Ecological and Agrarian Regions of South Asia circa 1930.

• Author: Gerow, Edwin
• Position: Review

Ecological and Agrarian Regions of South Asia circa 1930. Edited by DANIEL THORNER. Based on a monograph by CHEN HAN-SENG. Karachi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. xiii + 148.

This large-format (ca. 12" x 17") statistical atlas is caught in something of a time warp. It reflects, essentially, the status quaestionis of the years 1950, when Chen Han-seng's monograph (on which the tables and charts are based) was finished, through 1965, when Daniel Thorner wrote the preface to what was by then a finished work. Thorner died in 1974, without seeing publication; now, twenty-five years later, his widow, Alice Thorner, has successfully brought the project into the light of day, through "alternate phases of hope and despair, promises and betrayals, frantic activity and exasperating delay" (p. viii).

The Raj of 1930 is divided, for the purposes of Thorner's atlas, into twenty-one regions--from the Northwest Frontier Province to the Tamil country--each provided with a somewhat schematic land-utilization map and circle diagrams indicating types and proportions of produce, by district (when known). These diagrams are then...