An alley as microcosm of a cruel society
Reviewed by M.L. Raina
Children of the Alley by Naguib Mahfouz and translated from Arabic by Peter Therous Anchor Books, London & New York. PAGES VII+448. $ 14.95.

English is as English politics does
Reviewed by Rumina Sethi
English and the Discourses of Colonialism by Alastair Pennycook. Routledge, London. Pages 239. £ 14.95.

Industry should go West
Reviewed by Randeep Wadehra
Globalising Indian Industries by VR Rajan. Deep & Deep Publications, New Delhi. Pages xiii+197. Rs 380.

Corporate Growth through Mergers and Acquisitions by S. Shiva Ramu. Response Books, New Delhi. Pages 299. Rs 250.

Miners and Millhands by Janaki Nair. Sage Publications, New Delhi. Pages 325. Rs 450.

Shobha De takes time off to talk about herself, and it is good listening
by Cookie Maini

THIS book was released with wide publicity, was the topic of various talk shows, hit the bestseller list and remains there, and had been reviewed extensively. So, another review only amounts to an overkill. However, like her books which are devoid of much literary content and yet are an irresistible read, it is tempting to attempt a review.

Shobha De was reluctant to write her autobiography (as she says in the prologue to the book) to mark her 50th birthday; however, David Davidar of Penguin advised her, “Think of it as a column. A rearly long one. That’s what your life has been for 25 years — an unending column.”

Her columns are like her books: tangy, wacky, interesting, sleazy, sometimes satirical and unconventional. But an autobiography is different; it is an introspection of sorts. In her case it has to be a sensitive portrayal of the transformation of a girl from a conservative Maharashtrian family to the Jackie Collins of Indo-Anglian writing.

“If nothing else, ‘Selective Memory’, aided and abetted the transformation. Kick-started the process, as it were. Forced me to glance over my shoulder. Look back, sift, discard, reinforce, assess, re-assess, come to terms, recognise, accept — above all, accept. It was not easy. Not easy at all,” she admits.

But there is the sunny side. “But having endured the experience, I feel that much stronger. It wasn’t as painful as I’d imagined. I didn’t ‘suffer’. It’s the exhilaration of forced remembering that I’ll cherish. In my preoccupation with the present I’d lost touch with my past. The book served as an excuse, an alibi and a prod. There was no escape.”

Most reviewers graded the book as nothing great, but they did the job with aplomb. What makes De tick? Why is it that she is such a paradox? We criticise her work, yet she is popular with readers. I think her forte is to write as if it were a screen script of a one-to-one conversation. Her no-nonsense approach, modest vocabulary, and easy access to high society had facilitated her eventual breakthrough into highbrow writing. Some even accuse her of using her journalistic past to popularise her books.

Of course, it is wrong to totally rule out charisma. To hear it in her words, “We lack both the will and the experience to exploit a book’s commercial potential by providing the right infrastructure to the author. If the individual lacks that ambiguous factor called ‘charisma’, if he or she does not interest the media, if he or she is idealistic enough to believe that at the end of the day, a good book will succeed in finding its own audience — that’s a major misconception, especially in India.

“Hundreds of excellent books get pulped by the publishers each year on account of poor sales. Authors complain that the poor sales are because of low public awareness — why would someone think of buying a book nobody even knows is available? Which is why no amount of publicity is too much publicity for this underrated, largely misrepresented vocation.”

Undoubtedly, the autobiography contains no spectacular revelations. But it is more readable; one can relate oneself to the subject. It could well be the life story of any middle class girl with normal aspirations to break out of conservative parental strictures, though she turned out to be one of the lucky ones to make it big. To use a cliche, she had beauty and brains. Plus an ascerbic wit which just flow out of her pen effortlessly.

Yet, for all her frivolity and desire to live life to the hilt, she had sensitivity and seriousness; she abandoned the glamour of a professional model to take to writing even though, as her autobiography reflects, it was thrust on her. She pursued the new calling to emerge as one of the most popular women writers.

In all her writing and in her autobiography the key work is identification. A reader can easily identify himself with her; she expresses herself simply, expressing his own emotions. That is why leafing through the book is as effortless as it is absorbing. Here between the lines emerges the saga of an individual, often vulnerable to poignant relationship. It is quite like the impact Shobha De makes when one meets her in person. People expect to see a raucuous, painted , diamond-laden, society woman (like the ones she portrays); but she emerges as a soft-spoken, warm, unassuming, understated and quite open-to-criticism person.

Right through her book, one point that emerges is that human relationships, particularly family ties, are what she values above everything else. Her parents, her husband or her children, they are her anchor in every crisis.

Her description of such experiences is poignant and self-explanatory. For instance, her father’s 50th birthday present). “I took the coin out of its packaging and stared at it for a long time. It looked like a miniature sun on my palm. I was far too moved by the gesture to say anything. It really was perfect, even in its execution. For a change, the government design department hadn’t gone horribly wrong. There was nothing ostentatious about the coin. And I could only marvel at my father’s imagination.

“Another man might have handed over a sum of money and said, ‘buy yourself something’. But here we were, sharing such a deeply moving movement — and I couldn’t think of a thing to say, not even ‘thank you’. We admired its impeccable finish, turned it around a few times in our hands. I imagined my mother’s presence beside me. This was so much ‘her’ room, with her things still all around — her hand mirror, her dressing table, her toiletries, the towel rack with her ‘home sarees’ on it.

“Finally, I bent down and touched his feet. We did not embrace. The old awkwardness was still there. ‘God bless you, my dear,’ he said, a small catch in his voice.”

Or her near fatal accident in London on an escalator. “Suddenly, it was over. I wasn’t dead. But I wished I had been. Never before in my life had I experienced such a raw sense of terror, panic and pain. Those few dizzying seconds when the pattern of the escalator grid swung crazily all around me, there was just one image in my mind, I understood just one thing, I thought of just one person — my mother. And the physical pain she’d stoically endured for three decades. And how I hadn’t experienced any myself and could never have imagined the intensity of the sensation. I thought this was God’s way of teaching me a lesson, opening my eyes to another’s suffering, making me learn the hard way. In that one excruciating moment, I became my mother’s pain. And wept like one of my own young children”.

The book in fact largely strings a range of anecdotes involving various family members, she calls it “Stories from my life” punctuated here and there with other well-known personalities who made an impact or whom she met diving her journalistic career. Her accounts are candid, so typical of her.

Shobha De has treated her autobiography as an occasion for self-analysis, a reflection on her life and its vicissittudes, and also an assessment of her achievements. Just as well, otherwise, the readers would see in her a Jackie Collins of India with a typical menu of high society satire, glitz and glamour. “The woman you meet in ‘Selective Memory’ may not be the woman you think you know. But it’s me all right. Dates, times, events, places... I’ve tried to get them right.

“But the book is not about chronological correctness, it has more to do with perceptions and feelings. I wasn’t working with files and papers, just emotions and textures. It’s possible I’ve got sequences jumbled up and a few vital facts haplessly scrambled. However, I’ve sincerely tried to marshal as many relevant, significant details as it was humanly possible to recall while writing the memoir.

“If there are any lapses or errors in the narrative (as there are bound to be), I appeal to your better nature to overlook them. What’s more important is the telling of the story and that I can assure you has been completely upfront, well-intentioned and truthful.”

At the end of it all, I wonder why Shobha De portrays herself as a woman with sharp fangs, obsessed with you know what, when she is actually a soft, gentle, often ethical human being and, above all, a caring mother and a doting wife. Maybe, if all writers were writing serious, straight-laced, conformist stuff, life would be dull; an occasional jester with a capacity to expose society is the most wanted person.

An alley as microcosm of a cruel society
by M.L. Raina

INTRODUCING his latest book of travels, “Beyond Belief”, V.S. Naipaul calls it “a book about people...not a book of opinions...a book of stories”. The people he met in his journeys through Islamic countries speak of the religious imbroglios of their societies, their painful efforts to fashion their identities in the face of demands for conformity. Naipaul listens to them in detachment, observes their oddities, mildly questions their beliefs, raises important issues of tradition and modernity and comes away with his westernised rational convictions in tact.

Naguib Mahfouz is also a teller of stories but with a difference. “This is the story of our alley— its stories rather,” he says in the beginning of the book. He is not detached. His narrative voice does not talk down to the people he describes, it is implicit in their lives. Indeed, it speaks through them. His narrator does not stand outside the world he portrays. He inhabits that world, records its minutest vibrations of tone and character, its fluctuating fortunes and misfortunes and, above all, the struggle of its inhabitants to survive repeated onslaughts of tyranny and injustice. In a sense, the present novel is also about tyranny and injustice and, on its serialisation in 1959, created an uproar similar to the one created by Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”.

To call Mahfouz a teller of stories would be only half the truth. He is a singer of tales, a balladist of the bustling alley, as I described him in these pages while reviewing a selection of his stories, “Fountain and Tomb”, some years ago. Like poets Ridhwan, Gawad (he is blind but is he meant to be a Homer?) and Taza who figure prominently in the present book, Mahfouz is the conscience of his people, the keeper of their memories. The memories of the alley are secure (that is what his name implies) in his keeping. Like an epic balladist and singer, Mahfouz is the custodian (muhafiz) of the small but vibrant Cairo alley he conjures up in this remarkable novel.

As a book of memories the present novel may invite comparison with Peter Nadas’s substantial recent novel, “A Book of Memories” (translated from the Hungarian by Ivan Sanders and published in 1997). But the major difference between the two is that whereas Nadas’s book links two elaborately conceived Proustian narratives of consciousness with the communist East European experience in real historical time, the present book evokes folk memories through a series of generational time frames in which the men and women of the Cairo neighbourhood unwittingly re-enact the lives of their holy ancestors: the children of the alley. It is as if Scheherazade had taken up residence in Cairo and unspooled a long meditation on fate, death and the grinding wheel of time with the old patriarch Gabalawi at the hub.

“Epic balladist” may sound contradictory, but I think this is how one could describe this Nobel Prize-winner and foremost contemporary novelist of the Arab world. Epic does not simply denote scale and proportion. It also denotes a measure of imagination that is capable of sustaining a wide variety of human behaviour on a small but concentrated canvas. Poetic feeling results from that concentration (Hardy’s Wessex is a good instance), while the appetite for character springs from a blend of sympathy and curiosity.

Mahfouz is a poet in the sense that he feels into the lives of his lowly but alive characters, just as Hardy does for his Wessex folk, just as, in a comic vein, R.K. Narayan does for his Malgudi crowd. It is no accident that poets and minstrels abound in the alley’s coffee houses and taverns, singing of the ages gone by and reinventing heroes and their valorous deeds that become exemplary in the moral and spiritual histories of the alley.

Mahfouz may have been influenced by the classic European realist novel of Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens, as claimed by his Western admirers, who also see Proust’s echoes in his work. The celebrated “Cairo Trilogy” can justly be regarded as a version of the classic realist novel. But Mahfouz is a teller of tales of mythic and trans-historical resonance in the manner of an allegorist or a parable writer, as this and another novel “Harafish” (originally published in Arabic in 1977 and reviewed earlier in these pages) demonstrate. The memories he evokes are those of the common people, harafish, as he calls them, and can span long years in which successive generations come and go (in “Harafish” the narrative span is 800 years).

In “Harafish” the history of 10 generations of the al-Nagi family is traced in the light of the high ideals of the patriarch Ashur Abdullah and the steady decline of these ideals in the hands of his successors. In place of a meticulous description of specific time and scene in the Cairo trilogy, and in place of a socio-political analysis of the ills of the contemporary Egyptian society focused on the fortunes of the al-Jawad family, we get in this novel as well as in “Children of the Alley” an immemorial pattern of events dictated by the relationship of successive generations of characters to the one centre of authority, the first al-Nagi patriarch and the occupant of the Gabalawi mansion respectively.

Though published almost 16 years apart, both novels mark a significant departure from the realist/naturalist mode of the trilogy towards a more or less oral mode of narration which implies deep respect for tradition and inherited wisdom. The narrator of the present novel comes through as a wizened and well-tempered participant who has seen it all and knows what consequences follow what actions. Conscious of death as the ultimate leveller, he places in perspective the various events in the generational march of the Gabalawi family and its failing hold on the ordinary residents of the alley.

“Children of the Alley”, in spite of its length and trans-historical provenance, is like a medieval woodcut — spare, authoritative narrative lines deployed to render grisly scenes of violence and gang warfare, as in the murder of the chief inheritors of the Gabalawi mantle, particularly Gabal, Rifaa and Quassem, or in the depiction of the successive betrayals of people who set out to do some good to the alley community. Not a testimony to its author’s faith in justice and order, the novel places little stock in the ability of good intentions to dampen human appetite for duplicity, cruelty and the disruptive force of power.

Indeed, as the escalating level of violence and chaos reaches its peak in the Arafa section of the book, we are left with a searing image of grief, loss and futility. This image is etched further in the last paragraph: “And so it happened that some of the young men of our alley began to disappear, one by one, and it was said...that they had found their way to Hanash’s place...Overpowered by fear, the overseer and his men sent their spies everywhere to search homes and shops and impose the cruellest punishments for the slightest offences. They beat people with sticks for a laugh until they endured a nightmarish atmosphere of fear, hatred and terrorism.”

“And so it happened,” Here is the storyteller, as Walter Benjamin imagines him in his classic essay of that name, bringing his story to an end, and bidding his listeners (as distinct from readers) to go ponder over the fate of the alley after all the mayhem they have witnessed. This statement also disallows any desire to see a happy ending to the spiralling cycle of violence which forms the ground bass of the narrative. That violence and hatred will return to the alley as long as power remains a reality and justice and hope are a mirage, is the pessimistic finale of Mahfouz’s narrator, now silenced in his singing by the fear of what is to come. One can sense in this ending the alley community retreating into their lairs to expect another bout of bloodletting by both the so-called “protectors” of the alley’s fragmented zones and by those who dare to resist them.

As I said above, the novel on its serial appearance created a good deal of uproar in Cairo’s literary circles. This was a time when Nasserite rhetoric was gaining the upper hand. Having routed the corrupt monarchy, Nasser raised hopes of a renovation of Egyptian life. But it looks as if Mahfouz was already sceptical about the power of revolutions to change anything, a fact confirmed time and again by the failure of revolutionary movements and their degeneration into tyrannies all through history. But Mahfouz chose allegory and myth as vehicles of his pessimism rather than an overt ideological stance.

This gives him two advantages, one thematic and another stylistic. He manages to show up the hollowness of the revolutionary claims of the contemporary rulers. But, more importantly, he raises his story to the status of a myth by creating a centre of power as well as value in the person of the patriarch, Gabalawi, and invests him with the controlling force of symbolic representation. Contemporary history becomes a stage for re-enacting the enduring themes of struggle against tyranny, injustice and criminality.

Though there is enough plausible action in realist terms in the novel, it is primarily on the symbolic level that it yields maximum meaning. If the Gabalawi mansion with its langorous garden represents the primeval Eden, the first expulsion of Idris, the oldest of the patriarch’s sons, for disobeying his father is an act of transgression whose import can be grasped only in Biblical motifs which underpin much of the book.

Adham, another of Gabalawi’s five sons, has a tell-tale name and the fact that he succumbs to his wife’s temptations to open the Book of Ten Conditions in search of the old man’s will results in his expulsion as well. We know from earlier sections of the book how much he cherished the garden: “Umaima diligently kept by his side in the garden, only rarely falling silent, he had grown used to her, and listened with only half his attention, or less. Whenever he liked he picked up his flute and played whatever music came from him. He could say, in perfect contentment, that everything was good.”

The proximity of the Eve figure, his wife, is enough to enforce the biblical overtones of the scenes, though Mahfouz is careful to keep the realistic possibility in tact. This is done by recording Adham’s concern for his sick mother as well as the patriarch’s visit to his wife’s sick bed. One implication of the expulsion theme is the need for return to the paradise which Mahfouz conceives as the restoration of the patriarch’s umbrella protection.

Continuing with the biblical motifs, the killing of Hamum by Qadri, both Adham’s sons, introduces the Cain-Abel theme and goes on for the rest of the book, for there are fratricidal killings all through, contributing to the gloom and pessimism of the tale. But the return to paradise, here the mansion, remains the ultimate dream of the children of the alley and their descendants. But why is the paradise not attained and why are the hopes kept alive at the end? What does the patriarch symbolise?

Gabalawi is the inscrutable cause whose workings are revealed only to a few, as they are to Gabal, Rifaa (who also suffers exile for transgression), Quassem, all in some ways connected to the great mansion and its ruler. But is paradise unattainable because no one of the Gabalawi descendants understands the patriarch’s meaning, or is it because human nature cannot overcome cupidity, hatred or the lust for power?

That the Gabalawi mansion is taken over by rapacious overseers and gangster-protectors who subjugate the innocent residents of the alley, is Mahfouz’s, the allegorist’s, way of commenting on the revolution gone sour. “How much people have suffered because of the lost estate and blind power,” says Rifaa in the middle section of the book. Earlier he had said, “Every hour of the day and night we see people beating up people...where is justice? How obscene it all is?” Rifaa immediately reminds you of how the protagonist in Sholokov’s “Quiet Flows the Don” also wonders if the only achievement of the Bolshevik revolution for him is the fact that he fathered a bastard!

If the pervading symbolism of the novel follows a biblical pattern of paradise lost or regained, the overall narrative structure has the inevitability of a tragic plot in the classical sense. Yet the book teems with life, its sheer presence in various events and episodes counters the centripetal pulls of allegory and symbolism. Marriages, particularly marriage processions, deaths and sundry other activities of everyday life such as the coffee house gossip and tavern talk, relieve the pared-down intensity and the surface chill of mythical form. Even after Gabalawi dies as a result of his mistress’s accidental death at Arafa’s hands, this life promises to continue undeterred. In spite of gloom, Mahfouz exudes a flattering faith in our capacity to rise above our fates. This, in my opinion, is no mean achievement.

English is as English politics does
by Rumina Sethi

“IT is a little after midnight. The night of June 30/July 1, 1997. It has been a long, steamy evening, with fireworks dampened by rain, and crowds of people in the streets. I lean on the weathered, varnished wooden rail of the Star Ferry as it plows back across Hong Kong Harbour. Over the dark, choppy water, beyond a ring of protective boats, the Britannia is pulling slowly away from the quay. On board, Prince Charles and Governor Patten, signalling this symbolic end to colonialism in Hong Kong.... The Handover. The Handback. A great piece of political theatre. The end of British colonialism.”

This is how Alastair Pennycook begins his elegantly and provocatively written book, “English and the Discourse of Colonialism”, that provides a historically rich account of the end of colonialism and explicates its political significance. It is a timely and thoughtful book written with historical sensitivity and, above all, an appreciation of the need to place the question of post-colonialism at the centre of an engagement with the colonial paradigm which acquires an urgency even today as cultural, racial, and moral differences established by imperialism still persist.

Pennycook has produced an acute, entertaining and often surprising book. He is fiercely alert to the different sources that he dissects: from colonial documents from India, Malaysia and Hong Kong to travel writing; from popular books on English to student writing; from personal experiences to newspaper articles where he traces implications for the many issues concerning the discourse of colonialism.

He has written with a great panache and the rigour of his arguments is visible from the outset when he begins his account of the British departure from Hong Kong marking the end of British colonialism. This historic exit did not mean the end of colonialism as its indelible mark has been left on all colonised nations.

The book examines English, English language teaching and colonialism, revealing cogently how the practice of colonialism permeated the cultures and discourses of both the colonial and colonised nations, the effects of which are still evident today. Rather than giving in to the popular belief that English has become a neutral language of global communication, Pennycook argues that “it remains a language to which colonial discourses still adhere, a language still laden with colonial meanings”.

Many things “won’t be changing” as the “traces left by colonialism run deep”. These traces apparently are not just visible in Hong Kong or the other colonies “but have emanated from these colonial contexts to inhabit large domains of western thought and culture.”

Colonial constructions are not only the result of colonial imposition, but a site for colonial production too. And this is visible in the use and spread of the English language and its inherent interweaving with the discourses of colonialism, a reminder of the need to rethink the practice of English language teaching and to decolonise applied linguistics in the context of the history of “world” English and of attitudes to English in the contemporary world.

Siting George Steiner’s argument in “Language and Silence” that the German language “was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism” and that the documentation of the Nazi atrocities “dehumanised” the citizens of Germany as well infused the language with “lies and sadism”, Pennycook questions and doubts the view that certain uses of German have rendered it corrupt right to the “marrow of its bones”.

Should’t this have happened with English? Is Steiner not suggesting that languages become fascistic if employed in a strategic political context such as German or the colonial? A connection between English and the long history of colonialism cannot be ignored, and it could be said that “they do not lie so much in ‘the marrow’ of English but in the intimate relations between the language and the discourse of colonialism”.

The colonial enterprise of the British Empire contained the thought that language was responsible for bestowing upon the colonised a civilisation and its inherent benefits of knowledge and wealth, a syndrome that still predominates in many Third World culture. The language of English, apart from this motive, goes on to also racially define the people that come under the hegemonic western dominance, and thus its significance for many “indigenous writers” who endeavour to understand the political nature of their position as “different, exotic, traditional”.

In Australia, for instance, the indigenous will always be known as people of colour, in India as “elites”.

The central interest of writing in English in countries where this is more of an imposed language because of their colonial background becomes problematic, both theoretically and politically. Is there something about this language that still continues to construct racial definitions, and locates the Other within the paradigm of the common usage of an alien language?

Pennycook does not want to find the relationship between definitions of the Other and English in the grammar or lexicon of English itself but locate “ways in which certain discourses adhere to English”. Such a methodology conceives of ways of coming to terms with language and the semantics of certain usage which come to be inherently attached to it. Every utterance does have the burden of its past history and is filled with meanings and words already used by others. Such claims have been made by Bakhtin, by Nedebele, and by Fanon who have similarly felt that this is how meanings are entrenched in a culture which “supports the weight of a civilisation” as well as in the morphology of a language which connotes attitudes, perceptions, and goals of a society.

It can, therefore, not be ruled out that English is the language of arrogance and brutality that hegemonised the colonised, subjugating them in a manner that there developed in their very psyche a disgust for their own language. Humiliation and subjection were its only motives, and culturally it convinced the non-English speaking races that the knowledge of English is, in the words of Chris Searle, “a necessary badge of their social mobility”.

Complex networks of speaking, reading, and writing practices within a society such as India, Australia, or Malaysia indicate the way discourses are constructed; these, in turn, have a significant influence in fashioning identities. Racist thought and behaviour is inbuilt in a range of texts written over a long period, showing the inter-textual coherence of racist thought and behaviour. Different texts may try to criticise each other, but the meaning remains consistent and continuous, thereby enabling discursive fields to remain “linked to a particular language.”

Nevertheless, a revaluation of past discourse does go on within the colonial space and new formulations are born out of varying historical, political, and cultural contexts. Pennycook, in the book, recognises this and shows how “primitivism has much in common with earlier constructions of the primitive” but he does not overlook the need to understand it in “its current context relative to other contemporary discourses, such as New Age, environmentalism, multiculturalism, identity politics, and so on.”

We must not forget that discourses organise and formulate texts, and this reciprocity is essential to the understanding of meaning. Though this is not to suggest the static nature of semantics, the emphasis that “with powerful discursive fields, there is often a remarkable continuity and resilience to this relationship” is chiefly Pennycook’s concern. The book explicitly urges the post-colonial writer to free the English language from discourses of colonialism by generating counterdiscourses.

The spread of English is not natural, neutral, or beneficial as is often thought. It is a wicked plot, an invention of western imperialism, and needs to be countered.

As in his previous book, “The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language”, Pennycook here further extends and reiterates the argument. It might, in fact, be a response to Sir John Hanson, director-general of the British Council in 1995, who argued relentlessly against Pennycook’s thesis by insisting that the world needs the English language and, therefore, the British Council must “get out and get on with giving it what it wants — the teachers, the methodology, the books”.

Hanson saw no irrationality in the choice different nations make in learning the language and made it clear that “if not English, then what?” His rather simplistic arguments with a rabid undertone of English supremacy is here challenged by Pennycook who takes into consideration the political, commercial, and cultural motives of the British Council behind the worldwide use of English. Popular demand for any language is obviously a cultural and political construction and conceals behind it a complex matrix of attitudes, social aspirations, orthodoxies, and power structures.

Industry should go West
by Randeep Wadehra

Globalising Indian Industries by VR Rajan. Deep & Deep Publications, New Delhi. Pages xiii+197. Rs 380.

IS globalisation a mere word in vogue? The heady days of socialism are now history. Then it was fashionable to quote Marx and discuss the downtrodden while sipping IMFL. Soon perestroika and glasnost became fashionable. But seeing what these two phenomena did to the Soviet Union, our chatterati dropped them like a hot potato.

Then came the globalisation mahamantra. However, it quickly slid from the high falutin philosophical pedestal to a pedestrian ritual and, finally, to its present status of a cliche. Trust our intellectuals to trivialise the weightiest of concepts!

As the Managing Director of Hindustan Composites and a Ph.D. from MDU, Rohtak, Rajan considers globalisation a national priority. He has given statistics to prove how the liberalisation process set in motion in 1991 has encouraged India Inc. to go global.

Nevertheless, he takes a passive view of the concept. He fails to analyse the marvel of the Asian Tigers. Globalisation is the end result of a certain mindset.

To be competitive one has to be aggressive. Aggression is endemic, and comes from a struggle for survival in a hostile environment, something the hitherto protected Indian industry is experiencing only now. Barring a few honourable exceptions not many corporations can survive, let alone flourish, in competitive environs. Rajan’s tome is useful for its case studies, models and statistics, although it fails to tackle the dynamics of globalisation.

*****

Corporate Growth through Mergers and Acquisitions by S. Shiva Ramu. Response Books, New Delhi. Pages 299. Rs 250.

WHAT do Swraj Paul, Ram Prasad Goenka, Manu Chhabria and Vijay Mallya have in common besides being industrialists? Yes, they are all corporate raiders. Once a dirty name in the cloistered Indian economy (remember the uproar during the Swraj Paul-Nanda family of Escorts face-off?). Now corporate raiders have a respectable nomenclature — “venture capitalists”! The only people wary of them today are the family-run business houses that are vulnerable to takeover bids by bigger conglomerates.

However, Shiva Ramu deals with far weightier matters than boardroom battles and intrigues. His is a methodical study of the concept of corporate merger and acquisition (M&A), and the emerging trends on the Indian scene. Acquisition is different from merger. While in merger two companies voluntarily unite to form a new corporation, acquisition denotes a unilateral shedding of identity by the company being acquired.

The book also deals with the advent of M&A and its evolution since the 1890s. It is interesting to note that the merger movements came in five specific “waves” in the USA — the 1890s, the 1920s, the 1960s, the 1980s and the 1990s. Each wave led to a metamorphosis in the industrial profile. The first wave gave rise to monopoly and the subsequent waves led to oligopoly, conglomerate takeovers, etc.

Ramu goes on to elucidate different aspects of and the processes involved in M&A. He analyses the reasons behind such phenomena. The financial and non-financial factors, the legal framework, planning, integration and post-merger evalution, etc. are all discussed in detail.

*****

Miners and Millhands by Janaki Nair. Sage Publications, New Delhi. Pages 325. Rs 450.

THE Industrial Revolution had resulted in exploitation of labour in a bestial manner, and on a mind-boggling scale. Consequently, reaction set in. Resistance, both at the intellectual and plebian level, resulted in organised labour unions. Bolshevism was perhaps the most aggressive manifestation of organised resistance.

This book is the end product of 11 years of reserach done on work cultures obtaining in Bangalore and Kolar Gold Fields, obtaining in the first half of the 20th century. Janaki Nair has used a thematic rather than a strictly chronological format to expound her thesis.

While studying Mysore’s labour classes the critique looks at the relations of power and authority that were forged in a princely state under colonial rule. Since no Bastille was stormed in the gentle Mysore, there was no Louis XVI to ask, “C’est une revolte?”; and hence no occasion for the reply, “Non, Sire, c’est une revolution”.

This book is a must for the students of labour history.