RELIGION AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION 65 alore have taken up for study specific problems of development and social transformation. Dr Gabriele Dietrich, currently on the staff of the Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary in Madurai, was for three years the leader of one such project. Sponsored by the Commission of the Churches for Participation in Development (GGPD) of the World Council of Churches, this study set out to examine the role of religion in development. The book under review is the outcome of this project, which involved library research, group consultations and a field survey. It is clear that Dietrich and her team of researchers have put their feelings and a good deal of effort into the project; their positive attitude of respect and sympathy towards the people they have sought to study deserves warm recognition. Having said this it must be emphasized, however, that the research failsj to shed any significant light on the questions it has taken up for study. Reference to the book's table of contents provides an initial clue as to why this should be so. One is immediately struck by the discrepancy between the book's title—"Religion and People's Organization in East Thanjavur"—and the actual contents. Only one chapter out of four, amounting to 61 of a total of 169 pages, is given over to a study of the situation in East Thanjavur. The remaining chapters, constituting nearly two-thirds of the book, are devoted to a remarkably roving and confused discussion of theoretical and theological issues. The book is, in effect, split into two distinct and unconnected sections: one, the summarized results of a field study which, on the face of it at least, promises to make some worthwhile connection with life; the other, an undigested mass of theoretical contentions and "insights", drawn together on the basis of extreme eclecticism. Moving with bewildering ease from Gandhi to Gram-sci, from the scientific stand and viewpoint of Debiprasad Chatto-padhyaya to the philistine neo-Freudian speculations of Philip Spratt, from the behavioural perspective of David McGlelland and K W Kapp to the class analysis of E M S Namboodiripad and B T Ranadive, Dietrich touches upon many complex issues without batting an eyelid, and, in the process, offers us quite a few naive assertions and sweeping generalizations. The theoretical contusion, underlined by quite startling eclecticism, pulls the analysis in many different directions. At times, one is not certain whether one is reading a concrete study of people's movements in East Thanjavur, a pocket guide to Indian sociology or an updated theological tract on development and the "Christian conscience".