BOOK REVIEWS 77 Their intellectual retardation was perhaps facilitated by a tradition—or a misinterpreted tradition—which taught that literature and music were the two breasts of Saraswati and that an adult response to literature can be identified with the determination of rasa, alankara and chhand of verses poi fraying a decadent sensuality. The English teacher suffered and continues to suffer from a different set of handicaps. Without acquiring even a semblance of inwardness with the rhythms of a foreign language he has to teach its literature to vast hordes of students who have no background knowledge of English history, culture, or life. The limit of our average English teacher's intellectual horizon is drawn by a vaguely understood ideology of British liberalism and empiricism and more often than not, his most "revolutionary" theoretical discovery is likely to be that a poem should be discussed "on its own terms" without "smuggling in" extra-literary paraphernalia drawn from philosophy, history, sociology and so forth. So far as the language aspect is concerned, an Englishman would be appalled to know what is going on in our classrooms in the name of English teaching. He would not believe his ears and he would heartily endorse the Hindi enthuisiast's slogan "Angre^i hatao" (Eliminate English). Having no clear-cut national educational consensus regarding the purpose of English teaching in our country, the frustrations and irritations of the teachers and the students in the class' rooms arc only natural. Radicals in a Dying Culture Those who arc interested in giving a radical ideological orientation to the teaching of English in the Indian universities and colleges will find The Politics of Literature stimulating and thought-provoking. The problems and perspectives of literature teaching in the USA are materially different from those obtaining in this country, But there are common elements. One such element is the student apathy. The editors of the book under review say: "Student incompetence, open admissions, degenerating standards, threatening legislators, cutbacks, female studies, realty-tax like, freeze on promotions, breakdown in air conditioning . ., The students remain angry, bored, or pedantic; the administration oppressive or stodgy; the journals tedious; the profession philistine.'51 Listen to what a veteran professor of English Sisirkumar Ghose has to say about the situation in India: "The unwanted majority, faced and fed up with an irrelevant syllabus ineffectively taught with outmoded methods of instruction, followed by a questionable system of examination, and with no job prospects at the end of a long-drawn farce, feels naturally frustrated and furious."2 Specifically, the problem of the radical literature teacher is, in the words of Sheila Delany, the following: "If you teach English literature, you may find it more difficult to relate left political convictions to teaching than do your friends in the social sciences, for your job is to disseminate the monuments of a culture many of whose central values you