3 Review(s)

This book in memory of Prof. G. K. Das takes on special significance as India reflects on the ever-changing prospect ahead of the first seventy-five years of her independence. It should be of intrest to the general reader as well as to scholars from the fields of literature and cultural studies. The collection outlines the exciting yet troubled relationship between texts and the larger cultural context that htey help shape and that shapes them in turn. From India's legendary past, through the dawn of colonisation, its high noon and long-drawn out twilight, the essays urge the reader to compare in principle and in practice the sophisticated relationship between events and the written word, or between lines of inquiry and the various kinds of writing that articulate them. The framing narrative of historical and social change in the world outside India encloses this core concern. The collection closes with a previously unpublished essay by G.K. Das that brings to the forefront one of the most urgent global issues of today, the troubling relationship between humanity and an ecologically fragile environment within which it functions.