On Coping

Vasanth Kannabiran, the Hyderabad based feminist, poet, writer and founder-member of the Asmita Collective that works on issues of women's rights has a new book out from Orient Blackswan.

A Grief to Bury: Memories of Love, Work and Loss is a series of conversations with women about marriage and widowhood. The women speak here with frankness and candour about their often quite unconventional relationships with their husbands, and of coming to terms with the loss of a life-long partner. Despite the grief, despite an altered and often fractured sense of self, each woman is determined to live a productive and creative life. 

Reflecting the social history of a class of women born before Independence, this volume explores how the institution of marriage shaped their lives. These are extraordinary women, who have lived rich, full lives where work has not been separated from leisure, nor has the private world of home and family been separated from the wider world of work and social commitment. As such they have redefined marriage and family, and equally the public sphere of work to make both inclusive spaces.

This collection of interviews raises important questions: Is it possible to retain your identity and hold on to your beliefs in a long marriage? What is the line that separates and insulates home and family from community and nation? How do these women breathe normally and smile graciously while coping with a shock that uproots and erases chunks of the self? What happens when a long and supportive partnership ends?

Eminent personalities, among them, Neera Desai, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Ela Bhatt, K. Saradamoni and Shanta Rameshwar Rao discuss their long partnerships of shared visions and love. Their choices, their struggles, and their indomitable will may provide answers to countless young people today.

A Grief to Bury: Memories of Love, Work and Loss in our Womens Studies and Biography sections, Rs 725 in hardcover, 400 pages.  ISBN: 9788125043058

NRI, PIO, ET

Sanjay Subrahmanyam's  Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World looks at individual trajectories in an early modern global context. It draws on the lives and writings of a trio of marginal figures who were cast adrift from their traditional moorings into an unknown world.

The subjects include

• a “Persian” prince of Bijapur in Central India held hostage by the Portuguese at Goa
• an English traveller and global schemer whose writings reveal a nimble understanding of realpolitik in the emerging world of the early seventeenth century
• an insightful Venetian chronicler of the Mughal Empire in the later seventeenth century who drifted between jobs with the Mughals and various foreign entrepôts, observing all but remaining the eternal outsider

In telling the fascinating story of floating identities in a changing world, Subrahmanyam injects humanity into global history and shows that biography still plays an important role in contemporary historiography.

Anthony Pagden says "With his wry humor, keen eye for detail, and gift for startling juxtaposition, no one can match him." while Stuart Schwartz feels that "Few scholars in the world can match his mastery of the political and economic history of the Early Modern empires of Asia and Europe, or the ease with which he crosses historiographical traditions to bring their history together in this lucid and innovative study.” 

From Permanent Black. In our History and Gossip sections, in hardcover,  248 pages, Rs 595. ISBN: 9788178243399

Will code for food

A book that is available here, is relevant here, but strangely, does not have an Indian edition is Xiang Biao's Global "Body Shopping": An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. 

How can America's information technology (IT) industry predict serious labor shortages while at the same time laying off tens of thousands of employees annually? The answer is the industry's flexible labor management system--a flexibility widely regarded as the modus operandi of global capitalism today. Global "Body Shopping" explores how flexibility and uncertainty in the IT labor market are constructed and sustained through concrete human actions.

Drawing on in-depth field research in southern India and in Australia, and folding an ethnography into a political economy examination, Xiang Biao offers a richly detailed analysis of the India-based global labor management practice known as "body shopping." In this practice, a group of consultants--body shops--in different countries works together to recruit IT workers. Body shops then farm out workers to clients as project-based labor; and upon a project's completion they either place the workers with a different client or "bench" them to await the next placement. Thus, labor is managed globally to serve volatile capital movement.

Underpinning this practice are unequal socioeconomic relations on multiple levels. While wealth in the New Economy is created in an increasingly abstract manner, everyday realities--stock markets in New York, benched IT workers in Sydney, dowries in Hyderabad, and women and children in Indian villages--sustain this flexibility.

Mathangi Krishnamurthy writes in American Ethnologist: Xiang Biao's avowed goal at an analysis incorporating ethnography and political economic analysis has long been a requirement for scholars interested in the production and maintenance of transnational work and flexible labor. Global Body Shopping more than lives up to this ideal. . . . I strongly recommend this ethnography as essential reading for scholars interested in questions of globalization, transnationality, and flexible labor. 

Winner of the 2008 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology, Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology,  the book is 208 pages in paperback, $25.95  ISBN: 9780691118529, Princeton University Press.