2011: Our Prime

We start this year with the launch of our new website, swb.co.in!

Its a new beginning with a new design, a new architecture*, and a new look and feel. The website is geared to do many of the things we have been wanting to do for a while- to integrate our blog posts, newsletters, to manage accounts more efficiently, to carry different kinds of educational material, to bring more publishers into SwB.... to go mobile... the list goes on. The old site will stay for a little bit longer, but soon we will migrate

entirely: there are still a few glitches, so please bear with us while we make the transition.

We've tried to make things simpler, so all shipping within India is free (by Registered Book Post) and for international orders there is a flat rate. Courier charges are extra, of course.

So here's wishing all of you a very Happy New Year! We look forward to hearing from you as to how we can improve things- what you would like to see us carry (or drop!) and how we can be better... Thanks. Write to us at hello@swb.co.in.

And yes, 2011 is a prime number. For more properties of this wonderful number- or of any number- there is the great website of the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

*Thanks to The Ford Foundation for support under the Access Equity Initiative, to the Web Design team of Kaustubh Srikanth and Rahul Gonsalves, and to Vinutha Rajeev and Chethan Elvis at Mahiti, Bangalore!

Dernier Post... of 2010

The last post for 2010 is on a theme we are inordinately fond of... Fiction, Poetry, Essays, Northeast India... all coming together in the two volumes of Tilottoma Misra's The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India.

Dr. Tilottoma Misra was formerly Professor, Department of English, Dibrugarh University, Assam. Covering almost 60 years (since early 1950s) of literary activity, this two-volume anthology includes fiction, poetry, and essays by some of the leading writers from North-East India, comprising the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura. Offering a judicious selection of writers from three generations of the post-Independence era, the state-wise arrangement allows a comparative analysis of the development of literature in the region. Alongside established practitioners, the anthology includes pioneering works that show a new awareness about the emerging social and intellectual concerns in the region.

• Volume I includes 32 pieces by 31 writers representing some of the best fiction writing from the region. Contemporary issues such as violence perpetrated by various militant outfits and in the form of counter-insurgency operations by the armed forces and human endurance in the light of these are some of the dominant themes of fiction writing included in this volume. Divided into seven sections, in this volume we come across some of the most celebrated practitioners of the genre. In Lummer Dai and Yeshe Dorjee Thongchi, we find the first generation of fiction writers from Arunachal Pradesh, who through their writings sensitively questioned the values represented by the traditional institutions that gave little space to the voices of the youth and the women. Alongside these master architects features Mamang Dai, a contemporary literary voice from the region. Including some new translations commissioned especially for the project, the volume comes with a comprehensive Introduction by Tilottoma Misra that traces the roots of the literature of the North-East.

• Volume II is divided into two sections. Arranged state-wise, Section I includes 85 poems by poets who initiated new trends in the modern poetry of the region. Section II includes 15 essays, which range from the philosophical to the analytical and the descriptive, and discuss the various aspects of literature and culture of the region. They deal with the literature and culture of particular ethnic or linguistic groups of the North-East, along with studies that reflect on the different dimensions of the multi-ethnic and multilingual cultures of the region. Including some new translations commissioned especially for the project, the volume comes with a comprehensive Introduction by Tilottoma Misra that traces the roots of the literature of the North-East.
  

In various sections on our new site, Volume 1: Fiction is in hardcover, 320 pages, Rs 595, ISBN:9780198067481

Volume 2: Poetry and Essays, also in hardcover, 350 pages, Rs 595. ISBN: 9780198067498

Sparsh

Heralding the New Year is Navayana's BHIMAYANA, a book that is remarkable in many ways. It is an illustrated telling of Experiences of Untouchability Incidents in the life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the illustrations have been done by the Gond artists Durgabai and Subhash Vyam.

What does it mean to be an untouchable in India? Why do some Indians despise the touch of others? Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), one of India’s foremost revolutionaries, recounts his experiences of growing up untouchable and being routinely discriminated against: in school at the age of 10, in Baroda after his return from Columbia University, and while traveling. Battling odds, Ambedkar drafted the Constitution of India and eventually embraced Buddhism. Experiences similar to Ambedkar’s continue to haunt a majority of India’s 170 million dalits. They are still denied water, shelter and the basic dignities of life.

In this ground-breaking work, Pardhan-Gond artists Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam interweave historical events like the Mahad satyagraha with contemporary incidents. Defying conventional grammar, they infuse fresh energy into the graphic idiom through their magical art mounted on an epic scale.

The book has come in for some well deserved praise-

• In his foreword, John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing calls it “An extraordinary book… No more rectangular framing or unilinear time. No more profiled individuals. Instead, a conference of corporeal experience across generations, full of pain and empathy.”
• Arundhati Roy, author of The God of small things, and activist says “The story of the life of Bhimrao Ambedkar, one of India’s most important thinkers, has been deliberately sidelined for decades. Bhimayana re-tells it in the most unusually beautiful way. It is unforgettable.”
• Joe Sacco, author of Palestine: The artists Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam have dropped most of the West’s and manga’s typical comics conventions and boldly use of their own artistic heritage, the Pardhan Gond tradition, to craft a distinctive graphic biography of one of India’s bravest and greatest leaders, Bhimrao Ambedkar, an ‘untouchable’ and a fierce critic of Gandhi. Heavy in symbolism and motifs, Bhimayana is challenging in all the right ways and still conveys with flair who Ambedkar was and why his revolutionary ideas about the caste system still matter so much to the India of today.”
  
  


Durgabai and Subhash Vyam belong to the same clan as the legendary Jangarh Singh Shyam. The artist-couple lives in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. Durgabai has won acclaim for her paintings and for illustrations for several books. Subhash is an accomplished sculptor and has worked with many media. This is their first graphic book and their first book together. The story is by Srividya Natarajan and S Anand.


Paul Gravett a London-based graphic art curator, says, “The pages I have seen are wonderful, their figures and clothes drawn in intense patterning, faces mainly in profile with large single eyes, and their pages divided into panels by curving, decorated borders. Accusing, pointing fingers are repeated in one panel. Even the balloons have shapes and tails uniquely their own: bird-like outlines for regular speech; a scorpion’s sting as the tail for venomous dialogue; and a distinctive eye in the thought bubbles to represent the mind’s eye. What better art to retell this tale today?”


In our Dalit Studies and General Book sections, the 108 pages limited Edition Hardback in special paper is for Rs 995. ISBN: 9788189059170, while the paperback edition is for Rs 395, ISBN: 9788189059354. These prices are valid within India only. For overseas orders, there are additional charges.

A Musical Atlas of India

On the 23rd of this month OUP (India) had the release, in Chennai, of the Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Music of India.

A three volume compendium that extends to 1800 or so pages, this is a comprehensive survey of 2000 years of music, covering classical, folk, film, and other forms of music from across India and neighbouring countries, with 5000 in-depth entries on all forms of music, dance, raga, tala, gharana, treatises, technical terms, and instruments, with about 100 acclaimed contributors who have written short biographies of vocalists, musicologists, saint poets, gurus, composers, and instrumentalists, and which includes 200 rare photographs from private collections and family albums.

The volume spans all regions of India: from Assam, Meghalaya, and Manipur to Gujarat, and from Kashmir to Kerala. The music of the subcontinent, including Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka also finds a place.

The book is a result of a vast collaborative effort spanning 12 years and supported by an extended group of around 250 musicians, musicologists, scholars, and teachers of music from India and the world, the Encyclopaedia includes more than 200 photographs from family albums and private collections as well as line drawings of rare instruments. The text and visuals blend to extend our understanding of the many modes and moods of the music of India.

The Sangit Mahabharati is one of India’s premier music academies, established in 1956 in Mumbai by internationally renowned tabla maestro and guru Padma Bhushan Late Pandit Nikhil Ghosh. They enjoy recognition and support from the State and Central governments, the Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi, and the Mumbai Municipal Corporation besides other charitable trust organizations. This first-of-its-kind Encyclopaedia will be indispensable for practicing musicians and students and teachers of Indian music in all its forms.

In our Culture, Music and Ethnomusicology sections, on our brand new site, Rs 9950, in three volumes in a boxed set. ISBN: 9780195650983

Bengal had Rabindranath

The Bengal Renaissance has been written about, talked about, celebrated, commemorated... and relived in so many ways, in print, in song and in spirit. Subrata Dasgupta's Awakening : The Story Of The Bengal Renaissance from Random House is a new celebration of the times gone by, in time for the Tagore Sesquicentennial.



For a few glorious decades in the nineteenth century, Bengal would witness a revolution like it never had before, and never would since. It was a revolution of the mind and of a handful of men and women, but it would change the fabric of Indian society irrevocably.

 It began with a band of Englishmen, led by the brilliant Orientologist, William Jones. Then there was the enigmatic Rammohun Roy who invented a reformed Hinduism called the Brahmo Samaj; and his close friend, David Hare, who conceived the idea of an institution which could teach the youth of Bengal Western thought, an idea that became the Hindu College.

 There was the ‘poet, philosopher, madman’ Derozio who inspired a generation of youths at the Hindu College; the tempestuous Michael Madhusudan Datta who created new forms of Bengali verse on European lines; and Michael’s well-wisher, the scholar Vidyasagar, who fought fiercely for the cause of Hindu widows and women’s education. There was Bankimchandra, a civil servant who helped create the novel in Indian literature. There were two remarkable women, Rassundari Devi who taught herself to read and write and was the first Indian woman to pen her autobiography; and the ill-fated Toru Dutt who wrote poems and novels in English and French at a time when women could scarcely read.

 There were Jagadish Bose and Prafulla Chandra Ray, two lonely workers in laughably primitive laboratories who became the frontiersmen of modern Indian science; and Vivekananda, the monk who preached a new form of Vedantism, both at home and abroad. There was, finally, the hypnotic, impossibly gifted Rabindranath Tagore, the very epitome of the Bengal Renaissance, Renaissance personified. Woven into these lives was Calcutta, the ‘second city’ of the British Empire; and a constellation of places of learning.

For the first time comes a gripping narrative about the story of the Bengal Renaissance and the extraordinary men and women who were part of it. How did such an astonishing flowering come to take place? And how did it change India? Immaculately researched, told with colour, drama, and passion, Awakening is a stunning achievement.



Subrata Dasgupta is Director of the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Louisiana where he also holds an Eminent Scholar Chair. He has worked for many years on the Bengal Renaissance.

In our History section, in hardcover, 416 pages, Rs. 499. ISBN 9788184001259

More Tales Tamils Tell

Orient Blackswan have a new book out on the South Indian oral tradition, translated by Sujatha Vijayaraghavan. Hundred Tamil Folk and Tribal Tales "beacons a serious engagement in Indic studies. It locates this body of work at the interface between folklore, anthropology, sociology and public culture of a by-gone era. This handy collection provides an easy access to the cultural registers and linguistic mores of a tribal/folk population at a crucial juncture of colonial modernity. Furthermore, she translates not merely the tales as she finds them in the Tamil original (naatupura kathai kalanjiyam), but distinguishes and recognises the tribal tale, otherwise unnoticed in a proverbial ocean of Indian folklore. As a vibrant vein of wit and wisdom in Dravidian lives and traditions, the tribal-tale receives the first-ever straight look in these pages."

In our Folklore section, 324 pages in paperback, Rs 295, ISBN 9788125039204

Inception

An initiative of great significance by the cutting edge publishing house Navayana is the forthcoming publication of four collections of poetry. Waking is Another Dream is a set of poems on the genocide in Eelam by Canada-based poet Cheran along with Jayapalan, Yesurasa, Latha and Ravikumar. At the launch in Delhi on the 8th of December, the poets Anamika, Mangalesh Dabral and K Satchidanandan will speak.

What happened between 8 and 18 May, 2009 in Eelam? There is no one to tell the stories, but here is the poetry that emerged from the "wounded land-mass" where "no bird is able to fly", where people "ate death". The poets lament the loss of their land, their language and their identity.

N D Rajkumar, born into a traditional shaman community in a border town between Kerala and Tamil Nadu, cracks open a world that offers the modern reader stunning glimpses into a magic-drenched, living dalit history. His Tamil poems have been rendered in English by Anushiya Ramaswamy in the collection Give Us This Day A Feast of Flesh.

The title of Meena Kandasamy's collection of poems evokes the Sri Lankan Tamil rapper M. I. A.... Ms Militancy stands myths on their heads in highly experimental poems, which critic and poet K. Satchidanandan says, “shock and sting the readers until they are provoked into rethinking the ‘time-honoured’ traditions and entrenched hierarchies at work in contemporary society”.

Finally, there’s a re-issue of Namdeo Dhasal’s high-voltage, bruising poetry. First published in 2007 as a hardback edition, the paperback is titled A Current of Blood.

All these printed on earthy brown craft paper and priced between Rs 150 and Rs 180. All titles can be ordered online from the Scholars without Borders store.

Makers of Modern Indian History

Ram Guha has in many ways captured the mood of how modern Indian history is read in these times. His India after Gandhi was panoramic, defining a moment in time as the pivot on which Indian history divided itself, Before the Assassination, and after.

He follows this with Makers of Modern India, a rich and comprehensive repository of India's political traditions [that] profiles nineteen Indians whose ideas had a defining impact on the formation and evolution of our Republic, and presents rare and compelling excerpts from their writings and speeches. These men and women were not only influential political activists – they also wrote with eloquence, authority and deliberation as they reflected on what Guha describes in his illuminating Prologue as 'the most contentious times in the most interesting country in the world.' Their writings take us from the subcontinent's first engagement with modernity in the nineteenth century, through the successive phases of the freedom movement, on through the decades after Independence. This book highlights little-known aspects of major figures in Indian history like Tagore and Nehru; it also rehabilitates thinkers who have been unjustly forgotten, such as Tarabai Shinde and Hamid Dalwai.

These makers of modern India did not speak in one voice: their perspectives are sometimes complementary, at other times contradictory. The topics they explore and analyse include religion, caste, gender, language, nationalism, colonialism, democracy, secularism and the economy—that is to say, all that is significant in the human condition.

These issues have a resonance in our own times, not just in India but everywhere in the world where violence is opposed to non-violence, where people of different faiths have to learn to live with each other, where the marginalized struggle for their rights, and where states have to chose between privileging a single 'national' culture or permitting a hundred flowers to bloom.

In History, in Hardcover, 560 pages, Rs 799. ISBN: 9780670083855

Minus the Fiction

Communalism Combat • Sahmat • Social Scientist come together to organize a symposium FACT AND FAITH: DEMOCRACY AFTER THE AYODHYA VERDICT

on 6, 7, 8 December 2010 • 9.30 am – 6 pm
at Muktadhara, 18–19 Bhai Vir Singh Marg, New Delhi

The line-up of speakers is impressive:

Abdul Haleem Siddiqui, Anupam Gupta, Anwar Rajan, Aparna Bhat, Asad Hayat, Ashok Dutta, Attique Hussain, B.A. Desai, Father Prasad, Hasan Kamal, Hosbet Suresh, Irfan Habib, Jaya Menon, K.M. Shrimali M.K. Raina, Manoj Mitta, Maulana Azhari Mihir Desai, P.B. Sawant, Parvez Parvaaz, Prabhat Patnaik, Prashant Bhushan, Pushpa M. Bhargava, R.C. Thakran, Rajeev Dhavan, Rajinder Sachar, Ram Punyani, Ram Rahman, Ramesh Dixit, Ramesh Rawat, Ravi Kiran Jain, Roop Rekha Verma, S. Nadeem Ali Rezavi, S.H.A. Raza, Sandeep Pande, Shafibhai, Sheetla Singh, Sherifa Daud, Shireen Moosvi, Shiv Sunder, Siddharth Varadarajan, Smita Gupta, Sreedhar, Supriya Verma, Teesta Setalvad, Vidya Subramaniam, Yugal Kishore, Zoya Hasan.

You can download the detailed programme below:

The Buddha of Cambodia

The cover image of Ian Harris' Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice is gruesome, and given the recent history of the land, brings very unwelcome associations to mind. However, given the paucity of primary material in the area, the book is very welcome.

The study of Cambodian religion has long been hampered by a lack of easily accessible scholarship. This impressive new work by Ian Harris thus fills a major gap and offers English-language scholars a booklength, up-to-date treatment of the religious aspects of Cambodian culture.

Beginning with a coherent history of the presence of religion in the country from its inception to the present day, the book goes on to furnish insights into the distinctive nature of Cambodia's important yet overlooked manifestation of Theravada Buddhist tradition and to show how it reestablished itself following almost total annihilation during the Pol Pot period. Historical sections cover the dominant role of tantric Mahayana concepts and rituals under the last great king of Angkor, Jayavarman VII (1181–c. 1220); the rise of Theravada traditions after the collapse of the Angkorian civilization; the impact of foreign influences on the development of the nineteenth-century monastic order; and politicized Buddhism and the Buddhist contribution to an emerging sense of Khmer nationhood. The Buddhism practiced in Cambodia has much in common with parallel traditions in Thailand and Sri Lanka, yet there are also significant differences. The book concentrates on these and illustrates how a distinctly Cambodian Theravada developed by accommodating itself to premodern Khmer modes of thought.

Following the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk in 1970, Cambodia slid rapidly into disorder and violence. Later chapters chart the elimination of institutional Buddhism under the Khmer Rouge and its gradual reemergence after Pol Pot, the restoration of the monastic order's prerevolutionary institutional forms, and the emergence of contemporary Buddhist groupings.

In our Religion section, from MRML. In hardcover, 402 pages, Rs 1095, ISBN: 9788121512176