The practice of tradition

The two books we write about today share a photographer, Usha Kris, and are both on Hinduism in practice.

R Champakalakshmi who retired from the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU is an expert on South Indian history. In a book done for Roli's Lustre imprint, she writes about The Hindu Temple. The book, written in 2001, "is a comprehensive expose on the evolution of a simple and sacred place of worship to a monument, which over the centuries became the pillar of Indian religiosity, culture and aesthetic significance; the super ordinate ideological focus of society and polity. Tracing its origin to the pre-Christian era, its sanctity, and the unwavering reverence accorded to it even today, is manifested in the elaborate rituals performed within its precincts by devotees, and the festivals celebrated by them. The book brings into special prominence the relevance of the temple in the social, economic and political integration of the subcontinent. Authoritatively written and impressively illustrated with exceptional and rare photographs, it elucidates in minute and graphic detail the multifaceted sculptural and architectural wonder that is the Hindu temple."

Usha Kris' photographs- exceptional and rare- also adorn a somewhat more lavish and detailed Follow the Hindu Moon: A guide to the festivals of south India by Soumya Aravind Sitaraman from Random House, India. The book is a comprehensive how-to guide to the hindu festivals of south India.

In two parts, the first book, Celebrate "showcases pooja and features complete walkthroughs of every South Indian festival celebrated by the people of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Book 2, Understand, presents an overview of Hindu cosmology and culture, toothsome festival recipes, and guides to festoons, kolams, and etiquette. No question goes unanswered – Soumya and her team of consultants tell you when to light a ghee lamp, how to water clap, which prayer or shloka to recite at what time, how to cook the perfect neivedya, and much more. Here is the wisdom of your aunts and grandmothers, never before collected in one place – and for those who just don’t have the time, cheatsheets and choices between quick and elaborate pooja options are within easy reach. Infused with a warm, personal tone, Follow the Hindu Moon is a tribute to the family who worships together."

When the book was released a couple of years ago, The Indian Express said "Everything has been put together with a precision that accompanies the handing over of age-old recipes. This, with a presentation that makes it contemporary and easy-to-approach. Photographs by Usha Kris provide the visual reference."

Both books are new in our Culture section. The Hindu Temple is in hardcover, 144 pages, Rs 695, ISBN: 9788174360946

Follow the Hindu Moon is also in hardcover a two-voulme set of 908 pages, Rs 3500. ISBN: 9788184000115

Also Sprach Ambedkar

Navayana's new title- which will be out soon - is the first in the Thus Spoke Ambedkar series. Entitled A Stake in the Nation, this is a selection of Ambedkar's speeches, edited by Bhagwan Das, with annotations. The format is interesting- the book is square, and in hardcover. One could almost expect a DVD hidden within... But the content is what grabs.

In India, there are castes. These castes are antinational. These words by Ambedkar define the project. A Stake in the Nation is the first of the four volumes selected and edited by Bhagwan Das, a veteran chronicler of the dalit movement who in 1955–56 worked as a research associate with Ambedkar. "The twenty speeches in the first of volume of Thus Spoke Ambedkar showcase the wide range of issues that Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar engaged with as one of the founders of modern India. Delivered between 1930 and 1956, they unravel a story otherwise jettisoned by mainstream ‘nationalist’ narratives that valorise a rather Hinduised ‘idea of India’. The uncanny prescience of the ideas contained here will help us seek answers to many of our persistent problems.

Speaking at times like a swordsman who strikes to defend but not to wound, and at others like a surgeon focused on eliminating the one rotten organ – caste – that endangers the entire body, Ambedkar grapples with questions of inequality, democracy, labour, minority rights, communalism, brahminism, constitution-making and foreign policy in speeches that address various publics: dalit workers in Nashik, British lawmakers in London, parliamentarians in Delhi and college students in Jalandhar. The prose spans different registers of reason and affect—lyrical and polemic, combative and poignant.

This volume, the first in the Navayana Ambedkar Library series, is essential reading for all those keen on understanding India."

In our Dalit Studies section, in hardcover, 224 pages, Rs 395. ISBN 9788189059187

India’s voice of the future

Vandana Shiva is one of the world's most prominent radical scientists, and among the most articulate. Through her several books she has made the case- quite forcefully- for a variety of causes. An early book of hers, Staying Alive, will shortly become available in a second edition, from Women Unlimited.

The earlier edition was described so: Inspired by women's struggles for the protection of nature as a condition for human survival, this book goes beyond a statement of women as special victims of the environmental crisis. It attempts to capture and reconstruct those insights and visions that Indian women provide in their struggles for survival, which perceive development and science from outside the categories of modern western patriarchy. These oppositional categories are simultaneously ecological and feminist: they allow the possibility of survival by exposing the parochial basis of science and development and by showing how ecological destruction and the marginalization of women are not inevitable, economically or scientifically.

Shiva writes provovatively, and inevitably polarises. However, her work has been praised quite lavishly in diverse quarters. The Guardian said Staying Alive defines the links between ecological crises, colonialism, and the oppression of women. It is a scholarly and polemical plea for the rediscovery of the "feminine principle" in human interaction with the natural world, not as a gender-based quality, rather an organising principle, a way of seeing the world. The Greens' Dalia Sapon-Shevin says Shiva’s powerful narratives allow us to hold a piece of food in our hands and, in a thought process we have never been taught to follow, lets us trace backwards the story of the land it was grown on, the cultural and economic toll on the ecosystem and people, the sacrifice endured so that it might be made, the full weight of environmental devastation present in its existence.

A book worth reading, in our Gender and Ecology and Environment Sections. In paperback, 253 pages, Rs 300. ISBN: 9788188965588

Essays by Raj Chandavarkar

A set of essays by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar that has been published posthumously by Cambridge University Press as History, Culture, and the Indian City.

Raj Chandavarkar was widely regarded as one of the "finest Indian historians of the twentieth century. He died sadly young in 2006, leaving behind a very substantial collection of unpublished lectures, papers and articles. These have now been assembled and edited by Jennifer Davis, Gordon Johnson and David Washbrook, and their appearance will be widely welcomed by large numbers of scholars of Indian history, politics and society. The essays centre around three major themes: the city of Bombay, Indian politics and society, and Indian historiography. Each manifests Dr Chandavarkar's hallmark historical powers of imaginative empirical richness, analytic acuity and expository elegance, and the collection as a whole will make both a major contribution to the historiography of modern India, and a worthy memorial to a major scholar. "

The collection captures the suddenness of Raj's absence. In a note, the publishers say "With one exception, these essays were selected from a very substantial corpus of unpublished, semi-published and unfinished papers left by Dr Chandavarkar at the time of his death. The apparatus of each essay should be internally consistent, but no attempt has been made to impose any sort of uniform style or presentation, and there are inevitable substantive and bibliographic gaps. Each essay remains, we hope, true to the author’s original intentions."

In our History and Urban Studies sections, in hardcover, 282 pages, Rs 695. ISBN: 9780521767477

Explaining insanity

Permanent Black will publish Irfan Ahmad's Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami early next year. Irfan is an anthropologist and assistant professor of politics in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University in Australia, where he helps lead the Centre for Islam and the Modern World.

"Jamaat-e-Islami Hind is the most influential Islamist organization in India today. Founded in 1941 by Syed Abul Ala Maududi with the aim of spreading Islamic values in the subcontinent, Jamaat and its offshoot, the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), has been watched closely by Indian security services since 9/11. In particular, SIMI has been accused of being behind terrorist bombings.

Islamism and Democracy in India is the first in-depth examination of India’s Jamaat-e-Islami and SIMI. It explores political Islam’s complex relationship with democracy and gives us a rare window into one immensely significant Islamic trajectory in a Muslim-minority context.

Irfan Ahmad conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork at a school in Aligarh, among student activists at Aligarh Muslim University, at a madrasa in Azamgarh, and during Jamaat’s participation in elections in 2002. He deftly traces Jamaat’s changing position towards India's secular democracy and the group’s gradual ideological shift in the direction of religious pluralism and tolerance. He demonstrates how the rise of militant Hindu nationalism since the 1980s—evident in the destruction of the Babri mosque and widespread violence against Muslims—led to SIMI’s radicalization, its rejection of pluralism, and its call for jihad.

Islamism and Democracy in India argues that when secular democracy is responsive to the traditions and aspirations of its Muslim citizens, Muslims in turn embrace pluralism and democracy. But when democracy becomes majoritarian and exclusionary, Muslims turn radical.

The book has been lavishly praised. Peter van der Veer says “This is an outstanding historical and ethnographic account of one of the most influential Islamist movements in South Asia. It is the result of courageous fieldwork at a time of increased Hindu-Muslim tension in India. The book's thesis that even a radically antisecular Islamist movement can be transformed into supporting secular democracy is an extremely important contribution to today's global discussions. It is essential reading for political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and students of Islam.”

And Barbara Metcalf: “Irfan Ahmad's book could not be more timely or important. At a time when clichés about ‘Islamists’ and ‘Islamic terrorists’ abound, he demonstrates the ideological transformation of one of the twentieth century’s most important Islamist movements, India’s Jamaat-e-Islami, in support of active participation in a secular, plural democracy. Ahmad’s work is essential reading not only for scholars, but for policymakers and concerned citizens alike.”

In our Politics section, Rs 695, in hardcover, 328 pages. ISBN: 9788178242699

Borders, real and imagined

Cambridge University Press, India, bring us a reprint of The Borders of Islam: Exploring Samuel Huntington's Faultlines, from Al-Andalus to the Virtual Ummah by Stig Jarle Hansen, Tuncay Kardas & Atle Mesøy (Eds.) that was published earlier by C Hurst.



In his seminal work "The Clash of Civilisations", Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington claimed that conflict between cultural blocs, or civilizations, will dominate the future. More controversially, he predicted that future conflicts will occur on the borders between Western and Islamic civilisations. The statements of Osama Bin-Laden seem to support his views: 'This battle is not between al-Qaeda and the US,' he said in October 2001. 'This is a battle of Muslims against the Global Crusaders'.

This specially commissioned set of essays sets out critically to examine the border zones of Islamic civilisation, be they geographical, cultural or virtual. The contributors explore the local dynamics in these zones to test whether or not they support or contradict Huntingdon's thesis of an emerging global confrontation between Islamic civilisation and its neighbours, be they Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or godless. Among the borders discussed are those where Muslims are the majority (Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Somalia, Pakistan, Turkey), those with very large Muslim minorities (Philippines, Nigeria, India) and those where new faultlines have been created, either through migration (France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain) or technology (the internet). A commonthread running through the book is whether the rise of international Salafi jihadism can be traced to countries on the faultline between Islam and the non-Islamic world.

The contributors conclude by arguing that many of the border regions of Islamic civilisation are influenced by mechanisms far more complex than those highlighted in "The Clash of Civilisations", suggesting that poverty and institutional failure, both often the result of war, tend to heighten religious awareness and practice, but that the effects of these phenomena differ from those suggested by Huntington.

In our Politics and Religion sections, Rs.695. Hardcover, 396 pages, ISBN: 9781850659723

A brave new world

The major part of G P Deshpande's career was at Jawaharlal Nehru University where he was in the School of International Studies for 35 years.

Apart from academic writing on China and international politics, he ran a regular column in the Economic and Political Weekly for about three decades. In addition, he is a prolific writer in Marathi, having published ten plays, two volumes of social and literary criticism, and one collection of poems.

A recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi award, he has also received the Maharashtra State Government award for playwriting on three occasions.

The historiography of nineteenth-century India is beset by a problem which flows from an assumption that India is one history area. It is within the grand narrative of Indian history that debates in different regions and in various language discourses are viewed and interpreted. This leaves a large gap in our understanding of particular histories, especially the history of ideas. In Marathi writing, for instance, the figure of Savarkar evokes responses – from critics as much as from admirers – that are very different from those in English.

Deshpande’s new book, The World of Ideas in Modern Marathi: Phule, Vinoba, Savarkar shows us the riches we can hope to unearth if only we start listening to the vernacular. He discusses the ideas of three influential – and vastly different – thinkers in Marathi: the radical ideologue of shudratishudra emancipation, Jotirao Phule; the Hindutva ideologue V D Savarkar; and the ideologue of Vedanta supremacy, Vinoba Bhave. This unusual grouping itself helps us break out of conventional ways of looking at intellectual history, but the author goes further. By analysing the writings of these thinkers in conjunction with writings on them in Marathi, he underlines that the reception of their ideas in that language is as important as the ideas themselves. He thus points to a method of reading that will be useful to those interested in the history of ideas in any Indian language.

In making a series of rigorous arguments in an entertaining and polemical style, this book is an original and feisty addition to the historiography of modern India.

In our Essays and Nonfiction section, in paperback, 120 pages , Rs 240. ISBN: 9788189487607

Born to be Free

Magic Lantern and The Centre for Internet and Society bring us the Free Culture Roadshow – a presentation on The Right to Share and The Promise of Open Video at the India International Centre on Sunday, 20th December, 2009 from 9.00 am to 01.00 pm.

The Internet has unleashed the potential to communicate and collaborate like never before, and the result has been an unprecedented flow of culture and information. Millions of individuals are now sharing and creating culture: copying, cutting, remixing, and participating in new and different ways.

Sometimes this activity is transformative. Sometimes it's straight copying. In either case, there is a clear connection between this sharing of culture and personal freedom.

This talk will explore how various conceptions of "freedom" have shaped the social movements for free software, free culture, and free knowledge, and how this ideology has manifested itself in real action. It will connect theory with practice, exploring the cultural innovations and political changes that have spawned forth from these movements. Lastly, it will make the case that the broad-based availability, accessibility, and abundance of culture is a good thing for our global society.

The Revolution Will Be Recorded, Remixed, and Redistributed: The Promise of Open Video.

Between news, cinema, television, and documentary film, we find ourselves swimming in a sea of moving images. This has been the story of the 20th century. Yet in this age, the tools for creating and sharing video are becoming widely distributed in the hands of millions of individuals. Desktop video editing software is pervasive; webcams and video-equipped mobile phones abound. Video now belongs to everyone. It is becoming a powerful medium for self-expression, a kind of cultural currency.

How will this phenomenon change the Internet? How will it change society? What questions persist for the architecture of the Internet, and how will public policy address this ultimately political transformation? This talk sets forth a vision of networked video as a truly participatory medium, one that will power the next 10 years of innovation on the web. Dean Jansen and Ben Moskowitz introduce some core technologies for open video, and the obstacles they face on the road to mass adoption.

Come, listen, learn!

Humanism Redefined

Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji (1894–1961) a major social scientist of the country was Professor of Economics and Sociology at Lucknow University where he taught from 1922 to 1954. He then moved to Aligarh Muslim University where he taught economics, till 1959.

He was a man of wide-ranging interests and of great erudition: apart from being a social scientist, Mukerji was a novelist, essayist and critic of note in his mother tongue, Bengali. He was a connoisseur of the arts, especially of music, on which he wrote several books, one co-authored with Tagore.

Tulika Books, New Delhi bring out a collection of his essays edited by Srobona Munshi. Entitled Redefining Humanism, the essays, "written during a period of tumult and gestation in India’s history, [...] provide an intellectual’s serious commentary on nascent nationhood. What makes this collection interesting is not just its historical value, but also its very evident contemporary relevance. Rare is the mind that can look critically at the present and read available signs to organize and project a picture of the future. Rarer still is the ability to pinpoint the exact issues that will define the grounds of national debate over the next half century.

Written during the 1930s and 40s, these essays view problems of communal division, economic disparity, social injustice, neocolonialism and disunity in the Left with both an intellectual and a human eye. Mukerji sets forth a new kind of humanism, reflecting an understanding of troubled times and indicating ways of possible resolution."

In our Essays and Nonfiction section, Rs. 175, in paperback, 116 pages. ISBN: 9788189487621.

Théatre des quatre Saisons

Navayana's ultra-intellectual offering this winter is a set of four books by Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu. And a travelling roadshow with documentaries by and on Žižek!

About the books...

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Žižek: The title of this book is intended as an elementary IQ test for the reader: if the first association it generates is the vulgar anti-communist cliché —“You are right—today, after the tragedy of twentieth-century totalitarianism, all the talk about a return to communism can only be farcical!”—then I sincerely advise you to stop here. Indeed, the book should be forcibly confiscated from you, since it deals with an entirely different tragedy and farce, namely, the two events which mark the beginning and the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century: the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the financial meltdown of 2008.

In paperback, 156 pages, Rs 200, ISBN: 9788189059019

The Future of the Image by Jacques Rancière: To resemble was long taken to be the peculiarity of art, while an infinite number of spectacles and forms of imitation were proscribed from it. In our day, not to resemble is taken for the imperative of art, while photographs, videos and displays of objects similar to everyday ones have taken the place of abstract canvases in galleries and museums. But this formal imperative of non-resemblance is itself caught up in a singular dialectic. For there is growing disquiet: does not resembling involve renouncing the visible? Or does it involve subjecting its concrete richness to the operations and artifices whose matrix resides in language? A counter-move then emerges: what is contrasted with resemblance is not the operativeness of art, but material presence, the spirit made flesh, the absolutely other which is also absolutely the same.

In paperback, 160 pages, Rs 200. ISBN 9788189059033

Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action by Pierre Bourdieu: We must bear in mind that there is not just one racism, but several: there are as many racisms as there are groups that need to justify existing as they do—which is the invariant function of all racisms. It strikes me as very important to bring analysis to bear on those forms of racism that are undoubtedly the most subtle, the most open to misrecognition, and thus the most rarely denounced, perhaps because those who usually denounce racism themselves have some of the properties that incline people towards these forms of racism. I have in mind racism of the intelligence.

This racism is specific to a dominant class whose reproduction depends, in part, on the transmission of cultural capital, an inherited capital that has the property of being an embodied capital and thus apparently natural and innate.

In paperback, 416 pages, Rs 490 ISBN 9788189059040

Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–75 by Michel Foucault: The figure of the masturbator appears at the end of the eighteenth century with a number of specific characteristics distinct from those of both the monster and the individual to be corrected. The first is that the masturbator is not at all an exceptional figure in eighteenth-century thought, knowledge, and pedagogical techniques; he is, rather,

a frequently encountered individual. He seems to be an almost universal individual. Now this absolutely universal individual, or rather, the practice of masturbation that is recognized as being universal is, at the same time, said to be an unknown or ignored practice that no one has spoken about, that no one knows and whose secret is never revealed. Masturbation is the universal secret shared by everyone but disclosed to no one.

In paperback, 400 pages, Rs 490. ISBN 9788189059026.

Find these in our Navayana section! And by name...

Before there was Rajni

The Medium is the Message, Marshal McLuhan famously said... And the subcontinent has seen the truth of it in many ways, one most visible evidence of which is in the inordinate influence that our movie personae have on national politics...

Theodore Baskaran is a man with a richly diverse career. Retiring as the Chief Postmaster General of Tamil Nadu, he morphed into a writer with special interests in film history and on the environment.

The Message Bearers is "a path-breaking book that explores the relationship between Indian nationalism and the popular media of the period in Tamil Nadu. The period with which this study is concerned—1880 to 1945—was a crucial one in the history of Indian nationalism and this book taps popular sources— Tamil newspapers, magazines, popular song books, gramophone records and films—to understand the spirit of the times. It also attempts to interweave three separate strands: mass media, regional cinema and social history. Written in Theodore Baskaran’s characteristically engaging style, this book is a detailed and entertaining look at the ways in which the nascent media industry fuelled and influenced a period of critical change in India’s history."

First published in 1981, the book has been reissued by New Horizon Media in Chennai. Writing for this edition, Thomas Trautmann says "This is a landmark work of cultural history, showing how folk songs, ballads and popular drama, propagated through the new media of gramophone records contributed to the freedom movement in south India. It is a pioneer in the serious study of cinema in the south, a work of tremendous historical importance by one of the leading writers of south India". This has also been called as "perhaps one of the best books on film history to have appeared in recent years. Baskaran’s originality and meticulous research make this book a model for film historians."

In our Film Studies section, 240 pages, paperback. Rs 200. ISBN: 9788183689991

A store we could grow to love...

Yoda Press' Arpita Das has opened YODAKIN, the alternative bookstore for independent publishers at 2 Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi.

Apart from books by the independents, you can also get independent cinema, world cinema, documentary films and music by independent record labels and musicians.

Yodakin is one more in a list of stores we like... many of them sell books, and some of them do not. However, they all share a streak of what Yodakin has in plenty, INDEPENDENCE!

To mention just three, there is Pune's Either Or, which does carry some books, some great design and some good clothes, patterned much like the original alternative store, New Delhi's People Tree. Not far from Yodakin is Tatsat, in the other Hauz Khas market, with a commitment to natural and handmade things... So far the only books they carry are notebooks made of elephant dung, but what the heck, its a beginning...

Great to have Yodakin finally here. Cheers!

On the edge

TROUBLED PERIPHERY: Crisis of India’s North East by Subir Bhaumik, was recently published by Sage.

"This book maps the evolution of India’s North East into a constituent region of the republic and analyses the perpetual crisis in the region since Independence. It highlights how land, language and leadership issues have been the seed of contention in the North East and how factors like ethnicity, ideology and religion have shaped the conflicts. It also throws light on the major insurgencies, internal displacements, protest movements and the regional drug and weapons trade in the region. It examines ‘the crisis of development’ and the evolution of the polity before offering a policy framework to combat the crises."

With a large body of original data, documentation and field interviews with major players as well as stakeholders this could be an important resource, not just for academics, but also for those with a stake and with a real interest in the North East.

In our Northeast Studies section, Rs 595, hardcover, 324 pages. ISBN: 9788132102373

Iron Pillar

With the passing away yesterday of R Balasubramaniam, the B B Lal Chair Professor in the Department of Materials and Metallurgical Engineering at IIT Kanpur, the field of Archaeo-metallurgy lost a major champion.

A prolific researcher, Bala combined a passion for history with deep knowledge of technology, and in the process wrote a number of books for both technical and non-technical audiences.

One of his main interests was the iron pillar in the Qutub complex in Mehrauli, and on this he wrote at length. Delhi Iron Pillar, published by Aryan Books International is about the "1600-year old Delhi iron pillar [that] has attracted the attention of archaeologists, metallurgists and corrosion scientists for its excellent resistance to corrosion. The book details new insights on the Delhi iron pillar based on the researches of the author. The identities of the patron Chandra and the original location Vishnupadagiri of the pillar have been critically analyzed. The engineering details of the pillar, including its decorative bell capital, have been highlighted. The manufacturing method of the pillar has been elucidated. The important aspect of corrosion resistance of the pillar has been discussed in light of a detailed characterization of the pillar."

Another book, Story of the Delhi Iron Pillar "traces the history of the pillar located in the Qutub Complex and describes its structure in detail. It unravels the mystery behind the resistance of the pillar to corrosion for more than sixteen centuries. It also discusses the amazing process by which the pillar was manufactured using the technical know-how available at the time. the book is primarily aimed at general readers and tourists, with a view to igniting their interest in this metallurgical wonder of ancient India. Written in simple language and a lucid style, it carries numerous photographs and elaborate figures to enhance the discussion."

In recent years his interest extended to other aspects of metallurgical history. His book The Saga of Indian Cannons' tells how the "invention of cannons and their use in warfare added a different dimension to battles. The fates of nations were decided by the use of cannons. The science of gunpowder and the technology of cannons, from their introduction in the Indian subcontinent in the middle of the fifteenth century up to the premodern period, have been illustrated using Mughal miniature paintings and analysis of extant cannon pieces. The massive and wonderful forge welded iron cannons and cast bronze cannons of medieval India have been presented, some for the first time, in this book. The mighty cannons that established Mughal, Maratha, Sikh and Deccan powers have been described. Indian innovations in cannon technology like shaturnal (cannons fired from back of camels), composite cannons (of inner wrought iron bore and outer bronze casting) and bans (battlefield rockets) offer sufficient proof of Indian ingenuity in science and technology.

The book draws inspiration and major material from the original publications on the subject by the author. Written simply and profusely illustrated with the drawings and photographs, the book embodies the latest researches on the subject. It will fascinate both serious scholars and lay readers, and provide them rare glimpses into India's rich military and metallurgical heritage."

His work had received considerable national and international recognition: The INSA Young Scientist Award (1993) , the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship (1996), Materials Research Society of India Medal (1999), Metallurgist of the Year award (1999), and the Distinguished Educator Award (2009) from Indian Institute of Metals.

His books are featured in our History of Science and Archaeology sections.

Wives, and other women

The American Institute of Indian Studies has played an important in promoting and developing scholarship on India, particularly in the areas of anthropology, history, sociology... and music. A recent title that has just been published by Orient Blackswan is Mytheli Sreenivas' Wives, Widows, and Concubines which was awarded the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences by the AIIS and which was earlier published by them with Indiana University Press.

Sreenivas is Assistant Professor of History and Women’s Studies at The Ohio State University. In this book, her study is of the Tamil family in colonial times, particularly around the time of the nationalist movement. "The family was at the center of intense debates about identity, community, and nation in colonial Tamil Nadu, India. Emerging ideas about love, marriage, and desire were linked to caste politics, the colonial economy, and nationalist agitation. In the first detailed historical study of Tamil families in colonial India, Wives, Widows, and Concubines maps changes in the late colonial family in relation to the region's culture, politics, and economy.

Among professional and mercantile elites, the conjugal relationship displaced the extended family as the focal point of household dynamics. Conjugality provided a language with which women laid claim to new rights, even as the structures of the conjugal family reinscribed women's oppression inside and outside marriage. The book argues that notions of community centred around the changing family were fundamental to shaping national identity in the early twentieth century."

In our Anthropology, Gender and History sections, in paperback, 184 pages, Rs. 375. ISBN: 9788125037255

A rare sense for texture

A new poet, and an unusual one at that, is Vivek Sharma. After all, how many people combine a passion for polymer physics with poetry?

His first book, Saga of a crumpled piece of paper has, as its title poem

I was a crumpled piece of paper
till your curiosity unfurled me;
An excited child in you ironed away
my wrinkled and discarded past
and laughed at what I bore boldly
written in her hand, in pencil
in dark arches, colons, commas,
with a full stop.

You laughed till your tears
made maps over me
and then you smiled and erased away
her words, her punctuations
and took crayons to wax me with color.
Fascinated by the impact of your hands,
you embellished me,
revived me and then artfully
sold me away.


Currently a post-doctoral research associate in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sharma writes poetry and prose in Hindi and English. He studied at the IIT Delhi, then went to the US, to Georgia Tech where he did a Ph D... His poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Poetry, Bateau, The Cortland Review, Kartika Review, and has been nominated for a Pushcart award...

Thomas Lux has been an important champion for and mentor of Vivek Sharma. In his introduction to the volume of poetry, Lux writes: About his poetry, specifically, I’m going to be short but incisive: he is a gifted young poet with a rare sense for the texture of language, he knows how to use language in such a way that it helps the reader explain him/herself to him/herself. His poems provide for me “a momentary stay against confusion” as Mr. Frost defined poetry. He’s a lyric poet with a narrative streak... He is a member of the tribe, albeit scattered all over the planet, of poets. He is, and will be, one of the voices the future of poetry needs to hear.

Reading some of this reminded me of a poem by Agha Shahid Ali that I had read many many years ago...

Stationery

The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.

The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.
Write to me.

In our Poetry section, in hardcover, 84 pages. Rs 200, inclusive of postage in India, and $20 elsewhere. ISBN: 9788181578518

He did bestride the narrow world

like a Colossus.

Words that could be- and were- said of Homi Bhabha, whose birth centenary has just been celebrated at the TIFR, Mumbai, an institution that he built, nurtured and cherished.

It was a grand celebration, befitting of the man who essentially forged India's scientific destiny, by not just realizing that our country's progress, both material and social, required a scientific foundation, but also went about enabling us in the most fundamental way- by building the required institutions. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, the Department of Atomic Energy... and their numerous descendants, IGCAR (Kalpakkam), CAT (Indore), the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, the Harishchandra Research Institute, Allahabad... The list is long and very distinguished.

Bhabha was a man of many parts. First and foremost, he was a great scientist, part of the golden age of physics in the last century. Who counted among his friends and mentors Einstein, Dirac, Bohr, Pauli, and many others. Who predicted mesons. After whom a special form of the relativistic wave equation for elementary particles - the Bhabha equations - are named... And in addition, he was an aesthete (of the times when the word was complimentary) with sensibilities that extended to the creative arts, a painter of some distinction, a landscaper, a great collector and patron of the fine arts.

There are many books by and on Bhabha. Earlier, this blog has talked about his Magnificent Obsession, and has also featured the Physics News issue on him.

The Indian Physics Association has just brought out a superb collection of articles on Bhabha entitled Tribute to a Titan, edited by Dipan Ghosh and Arun Grover. Priced at Rs 300, this collection has some of his important letters, lectures, articles on him, his work, and his vision. It is simple to order: Write to us here.

The other partition

Some years ago, Jasodhara Bagchi of Jadavpur University and Subhoranjan Dasgupta of the Institute of Development Studies put together The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India. The book had a special "focus on what women experienced, felt and witnessed. Weaving together the voices of many women and incisive analysis, the book provides an invaluable discussion on displacement, rape, loss and why women pay the price, and it thus traces the strenuous triumph attained in the crucible of suffering.

The trauma of the partition in Eastern India is discussed explicitly in a way that has not happened before. Drawing upon interviews with women who were uprooted from old East Bengal in 1947, on diaries, memoirs and creative literature, the editors lift the 'veil of silence' that has surrounded partition. The book weaves together analysis, interviews, translations of creative work and documents to build up an accurate picture of the times. The lack of overt public discourse has meant that people outside Bengal have tended to believe that the impact was very much less on the people in the eastern region. In truth the sufferings, the loss of life and livelihoods and of shelter were very real but of a different nature from the fast-moving horror of the Punjab. It was more like an oozing wound that seemed not to heal than a one-time clear severance of a limb; indeed, an ongoing process, as the book reveals."

This year, Stree, Kolkata bring out The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, Vol. 2, edited by Bagchi, Dasgupta, now with Subhasri Ghosh of Swayam.

This new book "continues the discussion on partition in the eastern region, focusing more fully on both East Bengal and West Bengal . The editors have been guided by the intention ‘to incorporate as much of the Muslim voices and experiences often taking place on the other side of the divide, that is, erstwhile East Pakistan or present-day Bangladesh.’ They have also called attention to the lives of some Muslim women residing in West Bengal.

Part I begins with short stories from both sides of the border, which share common themes of grief and conflict. Part II presents reminiscences that support the narrative of the short stories, offering stories of survival struggles, of a grandmother’s desperate flight to safety, of the reflections on space and identity, of a Hindu woman’s migration from Calcutta to East Pakistan, to Calcutta, and then to Canada. Two thought-provoking pieces are situated wholly in East Pakistan: on a Hindu professor and his family’s decision to remain in Dhaka , witness to the later War of Liberation. The second is an account of Kaloibibi, the remarkable woman leader of the Nankar rebellion, in Sylhet, 1949-50.

Part III, Interviews, capture the intricate nature of migration and of non-migration, covering Hindus who moved from East Bengal, Muslims of West Bengal who moved to and those who chose to remain. Part IV presents a screenplay of an elderly couple who return to their old home in Bangladesh. Part V takes the reader to interviews in the Permanent Liability camps that still hold the original refugees of partition, dwelling on the implications of the failures of state policy. Of special interest is the study from two villages where the voices of the women of the minority community can be clearly heard. Finally, Part VI offers extracts from state documents, 1946-57, on the themes of communal violence, of the abduction of women, and their rehabilitation."

In our Gender and Culture sections.
Vol 1, Rs. 350, 272 pages. Hardcover, ISBN: 9788185604558
Vol 2, Rs. 550, 298 pages. Hardcover, ISBN: 9788185604985

Book-a-roo

With a name that has resonances of various kinds, I was not sure what I would find at the two day festival of children's books in Delhi, sponsored by Bookaroo, a Charitable Trust based in New Delhi, India committed to bringing children and books together. [They] are a loose collective of booklovers, publishers, booksellers and writers who believe that books are fun and books are for everyone..

A host of sponsors has ensured that this festival brought together a galaxy of children's authors from India and elsewhere- Alison Lester, Devika Rangachari, Paro Anand, Sandhya Rao, Anushka Ravishankar, Subhadra Sengupta, Bulbul Sharma, Manasi Bloch... And the days were filled with activities centered around books of all sorts, from Feluda stories as comics, a host of new Puffins, a charming reissue of Nehru's letters to Indira, Tara Books by the tablefull, Hachette's Horrid Henry. Tulika Chennai's multilingual readers, and so on..

For me, the highlight of the day was an hour long and spectacular A Magic Carpet of Stories by Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain, Dastangos or storytellers, who enthralled an audience that had all ages from 8 to 80. And who listened rapt, with scant awareness of passing time.

The story they told was an excerpt from the The Adventures of Amir Hamza by Ghalib Lakhnavi, newly translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, and recently published by Random House (along with his Hoshruba). "The Adventures of Amir Hamza is captured with all its colourful action, ribaldry, and fantastic elements intact. Here is the spellbinding story of Amir Hamza the adventurer who loves Mehr-Nigar, the daughter of the Persian emperor, Naushervan. Guided by a clairvoyant called Bazurjmehr, protected by legendary prophets, and accompanied by his loyal friend, the ingenious trickster Amar Ayyar, Amir Hamza rides his devoted winged demon-steed, Ashqar, into combat against a marvelous array of opponents. A sweeping tale, The Adventures of Amir Hamza is an extraordinary creation and a true literary treasure."

The Dastangoi by Farooqui and Husain was phenomenal, evocative of times past, when the art of storytelling had its place and its pace. Education as performance, so to speak...

Hamza is in our Indian Literature in Translation section, in paperback, 984 pages, Rs 750. ISBN: 9788184000443