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SAINT ON THE MARCH. By Hallam Tennyson. (Gollancz, 13s. 6d.) THIS book should have been given a better title, for it contrives in a couple of hundred very readable pages to bring rural India to life, at the same time giving an eye-witness account of what is intended to be, and believed by the author to be, a moral revolution that demands our attention. The Bhoodan movement led by Vinoba Bhave is something more than a campaign of voluntary land reform that takes the wind out of the Indian Communists' sails; but even on that basis the statistics are sufficiently astonishing. Up to a year ago 230,000 landowners large and small in all parts of India had given to the movement three and a quarter million acres, and the un- believable still goes on happening. Vinoba himself, ageing, afflicted with stomach ulcers and chronic malaria, living on next to nothing, has by now walked many thousands of miles from village to village, but his target is no less than 50 million acres. All this has been re- ported in the wprld's press, but Mr. Tennyson's book is the first attempt to assess the signifi- cance, the philosophy, the achievement and the possibilities of the 'revolution through love' as a whole. It gains by being a personal account by a Westerner prepared to face all the discomforts of a participant in the cam- paign, to face his own doubts also and to acknowledge the various criticisms of Bhoodan that have been made in India and abroad.
FRANCIS WATSON
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