Quantum Information. The Basics.

Scores of physicists- the world over-will tell you that one of the finest books from which one might learn quantum mechanics is Principles of Quantum Mechanics by R Shankar, published by Plenum Press.

The good news for us all is that finally this book has become available in an Indian edition, courtesy Prism, a small publisher based in Bangalore, but one who has been interested in making quality texts available in the country, along with Springer, India.

Shankar, Professor of Physics at Yale University, is very well known both for his research as well as for his approach to pedagogy. And he has a charming self-deprecatory style- his webpage lists his most important contribution to physics as his discovery of a "small parameter that justifies most calculations performed in physics: 1/ego, where ego is the author's ego".

In this edition, Shankar has introduced major additions and updated key presentations. New features of this innovative text include an entirely rewritten mathematical introduction, a discussion of Time-reversal invariance, and extensive coverage of a variety of path integrals and their applications. Additional highlights include a clear, accessible treatment of underlying mathematics and a review of Newtonian, Lagrangian, and Hamiltonian mechanics. The student's understanding of quantum theory is enhanced by separate treatment of mathematical theorems and physical postulates. The book is particularly well known for its coverage of path integrals and their relevance in contemporary physics.

A widely admired text for advanced undergraduate- and graduate-level students, Principles of Quantum Mechanics is fully referenced and is supported by many exercises and solutions. The book’s self-contained chapters also make it suitable for independent study as well as for courses in applied disciplines. Shankar's other well-known book is Basic Training in Mathematics: A fitness program for science students, also from Plenum (but unfortunately not yet also from Prism).

In our Physics Section. ISBN 978-81-8126-686-4, Rs 695.

The truth that dares to speak.

‘If you were to knock on the words of pain, you would hear the sound of truth . . .
if you were to dig into them, you would find blood streaking out.’

This is how B. Kesharshivam describes the quintessential experiences of the life of a dalit. In the sixty years after independence, many believe that much has changed for dalits. The author himself, born and raised in poverty in the dalit moholla of Kalol in north Gujarat, passed the Gujarat Public Service Examinations to become a mamlatdar, a revenue officer, and finally a Class 1 officer who held many significant postings including comptroller of the household to the governor of Gujarat. Yet as he says, ‘At every step in life I was made aware of being a dalit.’

Translated from the Gujarati original, Purnasatya, by Gita Chaudhuri, this is the first autobiography of a dalit in Gujarati. Beginning with his life as a child who plays in the dust of the bone meal factory, where he later works, going on to labour with his parents in the ‘cotter mill’, the book presents a non-sentimental account of a childhood where friendships exist, sometimes across castes, and discrimination and abuse are constants. The second part of his story relates to his working life, his struggles on behalf of the dalits and the tribal populations against a backdrop of continuous discrimination. As the author questions accepted norms and verities, he forces readers to confront themselves.

THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH: A Dalit’s Life, is full of insight, egotistical, bitter and yet never defeated. From Samya, Kolkata.

In our Dalit Studies and Biography sections. ISBN 978-81-85604-87-9, Rs 350.




And from Stree, Samya's sister publisher, comes HER STORY, OUR STORY and ON THE SWING, translations of the work of Malatibai Bedekar who wrote under the pseudonym of
Vibhavari Shirurkar.

When published in the 1930's Pune was outraged. ‘The writer of indecent, obscene works such as Kalyanche Nishwas and especially Hindolyavar [On the Swing] must be killed.’ The author’s effigy was burnt on the streets... Vibhavari Shirurkar had bravely written on the complex yearnings of young girls, touching upon their sexuality and their tentative steps to an inchoate self-hood, and in the novella, of an abandoned wife’s courage in forming a new relationship. This outraged middle class respectability.

In the 1976 edition of Kalyanche Nishwas (from Popular Prakashan, Mumbai), the author wrote a note on the public reaction to these two works when first published, which has also been included in this volume. She declared that her portrayal of young working women being financially exploited by their fathers, of their being drawn towards devious men despite themselves, or their severe stress as widows or abandoned wives, was a diluted version; the reality was much worse.

These two fictional works, translated into English from the original Marathi for the first time, and accompanied by a critical note, written in 1933, by the sociologist and Marathi encyclopaedist S. V. Ketkar, are like a slice of social history. Together, Her Story, Our Story and On the Swing speak about women who loved and lost, despaired, doubted the choices they made, yet made them nevertheless.

In our Gender and Translation sections. ISBN 978-81-85604-94-7 Rs 275.

We are happy to list these on our site. Open every day. All the time. Non-polluting.

These are things that we care about very deeply.

Love me, love my books

The City of Love by Rimi B Chatterjee is an Indian English novel, recently published by Penguin. The publisher's blurb is provocative- "It challenges everything we think we know about that world" and enticing "a richly textured narrative that is hard to put down". The Hindu is equally charmed, "This is … an acknowledgement of the tradition of our epics, the easy ability of gods and narrators, often the same person, to digress and begin a new story while in the middle of another, like a taan embellishing the body of a raag."

The author, Rimi Chatterjee is a novelist, translator, and academic. She was born in Belfast, grew up in England and came to live in India at the age of ten. Empires of the Mind: A History of Oxford University Press in India During the Raj published in 2006, won the SHARP de Long prize for that year. She is now a lecturer in English at Jadavpur University, having previously been at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Her other interests include martial arts, gardening and theatre.

It is ironic that the first book of IWE, Indian Writing in English, on our site is from Kolkata, and this on the day when the papers are filled (to our eyes, at least) with the news that the Kolkata Book Fair has been cancelled this year. Cancelled. Such finality.

The entire episode has a tragic air to it... and all for want of some foresight on the part of all parties concerned. Having seen the usual cast of characters- the politicians, booklovers, authors and publishers- express their outrage on national TV, one wonders. Did nobody see it coming? The things that we truly care about should not be taken so lightly.

Our IWE section is thin, but will grow...

Two from Shereen Ratnagar. Two from Tulika.

Tulika Books, New Delhi latest two books... From one of the best known ancient historians who till recently was on the faculty of the JNU, Shereen Ratnagar, who writes extensively and with authority on matters archaeological.

Makers and Shapers: Early Indian Technology in the Home, Village and Urban Workshop is a study of technology as self-help endeavour in the home and the provisioning of the household; as work in the rural workshop that supplies pots or tools for the village; and as techniques mastered in the urban workshop, feasible not in simple tribal villages but when new production institutions emerge with the development of a political hierarchy. The reader is taken from the agricultural field to the building of the home (with its food-processing and storage facilities), to urban water supply techniques and transport mechanisms, to the use of stone, bronze and iron for tools and weapons. A glimpse is afforded of the difference between making pottery by hand and by using the potter's wheel. The social circumstances required of pottery production are in turn contrasted with those required of metallurgy. The whole is based on archaeological evidence of the Neolithic to Iron Age cultures of South Asia, and, concurrently, on observations of technological processes followed by villagers today.


The second title, Ayodhya: Archaeology after Excavation is coauthored with D Mandal. In this book, Ratnagar discusses the controversy over the history of a small site in the city of Ayodhya that has been a blot on the recent history of India, not least because it has led to the deaths of hundreds of people. Was there indeed a temple commemorating the birth of the god Ram under the Mosque built by a general of Babur? For many who were not drawn into one or other position, this began to look like a matter of ideology rather than fact. This, until the time when the High Court of Allahabad directed the Archaeological Survey of India to open up the ground under the Mosque, by then broken down by the vandals of 1992, to search for temple remains. The Archaeological Survey excavated the site for six months in 2003, and submitted its Report the same year. The Report gave the suggestion that there are traces of a pillared temple in strata under the Mosque. While this book places on record the reasons why two scholars conclude that claims about the temple are not credible, in the broader sense it also indicates why attempts to 'restore' holy places to their 'original' owners can be self-defeating projects.

A recent blurb (for her book from the Three Essays Collective) says that she gave up her Professorship in Archaeology at the JNU when it ceased to be fun and has since been researching and teaching in various places. Her interests include the bronze age, trade, urbanism, pastoralism, and, recently, the social dimensions of early technology.

An author of such originality comes warmly recommended. In our Archaeology section.

More Music to our Ears

The Indian Musicological Society, based in Vadodara, Gujarat, and founded in 1970 by Ramanlal Mehta, publishes a Journal in addition to a number of academic (and semi-academic) books. Vanishing Traditions in Music, edited by Shakuntala Narasimhan, for instance, or Ashok Ranade's Reflections on Musicology and History. Or The Musical Heritage of Sri Muthuswami Dikshitar, edited by T. S. Parthasarathy.

These books are probably already well-known within specialist circles, but like much of our academic work, is of much broader appeal and should be known more widely. We are happy to list these titles and make these available via Scholars. The main focus of the IMS is the promotion of research in the field of musical styles and forms, the musical Gharanas, comparative and historical studies, psychology, acoustics, aesthetics in music, and music criticism. The Journal published by the Society has contributions from leading musicologists. In our Ethnomusicology section.

A new publisher, a new book. Mrdangam, by T V Gopalakrishnan, and published by his Vision Musica, in Chennai. "The book covers everything about mridangam from the period of Bharatha’s Natya Sastra to the present day. This is a very large book for which the primary conclusion should be stated at the outset. It is the most penetrating examination ever done of all aspects of mridangam and of the Tala system. It contains valuable information not found in other mridangam studies. These could have been gathered during his long years of concert experience, and from his interactions with great performers and scholars."

The book comes with a CD. Also in the Ethnomusicology section. Come explore!

Transforming Detection

Sara Paretsky, credited with transforming the mystery genre through the creation of her female private eye, V I Warshawski, was given the Cartier Diamond Dagger award for lifetime achievement from the British Crime Writers’ Association. Bleeding Kansas, the latest of her novels, will be out shortly.

Women Unlimited is bringing out her Writing in an Age of Silence, a beautiful, compelling exploration of the writer’s art and the traditions of political and literary dissent that have informed her life and work, against the unparalleled repression of free speech and thought in the USA today, and the assault on civil liberties post-September 11.

In tracing the writer’s difficult journey from silence to speech, Paretsky turns to her childhood and youth in rural Kansas, and brilliantly evokes Chicago—the city with which she has become indelibly associated—from her arrival during the civil rights struggle in the mid-1960s to her most extraordinary literary creation, the south-side detective Warshawski. Paretsky traces the emergence of Warshawski from the shadows of the loner detectives that stalk the mean streets of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler’s novels, and in the process explores American individualism, the failure of the American dream and the resulting dystopia.

Listed with other WU Titles, Rs 250 • Pb • pp.160

Coy, but Accurate

Divided we Stand is a recent offering from Sage. Subtitled India in a Time of Coalitions, this new book by journalists Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, and Shankar Raghuraman "explains why India has entered a new era of coalition politics and analyses the consequences and implications of this relatively recent phenomenon. Transition from single party domination to multi-party configurations or coalitions, the authors argue, is neither temporary nor an aberration. Dismissing the notion of bi-polarity, and resting the debate on whether coalition governments are here to stay, the authors debate on whether coalitions are at best a necessary evil or are better than single-party governments. "

At least thats what the publisher's blurb says. The title is, admittedly, coy. But felicity of phrase is one of the affectations of journalists (and bloggers, perhaps?). The authors, Guha Thakurta in particular, are often to be found on national television, analysing events as they unfold, and they are thus in an ideal position to offer some analysis of the interesting times as we live through them...

In our Politics Section. Hardcover, 525 pages. ISBN: 9780761936633 , Rs 650.

Houses of Learning

Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, founded by K M Munshi in 1938, lists a veritable galaxy of national leaders- Rajendra Prasad, C Rajagopalachari, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel- among its founding members. Started in Mumbai, but now having over 200 affiliated institutions- including 7 outside India, this organisation brings out nearly 1800 titles in English, Sanskrit and several Indian languages.

The Bhavan pursues a range of activities- the teaching of foreign languages being one, vocational training being another, not to mention a full fledged course in, of all things, astrology. At the same time, they do publish low cost editions of valuable books. Among their titles are C Rajagopalachari's tellings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata which cannot be matched for erudition and readability. Mrinalini Sarabhai's biography of Mahatma Gandhi. Lada Gurden Singh's biography of Subbudu. D P Chattopadhyaya's Societies, Cultures, and Ideologies. These are just a sampling of many hidden and unexpected treasures.

We list a few titles on our site, but will be happy to get you any others you might like to read.

Mother India. The Other India.

Stree, Kolkata, have a new book out. Gender, Food Security and Rural Livelihoods, edited by Maithreyi Krishnaraj, is about the crisis in Indian agriculture. Men are migrating from farms to towns, cities or other rural areas in search of work, leaving the running of farms to women. The resulting ‘feminization’ has ominous implications for food security and rural livelihoods. Women seem to be in a no-win situation where work burdens and responsibilities have increased without enhancement of productivity or earnings. While the economic importance of land has declined (its contribution to the gross national product has been reduced), it still employs the great majority of the population who are unskilled, overburdened and malnourished.

The reality is that women lack rights to land. Meanwhile technological change means that women lose their jobs like threshing rice or making rice products at home. They may get jobs in rice mills, but at low wages. They end up having less to eat when they never got enough anyway.

The book examines conceptual and macro issues and also presents field studies, discussing the day-to-day implications of the crisis. With contributions from Sara Ahmed, Pralhad Burli, Barbara Harriss-White, Mahabub Hossain, Aruna Kanchi, Praveena Kodoth, Maithreyi Krishnaraj, Joyce Luis, Kanchan Mathur, Alka Parikh, Thelma Paris, Nitya Rao, Amita Shah, Abha Singh and Swarna Vepa, the book offers a new look at the hidden costs of modernizing India.

In the Economics and Gender Studies sections of Scholars. Rs 600, 402pages, Hardcover. ISBN 81-85604-89-4

Babasaheb

By all accounts, a very unusual man, Babasaheb Ambedkar is the subject of a new photo-biography. Brought out this past year by Lokvangmaya Griha, publishers based in Mumbai, this volume brings together photographs, documents, front pages of newspapers and covers of books- a wealth of visual material that helps to give a complete picture of the man.

The book has contributions from Prakash Vishwasrao (artist, Graphic designer and an expert in the fields of printing, designing and typography), Vijay Surwade (an archivist for Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, his life and his movement who has written several books on Dr. Ambedkar's correspondence, speeches, reminiscences of veterans of the Ambedkarian movement, and has edited many books of Dr. Ambedkar's selected literature), Vasant Abaji Dahake (poet, critic and scholar of the history of literature, one of the editors of 'Sankshipta Marathi Vangmay Kosh' and 'Vangmayeen Sandnya-Sankalpana Kosh'), Nitin Rindhe (a poet and critic), Jayprakash Sawant (one of the editors of Lokvangmay Griha), Ramesh Tukaram Shinde (editor of many special issues on the Ambedkarian Movement), Gayatri Pagdi (a freelance editor-translator and a journalist), Shubha Chitre-Piplapure (a research assistant to film producer and director Govind Nihalani and a freelance translator) and Vijay Mohite (a follower of Dr. Ambedkar's ideology and professional artist).

The net result of this collective effort- this labour of love- is marvellous! The book has been widely praised for the new material on Ambedkar that has become available to scholars, and the photographs, many of which have not been accessible before, are of excellent quality and very unusual.

Rs 2000. On our site, in the Biography and Dalit Studies sections.

Indian Textbooks Rule!

A friend from the US wrote in to tell us about an article in yesterday's New York Times. Indian schools and Indian teaching methods are coming up in Japan...

As of now, its just the Little Angels English Academy and International Kindergarten in Mitaka, Tokyo, where the largely Japanese classes of toddlers count to 20, the 3-year-olds are introduced to computers, and the 5-year-olds "learn to multiply, solve math word problems and write one-page essays in English, tasks most Japanese schools do not teach until at least second grade." Well, it may only be a few years before DPS (Tokyo) opens its doors! But the Japanese are apparently responding to what we have known for a while- Indian education emphasizes "learning more at an earlier age .... memorization and cramming, and a focus on the basics, particularly in math and science. "

Given the size of our country, education for all is a desirable but daunting task. And the NCERT, the National Council of Education Research and Training (set up during the time of Jawaharlal Nehru, along with with National Book Trust, the NBT) has the unenviable job of providing instruction via the large number of textbooks that they write and produce. Amazingly enough, many of these books are available in softcopy for free download- just drop by their site.... and the books themselves are often excellent, written by leading academicians and educators.

At SwB we've hesitated putting these on the site- our For Children section does not have any textbooks as such.  But this is not because the thought did not cross our minds. There are any number of alternate means throughwhich the books reach all parts of India, there seemed to be little point in duplicating the effort. And availablity of the books is not always guaranteed- rumour has it that the senior school texts are bought even by aspirants for the Civil Services examinations!-

Anyhow, should you want any NCERT titles (and if you know which are the ones you want) do write in and we will try to do our best. After all, we know how good they are...