However surprising Russell's combination of mathematical logic and pacifist anti-capitalist ethics may appear, it becomes understandable if one looks for its psychological roots. He who is ready to overthrow the oldest traditions in logic and to uncover the illusory nature of ancient ideals will also look with more freedom at the ideals of bourgeois ethics and not be afraid to give up values which those who are tradition-bound are unable to renounce.

Writing for Premchand (1880–1936) was a mission. In the course of a literary career that spanned over three decades he passionately clung to the belief that no writer in a subject country could afford the luxury of writing without a social purpose. India, so long as it was ‘under the yoke of alien subjection’, could not ‘scale the highest peaks of art’. Her writers were obliged by their political and social conditions to educate the people wherever it was possible for them to do so. The more intensely they felt, the more effectively educative became their work. Aware of the inevitable price, in terms of literary quality, that the colonial writer had willy-nilly to pay, Premchand had the insight to see the identity between the demands of society and the demands of literature. And precisely because he could perceive this identity, he succeeded increasingly in creating works that combined social purpose and artistic excellence.

In the third century, a poet in the ancient Cōḻ capital of Uṟaiyūr, on the banks of the Kāvērī river opposite the island of Śrīraṅkam, looked into the sad face of his lover and said that her face reminded him of the bank of the Kāavērī strewn with stalks of banana plants after the celebration of the Paṅkuṇi festival on Śrīraṅkam island. Although this early reference to the Paṅkuṇi festival being celebrated on Śrīraṅkam island dates from a period when the great Paṅkuṇi temple must have been at most a minor shrine, it seems likely that the Paṅkuṇi festival of today is a direct descendent of that early celebration. When inscriptions were carved on the temple walls between the tenth and eighteenth centuries they regularly mention the Paṅkuṇi festival as one of the main features of the temple's ritual, and references in the temple chronicle also seem to assume a continuous performance of this festival. As other festivals began to crowd into the temple calendar the Pankuni festival came to be known as the Āti festival or the ‘Original’ Festival in order to distinguish it from all others.

This paper represents an attempt to throw more light on the problems faced by developing countries in their efforts to industrialize, through an examination of the recent economic history of a particular case, the scientific instruments industry in India. Since many of these problems are connected with technological matters, particular attention is paid to the relations between ‘science’ and ‘production’, broadly defined, and to how these relations affect prospects for industrial development under present-day conditions. The paper's other focus is the role of'planning’ in the industry's development, and the gap between what the planners envisaged and what happened in actual practice.