Ethnological study.

This volume represents as accurate a list of India's Scheduled Castes as can currently be made. It reveals a highly heterogeneous profile of Scheduled Caste communities, which are spread across the country and which are mainly landless, with little control over resources such as land, forest and water. It also shows the persistence of 'untouchability' in many pockets, and the variable measures of equality that have so far been achieved in the struggle for social upliftment by the Scheduled Castes. It reveals that these castes have been increasingly involved in modern occupations, such as service in government departments wherever traditional industries have declined. As a consequence, a new sense of self-respect is in the air, gradually replacing some of the old myths which sought to legitimize their degradation.

Distringuished as both a great novelist and a great poet. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) had a writing career which spanned more than sixty years, concentrating first on prose and then, after publishing his last novel in 1895, on verse. A master of the short lyric and the vivid narrative, Hardy is pre-eminently the poet of remembrance and tender regret for lost happiness; but he is also an ironist whose exquisite descriptions of rural life are the setting for bitingly sharp observations of human frailty.