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.


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

 

A young London-based filmmaker happens to find her grandfather’s diaries which narrate his experiences as a British police officer in India during the freedom struggle. Excited by these memoirs, she arrives in Delhi, and casts a group of five young friends to play the roles of legendary Indian revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, Ramprasad Bismil and Ashfaqullah Khan in a documentary film. The complex narrative in this compelling new film interweaves two strands, one set in modern India and the other in an India of the first half of the twentieth century, with dexterity and yet apparent effortlessness. The screenplay, published for the first time, supplemented with behind-the-scenes and other visuals from the film, and a commentary from the director, Rakeysh Mehra, brings this youthful yet profound tale of the awakening of a generation to a captivated audience once more.

Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra moved to Bombay in the late 1980s and set up Flicks Motion Pictures Co. Pvt. Ltd., a film production house specializing in making advertising films. He began his career as a film director with the critically acclaimed Aks. Rang De Basanti is his second film as director.

Kamlesh Pandey, dialogue, screenplay and story writer, started his career as a writer with Pankaj Parashar’s Jalwa. Among the films which he has written, are Tezaab, Chalbaaz, Dil, Saudagar, Khalnayak and Beta.

Rensil D’Silva began his career with ad films and documentaries. He joined J. Walther Thompson in the year 1991 and subsequently worked in Rediffusion DY&R, Saatchi & Saatchi and Mudra. In 2005 he joined O&M as Senior Creative Director. 

 

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 Architetcure (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 Architetcure – 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.

 

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.

 

In this interesting new volume, twelve anthropologists present a set of portraits of Muslims in India today. The portraits in this book present their stories, predicaments, aspirations and the highs and lows of their lives, and in doing so, each individual portrait provides a snapshot of a life as ordinary and representative as millions of others. Intimately told and stripped of jargon, yet nuanced and incisive, this is a valuable addition to the corpus of titles on the Muslim community in contemporary India.

Mukulika Banerjee is Lecturer in Anthropology at University College London. She is the author of The Pathan Unarmed and co-author of The Sari.

 

Sunil Gupta stands at the forefront of that creative ‘migrant’ generation which first exploded on the visual art scene in the 1980s. Pictures from Here and There is a memoir in photos by this important photographer of Indian origin for whom home is where he finds himself at a given moment. In this thought-provoking work, the personal becomes political without guile or inhibition as the photographer explores contentious terrain such as sexuality, gender and racism. His courageous engagement with the issues which have shaped his experience and practice has given decisive shape to the contemporary debate about difference.

 

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.

 

The Case for Ancient India shows the crucial value of the ancient period of Indian history for understanding India's deep history, through studies of theories of time and history, patterns of kinship and marriage, relations of languages and nations, legacies of Orientalists and Orientalism.

This anthology of Indian Writing in French, brings together texts from Pondicherry, Karaikal and Mahe, the erstwhile French territories in India. It also includes writings from Goa, a former Portuguese colony, where French was widely used in literary circles. Some of the writers whose texts appear in the anthology are Toru Dutt, Sri Aurobindo, M. Mukundan, Paulino Dias, Léon Saint Jean and so on.

Vijaya Rao is Associate Professor at the Centre for French & Francophone Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where she teaches French and Francophone literature.

Extent: c.200pp.
Price: c.Rs225
Binding: Paperback
Size: Demy Octavo
Forthcoming in May 2008
For sale only in South Asia

This unusual yet engrossing volume is an exploration of how three English writers - Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood - who shared a similar sexuality, sought in Hindu spirituality one way of achieving personal autonomy and fulfillment. Tackling the themes of the guru-disciple relationship, their quarrel with Christianity, relationships with their mothers and the problematic feminine, the tensions between sexuality and the attraction of Hindu mysticism, this fascinating work follows the three writers on their intriguing personal quest.


Extent: c.304pp.

Price: c. Rs 325
Binding: Paperback
Size: Royal
Forthcoming in August 2008
For sale only in South Asia

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.

Pages: c. 200pp.
Price: c. Rs 425
Size: Demy Octavo
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: to be assigned
Forthcoming in January 2009
For sale in South Asia only

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.

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