Paresh Chandra

Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, Viking-Penguin, New Delhi, 2008.

“Back then, a few clumps of poppy were enough to provide for a household’s needs, leaving a little over, to be sold: no one was inclined to plant more because of all the work it took to grow poppies…Such punishment was bearable when you had a patch or two of poppies…but what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there was better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables? But those toothsome winter crops were steadily shrinking in acreage: now the factory’s appetite for opium seemed never to be sated”. (29)

“As a family, their experience lay in the managing of kings and courts, peasants and dependants: although rich in land and property, they had never possessed much by way of coinage; what there was of it they disdained to handle themselves, preferring to entrust it to a legion of agents, gomustas and poor relatives. When the old zemindar’s coffers began to swell, he tried to convert his silver into immovable wealth of the kind he best understood – land, houses, elephants, horses, carriages and, of course, a budgerow more splendid than any other craft then sailing on the river. But with new properties there came a great number of dependants who had all to be fed and maintained; much of the new land proved to be uncultivable, and the new houses quickly became an additional drain since the Raja would not suffer them to be rented”. (86-87)

In a country like India, the origin of capitalism becomes hard to extricate from its colonial history. Capitalism seemed to set in catastrophically – the logic of capital descended upon a reality in which lives were still dominated by inward oriented, localised rural economies with age-old unchallenged hierarchies. Indians were still trying to emerge out of the anxieties that the crisis of feudalism (represented by the Mughal empire’s decline) entailed, when they suddenly found themselves located in the evolving cartography of the capitalist world system. This novel to my mind narrates the exposure of Indian people to capitalist demands, mediated as it was by a period dominated by the accumulative logic of British capitalism. When I say people, I don’t use it in the usual populist sense, but in a much wider one; “people” includes the ordinary people, feudal lords, women, men, children, everybody. I speak of a general sense of having been caught up like pawns in a chess game, like minor characters in the determined world of a tragedy. I don’t suggest that no person had agency, but the larger sense was nonetheless of being ruled.

I will try to clarify: I do not mean that individuals like Deeti and Neel have completely no hold over the reality they inhabit, or that they are unable to assert their respective individualities. In their interaction with individuals these characters show resilience in adverse circumstances. Interestingly, Deeti a poor rural woman seems to be able to handle it better than Neel, the upper class, male zemindar. But having said that, it is true, I think, that they are unable to gain a reasonable grasp over the swift changes that engulf their lives. Their alienation starts with the destruction of those relationships and ways of living that had ordered their world.

The passages I have quoted show us the lack of ease which characterised their perception of this changing world. For Deeti and her lot, the idea of not producing what one needs, in order to survive, was alien. Furthermore, because the new set of superstructural apparatuses which would revolve around a money/market based system had not yet evolved, they were stuck in an in-between zone of discomfort. The second passage works like a lesson out of Balzac. The lesson being this: Money is no longer money as money alone but also money as capital.  Money is valuable as long as it is capable of being transformed into capital; which in turn is possible only when money is used to extract surplus value, or in common parlance, to earn more money or profit; so while the money in the hands of a worker or an aristocrat is not capital, in the hand of a banker it is so. This quite obviously the Raja did not understand, and it was this lack of understanding, combined with the continued indolence of feudal ways that led to the downfall of the family.

Is this what the novel is about then? I suggest that while this is so, it is also not quite so. The discursive space that histories (referring to the discipline of history) of India occupy are usually monologic, sometimes defined by nationalism, sometimes by post-colonial ardour, and sometimes even by celebration of colonisation. To explain what I mean by “monologic”, in short: it refers to a plain of being in which only one privileged narrative is understood to explain both the spatial and temporal arrangements of objects and events. The narratives of theocracy, nationalism, state and when investigated at one discrete moment, of resistance are examples of what I call monologic discourses.

A novelistic ontology is different from if not opposed to the sphere that any monologic discourse occupies (as Kundera indicates in the first chapter of Testament Betrayed, this comes out very well in Khomeini’s opposition to The Satanic Verses). While this is not the place to explain this assertion, I can direct the reader to what I think is a crucial clue. The European novel (Ghosh’s work to my mind, falls in this genealogy of the novel) is a part of the same constellation of notions as modernity, Cartesian doubt, relativism and so on. The epistemological thrust of the novel is such that it continuously redefines itself as a genre/art and also resuscitates and radically transforms what it takes as its subject. So, true novelisation of Indian colonial history would be to render to a state of ambiguity and open-endedness a discourse that for the Indian imagination is a finished narrative.

*      *      *

What does poppy signify? To answer this question in a regrettably schematic manner: it signifies three things. It stands for the logic of capitalist production, capitalist distribution and also alienation. As one of the passages I quoted above demonstrates, for Deeti, who had always produced for self-consumption, growing so much poppy seemed absurd. She did not understand the “profit motive”. With mass cultivation of poppy, the colonised land as well the colonised consciousness was introduced to the idea of the commodity: an item produced not to be consumed but to be sold. Furthermore, the serf who had some control over her/his labour process was transformed into a worker who had absolutely no control. The decisions were made on a plain beyond comprehension of the worker.

To come to its second signification, saying that this refers to capitalist distribution is somewhat deceptive insofar as the spheres of production and distribution are internally related moments in the same circuit of capital in which surplus value is created and realised. The Opium Wars of 1839-40 were fought because the paternalistic Chinese monarchy was unwilling to let the British continue poisoning its subjects, and such unwillingness defied the interests of British capitalism. So then this becomes one of the many wars fought for the “profit motive.” By distribution I refer to the market and to the entire process that determines what is sold in the market and the means used to perpetuate the rule of the market.

Finally, poppy becomes a symbol for an entire way of life, a life of un-involvement, of alienation, of escapism. Alienation which starts with man’s relation with the larger world, seeps into his very existence, all his relationships; and “drug abuse” as the twentieth century teaches us is a good way of escaping it, or at least a good way of attempting such an escape. Whether it is Deeti’s lame husband or the disillusioned skipper of theIbis, opium is the most easily available cure for alienation. On the margins of consciousness exists Ahfat, the decaying, at times barely-human addict, acting as warning for those who attempt such an escape.

*      *      *

The creation of a narrative that contains well defined characters and their stories brings into a zone of comfort this period which we otherwise encounter in discourses that try to maintain a degree of distance in their treatment. Ideas like those of the “colonial encounter,” “divide and rule,” and so on no longer have the epic dimensions that they assume not just in popular historiography but also (and more importantly) in popular culture.  In this novel, the foreigner becomes one of the many determinants that individuals deal with. We do not encounter tales of pain and destruction brought upon Indian reality by the English, but learn of the manner in which life in its polyphony draws into its fold the new ruler, the old ruler, and the eternal subject. The process of novelisation begins here, with the breaking of the epic-like self-sufficiency and finality that the discourse of the colonial past usually has. The past does not remain a container that merely keeps pouring its never-ending supply of manna into the present without making itself available to reinterpretation or doubt.

As a novelist, Ghosh does not depend solely upon historiography as a source of history. Half-consciously if not consciously there is a lot he takes from novels of the past. His subject matter takes him to a period of time when Indian history was very directly linked with that of England, and quite understandably, his characters bring to mind types from literature, especially novels, of those times. The Burnham-Kendalbushe pair reminds us of the Bounderby-Gradgrind alliance – entrepreneurial and accumulative skill combined with a proper ideological defence. The afeemkhor thinker, Captain Chillingworth, who seemed to have learnt with experience the hollowness of evangelical zeal and had seen the true logic of colonialism, could well have been a character out of Conrad. It is actually through a tracing of these lineages that one finds the actual novelistic tradition within which to place this work. The difference is that while the centre of Conrad’s work was the construction or deconstruction of the European consciousness in the colony, the centre of Ghosh’s work is the reconfiguration of the colonised subjectivity under the influence of colonialism.

In an interactive session with the author (which I happened to attend) held in New Delhi, following the release of Sea of Poppies, a gentleman made an observation concerning the description of the opium factory (a passage that Ghosh chose to read out). He said that parts of the description struck him as remarkably similar to Dante’s description of Hell. Interestingly Ghosh’s response (if my memory serves me right) was something to this effect: this semblance might be present and discernible, because of the place that Dante has come to occupy in our consciousness. It is an interesting comment because in it Ghosh places himself and his reader, quite willingly, in a history influenced by European culture. Ghosh is an Indian writer, who acknowledges his debt to European literature, writing a novel which according to me falls in line with the European novel, at least one of whose major subjects is the colonisation of India. I make this observation because I think it is crucial for our understanding of the fact that while there might be nothing ambivalent about Ghosh’s indictment of certain English characters or the logic of colonialism, he is nonetheless not revisiting colonialism to mourn the loss of a pre-encounter state.

*      *      *

The ship is a dual metaphor. On one hand it is a metaphor for a journey, in this case an unfinished one since the novel ends in the middle of the ocean. On the other, it becomes a metaphor for fate, insofar as once they are on the ship, the direction in which the people move is determined by the movement of the ship, and hence, it becomes possible to discern who has greater agency and authority within the limits set by history. At the same time the ship is not merely a metaphor, but is also the seed from which the narrative germinates. I suggest that the ship came first and everything else later. The writer begins with a ship that is going to make a journey from India to the Caribbean (of course broadly speaking the writer has already decided what he wants to write about). On exploring the ship he finds a set of people on it, namely, a bunch of Indian (to be) indentured labourers, Indian soldiers in British employment, a few prisoners, captain, steward, seamen and so on. Here onwards he charts the histories of these characters. That they meet on this ship is no artificially contrived coincidence, since they are simply a bunch of passengers on a ship, a very commonplace occurrence. The history gets an interesting twist when the ship is revealed to be one of those that served in the Middle Passage in the transfer of Africans to the Caribbean and to America as slaves (Zachary’s story is a similar twist).

Before getting on the ship, Ghosh explores the sequences of exploitation and suffering that characters undergo, in which the role of the new rulers and of older prejudices is clearly discernible. At this point, the Ibiscomes like the saving ark to Kalua and Deeti, a phenomenal reconstituting of the slave ship. Furthermore this ship then becomes a site where camaraderie is created – a carnivalesque demolition of older hierarchies takes place.

“On a boat of pilgrims, no one can lose caste and everyone is the same: it’s like taking a boat to the temple of Jagannatha, in Puri. From now on, and forever afterwards, we will be ship-siblings – jahaz-bhais and jahaz-bahens – to each other. There will be no differences between us.

This answer was so daring, so ingenuous, as fairly to rob the women of their breath. Not in a lifetime of thinking, Deeti knew, would she have stumbled upon an answer so complete, so satisfactory and so thrilling in its possibilities. In the glow of the moment, she did something she would never have done otherwise: she reached out to take the stranger’s hand in her own. Instantly, in emulation of her gesture, every other woman reached out too, to share in this communion of touch. Yes, said Deeti, from now on, there are no differences between us; we are jahaz-bhai and jahaz-bahen to each other; all of us children of the ship”. (356)

This carnival is a life-in-death situation, where pain and pleasure do not merely coincide but relate to each other symbiotically. It is symbolised by the wedding that takes place on the ship; this wedding modelled on the archetypal village wedding evokes the parting pain of the bride and an immediate parallel is found in the plight of these people who are exiled forever. And yet it is this exile that is also redeeming.

“Talwa jharaile
Kawal kumhaile
Hanse roye
Biraha biyog

The pond is dry
The lotus withered
The swan weeps
For its absent love

In the escalating din, Deeti’s song was almost inaudible at first, but when the other women grew aware of it they joined their voices to hers, one by one, all except Paulette, who held back shyly, until Deeti whispered: It doesn’t matter whether you know the words. Sing anyway – or the night will be unbearable.

Slowly as the women’s voices grew in strength and confidence, the men forgot their quarrels: at home too, during village weddings, it was always the women who sang when the bride was torn from her parent’s embrace – it was as if they were acknowledging, through their silence, that they, as men, had no words to describe the pain of the child who is exiled from home.

Kaise kate ab
Biraha ki ratiya?

How will it pass
This night of parting?” (398)

The moment of carnival is an extended one, or rather becomes extended as it is transformed into a coalition of the suppressed in the face of hierarchies present on the ship. It is the struggle between this coalition and individuals like Hukam Singh who have power on the ship that takes the novel to its end. Of course this struggle actually takes place on the level of individual conflicts, which however also become representative of a larger struggle because of the nature of the said alliance of the oppressed.

Though the locus of this discourse is openness, the logic of the plot takes it, and that is quite inevitable, towards some sort of resolution. The denouement, the final movement on the ship contains as it were, a series of encounters and discoveries, which push the narrative towards a crisis. At this moment the novel reveals itself as a fast moving human drama that it gives indications of becoming throughout. Taking this text to be a novelisation of history seems problematic now, because this final portion does not quite fit in. However as I mentioned earlier it is precisely this concern with individuals (which is after all what novels are about) which takes the novel away from the discourse of historiography and allows history to be the subject of a novel. History here, is not a modern revision of Fate, and becomes something that people make, significantly, not in the way they want to. These characters are not the heroes of history as say Victor Hugo’s might have been, and that is precisely why the Sea of Poppies moves, to repeat what to my mind is important, towards a novelisation of history. “Historic figures” are the products of the discipline of history and are determined, and external determination is opposed to the space that novelisation creates. The coda of Napoleon’s narrative would coincide with that of the historical event he was the hero of. But the ending of Deeti’s or Neel’s narrative would necessarily not fit into the limits of any monologic narrativisation of that period.

The period that Ghosh chooses catches colonialism in a stage where the “tragic onset” has already taken place and it is already to an extent part of the local environment. Deeti’s shrine becomes the storage place where the past, the present and the future, all come together. The gods under attack and the reality that was, bits and pieces of reality that is and the future beyond the seas, which is strangely a return of the reality that was, though as a reduced pastiche of itself – for crossing the kaalapaani implies crossing the boundary beyond which that past cannot truly exist. In the final image of the novel, beneath a lightening lit sky, stand four figures. The Indian “foreigner” Paulette, Baboo Nob Kissin, a man who personifies modernity’s farcical reduction of religion and is also something of an entrepreneur; Deeti, a woman who has made the decision to leave behind a daughter, marry a lower caste man and then to cross the black waters; and, Zachary, a fair skinned son of a black mother – another product of colonialism. A lot of 20th century literature has been written around the descendents of this bunch of people. Ghosh’s characters are quite simply products of a changing reality: whether they are the rubble left after history’s rampage or individuals signifying a new stage of becoming remains ambiguous.

Note: While I have tried to treat this book as complete in itself, the fact that it was introduced to its readers as the first part of a trilogy does not let analysis remain unaffected. As a result even as I try to make certain surefooted assertions, other observations remain like loose ends, which I cannot tie without reading the sequels. For instance, there might be more that needs to be said about the significance of poppy to the work, but I think it depends largely on how the sequels work out.

Madhu Prasad

Dave Hill and Ravi Kumar (ed), Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences, Routledge, 2008.

This is an important collection of articles which focuses on theoretical issues and policy analyses to bring life and meaning to the facts of the crises facing educational institutions the world over.

Neo-liberalism has resulted in the merchandization of knowledge under conditions that subject its content, structures and modes of accessibilty to the pressures of a global market. The impact on the entire gamut of educational policy and practice has been devastating. As Nick Grant states in the ‘Foreword’ (xv-xvi), the “essentially social and cooperative ethic derived from a natural model of child development, which has informed most educationalists in most countries for centuries, is now challenged by a highly personalized and competitive model of education derived from modern business methodology.” Ravi Kumar and Dave Hill’s ‘Introduction’ outlines the significant social repercussions of this shift from pedagogical to market values. In conditions of increasing socio-economic disparities and loss of opportunities for the disadvantaged sections of society, the state is rapidly retreating from its earlier role as provider and guarantor of ‘welfare’ services, including education, that had ensured the ‘massification’ of skills required by the productive capitalism  of the 20th century until the ’70’s. Cuts in public expenditure have since facilitated dependence on markets and opened up avenues for privatization of the education system. As a consequence, fundamental concepts like equality have been called into question. This remains an abiding concern throughout the many contributions to the volume.

Hill and Kumar (‘Neoliberalism and its Impact’) further demonstrate through an account of the British experience of systemic degeneration induced by neo-liberal pressures, how the ‘philosophical incompatibility’ between the demands of capital and the demands of education is increasingly being resolved by governments on terms that are more and more favourable to capital. In an ideological and economic reproduction of the dominant Thatcherite conception of social development, critical thought has been replaced by an instrumentalist rationality driven by market values. The loss of academic autonomy has led to an undermining of the role and status of the educator, a feature that is becoming characteristic across societies as the World Bank-IMF inspired structural reforms, pressing for withdrawal of the state from education and other services, are imposed on developing countries.

Henry Giroux (‘Neoliberalism, Youth and the Leasing of Higher Education’) identifies the youth as the worst sufferers of this “market ideology… reaching into and commodifying all aspects of social and cultural life.” (p 30). With the state no longer assuming responsibility for a range of ‘social needs’, agencies of government are carrying out policies of deregulation and privatization that are undermining the once “non-commodified public spheres that serve as the repository for critical education, language and public intervention” where democratic values and social relations “are learned and take root”. (p31). Giroux forcefully argues that the “death of the social, the devaluing of political agency, the waning of noncommercial values, and the disappearance of noncommercialised public spaces have to be understood as part of a much broader attack on public entitlements….” (p 46). All social safety nets having collapsed, a neoliberal Hobbesian ethic prevails in which all public concerns are “understood and experienced as utterly private miseries… (and) the losers vastly outnumber the winners.” (p 32)  Since neoliberalism sees youth as a commodity, and young people only as consumers – otherwise they are a ‘social problem’ controllable only by a “rhetoric of fear, control and surveillance” – today’s youngsters represent the broken promise of capitalism in the age of outsourcing, contract work, deindustrialization and deregulation.

The market has no way of dealing with social inequality or civil rights. It has no vocabulary for addressing respect, compassion, ethics, or what it means to recognize antidemocratic forms of power. Giroux advocates struggle for a re-assertion of higher education as a public or social good, for democratic principles of inclusiveness and non-repression provide citizens with the critical tools necessary for investing public life with vibrancy and expanding the base of freedom and justice. As such, faculty resistance against corporatisation would certainly mean struggles for job security and academic freedom, but it must also mean the dynamic of “engaged academics” and “public intellectuals” interacting with student protests for peace, greater freedoms and against exploitation and oppression.

The ‘democratic deficit’ of neoliberal institutions like the WTO and trade regimes like the GATS, is also focused by Pierrick Devidal (‘Trading Away Human Rights?’).  The global regulatory systems of neoliberalism are marked by the conception of a right to education as a utility, whereas the socialist-democratic perspective projects education as a non-utilitarian empowering right. “The normative arguments advanced for the protection of human rights are deontological: they focus on principles about how people are to be treated, regardless of the consequences”. (F.J. Garcia, Protecting the human rights principle in a globalizing economy,2001. Quoted p 92).

Hill, Greaves and Maisuria (‘Education, Inequality and Neo-liberal Capitalism: A Classical Marxist Analysis’) provide an account of the class systemic nature of the increasing inequalities resulting from neoliberal economic conditions and educational strategies. They point to the inherent tendency within the system to segregate the privileged in ‘good’ institutions, while relegating the poor, minorities and other disadvantaged sections to sub-standard multi-track schools without adequate resources or infrastructure. Markets only serve to exacerbate existing inequalities: “the poor have less access to pre-school, secondary and tertiary education; they also attend schools of lower quality where they are socially segregated. Poor parents have fewer resources to support the education of their children, and they have less financial, cultural and social capital to transmit.” (F. Reimers, Unequal schools, unequal chances. The challenges to equal opportunity in the America, 2000. Quoted p 119). Only policies that explicitly address inequality, with a major redistributive purpose, could make education an equalizing force in social opportunity.

Tristan McCowan’s critique (‘Higher Education and the Profit Incentive’) of J. Tooley’s neo-liberal opposition to state intervention in education identifies and elaborates “seven virtues of the profit motive” at the core of Tooley’s approach. Therefore McCowan sees his own argument as a “moral and not simply a pragmatic one… for the ability of states to defend their public education system, and for the notions of equality of opportunity and democratic control on which the systems in principle rest.” (p 55).

The claim that under neoliberalism successful modern economies “will be those that produce the most information and knowledge – and make that information and knowledge easily accessible to the greatest number of individuals and enterprises”, is examined by Nico Hirtt (‘Markets and Education in the Era of Globalized Capitalism’). Is it higher education, he asks, or the scarcity of it, the competition for it, that makes it so profitable for individuals and firms? Isn’t a flourishing economy the condition for boosting higher education and drawing investment into the area? ‘Unleashing the potential’ of those who have been unjustly left behind in a stratified, unequal society does require providing them with the weapon of knowledge and organizational capacity. But is this what our schools provide? And is this what we expect of them? Hirtt exposes the neoliberal claim of promoting a ‘knowledge-economy’. Given the volatility of the economic, industrial and technological environment, knowledge has become “a perishable product”; the important activity in education is not learning but “learning to learn”, that is, the acquisition of an ensemble of knowledge skills that are less institutional and more informal. Such “modular qualifications” (know-how, personal behaviour and development) are essential to be able to adapt to the evolution of, and the upheavals in, the job market.

Edwardo Domenech and Carlos Mora-Ninci (‘World Bank Discourse and Policy on Education and Cultural Diversity for Latin America’) provide a historically contextualized view of World Bank functioning.  Co-opting a range of governmental and nongovernmental organisations, it ensures that their functioning remains complementary to the market, acting to make its functioning better and correcting its flaws.  Together with international agencies and national governments, the Bank “seeks to gather together public officials, academics, designers and beneficiaries of nongovernmental programs, with the aim of revising its strategies and policies in search of new agreements and political support for its economic and social reforms. In this process, the WB procures the involvement of all public, private and nongovernmental agencies that are seen as complimentary to the optimization of the programs to reduce government expenditures. It is also important to note that the relationship between the WB and these international, governmental and nongovernmental organizations is not linear or unilateral… The WB was compelled to modify its discourse during the 1990’s due to heavy criticism and opposition from various social and political entities, especially the so-called new social movements.” Consequently, the “Bank’s discourse has become an odd mixture of decontextualisation, generalization, distortion and omission… as if the WB itself were not one of the key international actors that has engineered the so-called new international order.” (p 156-7).

Propagating the theory of human capital and education as investment, WB relies on an individualist perspective that promotes personal challenge over structural conditions of inequality, making each individual solely responsible for their own successes or failures. However, neoliberal individualism differs from classical liberalism in that it has lost the social component. Compensatory and targeted policies substitute the idea of equality for that of equity, the notion of common interest for particular interest, an ethics of personal gain that sees itself as being in contradiction with, and threatened by, the search for the well-being of society.

Such policies of assistentialism consolidate the segregation and fragmentation of education circuits, neutralizing the pedagogical function rather than complementing it. For example, the marginalization, asdisadvantaged groups, of indigenous communities and diverse minority groups, results in strategies for maximizing enrolment and ensuring retention, but fails to question the ability of the system itself to prove adequate to the pedagogical value and challenge of pluralism. This results in the “deterioration of pedagogical practice at the level of elaboration of pertinent strategies, as well as at the level of representations and expectations that allows generating actual learning in children”. (p 158)  A pedagogy centred on the political critique of identity and difference, exposes the assimilative attempt as reinforcing the actual structures of power and domination by its understanding of socio-cultural diversities as the nonconflictual or unhierarchical coexistence of different communities/ groups. Societies are not homogenous and the specific power structures within their great social variety require to be uncovered.

The final contribution of the volume, Curry Malott’s ‘Education in Cuba: socialism and the encroachment of capitalism’, looks at the Cuban experience to see what can be learned about resisting the contemporary phase of capitalism. Cuba allocates over 10 percent of GDP to education, has one of the finest life-long teacher training programmes in the world, and has achieved universal school enrollment and attendance. Despite the hardship imposed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the continuing illegal US economic embargo, the quality education the system provides to all “makes it first amongst all countries in the world… (and) we are sharing this immense human capital with our sister nations of the Third World without charging a cent.” (Fidel Castro, 2002). This ‘globalization’ stands out in stark contrast to neoliberalism, but is also subjected to global market pressures. Cuban state capitalism, the basis of its great provider role which still has the support of the majority of the population, is being forced to reprivatise and open sections of its economy to foreign investment to provide employment for the “best-educated and healthiest population in Latin America”. Education is the site of an inherent tension between learning as empowerment, the great egalitarian leveler, and learning as the social reproduction of labor power. While Cuba remains an inspiration as to the magnitude of human progress that can be achieved by resisting neoliberalism, it also serves to emphasize the fundamentally dehumanizing nature of value production under capitalism.

This is also the message and the understanding conveyed by the volume as a whole. Covering a wide range of concerns about the process of education, perhaps the most significant social activity apart from production itself, it is obvious that many issues taken up in this collection are debatable, that statements and arguments can be controversial or better framed, that many theoretical concepts and positions could have been included or explored in greater depth. However, given the stimulating achievements of the volume, these questions are best left to continuing debate and discussion.

Madhu Prasad teaches in the Department of Philosophy, Zakir Husain College, University of Delhi.