TLC

A new addition to our Public Health list from Routledge, Health Providers in India: On the Frontiers of Change by Kabir Sheikh and Asha George “brings together contributions featuring research, comment and analysis on health care providers — doctors, nurses, public health workers, counsellors, traditional practitioners and home care providers. The ideas and themes that emerge contribute to the understanding of providers’ roles as actors in the health systems and societies of contemporary India, and re-examine preconceptions about this critical occupational group.

Different groups of health providers face struggles at diverse frontiers — social, professional and systemic; for instance, in reforming health systems, government health workers must constantly negotiate the vagaries of changing working environments and policy vacillations. Formal health systems and structures often reject and exclude the contributions of traditional and home care providers.

Medical doctors, conversely, face challenges of introspection, as they tread the line between personal gain and public service. Contributed by health researchers, practitioners, policy advocates, programme managers and a journalist, each article presents a distinctive view of a particular group of frontline health providers, based on field research or on the authors’ respective experiences of working with or as providers. Four poems by the renowned poet–physician Gieve Patel conclude the volume. Advancing the case for a fuller appreciation of the complex landscape of health care provision in India, the volume locates frontline health providers as central figures in development.”

In our Public Health list, in hardcover, 355 pages, Rs 595. ISBN: 9780415579773

A princess explains

Princess Aswathi Tirunal Gouri Lakshmi Bayi is a niece of the last Maharaja of Travancore, Chithira Thirunal Rama Varma. A prolific author, her book Glimpses of Kerala Culture that has been brought out by Konark Publishers, New Delhi was released recently.

Glimpses of Kerala Culture offers an impressive and highly readable introduction to the various art forms of the rich and ancient culture of Kerala. The book gives profound and erudite insights into the four defined purposes of Hindu life, the origins and nature of dance forms of Kerala and its unique martial arts. The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the Dravidian or the Non-Vedic Stream of civilisation, the Vedic or the Aryan Stream, and the Colours of the United Stream.

The book provides a wealth of information while delineating various art forms and reflecting on a host of cultural aspects. The colours of Kerala come alive in the vibrant mosaic of Indian heritage.

In our Culture and Religion sections, in hardcover, 180 pages. Rs 1000. ISBN: 9788122007793

Ten Years of Searching

Friday, 23rd April will see the release of The KHOJ Book in New Delhi, at the British Council by Robert Loder, founder of the Triangle Arts Trust, UK.

The KHOJ International Artists’ Association
is the wonderfully inventive group of artists who support a variety of imaginative projects all over the city. The book "takes a consolidated view of contemporary art practice in India during a particularly dynamic decade. This unique compendium contains five lead essays by eminent art critics and thinkers of our time, and interviews of 101 Indian artists by artists.

Lavishly illustrated with over a 1000 coloured images of art works, this 680-page book covers not only some of India’s foremost contemporary artists, but also younger artists across the country who may well be the future vanguard. It offers the reader, researcher, student, collector and art aficionado a rich store of material ‘in the artist’s own words’ from which to draw their own inspiration and conclusions.

The artists and writers featured in the book include Babu Eshwar Prasad Baiju Parthan Bharti Kher Biju Joze Bose Krishnamachari Chittrovanu Mazumdar CK Rajan Desire Machine Collective Dipyaman Kar Gargi Raina Gauri Gill Gigi Scaria Hema Upadhyay Himanshu Desai HK Dwarkanath Inder Salim Indrapramit Roy Jagannath Panda Jasmeen Patheja Jayashree Chakravarty Jehangir Jani Jitish Kallat Jyotee Karl Antao Kausik Mukhopadhyay Kiran Subbaiah Kristine Michael KT Shivaprasad Manas Acharya Manisha Parekh Masood Hussain Masta Justy Mithu Sen Nanaiah CR Nataraj Sharma Navjot Altaf Nikhil Chopra NN Rimzon Paula Sengupta Prabhavathi MeppayilPrajakta Potnis Prasanta Mukherjee Prithpal S Ladi Pushpamala N Radhika Vaidyanathan Raghavendra Rao KV Rajkumar Ramesh Kalkur Ranbir Kaleka Ranjani Shettar Ravi Agarwal Reena Saini Kallat Reghunadhan K Riyas Komu Rohini Devasher RV Sindhu Sanchayan Ghosh Sarnath Banerjee Shaina Anand Shamala Nandesh Shambhavi Singh Sheba Chhachhi Sheela Gowda Shilpa Gupta Smitha Cariappa Sonia Khurana Soumyabrata Choudhury Sovan Kumar Subodh Gupta Sudarshan Shetty Sumedh Rajendran Sunil Gawde Surekha Surendran Nair Suresh BV Suresh Jayaram Suresh Kumar Reddy Susanta Mandal Sushil Kumar Tallur LN Tejal Shah Umesh Maddanahalli Valsan Koorma Kolleri Vasudha Thozhur Vijay Bagodi Walter D’Souza Zuleikha Chaudhari Geeta Kapur Nancy Adajania Pooja Sood Rahul Srivastava Shuddhabrata Sengupta Aastha Chauhan Abhishek Hazra Adip Dutta Ajay Desai Alex Mathew Alwar Balasubramaniam Anita Dube Anjum Singh Anup Mathew Thomas Archana Hande Arunkumar HG Ashim Purkayastha Atul Bhalla Ayisha Abraham...

Published by Harper Collins, the book is in our Art and Contemporary India sections. In hardback, 680 pages, Rs 5999. ISBN: 9788172236878

Photographing History

History in the Making: The visual archives of Kulwant Roy will be released this coming Saturday at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

Serendipity has played a major role in the birth of this book, a collaboration between the photographer Aditya Arya and JNU historian Indivar Kamtekar.

This valuable collection of photographs by press photographer Kulwant Roy from the 1930s to 1960s remained forgotten in boxes for over twenty-five years after his death, until their inheritor Aditya Arya, a photographer himself, began cataloguing them.

In the process, he discovered a unique visual archive that included many unpublished pictures from a momentous era in India's history. These included Muslim League meetings, the INA trials, the signing of the Indian Constitution, as well as significant post-Independence milestones such as the building of the Bhakra Nangal Dam.

Enriched by an insightful text, written by historian Indivar Kamtekar, this book is a collector's item for anyone who wishes to discover the multilayered dimensions behind India's 'tryst with destiny'.

In our History and Photography sections, in hardcover, 304 pages, Rs. 4999. ISBN: 9788172238681

Feeding Billions

The Indian Institue of Science, Bangalore, celebrated its centenary this past year, and one of the many ways in which they marked this year was to organize a number of talks and conferences. M S Swaminathan, one of the most visible of our scientists, and a man who has done a great deal to educate the general public about matters agricultural, was one of the distinguished lecturers at the IISc last year. Wisely, the IISc has taken the opportunity to bring out a selection of his papers to mark the occasion.

SCIENCE AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SECURITY: Selected Papers of M S Swaminathan is published jointly by IISc and World Scientific, Singapore, and will be released in Delhi on the 21st April, by Jairam Ramesh.

This book provides a roadmap for achieving sustainable agricultural advance and food security in an era of climate change and global economic melt-down. The contents include a description of the paradigm shift under the leadership of the author, from a green to an ever-green revolution necessary for advancing productivity in perpetuity without ecological harm.

Science and Sustainable Food Security shows many methods of linking ecological security with livelihood security, and provides a scientific basis for entering an era of biohappiness based on the sustainable and equitable use of biodiversity. Also, methods of adaptation to the impact of global warming are described. This book will prove invaluable to all interested in sustainable human security and happiness.

Contents:

• Food Security and Economic Development — How Science is Applied to Solve Problems of Poverty, Drought and Famine
• Science and Food Security — How Science is Used to Generate Efficient and Optimal Agricultural Outputs
• Food Security and Ecological Balance — How the Gains of Green Revolution are Impacted by Climate Change, How Science Will be Helpful in Ensuring Sustainable Food Security, Green Revolution to Ever-Green Revolution — A Roadmap

Swaminathan is justly lauded the world over for his efforts to provide the country food security. Kenneth M Quinn, President of the World Food Prize Foundation says “History will record that the last 60 years were the single greatest period of food production and hunger reduction in all human history. Professor M S Swaminathan was, with Dr. Norman Borlaug, at the forefront of the scientific breakthrough achievements that led to the Green Revolution in the Twentieth Century. With his vision for a Doubly Green Revolution, he is leading this effort into the Twentieth-first Century. His selection as the very first World Food Prize Laureate reflected both his intellectual contributions to this process as well as the global leadership he exerted, and continues to exert, in the struggle to ensure global food security. As such, this new volume constitutes an invaluable record of the work of one of the truly great pioneers in the epic endeavor to confront hunger and famine.”

“From his writings and even more through his works, Professor Swaminathan is regarded as a defender and promoter of the struggle against poverty and hunger, in the endeavour to guarantee every human being the basic and fundamental right to a dignified quality of life. He is an example of moral energy, personifying the spirit of brotherhood and social equality in humankind, regardless of race, creed or ethnicity.” Gian Tommaso Scarascia Mugnozza, National Academy of Sciences, Rome, Italy

In our Essays section, in hardcover, 436 pages, US$ 98 (about Rs 4500). ISBN: 9789814282109

Sufiana

Raziuddin Aquil, Fellow in History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, has edited a new book, part of prestigious "Debates in Indian history and Society" series from OUP, Sufism and Society in Medieval India.

This volume brings together seminal essays on the perennial debate regarding the role of Sufis in Indian history and society. The reader focuses on crucial issues like the Sufis' encounters or interactions in Indian environment, episodic conversion, process of Islamicization, and expansion of Islam in India. The essays provide counterpoints on the major debate about the political intervention of Sufis and their interaction with the rulers and state.

The editor's introduction deals with the debates and the historiography while posing new questions and providing new dimensions to the study of Sufism in India. The selection has essays from very prominent social historians like K. A. Nizami, Aziz Ahmad, S. A. A. Rizvi, Richard M. Eaton, Carl W. Ernst, Yohanan Friedmann, Simon Digby, and Muzaffar Alam.

In our Religion and History sections, in hardcover, 296 pages, Rs 645. ISBN: 9780198064442

Routledge on Development

Two interesting titles from Routledge, India, on different aspects of development (or, to be more honest, the complexities thereof).

Chandan Sengupta and Stuart Corbridge edit Democracy, Development and Decentralization in India. Economic reform in India has largely taken place at a time of assertive cultural nationalism and growing pressures for advancement and assertion from within India's subaltern communities. This book explores the mainsprings, contours and consequences of democratisation, decentralisation and development in India and offers new insights into its contemporary political economy. It considers how and why unequal patterns of economic growth have taken shape within the context of a democratic and decentralising political system, and how and why that system has impacted upon processes of economic development.

The different articles address how competing claims have been negotiated; in what measure has a bias in favour of political decentralisation helped the government push ahead with an economic reform agenda; and who is being left behind in the race for income growth. The book makes some important theoretical contributions to the continuing debates on democracy and development in Indian context and balances the arguments with a good variety of empirical material.


In Religion, Community & Development: Changing Contours of Politics and Policy in India edited by Gurpreet Mahajan & Surinder S. Jodhka the focus is more on the political and cultural aspects of development.

The Sachar Committee Report (submitted to the Prime Minister of India in 2006) initiated a new political discourse by making the religious community a relevant category for discussing development deficits. While the liberal–secular constitutional framework privileged the individual over the community and preferred using the category of class, the Sachar Committee differentiated between citizens on the basis of their religious identity.

The articles in this volume focus on the nature and implications of this shift in public policy. Based on a close reading of the findings of the Report, they bring to light the challenges posed by inter-community comparisons, and construct a profile of all religious communities in India, factoring in their concerns of development into the present discourse so as to nuance and modify the simple indicators to which development is often reduced.

DDD is in our Development Studies and Economics sections, 355 pages, Rs 795. ISBN: 9780415563178

RCD is in our Development Studies and Politics sections, 348 pages, Rs 695. ISBN: 9780415585668

Lions of the Punjab

Hew Macleod, who passed away last year, came to Punjab in the 1950s as a Christian missionary but ended up being a globally-reputed historian on Sikhs. Settling down in Batala, Mcleod's interest in Christianity decreased while his interest in Sikh history increased, to the extent that he became a world authority of Sikhs and Sikhism, earning a Ph D on Sikh history from the University of London.

Yoda Press, New Delhi, have brought out a new edition of his Sikhism (that was published earlier by Penguin). At the heart of Sikhism are the ten Gurus, who transferred authority from individual leaders to the scriptures and the community itself. Sikhism explores how their distinctive beliefs emerged from the Hindu background of the times, how a number of separate sects split off, and how far the ideas of sexual equality have been observed in practice.

Rukun Advani, in a review written in The Hindu some years ago said "McLeod has done more for Sikh history than anyone now alive. In fact, if there is a Father of Sikh History, it is Hew McLeod." Tony Ballantyne, in The Guardian, said ‘Hew was renowned for his openness and his readiness to answer any question and to read any manuscript. This generosity, together with his precocious embrace of email, placed him at the centre of an international scholarly community.’

In our Religion and Culture sections, 380 pages, in paperback. Rs 350. ISBN 9788190666879

We hold these truths...

A friend (and roving scholar) brought a recent article by Anthony Grafton in the New York Review of Books to our attention. Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities struck so many chords as it described much that was going wrong in higher education... it might well have been an article on India.

While warmly recommending the NYRBlog, here are some excerpts that may well have been written with India in mind.

Helson's Harmonic Analysis

The second edition of Harmonic Analysis by Henry Helson is being published in paperback by Hindustan Book Agency in their TRIM series.

The book is enlarged and considerably rewritten in comparison with the first edition. Among the new topics are: infinite product spaces with applications to probability, disintegration of measures on product spaces, positive definite functions on the line, and additional information about Weyl’s theorems on equidistribution. Topics that have continued from the first edition include Minkowski’s theorem, measures with bounded powers, idempotent measures, spectral sets of bounded functions and a theorem of Szegö, and the Wiener Tauberian theorem.

The book comes with a statutory warning: Readers of the book should have studied the Lebesgue integral, the elementary theory of analytic and harmonic functions, and the basic theory of Banach spaces. The treatment is classical and as simple as possible. This is an instructional book, not a treatise.

The review in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society says "...this volume can be an excellent way to get one's feet wet and see whether it is worthwhile to take the plunge. The book has helpful and challenging exercises for the reader. It should be emphasized that the great strength of the book lies in the large number of interesting special results it contains. Many of the prettiest facts of harmonic analysis are on display here in a very attractive setting"

In our Mathematics secion, in paperback, 236 pages, Rs. 300. ISBN 9789380250052

Khalistan

The idea of Khalistan is so much a part of our recent history- and with so many consequences that most of us are only dimly aware of- this new book from Sage, India, is very welcome.

THE SIKH SEPARATIST INSURGENCY IN INDIA: Political Leadership and Ethnonationalist Movements is by Jugdeep S Chima, Associate Editor for South Asia of the Asian Survey at UC Berkeley,

The “Punjab crisis,” a two-decade long armed insurgency that emerged as a violent ethnonationalist movement in the 1980s and gradually transformed into a secessionist struggle, resulted in an estimated 25,000 casualties in Punjab. This ethnonationalist movement, on one hand, ended the perceived notion of looking at Punjab as the model of political stability in independent India and, on the other, raised several lingering socio-political questions which have great effect on Indian politics for decades to come, including the prospects of recurring ethnic insurgencies.

The Sikh Separatist Insurgency in India: Political Leadership and Ethnonationalist Movements provides an authoritative political history of the Sikh separatist insurgency in Punjab by focussing on “patterns of political leadership”, a previously unexplored explanatory variable. It describes in detail the trends which led to the emergence of the “Punjab crisis”, the various dynamics through which the movement sustained itself and the changing nature of “patterns of political leadership” which eventually resulted in its decline in the mid-1990s.

Providing a microhistorical analysis of the “Punjab crisis,” this book argues that the trajectories of ethnonationalist movements are largely determined by the interaction between self-interested ethnic and state political elites, who not only react to the structural choices they face, but whose purposeful actions and decisions ultimately affect the course of ethnic group—state relations. It consolidates this theoretical preposition through a comparative analysis of four contemporary global ethnonationalist movements—those occurring in Chechnya, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, and Assam.

This book will be of interest to students and academics studying political science and history, especially those working on South Asia and the Sikhs, and also for public policy practitioners in multi-ethnic societies. It remains invaluable reading for those interested in the phenomenon of ethnonationalism.

In our Politics and History sections, in hardcover, 356 pages, Rs 750. ISBN: 9788132103028

Bioscopewallahs

Sage Journals announce a new journal, BioScope: SOUTH ASIAN SCREEN STUDIES which is edited by Ravi Vasudevan of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies/Sarai, New Delhi, Rosie Thomas, University of Westminster, Neepa Majumdar of the University of Pittsburgh, and Moinak Biswas of Jadavpur University.


BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies is a blind peer-reviewed journal published biannually, starting January 2010, [that] encourages theoretical and empirical research both on located screen practices and wider networks, linkages, and patterns of circulation. This involves research into the historical, regional, and virtual spaces of screen cultures, including globalized and multi-sited conditions of production and circulation.

An early and popular form of film projector, “bioscope”, was widely used to refer to the cinema in twentieth century South Asia. By focusing on the word’s component parts, [the journal] highlights the expanding spectrum of forms involved in thinking about the relationship of life to visual and sound technologies. From the orbit of film, television and video, [they] invite research into a wide historical and contemporary canvas, from precinematic forms of assembly, through to contemporary computer practices, game cultures, multimedia telephony, ambient television, surveillance cameras, and the wide range of materials assembled on the internet. [Their] interests also extend to new media arts and contemporary screen-based art installations.

There is special attention given to archival research and field work. This includes documentation and ethnographic enquiry into media institutions and industries, and their modes of regulation, for example, the policies, debates and practices of urban administration, censorship regimes, and intellectual property regulation.

Published twice a year, in January and in July, BSASS is newly in our Journals section. Annual subscriptions range from Rs 650 for the individual subscriber, to Rs 1400 for institutions. Check here.

The Socialist View

Samir Amin, born in 1931, is a reputed author of numerous books. He has been an active and committed intellectual associated with the liberation movements of Africa and Asia during the Bandung era (1955–80), and is currently Director of the Third World Forum and Chairperson of the World Forum for Alternatives.

Tulika Books, New Delhi bring out his collection of essays entitled From Capitalism to Civilization: Reconstructing the Socialist Perspective.

The history of ‘actually existing’ capitalism is one of the conquest and submission of Asia, Africa and Latin America to the imperialist rule of Europe, the United States and Japan. The twentieth century witnessed the first wave of liberation of nations of the South, and the twenty-first century will see the emergence of a second wave of emancipation of these countries, which will change the face of the world. The simultaneous anti-imperialist dimension of the struggles in these nations will pose a challenge to capitalism. Decisive advances towards socialism in the twenty-first century will create the basis for a revival of internationalism among working classes and peoples of the world, as against the cosmopolitanism of the oligarchies who currently manage capitalist–imperialist globalization.

In our Politics section, in paperback, 202 pages, Rs 300. ISBN: 9788189487645

Goparaju Ramachandra Rao

A largely forgotten figure of the national movement, Goparaju Ramachandra Rao or Gora is the subject of a new book by Mark Lindley. Published by Popular Prakashan, Mumbai, The Life and Times of Gora has a foreword by Mridula Mukherjee, Director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, and colleague at JNU.

Goparaju Rao took the name Gora when he renounced religion and founded the Atheist Centre in 1940 in Andhra Pradesh... The Centre, which is still very active, is a social change organization striving for eradication of superstitions, inculcating rational, scientific and secular outlook for spreading positive atheism and humanism as a way of life (life-stance).

The Life and Times of Gora seeks to comprehend the reformer vis-à-vis his time and his relationship with Mahatma Gandhi. Gora was born in a Brahmin family in 1902 and was excommunicated from Brahmin society for renouncing religion. Gandhji came in contact with Gora late in his life, during 1944-45... and was partly responsible for the change in his views on Ambedkar’s beliefs on caste system. While Ambedkar was for uprooting the caste system, Gandhiji’s approach was milder; he wanted the negative aspects of caste system like untouchability to go while retaining its framework.

Gandhi formed the subject of an earlier book by Lindley and Gora's son, Lavanam Gora, Gandhi: As We Have Known Him. Many people have written about Mahatma Gandhi and religions, and many have published their personal reminiscences of him. A distinctive feature of this book however, is that the chapters on Gandhi and the several religions which he drew upon are complemented by a chapter describing his relationship-which changed more than once during his long life-to various forms of religious nonbelief.

In our Gandhi Studies, Dalit Studies, and Biography sections. The Life and Times of Gora is in paperback, Rs 180. ISBN: 9788179914571

Gandhi: As we have known him is in hardcover, Rs 690. ISBN: 9788121208635

Yule Log

Paul Alan Yule is an archaeologist at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, Heidelberg. He studied at the New York University Marburg University, with a main focus on the archaeology of India, Oman and the Yemen.

In the 1990s he catalogued and evaluated metallic artefacts of the so-called "Copper Hoard Culture" by means of European methods for the first time, whereby numerous finds came to light in the Kanya Gurukul in Narela/Haryana. These numerous copper artefacts appear to be non-functional objects, probably used in ritual functions. A find from a cemetery in Sankarjang may be the earliest musical instrument in India.

From 2001-2004 in India, Yule documented ancient forts and other archaeological sites for the first time, especially in Orissa and Chhattisgarh. Using a laser scanner, ground penetrating radar, and a GPS receiver, he studied the early historic fortress at Sisupalgarh...

One result of this work was the monograph, Early Historic Sites in Orissa, published in 2006 by Pragun Publications, New Delhi.

"While art historians have long extolled the intellectual and artistic achievement of the medieval temple art of Orissa, quantitatively and qualitatively its archaeology trails behind that of most of South Asia. Until recently, archaeology has remained a matter essentially of local interest. Characteristic of the archaeology of Orissa are gaping informational voids held together by notions of a linear development of artefacts within and between periods.

Despite rare informational stepping stones, archaeologically early historic western Orissa and the adjacent Chhattisgarh region are best described as archaeological terra incognita. Spread over an enormous surface (156,000 sq km, i. e. a little less than half as large as present-day Germany) few prehistoric and early historic are proven or documented in Orissa. The present study documents new survey and excavation on the early history of Orissa, from the iron age up to roughly the Gupta age, and attempts to close or articulate some the research lacunae."

In our Archaeology section, in hardcover, 58 pages. Rs 750. ISBN: 9788189645441

A woman of substance

Ajita Chakraborty, Fellow, Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, MRCP, Edinburgh and FRCPsychiatry, Royal College of Psychiatry in London was Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry, Postgraduate Institute of Medical and Research Institute, Kolkata, and later its Director. She was also President, General Secretary and Treasurer of the Indian Psychiatric Society.

In My Life as a Psychiatrist: Memoirs and Essays (published recently by Stree, Kolkata), she presents her memoirs and selected essays that throw light on psychiatry and the way she practised it.

Born in 1926, she was a pioneering woman psychiatrist in India. She took a stand against the mainstream that simply used the premises and methods of western psychiatry, insisting that an Indian school of psychiatry must develop to suit Indians who were certainly not to be seen as just a variant of westerners. Right from her childhood, she knew she wanted to be a psychiatrist, propelled by the need to know herself; to ‘pursue a career that explained things to me’. She left for the UK to train in psychiatry as soon as she received her MBBS degree in 1950, returning to Calcutta in 1960 as the first fully trained female psychiatrist of the country.

The memoirs discuss her difficulties in building up her career; there was resistance from the medical establishment despite her formidable qualifications. Her first appointment was at the prestigious Presidency General Hospital, at the adjoining Mental Observation Ward, in the absence of a department of psychiatry. She worked very hard in making it almost a full-scale department, creating records of patients and their treatments, providing a much needed database. This experience helped her in conducting the massive survey, covering ten millions, in Greater Calcutta, reminiscent of the Manhattan Project of the USA, with valuable information and analysis (later published as Social Stress and Mental Health, Sage 1990 and also in Bhargavi Davar, ed, Mental Health from a Gender Perspective, Sage 2001).

Of special interest is her account of new developments in psychiatry in the West, the anti-psychiatric movement which was a revolt against mainstream psychiatry, led by brilliant practitioners like Dr. R. D. Laing, whom she acknowledges as her guru. She also writes of the growing recognition of the primacy of culture in psychiatry.

In a foreword, Ashis Nandy, the distinguished scholar and Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi says She represents the chaos, the uncertainty and the inner conflicts over theoretical compromises and therapeutic experiments that cannot but be the lot of a practitioner of a new discipline in an old society, more so when that society has its own ideas and traditions of mental health and ill-health.

In our Biography section, Rs. 550 in hardback, 226 pages. ISBN: 9788185604923.

Casteing about...

Over the centuries, the poison of caste has been variously sung about, lamented, protested, outlawed and adjudicated in this region. During that time, the economic and cultural foundations of – and, most of all, the religious sanction for – this abhorrent practice have all been sculpted to ‘perfection’, spawning replicas in all corners of the world. Yet while the new economic order and emerging professions have tended to blur the rigid lines, modernity and education have not done away with caste. Instead, the locus has changed, the forms have morphed, and upward mobility and reservation have allowed former ‘untouchables’ to pursue new vocations.


The April 2010 issue of Himal, that imaginative magazine based in Kathmandu, is on "The Future of Caste". The birth anniversaries of Jotirao Phule and Bhimrao Ambedkar, two stars of the anticaste struggle fall in this month, on the 11th and the 14th, respectively and its a good occasion to debate the issue. The question of caste is thus addressed in this issue of Himal through a range of subjects and issues: art, cinema, fiction, poetry, politics, civil society, theory.

The authors include Meena Kandasamy, Ashley Tellis, Prashant Kadam, Gail Omvedt, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Kancha Ilaiah, Priyamvada Gopal, Vijay Prashad, Dwaipayan Sen, Anand Teltumbde, C.K. Lal, Githa Hariharan, Nirupama Dutt, ND Rajkumar, Desraj Kali, Lokesh Khodke, AK Sivadas, Premanand Gajvi/Shanta Gokhale, S. Anand, Satish Deshpande, Shefali Chandra and Shiva Shankar.

Available at discerning bookstores everywhere, and naturally, via Scholars. Write to us!

Ode to Angst

The latest Sarai Reader is on FEAR. Especially when thinking about fear, The Editorial Collective of Sarai says, we need, as always, fearless speech.

They go on to say “Sarai Reader 08 is interested in the phenomenon of fear in the form of nuclear attacks, lethal outbreak of a virus, of flash floods and freak storms, etc not as empirical facts but as cultural processes. The book aims to question how fear and anxiety shape individual and collective dispositions, how lives and social processes are designed around and against them, and what effects they have on our politics and our economy. It is especially interested in fear as language, as mode of communication, as a way of ordering and rendering the world…

… The Reader gathers to itself texts and contributions in the form of image-text assemblages that look at the transmission, generation and processing of fear on an intimate as well as on an industrial scale. They encompass mechanisms designed either to allay or intensify fear or ratchet up and down levels of anxiety and feelings of security. We see this as a beginning, and a broad range of questions and areas of interest, some of which have been touched upon this book, still remain to be unaccounted for. While Sarai Reader 08 does not claim to be exhaustive, it does aim to straddle a wide territory. The form that contributions to the Reader have taken is as varied as the content. While there are stand-alone essays, there are also reports, interviews, photographs, image-text combinations, comics, art-works, personal journal entries, research and commentaries. We believe that this diversity helps the Reader evoke responses to the idea of fear in all its myriad dimensions.

We have always viewed the Sarai Reader as a comfort zone for new and unprecedented ideas, as a space of refuge where wayward reflections can meet half-forgotten agendas. This is why we see it possible to imagine Sarai Reader 08 as setting the stage for a productive encounter with the demand for an account of the limits, margins and edges of our times."

Like the other Readers, this is produced and designed at the Sarai Media Lab, Delhi by the Editorial Collective of Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Ravi Sundaram, Ravi Vasudevan, Awadhendra Sharan + Jeebesh Bagchi

And like the other Readers, listed in our Media Section, in paperback, 312 pages, Rs 350 (or $20). ISBN: 9788190585323

Global Marginals

Samir Kumar Das, member of the Calcutta Research Group and Professor of political science at the University of Calcutta brings together a distinguisehed set of sociologists, anthropologists, historians and other academics- Paula Banerjee, Thomas Benedikter, Bojan Brezigar, Samir Kumar Das, Andreas Eisendle, Benedikt Harzl, Harriet Hoffler, Emma Lantschner, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Javaid Rehman and Ranabir Samaddar- among them, in Samya, Kolkata's latest book, Minorites in South Asia and in Europe: A new Agenda.

This book studies minorities of South Asia and Europe from a comparative and transnational perspective. It is not difficult to come across country-specific studies of minorities; but comparisons within a region, like South Asia and Europe, or across them are almost non-existent. Minorities are created as modern states emerge and their boundaries are drawn in neat and precise terms. Studying minority groups across such disparate regions as Europe and South Asia makes us aware of the underlying similarities in their situations, as well as of the very real differences, which, perhaps, are as important as the similarities in understanding them.

Not all minority interests are reconcilable with one another or even with the transregional agenda. Caught in the whirlpool of global politics, minorities sometimes do not know how to retain the autonomy of their social and political agenda. The book seeks to respond to this challenge by sensitizing us to the lessons of minority experience from a cross-national and cross-regional perspective.

In our Anthropology section, in hardback, 336pages, Rs 700. ISBN 9788190676038.

Making a Mahatma

Pietermaritzburg, 7 June 1893. Winter. A 24 year old attorney, M K Gandhi, recently arrived on South African shores on a year's girmit (or contract) is thrown out of a first class compartment of a train from Durban to Pretoria... And the rest is our history. As Mandela famously said, You gave us Mohandas; we returned him to you as Mahatma Gandhi.

Gandhi had come to Durban to fight a lawsuit for Dada Abdullah and Co. Tasting the racial discrimination that plagued the land at that time and his subsequent experiences in South Africa, he became sensitive to the plight of the girmitiyas (bonded labours).

Suspended between despair and a hope for an implausible escape to their promised land, the girmitiyas found in this young attorney a voice that would guide them to a new dawn.

In The Girmitiya Saga, published recently by Niyogi Press, Giriraj Kishore retraces the socio-political background of the 19th and 20th-century South Africa, highlighting the importance of the young attorney’s actions in South Africa and their monumental significance for humanity as a whole. After having carefully researched the subject in South Africa, England, Mauritius and India, Giriraj Kishore has imaginatively cast the facts in the mould of an arresting novel—Pehla Girmitiya. First published in Hindi in 1999, the novel was very well received in the world of Hindi literature. The following year, the author was honoured with the Vyas Samman by the K.K. Birla Foundation, and the Mahatma Gandhi Samman by the Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sansthan for this book.

A flesh-and-blood human being, Mohandas Karamchand is an average man who finds himself, along with many others, in a particular historical and sociological configuration that sets him off on a life-altering path—towards becoming the Mahatma…

Padma Shri Giriraj Kishore founded the Institute of Technology Kanpur's, Centre for Creative Writing. He has been Convener of the Hindi Committee of Sahitya Akademi, Delhi, a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, and Emeritus Fellow of the Ministry of Culture. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992. Originally published in Hindi, this book has been translated by Prajapati Sah who retired as Professor of English and Linguistics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

In our Gandhi Studies and ILT sections, 1026 pages in hardcover, Rs 995. ISBN: 9788189738457.