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The Indian Nationalist Movement, 1885–1947: Select . Edited by B. N. Pandey. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979. xxiii, 272 pp. Appendixes, Index. $19.95.

This selection of documents is divided into four main sections: "The Moderate Phase, 1885-1916"; "The Advent of Mass Politics, 1917-1935"; "Towards Partition, 1936—1947"; and "The Indian States, 1918-1947." Each section begins with a chronology of events and is then subdivided into specific topics—the first, for instance, into documents on Congress, Muslims, Terrorists, and British policy. The book concludes with appendixes containing brief biographies and lists of viceroys and secretaries of state. Although each main section contains some documents on British policy, the emphasis is on Indian materials, and the selection draws in particular on the rich collections of nationalist leaders' private papers which have been gathered together in Delhi over the past fifteen years. Dr. Pandey has an eye for the lively and telling extract: Jawaharlal Nehru's letter to Rajendra Prasad explaining the exclusion of the Muslim League from the U.P. Congress government, and Jai Prakash Narayan's reasons for the failure of the Quit India movement, reveal much about these great events succinctly and directly. Students can only benefit from exposure to such materials, but they will need guidance. Here the documents are served up cold; much could have been added to the volume had the sections been given introductions explaining the meaning and thrust of each extract. The documents deal only with the nationalist movement and British policy at the all-India level. "Perhaps no apology is needed for this limitation," the editor asserts, because the all-India movement "became during the period of this survey an intelligible, self-sustaining body and acquired a momentum of its own." The case is arguable. Indeed, when Dr. Pandey gives extensive coverage to a great moment in high politics, the limitation is no drawback: the story of the Cabinet Mission of 1946, and the acceptance and then rejection of its plan, emerges clearly from the documents. The book's most serious weaknesses lie in a section entitled "Growth of the Muslim League, 1936-1945," which gives little indication of how much power the League gained. Further, little is done to illustrate the development of an all-India level of nationalist politics, which surely could have been achieved by illustrating the development of the Congress from a debating society with limited support which met once a year into a genuinely all-India organization prepared to fight the nationalist cause day by day. Indeed, overall, the first forty years of the movement are poorly served. Moreover, the assumptions on which the selections were made ought to be questioned. Is it really possible to study the Indian nationalist movement without an awareness of its provincial and local dimensions? Nationalist leaders rarely forgot them, so why should historians? Indeed, the editor runs afoul of some of the dangers of the Olympian approach when he declares that "the Muslim community was a minority and lagged far behind the Hindus in terms of wealth and modern education" (p. xvii), a statement which conceals much more than it reveals. And should students be encouraged to feel that they can approach the greatest manifestation of colonial nationalism without coming to grips with the processes of ideological, social, and economic change which lay behind it? A case can certainly be made for the study of high politics, but the Indian Nationalist Movement consisted of much more than just high politics.