This edited volume interrogates the "global cities" literature, which views the city as a shimmering, financial "global network." Through a historical-ethnographic exploration of inter-ethnic relations in the "other global" cities of Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Bukhara, Lhasa, Delhi, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo, the well-known contributors highlight cartographies of the Other Global City. The volume contends that thinking about the city in the
longue duree and as part of a topography of interconnected regions contests both imperial and nationalist ways of reading cities that have occasioned the many and particularly violent territorial partitions in Asia and the world.
Page Extent: c. 242
Price: c. Rs 395
Size: Royal
Format: Paperback
Subject: Anthropology
Forthcoming in December 2011
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 has
been 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.
Anjali Purohit is an artist and writer based in Mumbai.
Page Extent: c.150pp.
Price: Rs 425
Size: 8.75"x 6.75"
Binding: Paperback
Subject: Trade/ Cuisine
Forthcoming in December 2011
Julie Skarland professes her love for India and her fascination with Delhi through pictures in Dilli Dil. Her love for the colors and the artistry shown in the simplest of things in everyday life is artfully put across in her book. Capturing everyday life, from the different ‘Stop’ signs on autorickshaws, to the cows on the streets, Julie Skarland finds beauty in everything Delhi, as she describes her journey through the capital.
Julie Skarland is a Norwegian fashion designer. After
starting her own brand and boutique in Paris for 18 years,
she moved to New Delhi in 2005 where she lives till date.
Page Extent: 210
Price: Rs 500
Size: Postcard Size
Format: Paperback
Subject: Visual culture
Forthcoming in December 2011
If you really think about it, there are only two kinds of people; those who spend the week before a trek to the Everest base camp climbing stairs and eating right, and those who lie in bed agonising over which book should make it to their backpack. Would You Like Some Bread With That Book? is about this second group, for whom books are not merely words on a page, but milestones around which memories are built. This is a collection of 14 essays about books and reading. It traces literary experiences from lying in the labour room frantically thumbing through the birthing chapter of a pregnancy manual to being spat on by a demented gentleman who sold his library.
Page Extent: c. 150pp.
Price: c. Rs 195
Size: B-format
Format: Paperback
Subject: Reading/Humour Rights: Available
Forthcoming in: February 2012
This book traces the author’s journey through the districts of Gadchiroli, Chandrapur, Melghat, Yeotmal, Nanded and Nandurbar while researching ‘Quantitative’ Primary Education in Maharashtra. While researching the state of education in the Adivasi area, it was seen that even those students who had studied for more than seven years in village schools could neither read nor write properly; nor could they do simple calculations.
Only seven students out of a hundred make it to college. To save the remaining 93 per cent from being dropouts, primary education must be improved. The political parties, social activists, media of Maharashtra do not bother to explore the problems of education with any earnestness or intensity, an attitude which can easily be seen as reflective
of the deplorable state of education in the rest of the country.
Through this book, the author highlights the need for change in primary education as well as higher education at the village level, as he asks for a better teaching methodology through all levels in the government education system.
Page Extent: c. 150
Price: c. Rs 195
Size: B-format
Format: Paperback
Subject: Sociology
Forthcoming in: 2012
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.
Arvind Narrain is the author of Queer:
Despised Sexuality, Law and Social Change and the
co-editor of Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in
India.
Vinay Chandran is a queer rights activist based in
Bangalore.
Page Extent: 350pp.
Price: Rs 425
Size: Crown Quarto
Binding: Paperback
Forthcoming in: 2012
Rights: Available
Edited by
Sumathi Ramaswamy, Christiane Brosius and Yousuf Saeed
This
book brings to the reader the best of Tasveerghar, a
trans-national digital network of South-Asian popular visual
culture. A visual treat, the book is a collection of the
‘popular’ forms of art, which include posters, calendar art,
pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings,
advertisement and other forms of street and bazaar art.
Presenting ‘other’ kinds of art, the kinds that exist
outside art-galleries, Tasveerghar provides an insight into
the throbbing social and performative life of images, the
techniques of visuality of street art and the histories,
everyday lives and voices of the producers, disseminators
and ‘consumers’ of these kinds of popular art.
Tasveerghar (http://tasveerghar.net)
was founded and is run by the collaborative efforts of
Christiane Brosius, Manishita Dass, Sumathi Ramaswamy,
Yousuf Saeed and Suboor Bakht.
Page extent: c. 300pp.
Price: c. Rs 995
Size: Royal
Format: Paperback with flaps
Subject: Visual Culture
Forthcoming in: 2012
Sixty-some
years after its emergence as an independent nation, controversy
over the meaning and causes of the creation of Pakistan remains vibrant.
Part of the controversy lies in conflicting interpretations of what happened
in the run-up to the partition of India in 1947. For some the Pakistan
movement was in fact neither nationalist nor religious. Perhaps the most
powerful exponent of such a view of the Pakistan movement was Jawaharlal
Nehru. The history of colonialism is indeed critical to Pakistan’s story.
But so is the relationship of Pakistan to the larger--and longer—universalizing
history of Islam. The particular locality for the present volume is colonial
Punjab: the history of Punjab’s role in the coming of Pakistan continues
to be a matter of dispute—and illustrates dramatically the critical intersection
between local structures of power and narratives of identity and the larger,
civilizational ideals, whether modern/scientific or Islamic, out of which
the demand for Pakistan was fashioned. This story also provides
a perspective
in trying to locate the creation of Pakistan not only in the larger narrative
of Muslim history, but also in the narrative of South Asia’s distinctive
encounter with modernity.
David Gilmartin is Professor of History, North Carolina
University, Raleigh, NC, USA.
Page Extent: c. 300pp.
Price: c. Rs 395
Size: Demy Octavo
Binding: Paperback
Subject: History
Forthcoming in 2012
Rights: Available
'Humans in my Backyard' looks at the exploitative nature of human
encroachment on wildlife resources. The events are recounted in the
innocent and engaging voice of a young elephant whose
survival is threatened by thoughtless human exploitation. Accompanying
his words is Vishal Menon’s skillful photography; where each
photograph is a sensitive portrayal of the elephant and his herd’s
experiences. Intended for children, the book is a result of Menon’s
intimate interactions with a herd of wild elephants at the Nilgiri
Biosphere Reserve. Offering this unique perspective the
writer/photographer not only looks at the issue of the plundering of
resources by the 'two legged tormentors' but also beautifully captures
the coming of age of a young elephant.
Page Extent:c.20pp.
Price: c. Rs 50
Size: 9 x 6 inches
Binding: Paperback
Subject: Trade/ Children/ Wildlife Forthcoming in January 2012
The 1947 Partition
of India resulted in the death of two million people and the displacement
of sixteen million more. It continues to haunt contemporary life in India-
not only for discourses that debate the place of religion in India, but
also for the historical interpretation of justice and minority belonging,
and for the tension-ridden struggle over the production of secular national
culture in the subcontinent.
Violent Belongings is about the relation between culture and violence in the
modern world, exploring contemporary ethnic and gendered violence, and the
questions about belonging that trouble nations and nationalisms today.
Kavita Daiya examines South Asian ethnic violence and related mass migration
in and after 1947 through its representation in postcolonial Indian and, more
broadly, global South Asian literature and culture. By investigating such texts
as Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan with Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown
and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies, alongside the writings of
Mahatma Gandhi and Bollywood cinema--diasporic films like Deepa Mehta’s Earth--
Daiya illuminates the cultural and political negotiation of postcolonial migration,
nationality, and violence in transnational public spheres.
Kavita Daiya is Associate Professor of English at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Page Extent: 280pp.
Price: c. Rs 350
Size: Royal
Binding: Paperback
Subject: Cultural Studies
Forthcoming in 2012
Only for sale in South Asia
Recording
his encounters with people and places while travelling along the west coast of India,
Anil Purohit strings together an engaging collection of essays which effortlessly yet
determinedly busts the myth about travel writing only being about exotic locales. The
text is effectively supported by photographs taken by the author on his travels.
Anil Purohit is an occasional travel blogger and
writer based in Mumbai.
Page Extent: c. 150pp.
Price: c. Rs 225
Size: 7.75”x 5”
Binding: Paperback
Subject: Trade/ Travel
Forthcoming in 2012
Rights: Available
The volume seeks to bring together a group of individuals from varying fields:
art historians, visual anthropologists, critics, practitioners, theorists and students with
original and rigorous contributions the on the history and practices within photography in India.
The first section of the Reader called Photography: Invention and Practice seeks to discuss the
birth of photography in India, its ideological and conceptual basis. The second section called
the The Desire for Modernism will relate mainly to how the camera was a more democratized medium
during the early part of the 20th Century, which led to the rise of studio photography, freely
available and circulated mediums such as oleographs, chromolithographs, painted photographs,
among other hybrid and mobile formats. The following section, The Independence Movement and
Beyond will concentrate on the rise of photography during the national movement, and its
subsequent usage after. The section called Figuring the Cityscape: From Professional to Casual
Photography would introduce how photograph in the present is perceived and utilized to represent
the predicament of a generation influenced by the digital medium. The section Interviews talks
to practitioners about their inspirations and reasons for practice, while the final section,
Enduring Portraits, discusses eminent photographers like Amrita Sher-Gil, Satyajit Ray, and
Ram Kinkar Baij.
Rahaab Allana is Curator, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi.
Page Extent: c. 300 pp.
Price: c. Rs 595
Size: Demy Quarto
Binding: Hardback
Subject: Photography
Rights: Available
Forthcoming in 2012
The second volume to the now iconic Because I have a Voice:
Queer Politics in India, a collection of queer writing,
continues to foreground the best and most critical queer
writing from India. The book brings together writing in
English and Indian languages on a range of themes related
to the lives of same sex desiring people, transgenders and
all others who are challenging the sexual and gender stereotypes
imposed by society, its political and cultural structures.
The writers are of different sexualities and genders and
the book will include poetry, short stories, graphic
strips, photographs, and personal narratives. This
collection aims to present a range of queer experiences
in India today.
Page Extent:c.250pp.
Price: c. Rs 225
Size: Demy Octavo
Binding: Paperback
Rights: Available
Subject: Sexualities
Forthcoming in 2012
'The six years
I spent in India in the late 1970s and early 1980s as an international volunteer turned my
life inside out... India helped me discover something I had managed to keep hidden for more
than 30 years - my deep attraction to persons of my own sex.' This memoir depicts John Burbidge's
love affair with India, as well as his passion for its young men. Written nearly 25 years after
the fact, it shows that when we let go of the traditions and mores of our upbringing and dare
to embrace those of a different ilk, we open ourselves up to discovering new aspects of our
humanity and extend ourselves in ways we might never have imagined. After taking the initial
plunge with amateur masseurs on a Bombay beach, Burbidge found himself on a roller-coaster ride
of sexual adventuring that went from abstinence to addiction in two short years. A complicating
factor in this journey of self-discovery was the tightly knit community in which he lived and
worked. Its highly regimented schedule and minimal privacy forced him to live a double life.
When John first wrote about these experiences in the late 1980s, he did so as a ‘coming out’
story set against the backdrop of India. More than 20 years later, he has come to see it almost
as the opposite. The intervening years have allowed him to explore new dimensions of his
experience - in regard to his professional work, the community of which he was a part of,
and his relationship with his mother.
John Burbidge played an active role in the burgeoning
development sector in India in the 1970s and 1980s.
Page Extent: c. 200pp.
Price: c. Rs 395
Size: Royal
Binding: Paperback
Subject: Memoir/ Sexualities
Rights: Available
Forthcoming in 2012
Shorelines
chronicles a politics of space-making among India’s
southwestern fisher Catholics through which they have laid
claims to rights. By narrating the interplay of rule and
opposition through the production of space, it attests to
how space itself is an essential ingredient in struggles for
rights. Fishers have not simply negotiated within spaces of
power. Rather, as this book illuminates they have generated
political geographies that challenge the marginalization of
the coast and its inhabitants.
Page Extent: 320 pages, 2 tables, 7 illustrations
and 1 map
Price: c.Rs 450
Size: Royal
Format: Paperback
Subject: Anthropology Forthcoming in 2012
This edited volume interrogates the "global cities" literature, which views the city as a shimmering, financial "global network." Through a historical-ethnographic exploration of inter-ethnic relations in the "other global" cities of Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Bukhara, Lhasa, Delhi, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo, the well-known contributors highlight cartographies of the Other Global City. The volume contends that thinking about the city in the
longue duree and as part of a topography of interconnected regions contests both imperial and nationalist ways of reading cities that have occasioned the many and particularly violent territorial partitions in Asia and the world.
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 has
been 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.
Julie Skarland professes her love for India and her fascination with Delhi through pictures in Dilli Dil. Her love for the colors and the artistry shown in the simplest of things in everyday life is artfully put across in her book. Capturing everyday life, from the different ‘Stop’ signs on autorickshaws, to the cows on the streets, Julie Skarland finds beauty in everything Delhi, as she describes her journey through the capital.
If you really think about it, there are only two kinds of people; those who spend the week before a trek to the Everest base camp climbing stairs and eating right, and those who lie in bed agonising over which book should make it to their backpack. Would You Like Some Bread With That Book? is about this second group, for whom books are not merely words on a page, but milestones around which memories are built. This is a collection of 14 essays about books and reading. It traces literary experiences from lying in the labour room frantically thumbing through the birthing chapter of a pregnancy manual to being spat on by a demented gentleman who sold his library.
This book traces the author’s journey through the districts of Gadchiroli, Chandrapur, Melghat, Yeotmal, Nanded and Nandurbar while researching ‘Quantitative’ Primary Education in Maharashtra. While researching the state of education in the Adivasi area, it was seen that even those students who had studied for more than seven years in village schools could neither read nor write properly; nor could they do simple calculations.
Only seven students out of a hundred make it to college. To save the remaining 93 per cent from being dropouts, primary education must be improved. The political parties, social activists, media of Maharashtra do not bother to explore the problems of education with any earnestness or intensity, an attitude which can easily be seen as reflective
of the deplorable state of education in the rest of the country.
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. 
This
book brings to the reader the best of Tasveerghar, a
trans-national digital network of South-Asian popular visual
culture. A visual treat, the book is a collection of the
‘popular’ forms of art, which include posters, calendar art,
pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings,
advertisement and other forms of street and bazaar art.
Presenting ‘other’ kinds of art, the kinds that exist
outside art-galleries, Tasveerghar provides an insight into
the throbbing social and performative life of images, the
techniques of visuality of street art and the histories,
everyday lives and voices of the producers, disseminators
and ‘consumers’ of these kinds of popular art. 
Sixty-some
years after its emergence as an independent nation, controversy
over the meaning and causes of the creation of Pakistan remains vibrant.
Part of the controversy lies in conflicting interpretations of what happened
in the run-up to the partition of India in 1947. For some the Pakistan
movement was in fact neither nationalist nor religious. Perhaps the most
powerful exponent of such a view of the Pakistan movement was Jawaharlal
Nehru. The history of colonialism is indeed critical to Pakistan’s story.
But so is the relationship of Pakistan to the larger--and longer—universalizing
history of Islam. The particular locality for the present volume is colonial
Punjab: the history of Punjab’s role in the coming of Pakistan continues
to be a matter of dispute—and illustrates dramatically the critical intersection
between local structures of power and narratives of identity and the larger,
civilizational ideals, whether modern/scientific or Islamic, out of which
the demand for Pakistan was fashioned. This story also provides
a perspective
in trying to locate the creation of Pakistan not only in the larger narrative
of Muslim history, but also in the narrative of South Asia’s distinctive
encounter with modernity.
'Humans in my Backyard' looks at the exploitative nature of human
encroachment on wildlife resources. The events are recounted in the
innocent and engaging voice of a young elephant whose
survival is threatened by thoughtless human exploitation. Accompanying
his words is Vishal Menon’s skillful photography; where each
photograph is a sensitive portrayal of the elephant and his herd’s
experiences. Intended for children, the book is a result of Menon’s
intimate interactions with a herd of wild elephants at the Nilgiri
Biosphere Reserve. Offering this unique perspective the
writer/photographer not only looks at the issue of the plundering of
resources by the 'two legged tormentors' but also beautifully captures
the coming of age of a young elephant.
The 1947 Partition
of India resulted in the death of two million people and the displacement
of sixteen million more. It continues to haunt contemporary life in India-
not only for discourses that debate the place of religion in India, but
also for the historical interpretation of justice and minority belonging,
and for the tension-ridden struggle over the production of secular national
culture in the subcontinent.
Recording
his encounters with people and places while travelling along the west coast of India,
Anil Purohit strings together an engaging collection of essays which effortlessly yet
determinedly busts the myth about travel writing only being about exotic locales. The
text is effectively supported by photographs taken by the author on his travels.
The volume seeks to bring together a group of individuals from varying fields:
art historians, visual anthropologists, critics, practitioners, theorists and students with
original and rigorous contributions the on the history and practices within photography in India.
The first section of the Reader called Photography: Invention and Practice seeks to discuss the
birth of photography in India, its ideological and conceptual basis. The second section called
the The Desire for Modernism will relate mainly to how the camera was a more democratized medium
during the early part of the 20th Century, which led to the rise of studio photography, freely
available and circulated mediums such as oleographs, chromolithographs, painted photographs,
among other hybrid and mobile formats. The following section, The Independence Movement and
Beyond will concentrate on the rise of photography during the national movement, and its
subsequent usage after. The section called Figuring the Cityscape: From Professional to Casual
Photography would introduce how photograph in the present is perceived and utilized to represent
the predicament of a generation influenced by the digital medium. The section Interviews talks
to practitioners about their inspirations and reasons for practice, while the final section,
Enduring Portraits, discusses eminent photographers like Amrita Sher-Gil, Satyajit Ray, and
Ram Kinkar Baij.
The second volume to the now iconic Because I have a Voice:
Queer Politics in India, a collection of queer writing,
continues to foreground the best and most critical queer
writing from India. The book brings together writing in
English and Indian languages on a range of themes related
to the lives of same sex desiring people, transgenders and
all others who are challenging the sexual and gender stereotypes
imposed by society, its political and cultural structures.
The writers are of different sexualities and genders and
the book will include poetry, short stories, graphic
strips, photographs, and personal narratives. This
collection aims to present a range of queer experiences
in India today. 
'The six years
I spent in India in the late 1970s and early 1980s as an international volunteer turned my
life inside out... India helped me discover something I had managed to keep hidden for more
than 30 years - my deep attraction to persons of my own sex.' This memoir depicts John Burbidge's
love affair with India, as well as his passion for its young men. Written nearly 25 years after
the fact, it shows that when we let go of the traditions and mores of our upbringing and dare
to embrace those of a different ilk, we open ourselves up to discovering new aspects of our
humanity and extend ourselves in ways we might never have imagined. After taking the initial
plunge with amateur masseurs on a Bombay beach, Burbidge found himself on a roller-coaster ride
of sexual adventuring that went from abstinence to addiction in two short years. A complicating
factor in this journey of self-discovery was the tightly knit community in which he lived and
worked. Its highly regimented schedule and minimal privacy forced him to live a double life.
When John first wrote about these experiences in the late 1980s, he did so as a ‘coming out’
story set against the backdrop of India. More than 20 years later, he has come to see it almost
as the opposite. The intervening years have allowed him to explore new dimensions of his
experience - in regard to his professional work, the community of which he was a part of,
and his relationship with his mother. 
Shorelines
chronicles a politics of space-making among India’s
southwestern fisher Catholics through which they have laid
claims to rights. By narrating the interplay of rule and
opposition through the production of space, it attests to
how space itself is an essential ingredient in struggles for
rights. Fishers have not simply negotiated within spaces of
power. Rather, as this book illuminates they have generated
political geographies that challenge the marginalization of
the coast and its inhabitants.