A Polish connection

Danuta Stasik at the Oriental Institute of University of Warsaw is a scholar of Hindi, both the language and the literature. She works on Ramkatha (राम कथा), the history of Hindi literature, and translation among other things. A recent work of hers, published by Manohar, is the study of the Ramayana, The Infinite Story: The Past and Present of the Ramayanas in Hindi.

The story of the Ramayana is well-known in all Indian languages and Hindi literature is no exception to it. It has a long and rich tradition based on Ramkatha that through the centuries has challenged many authors.

The main aim of this work is twofold। Firstly, it seeks to analyse the development of the Ramayana tradition in Hindi literature from the perspective of its most important achievements against their historical background and socio-cultural context. Secondly, it attempts to examine the relationship between the story, i.e. Ramkatha, as told by different authors, and Ram, the protagonist of the Ramayana, who functions as a cultural hero and serves as model of right behaviour for the others and at the same time appears to be one of the most important factors in the continuing popularity of the tradition.

The volume opens with an introduction that outlines the diversity of the Ramayana tradition in India, beginning with the first known Ramayana ascribed to the sage Valmiki। It discuses later developments in Sanskrit and vernacular literatures, as exemplified by their best achievements originating from Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina contexts. It also considers the implications of all these works for the unfolding of the tradition in Hindi. In its closing portion, the volume provides an overview of the growth of the cult of Ram in North India.

In our Religion and Translation sections, in hardcover, 320 pages Rs 995, ISBN: 9788173048159

Women's Health

To be endorsed by both Brinda Karat and Shabana Azmi is perhaps not surprising, but endorsement by such high-profile readers brings its share of attention.

Mohan Rao, colleague at JNU, and Sarah Sexton edit Markets and Malthus: Population, Gender, and Health in Neo-liberal Times which explores the ideas and institutions that were framed at the 1994 United Nations population conference in Cairo and traces their trajectories sixteen years down the line. Why were Third World feminists profoundly critical of the Cairo consensus and process? How has the health of people around the world been affected by neo-liberal economic policies? What have these meant for women’s rights, including reproductive rights?

The book presents detailed case studies from various countries ranging from India and China, to Egypt, Tanzania, Uganda, and across Africa to Argentina, Peru, and throughout Latin America, as well as overarching themed essays. From the politics of abortion and immigration to rising levels of fundamentalist violence and sex selective abortions, the volume explores a range of issues from several vantage points. It offers startling new insights into these issues by linking them to neo-liberal economic policies that have profoundly shaped health policies globally.

The endorsement by Karat goes " This remarkable collection of essays shows us, through case studies from across the world, how the Cairo Conference`s call for reproductive rights have been subverted by neo-liberal economic policies to promote fertility control at the cost of women`s health" while Azmi says "the current climate when overpopulation arguments are again prominent, this book is essential reading for health and women`s rights activists and indeed policy-makers. It explores how the promises of reproductive health and rights at the ICPD in Cairo in 1994 were hollowed out by neo-liberalism. Both market fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism took their toll."

With essays by Mohan Rao, Sarah Sexton, Sumati Nair, Betsy Hartman and others, MARKETS AND MALTHUS is 368 pages in hardcover, Rs 795. ISBN: 9788132102977

In the lurch

Monobina Gupta brings her journalist experience to write on the state of West Bengal. Subtitled Time Travels among Bhadralok Marxists, Left Politics in Bengal traces the Left Front government’s rise to power in the wake of the Emergency. It tells the story of how a communist almost became India’s Prime Minister; and how the CPI-M powering its way to electoral victory through promises of empowerment to the most wretched, began gradually to betray its followers and abandon its ideology. Tracking the heady 60s and 70s, Left Politics in Bengal describes the CPI-M’s evolution from a party leading peasant movements to one that unleashed violence to take land away from the peasantry; from a party of unstinted opposition to the Congress to one keeping its former adversary in power at the Centre.

The author narrates a tale both deeply personal and objective. Through academic histories, literature, music, films, narratives of former comrades and her own journalistic and personal experience, she explores the structures and relations of power; specific not just to the CPI-M but communist parties in general. Emphasising both the representation of the Left in popular mentality, and the institutional changes wrought by the party in government, she creates a nuanced, well-observed portrait of a government’s fall from grace.

From Orient Blackswan, in our Politics section, 287 pages, Rs 245, ISBN: 9788125040248

Keeping the faith

Aditya Prakashan specialize in books on Buddhism and Hindusim. They have published all the books under the renowned Satapitaka Series from the International Academy of Indian cultures, New Delhi for the last few decades. The latest few books in this series are featured in this post.

In at No. 629 in the series is Sanskrit manuscripts from Tibet: Vimalaprabha commentary on the Kalacakra-tantra, and Pancaraksa, reproduced by Lokesh Chandra. This volume is a facsimile edition of two ancient Sanskrit manuscripts from Tibet, which were actually used by Indian acaryas and Tibetan lotsavas for translation into Tibetan. They are valuble for the comments of the lotsavas written in the cursive Tibetan script dbu.med on the palmeaves themselves. The two texts are: (i) Vimalaprabha commentary on the Kalacakra-tantra, and (ii) Pancaraksa. The script of the manuscript of Vimalaprabha shows that it was written in Magadha and belongs to the early 11th century. It is the earliest manuscript of the Vimalaprabha. Jagannath Upadhyaya, Vrajavallabh Dvivedi and S. S. Bahulkar edited the commentary and original Tantra in 1986-1994 from the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath. They used six manuscripts, three of them in Devanagari script, two in Newari script, and one in old Bengali script. The present manuscript is the oldest of them, and merits a new edition. The five texts of the PANCARAKSA have been treated as separate titles in the Kanjur (Toh. 558, 559, 561, 562, 563). They were translated by Ye.ses.sde with the help of Silendrabodhi, Jnanasiddhi, Sakyaprabha, Jinamitra and Danasila, during the reign of Ral.pal.can who ruled from 817 to 836. It was a period of great literary activity, when a common terminology was developed by a royal commission with eminent Indian and Tibetan scholars for the translation of complex philosophic ideas. The outcome of this historic effort was the Mahavyutpatti, which is an astounding linguistic work of transforming a primal Tibetan language into a valid literary language of Classical sophistication. The Sanskrit manuscript of the Five Raksa texts reproduced here should go back to the early ninth century. It is a glorious symbol of the foundations of the literary heritage of Tibet.

Oversize (29 x 43 cm) in hardcover, 144 pages, Rs 1500. ISBN: 9788177420944

And Nos. 630 and 631 are the two-volume set, Buddhist Poetry, Thought, and Diffusion encompasses the research of the greatest Indologists of the West from 1923 to 1973 in a pan-Asian approach. From Sanskrit they passed into Tibetan, from kavyas to the transcendence of philosophical subtleties in the Abhisamayalankara, from Sogdian to Chinese across the deep sands of Central Asia, from Queen Ken Dedes of the Majapahit to the sublime science of Maitreya, from the mudras of the Durgati-parisodhana mandala to the Ten Stages of a Bodhisattva's meditational way in the Dasabhumika-sutra which was translated into Chinese in AD 297 by Dharmaraksa, the great Yueh-chih master who spoke thirty six languages of the Central Asian kingdoms. With a foreword by Lokesh Chandra, these volumes collect the works of Harris Birkeland, Oslo; J. J. L. Duyvendak, Leiden; P. H. L. Eggermont, The Hague; C. L. Fabri, Leiden; B. Faddegon, Amsterdam; Erik Haarh, Copenhagen; H. Hackmann, Amsterdam; Walther Heissig, Bonn; E. H. Johnston, Banburg; Sten Konow, Oslo; Per Kvaerne, Bergen; N.D. Mironov, Ariana, Tunisia; Georg Morgenstierne, Kristinia; E. Obermiller, Leningrad; J. Rahder, The Hague; Nirmala Sharma, New Delhi; W. F. Stutterheim, Batavia (Now Jakarta); F. W. Thomas, Oxford; Friedrich Weller, Leipzig.

In hardcover, 1218 pages, Rs 2750, ISBN: 9788177420951.

All in the family

Releasing today at the India International Centre in New Delhi is Permanent Black's Dharmanand Kosambi: The Essential Writings that has been edited and translated by Meera Kosambi, his granddaughter.

As indicated in recent articles in the Hindustan Times and in the Times Higher Education Supplement by the Delhi University historian, Nayanjot Lahiri, D Kosambi is not as well known as his son D D Kosambi in part because he wrote mainly in Marathi.

He was, however, a remarkable man, as is brought out by this translation of his works. "The life and writings of Dharmanand Kosambi (1876–1947), pioneering scholar of Pali and Buddhist Studies, comprise the substance of this book.

Born in rural Goa, Dharmanand came under the spell of the Buddha’s teachings during his adolescence. As described in his long autobiographical memoir (included here), at an early age he set off on an incredible journey of austere self-training across the length and breadth of Britain’s Indian Empire, halting to educate himself at places connected with Buddhism. His sojourns included living in Sri Lanka to master Pali as a novitiate-scholar, in a Burmese cave as a bhikshu, and in some viharas of North India—begging for monastic sustenance—as well as in Nepal and Sikkim which he reached after arduous, sometimes barefoot, treks. Over these itinerant years Dharmanand acquired such mastery of the Buddhist canon that he was variously appointed to teach and research at Calcutta, Baroda, Harvard, and Leningrad.

As a thinker Dharmanand blended Buddhist ethics, Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of truth and non-violence, and the ideals of socialism. He exchanged letters with the Mahatma, worked for his causes, and died in the approved Buddhist/Jain manner by voluntary starvation at Sevagram ashram. Arguably, no Indian scholar’s life has been as exemplary as Dharmanand’s, or has approximated as closely to the nobility and saintliness of the Mahatma’s.

Despite his mastery of several languages, Dharmanand chose to write in Marathi because of his strong region-specific commitment. Consequently, very few today are familiar with his copious output in Buddhist Studies, and fewer still with his contribution to social and political thought.

By translating and marshalling his most significant writings, Meera Kosambi shows the manifold dimensions of Dharmanand’s personality, and the profoundly moral character of his intellectual journeys. Her Introduction also contextualizes the life, career, and achievement of one of modern India’s greatest scholar-savants."

In hardcover, 430 pages, Rs 695. ISBN: 9788178243030

SEARCH in Action

Rani Bang, a co-founder of SEARCH, the Society for Education Action and Research in Community Health is a pioneer in the field of Indian healthcare. Stree Books, Kolkata have just brought out her Putting Women First: Women and Health in a Rural Community.

Written with Rupa Chinai, a distinguished journalist who has specialized on developmental journalism with a focus on health and Sunanda Khorgade, who works with the women’s health programme at SEARCH, the book has a foreword by Rahul Goswami, a policy analyst and writer based in Goa who says "this book is as much about the lives and times of ordinary people as it is about social medicine."

It is a doctor’s story about her practice, which lets her extrapolate about the realities of rural India for all Indians. Set in Gadchiroli, a district in central India, known for being an underdeveloped and backward area, it is where Dr. Rani Bang and her husband, Dr. Abhay Bang, set up the clinic for the Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health (SEARCH) and to practise medicine that explicitly catered to the Raj Gond, Madiya Gond, Pardhan and Halibi, the dominant tribal groups, along with non-tribal poor people who live in the area. This settlement goes back to prehistory and is a part of the ancient Dandakaranya forest mentioned in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

Rani Bang’s research found that 92 percent of women in this region had no access to treatment for gynaecological disorders in the absence of women doctors. Such neglect was exacerbated by ‘development’ since rural families were, and remain, unprepared for the rapid changes wrought in the spheres of education, information, material enhancement and changes in lifestyle, which impact on relationships and health.

The book plays many roles: a commentary on the ‘chronic myopia’ of a planning process that refuses to see millions of Indians or to think of the ways in which their lives could be bettered; careful observations on the enormous social changes that impact on tribal society where traditional kinship and ecological systems are being sorely stressed; and a logbook of case medicine.

In their own way, the Bangs have set in motion a type of revolution that equips people, communities and administrators with the tools to ‘build an indigenous expression of development, one in which the fundamentals of healthcare, interdependence and sustainable economics are paramount’. The last chapter of the book summarizes the author’s recom-mendations for policy makers.

In our Public Health and Gender sections, in hardcover, 300pages, Rs 700. ISBN 9788185604961

A rose is a rose is a rose

The list of contributors to the book Bengaluru, Bangalore, Bengaluru: Imaginations and their times edited by Narendar Pani, Sindhu Radhakrishna and Kishor G Bhat (Sage, New Delhi 2010) is impressive. M K Gandhi, Mirza Ismail, Thomas Munro, U R Ananthamurthy...

Probing into history beyond mere historical facts, this book focuses on the ‘imaginations’ that have determined the course of Bengaluru over the last two-and-a-half centuries. It puts together contemporary accounts of the imaginations of those who were heard at each point of time. This approach is particularly relevant in the India of the current time where debates on history are largely a matter of choosing one set of historical facts over the other.

The imaginations in the book relate to those of the Bengaluru of the eighteenth century that the British colonised; the nineteenth century Bangalore they ruled, directly or indirectly; the post-Independence Bangalore of the twentieth century; and the Bengaluru of the twenty-first century. It identifies the events that marked the turning points in the history of the city over those centuries, from the Battle for Bangalore in 1791 to the battles on the city’s roads in the twenty-first century. It then picks the ‘words’ that capture the vision that prompted each event, whether it was in the form of Thomas Munro’s letter home, Seshadri Iyer’s report to the Assembly on the plague or the prospectus of the Initial Public Offer of shares by Infosys.

This work, which provides a new picture of Bengaluru’s history as well as a method of looking at the past is quite different from most Indian historical studies.

In our Sociology, History and Urban Studies sections, hardcover, 316 pages, Rs 795. ISBN: 9788132103035

SwB is 5!

Today is our 5th birthday... and to celebrate, our first eBook appears as an App on the iTunes App Store!

Lilavati’s Daughters: The Women Scientists of India is a book that we wrote about from the time it was released by the Indian Academy of Sciences. As some of you will know, the book, which is a collection of essays by working women scientists in India (with a few biographies as well) has been brought out as part of an initiative to increase the representation of women in science in India. The book has been available for direct purchase from the Indian Academy of Sciences in Bangalore, or online through SwB.

The book now debuts on iTunes in a new format, for the iPad or iPhone, and has been developed in collaboration with Fliplog, a Bangalore based company. We are very excited about this new medium, and hope to reach a wider audience. Here's the link to the iTunes site for Lilavati's Daughters.

Meanwhile, here is the post we did on LD when it was first released:

An issue that concerns the scientific establishment in the country - and, it must be acknowledged, in most countries- is the low numbers of students opting for a career in the sciences. A second matter of concern is the lack of diversity in the types of students who do come to the sciences, and here, the number of women who choose a scientific career is particularly low. Especially as a proportion of the number of women who get an education in the sciences.

The Indian Academy of Sciences in Bangalore has taken an initiative in probing these issues. On the matter of women in the sciences, they have set up the Women in Science (or WiS) panel. As one of the more tangible of their activities, the WiS panel has asked about one hundred women scientists who are based in India to write about themselves, what brought them to science and what has kept them going... This collection of essays, entitled Lilavati's Daughters. The women scientists of India, was released two days ago at the annual meeting of the Indian Academy. The essays are both biographical and autobiographical, and typically run about three or four pages each... Ideal dipping material that one can read in bits and pieces, and of the hundred or so contributors there is a wide representation... Physicists, biologists, chemists, mathematicians, doctors, geoscientists, computer scientists... and from all parts of India. The title of the book "is drawn from The Lilavati, a twelfth century treatise in which the mathematician Bhaskaracharya addresses a number of problems to his daughter, Lilavati. Although legend has it that Lilavati never married, her intellectual legacy lives on in the form of her daughters - the women scientists of India". What makes a successful career in science possible for a woman? Many answers to this question can be found somewhere in the essays written by Lilavati's Daughters. The book is directed towards the reading public. A young student with research ambitions will find this an important collection where she or he can learn firsthand of women who functioned and achieved their goals in the Indian social and academic environment. Others will also find the essays to be of value and interest for what they say. And as is often the case, also for what they do not say..." Edited by Rohini Godbole and Ram Ramaswamy, both members of the WiS Panel of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, the book is available online exclusively through Scholars. In our Gender Studies, and Biography Sections, 368 pages, paperback. Rs 325 (inclusive of postage) within India, and US$25 (again inclusive of postage) outside India. ISBN 978-81-8465-005-1

Post-Ultimate

Aditya Nigam, Joint Director of the Programme in Social and Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies is particularly interested in cultural politics and is engaged in attempting to understand political practices beyond limits of ‘political science’. His new book, published by Viva, New Delhi, is After Utopia: Modernity, Socialism, and the Postcolony.

After Utopia is an attempt to think new political practices and subjectivities in the twenty-first century. It recognizes that our present demands a reinvention of the great dream of a world beyond capitalism and a world without borders that marxism once dreamt of. It argues that if the world today has to save itself from impending all-round disaster, brought on by the ravages of capital and Empire, it must once again confront questions of class and property relations. It must also reclaim the earth from capital. But After Utopia is written with the deep awareness of the post-utopian world that we inhabit, where there are no fixed and ready-made answers to those questions that marxism once posed. They can and do arise in entirely unanticipated ways and demand fresh responses.

The author therefore argues that this requires a fundamental restructuring of our vision – away from state-dependent strategies of transformation, by recognizing the power of shared molecular economies that constitute the practices of everyday life in large parts of the world. Such a restructuring alone can enable us to find the resources for a new and ecologically sound way of thinking about an egalitarian future.

In our Politics section, in hardcover, 292 pages, Rs 895. ISBN 9788130910246

Exposed Histories

Sarmistha Dutta Gupta is a scholar, translator and activist who has published earlier with Stree has a new book out. In Identities and Histories: Politics and Women’s Writings in Bengal she explores the interface between women’s writing and politics and studies gender identities in their shifting interrelations with other categories of identity like class and religion. Focusing on what Bengali middle-class women wrote in leading literary and political journals of the 1920s to the 1950s: Probasi, Saogat, Jayashree, Mandira, Gharey-Bairey and in the daily newspaper of the Communist Party of India, Swadhinata, the author interrogates the fashioning of different kinds of selfhood of women through papers subscribing to different ideologies.

Literary journals like the prestigious Probasi, founded and edited by Ramananda Chatterji from 1901, encouraged women to bring their refined femininity to the outside world while remaining contained within enlightened domesticity. Saogat, founded in 1918 by Mohammad Naseeruddin, madewriters out of Muslim women within the confines of their homes. By the 1940s, as women became more adept writers, they were shifted to a separate domain, Mahila Saogat, and later to the weekly Begum.

Jayashree, Mandira and Gharey-Bairey were committed to expanding the political consciousness of women. Leela Roy (Nag), an early nationalist and feminist, founded Jayashree in 1931, to bring like-minded women together against the empire. Mandira was founded in 1938 by Kalyani Bhattacharjee and Kamala Mukherjee who had met while incarcerated as political prisoners and later joined the Congress Mahila Sangha. Increasingly dominated by Congress political compulsions, by 1948 it had a male editor. Begun in 1948, Gharey- Bairey’s prime founders were leading Communists Manikuntala Sen and Kanak Mukherjee of the Mahila Atmaraksha Samity, who tried to keep it free of party control. Divisions within the fracturing party brought on its brought on its demise. Swadhinata, founded in 1945 by the Communist Party of India, addressed the large majority of Bengali women for the first time. But here too ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ spheres of work were sustained and women’s writing gradually got confined to women’s pages.

Exposing hitherto neglected aspects of cultural politics in Bengal through incisive analysis of largely uncharted material, the book makes structural connections between what women produced and the politics of the public as well as the private spheres.

In Gender Studies, in hardcover, 306 pages, Rs 700. ISBN 9788190676021

Law & Society

With Githa Hariharan as their "Line Editor", and with the likes of Upendra Baxi, Nivedita Menon, and Sanjoy Hazarika on their Advisory Board, the National Law School of India's Socio-Legal Review has much going for it.

Edited by Vatsala Sahay and a team that includes Mallika Abidi, Raeesa Vakik, Sahana Manjesh and Vrinda Bhandari, the Socio-Legal Review (SLR) is a student-edited, peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal published annually by the Law and Society Committee of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. The Journal aims to be a forum that involves, promotes and engages students and scholars to express and share their ideas and opinions on themes and methodologies relating to the interface of law and society.

SLR thus features guest articles by eminent scholars as well as student essays, providing an interface for the two communities to interact.

The Journal subscribes to an expansive view on the interpretation of “law and society” thereby keeping its basic criteria for contributions simply that of high academic merit, as long as there is a perceivable link. This would include not just writing about the role played by law in social change, or the role played by social dynamics in the formulation and implementation of law, but also writing that simply takes cognizance of legal institutions/ institutions of governance/administration, power structures in social commentary and so on. Through this effort, the journal also hopes to fill the lacunae relating to academic debate on socio-legal matters among law students.

Socio-Legal Review welcomes contributions for its seventh volume to be released in 2011.

Here are some guidelines, but for any clarifications, please write to them at slr@nls.ac.in. All contributions submitted to the journal should be original and should not be simultaneously considered by any other publication. The Editorial Board has refrained from imposing a theme. A submission is welcome as long as it fits within the general mandate of the Journal, as outlined above.

1. Contributions should be mailed only in a soft copy to slr@nls.ac.in, the subject of the mail being ‘Submission for 2011 volume’. Biographical information is to be provided in a removable title page.
2. The Journal is accepting contributions for Articles and Short Articles. Articles should not ordinarily exceed 8000 words, and Short Articles should not ordinarily exceed 3000 words. The Editorial Board reserves the right to reject without review manuscripts that exceed the word limit substantially.
3. The last date for submission is November 30th, 2010. Submissions made after this date will be considered for publication in the next volume.
4. All submissions are to be made via e-mail as .doc documents (preferably Microsoft Word 2003).
5. SLR follows the Harvard Blue Book – A Uniform System of Citation (19/e) style of referencing. Contributors are requested to comply with the same.
   
   

The Persistence of Cruelty

In Khairlanji, on 29 September 2006, 44-year-old Surekha Bhotmange and her daughter Priyanka Bhotmange were stripped, paraded naked, and raped repeatedly. Surekha’s sons Roshan and Sudhir were lynched. The entire village was involved. The four bodies were dumped into a canal. The Bhotmanges were dalit. The Bhotmanges have been forgotten. After all, two dalits are murdered every day in India.

Anand Teltumbde's Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop is now followed by an even more serious analysis of the events of 2006, in The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders & India’s Hidden Apartheid, also from Navayana.

While the caste system has been formally abolished under the Indian constitution, according to official statistics, every eighteen minutes a crime is committed on a Dalit. The gouging out of eyes, the hacking off of limbs and being burned alive or stoned to death are routine in the atrocities perpetrated against india’s 170 million Dalits. What drives people to commit such inhuman crimes?

The Persistence of Caste uses the shocking case of Khairlanji, the brutal murder of four members of a dalit family in 2006, to explode the myth that caste no longer matters. Analyzing context and crime, it seeks to locate this event in the political economy of the development process India has followed after Independence. Teltumbde demonstrates how caste has shown amazing resilience – surviving feudalism, capitalist industrialization and a republican Constitution – to still be alive and well today, despite all denial, under neoliberal globalization.

Anand Teltumbde’s analysis of the public, ritualistic massacre of a dalit family in 21st century India exposes the gangrenous heart of our society... This is not a book about the last days of relict feudalism, but a book about what modernity means in India says Arundhati Roy. I would hope to see it read by every Indian activist and also foreigners who do not see how odious the caste system is, from Samir Amin.

In our Dalit Studies section, this edition is only for sale in South Asia. In paperback, 192 pages Rs 200. ISBN 9788189059286

Tansen's followers

Miyan Tansen is reputed to have started fires by singing the raag Deepak... Those flames, fanned over centuries, have given rise to the several gharanas of Hindustani music.

In this new book from Bibliophile South Asia, Ashok Da. Ranade writes of some of the main exponents of hindustani classical music of recent times. In Some Hindustani Musicians: They Lit The Way he discusses the life and art of, among others, Pt. Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, Kesarbai Kerkar, Pt. Omkarnath Thakur, Ustad Bade Gulam Ali Khan, Heerabai Badodekar, Mallikarjun Mansoor, and contemporary singers such as Bhimsen Joshi and Gangubai Hangal.

Today Indian Music has won a place of pride in the global musical heritage. Hindustani classical music and its vocal stream have been major influences in creating the larger Indian musical tradition. Music being a performing art, lives in performance. These performances are obviously realized through performing ideas and their exploration by artists concerned. The identification of performing ideas provide the prime clue to the qualitative forces in any artist's work. Dr. Ranade has attempted to identify and analyze 19 major performers' performing ideas as they became accessible to him in mehfils, recordings or teaching sessions. Four other musicians are also briefly discussed. These music-makers -- and of course others not discussed here -- have lit the 20th century, i.e., our immediate and adjacent living past. Hence the special contemporary quality of their work. They belong to different gharanas and language-regions and the variety of their approaches is a challenge as well as delight.

Himself a hindustani classical vocalist, Ashok Da. Ranade is also composer, musicologist, ethnomusicologist, voice-culturist and a teacher with degrees in literature, law and music. He has held many positions, won many awards, fellowships and as visiting professor in India and abroad and has published several books, many of which are available on Scholars.

In our Biography and Ethnomusicology sections, in hardcover, 388pages, Rs 750. ISBN: 9788185002736.

Keeping Promises

And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Frost's poem rings true for many people of high achievement who only rarely feel that they can rest on their laurels... And Professor C N R Rao (or CNR as he is commonly known) is one who leaves you in no doubt of his continuing commitment to science, to the development of science, and to research. And the many miles left to go...

For one who has achieved so much- enough for many lifetimes for most scientists who work in India!- CNR is the essential scientist, inquisitive to the last, and forever enthused by questions. Apart from his prodigious scientific output, he has contributed greatly to science administration, serving on the Science Advisory Council to several of our Prime Ministers, built institutions, starting with the IIT Kanpur where he helped create a superb department of Chemistry in the 1960's, to the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Jakkur, the institute where he now works

His autobiography, Climbing The Limitless Ladder: A Life In Chemistry has just been published by the Indian Institute of Science Press and World Scientific. This important book is an autobiographical account of doing scientific research in India. It provides an insight to the perseverance of a scientist from a develpong country. His relentless pursuit of excellence in chemistry for more than half a century is a remarkable source of inspiration to young scientists facing modern-day challenges.

In our Biography section, in paper and hardcover, 232 pages, Rs 895. ISBN: 9789814307864.

Save our Land!

Earthcare Books, based in Kolkata, publish and distribute books on environmental issues and on just and sustainable development. One of the titles they have brought out is Bhaskar Save and Bharat Mansata's The Great Agricultural Challenge.

Addressing the mounting spate of farmers’ suicides—its roots and remedies—Bhaskar Save writes in his open letter to M. S. Swaminathan: “I am an 84-year old farmer with six decades of experience.... I say with conviction that only by organic farming in harmony with Nature, can India sustainably provide abundant wholesome food and meet every basic need of all—to live in health, dignity and peace.” “You are the ‘father’ of India’s so-called ‘Green Revolution’ that flung open the floodgates of toxic agro-chemicals, ravaging the lands and lives of millions of Indian farmers over the past 40 years....” What follows is a devastating critique of the government’s agricultural policy, and an eloquent plea for urgent fundamental re-orientation. It reveals deep insights into the ground realities and wounded potential of Indian farming. A reader comments, “This is reminiscent of the native Chief Seattle’s immortal letter to ‘the Great White Chief’ of the marauding soldiers.”

Swaminathan—heading the National Commission on Farmers—diplomatically wrote back to Save, “I have long admired your work and am grateful to you for the detailed suggestions.... valuable comments and recommendations. We shall take them into consideration in our final report.”

Here is the whole fascinating record of the correspondence and annexures, including one on Save’s farm—a veritable ‘food forest’ and net supplier of water, energy and fertility to the eco-system of the region, rather than a net consumer! The book contains too the Civil Society and Farmers’ Representation: ‘Eleven Point Holistic Ecological Agriculture Agenda for India’; as also an incisive critique of the Indo-US ‘Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture’.

First published in 2008, this slender tract- 115 pages- is priced at Rs 100 and is already in its third printing.

Missing in Action

Toilets, trees and gender? Can there be a connection?

Is there a gender angle to a business story? Is gender in politics only about how many women get elected to parliament? Is osteoporosis a women's disease? Why do more women die in natural disasters?

These are not the questions journalists usually ask when they set out to do their jobs as reporters, sub-editors, photographers of editors. Yet, by not asking, are they missing out on something, perhaps half the story? This is the question this book, edited and written by journalists, for journalists and the lay public interested in media, raises. Through examples from the media, and from their own experience, the contributors explain the concept of gender-sensitive journalism and look at a series of subjects that journalists have to cover - sexual assault, environment, development, business, politics, health, disasters, conflict - and set out a simple way of integrating a gendered lens into day-to-day journalism. Written in a non-academic, accessible style, this book is possibly the first of its kind in India - one that attempts to inject a gender perspective into journalism.

Zubaan's new title, Missing Half the Story: Journalism as if Gender Matters, edited by Kalpana Sharma. In paperback, 304 pages, Rs 395. ISBN 9788189884833.

Ralph Russell

Marion Molteno edits the second volume of the autobiography of Ralph Russell, Marxist and celebrated Urdu scholar. Published by Three Essays Collective, the book is titled LOSSES GAINS: The Autobiography of Ralph Russell. The Middle Years: 1945-1958 and offers a fascinating insight into some of the major 20th century events which have shaped our world today.

Ralph Russell (1918-2008) is best known as one of the foremost western scholars of Urdu literature. For over fifty years his teaching, translations and writings have made this rich literature accessible to readers with no knowledge of the language, and earned him a high reputation among fellow Urdu scholars. For thirty years at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and afterwards in Asian communities in British cities, he pioneered the teaching of Urdu as a means of bringing closer understanding between people and bridging cultural divisions. His honesty, humour and unusual insight have won him a unique place in the affections of lovers of Urdu worldwide. He belonged to that extraordinary and celebrated generation of British scholars who became Marxists at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1930s and became an influence on the intellectual life of the twentieth century. He shares the company of, amongst others: Eric Hobsbawm, EP Thompson, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Victor Kiernan and Joseph Needham. Part 1 of his autobiography, 'Findings Keepings' (1918–1946), gave a refreshing personal account of three decades and a world war, seen through the eyes of a child, boy and young man of warm affections and high ideals. Part 2, 'Losses Gains' (1945-1958), continues the story of his life from his return from the war in India, to 1958. It traces his progress from demobbed soldier to student, teacher and scholar of Urdu, while it charts his growth in political maturity, following the traumatic effects of his realisation of the betrayal of communist values by the party leadership. A fascinating insight into a period of complex social and political change.

In our Biography section, in paperback, Rs 500. ISBN: 9788188789290