked into the international network of Third World scholars, assiduously cultivated by the west, and assuage the western conscience by acting as its loyal and well-paid critics.'' He should have added that the expatriate scholars also help the western conscience by focussing on the real or imaginary defects of their own society to absolve the unhealthy impact of western colonial rule.

Subrata Mitra's excellent essay describes how the Oriya genius was able to synthesise many strands of ideas and social practices to produce a syncretic form of regional Hinduism. Field's paper on acquisition of mathematical concepts is novel and it amply supports the reviewer's experience in a largely illiterate Tamil village four decades ago.

A person who may not be able to sign his name in paper will nevertheless have a thorough grip over interest rates, profitability ratios, geometrical proportions and other such mathematical knowledge needed for both his economic relationships and constructional activities.

There are other interesting papers like D. Mariau's foray into the idea of ``memory'' in Ramanuja's commentary, Heseltine on jute production in Bengal, Ray Chaudhuri on Vivekananda, Madan on secularism, Nandy on Indian approach to terrorism and Upen Baxi on the Indian Constitution.

Baxi's paper raises a question. He has recently argued against the Constitution Review Committee but one gets the impression on reading his essay on the Indian Constitution written a few years ago that he was thoroughly dissatisfied with it. One supposes that both his early comment on the Constitution of India and his present reaction to the Venkatachaliah Committee are as he would say ``never ideologically innocent''.

All authors - especially the pillars of the Indian academic edifice - say wise, smart and fashionable things in a magisterial tone. No self-doubt assails them.

The reader is expected to believe that the interpretation that they give to individuals, institutions and events is the correct one. Whatever they say is pronounced from the Olympian heights, and for them, Indians and their institutions are no different from the microbes to be investigated under a microscope.

Their defects are gleefully portrayed and one would have thought that these gentlemen were not part of the hegemonic exploitative system (occupying as they did some of the highest posts like vice-chancellor and director that the Indian power structure could offer), and to what some of them derisively call ``middle class''. Some introspection would have done a lot of benefit to them and made them more credible.

S. AMBIRAJAN

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