Sikhism began with Guru Nanak (b.1469). At the end of the 17th century, the 10th and the last Guru, Guru Gobind Singh established the order of the Khalsa. After his death, his authority as a Guru was transferred to the collection of sacred scriptures, known thereafter, as the Guru Granth Sahib. The Sikh community underwent a major change at the end of the 19th century with the rise of the Singh Sabha movement. Observant Sikhs, both men and women, bear the outward physical signs known as the Five Ks, the most obvious of which is to leave their hair uncut.

Extent: c. 334pp.
Size: 7.75”x 5”
Binding: Paperback
Forthcoming in 2009

This delightful new book takes the reader for a walk through the streets and buildings of the so-called ‘native town’ of colonial Bombay, reading their past and excavating their memories, while continuing to negotiate their present context. This historic neighbourhood of Mumbai, while continuing to be a residential and religious area of the city, is today also the city’s essential commercial marketplace. It holds within itself a complex history of migration and social history, which reflects strongly in the architectural designs of the area. The buildings are literally registers of history; they are maps of a time gone by, but they continue to find themselves in a new metaphor that defines the contemporary context. Lane after lane, the buildings breathe in the salty air of Mumbai and speak to those who care to listen.

Kaiwan Mehta has studied architecture, literature and Indian aesthetics and has a keen interest in urban studies. He is currently pursuing a Doctorate in Culture Studies at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. He is also a senior lecturer at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture (KRVIA), Bombay, visiting lecturer at the Philosophy Department, University of Mumbai, and is the Assistant Editor for Indian Architect and Builder magazine, and former Consulting Editor for Architecture – Time, Space and People, the official journal of the Council of Architecture, India. He has also received research fellowships from the KRVIA, Centre for Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore and SARAI (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies), New Delhi. He is associated with various art, architecture and urbanism oriented research and educational organisations.

Extent: c. 200pp.
Price: c. Rs 225
Binding: Paperback
Size: Demy Octavo
Forthcoming in 2009
Rights: Available

Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi (1856–1921) was a major Sunni Muslim scholar in North India at the height of British rule in India. In his legal writings (fatwa), he laid out a clear vision of how Muslims should conduct themselves in the absence of political power. He advised his followers to follow the ‘Sunna’ or ‘path’ of the Prophet Muhammad in all they said and did. However, there were major differences in the interpretation of what, in practical terms, this meant, and his views were not accepted by other Sunni Muslims of the time, especially the religious scholars (`ulama) of Deoband.

This book lays out the views and supporting arguments of the Ahl-e Sunnat movement by taking a close look at Ahmad Riza’s Urdu writings.

Extent: 365pp.
Size: Demy Octavo
Binding: Paperback
ISBN 978-81-906668-6-2

In this imposing new volume, Saurabh Dube writes against the grain of understandings which often set up objects of intellectual inquiry as the singular yardstick for judging the scholarly novelty and theoretical validity of intellectual endeavours. The essays here eschew widely present intellectual habits which may be seen as part of the business-as-usual of the academy, and attempt to establish critical exchanges and interactions between different perspectives in the task of academic endeavour. In the first section called 'Questions of Conversion', Dube addresses questions of conversion by examining colonial writings of a vernacular Christianity and by tracking the transformations of caste and sect in South Asia. In the next section called 'Personal Portraits', he writes of an artist friend and his anthropologist father, seeking to conjoin crucial concerns of histories of anthropology with those of an ethnographic biography of a subject of anthropology, and to combine critical considerations of ethnographies of art with those of an anthropological history of a dalit imagination. The third and final section presents a contemporary event in the shape of a critical commentary before turning to some of the ways in which questions of modernity have been discussed in scholarship on South Asia.

Saurabh Dube is Professor of History, Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico City.

Extent: c. 250pp.
Price: c. Rs 595
Binding: Hardback
Size: Demy Octavo
ISBN: 978-81-906186-6-3
Forthcoming in 2009
Series: New Perspectives on Indian Pasts
Rights: Available

Goan churches is the first ever published, comprehensive history of Catholic-church architecture in Goa, from the first churches built in that territory in the early 16th century to the first contemporary churches built in the 1950s. Beginning with the churches in and around Old Goa, the book goes on to discuss the peculiarities of other churches scattered through Goa, aiming at demonstrating that the churches of Goa were Indian Catholicism’s first and foremost cultural manifestation.

Paulo Varela Gomes was also the presenter of two television documentary series for the Portuguese television, one of which was about the Portuguese in India (O Mundo de Cá, 1995).

Extent: c.250pp.; including c. 200 illustrations
Size: Crown Quarto
Binding: Hardback
Rights available

This photographic monograph visually traces the lives of Bombay’s single-screen cinema halls. The images explore dimly lit auditoriums and the surrounding labyrinth of shadowy corridors, silent lobbies, hidden storage chambers and domiciled projection rooms.

The visual narrative reveals these halls to be lived spaces whose contours have been shaped and inscribed over time by interactions with both audiences and inhabitants. These buildings exist today in defiance of the generic aesthetic and cultural experience of the city’s new multiplexes.

Extent: c. 120pp.; all four colour
Size: 8.75”x 6.75”
Binding: Hardback
Forthcoming in January 2010

In 1939, young Joan Falkiner’s spirited flight from South Yarra to princely India and her marriage to the Muslim ruler of a small state in Gujarat sent shockwaves through the Melbourne society. Political reverberations were felt throughout the Raj and – as the kingdoms were about to disappear forever in the maelstrom of Indian Independence – as high as the British throne. How did it all come about? Through conversations about Melbourne, Mumbai and the South of France, research in the India Official Library in London, and the author’s personal journey while travelling in modern India, Suzanne Falkiner traces the course of a most unusual love story.

Extent: c. 331pp.
Price: c. Rs 350
Size: 210x 176
Binding: Paperback
Forthcoming in December 2009
For sale only in South Asia
 

In this impressive new work, Benjamin Zachariah questions the tendency to regard nationalism as a necessary, inevitable and natural basis upon which to organise the world. In doing so, he embarks on a series of reflections on a longstanding project in Indian historiography which has till today not reached successful resolution: that of ‘decentring’ the nation as the central focus of history-writing in and about India. This outstanding collection presents essays held together with one common thread: a concern with writing histories of India that cannot be subsumed within a bland and obligatory history of Indian nationalism, and a concern with not writing histories of nationalism while writing histories of absolutely anything or everything. Claiming to speak from the perspective of internationalism and celebrating the rootless cosmopolitanism of the merely human, Benjamin Zachariah urges historians to begin the completion of this incomplete yet necessary ‘decentring’ project by placing their own histories, politics, and ‘interests’ before a readership and leaving these open for scrutiny and comment.

Benjamin Zachariah’s research interests centre on the social and intellectual history of South Asia, in particular on interactions between metropolitan and Indian ideas, and on political culture, political rhetoric and standards of political legitimacy in colonial and postcolonial India. He studied history at Presidency College, Calcutta, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, and now teaches international history at the University of Sheffield.

Extent: c. 250pp.
Price: c. Rs 495
Binding: Hardback
Size: Demy Octavo
ISBN: 81-903634-5-X
Forthcoming in 2009