These are fascinating and important new books. In themselves they cover different ground and may seem improbable bed-fellows for a review article. But there are major and telling affinities. Nirad Chaudhuri is himself an outstanding latter-day member of that Bengali bhadralok intelligentsia, which, if narrowed to the Brahmos, constitutes the subject-matter of David Kopf's new book. The Brahmos, in their reaction to Western thought and Christianity were concerned above all at formulating a new critical response to Hinduism, the essential concern of Chaudhuri's own most recent work.
Of late we have tended to look at Hinduism in terms ofits compatability with modernization, especially economic. This was an approach of the late 1950s, a product ofgloom on the poor performance of Nehru's five-year plans.
In a work which triggered offthis debate, Blossoms in the Dust (New York 1962) Kusum Nair concluded: 'Development will not become a self-generating process with its own momentum unless the value system of the community and the social structure containing it are first altered and adjusted to be in harmony with the socio-economic objective ofplanning.' This mode of analysis was pursued amongst others by K. W. Kapp in Hindu Culture, Economic Development and Economic Planning in lndia (New York 1963) and its general argument ably summarized by Professor Morris in the Journal of Economic History, December 1967. It would be foolish to query the pertinence ofsuch an approach in any discussion ofthe relationship of Hinduism to the modernization process. The eclipse of Confucianism in modern China remains a damaging analogy for the future of Hinduism in India. Yet there was ahvays a 0OIS--721X/81/010083 + 11501.00/0 (~1981 Academic Press Inc. (London) Ltd.