Losing a language

Sheldon Pollock's The Language of the Gods in the World of Men is a widely admired book, one that has been given much praise and many awards.  The Coomaraswamy Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies, the Lionel Trilling Award from Columbia University, the 2006 Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division Award for Excellence in Literature, Language & Linguistics are some of these. Permanent Black now brings this book in paperback.

In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India’s ancient language, as a vehicle for poetry and polity by tracing the two great moments of this transformation. He asks whether the very different histories of these two moments challenge current theories of culture and power and suggest new possibilities for practice.

The Telegraph has called the book “truly breathtaking in its scope and originality”, while a review in the Journal of Asian Studies says “Magisterial . . . The kind of scholarly synthesis and insightful interpretation that comes along, at most, once in a generation or two.”

For the South Asia market only, 702 pages in paperback. In our Religion, Culture, and Linguistics sections,  Rs 695.  ISBN 9788178242750.

The Peshwas

Varsha Shirgaonkar, historian at the SNDT University in Mumbai has a new title out from Aryan Books International. Eighteenth Century Deccan: Cultural History of the Peshwas that deals with one of the prominent debates in Indian History, [] the eighteenth century period that revolves around the relationship between political stability and culture. Eighteenth century marked a significant stage in the Maratha history since in this century the Maratha rule expanded in North India and Karnataka. This century also witnessed an important position granted to the post of the Peshwa, as seen from the sanad of Maratha king Chhatrapati Shahu in the name of Peshwa, bestowing upon him total administrative authority. The political connections with the new provinces outside Maharashtra brought with them the streams of a new culture to the Deccan. Historical records reflect upon the intention of the Peshwas and their sardars to create the prototype especially of the culture of North India.

Various dimensions of new culture such as Persian language, luxurious items, music and dance entered the Deccan and blended with its prevalent cultural characteristics. The eighteenth century, towards its close, also witnessed the entry of European culture into the Deccan. The book shows how cultural dynamism was operative in the eighteenth century Deccan with special reference to the Peshwa period. The downfall of Maratha Empire took place in 1818 and hence the discussion in the book goes beyond the eighteenth century. In conclusion, the book takes a stand that culture thrives in spite of political instability and that it migrates in search of patronage. When culture settles in the new patron house, its blend with the local trend is inevitable and thus the process paves the way for a composite culture. The book will interest researchers of the cultural history of India.

In hardcover, oversize with 178 pages, Rs 2500. In our History section, ISBN: 9788173053917

Raman & Saha

Abha Sur teaches in the MIT Program in Gender Studies. Trained as a research chemist, she combines a deep knowledge of the practice of science with a sensibility to social issues. Her new book is titled Dispersed Radiance is published by Navayana, and is on the contrasting lives of Meghnad Saha and C V Raman, both iconic figures of Indian science. 

This book is a step toward writing a socially informed history of physics in India in the first half of the twentieth century. Through a series of micro histories of physics, Abha Sur analyzes the confluence of caste, nationalism, and gender in modern science in India, and unpacks the colonial context in which science was organized. She examines the constraints of material reality and ideologies on the production of scientific knowledge, and discusses the effect of the personalities of dominant scientists on the institutions and academies they created. The bulk of the book examines the science and scientific practice of India’s two preeminent physicists in the first half of the twentieth century, C.V. Raman and Meghnad Saha. Raman and Saha were—in terms of their social station, political involvement, and cultural upbringing—diametric opposites. Raman came from an educated Tamil brahmin family steeped in classical art forms, and Saha from an uneducated rural family of modest means and underprivileged caste status in eastern Bengal. Sur also reconstructs a collective history of Raman’s women students—Lalitha Chandrasekhar, Sunanda Bai, and Anna Mani—each a scientist who did not get her due. 

Dispersed Radiance makes an important contribution to the social history of science. It provides a nuanced and critical understanding of the role and location of science in the construction of Indian modernity and in the continuation of social stratification in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

In our Biography and History of Science sections, in hardcover, 286 pages Rs 495. ISBN 9788189059323 

Dalit-jin

Timothy Amos, Assistant Professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at the National
 University of Singapore, has a new book out from Navayana that should be of interest to those who study problems of social exclusion in India. Titled Embodying Difference: The making of Burakumin in Modern Japan,  the book is co-published by the University of Hawaii.

The burakumin, Japan’s largest minority group, have been the focus of an extensive yet strikingly homogeneous body of Japanese language research. The master narrative in much of this work typically links burakumin to premodern occupational groups engaged in a number of socially polluting tasks like tanning and leatherwork. This narrative, when subjected to close scrutiny, tends to raise more questions than it answers, particularly for the historian. Is there really firm historical continuity between premodern outcaste and modern burakumin communities? Does the discrimination faced by these communities actually remain the same? Does the way burakumin frame their own experience significantly affect mainstream understandings of their plight?

Embodying Difference is the result of a decade-and-a-half-long search for answers to these questions. Based on an extensive array of original archival material, ethnographical research, and critical historiographical work, it argues that there needs to be a fundamental reconceptualization of the buraku problem for two main reasons. First, the master narrative is built on empirically and conceptually questionable foundations; and second, mainstream accounts tend to overlook the important role burakumin and other interested parties play in the construction and maintenance of the narrative. By continually drawing a straight line between premodern outcaste groups and today’s burakumin, the Japanese government, the general population, scholars, and burakumin activists tend to overlook some of the real changes that have often taken place both in who are identified as members of socially marginalized groups in Japan and how they experience that identification. Clinging to this master narrative also restricts the ways in which burakumin can productively and more inclusively identify in the present to imagine a liberated future for themselves. Amos’ attempt to rethink the boundaries of buraku history and the category of the outcaste in Japan results in a compelling study that also offers us insights on how to comparatively frame the ‘undeniably similar’ dalit question.

In our Dalit Studies and Culture sections, in hardcover, 302 pages, Rs 495. ISBN 9788189059293

Boser Kampf

Among the more controversial aspects of Subhas Chandra Bose's life - and one that his biographers have not dwelt on at sufficient length - was his visit to Nazi Germany. Romain Hayes is an independent researcher  who has specialized on German foreign policy during the Second World War. He  has a new book out from Random House, Bose in Nazi Germany: Politics, Intelligence and Propaganda, 1941-43.   

The first account of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s years in Germany and his relationship with the Nazis By the late 1930s, Subhas Chandra Bose had become disillusioned with Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian National Congress and the nationalist struggle. With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, he resolved that India could only achieve freedom through a violent uprising. 

Two years later, in 1941, Bose went on to make a daring escape, via Afghanistan and Russia, to Berlin in search of an anti-British alliance. The Nazis seized Bose’s offer and the possibilities of an anti-British revolt in India, even envisaging German troops marching into the country as ‘liberators’. Meanwhile, thousands of British Indian troops captured in North Africa enlisted in the Wehrmacht hoping to join the Nazi march into India as they swore oaths to Hitler and Bose ‘in the fight for the freedom of India’. Yet for all their accord, the Bose-Nazi relationship remained complicated, full of ambivalences on both sides.

This book for the first time, tells the story of Bose’s war years in Germany and examines his relationship with the Nazis. This period remains a deeply controversial moment in Indian history and has thus far been suffused with hagiography. Using rare German and Indian war records, Romain Hayes has written a nuanced, thoughtful, and vital account of these years, shedding light on an aspect of Bose that has till now remained in shadow. 

In our Biography section, 284 pages,  Rs 399, ISBN: 9788184001846 

Divided we stand

Viewed from the outside, many separatist movements can seem inexplicable if the course of history and chance are not taken into account. That said, in the era of globalization, when so many barriers seem to dissolve, and national boundaries seem less important, movements to divide states into smaller units do seem to be somewhat against the tide. 

At this point in time, the movement for the formation of Telengana has considerable momentum, and it is not clear how things will work out in the next few days/weeks/months. Exactly what the issues are and why things have come to such a head is the subject of a recent book, Battleground Telenagana: Chronicle of an Agitation by Kingshuk Nag.  

When the state of Andhra Pradesh was formed in 1956, the people of Telangana (the region ruled by the Nizams at the time of independence) did not want to be a part of it, fearing that they would be displaced by the more enterprising and better educated migrants from the Andhra region. In 1969, massive agitations for a separate Telangana left 400 people dead but the movement petered out.

With the creation of new states like Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Uttaranchal in 2000, the battle for Telangana began once again. In 2009, the Indian government announced that Telangana would be a separate state, but is now dilly-dallying, worried about the backlash from the Andhra region. At the heart of the problem is the city of Hyderabad, which lies bang in the middle of Telangana but is being claimed by both sides.

Is the upsurge in Telangana so strong that the Indian government will be unable to resist it? Is there a middle course? This book explores the complex issues, and the underlying causes of the Telangana movement.

Nag has been a journalist with The Times of India for some time, and is currently the resident editor of its Hyderabad edition. He is a winner of the Prem Bhatia Award for excellence for his coverage of the 2002 riots in Gujarat. He combines a reporter's analysis with a genuine desire to understand just what is going on in this very readable book of the moment from Harper Collins.

In our Politics and History sections, in paperback, 248 pages Rs 350, ISBN: 9789350290743  

Mutter... mutter

Nitoo Das teaches English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She was born in Assam, in Guwahati, came to Delhi for higher studies and decided to stay on. Her first book of poetry is now out from Timberline, an imprint of the Virtual Artists Collective.

Boki…. A word that means nothing in English, but when you come to the poem that it’s in – well, there it stands for a shouted syllable, a deconstruction of someone’s name – someone who “went around / with scowling hair, // her long betel-spittled / lips exploding sex-words” while “She sat in street-corners / and exposed glistening secrets / like roots with / shifty-eyed knowledge.” A “nonsense” word that brings so much from its two syllables, is surely what poetry is about. The creation of image from sound. “To bok” in Assamese means to mutter/speak meaninglessly and repetitively. The Sanskrit word, Vak, from which this irreverent Assamese derivative takes its origins, means Speech. And Nitoo Das’ Boki speaks in an explosion of images in which she demonstrates an uncanny ability to create poems that surprise us, hold us, move us to see things in new ways. “A poem / laughs / when you tell it to sit.” These poems not only laugh but insist on dancing. They taste “lush and orange” on the tongue like Disco-Papita, and they will leave you turning the pages for more.

  

The potency and the appeal of any poem lies in the literary experience it provides to its readers. And that is why, when it comes to a poetry collection, this experience needs to be spectral, and multidimensional. Nitoo Das’s newly published poetry collection delivers this multidimensionality. Well... at least most of it.

The Boki poems are mainly based on gender and sexuality, interweaving these two realms across a plethora of social, political as well as private issues. The richness of ‘Boki’ lies in the polymorphous, shifting identity of its poet’s voice, which is fluid and surreal at times, and concrete and established at others. An Associate Professor of English in Delhi University, Das has worked on an experiment on Poetry as hypertext on her blog. Many of the poems in this collection have been taken from her blog. A self proclaimed ‘ventriloquist’, Das employs a well articulated suspension of the self styled ‘I’ or the ‘eye’ of the voice in the poems, that gives each poem in the collection a strong, self independent feel. From one poem to another, the poetic voice varies between different voices, making each poem a different experience to read- unpredictable, even shocking at places, but crisp and fresh.

Flipping through the pages of this collection, one can see the objectivity of everyday objects, situations, places and people transform under the subjective gaze of the poetic voice, rather voices, which renders a new, mundane dimension to them, making them unfamiliar to the familiarity of one’s perception, and forcing one to stop, take a moment and try to understand this difference.

Stark, sensual imagery, full of curiously intermixed sensory depictions appeals to the reader’s eyes, and does justice to the theme of gender and sexuality prevailing through the collection. A self proclaimed feminist, Das experiments with various poetic forms in the collection, to give pliancy to the feminist issues addressed in her poems. There are a lot of historical, folk, as well as popular culture references in the poems, which simultaneously give the poems a subjective as well as objective colouring. Most poems are short, crisp and written in simple words, even though rich on the interpretative scale, which makes the collection a good read for the occasional reader, as well as to the more trained eye.

Nature, the body, the gaze, the private and the public, all whirl together to make this collection of poems fresh and vibrant. 

In paperback, 82 pages, Rs 250. ISBN 9780979882548. Write to us!

Bollywood Reflected

The novelist Ismat Chhugtai knew Bollywood only too well.. Her novel Masooma has been translated from the original Urdu by Tahira Naqvi and published by Women Unlimited.

Masooma, published in 1962, may well be regarded as a work that celebrates all of Ismat Chughtai’s talents as a writer. Perhaps her darkest novel, a narrative of lost hope and endless cycles of corruption and injustice, it traces the journey of Masooma, a young woman from a respectable Muslim family who becomes embroiled in a game of exploitation and treachery and becomes Nilofar, a commodity that can be easily bought and sold. Once again, in telling Masooma’s story, Chughtai cuts open the underbelly of India’s political landscape and the underpinnings of the Bombay film world to reveal their shadowy and unsavoury side.

The book has ... inimitable style ... racy prose and a strong narrative with a powerful sense of drama says The Book Review. She grabs your attention with her poker-sharp words – in which sometimes an entire world of experience is buried in a single sentence. Where did she get that amazing observation, that acerbic wit, that dry sense of humour? And why can’t we have more writers like her? (The New Indian Express). Her writing is ironic, caustic, frank, bold and, yes, irreverent ... She is merciless in her depiction of corruption, deceit, injustice and hypocrisy. Yet, her empathy for her characters is always evident, as is her pain for their suffering The Hindu).

Chughtai, born in 1915 in Badayun, was the first Muslim woman in India to acquire a BA degree. She is counted among the earliest and foremost women Urdu writers, and focuses on women’s issues with a directness and intensity unparalleled in Urdu literature among writers of her generation. Author of several collections of short stories, three novellas, a novel, Terhi Lakir (The Crooked Line), and Kaghazi Hai Perahan (The Paper-thin Garment), a memoir. With her husband, Shahid Latif, a film director, whom she married against her family’s wishes in 1942, she produced and co-directed six films, and produced a further six independently after his death.

Tahira Naqvi, a translator of Urdu fiction and prose, taught English for twenty years, has taught Urdu at Columbia, and now heads the Urdu programme at New York University. She has translated Ismat Chughtai’s short stories, her novel and her essays. She has also translated the works of Khadija Mastur, Sa’dat Hasan Manto and Munshi Premchand. Naqvi also writes fiction in English. She has published two collections of short fiction, Attar of Roses and Other Stories of Pakistan and Dying in a Strange Country.  Her short stories have been widely anthologised.

In our Fiction and ILT sections, in paperback, 152 pages, Rs 250. ISBN: 9788188965663