Rocking the strange cradle

n The Adoption (Headline/Review, £2.99) by Dave Hill is a dramatization of the conflicts between love and duty and between contentment and desire. Set in east London, this fourth novel from Hill tells the story of Jane Ransome, a mother of three, who craves for a fourth child. Unable to conceive, Jane, along with her husband, Darren Grice, adopts a three-year-old girl called Jody. The newcomer awakens the family to an unfamiliar world — one that leaves its unwanted children badly damaged. Although the book ends with a happy resolution of sorts, questions remain as to the judiciousness of asking for what one has not been given naturally, and as to the need to prioritize between different choices. A perceptive and insightful writer, Hill has conjured up a world that is both realistic and unwilling to judge its inhabitants. However, Hill could have made the protagonist’s childhood less politically correct.

n Ideology and Social Science (Penguin, Rs 250) by André Béteille comes with a foreword by Ramachandra Guha and is a new collection of fifty of Béteille’s articles on social, political and cultural issues in India. The selection ranges from theoretical and philosophical debates within sociology to issues such as liberalism and fundamentalism in Indian politics. The sixth section of the book deals with the current controversy over caste and quotas. These articles use Béteille’s earlier research on caste and class in Indian society to show how policy-making fails to address the problem. In the same argumentative vein, Béteille also emphasizes the need to separate the discipline of sociology from social activism. In many of the pieces, Béteille seems to hanker after an essential Indian identity that discounts persistent myths, remains amorphous and accounts for the changing value systems within the family and society. In its sheer breath of interest and the author’s erudition, this book should be useful to both academics and lay readers.

n Golden Stag (Mosaic, Rs 350) by Sivasundari Bose has its distinction in the title’s reference to Tagore’s “golden stag” — which symbolizes a transformation, sought, in this case, by five generations of a Tamil family in rural and, eventually, small-town Tamil Nadu. But Bose’s prose, although lucid at times, tends to lapse into clichés. It also uses improvised constructions such as “same-sized pebbles”, as a result of which it become self-defeating given the abundance of such constructions in English novels by Indian authors. Golden Stag is further weakened by the trite ‘great Indian’ theme of village to Silicon Valley abroad to Silicon Valley back home.

n Women, Development, and the UN (Orient Longman, Rs 395) by Devaki Jain studies the contribution of women to the United Nations since 1945. Jain, a development economist, uses the available literature as well as her own experiences to evaluate UN programmes catering to women in the developing world. As an activist, Jain also looks at how the notion of women’s rights and gender equality have, in turn, shaped the UN’s ideas and policies on development. She acknowledges the challenges of the twin subversions of writing on women and development, that too from a “southern” perspective, which does not view development in a euro-centric light. Her defence is secured with the opening argument that Gandhi was more important to the Indian economy’s recovery from colonial subjugation than J.M. Keynes. In his foreword, Amartya Sen iterates the need for women to document and learn their own history which is “exhilarating”.