Going westwards

Peggy Mohan's Jahajin is an unusual book by an unusual woman. On the face of it, the book is a novel about the girmitiyas, the indentured labour that crossed "two oceans to reach their new homes on the other side of the world. Jahajin illuminates for us the extraordinary experience of that journey: the train ride from Faizabad to Calcutta, the passage down the Hooghly, the three-month voyage around the stormy Cape and up the Atlantic to Trinidad, where the weary migrants settled into life as indentured labourers on the sugar estates.

The novel opens with the narrator, a young linguist, talking to 110-year-old Deeda, who came to the Caribbean on the same ship as her great-great grandmother. Deeda speaks of leaving her village in Basti with her son and sailing across the seas to 'Chini-dad', the land of sugar, and about the life and friendships she built on the estate. Nested within this larger story is the dreamlike myth of Saranga, torn between her monkey-lover and her prince. Deeda's stories of a lost world captivate the younger woman, encouraging her to make the journey back across the kala pani.

Alive with compelling characters and the lilt of Trinidad Bhojpuri, Jahajin gathers up the various narratives of relocation and transformation across a century in a tale that is part history and part fairy tale"

But of course, it is more than that. Peggy, who was born in the West Indies (but has lived in India for over twenty five years) and now teaches music at the Vasant Valley School in New Delhi, is a product of this past. A linguist who did not remain in academics, she has done many things including working in television, researching media, music, and more. And as an immigrant to India, she has made the girmitiya journey in reverse!

Given this background, and the wealth of experience, the book is naturally partly autobiographical. And very much a product of the times: Peggy says that her "most constant traveling companion as I wrote was Google. The things I found there were amazing! For example, I knew the month and year my great-great grandmother’s boat had reached Trinidad, but not the date: there was a hole in the paper on her freedom certificate at that spot. Google knew the date. I was able to google into the old accounts of the estate my family was indentured to, and I found a bill for my great-great grandfather’s hospital treatment. I wanted to see the place where the sloop taking the migrants to the estate had landed. Google showed me a number of photographs of the bay with its jetty!

My last thought as I look back on the experience of writing Jahajin is that I could not have written this sort of book if I had not lived all these years in India. The person I was before I came here would not have had the same feel for the landscape the migrants left, the same facility with Bhojpuri and Hindi, the same contacts who could point me so easily towards whatever I wished to know. And before I crossed the kala pani myself, I don’t think I could ever have understood how Deeda would have felt, waiting all those years just to send a message back…"

Talking about the book at its release at the University of the West Indies in St Augustine, (the Trinidad and Tobago diplomat) Reginald Dumas called Jahajin "an extraordinarily, even fiendishly, complex work of art. It is a story within a story within a story, the stories’ landscapes fretted by many sudden streams and tributaries, all converging and flowing towards a vast ocean of themes and ideas and self-discovery. Fact and fiction are intertwined; fiction could be fact."

In its second printing at Harper Collins, the book is listed in our IWE section. Rs 295, ISBN: 9788172237141

Mind it!

While the subaltern view of history is both controversial and popular, very little is known about how people thought at different points in time. D N Jha, former Professor of History at Delhi University, and Eugenia Vanina of the Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow have edited the book Mind over Matter that tries to probe just that, with regard to medieval India. They "believe that there is need for comparative studies, first, to realize the peculiarities of the medieval outlook in various regional cultures of India, and second, to study what in the worldview under research was specifically Indian and what was typically medieval and common to other pre-modern societies. "

"The primary focus of most scholars in the field of medieval Indian studies has been on economic history. Their judgement and estimate of medieval Indian society are largely based on the data available on economic, social and politico-administrative institutions. In contrast, processes and phenomena that belong to the spheres of mentality, religion, culture, scientific knowledge – the very worldview of medieval Indians – have attracted little attention, and mostly as an appendix to the ‘fundamental’ themes. The typical historical treatise on the medieval period deals with political events, the economy (agriculture, crafts and trade), major social groups (their relations and life), the administrative system, taxation and, at the end, as a concession, ‘a bit of culture’ – brief descriptions of religious life, literature and the fine arts. In such a scheme, cultural and mental phenomena are a reflection of socio-economic processes and a secondary source of the latter.

This volume seeks to create an interest in the mental and behavioural aspects of medieval society in India, and widen the area of research. The contributors to the volume belong to various schools of thought and follow different methodological approaches in their study of the socio-economic and administrative development of medieval India. But when they discuss medieval Indian society from the viewpoint of ideas, mental patterns, and religious and cultural developments, they come to certain shared terms and allow their findings to complement each other at a somewhat broader level.

The papers presented here make a collective effort to denote several components of the medieval Indian ‘mental programme’. First, that the medieval Indian state may be viewed not only in terms of control, exploitation, extraction and appropriation, but also in terms of practices, ideas and ideologies that were closely linked (among other things) with religion. Second, that medieval Indian society had a specific understanding of the past and of social experience, and that history, individual or collective, was recorded and reproduced not just to state facts, but also to create patterns for subsequent generations to follow. Third, that a central feature of medieval society was hierarchy – as embedded in the relations not only between social classes and groups but between individuals, and as ecompassing even intimate feelings and desires. Further, that the intellectual worlds of medieval India as revealed by literary, philosophical and grammatical treatises, which are the repositories of intellectual, spiritual and emotional experience, reflect the modes of dissemination and preservation of tradition as well as of dissent. Fourth, the presence of social and communal conflict, and of mechanisms of conflict resolution, that were peculiar to medieval Indian society.

From Tulika, New Delhi, in our History section. Hardcover, xvi + 354 pages, Rs 725, ISBN: 9788189487478

Kabul Wallah

Gallerie International's latest issue- its 23rd- is titled UNDERSTANDING AFGHANISTAN. This issue of the biannual periodical is a valuable collection that brings together features and stories of a country beyond the north-west frontier province... A country that has become synonymous with the Taliban... And with a long history of grandiose geopolitcal plans going awry.

But little is known about its contemporary culture. Understanding Afghanistan addresses their socio-political & cultural issues while showing a face of Afghanistan few people are aware of: its art, music, theatre, photography, cinema, poetry and anthropological story of the Kuchi nomads.

This issue of Gallerie includes a free CD of exquisite Afghan music and a beautiful documentary, Slowly Slowly Mud and Lotus, a film tracing the interface between imagination and reason in the lives of Afghan artisans.

Issues of the periodical can be ordered directly from Scholars. Pay online. Or offline...

Jungle Fever

A good thing that has happened with new institutions coming up outside the State and Central University system is that new spaces and opportunities can now be created for our diverse scholarship. However unusual - both the institution and the subject!- these might be...

The anthropologist Vishvajit Pandya works at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Infomation and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. For many years now he has been carrying out ethnographic research on the Andaman Islands and this involvement has resulted in two books. In the Forest: Visual and Material Worlds of Andamanese History (1858 - 2006) has just been published by University Press of America.

"There are always at least two histories of encounter or contact, as each party would tell the story differently, but where and when is it really the first contact and for whom? This book deploys an analytical framework developed from Semiotics to have both sides of the story address each other. It is ethnography of dialogue, emerging from textual representation by outsiders and its relationship to visual response and presentations by the Andaman Islanders that this book aims to present as the critical ethnography of history.

The section on Visuality looks at how the Other is incorporated into an organized knowledge-system including Ongee myths and songs about outsiders and the early photographs of tribal people by British settlers and ethnographers. The section on Materiality concerns the investment in things made, to influence natural processes or to distinguish the human body, and discusses how they are transacted between cultures that come into contact. The concluding section on history addresses encounters and developments in which the experiences of both tribal and settler are implicated more thoroughly than in the transaction of objects. Thus juxtaposing alternative perspectives on change indicates areas of experience unaccounted for in the dominant discourse and shows the provisionality of images."

Veena Das has much good to say about this book that "brings long years of ethnographic engagement with the Ongee and the Jarawa, otherwise known as the Andaman Islanders, to render an intimate history of their contact with traders, colonialists, global tourists and the developmental state. Vishvajit Pandya displays a superb command over theory, history and ethnography that makes this one of the most important books to engage with the question of how ideas of wildness and civilization have been shaped through sensory experiences of vision, touch, smell and sound. The history of intimacy is rendered with consummate skill, making this a book that will be treasured by specialist and nonspecialist alike."

In our Anthropology Section, Paperback, 540 pages. US$ 65. ISBN: 9780761841531.

The Method in the Madness

Terrorism has become such a commonplace... and yet. We live from crisis to crisis and endure. And yet, it is important to try to make some sense of it all, and by now there is more than enough by way of examples that allow one to see the method in the madness.

A new title from Sage, India is Terrorism: Patterns of Internationalization by Jaideep Saikia and Ekaterina Stepanova "provides a systematic analysis of the concepts of internationalization of terrorism. It looks into the stages and processes through which terrorism has spread in various parts of the world and binds together the facts to present a comprehensive picture of the distinguishing features that characterize the internationalization of terrorism—from local to global. Through 11 well-researched chapters, leading experts on terrorism from across five continents express their views and analyze the main patterns, stages, and levels of internationalization of different types of terrorism in a broad cross-regional perspective.

The book challenges a number of conventional patterns of analysis and underlines the importance of visualizing terrorism as an act driven by political motivation, notwithstanding the fact that it is manifested through ideological or religious sentiments. It also analyzes the various tactics used by different terrorist organizations in different regions and distinguishes terrorists from other non-state actors. It dwells on the dangerous implications of the internationalization of terrorism and emphasizes the need to develop a research methodology which can help understand the current conceptualization of the phenomenon and bring forward analytical solutions."

A book worth reading for expert and non-expert alike. In our Strategic Affairs section, Hardcover, 316 pages. Rs 695. ISBN: 9788178299518

Goethe in India

The Goethe Society of India (GSI) was founded in 1997 by a group of Indian scholars teaching German language, literature, and culture in different universities.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832) was not just a German writer and poet, but also thinker, scientist and administrator. The society therefore seeks to promote scholarly research on his entire body of work also and on classical German heritage, together with their relationship to contemporary cultural developments.

The GSI emphasises the European context of this heritage and its comparative international dimensions symbolised by Goethe's notion of World Literature and actively promotes an academic dialogue between India, the German speaking countries and Europe.

One activity of the GSI has been to actively promote academic dialogue in the fields of arts and literature within the broad ambit of Goethe's vision of World Literature between India and the German speaking countries. In this venture it is supported by various academic and cultural institutions in India and Germany, and its conferences result in an annual yearbook.

Rethinking Europe and Schiller and Aesthetic Education Today formed the subject of the 2005 and 2006 yearbooks. Published by Mosaic Books, New Delhi, these conference proceedings are a valuable record of the scholarship promoted by the GSI.

In our Institutional Lists. Rs 350 each.

Sunithi

My aunt Sunithi Narayanan spent much of her adult life showing Tamil Nadu to visitors to India... Hundreds have had the good fortune to have her take them to Mahabalipuram, or Thanjavur, or Madurai. Or for that matter, anywhere in the South of India, and had her share with them her considerable knowledge generously, and with warmth.

And with what vivacity! Her striking looks and her animated style would bring each monument alive, make each viewing an experience to live through...

Stephen Huyler, an art historian, cultural anthropologist, and photographer has captured some of this quality of hers in a chapter of his new book Daughters of India: Art and Identity, published recently by Mapin, Ahmedabad. Stephen "has spent three-and-a-half decades documenting Indian art as it relates to ritual and society. As a cultural anthropologist conducting field research across the length and breadth of India, Huyler has been a guest in innumerable Indian homes. His photographs have appeared in many exhibitions, including those he has curated at major museums internationally. India's Daughters is his fifth published book."

The book interweaves the stories of twenty women with photographs of high quality- documenting the ordinary and the everyday, but capturing the essence of the life. And he has chosen his subjects well- they are diverse and representative, and in being otherwise unremarkable- no movie stars, no politicians- they remind one of just how special each individual is... And how remarkable!

"Daughters of India profiles twenty women from diverse communities ranging from the rice paddies of far Southern India to the plantations of the Himalayas and from the dry western deserts to the verdant east coast. Differing in age, economics, social status, privilege, treatment and opportunity, they represent every woman. In their battles against adversity, their own words express their innate strength. All of these women are connected by a single thread: creative expression. Indian women are often completely unconscious of their artistry and it is only recently that they have drawn any attention. In these chapters, artistry is combined with individual women's words and stories to portray the empowerment of Indian women.

Daughters of India is about change in the face of almost impossible odds, personal initiative that carves out a new identity and implacable insistence on the recognition of human rights."

In our Gender, Culture, and Art sections. Hardcover, 264 pages, oversize. Rs 2500.
ISBN: 9788189995010

Chew on this...

Whoever thought up of the neologism islamicate has much to answer for. May she or he immediately go on a staycation ... or at least think twice about inventing new words that sit in one's mouth, uncomfortably, suggesting sophomoric rhymes. Or worse. I'm no stylist, but its jarring, not least because most of the other words I know that end in icate are verbs...

Be that as it may, the latest book from Tulika, New Delhi, is Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema by Ira Bhaskar of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Richard Allen of the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. Did they just mean Muslim influences on Bollywood? Probably not, or they might have used that...

"This book explores the Islamicate cultures that richly inform Bombay cinema. These cultures are imagined forms of the past and therefore a contested site of histories and identities. Yet they also form a culturally potent and aesthetically fertile reservoir of images and idioms through which Muslim communities are represented and represent themselves. Islamicate influences inform the language, poetry, music, ideas, and even the characteristic emotional responses elicited by Bombay cinema in general; however, the authors argue that it is in the three genre forms of The Muslim Historical, The Muslim Courtesan Film and The Muslim Social that these cultures are concentrated and distilled into precise iconographic, performative and narrative idioms.

Furthermore, the authors argue that it is through these three genres, and their critical reworking by New Wave filmmakers, that social and historical significance is attributed to Muslim cultures for Muslims and non-Muslims alike."

Glossy and colourful, this is one academic book that is also visually very appealing. In our Film Studies section. Hardcover, 360 pages, Rs 995. ISBN: 9788189487539

Sub molior

Under Construction, the felicitously named film distribution initiative of Magic Lantern Foundation, a non-profit group working with media and human rights has been conceived as a non-broadcast, educational distribution centre for independent films.

Gargi Sen and Ranjan De- the moving spirits behind UC- provide a great platform for the documentary film makers working in India, by enabling a professional distribution channel. At present, they offer several hundred films (from all over the world, though most are from India) on a range of themes and ideas: globalisation, human rights, gender, migration, border, conflict, sexuality, identity, citizenship, resistance, culture, arts, biographies, environment, development etc.

Check out their films that are listed on our site. Some are perennial favourites- Goa under Siege!, A Healer is Born, Born at Home, Unlimited Girls,A Day In The Life Of Ponga Pandit, A Million Steps, A Night Of Prophecy, A Woman's Place, Aids Has A Face... to name a few. And from some of the most creative of our documentary film makers- Gargi Sen, Ranjan De, Paromita Vohra, Sudhanva Deshpande, Pankaj Butalia, R V Ramani... The list is long, and you can explore them on the Scholars pages for Under Construction.

And Sub Molior? Thats just UC in Latin... seems like a good motto for an enterprise that is always growing!

Memoirs from the Oriya

Much of the original writing in India remains invisible to the reader who can only approach this rich literature through English. Of the 80 000 or so books that are published each year, less than a fourth are in English (most of them of questionable quality, but still). The vast majority of books remain inaccessible- and of unknown quality.

Rupantar a not for profit organization based in Bhubaneswar that has a simple philospohy: they are committed to preserving and promoting cultural diversity through translation. In the decade or so that they have been in operation, they have published a small number of books, mainly translations from memoirs originally written in Oriya: Prayers and Reflections, Sketches of Orissa, Stories, Meeting the Mahatma, A Leaf in the Stream, From Bondage to Freedom, Satakada Sahe Gandhi, From Kharasuan to Kulabiri.

Jatin Nayak, the man behind Rupantar teaches English at Utkal University. With Arun Mohanty, a member of the Orissa Education Service, one of the books that Rupantar have brought out is From Bondage to Freedom, based on autobiographies in Oriya relating to the freedom struggle in Orissa. "The experiences recorded in these personal narratives relating to the freedom struggle take readers beyond the conventional sources of history. Recounted from the shifting, subjective perspectives of individuals, they tell us the fascinating story of great events unfolding and transforming the social and political landscape during the freedom movement in India. They celebrate the quiet heroism of ordinary men and women and offer us a glimpse of a world animated by millennial hopes. They reconstruct the past through a process of recollecting it in the present and help us arrive at a fuller understanding of history."

Another title that would be of interest in the context of caste studies is a translation, by A J Khan and Zehara Jabeen (who teach English at Utkal University and Cuttack respectively) is From Kharasuan to Kulabiri, the autobiography of Nishakara Das. Like Karukku or Viramma, From Kharasuan to Kulabiri "tells the remarkable story of a life lived in the midst of caste discriminations and economic deprivation." However, the writer is a Gandhian, a social worker who "belongs to a community, which was subjected to social oppression for ages. The narrative records experiences of humiliation and atrocities; but is remarkably free from feelings of rancour and self-pity. It is animated by hope, compassion and faith in humanity" while depicting different facets of his struggle for survival.

All Rupantar titles can be ordered from Scholars.

Thugs, all

A recent OUP title, Stranglers & Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee, brought back memories of my schooldays when reading the likes of John Masters (and Oliver Strange, and Mickey Spillane, I must admit) was an absolute necessity...

Kim Wagner of the South Asian history department at the University of Edinburgh gives a historical account of Thuggee "the controversial cult of ritual highway murderers ‘discovered’ by the British in early nineteenth-century India forms one of the most sensational and contentious practices in South Asian history. As one of the most potent images of colonial lore and fiction, interpretations of the reality, meaning, and representation of thuggee vary. Were the thugs religious fanatics who practiced human sacrifice? Or were they a mere figment of colonial imagination, invented as a convenient pretext for the expansion of British rule?

From pre-colonial accounts to post-colonial critiques, Stranglers and Bandits provides a fascinating and accessible chronological account of thuggee. It presents a unique range of material, including key primary sources, popular accounts, and scholarly perspectives. Hitherto unpublished documents from the first anti-thuggee campaign of 1810–12 and rare archival records provide new insights. Literary accounts and scholarly readings, from 1839 to 2006, shed light on shifting interpretations over the past two centuries.

A comprehensive introduction by Kim Wagner explores thuggee within a comprehensive historical context and questions whether authentic voices of thugs can be discerned from available British records. It also discusses theoretical and methodical issues in detail. The richness and diversity of the anthology will stimulate and enthrall readers, while opening way for different approaches and new lines of inquiry."

In our History Section, Hardcover, 336 pages. Rs 695. ISBN: 9780195698152

By gum!

M I H Farooqi retired from the National Botanical Research Institute, Lucknow and put his long experience to use by compiling the DICTIONARY OF INDIAN PLANT GUMS, RESINS, DYES & RELATED PRODUCTS that has been recently published by Sidrah Publishers, Lucknow.

The book is an extremely useful resource with more than 1400 plants being documented in it. "An omnibus of succinct information on various aspect of gums, resins and dyes of vegetable origin—useful for researches and Industries" says S. K. Jain, former Director of the Botanical Survey of India, in his Foreword. A report in the Indian Express calls this "a unique effort in that it combines content with utility, helping the scholar and entrepreneur alike."

And well it should. Guar gum alone helps Indian exporters rake in foreign exchange worth Rs 1,000 crore-plus. The dictionary puts at your fingertips all the information you need about gums, resins and dyes originating from vegetation. Besides giving in alphabetical order the names of each, it also gives the reader every known synonym in various languages. Most names included are of plants of Indian origin, but those of foreign origin find mention too. The dictionary also assumes commercial importance for the extensive list it carries of Indian manufacturers and exporters of plant gums, resins and dyes.

Scholars is pleased to list the book in our Agricultural Sciences list and also in Dictionaries. The book provides a ready reckoner of names that would help manufacturers from across various regions to get these natural products even from tribal regions with the help of their native names.

In Hardcover, 352 pages, Rs 800. ISBN: 9788190135221.

Before Jai Ho!

Before Indian music (which, like Indian culture, is open to interpretation) was given Grammys and Oscars, there was Norwegian Wood. Not the greatest from the Beatles, maybe, but memorable for Harrison's sitar notes (and of course, the lyrics.... always evocative of the flower child era...) that stood out in this 1960's song- one of the first examples of the fusion of two musical cultures...

A new book from Harper Collins by Peter Lavezzoli, Bhairavi: The Global Impact of Indian Music explores this fusion. "In 1955, Ali Akbar Khan issued an LP called Music of India: Morning and Evening Ragas, with spoken introductions by Western classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Between then and now, there has been an explosion of Indian music and culture in the West. Most visibly, the wonders of Indian musical world were spread by Ravi Shankar and George Harrison of the Beatles, but the music also had a profound effect on Mickey Hart and the Grateful Dead, John McLaughlin, Philip Glass, the Byrds, John Coltrane, and many others. Lavezzoli, in this engaging book explores the relationships between Indian music and jazz, rock, and electronic music."

Today's Mint carries a (not entirely flattering) review of the book by Samanth Subramaniam, who says "As a professional percussionist and singer, and as a student of tabla and dhrupad, Lavezzoli has a natural empathy for the invisible grind of making music and an ear that can pick apart an edifice of sound to examine how it was put together. His discussions on Harrison’s India-touched songs, such as Norwegian Wood, Love You To and The Inner Light, or on Coltrane’s gorgeous four-movement suite A Love Supreme are lucid deconstructions of the music and of how its elements were conceived. Pleasingly, the book’s sharpest insights into the creative process come, in the end, through the music itself." The whole review can be read online here.

In our Music Section. Rs 450, 300 pages, paperback. ISBN: 9788172238070.

Politically Correct

With a line-up of contributors of the likes of Flavia Agnes, Upendra Baxi, Shyam Benegal, Akeel Bilgrami, Partha Chatterjee, V. Geetha, Sunil Khilnani, Nivedita Menon, Ashis Nandy, Gyanendra Pandey, Gyan Prakash, Arvind Rajagopal, Paula Richman, Sumit Sarkar, Dwaipayan Sen, Shabnum Tejani, Romila Thapar, Ravi Vasudevan, and Gauri Viswanathan, Permanent Black's new title, THE CRISIS OF SECULARISM IN INDIA edited by Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan needs no further endorsement.

"Collectively, the essays consider the history of secularism in India; the relationship between secularism and democracy; and shortcomings in the categories majority and minority. They examine how debates about secularism play out in schools, the media, and in popular cinema. And they address two of the most politically charged sites of crisis: personal law and the right to practice and encourage religious conversion."

In our Politics section. Paperback, 410 pages, Rs 450. ISBN 9788178242569

The Young and the Restless

ATREE, the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bangalore is a vibrant group of researchers who share a serious concern of the world we live in and the world we are likely to leave for our grandchildren...

The organisation does many things, including publishing the journal Conservation & Society on behalf of an informal alliance of natural and social scientists to promote interdisciplinary research in conservation and to foster communication among scientists, resource managers, educators and policy makers.

Conservation & Society is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary open access journal dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practice of conservation. The journal draws on both natural and social sciences and covers basic and applied research in areas including but not restricted to political ecology, human-wildlife conflicts, decentralised conservation, conservation policy, ecosystem structure and functioning, systematics, community and species ecology, behavioural ecology, landscape ecology, restoration ecology and conservation biology. The journal publishes submitted and commissioned articles, debates and discussions, editorials, book reviews, comments and notes.

Conservation & Society, an open access journal, published and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, is published four times a year in both hard copy and electronic formats. The journal is of interest to academics, researchers, teachers, naturalists, policy makers, planners, resource managers and media professionals. It aims to serve as a bridge between conservation practitioners from a wide array of disciplines and therefore seeks to disseminate work presented in an integrative and simple manner that is accessible to individuals from disciplines ranging from the natural and social sciences to the humanities.

Their contributors are impressive, and given the issues at hand, of considerable global standing. Guest editors for different special issues have been Jesse C Ribot, Ashwini Chhatre and Tomila Lankina: Choice and Recognition in Local Democracy, Jim Igoe and Dan Brockington: Engaging Neoliberal Conservation, Bram Büscher, Conrad Steenkamp and William Wolmer: The Politics of Engagement between Biodiversity Conservation and the Social Sciences, Jeffrey Kaufmann: New Perspectives on Conservation in Madagascar, and Mahesh Rangarajan and Ghazala Shahabuddin: Debates on relocation.

We list them in our Open Access Journals section, along with Current Conservation, a sister publication …about which, more in a few days.

ATREE was established in 1996 to combine principles of natural and social sciences to conserve biodiversity and promote sustainable development; and, to build the necessary social and human capital needed to address our most pressing environmental challenges. ATREE deals with issues relating to India's rapidly diminishing biological resources and natural ecosystems, and the environmental, and the social and economic dimensions and implications of this decline. ATREE has a network of four offices and various field stations across India, through which it works to develop social and human capital to address environmental issues at the local, regional and national levels.

The programmes at ATREE are designed to enhance the prospects for conservation by working with civil society, local communities, and policy makers on the one hand, and by scientific research on the other. Activities are organised under interdisciplinary research combined with action, education, and outreach, including policy and governance reforms. ATREE's strength lies in its ability to integrate these activities into coherent programmes that generate and disseminate new knowledge, and foster innovative change in the way environmental problems are tackled.

Ritual as Spectacle

Seeing the colourful faces parading around today- its Holi!- reminded me of a book that was ready some years ago, but took its time being released.
The carnival spirit lurks somewhere in all of us, I guess.

Ritual as Ideology: Text and Context in Teyyam by T V Chandran is now finally available. A co-publication of the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts (IGNCA) and DK Printworld, this is a definitive text on Teyyam, the ritual and distinctive dance performed in Kerala. " ...what was once expressed through the distinctly indigenous forms of this religious "other" no longer remains the same, as the specificities of meaning and messages as encoded in the whole structure of its ritual performance were leveled out and superceded by the ideological laundering of caste Hinduism. Rituals as ideology looks into the specific cultural formation of teyyam -- it re-frames and interprets various myths of the mother-goddesses and hero-deities by situating them in the historical conditions in which they originated.

Based on a study of the myths at a micro-structural level, the book explores from a sociological perspective how the ritual functions as ideology, apart from its cultic or religious significance. The study also unfolds and explains the gender disparity between the archetypal female devourer and her male victims, the recurrent motifs in the myths related to various manifestations of the terrible mother in teyyam. The study thus acquires contemporary significance in the face of cultural authoritarianism that in its design of appropriation attributes the village pantheon of every "little tradition" to canonical Hinduism, a process that has been so rife in today's cultural politics."

In our Culture Section. 133 pages, Hardcover. Rs 650, ISBN: 9788124602751

What has made the difference

Stree, Kolkata's latest book is a translation of Vinodinee Neelkanth's writings, The Road Less Travelled. Included with the translations which are by Jagadeep Parikh, Rohini Patel, Ranjana Pendharkar, Sohan Nilkanth, Shailaja Kalelkar Parikh and Rita Kothari is a biographical sketch Aparna Basu and Shailaja Kalelkar Parikh.

"Presenting the life and work of Vinodineeben Neelkanth (1907-1987), this book offers a portrait of a woman who played many roles with distinction: as a social activist, a champion of women’s rights, in the struggle for independence and as a journalist who wrote the column ‘Ghargharni Jyoti’ in the daily Gujarat Samachar that made her famous among both women and men. Born into a family that championed social reform and education––her mother, Vidyagauri, and her aunt Shardaben had become graduates in 1901––she made bold and unconventional choices all her life. In 1929, aged twenty-one, she won the prestigious Barbour scholarship at the University of Michigan and gained a Masters degree in sociology and child psychology in 1930. On her return to Ahmedabad, she became the principal of the Municipal High School, earning a living which was unusual for a woman of her privileged background. Later she was to make an unconventional marriage that led to much public criticism and initial ostracism. She also became a writer. Most of her journalistic writings aimed at encouraging women to speak up for themselves and take control of their lives. Insofar as she strove to give women a sense of identity, she may be regarded as one of the precursors of feminist literature of Gujarat.

The book traces the social milieu in which she grew up and lived, capturing the immense political and social changes that were coming about by a rapid state of modernization and urbanization in the early twentieth century. The translation, for the first time, of her works into English, reveals her critical public gaze on many an institution and practice that had long been held sacred and inviolate. Divided into two parts, Part I offers the Biographical Sketch, while Part II presents selections from her writings as a journalist, her essays, short stories and an extract from a novel."

In our Gender and Sociology Sections, Paperback, 336 pages. Rs 375. ISBN 9788185604718

Flower Power

Tabish Qureshi of Jamia Milia Islamia has created a fantastic website, Flowers of India.

"Remember that tree laden with yellow flowers, which hang like bunches of grapes? How often have you wondered: What's that flower? Nobody around you seems to know ... for the city bred individual, flowers are only like pretty pictures.

Flowers of India is aimed at having information about all the flowers found in India, with their common names, especially in Indian languages, pictures and habitat, easily available in one place. This is meant to be a place you can look at if you saw a flower and wanted to know more about it. Knowing more about flowers, and then going out and having a look at them, will be more like communing with nature."

The site is organized extremely well- for instance, the flower on the right is the Brahma Kamal, ब्रह्म कमल , or Saussurea obvallata... and the annotation is quite detailed: "The Brahma Kamal, the much revered flower of the Himalayas, is an excellent example of plant life at the upper limit of high mountains (3,000-4,600 m). The flowerheads are actually purple, but are enclosed in layers of greenish-yellow, papery, boat-shaped bracts. The flowers bloom at the height of the monsoons and abundant in high-altitude places like The Valley of Flowers. The bract-cover provides the warm space needed to bloom in the cold mountains. The flowers are used as offering in the hill temples, like the shrines of Badrinath. The thick curved root of the plant is applied to bruises and cuts, as part of local medicine. Brahma Kamal is the state flower of Uttarakhand. A postal stamp was issued by the Indian Postal Department to commemorate this flower."

The many thousand flowers on the site have photographs (of excellent quality, in most cases!) are indexed by name, colour, flowering time, botanical names, and so on... with special sections on vines, creepers, cacti, medicinal plants, and so on... Flowers in the ancient literature, Himalayan flowers... the classification possibilities are numerous and Tabish and his team have made this site a joy to navigate and learn from.

Flowers of India is built by contributors from all over the country- it really is a pan-Indian effort, and one to enjoy and share-

A new entry on their home page is a whole section on the Trees of India. A very valuable tool for the enthusiast, these pages could be a fine companion to Pradip Kishen's Trees of Delhi: A Field Guide that we have written about earlier, The Book of Indian Trees by K C Sahni, or Subhadra Menon and Pallava Bagla's Trees of India. Or many other books...

A recent title in the area is a compendium of the trees on the campus of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, A Botanist's Delight by K Sankara Rao. A collection of excellent photographs accompanies text describing the flora of the campus, well known in academe for its landscaping and planning.

All the books listed here can be ordered via Scholars.

Voicing the Marginals

"Folklore is a tradition based on any expressive behaviour that brings a group together, creates a convention and commits it to cultural memory. "

That is a part of the pithy manifesto of the NFSC, the National Folklore Support Centre, a Chennai based NGO dedicated to "the promotion of Indian folklore research, education, training, networking, and publications. The aim of the Centre is to integrate scholarship with activism, aesthetic appreciation with community development, comparative folklore studies with cultural diversities and identities, dissemination of information with multi-disciplinary dialogues, folklore fieldwork with developmental issues, folklore advocacy with public programming events and digital technology with applications to voice the cultures of the marginalised and historically disadvantaged communities."

Scholars has had NFSC publications on our site for a while now- their Indian Folklore Research Journal ifrj can be subscribed via SwB...

They are also engaged in establishing digital archives for a number of communities such as the Jenu Kuruba , the Nari Kurava and the Seraikela Chhau where rich oral traditions and traditional knowledge systems thrive and determine the lives of the people.

In addition, they publish a number of books on the folkloric traditions of peoples and cultures that are vanishing fast: sample titles are Oral Epics of Kalahandi, Indian Folktales from Mauritius, Khasi-Jaintia Folklore, and so on... Come explore!

Medieval Indian Institutes of Technology

The Iron pillar in Delhi... the Great Temple in Thanjavur... the Taj Mahal... the worlds largest cannon, Jaivan, in the Jaigarh fort... All these spectacular "monuments" fill one with a sense of wonder, much of it as a consequence of the technology that must have been used in those days. To have an iron pillar that has not rusted in over a millennium, to have constructed edifices that even today would require major logistics, to have cast, in the eighteenth century in a rural foundry Rajasthan, an awesome cannon that weighed over 50 tons.... all these indicate the existence of a very nontrivial technology in our past.

A recent title from Tulika, Technology in Medieval India by Irfan Habib, the distinguished historian at the Aligarh Muslim University, does much to educate us about this past. In addition to Professor Habib's formidable writings on the economic history of India (many of his books are available via Scholars), he is the General Editor of the slender volumes that comprise the People's History of India series.

His study of the "history of Indian technology goes back to 1969, when he published his first paper raising the question of the connections between technological change and other historical developments. This book covers an important aspect of our history, on which no general work or textbook yet exists.

It aims at covering the whole range of technology, form the tools and skills of ordinary men and women to the instruments of astronomers and the equipage and weaponry of war. A key element of the study is that it is essentially historical, that is, changes in technology are carefully traced and their consequences examined. Larger questions, such as those of constraints on technological development and the role of the social and economic environment, are also addressed.

Much of this may be found by the reader to be very new unless he has kept abreast with the relevant literature of the last thirty or forty years. This volume, in line with the others of A People's History of India, gives several extracts from texts, containing significant information about specific aspects of pre-modern technology. There are special notes on technical terms, sources of the history of technology, the problem of invention versus diffusion, and the development of medieval technology outside India. There are as many as 41 illustrations, all but five taken from medieval sculpture, painting and book-illustrations.

A special effort is made to keep the style non-technical without loss of accuracy. It is hoped that the theme is sufficiently interesting not only for the historian but for any citizen wanting to know what common people, men and women, did with their hands and tools in earlier times."

In our History Section, Hardcover, 152 pages. Rs 275. ISBN: 9788189487485

Orientalism

The Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, houses a remarkable institution, the Oriental Institute.

Founded in 1927, for nearly a century now this Institute has been collecting rare and important manuscripts and publishing translations of classics. , starting with the Kavyamimamsa of Rajasekhara, Edited by C D Dalal and R A Sastry in 1916, to the Krtyakalpataru- Santikanda edited by M. L. Wadekar published a few years ago. In addition, they bring out the M S University Oriental Series (now up to volume 22), the Journal of the Oriental Institute and numerous other publications- including a critical edition of the Valmiki-Ramayana (1992). In all, more than 185 works have been published in the world renowned Gaekwad's Oriental Series...

Of the over 28,000 manuscripts they hold (in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Gujarati, Marathi, Persian) the vast majority are in paper, with some in palm-leaf, one in birch bark and some in metal. The oldest goes back to the 14th century, and any interested scholar can write to them for a photocopy of any of the manuscripts they hold. Three volumes of the catalogue of manuscripts of the Institute have been published and a fourth volume is in progress. The Director, M L Wadekar and S Y Wakankar, the Deputy Director, are scholars of repute and prolific at that.

All publications of the Oriental Institute can be obtained via Scholars. Check out their page in our Institutional Lists.

Bangalore Wilderness

The Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore occupies a very special place in the academic landscape of India. Famous, and justly so, it is one of those institutions in our country that one can be proud of, one can rely upon for a certain basic standard and quality, and one that we can hold up to the rest of the world as an example of what is possible in India...

The IISc (known locally as the Tata Institute) occupies a huge tract of land near Malleswaram in Bangalore. The campus is a fairly unique place that has been protected from the rapid development which the rest of the city of Bangalore has seen. Having been a visitor to that campus innumerable times in the past forty or so years, I have spotted the occasional scorpion, the odd chameleon, the unusual bird...Even today, it retains some wild spaces and native vegetation. Its plant community has been modified and added to over the years, fostering an unusual diversity in both plants and animals.

One of their recent Ph D students, Natasha Mhatre, took full advantage of this diversity. An avid and superb photographer, she stalked the wild (and not so wild) life that inhabits the campus as she pursued her research ... The spectacular result is "Secret Lives: Biodiversity of the Indian Institute of Science campus", a book of photographs of the campus wildlife.

"But the photographs are only the beginning. The book is also a quick whistle-stop tour of many ideas in ecology and evolutionary biology. Unlike other books on biodiversity, Secret Lives does not contain lists of all the birds, animals, insects or plants on campus. The book instead has chapters that read like a list of the bare necessities of life, 'Habitat', 'Food', 'Water', 'Sex' , 'Babies', etc. They describe the ideas that biologists have had through the years about these different aspects of life, why and how these ideas came to be as they are; the general theories in biology."

Dr Mhatre's academic research is on crickets, the sounds they make, and how that influences behaviour. Her credentials as a photographer are impressive. She was winner of the National Wildlife Federation Photo Awards 2007, and the Ecotone & GNAPE Living Light Photography competition, and placed third as Sanctuary Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2006.

No mean achievements, any of these. And the book speaks for itself. In our Natural History section. Hardcover, 230 pages. Rs 1500.

Physicists of India, Unite!

The Indian Physics Association (IPA) was founded in 1970, with the aims and objectives of helping the advancement, dissemination and application of the knowledge of physics in India. To that end, this society has done a number of things, including dissemination of information in the various fields of physics by publication of bulletins, reports and newsletters, and by arranging special programmes for students- seminars and lectures on research and teaching in physics.

At present the IPA has about 3,500 members in 41 chapters in India and one chapter in the US as well. They are responsible for a number of awards, including the R. D. Birla, the S. N. Seshadri Award for Instrumentation, the N. S. Satyamurthy Award for young scientists, the Murali M Chugani Award for Excellence in Applied Physics, and a Best Thesis Award in Nuclear Physics, Solid State Physics and Atomic and Molecular Physics.

This post is about the (revamped and new-look!) IPA publication Physics News which is published quarterly. The present editor is Professor Dipan Ghosh of the IIT Bombay, and the current issue (January 2009) is on the Bhabha Centenary.

With articles that discuss the man and his science, this volume is a collector's item. Bhabha was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and when he died, a biography written by Lord Penney appeared in their Biographical Memoirs. That article is largely reprinted here. M G K Menon, Devendra Lal, Govind Swarup, Obaid Siddiqui, G Venkataraman, P K Iyengar and others reminisce about their associations with Homi Bhabha. Homi Sethna offers some piquant anecdotes. B V Sreekantan and Virendra Singh talk about his scientific contributions, and Bhabha himself speaks, his 1945 lecture at the founding of the TIFR is reprinted here as well.

Priced at Rs 100, this special issue can be got in two ways. One is by becoming a member of the Indian Physics Association- write to ipa.india@gmail.com. Their website is hosted at TIFR, http://www.tifr.res.in/~ipa.

The other, is, as always, to write to us.