BOOK REVIEWS 63 language in their work—this is the gist of Gargi's argument. After giving a list of Panjabi and Hindi fiction writers who describe sexual scenes with varying degrees of frankness he'pleads for tolerance on the part of,readers and critics. The third contributor to this aspect is Aditya S^n who finds it difficult to disentangle pornography from progressive literature. The problem of obscenity in literature is of course relevant and should be discussed by writers, critics and readers. But a discussion on obscenity misses its mark if the only demand is for franker portrayal of sexual themes without considering and clarifying the aesthetic issues involved. The aesthetics of obscenity, the artistic validity and justification of uninhibited descriptions of sexual scenes, the relativity of norms of sexual behaviour and obscenity, the necessity to prevent the collapse of aesthetic equilibrium—all these have to be discussed concretely. But the three contributors are mainly concerned with the writer's right to be more uninhibited. The same one-sidedness is seen in the section entitled "Literature and the Law". Pratap Sharma, B R Agarwala and Shrikant Varma ^ deal with the retrogressive nature of the censorship laws and the mindless bureaucratic interferences with writer's freedom to publish. Here also they cite instances of legal or bureaucratic suppression of supposedly obscene material. It is true that Shrikant Varma mentions some instances of harassment of writers for their political convictions. But the suppression of alleged ('subversive" matter and the mean and devious and legally un-challengable persecution of politically "undesirable" writers have not received the attention it deserves. I believe that writers in India betray a lamentable lack of professional solidarity. When a radical writer is harassed or persecuted the "respectable" writers will not protest for fear of displeasing the political distributors of awards and ^nedals. Passing Phase, Perhaps In the section ^'Literature of Protest" Pritish Nandy and Bhisham Sahni make a forceful plea for the production of committed literature effectively expressing the anguish and protest of the common man. Nandy draws our attention to a paradox in the cultural situation of the newly liberated countries of Asia, Africa and L^tin America: "The committed poet assumes a universal audience even-though he knows his books are sold only in very small editions and very few people finally get to read him. He is in that strange predicament where he speaks for those who do not know he speaks for them"8. Nandy does not see a single protest poet among the Indo-Anglian poets which confirms the opinion that it is a rootless literature unconcerned with theTrealities of our country.. He rightly calls upon the poets to break away from the tradition of British poetry and seek their roots among the masses. But curiously Nandy ends with an anti-poetical statement: "The time for poetry is almost over. It is the time to act." If one's poetry reading is confined to the stuff produced in English, such a despondent conclusion will not surprise us. But these poets operate only on the fringes of Indian cultural consciousness. Even then