LATEST FROM YODA PRESS

 

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
For sale only in South Asia

 

These vivid and compelling portraits reveal the lives of eleven ordinary Indians utterly different in class, occupation, language, and regional identity yet sharing the same hopes, fears, and life-challenges common to us all. The volume challenges the crude, monolithic stereotypes of Islam so often heard today. It is a timely and much-needed contribution.
Richard M. Eaton, Professor of History at University of Arizona, Tucsona.

In this captivating new volume, 13 anthropologists present a set of vivid portraits of Muslims in India today. Each of the contributors has had a long-term research interest in Muslim societies in India, but in these essays they profile one single individual whom they have met in the course of their research and whose story they found compelling. The subjects of this volume live in different parts of India, like Bhuj, the mountains of Kashmir, Hyderabad, Androth Island, and Lucknow, they speak different languages, eat different foods, are engaged in various kinds of work, but are all Muslim. Zooming in on individuals who have normally stood cheek-by-jowl with hundreds of others in a large canvas, these portraits focus attention on them in a separate frame, revealing their stories, predicaments, and realities, the aspirations they nurture and the impediments they overcome to attempt to achieve these. In doing so, they highlight the sheer diversity which lies hidden under the seemingly homogeneous category of the Indian Muslim, and shatter stereotypes. Intimately told and stripped of jargon, yet nuanced and incisive, this is a valuable addition to the corpus of books on the Muslim community in contemporary India.

Mukulika Banerjee is Reader in Social Anthropology, University College London. She is the author of The Pathan Unarmed (2000) and The Sari (2003; co-authored with Daniel Miller).

 

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.

 

For all those who grew up in seventies and eighties middle-class India, Amar Chitra Katha, or ACK as it was popularly referred to among friends, was an important influence if not an iconic cultural artefact. Published at a time when ACK appears to be on the verge of a second lease of life, this compelling new book draws our attention to the stimulating and troubling potentials of Amar Chitra Katha as a force in modern Indian history. Based on a reading of visual practices and the complicated art history informing the comics, the book delves into core issues of communalism, history writing and the ways in which middle-class India negotiates the consumption of products of popular culture to suit its ideological moorings.

During her research the author found that the creators of ACK amalgamated both local art traditions as well as a realist aesthetic borrowed from the calendar art-derivative style of Ravi Varma to produce an evocative yet sober style, appropriate for a largely middle-class, child audience. This was supposedly distant from the “vulgar” Hindi film posters, yet in practice it was completely immersed in the techniques of larger-than-life hyper-representation characteristic of the commercial Hindi film aesthetic. This technique succeeded in furnishing the reader with a visual imaginary of a mythological Hindu past that could at once blend into a real historical continuum, stretching from the ancient past to modern India, rendering myth historical and history mythological.

A provocative and cleverly argued monograph, this book is a must-read not only for scholars and students of modern Indian history, contemporary culture and politics, but also for everyone who grew up with, loved or hated Amar Chitra Katha.

Nandini Chandra teaches English at Hansraj College, New Delhi.

 

In January 2004, the Tourism Ministry of the Government of India announced its plan of developing a 100-acre strip of land on the banks of the river Yamuna into a riverside promenade with parks and fountains which would be marketed as major tourist attractions. At the time this plan was unveiled, the riverbank and bed along this stretch was occupied by the Yamuna Pushta ‘jhuggi-jhonpdi’ colony, a string of settlements home to around 35,000 working class families - more than 150,000 people – some of whom had lived here for over three decades. In February and April 2004, homes and community buildings along the banks of the Yamuna were razed to the ground in several 24-hour long operations. Having followed the events leading up to the so-called ‘voluntary’ demolitions which exploded into intense protests and forceful and violent suppression by the authorities, the authors of this present volume decided to expand the scope of their research and undertake a comprehensive household survey to map the situation on the ground in one of the relocation sites, Bawana, with respect to the commitments made in key policy documents. In carrying out the household survey, they chose women as their primary interlocutors since they are ideally situated to unravel and expose the interconnections and synergy between patriarchy and other systems of domination and inequality.

A critical exposé of a travesty in the name of urban development, Swept off the Map raises uncomfortable questions about the collective responsibility of authorities and all citizens in ensuring that uprooted communities such as the one from Pushta live with dignity in the face of the repeated assaults on their identities, homes, rights and lives.

In this important new book, Sudha Rajagopalan explores the consumption of Indian popular cinema in post-Stalinist Soviet society. In doing so, she highlights the enthusiastic response Indian popular films and their stars received from the Soviet audience, as well as the discursive and institutional context in which this consumption occurred from the mid-fifties till the end of the Soviet era in 1991.The death of Stalin in 1953 was followed by the introduction of important changes in government policy in the Soviet Union, including a relative liberalisation of leisure and culture which revealed the state’s resurgent interest in addressing popular tastes. The renewed import and screening of foreign entertainment films in the Soviet Union was one of the most visible outcomes of this change.

Drawing on oral history methodology and archival research in Russia, the author analyses the ways in which Soviet movie-goers, policy makers, critics and sociologists responded to, interpreted and debated Indian cinema in the Soviet Union between 1954 and the end of the eighties. Complemented by contemporary press and archival photos which capture the rapturous reception given to actors like Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Shashi Kapoor, Amitabh Bachchan and Mithun Chakraborty as well as Soviet film posters announcing films like Awara, Betaab and Chandni, this engaging book, which is also the first monograph on Indian cinema abroad among non-diasporic audiences, is a must-read not only for students and scholars of film history and cultural studies, but every such lay reader who has grown up on a regular diet of popular Indian cinema.

Sudha Rajagopalan is an independent scholar and writer, currently based in the Netherlands.

The political transition from rule by the Muslim Mughal dynasty to British colonial rule led to a basic religious reorientation among Indian Muslims. At this time of transformation in the early nineteenth century, a key Muslim movement called the Tariqah-i Muhammadiyah or Mummahadi movement, also referred to as the Mujahidin or Indian Wahhabi movement, gathered force in northwest India. Although the Muhammadi reformers gained recognition by waging a jihad (holy war), a much familiar and feared word today, the jihad was only one manifestation of a fundamental change in religious thought and organization. Using Muhammadi sources as well as the contemporary account of the movement by Muslims and British observers, this incisive study makes an important comment on the historical interaction of social and religious forces in the nineteenth century in the Indian subcontinent.

While basing itself on a Sufi world-view, organization and concepts inspired by the intellectual system of the eighteenth-century theologian, Shah Wali Allah, the Tariqah-I Muhammadiyah put forth a reformist program attacking the prevalent practices at the tomb of saints and mystics, and belief in any mediation between man and God. Widespread Muhammadi preaching and religious literature in the popular Urdu language presented the Divine Law to all classes of Indian Muslims for the first time. The Muhammadi were also among the first Muslims anywhere to use the printing press to spread their fundamentalist message. In proclaiming religious purification and revival as well as holy war to the Indian masses during a time of rapid historical change, the Muhammadi reformers helped to shape a new individual and communal identity and also initiated a process of Islamic reform in India. Pearson’s major contribution in this important volume is to show how the intellectual history associated with Shah Wali Allah was transformed in the nineteenth century to an activist, organized ‘mass movement’ that drew upon techniques technologies, notably printing and popular preaching, introduced to India by British officials and Christian missionaries.

Harlan O. Pearson graduated from the University of Minnesota and completed his Ph. D. at the Department of History at Duke University. After teaching at the University of Minnesota as a visiting Assistant Professor, he studied computer science and has worked as a software engineer developing communications and network systems.

 

What is wonderful about this book is the originality of Reddy’s ethnography. She significantly advances—really, transforms—discussions that until now were largely dependent on less comprehensive work. With Respect to Sex will reframe entirely the dominant conversation on hijra identity, which has seen it as being reducible to gender. This is an important book that will be read and reread by a broad range of scholars.
Lawrence Cohen

With Respect to Sex extends the theoretical context of work on gender in precisely the right direction, moving away from the idea of alternative genders as rigid categories and viewing them instead as multiple identities. Reddy’s deep and intimate ethnography makes this book an important contribution to the discipline of anthropology and to gender studies more generally.
Serena Nanda

In an important, intimate, rich and eminently readable ethnography, Gayatri Reddy creates a portrait of a community of hijras in Hyderabad that suggests that one cannot see hijras simply through the lens of gender and sexual difference because that is not how hijras understand themselves. Tracing their presence from an era of Hyderabadi royal patronage to the shifting social and cultural landscapes of modernity and nationalism and finally to contemporary neo-liberalism, Reddy shows the ever-changing, complicated and multi-faceted matrix of class, caste, religion, and regional identities and practices that underlie hijra understandings of both their identity and their difference. At stake, she says, are questions of nationalism, citizenship, identity, religion, class, sex, and economics.

Gayatri Reddy is assistant professor of anthropology and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

 

This book tells two interwoven stories. At a macro level, it tells a story of the pleasures and compromises of cultural sharing in the making of imperial architecture. At a micro level it sets out to recover conversations between people—the Indo-Britons—who met at the building interface in south India, where two very different aesthetic and material practices collided. The narrative is set between 1800 and 1880—the historical gap in which a colonial state appeared in India and Indian architects disappeared from British view.

Shanti Jayewardene-Pillai is trained as an architect in Sri Lanka and the UK. She obtained her Masters in architectural history from University College London and her DPhil from the University of Oxford. She has practised as an architect in Sri Lanka and the UK and taught history at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London University. She now lives in Oxfordshire.

 

Over the last few years there has been an increasing interest in studying masculinities in the south Asian region. Masculinities, the gender system that makes men, remains the least researched pool of darkness of the south Asian reality. We certainly know the obvious—the visible, hegemonic masculinity that bristles and valorously displays its wares but what about various other masculinities, those that remain silent, pushed under and un-recognised. What is the story of these masculinities? How do these masculinities relate with each other? Are they locked in some form of permanent conflict? Why are some forms of masculinity more assertive and more public? How do these masculinities impact on gender relations? Are various forms of masculinities definite, unbreakable, permanent or do they form historically, decay, change and transform? This graphic book, a mixed-media production comprising drawings, photographs, text and video frames attempts to frame these questions in a creative and reader-friendly mode.

Drawing on popular culture, socialisation charts used in schools, poetry, personal stories and documentary footage, the book brings together main theories, key concepts and empirical research on masculiniites. Designed to be an introduction to the study of masculinities, it utilises a south Asian tapestry to discuss the state of knowledge in the field.

Rahul Roy is an independent documentary film maker. Besides directing a number of internationally acclaimed films on the theme of masculinities, he has also written widely on men and gender issues.