Samya and publishing Dalit literature

When Samya published Joothan in 2004, the book was judged Winner of the New India Foundation Best Book Award. They have just reprinted it this month.

Joothan: A Dalit’s Life is by Omprakash Valmiki, and has been translated from the Hindi by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. Sumit Guha has called it 'a searing memoir of the life of a sensitive and intelligent Dalit youth in independent India. It tells us how he overcame contempt, humiliation and violence to gain an education and join the slowly growing ranks of Dalit intellectuals in India . . . indispensable to those who would understand modern South Asia.'

Translated into English for the first time from the original Hindi, Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography talks of growing up in a village near Muzzafarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, in an untouchable caste, Chuhra, well before the defiant term ‘Dalit’ was coined. As he states bleakly, ‘Dalit life is excruciatingly painful, charred by experiences, only he or she who has suffered this anguish knows its sting.’ Valmiki’s story is one of terrible grief and oppression, of survival and achievement, of his emergence as a freer human being in a society that remains ‘compassionless towards Dalits’.

The author, Omprakash Valmiki, is a poet and a literary critic, and now is an established name in Hindi literature. He works at the Ordinance Factory, Dehradun. The translator, Arun Prabha Mukherjee is Associate Professor, Department of English, York University, Toronto. She is a well-known scholar of post-colonial studies and is also a literary critic.

The book has long been on our site. Paperback, Rs 220. ISBN 9788185604633.

D D Kosambi, polymath.

It is a great pity that when the JNU Library system was gifted the collection of D D Kosambi's personal books, they eventually chose not to keep them together in a single physical location. What were the books that a mind such as his found interesting? What were the crucial influences that allowed him, throughout his intellectual life, to contribute to mathematics, as well as to sanskrit studies, numismatics and to Indian history? And what was the reason for the daily commute on the Deccan Queen? All that might have been learned by seeing the physical evidence of the man's taste will now have to remain in the realm of mere speculation.

Kosambi's publications in history and numismatics (his last published paper, in 1996, was on Scientific Numismatics, in the Scientific American) have been incredibly influential, and some of them are still in print- for instance Myth and Reality, and An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, first published in 1956 by Popular Prakashan, Mumbai. Of this work, A L Basham said "An Introduction to the Study of Indian History is in many respects an epoch making work, containing brilliantly original ideas on almost every page; if it contains errors and misrepresentations, if now and then its author attempts to force his data into a rather doctrinaire pattern, this does not appreciably lessen the significance of this very exciting book, which has stimulated the thought of thousands of students throughout the world."

A more recent compilation of some of his important writings are in B D Chattopadhyaya's D.D. Kosambi: Combined Methods in Indology and Other Writings published in 2002 by Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Both can be obtained via our site, naturally. For a fuller appreciation of the man and for some idea of his contributions, follow this link and beyond...

Nehru as author

The Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History , if writing these was all that he did, would have earned Jawaharlal Nehru a formidable reputation. He had a knack for the apt metaphor, the turn of phrase, that make him one of India's most quoted (and quotable) politicians. But of course, he was much more than that, and indeed even more of an author than most of us realize. "Jawaharlal Nehru as an author" is a new book by Pratap Singh of Gorakhpur University. This was released at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi on Monday 27 August by Dr Karan Singh.

One aim we have at Scholars without Borders is to make the different publications from India generally more visible. The number of different governmental organisations that bring out excellent publications is quite large, and very diverse. Indeed, Nehru was responsible for several of them, partly in his capacity as our first Prime Minister, when he helped set up the Publications Division, the National Book Trust, the National Council for Education, Research and Training, the Sahitya Akademi, among others. Look on our site for books from all these organizations, or write in to us.

Historical Botany

Our attention was recently drawn to a remarkable series of books by Henry Noltie, published by the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, that have to do with studies of Indian flora during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and are therefore of interest both from a historical as well as botanical point of view... Only one of these has an Indian edition and is on our website (naturally) but we hear that there may be Indian reprints of the others soon- and that would be really great! At any rate, they are well worth knowing about.

Indian Botanical Drawings 1793–1868 tells the story of the collections of Indian flora made by botanists at the RBGE who also commissioned Indian artists to make paintings of the plants to supplement the specimens and written descriptions. The paintings have languished largely unknown in the Library of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. A selection of 62 of these spectacular illustrations was conserved and exhibited in Inverleith House in 1998, as part of the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of Indian Independence. These are reproduced in full colour in the book.

A rich account of sub-continental journeys, scientific exploration and remarkable artistry is brought to light in Robert Wight and the Botanical Drawings of Rungiah & Govindoo. A three-volume boxed set, it is devoted to Robert Wight and the stunning botanical drawings undertakenfor him by two Indian artists during a period in which he discovered some 1,200 new plant species and 100 genera of South Indian flora, while employed by the East India Company during the early part of the 19th century.

Often accompanied by an artist, Wight (1796–1872) travelled extensively through the southern Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. Many of the resulting collections – including some 23,000 preserved herbarium plant specimens and 700 original paintings - are now held at RBGE, where he studied botany in 1816 and 1817. This rich background was the inspiration for a five year project for RBGE taxonomist Noltie, whose trilogy covers Wight's life and work as an East India Company surgeon and his major contributions to taxonomy and economic botany; the illustrated works of the Indian artists, featuring some 200 of the drawings commissioned by Robert Wight between 1826 and 1853 and a travelogue, describing the author's own journeys in search of Wight in Britain and India, illustrated with his own photographs.

The books- which are really stunning- are not very expensive, ranging from 20- 50 pounds plus shipping. They can be obtained on order; write in to us at mail@scholarswithoutborders.in.

Dapuri Drawings is about a remarkable collection of botanical drawings in safekeeping at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. These watercolors were commissioned by Alexander Gibson, an East India Company surgeon, and depict plants grown in the botanic gardens under his control in the Bombay Presidency. They are the work of an unknown Portuguese-Indian artist, made between 1847 and 1850. Mapin published the Indian edition of this book in 2002. A steal at Rs 1950, the book is listed in our Art section.

Hidden Sexualities

Seagull India have recently published The Phobic and the Erotic, a "flamboyantly eclectic anthology that explodes the myths about the lines which divide us - the heterosexual from the homosexual, the normative from the 'alternative', the phobic from the obsessive, the moral from the titillating, the academic from the activist." The e-card on the left announces a discussion on the book next month at the India Habitat Center in New Delhi.


Edited by Brinda Bose (who teaches at Hindu College, Delhi University) and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya (who teaches at Calcutta University), this collection of essays is a stunning array of serious, committed writing about what is both most visible and most hidden in our lives: our sexualities. More from the book blurb: While our social and cultural lives are determined by a fairly universal heterosexual code, this anthology argues that it is imperative to recognize multiple sites and discourses as equally valid. It 'outs' the 'alternative'. Constructed on the premise that it is time to foreground those sexual choices and identities that are counter-hetero-normative as the sites at which the most significant politics are being played out, The Phobic and the Erotic captures the complex issues, theories, contexts and debates crowding the sexualities arena in contemporary Indian society.

In our Gender Section, Rs 725. Paperback. ISBN: 9781905422142

The Flying Archaeologist.

David Kennedy, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Western Australia in Perth is one colleague (and an early champion of Scholars without Borders!) who combines his academic passion- Roman archaeology and the Roman army- with the joy of flying. David is an aerial archaeologist who works in the Jordan. On ground he works in Jerash, but off the ground, he scouts the Jordanian countryside in planes (sometimes provided by the Royal Jordanaian Air Force) photographing, and discovering from the air what is difficult and often downright impossible to see from low down.

He has written about his work in a number of books, two of which we have on the site. Ancient Jordan from the Air which he has authored with Robert Bewley offers the results of aerial surveys over Jordan through more than 200 colour photographs. Ten chapters group the stunning images period by period, and take the reader through the archaeological heritage of Jordan. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural heritage of the Middle East. It may serve as a useful guide to sites for the traveller in Jordan, a striking memento of a visit, and a useful adjunct to the shelf of any scholar. And anyone who has seen Petra from the ground up will be amazed and how it all looks from up there!

In our Archaeology section. Special imports from Oz.

A People's Historian

Irfan Habib, formerly Professor of History at the Aligarh Muslim University, is the General Editor of the People’s History of India series, six volumes of which have been published by Tulika Books, New Delhi. He is also author of a number of other books, notably The Agrarian System of Mughal India, An Atlas of the Mughal Empire and Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception.

This time around, he has edited a set of essays on Religion in Indian History which is just out from Tulika. Rounding out the set of essays by a distinguished set of colleagues- Nirmalangshu Mukherjee, B D Chattopadhyay and K M Shrimali among others- is an introduction by Habib.

Religion has been, and is, an important element in Indian society and history. It is, however, rare for the subject to be discussed with the necessary degree of detachment. This volume was, therefore, planned with the object of providing a collection of studies that would deal with the role of religion in Indian history on the basis of a rigorous application of academic criteria. The results may surprise those who are more familiar with chauvinistic or apologetic interpretations. The editor’s introduction and the fifteen chapters range over an extensive period, from prehistory to the present day, and take up specific problems of crucial significance in exploring the inter-relationship between religion and social change. This volume draws on new research and is meant for academics as well as general readers, who may find here much that is of relevance to their social and intellectual concerns.

In our History and in our Religion sections. Hardback, Rs 550, ISBN: 81-89487-25-6.

Our site carries many other titles by Irfan Habib, from Tuilika and from other publishers.

An inconvenient love.

Yeh ishq nahin asaan
Itna to samajh lijiye
Ik aag ka daryaa hai....

Qurratulain Hyder, who passed away this morning, was among the most gifted writers of fiction in Urdu. Her most celebrated work Aag ka Darya (1959) was "transcreated" by her in 1998 and has appeared as River of Fire a publication of Women Unlimited, New Delhi. The title is currently oyut of stock, but rumour has it that it will be reprinted soon...

Much praise came her way for her prose. Pankaj Mishra said in the New York Review of Books that her writing "has a magisterial ambition and technical resourcefulness rarely seen before in Urdu fiction. (...) Hyder employs diverse genres -- letters, chronicles, parables, journals -- to present her melancholy vision of the corrosions of time." And in The Times Literary Supplement, "… Hyder has a place alongside her exact contemporaries, Milan Kundera and Gabriel Garcia Marquez". As a Fellow of the Sahitya Akademi, she was widely acclaimed for pioneering novel techniques in Urdu fiction. Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan, Jnanpith, Nehru, Ghalib... many awards, which she carried with distinction.

Our website, Scholars without Borders carries some of her books in translation, but we should have more. And we shall. Look for her in our Translation, Gender Studies, and Literature sections.

Tishani Doshi. Poet.

Tishani Doshi is a poet based in Chennai. Her first book of poems is the sensuously titled Countries of the Body, and one of these, 'The Day we went to the Sea' was judged the winner in the 2005 British Council supported All India Poetry Competition.

In a review published in The Hindu, Anjum Hasan has this to say: Tishani's poems are thoughtfully crafted, economical, graceful in the way they echo the rhythm of a long breath being exhaled, or something describing a wide arc before it lands. She is sensitive to nuance, takes great pleasure in the physicality of things, evokes and then relies on moods to carry poems along. The confident exactness with which she can deliver lines makes the reader want to believe her at once: "I am miles from home, in Mombassa,/ Putting diamonds in my ears/ Like a woman with three names/ Instead of one" or "Rilke is following me everywhere/ With his tailor-made suits/And vegetarian smile" or "I forgot how Madras loves noise — /Loves neighbours and pregnant women/ And Gods and babies".

Countries of the Body won the Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection, and is published by Aark Arts in 2006. Its well worth reading, and having. Write to us.

Oeuvres complètes de....

Essentially all significant academic journals are now available online... and digital archiving in repositories such as JSTOR has made it easy to get original papers dating as far back as 1665 (The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London) at the click of a mouse button (and an institutional subscription of course, but thats just a question of grants....)

Collecting the works of influential scholars has been a preoccupation of publishers for quite some time- though most scholars rarely match up to Leonard Euler (the prodigious mathematician pictured on the right, who's life's works fill over 60 volumes, and who has kept generations of publishers happily busy!). It would seem easy to put together such collections today at least in digital form, but given the fact that access is limited (for one reason or another) print volumes of the collected works of important scholars will always remain useful to the academic community.

Three such titles in the Scholars list are the Collected works of Pancharatnam, Sudarshan, and Narasimhan.

S Pancharatnam, C V Raman's nephew and among his most gifted students, did extremely important work in the area of optics, anticipating by over 20 years, the geometric phase discovered by Sir Michael Berry in the 1980's. Pancharatnam died young, much before his prime.... but not before the importance of his work was appreciated. Subsequently, Berry himself did much to publicise the work of Pancharatnam, and the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore brought out a collection of his papers along with the Oxford University Press. The collection was edited by G W Series, a colleague of Pancharatnam's at Oxford. The book is available on request (yes, you read that right!). Look on our site for details.

George Sudarshan is among the most prolific and inventive physicsts from India... and one who has not been fully appreciated for his contributions, at least not by the Nobel Academy which, arguably, passed him over twice for the Prize. The Center for Philosophy and Foundations of Science in New Delhi have recently brought out a collection of Sudarshan's papers during the period 1957-75 and these include the very important contributions to the V-A theory and to Quantum Optics. This is a volume that no reasonable library can afford to be without.


M S Narasimhan, an algebraic geometer of " profound originality " has been one of the most influential of our mathematicians in the past few decades, first as one of the architects of the TIFR School of Mathematics, and subsequently as the head of the Mathematics program at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy from where he has recently retired. The TIFR, along with the Hindustan Book Agency in Delhi has brought out his collected papers. The two volume set has been edited by Nitin Nitsure.


We also intend to continue bringing more such titles to you via our site. Not just of scientists, but also of scholars in the social sciences, literature, history, and the arts. Look in the Collected Works section at SwB.

Brilliance Unlimited

Bama Faustina has earned a formidable reputation in the 15 years she has been writing... A short and blunt autobiography, "Karukku'' in 1992, a collection of short stories, "Kisumbukkaran'', and "Sangati'', a novel. All of which are available in translation: Karukku from Macmillan, Harum-Scarum Saar from Women Unlimited, and Sangati from OUP. All available on our site, naturally.

As a spokeswoman for her age, for Dalits, and for women, Bama has emerged as a mind that should be listened to. Read an interview with her in The Hindu. Its a bit dated, but still worth a read.

A good friend...

Saheli Documents 25 Years of Autonomous Politics

The influential and proactive women's group Saheli which is based in Delhi has completed 25 years, and as a birthday celebration, they brought out a small publication charting their history and their work in the context of autonomous womens' movements in India.

Twenty five years of continuity and change. Of hope, action, protest, song, togetherness, laughter, tears, dance, strength and feminist struggle. Through the work of Saheli since 1981, the book provides an insightful perspective on some of the major campaigns of the autonomous women’s movement: the campaign against violence; resisting coercive population control and hazardous contraceptives; combating communalism. The flavour of the politics of organising in a non-funded collective, with all its ups and downs is encapsulated through quotations, interviews, conversations and incisive analysis. Through notations from the organisational ‘daily diary’, minutes books, correspondence, priceless photographs, posters and pamphlets in an attractive easy-to-read layout, the book will be of immense interest to activists, students of women’s studies and anyone interested in the history of the women’s movement in India.

Get it from the Scholars site, for Rs 130 plus postage (Rs 20 in India, Rs 50 elsewhere). 116 pages. Best to write in.

Green Tape.... Red Tape...

This blog is about a book, Green Tapism, brought out by the Environment Support Group (ESG) Bangalore.

ESG is an independent not-for-profit voluntary organisation whose work involves research, documentation, advocacy, training and campaign support on a variety of environmental and social justice issues. They are among the strongest proponents in the country for the reform of environmental decision making processes: they would like to see this become more participatory as well as environmentally and socially just.

Green Tapism is one more effort on their part to see this happen.

The Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification issued in 1994 by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests is amongst the most critical legislative instruments that covers key aspects of environmental decision making including assessment of prospective environmental and social impacts of proposed developments. A comprehensive amendment of the Environmental Impact Assessment Notification was issued in September 2006. Throughout the process of its formulation there has been an active demand from Parliamentarians and civil society organisations that the Notification must only be finalized after it has been thoroughly debated and discussed across the country, especially in the Parliament, the Legislatures and Local government bodies. Given its critical importance to ensuring the ecological and livelihood security of India, this is the only reasonable stand to take.

Much against this legitimate demand, MoEF decided to consult mainly industry and investment lobbies, completely ignoring the call for a wider debate. A sad, regressive step.

"Green Tapism- A Review of the Environmental Impact Assessment Notification 2006" is a product of extensive and in-depth research, of well over 6 months since the Notification was finalised. Written by Leo Saldhana, Abhayraj Naik, Arpita Joshi and Subramanya Sastry in a style that discusses extensively the objectives of EIA based planning, both in the Indian and International contexts, the report can be relied on for understanding the new EIA Notification- 2006, its legal basis (or the lack of it), the problems that could be anticipated in its implementation, the implications for local communities and environmental groups in particular, and the widespread aggravation of the environmental and social impacts the Notification is likely to cause.

Available on our site at a nominal cost. (We might have named it Green Tape-ism, of course, but what's in a name...)

Want any of their other material? Write in to us.

small science

Teaching science and teaching it well... Not easy. Teaching it effectively. Really not easy. Teaching it in context and making children care... Impossible!

Well, almost. The books that we are blogging today are the amazingly well produced series called Small Science, and these make it possible to teach science to primary school children in a superbly effective manner. The books are brought out by the Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education in Mumbai. HBCSE is a part of the TIFR family of academic organizations (yes, there are several) and among the various things that they do, doing something about science education at the primary school level is one that they do very well.

The books come graded, and in 3 flavours: Textbooks, Workbooks and Teacher's Books. Grades 1 and 2 have a common Teacher's book, which, as the name suggests, helps the teacher draw on the world around him (or her) to make science alive to students as young as 5 or 6 years of age. The older students have textbooks and workbooks as well- and these are produced with care and effort, as are the Teachers's books. Each grade has a separate set, and as of now, there are books for Grades 3, 4 and 5. The authors of this remarkable series of books are Jayashree Ramadas, Jyotsna Vijapurkar, and their colleagues. All the books are available in translation, in Hindi (as the Halka Phulka Vigyan series) and Marathi (as Halke-Phulke Vidnyan). (Sorry about the awful transliteration: one of these days I'll learn how to blog in Devnagari...).

Some of the titles are available through Oxford University Press, and the Teacher Books are available as CDs as well. Check out the full range on our site, under Books, and look in the subsection titled For Children. The books are a great deal, not just because of what they contain, but also because they are seriously subsidised by the Government of India. Get them for your kids, but more importantly, get them for their teachers...

Crafts in our World

In our changing and globalized world, how do we all negotiate the warmth of the handicraft and the constant changing of styles? Today we showcase a book that attempts to study this particular interface between our world and custom, between handicrafts and changing world of modern design. Designers Meet Artisans - A Practical Guide is a production of the Craft Revival Trust in association with UNESCO and and Artesenias de Colombia. Produced in English, Spanish and French (we really believe in a world without borders....) this volume documents the many ways in which the world of the artisan intersects with society at large. The book covers commercial houses, Art schools, NGO’s and even legislators in their efforts to make the place of the handicraft artisan more secure and sustainable as well as dynamic.

The Craft Revival Trust believes “that access to information empowers both individuals and societies” is borne out by their efforts to bring together documentation and informed opinion on the cultural industries of craft, textiles, arts and its practitioners into the public domain. As companion to the book above they have also released a CD which attempts to provide connections in this world – included are listings of Museums and over 500 voluntary organizations in the field. This first project of a Directory Listing of All Indian Crafts and Artisans is a veritable homage to the artisan and provides a staggering list of over 45,000 artisans, along with ways of getting in touch with all of them. A screenshot is shown below...

Come by the Scholars site and check out the listing for the books and CD. Discover more about the social and creative worlds where your chikan kurtas and handloom bedcovers, bidri coasters and so much else have come from. Read more at our site about the book (we've listed it severally, but search for "design" in the title) . The CD is under Occasional Listings.

See what others had to say about it too...

Southern Belles...

Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs, is finally here.

Between 2000 and 2004, artist Pushpamala N and photographer Claire Arni undertook an unusual and brilliant project with the support of the India Foundation for the Arts. They were the "protagonists in a project exploring the history of photography as a tool of ethnographic documentation, playing with the notions of subject and object, the photographer and the photographed, white and black, real and fake, ..."

Well, it looks like (judging from the picture on the right, which was in The Hindu of the times) that they had a lot of fun, but there was serious business too... which ultimately led to the book of the event. With essays by Susie Tharu ("Goddesses, political satire, film stills, calendar icons, votive and high art images, anthropometrical and ethnographic records, news and documentary photographs and a host of other images and image formats are cited and wittily cross-fertilized. The artists create a virtual population explosion that mimics the mood, energy and genius of the visual vernacular in contemporary India.") and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs is a delightful record of what was clearly a very exciting collaboration.


In our Art and Architecture section. Hard Bound with dust jacket, 150 pages with more than 300 full colour illustrations. Rs 1500 or $40 (outside India) plus shipping. Write to us.

Equus bibliensis...

We're pretty proud of our Pegasus- winging his way across to bring you the books you want, but it turns out we have cousins across the world with much the same ambitions.

The BBC posted a story yesterday about Venezuela's bookmules or biblio mulas, the Universidad de Momboy's rather unique attempt to get books across to readers in the more inaccessible parts of the Andes. Read about them at the BBC site...

Double Dose

Great Indian Speeches: One week two books: Penguin and Random House both bring out tributes to Indian oratory. The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches: 1878 to the Present, is edited by Rakesh Batabyal, while Great Speeches of Modern India is edited by Rudrangshu Mukherjee.

There is overlap between them, of course, but the books are of very different sizes (over 150 speeches in one and less than 50 in the other) and there is much to enjoy from what is on offer. Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Subhas Chandra Bose, Sardar Patel, Ambedkar, Indira Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee figure in both the books, but the somewhat more eclectic and unusual find their way into Batabyal's collection. Kashinath Trimbak Telang, N.G. Chandavarkar, Har Bilas Sarda, S. Satyamurti, O. Tanikachala Chettiyar, Jaipal Singh, V.I. Muniswamy Pillay, M. Singaravelu, N. Rachiah, O.V. Alagesan, Kapur Singh and Nath Pai, for instance. To find out more about them, come by the History and the General sections at the Scholars site. The General section on our site is, as you might expect, a catchall, especially for those books which are in a class by themselves...


We do not judge books by their covers, necessarily, but both Penguin and Random House have outdone themselves... A duller looking duo would be hard to find... And this too in these times when getting people to read is admittedly difficult.

Another suggestion to Penguin and to Random House: what about putting out a companion CD of audio versions of these speeches? The older ones may not be available, but surely the more recent ones- like Sonia Gandhi's renunciation- should make interesting hearing as well...

The Great Speeches of Modern India. Edited by Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Random House, Hardback, 256pages, Rs 350. ISBN:9788184000160

The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches: 1877 to the Present. Edited by Rakesh Batabyal, Paperback, 952pp, Rs 595. ISBN: 014310263X

On the Edge...

This month, Women Unlimited will release At the Cutting Edge: Essays in Honour of Kumari Jayawardena, edited by Neloufer de Mel and Selvy Thiruchandran. This significant collection of essays honours Kumari Jayawardena, a pioneering South Asian feminist scholar, activist and social scientist. Contributors explore topics and contemporary debates that resonate closely with Jayawardena’s work on gender, nationalism, race and class. They offer a rich compendium of critical thought on issues of identity, culture, human rights, and gender and the state. The essays are by Uma Chakravarti, Kumkum Sangari, Nancy Fraser, Valentine M. Moghadam, Radhika Coomaraswamy, Laksiri Jayasurya, R.S. Perinbanayagam,Aloysius Peiris, Malathi de Alwis, Sheila Rowbotham, Romila Thapar and Maithree Wickramasinghe, eminent scholars all.

A critical engagement with nationalism and its linkages with gender, class and ethnicity has animated much of Jayawardena’s work. Her pioneering book on Third World feminism and nationalism showed that feminism was not a western import and that its existence and growth in emerging post-colonial nation states was distinctly related to their modernising impulses. Importantly she paved the way for an understanding of Third World feminisms as varied and rooted in regional, historical and cultural specificities.

Many of the essays in this volume are in dialogue with this initial post-colonial feminist phase and take it as a point of departure to explore several issues that animate current feminist activism and scholarship. As such they locate it at the cutting edge with its promise of both abrasion and vision.


Under WU Titles on our site. Hardback, 328 pages, Rs 450, ISBN: 81-88965-37-5

Ants!

Ajay Narendra and Sunil Kumar have written a spectacular primer to the life of ants in "On A Trail With Ants:

A Handbook of the Ants of Peninsular India."

Lavishly produced, and a steal at Rs 600, the book sets a trend in ant studies. Great photographs of wild ants (ever tried taming one?) make it possible for you to observe and identify ants at home and elsewhere, and as we all know, they really are everywhere.

The book is available directly from the authors, though we do list it in our Natural History section. There is also another detailed blog on the book and on ants in general, at http://antlinks.blogspot.com

Making a Difference

Books for Change, based in Bangalore, are publishers with a difference... They describe themselves as a publishing and distribution initiative set up to support the communication needs of civil society organizations and the development sector in India. BfC aims to bring together the enormous resources and leadership that exist in this area by communicating facts, perceptions and possibilities to do with social change as well as share information relevant to the change process.

All their titles can be ordered via Scholars, of course. Of particular note are their books on the marginalised, on health, governance and global issues...

Pearson Anniversary

Pearson Longman celebrate ten years in India and on a domestic and homely note. Launching Interpreting Homes, a selection of essays edited by Malashri Lal and Sukrita Paul Kumar, which brings together explorations in gender, identity and place through a new engagement with literature. The book marries these new themes and concerns with an investigation into narrativization.

One to bring home! Look for it at SwB in our Literary Criticism, Gender, or Culture sections. The publisher's blurb:

The search for the location in which the self is 'at home' has been one of the primary projects of modern literature all over the world. The book attempts to map the narratives of 'home' in South Asian literature from the advance of modernity on the subcontinent till the present day. It aims to read more than the domestic into representations of the home, to explore not only the geographical, but also the psychological and material connotations of 'home'. Its goal is to disassemble the concept of 'home' in all its incarnations - as confinement, as stability, as security, as myth and as desire.

The book problematises 'home' and its experience in different contexts. It investigates if and how home changes its significations when articulated from different locations, in different languages and by different subjects, paying particular attention to ideological determinants like gender and class. The editors of the anthology have encouraged contributors to also address diaspora writing and to achieve the widest possible comparative perspective. Though the focus has been kept on literature, some papers deal with cultural narratives of home in oral and folk mediums.

The collection comprises of an Introduction and 18 original essays divided into six thematic sections.

Hardback, 268 pages, Rs 550. ISBN: 8131706370