Green Asia

Economic and Environmental Sustainability of the Asian Region by Sucha Singh Gill, Lakhwinder Singh and Reena Marwah is a new title from Routledge, India.

The ongoing debate on carbon emission-mitigating strategies for reducing the impact of development on the environment has undermined the principle of equity and put a question-mark on the sustainability of the development process of some of the most dynamic Asian economies. This book focuses on core themes and issues related to the sustainability of Asia’s economic development in the context of policy initiatives to alleviate environmental damage. The articles in this volume contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of the Asian economic development process under the shadow of the inequitable global economic order and the international environmental policy regime, exploring the link between well-being, economic development and environmental concerns. Based on distinctive quantitative data and a rigorous analytical framework, the articles provide rich material for scholars working in the areas of development economics and environmental concern.

In our Environment section, 487 pages, hardcover. Rs 895, ISBN: 978041581448

More than Saris

One news item that has grabbed attention even in the days of FIFA is the death of a young woman who was once a model in the heady fashion lanes of Mumbai. The Indian preoccupation with fashion is excessive, considering the extent of real problems that we face, but perhaps there is something more to this side of the new India as well. This book, an import from Damiani Press and edited by Federico Rocca on Contemporary Indian Fashion, details the phenomenon.

Indian haute-couture is conquering catwalks worldwide. This isn't a book about saris and salwars, it's a book about Indian high-fashion and how it's creating global styles without losing sight of its traditions/background.

This book documents the scene, with an in-depth look at designers as diverse as Fightercock (a collaboration between Abhishek Gupta and Nandita Basu, who claim on one of their t-shirts that "The Revolution must wear Fightercock"), AtpuG varuaG (a.k.a Gaurav Gupta, who won Breakthrough Designer of the Year at the MTV and Zoom Style Awards in 2006) and Kavita Bharthia (who is known for both Indian and Western styles, impeccably finished on hand looms, which incorporate cottons and silks, scarves, stoles and knits). Other featured designers include Gayatri Khanna, Anamika Khanna, Small Shop, Anuj Sharma, Ashish N Soni, Ayesha Depala, CUE, Deepika Govind, Drashta Sarvaiya, Falguni & Shane Peacock, Manish Arora, Nachiket Barve, Namrata Joshipura, Nimita Rathod, Nitin Bal Chauhan, Prashant Verma, Rajesh Pratap Singh, Ranna Gill, My Village, Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Savio Jon, Shantanu & Nikhil, Shantanu Goenka, Swapnil Shinde, Varun Bahl, Wendell Rodricks and Bounipun.

Contemporary Indian fashion offers a host of experimental techniques for textiles, pattern cutting and sculptural draping, as well as the mixing of natural and synthetic fibers and unlikely juxtapositions such as jersey or chiffon with leather.

A special import, the book is in paperback, oversize, 208 pages, 200 in colour. US$ 60, ISBN:9788862081009

Teaching change

Lakshmi Bhatia is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Aditi Mahavidyalaya, Delhi. Routledge have recently published her book, Education and Society in a Changing Mizoram: The Practice of Pedagogy as the first in their Transition in Northeast India series.

Located in the domain of cultural politics, the book with rich ethnographical data from Mizoram, a lesser known and understood state, brings the community, state and culture to centre-stage, along with family and stratification of the sociological discourse in education. The book argues for a re-look at school education in Mizoram, besides providing critical insights into the North East region as a whole. It also points to the dilemmas of development in that region and suggests possible ways out of the impasse.

Marking a significant departure from conventional thinking on education as 'human capital' as reflected in North-East Vision: 2020, the book strongly advocates the need for critical pedagogies based on learning from conflict; inculcating the values of tolerance and compassion as a precursor to peace; reconceptualising `development, not merely as 'economic' but as indicator of national happiness and valuing lives equally besides respect for traditional institutions, thus marking a break from the much resented paternalism that underpins all state interventions in education.

One of the first studies of its kind regarding experience and practice of education, the book makes an important contribution to the role that education can play to usher in peace and promote respect for differences.

In our Northeast Studies section, in hardcover, 276 pages. ISBN: 9780415589208

Major Steps

Meera Kosambi is a prominent Indian sociologist. She has done her PhD in sociology from the University of Stockholm and has authored several books and articles on urban sociology and woman's studies in India. She is the youngest daughter of a prominent Marxist historian and mathematician, D. D. Kosambi, and grand-daughter of Acharya Dharmananda Kosambi, prominent Buddhist Scholar and a Pāli language expert.

In her book "Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History" Kosambi states that 'The notion of the threshold, indicating the restricted periphery of the 'woman's place' in family and society, was firmly embedded in the psyche of nineteenth-century women in western India. Yet some remarkable and articulate women (who are the focus of this book) 'transgressed' patriarchal boundaries--crossing thresholds, literally and metaphorically--to make their mark in the public sphere. These Indian women created the 'first ripple feminism' of the region.

Nineteenth-century men also inbabit the book--social reformers and those who helped these women, as well as conservatives who opposed both the reformers and the progressive women. The central objective of Professor Kosambi's book is to interrogate official social history--which posits strong male reformers and passive women recipients--as well as retrieve and assess women's own pioneering contribution to their proto-feminist efforts.

The Introduction presents a conceptual framework of public/private spheres, attempts to retrieve women's subjectivity through their published narratives, and discusses questions of representation and 'voice'.

The ten essays that follow span a variety of topics--the politics of iconizing individual women, women's complex relationships to their homes and their bodies, women's exposure to education and nationalism, the nature of conjugality and 'consent', ideas of motherhood and widowhood.
Uniting all these themes is the effort to amplify women's voices and reconstruct their experiential worlds.

The book straddles the areas of Gender Studies, History, and Asian Studies while underscoring the resonance of these women's lives with those of other women across South Asia and the West. '

In our Gender Studies Section, in hardcover, Rs.695 ISBN :9788178241821

Mokṣaśāstra

The Bhagavad Gita, often being described as a concise guide to Hindu theology, also serves as a practical, self-contained guide to life. Sometimes called the Gītopaniṣad, implying its having the status of an Upanishad, the Gita is classified as a Smṛiti text. However, those branches of Hinduism that give it the status of an Upanishad also consider it a śruti or "revealed".

As it is taken to represent a summary of the Upanishadic teachings, it is also called "the Upanishad of the Upanishads". Another title is mokṣaśāstra as it shows the way to Nirvana or Moksa.

The book The Bhagavad Gita: A Sublime Hymn of Yoga, Composed by the Ancient Seer Vyasa is a unique combination of different scholarly thoughts, by Guru Nitya Chaitanya Yati and Nataraja Guru and published by D K Printworld. This book uncovers the perennial philosophy at the heart of the Gita. It transcends sectarian dogma to reveal the work as a fully-developed scientific psychology, whose insights can be readily appreciated by modern man.

In our Religion section, 477 pages, in paperback, Rs. 316. ISBN: 9788124600108

Reason Reasoned

Bina Gupta is Curators’ Professor at the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Her new book, published by the Indian Council for Philosophical Research is Reason and Experience in Indian Philosophy.

Reason and Experience in Indian Philosophy is a philological and critical analysis of two crucial philosophical concepts, viz., "reason" and "experience." The study shows that, though there is no word in Sanskrit which may be taken as equivalent of Western "reason" and "thought," such terms as "tarka," etc., clearly capture parts or aspects of what is meant by "reason" and "thought" (Denken). The second goal of the study is to show that it is misleading to translate "sruti" as revelation." Construing "sruti" as revelation." Construing "sruti" as revelation surreptitiously import a Semitic theological concept into the Vedic tradition. The case of "experience" is more promising because we have such Sanskrit worlds as "anubhava" or "anubhuti," that do translate into "experience." However, "experience" in Western thought has acquired many shades of meaning, and the study determines in what sense the Indian "anubhava" captures the Western "experience." Finally, the book demonstrates that Indian Philosophy provides an account of the cognitive process that begins with perception and culminates in wisdom (highest experience).

The whole process may be called "reason," at both ends of which we can talk of experience, which places experience not in an external opposition to reason, but rather as something that belongs to it internally. Thus, the modern Western opposion between reason and experience collapses and the two together yield an integrated process of acquisition, validation, and practical application of knowledge.

In our Philosophy section, 305 pages in hardcover, Rs 500. ISBN: 9788189963071

Changing Media

Amit Rai, Associate Professor at Stanford University has interests in, among other things, Modern Thought and Literature, Globalization Studies, New Media and Popular Hindi and Hong Kong Cinema. And the Anthropology of Monstrosity...

Rai has published on a wide array of cultural phenomenon, from sexuality and the body in Gandhi, to the idea of mimicry as resistance in images of Elvis in Hindi films. His recent book (OUP) Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India's New Media Assemblage analyzes the evolving aspects of audio-visual media. Rai argues that the fast-paced, multivalent qualities of contemporary Bollywood cinema symbolizes the changing conditions of media consumption in a globalizing India. He analyses contemporary media practices and focuses on the multiple, contradictory, and evolving aspects of audiovisual media. He sheds light on how cinema and other popular media organize bodies, populations, and spaces to manage power and sensation and to reinforce a liberalized postcolonial economy.

Rai’s experience of attending the first showing of a Bollywood film in a single-screen theatre in Bhopal––the exhibition space, the sound system, the visual style of the film, the crush of the crowd––is significant. From that event, he elicits an understanding of cinema as a historically contingent experience of pleasure, a place where the boundaries of identity and social spaces are dissolved and redrawn. Rai goes on to trace the emerging correlation between the postcolonial media assemblage and capitalist practices, such as viral marketing and the development of multiplexes and malls in India.

In our Film Studies and Media sections. Rs. 725, ISBN: 9780198066422

What the Bhadramahila saw

Paschimjatriki is the book of travel writing that Durgabati Ghose, who was born in 1905 into a prosperous Bengali family wrote after her trip to Europe in 1932, when she accompanied her husband. This has now been translated into English as The Westward Traveller and published by Orient Blackswan.

Somdatta Mandal the translator, is at the Department of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan.

The Westward Traveller is an enchanting written record of this four-month long sojourn. Filtered through her upper middle-class upbringing and perceptions, the narrative is observant—not only emphasising on a sense of place, space and landscape, but also an aesthetic, intrinsic appreciation of every destination. The writing comes alive in the author’s everyday interactions with ordinary people, be they fellow travellers or hotel owners or even beggars. Focussing on an accurate description of the ‘real world’, she is always concerned with verisimilitude.

An interesting fact about this travelogue is that even within its set pattern, it offers nuggets of history. What makes the account endearing is the various examples of intercultural encounters and wry comments, often arising from not knowing the language and making value judgments that can be cited at random. As Ashis Nandy says in his Foreword to this translated work, ‘the way Durgabati recounts her adventures in Europe makes them variations on familiar Bengali domesticity, interpersonal patterns and femininity played outside their natural locale. This gives the travelogue a stamp of predictability and at the same time, a touch of robust, irreverent charm and self-confidence.’

To translate this depiction of Europe in colonial times through the eyes of a modernising Bengali woman has been a ‘labour of love’ for translator Somdatta Mandal. Simple and lucid in style, the work retains the traces of the times in which it was originally written and is faithful to the intention of the narrative. Coloured in the expanding consciousness of an individual woman, exploring previously unknown areas of the world, away from the home and hearth characterised by conventionality, conservatism and domesticity, this travel narrative will be a significant contribution to the history of women’s travel narratives from colonial Bengal.

In our Biography section
Paperback; ISBN : 978-81-250-3991-4; Price : Rs.195

Losing the battle, losing the war

This book tells the story of why the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) lost the war that they had always dreamt of winning in Sri Lanka. It is a collection of news stories and commentaries penned by the author from 2003 to 2009 on the ethnic conflict in the country. Each piece is provided with an introduction that places it in the context in which it was written. The unfolding of the drama is brought about through conversations with Sri Lankan leaders, Tamil activists, Indian officials, Norwegian and other diplomats, human rights activists, former LTTE guerrillas and civilians.

The Tiger Vanquished: LTTE's Story provides a detailed account of the critical years when Sri Lanka's internationally backed peace process slowly led to a vicious war that the LTTE decisively lost. The introduction provides previously unpublished information, including India's covert involvement in the Norwegian-sponsored peace process and the silent war that the Indian intelligence waged against the LTTTE.

The book, from Sage, has been written by M R NARAYAN SWAMY of the Indo-Asian News Service, New Delhi.

In our Strategic Affairs section, in paperback. Rs 325. ISBN: 9788132104599

Keeping her alive

Given the appalling state of public health in most of the country, child mortality is a major problem. One that is compounded by infanticide, particularly female infanticide, which completely skews the sex ratio in many states of the nation.

Books for Change, Bangalore, have a new title out by Koy Thomson and Ravi S K, BENEATH THE GRINDING STONE which describes a story of change-makers confronting patriarchy. Infanticide is the cut-price way to rid families of girl children. Killing your own child or ‘permitting’ their killing is an unnatural and appalling act, a powerful social taboo. Yet this slaughter of innocents is a socially approved practice in which mothers and mother’s mothers are complicit in turning against their own. Young girls who survive will turn to their grandmothers and say, “You tried to have me killed”. The astounding part of this story is that female infanticide and girl specific abortion are simply the outcome of every day discrimination against women and girls, running according to its internal logic. This discrimination seems to have reached a tipping point and is spinning freely towards its logical end- the extermination of girls before or at birth. What brought on this tipping point? Why has international law not recognized this result for what it is, the gender equivalent of genocide? And if it did, might we see the institution of patriarchy held as complicit in a crime against humanity?

In our Gender Studies section, Rs 120, 102 pages. ISBN:9788182910836

Law, First and Foremost

Among the first women to leave India in pursuit of higher education Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954) who studied at Oxford was also one of the first Indian women to practice at the Calcutta High Court.

Suparna Gooptu teaches history at Calcutta University, where she is also Director of the Gandhi Studies. Her Cornelia Sorabjee, India's Pioneer Woman Lawyer: A biography has just been brought out as an Oxford India Paperback by OUP.

Appointed to a senior office under the British Indian government, Sorabji championed the cause of opening up the legal profession to women much before they were formally allowed to plead before the courts of law.

The biography, which appeared in hardcover in 2006 has used a large amount of data and is supported by insightful analysis. Reviewing it in The Hindu, then, Geeta Ramaseshan said "Gooptu's biography skilfully draws a canvas of an individual who was in many ways ahead of her times and places Cornelia in the intersection of gender, class and racial politics. While tracing Cornelia's education, Gooptu narrates the complex way in which Oxford provided an ideological justification for the notion of the Empire.

Gooptu argues that Cornelia's struggles were located within the matrix of imperial politics where the woman's question was also subsumed within the Tory imperial ideology. "Even when British women were provided a public space, they had to work within the parameters of the Empire." Exposed to this complex English political atmosphere of the late 19th century, Cornelia disagreed with Ramabai and felt that social change in India could not be brought through legislation because India was unprepared for it. Gooptu's analysis and case studies of Cornelia's interaction with `purdanashins' and Cornelia's fight against male bias in the legal profession makes fascinating reading drawing as it were from Cornelia's own struggles in establishing herself as a lawyer and the problems faced by `purdanashins'. `Purdahnashins' could not publicly participate in the management of their estates.

The male agent, who was her sole trustee, undertook the administration of the trust. Cases of abuses and betrayals of trust were in plenty. Even in such cases a `purdanashin' could complain only through her trustee due to her seclusion. If she was a guardian of a male heir to the estate she and her minor children became wards of the court in British India or the collector. Emphasising the denial of justice for such women Cornelia proposed the appointment of a lady legal adviser to the court of wards for each province who would be able to serve their needs. The book draws a lot of materials from Cornelia's private papers and correspondence that reveal crucial dimensions of her private self. The author places Cornelia in context while providing a rich analysis of the negotiations she chose in her professional life, the choices she made in her personal life and the ideological beliefs to which she held on. Gooptu provides an insightful biography of a remarkable woman who has remained neglected in studies on India's transition to modernity and also in the historiography of women and gender. "

In our Biography, Gender, History and Law sections, Rs 295 in paperback. ISBN: 9780198067924

Another Tongue

Many of us in the subcontinent grow up bi- or tri-lingual, and often don't acquire new languages later in life. Exceptions are found aplenty at JNU, a place where people do come from all over the country to learn new languages- given the preeminence of our School of Language, Literature, and Culture Studies.


A new reprint from Viva by Zhad Hong Han, Fossilization in Adult Second Language Acquisition addresses a deep problem in the learning of languages late in life, the "fossilization", where the language level remains at a relatively low state, unable to evolve or progress... This book addresses a fundamental question in second language acquisition research, which is: why are learners, adults in particular, unable to develop the level of competence they aspire to in spite of continuous and sustained exposure to the target language, adequate motivation to learn, and sufficient opportunity for practice?

A long and widely held explanation is that fossilization (Selinker, 1972) has occurred somewhere in the course of learning. But what exactly is fossilization? How does it related to the above question? By means of a macroscopic and microscopic analysis, the author deconstructs the theoretical construct and evaluates its empirical basis, and in so doing, provides a window into the nature and the etiology of the lack of success observed across the second language learning community as well as within individual learners. The key issues discussed herein include: conceptual diversities and complexities surrounding fossilization, Critical Period effects, the preprogramming function of native language, methodological approaches to researching fossilization, empirical evidence, the modular nature of fossilization, linguistic structures prone to fossilization, and the relationship between second language teaching and fossilization.

The book delves deep into the ground of fossilization addressing all fundamental conceptual issues and covering a wide range of empirical studies. Crystallizing the complicated research and speculation of fossilization of over 30 years it will provide a source for constructing the database on which future understanding of fossilization will depend.

In our Linguistics section, in paperback, Rs 395. ISBN: 9788130905167

Politics, Religion, History

Yoda Press bring out the third edition of Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement, 1870-1920 by Usha Sanyal in their New Perspectives on Indian Pasts series.

Sanyal is a part time lecturer of Queens University of Charlotte and also a Visiting Assistant Professor of History in Wingate University. Her main research area is on the role of Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and Ahl-e Sunnat in Jamaat Movement in Britsh India. This resulted in her 2005 book on Ahmad Riza Khan, In the Path of the Prophet.

Devotional Islam and Politics in British India presents Sanyal’s nuanced study of the Sunni scholar Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi, his writing and the Ahl-e Sunnat movement. During the formative period of this movement, between the 1880s and 1920, the debates in which the Ahl-e Sunnat ‘ulama engaged with other north Indian ‘ulama’ pertained mainly to religion. The ‘ulama tried to inculcate in individual Muslims a stricter adherence to the shari’a or law to bring about reform or to engage in tajdid (renewal of faith). This effort at renewal was inspired in many instances by the example of the Prophet Muhammad. Their efforts at reform resulted in the opening of schools, the publication of tracts and journals, and the writing of fatwa’s (legal rulings) on concrete problems raised by members of the community with the ‘ulama emerging in the process as an important source of authority in the absence of Muslim state power.

In our History section, in paperback, 392 pages, Rs. 395. ISBN: 9788190666862

Earth Worms

Amarendra and Samarendra Das made a phenomenal documentary some years ago titled Wira Pdika or MATIRO PUKO, COMPANY LOKO which translates as Earth Worm, Company Man. This was made with and for the indigenous people of Orissa, whose speech, song, dance, demonstration and gesture comes alive here in a way that is only possible because the film-maker and the camera have entered this indigenous world, and surrendered to the intention of serving them, becoming a medium for their expression… Basically the film interweaves a number of separate stories around resistance to mining and metal factory projects, and the big dams which supply them with hydro-power and water.

What Adivasis and Dalits actually say is rarely heard in the media. In this film, as in their daily life, they speak with a clarity and vividness that pulls blinkers off our eyes, and brings us back to a reality grounded firmly in nature… Orissa’s Adivasis have much to teach us, and though it exposes the tremendous injustice and hardship they face from the mining/metals industry, this is also a film of tremendous hope and possibility. This is a people’s movement facing huge odds, and it’s not going to disappear. We in the civilized world may be complacent or cynical about what’s happening to the environment. Here are people prepared to take a stand. As a villager sings in a famous movement song,

“Don’t you see the danger?

What we are facing today

You will face tomorrow

You are not immune…”

And now, Samarendra Das and Felix Padel write about this in a new book, published by Orient Blackswan, Out of this Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel.

Capping the biggest mountains in south Odisha (as the state of Orissa has now been renamed) are some of the world’s best deposits of Bauxite, the ore for aluminium—mineral wealth to bring prosperity to one of India’s poorest states. But for tribal people who have lived around them since history began, these mountains are sacred—not a resource to be exploited, but a source of life itself, through the water they store, and release in perennial streams.

So metal factories, built in tribal areas with a view to mining the mountain summits, are seen as a new colonial invasion, to be resisted. Thousands of Adivasis have already been displaced, in a process of cultural genocide, that involves notorious scams, and corrupts the values of civil society at the same time as wasting irreplaceable resources.

Aluminium is a metal we take for granted in hundreds of artefacts. But what do we understand about its real costs? This book traces a hidden history, coming alive through hundreds of voices and stories, of how one country after another swallowed promises of prosperity, and plunged into a cycle of exploitation and unrepayable debt. What is the link between the massive meltdown of Iceland’s banks, and the promotion of dams and smelters? Between the mafia-style looting of Russia’s assets and the rise to power of a succession of aluminium barons? Why did the US set a limit during the 1950s-60s and start to outsource aluminium factories to other, poorer countries, such as Ghana, Guinea, Jamaica, India?

The answer lies in hidden subsidies and prohibitive ‘externality costs’.

Making aluminium consumes vast quantities of water and electricity. The industry is driven by a cartel that fuses mining companies, investment bankers, government deals, metals traders and arms manufacturers. Secret deals motivate the projects. Behind these stand metals traders in derivatives, in London and other capitals, whose deals drive the industry through futures contracts.

Adivasis who oppose this invasion of their landscape by aluminium projects in East India face an enemy as remorseless and difficult to fathom as the colonial East India Company. Mining projects are fuelled by an entrenched notion of development so powerful, that democracy and human rights often seem to wither in the face of it.

This penetrating anthropological study uncovers an epic clash of ideologies that pits metals traders against Indian citizens whose lifestyle is a model of long-term sustainability.

In our Anthropology section, with a foreword by Arundhati Roy, in hardcover, 752 pages, Rs 895. ISBN: 9788125038672