FORTHCOMING TITLES
 

Sikhism

Hew McLeod
 
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

 

Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood

Kaiwan Mehta
 
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

 

Beyond Survival: Personal Narratives of Women who Survived Abuse

Nighat Majid
 
In this important new contribution the author puts together life stories of eight courageous domestic abuse survivors from Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. Their narratives highlight the relationship between socio-economic status, gender, and gender-based violence. There is a lack in Indian social science literature of qualitative accounts of women’s experiences of gender-based violence. Country-wide surveys and crime statistics do not capture the multi-faceted, nuanced and context-specific nature of domestic abuse. In recording their stories, the author gives voice to women whose voices are seldom heard in Indian society, and in doing adds substantially to what we know about coping strategies and personal growth in the aftermath of domestic abuse. This heartbreaking yet inspiring little book is also a reflection of the author’s own unfolding feminist consciousness, and her making sense of who she is as a woman in the complex and intertwined matrix of multiple oppressions we all face as women.

Extent: c.176pp.
Price: Rs 250
Binding: Paperback
Size: Demy Octavo
ISBN: 978-81-906668-3-1
Forthcoming in 2009
 

Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement, 1870–1920

Usha Sanyal
 

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

 

After Conversion: Cultural Histories of Modern India

Saurabh Dube
 
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

 

The Scourge Of The Mission: Marco Della Tomba In Hindustan

David N. Lorenzen
 
An unusual and engrossing effort by a career academic, this book tells the life story of the Italian Capuchin friar, Padre Marco della Tomba (1726–1803. Padre Marco worked in Bettiah, near Patna, as a missionary of the Tibet-Hindustan Mission sponsored by the Congregation of Propaganda Fide in Rome, and during his time there, he recorded and commented on a number of critical events of the late eighteenth century in the subcontinent's history. The fascinating account is told in the first person since more than half the book is translated directly from essays and letters written in Italian by Padre Marco, while the remaining parts have been written by David Lorenzen mostly on the basis of Marco's letters and essays and those of some of his colleagues in the Mission. For long we have read volumes on the tumultuous eighteenth century by South Asian historians. This unusual effort places an important source directly in the hands of interested readers.

David N. Lorenzen is Professor of South Asian History at the Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico.

Extent: c. 200pp.
Price: c. Rs 425
Binding: Hardback
Size: Demy Octavo
ISBN: 978-81-906668-8-6
Forthcoming in 2009
For sale in South Asia only
 

Goan Churches: A History of Church Architecture in Goa

Paulo Varela Gomes
 

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

 

Dream Theatres: Images from Bombay’s Cinema Halls

Zubin Pastakia
 

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

 

Joan in India

Suzanne Falkiner
 
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
 

 

The Transcendental Retro Raagi Cookbook

Anjali Purohit
 
Ragi by any other name would be called Ragi, Nachani, Nagli, Kelvaragu, Mutthari, Coracano, finger millet or perhaps a much neglected wonder food; an indigenous grain that is grown and consumed in India’s rural areas for centuries. This is a collection of ragi recipes; some are traditional, others are variations of the traditional and some are entirely new innovations. The recipes are accompanied by a sparkling little tale about Aji, the author's genius grandmother, the author herself as a little girl, and the transcendental ragi grain. Transcendental because, as the author believes, it has the potential to take a weak and ailing body and lead it towards health, wisdom and self realisation. Adorning this unusual book are sketches by the author of the traditional implements used to cook with ragi.   

Extent: 150pp.
Price: Rs 425
Binding: Hardback
Size: 8.75”x 6.75”
Forthcoming: November 2009
 

Playing the Nation Game: The Ambiguities of Nationalism in India: Essays in Antinationalism

Benjamin Zachariah
 
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

 

 


Medicalisation of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
A Human Rights Resource Book

Arvind Narrain and Vinay Chandran
 
The emergence of the queer struggle which insistently questions the normative understanding of gender and sexuality has broadened our very understanding of what we mean by the 'political'. If previously it was taken for granted that those born as women dress as 'women' and fall in love with and marry men , today this norm is being questioned. There are women and men who choose to fall in love with others of the same gender and there are women and men who choose to transit from their gender at birth to the other gender. Equally there are questions being raised about whether children at birth should be made to conform to a gender through surgical intervention without their consent. This questioning about some of the fundamental norms of society is emerging from the perspective of the queer movement which encompasses a multiplicity of desires and identities, each and all of which question the naturalness, the rightness and the inevitability of heterosexuality. By proudly calling themselves queer, homosexual people are not only re-appropriating a word historically used as part of a language of oppression, they are also rejecting the power of the oppressor to judge them in the first place.

However, much remains to be done in terms of activism within the medical profession so that both attitudes to homosexuality, inter-sexuality and transsexualism change while the terms within which treatment is proffered are radically revised. A good point to start is the writing both within the medical profession as well as from within the field of emerging queer activism which is beginning to question heteronormativity in the field of medicine. This book attempts to put together some of the initial writings in one place as a comprehensive resource guide for activists, NGOs, doctors, medical professionals, and all those interested to know about this phenomenon which might prove to be the very lynchpin for the success of the queer movement in India.

Extent: 350pp.
Price: Rs 425
Binding: Paperback
Size: Crown Quarto
Forthcoming: July 2009
Rights: Available
 

Sikhs Online

Doris Jakobsh
 
This volume explores various aspects of Sikhs and the World Wide Web, particularly within contexts of migration and diaspora. In many ways, this notion of the virtual sangat, given its inherent boundlessness, is especially suited to a community as diverse and widespread as the Sikh community. The volume will examine the processes of negotiation and manipulation of social networks, individual and community dynamics, issues of authority, representation, voice and participation, with an attempt made to locate what appear to be novel situations, namely the WWW as new media, within an historical framework.   

Extent: c.200pp.
Price: c. Rs 250

Binding: Paperback
Size: Demy Octavo
Forthcoming: December 2009
 

Images Of Transcendence: Towards A New Reading Of Tyeb Mehta's Art

Ranjit Hoskote
 
Ranjit Hoskote's new volume offers a fresh interpretation of the art of this distinguished Indian modernist. Hoskote retrieves Mehta's paintings from inadequate art-historical accounts that have placed him within a Eurocentric history of twentieth-century art, and from the unexamined notions of 'autonomy' and 'abstraction' that have dominated the available discourse on artists of Mehta's generation. Instead, Hoskote contextualises Mehta in terms of a 'secret history' of the sacred within the secular, drawing out the connections between Mehta's apparently School of Paris style and his cultural background in the Dawoodi Bohra micro-minority. Hoskote also dramatises the emergence of a private mythology in Mehta's work, over six decades, and his negotiation between the painted image, the cinematic frame, and the narrative.

Ranjit Hoskote is a cultural theorist, curator and poet. He is the author of thirteen books, including five studies of art and artists, five collections of poems, a translation, an anthology of contemporary poetry, and a cultural history of the non-European sources of European culture.

Extent: c. 150pp.
Price: c. Rs 995
Binding: Paperback with flexi cover
Size: Crown Octavo
ISBN: 978-81-906186-7-0
Forthcoming in 2009
Rights: Available