Tzigane

When a book review starts " Rajen Harshe is one of those rare individuals who through their lives have played many roles. He has been and will no doubt remain an activist, scholar, teacher and institution-builder. To get a better sense of what this book offers and why it has been written the way it has, knowing the background of the author matters. Harshe is Professor in the field of international relations at Hyderabad Central University and has always had a special interest in Africa. Noted scholar and author of many academic books and articles appearing in prestigious journals, he has also been a public intellectual unafraid to take positions on and participate in civil society actions on a range of progressive causes." one is tempted to read the book, and possibly more. 

Achin Vainaik was reviewing the book  REFLECTIONS ON NATION BUILDING: A Gypsy in the World of Ideas by Rajen Harshe. Published by Pentagon Press earlier this year, the book has been very well received. Soon to be available in paperback, the book is a collection of essays. As Sachi Mohanty says in his review,  "MEMOIRS of teachers seem to be curiously non-existent today. And yet, names such as S. Radhakrishnan, K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, V.V. John and C.D. Narasimhaiah were widely known to the teaching community in post-independence India. Full of scintillating wit and humour, their accounts accomplished several goals at the same time: they mapped the contours of the teacher’s intellectual and spiritual evolution, captured the history of learning, especially with regard to the institutional and pedagogic aspects, recorded the changing attitude of society towards the university and finally, offered reflections that could serve as an effective road map for the future.

[...]

It is this humanistic self of Harshe that comes out again and again in the essays. With an experience that spans many places: Pune, Delhi, Paris, Hyderabad, New York and Allahabad, he has had a rich and eventful career as a teacher, administrator and institution builder. Calling himself a gypsy in the world of ideas, he writes insightfully on personalities like Gandhi, Marx, Nehru, Tilak and Mandela and introduces the ideas of J. Krishnamurti, Sarojini Naidu and Frantz Fanon. He examines issues such as the Naxalite movement, the university system, insurgency in the North East, alienation of youth, the Partition of India, the Berlin Wall and the globalized economy. Above all, there is the all powerful presence of history. He looks closely at history with its myriad meanings, examines the nature of the past and the problems inherent in the writing of this discipline.

The chapters themselves are fairly small, each written in the form of a column; many of these, we learn, were published in the form of a column called ‘V.C’s Diary’ in the Allahabad edition of Hindustan Times. As Harshe looks back, he asks a number of pointed questions: Was Nehru an enigma or tragedy? What are his lasting contributions? How did Tilak add an ideological or spiritual basis to India’s freedom struggle? What is the lasting legacy of the anti-colonial Fanon and the 13th century Marathi saint poet Gyaneshwar?

[...]

It is the chapter, ‘Golden Threshold’ that I liked the most in the book. It is at G.T., as the place is known locally, that Rajen reveals his innermost self. The memories often turn lyrical and poetic as he recollects the image of the birds seen through the windows of his office. These birds, he muses, ‘must have been writing poems on the sadness of the sky underneath the veins of green leaves with their beaks.’ They remind him of his students who were ‘perennial angels’ in his life. The music in him takes him inexorably into the many skies traversed by the birds that fly all over.

A Gypsy in the World of Ideas is a memorable account that would be of interest to a wide cross-section of society. The chapters are written at different times and therefore betray a degree of unevenness in style. Where he succeeds, Rajen is able to transfigure the academic experience into the personal, and finally in the form of lasting vignettes."

In our Essays and Nonfiction section, in hardcover, Rs 450, ISBN: 9788182744943 

Unlimited Woman

Vandana Shiva is well known as an environmental activist. Her books Soil not Oil: Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Insecurity  (2009);  Manifestoes on the Future of Food & Seed  (2007);  Globalization’s New Wars: Seed, Water & Life Forms  (2005); Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, & Profit (2002); and  Protect or Plunder? Understanding Intellectual Property  Rights (2001); Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food  Supply  (2000) are testimony to her commitment and her sustained work in the area. A recipient of the Right to Livelihood Award (1993) and the Sydney Peace Prize (2010), it makes sense to listen to her when she sounds alarm bells, this time through Women Unlimited, Delhi, in the evocatively titled Making Peace with the Earth: Beyond Resource, Land and Food wars.  

When we think of wars in our times, we think of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the bigger war is the on-going war against the earth. In fact, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya can be seen as wars for the earth’s resources, especially oil. The war against the earth has its roots in an economy which fails to respect ecological and ethical limits – limits to inequality, to injustice, to greed.  Making Peace with the Earth bears witness to the wars taking place in our times against the earth  and people. It also tells the stories of struggles to defend the earth and people’s rights to land and  water, forests, seeds and biodiversity. It outlines how a paradigm shift to earth-centred economics, politics and culture is our only chance of survival. 

In our Environmental Studies and Strategic Affairs sections, in paperback, 288 pages. Rs 375.  ISBN: 9788188965755

Menopausal Palestine

Women Unlimited has brought out a new work by Suad Amiry,  Menopausal Palestine.

Palestine, menopausal? Can a women's condition called change of life afflict a state-in-the-making? Suad Amiry's wacky, irreverent, unmistakably political account links the state of Palestine to the lives of ten women for whom Palestine or its absence-was the centrifugal force around which their lives revolved.

For 40 years, from the 1967 war till Hamas' victory in 2006, the ten women covered in this book shared a past and unfulfilled dreams and aspirations. With that victory, however, they now mourn the loss of a diverse Arab culture, of secularism and pluralism, and their replacement by what Amiry calls local nationalism and global religious fundamentalism.

She recalls the social and political history of  “Palestine through the lives of my PLO women's generation”, in what can only be called a personal-political tour de force.

In our Fiction section, in paperback, Rs. 250, 162+xviii pages, ISBN: 9788188965595

Land of the well

Sampurna Chattarji has a new novel from Harper Collins, Land of the Well.



 It is Goa in the monsoons. A shy and lonely teenager finds himself drawn towards a circle of young men and women holidaying there. In their midst is Momo, the woman he would do anything to be close to. As if sensing his need, they ‘befriend’ him and, at the end of a long and bewilderingly intense day of ragging, tell him about the strange circumstances of their friendship.

Bonded by illness, and ruled by a small, absurdly well-read man with baby cheeks, the group dubs the teenager ‘the innocent’, and challenges him to provide an answer to the riddle of their condition. The boy, discovering in himself a hitherto untapped gift for fiction, tells them the story of the Land of the Well. Expecting praise and further acceptance, he is horrified when the outcome is an alienation more complete than he has ever faced.

A novel that examines this age of anxiety, wherein the bodies of the young and successful erupt in ways that mirror their innermost traumas, Land of the Well walks the treacherous line between fact and fantasy, between erasure and compulsive recording.


In our Fiction section, Rs. 350 in Paperback, 384 pages, ISBN 9789350292242

First flush

Jayeeta Sharma, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto has a new book out on the history of Assam and its relation to tea. As Douglas Haynes puts it, "Assam is an area of South Asia that has received little attention from serious historians of the subcontinent, except those working on the tea industry. Jayeeta Sharma provides us with fascinating details of Assam’s history. More importantly, she relates local themes to larger issues of South Asian history: colonial ideologies of race and the importance of these ideologies to the political economy, the structure of colonial rule, the development of the public sphere, and the reformulation of identities under colonial circumstances. Empire’s Garden: Assam and the making of India also helps us to understand the historical dimensions of contemporary conflicts in the region, without making the conflicts seem predetermined by what happened in the colonial period."

In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the north-eastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labour from central India. In the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods.

In Empire’s Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region’s social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea labourer catalyzed a process by which Assam’s gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space. Various linguistic and racial claims allowed these elites to defend their own modernity while pushing the burden of primitiveness onto “non-Aryan” indigenous tribals and migrant labourers. As vernacular print arenas emerged in Assam, so did competing claims to history, nationalism, and progress that continue to reverberate in the present.

The historian C A Bayly has been generous in his praise: “Jayeeta Sharma’s subject is the creation of the notion of ‘Assam’ during the pre-colonial and colonial periods, both as a literary artefact and as a region defined by its relationship to the wider India. She wants to know how, when, and why the Assamese came to see themselves as different, particularly from Bengalis and from the Muslims of what is now Bangladesh. She is also interested in how some subordinate groups within the province were incorporated into the idea of a Hindu Assamese identity and others not … Dr Sharma has made a major contribution to the reassessment which is now under way of what might be called ‘regional patriotisms’, both in India and throughout  Asia. Her wider theoretical and historical interests in the emergence of ‘ethnicities’ or ‘micro-nations’ also put her work in the vanguard of developments in the social sciences more generally.”

In our Tea and History sections, for the South Asia market only. In hardcover,  348pages,  Rs 750. ISBN: 9788178243436 

Signal Green

Environmental history in India has generated a rich literature on forests, wildlife, human–animal conflict, tribal rights and commercial degradation, displacement and development, pastoralism and desertification, famine and disease, sedentarism and mobility, wildness and civility, and the ecology versus equity debate. This reader brings together some of the best and most interesting writing on India’s ecological pasts. It looks at a variety of the country’s regions, landscapes, and arenas as settings for strife or harmony, as topography and ecological fabric, in the process covering a vast historical terrain.

Of late the environmental sciences have become increasingly popular as a subject of study. With new courses on environmental issues being introduced in the topmost universities of the country, the need to have comprehensive books on the subject has been growing from quiet some time. For a very long time, the only reliable, and available comprehensive reader on the subject has been Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha’s This Fissured Land, which offered an extensive insight into the ecological history of India.

India’s Environmental History, by Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan, both professors, and eminent scholars in the field of environmental studies, fulfils this long awaited need. Published almost a decade after Guha and Gadgil’s book, this Reader offers a fresh perspective on the ecological history of the country. A concise collection of some of the best works on the subject, this reader, published in two volumes, provides a detailed account of the historiography of the country, from prehistoric India to the recent times. Tracing the environmental concern in India through this big a time span could not have been an easy task to attempt, and therein lies the best part of the book. In lucid, easy language, the book takes the reader through a histriographic journey through the forest and water disputes, frictions over rural and urban space, issues over natural resources and the struggles over land and water, and the ecological changes due to industrialization, canalization and hunting etc, and offers a different perspective on the environmental issues, and their management from early age to the recent postcolonial times.

The two volumes, needless to say, are supplementary to each other. While the first Volume concentrates on the early and medieval times, and the country’s environmental history through these times, the second volume pays attention to the changes incurred to the country’s demographics during the colonial rule, and it’s after effects. The Reader wins hands down on the account of its inclusion of the prehistoric ecological facts, as in doing so, it does something very few books before it have even attempted, and certainly never with this precision. Also, the effective time bound progress that the ecological events been neatly organized in makes it easy for the reader to trace the significant issues of a given time period. All the essays included in the collection are mostly prominent works of relatively well known environmentalists or historians, which gives the reader an astute

academic credibility.

Whether you want a good sourcebook for academic purposes, or India’s environmental studies interest you in general, in India’s Environmental History you’re most likely to find all the information you need. After all it’s not every day that a collection of the best scholarships on India’s environment is out there for grabs. Mahesh Rangarajan is Director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, and  K. Sivaramakrishnan is Professor of Anthropology, and of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University.  

In our Environmental Studies and History sections, in hardcover, 1096 pages, Rs 1850. ISBN 9788178243160

About Surviving. Just...

Sankar Prasad Singha and Indranil Acharya of the Department of English, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore have edited an important collection of short stories, Survival and Other Stories: Bangla Dalit Fiction in Translation for Orient Blackswan, Hyderabad. 

‘An eternity of oppression’ has defined the lives of Dalits. Yet they survive, resilient and defiant. Drawing on the works of Dalit writers, Survival and Other Stories is a collection of Bangla fiction in translation, that speaks of Dalit lives lived on the edge and of suffering, negation and revolt.

A mason is tortured for claiming equality with ‘upper-caste’ people but he refuses to yield. A ‘gunin’, or witch doctor holds a woman responsible for the illness of her grandchild; her son kills her but the child dies so the man kills the gunin too. A zamindar repeatedly taunts another for his ‘lowly’ ancestry: the latter forces him to drag a plough—replacing a bullock! A penniless man, woman and child wage a fight for survival with a poisonous snake coiled up in a hole full of grain. A proposal for marriage from the progressive-minded son of a corrupt politician is turned down by his ‘low-born’ lover believing that society is not ready to accept their union. A stick-wielding hireling of landlords, and later of a political party, learning in old age from his erstwhile Muslim adversary that they had been cynically exploited, reluctantly accepts his friendship. Evocative of the indignities heaped on the Dalits, these stories are insightful and perceptive. They are a sensitive retelling that retains the rhythms and idioms of the original Bengali narratives.

The spectrum of experiences as depicted in these probing and absorbing stories is a must read for students and scholars of Dalit and caste studies, development studies, Indian Literature in Translation, and gender studies. Each story has a glossary with meanings of non-English words in the end.

In our Dalit Studies and ILT sections, in paperback, Rs 295. ISBN: 9788125045106