SCHOLARLY SANITY ON A MAJOR AREA OF INDIAN WORRY

IRFAN AHMAD
Islamism and Democracy in India
The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami


Jamaat-e-Islami Hind is the most influential Islamist organization in India today. Founded in 1941 by Syed Abul Ala Maududi with the aim of spreading Islamic values in the subcontinent, Jamaat and its offshoot, the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), has been watched closely by Indian security services since 9/11. In particular, SIMI has been accused of being behind terrorist bombings.

Islamism and Democracy in India is the first in-depth examination of India’s Jamaat-e-Islami and SIMI. It explores political Islam’s complex relationship with democracy and gives us a rare window into one immensely significant Islamic trajectory in a Muslim-minority context.

Irfan Ahmad conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork at a school in Aligarh, among student activists at Aligarh Muslim University, at a madrasa in Azamgarh, and during Jamaat’s participation in elections in 2002. He deftly traces Jamaat’s changing position towards India's secular democracy and the group’s gradual ideological shift in the direction of religious pluralism and tolerance. He demonstrates how the rise of militant Hindu nationalism since the 1980s—evident in the destruction of the Babri mosque and widespread violence against Muslims—led to SIMI’s radicalization, its rejection of pluralism, and its call for jihad.

Islamism and Democracy in India argues that when secular democracy is responsive to the traditions and aspirations of its Muslim citizens, Muslims in turn embrace pluralism and democracy. But when democracy becomes majoritarian and exclusionary, Muslims turn radical.

IRFAN AHMAD is an anthropologist and assistant professor of politics in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University in Australia, where he helps lead the Centre for Islam and the Modern World.

THIS BOOK IS PUBLISHED IN PERMANENT BLACK'S 'THE INDIAN CENTURY' SERIES, OF WHICH THE GENERAL EDITORS ARE RAMACHANDRA GUHA AND SUNIL KHILNANI

“This is an outstanding historical and ethnographic account of one of the most influential Islamist movements in South Asia. It is the result of courageous fieldwork at a time of increased Hindu-Muslim tension in India. The book's thesis that even a radically antisecular Islamist movement can be transformed into supporting secular democracy is an extremely important contribution to today's global discussions. It is essential reading for political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and students of Islam.”—Peter van der Veer

“Irfan Ahmad's book could not be more timely or important. At a time when clichés about ‘Islamists’ and ‘Islamic terrorists’ abound, he demonstrates the ideological transformation of one of the twentieth century’s most important Islamist movements, India’s Jamaat-e-Islami, in support of active participation in a secular, plural democracy. Ahmad’s work is essential reading not only for scholars, but for policymakers and concerned citizens alike.”—Barbara D. Metcalf

“This is the most important book written on Muslims in India in the last three decades. Ahmad traces the incremental shift of most adherents of Jamaat-e-Islami to moderation and participation in Indian democracy, showing that from its inception the movement has been thoroughly modern. He deals with an aspect of India that is frequently neglected and engages the main debates concerning the relation of Islam to democracy.”—Dale F. Eickelman

HARDBACK / 328PP / Rs 695 / ISBN 81-7824-269-9 / SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS / Publishing in January 2010 / Copublished with Princeton University Press

THE ANTECEDENTS OF MEDHA PATKAR AND THE NARMADA BACHAO ANDOLAN

RAJENDRA VORA
The World’s First Anti-Dam Movement
The Mulshi Satyagraha 1920–1924


During the time of contemporary India’s most famous anti-dam movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a professor of politics in Pune, Rajendra Vora, wrote a study in Marathi of that movement’s forgotten predecessor. Back in the 1920s, the peasants of Mulshi Peta, near Pune, had protested against the construction of a dam being built with government support by the industrial house of the Tatas.

The struggle was led by Pandurang Mahadev ('Senapati') Bapat, a socialist and nationalist who had been educated in England. Like Medha Patkar of the Narmada Andolan, Bapat was a leader of much charisma and courage. Like her, he identified completely with the peasants who fought to save their ancestral lands from being submerged.

In 1995, Rajendra Vora's book on the Mulshi Satyagraha won the prestigious G.H. Deshmukh award of the Pune Sahitya Parishad. Vora was then persuaded to write an English version. This is that version: it is less a straight translation than a text extensively rewritten for an English-reading audience, including a chapter which links contemporary anti-dam protests with ideas and activities first expressed in the 1920s.

This is a study that will engage a wide range of audiences—those interested in Maharashtrian history, in the history of Indian nationalism, in the politics of the environment, in the sociology of peasant protest, and in alternative strategies of economic development.

RAJENDRA VORA (1946–2008) was Lokmanaya Tilak Professor of Political Science at the University of Pune, from which position he retired in September 2006. He was deeply concerned and connected with political and social processes, and the direction he gave to research in this area has influenced two generations of students and researchers. He co-edited Indian Democracy: Meanings and Practices (2004) as well as an encyclopaedic dictionary of political science in Marathi, Rajyashastra Kosh (1987).

At a function in Fergusson College, Pune, on 25 October 2009, Medha Patkar addressed a distinguished gathering in honour of the late Rajendra Vora and his posthumous book (see news cutting above).

Hardback / 240pp / ISBN 81-7824-248-6 / Rs 595 / World rights / 2009

THE TIMES OF HINDUSTANI: Bharatendu to Manto, via Premchand

SHOBNA NIJHAWAN, EDITOR
Nationalism in the Vernacular
Hindi, Urdu, and the Literature of Indian Freedom

with Introductions by Vasudha Dalmia and Christopher Shackle


This anthology comprises a selection of formative literary writings in Hindi and Urdu from the second half of the nineteenth century, leading up to Indian Independence and the creation of Pakistan. The texts here are mostly hitherto unpublished translations into English.

The anthology provides a picture of how nationalism—as a cultural ideology and political movement—was formed in literature. Unlike other anthologies, this one focuses on writings in two North Indian vernaculars with a contested relationship: Hindi and Urdu. The combination is deliberate: the relationship of Hindi and Urdu was being consolidated and sealed even as these texts were being written.

There are two separate Introductions to this anthology. Each grounds, respectively, the peculiar paths taken by Hindi and Urdu proponents and practitioners. The anthology emphasizes the shared ground of Hindi and Urdu. The Hindi and Urdu texts are arranged into eight thematic clusters, each represented by a nationalist mode of reasoning. Autobiographical writings in Hindi, prison poetry in Urdu, and social reform writings around gender, caste, class, and Dalits are also included in this fascinating collection.

SHOBNA NIJHAWAN teaches Hindi at York University in Canada. Her PhD, on women’s Hindi journals and nationalism, was from the University of California, Berkeley. Her special areas of interest lie in South and Southeast Asian Studies (Hindi/Urdu), with an emphasis on women, gender, and sexuality.

Hardback / 536pp / Rs 795.00 / ISBN 81-7824-260-5 / World rights / Early 2010

Finally Arriving and Soon to be Seen: The Siberian Crane of Indian Political Analysis

SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ

The Imaginary Institution of India

Politics and Ideas


Sudipta Kaviraj has long been recognized as among India’s most thoughtful and wide-ranging political thinkers and analysts, and one of the subtlest and most learned writers on Indian politics in recent times. Paradoxically, this has remained something of a state secret, because Kaviraj’s writings on these subjects have remained scattered in learned journals, many of which remain difficult to access. So the present volume fills a most important gap in the literature on politics and political thought in South Asia.

Among Kaviraj’s many strengths is his quite exceptional ability to position Indian politics within the frameworks of political philosophy in the West alongside perspectives from Indian history and indigenous political thought. The writings collected here range over a wide terrain, including studies of the peculiar nature of Indian democracy; the specificities of the regimes of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi; political culture in Independent India; the construction of colonial power; the relationship between state, society, and discourse in India; the structure of nationalist discourse; language and identity formation in Indian contexts; the relation of development with democracy and democratic functioning; and the interface of religion, politics, and modernity in South Asia.

This volume will be indispensable for every student and scholar of South Asian politics, history, and sociology.

SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ, currently a professor of politics at Columbia University, was earlier a professor of politics at the University of Chicago. Before that he taught for many years at SOAS, London University, following a long stint as reader in politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Hardback / 308pp / Rs 695.00 / ISBN 81-7824-283-4 / South Asia rights / Publishing Early 2010
Copublisher: Columbia University Press

ROLL OVER, TOLSTOY!

War and Peace in Modern India

A Strategic History of the Nehru Years

Srinath Raghavan

During his seventeen years as prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru led India through one of its most difficult and potentially explosive periods in international affairs. As the leader of a new state created amidst the bloodiest partition in history, saddled with new and outstanding problems, Nehru was confronted with a range of disputes which threatened to boil over.

Srinath Raghavan draws on a rich vein of untapped documents to illuminate Nehru’s approach to war and his efforts for peace. Vividly recreating the intellectual and political milieu of the Indian foreign policy establishment, he explains the response of Nehru and his top advisors to the tensions with Junagadh, Hyderabad, Pakistan, and China. He gives individual attention to every conflict and shows how strategic decisions for each crisis came to be defined in the light of the preceding ones. The book follows Nehru as he wrestles with a string of major conflicts—assessing the utility of force, weighing risks of war, exploring diplomatic options for peace, and forming strategic judgements that would define his reputation, both within his lifetime and after.

War and Peace in Modern India challenges and revises our received understanding of Nehru’s handling of international affairs. General readers as well as students of Indian history and politics will find its balanced consideration of Nehru’s foreign policy essential to gauge his achievements, his failures, and his enduring legacy.

SRINATH RAGHAVAN is Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College London. He is currently writing an international history of the India–Pakistan war of 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh.

‘War and Peace in Modern India is a major contribution to both history and international relations. In this book, Srinath Raghavan breaks new ground in his research, and in his arguments. He convincingly demonstrates that when it came to protecting India’s security and national interests, Nehru was far more of a “realist” than had previously been supposed. At the same time, his book greatly illuminates the process of state-formation in a large, complex, diverse, and newly independent country. It will influence scholarly debates for years to come.’ — Ramachandra Guha, author of India after Gandhi

‘A remarkable analysis, based on meticulous scholarship, of Nehru’s crisis-handling — in relation to Kashmir, the princely states, Pakistan, and China — and his search for an effective balance between diplomacy and coercion. By demonstrating how strategic thinking emerges in practical contexts, and not through abstract theoretical reasoning, Srinath Raghavan makes an important contribution to current debates in India and elsewhere.’ — Sunil Khilnani, Starr Foundation Professor, SAIS, Johns Hopkins University

‘In this important and readable book, Srinath Raghavan breaks new historical ground with a thorough and acute analysis of Nehru's foreign policy, demonstrating the subtlety and confidence with which he approached the various crises he faced as India's Prime Minister until he was caught out by China.’— Sir Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies and Vice Principal, King’s College London

‘War and Peace in Modern India is international history at its very best: broadly researched, tightly argued and with new interpretations on nearly every page. Raghavan’s book uses precisely the approach that the much under-studied international history of India needs.’— O.A. Westad, Professor of International History, LSE, and author of the Bancroft Prize-winning The Global Cold War

Hardback / 386pp / Rs 750 / ISBN 81-7824-257-5 / South Asia rights / Copublished by Palgrave Macmillan, London / December 2009

HINDI WRITING IN SHUDDH ENGLISH

Francesca Orsini

Print and Pleasure
Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India


Print and Pleasure tells the story behind the boom in commercial publishing in nineteenth-century North India.

How did the new technology of printing and the enterprise of Indian publishers make the book a familiar object and a necessary part of people’s leisure in a largely illiterate society? What genres became popular in print? Who read them and how were they read?

Our perception of North Indian culture in this period has been dominated by the notion of a competition between Hindi and Urdu, and the growth of language nationalism. Print and Pleasure argues that many other forces were also at work which, in the pursuit of commercial interests, spread quite different and much more hybrid tastes.

The importance of this major new book lies in showing, moreover, that book history can greatly enrich our understanding of literary and cultural history. Francesca Orsini mines a huge and largely untapped archive in order to reveal that popular songbooks, theatre transcripts, meanderingly seralized narratives, flimsily published tales, and forgotten poems are as much a part of colonial history as the elite novels and highbrow journals that are more frequently the subject of historical studies.


FRANCESCA ORSINI is Reader in the Literatures of North India at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her previous books include The Hindi Public Sphere: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (2002) and the edited volume Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (2006). She is currently involved in a project that seeks to rethink North Indian literary culture from a comparative and multilingual perspective. The next book to be edited by her, Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Cultures, will appear soon.


‘A sparkling and immensely readable fresh perspective on nineteenth-century popular publishing.’—Graham Shaw, eminent book historian

‘This book represents the first comprehensive attempt to gauge the impact of the popular press in Hindi and Urdu in post-1857 British North India. It charts the existence in text and performance of genres now ascribed to either Hindi or Urdu. Francesca Orsini has discovered and re-created worlds lost to us after the Hindi–Urdu divide. But she has offered us no utopias, for her book also traces the slow crystallization of Hindi as separating itself from Urdu even in popular print, first cemented in the1890s detective novel industry, and in that pleasure of all pleasures—the qissa of Chandrakanta, suitably and subtly Hinduized. Truly, Print and Pleasure is pleasure in print.'—Vasudha Dalmia, Professor of Hindi at the University of California, Berkeley

HARDBACK / 328PP / RS 695.00 / ISBN 81-7824-249-4 / WORLD RIGHTS / 2010

Eminent American Scholar on Women and Islam in India

GAIL MINAULT

Gender, Language, and Learning
Essays in Indo-Muslim Cultural History


Gender, Language and Learning is a collection of articles, published over the last thirty and more years, by a scholar who is among the most eminent Americans ever to have studied the history, life, and culture of Indian Muslims. The essays are made available together in this book for the first time.

The themes that have characterized Gail Minault’s scholarship are all in evidence here: Indian Muslim women’s rights and self-expression, Urdu as a language of cultural politics and identity, and education as a vehicle of social change among Indian Muslims. Also included is her well-known and frequently cited essay (coauthored with David Lelyveld) on the campaign for Aligarh Muslim University.

This volume will be invaluable for anyone interested in the development and trajectories of Islam in South Asia.

GAIL MINAULT is Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (1982), and Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (1998).


HARDBACK / 328PP / Rs 695.00 / WORLD RIGHTS / ISBN 81-7824-266-4 / WINTER 2009

THE ACADEMIC LOWDOWN ON MEDIEVAL HINDUS AND MUSLIMS

Finbarr B. Flood

OBJECTS OF TRANSLATION

Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter

Objects of Translation offers a nuanced approach to the entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North India. The book—which ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries—challenges existing narratives that cast the period as one of enduring hostility between monolithic “Hindu” and “Muslim” cultures. These narratives of conflict have generally depended upon premodern texts for their understanding of the past. By contrast, this book considers the role of material culture and highlights how objects such as coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures mediated diverse modes of encounter during a critical but neglected period in South Asian history.

The book explores modes of circulation—among them looting, gifting, and trade—through which artisans and artifacts travelled, remapping cultural boundaries usually imagined as stable and static. It analyzes the relationship between mobility and practices of cultural translation, and the role of both in the emergence of complex transcultural identities.

Among the subjects discussed are the rendering of Arabic sacred texts in Sanskrit on Indian coins, the adoption of Turko-Persian dress by Buddhist rulers, the work of Indian stone masons in Afghanistan, and the incorporation of carvings from Hindu and Jain temples in early Indian mosques. Objects of Translation draws upon contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and globalization to argue for radically new approaches to the cultural geography of premodern South Asia and the Islamic world.

FINBARR B. FLOOD is associate professor in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. He is the author of The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Making of an Umayyad Visual Culture.

“Complete, intelligent, and original, Objects of Translation is a remarkable achievement. This book is of such importance for the histories of India and the Islamic world, as well as for theories of culture and language, that it will be essential to all those who want to understand how different cultures interact with one another.”—Oleg Grabar, professor emeritus, Institute for Advanced Study

“With nuance and subtlety, Objects of Translation joins other recent books in challenging the validity of projecting present-day conflicts onto the earliest encounters between Indians and Persianized Turks. The author cites from an enormous range of materials and evidence, and he brings them all together in an intelligent synthesis.”—Richard M. Eaton, University of Arizona

“Objects of Translation demonstrates the complex variability of cultural interaction between Muslims and Hindus in medieval India. It is Flood's willingness to tell the whole story--rightly stressing the creativity, but not ignoring the conflicts--that makes the book such a compelling and important work of historical scholarship.”—Phillip B. Wagoner, Wesleyan University

“This smart and engaging book will be invaluable to readers who seek an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of art and culture, especially in border zones where the most exciting artistic breakthroughs often occur. Comprehensive, creative, and lively, it will be read by scholars of Indian and Islamic art, and educate our next generation of undergraduate and graduate students in a more holistic context.”—Eva R. Hoffman, Tufts University

Hardback / 384PP IN LARGE FORMAT WITH 175 B/W PIX / ISBN 81-7824-273-7 / Rs 1695.00 / Winter 2009
South Asia rights only / Copublished with Princeton University Press

RAMACHANDRA GUHA'S CLASSIC WORK IN NEW EDITION

RAMACHANDRA GUHA

The Unquiet Woods
(Twentieth Anniversary Edition)

Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya

Popular initiatives to halt deforestation in the Himalaya, such as the Chipko movement, are globally renowned. It is less well known that these movements have a history stretching back more than a hundred years. A proper understanding of this long duration within the forests of submontane North India required the marriage of two scholarly traditions: the sociology of peasant protest and the ecologically oriented study of history.

Twenty years ago there appeared on this subject an unknown author’s first book: The Unquiet Woods (1989) by Ramachandra Guha. Fairly quickly, the book came to be recognized as not just another study of dissenting peasants but as something of a classic which had willy nilly opened up a whole new field— environmental history in South Asia. While the monograph has as a consequence been continuously in print within India and in the West since then, its author has become a biographer and historian of international stature.

In celebration of its twentieth year in print, The Unquiet Woods is now reissued with additional material: a new reflective preface by the author on the genesis and limitations of the book which set him off on the path of writerly success, as well as three freshly commissioned critical essays by major academic specialists (Amita Baviskar, Joan Martinez-Alier, and Paul Sutter). Taken together, this additional material situates the monograph and its influence within environmental history in India, Europe and Latin America, and the USA.

This is a book for anyone interested in the history of India’s environment, forests and their dwellers, the varieties of colonial rule, and the specificities of rural rebellion. And it is a book for anyone interested in the writings of Ramachandra Guha.

RAMACHANDRA GUHA’s most recent book is the monumental India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. His biography of Verrier Elwin, Savaging the Civilized, fused intellectual biography with history of anthropology. Guha is also known as an essayist, columnist, and India’s supreme authority on cricket history. Now a writer at large, Guha has held the Arne Naess Chair in History in Oslo, and taught at many academic univesities and institutions including at Yale, Stanford, and Bangalore.

Hardback / 280pp / Rs 495 / ISBN 81-7824-277-X / World rights / Winter 2009

PAPERBACKING THE RENAISSANCE

THE BENGAL RENAISSANCE

Identity and Creativity from Rammohun Roy to Rabindra Nath Tagore

Subrata Dasgupta


Scholars have long debated the very idea of a ‘Bengal Renaissance’. Their controversies have dwelt almost entirely over whether there was anything like a ‘renaissance’ at all, and its significance or otherwise from social, political, and cultural perspectives.

This book addresses the issue from a very different framework. Subrata Dasgupta—an eminent scientist and author of a highly regarded intellectual biography of the scientist Jagadis Chandra Bose—approaches the topic from the perspective of philosophy of science and the psychology of creativity. His intention is to show that the phenomenon of the Bengal Renaissance is characterized by a certain collective cognitive identity, which had its roots in the work of the British Orientalists, beginning with William Jones, and which took form amidst a small but remarkable community of highly creative individuals in nineteenth-century Bengal.

The most notable figures in this creative community were the social reformer and savant Rammohun Roy; the poet Henry Derozio; the scholar-poet Michael Madhusudan Datta; the novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay; pioneering scientists and medical men such as Mahendra Lal Sircar, Jagadis Chandra Bose, and Prafulla Chandra Ray; the mystic Sri Ramakrishna, the pedagogue Swami Vivekananda; and the all-encompassing literary figure Rabindranath Tagore. The core work of each of these major figures is outlined for its distinctive style, analysed for its contribution to an intellectual milieu, and assessed for its effect on cultural life.

Written in completely accessible and elegant English, this is a work for general readers. Those unfamiliar with the basics of the Bengal Renaissance will find it an excellent introduction to the area; scholars familiar with the area will find this perspective on cultural history from the perspective of science and psychology quite novel, unusual, and compelling.

SUBRATA DASGUPTA is the Computer Science Trust Fund Endowed Eminent Scholar, and Director of the Institute of Cognitive Science, at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he is also Professor of History. He is the author of several books, including Jagadis Chandra Bose and the Indian Response to Western Science (Permanent Black paperback, 2009), and a boyhood memoir, Salaam Stanley Matthews (Granta Books, 2006).

World rights / ISBN 81-7824-279-6 / 286pp / Rs 295

NOW IN PAPERBACK

FOOTLOOSE IN THE HIMALAYA

by Bill Aitken


Away from over-used tourist trails and trekking routes, Bill Aitken wanders through the Himalaya. His inclination is to enter disused colonial dak bungalows and ruined temples, meander in wild glades above the treeline carpeted with wild flowers, filling his water bottle from mountain springs and waterfalls. Having left his native Scotland in his twenties to circumnavigate the world, Aitken reached the Himalaya and stopped, enraptured.

For Aitken, travel in the Himalaya is as much about the spirit as about landscapes, leeches, and aching knees. This sets him on a lively trail of holy men, both saintly and fraudulent, across all the pilgrim centres of the Himalaya. He travels in bulging buses to Rishikesh and Badrinath, Kedarnath and Gangotri. He seeks out tiny disused temples to little-known deities like Anasuiya, and discovers a village with temples dedicated to Duryodhana. He spends seven ascetic years in an ashram at Mirtola. All along he gropes for an answer to the question: what power does the Himalaya possess that has drawn generations of seekers to it?

If anything distinguishes Aitken from the regular travel writer, it is his inspired craziness. With his wide-ranging, sometimes eccentric, interests, this book is replete with literature, geology, philosophy, and folklore. There are detours into hill gossip, stories of local ghosts, accounts of local customs, and exasperated asides about political ineptitude. Bill Aitken’s intimate knowledge of the Himalaya, absorbed through a lifetime, makes this more a native’s account than a traveller’s.

World rights / ISBN 81-7824-281-8 / 268pp / Rs 295

NEW IN PAPERBACK

SUGATA BOSE
A Hundred Horizons
The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire

‘Sugata Bose has given us an excellent historical study, which is both interesting in itself (even for non-historians) and full of contemporary relevance for understanding an important ancestry of present-day globalization.’—Amartya Sen

Written around a set of sea voyages involving Curzon, Tagore, and Gandhi, as well as unknown merchants, labourers, soldiers, and pilgrims, this book asks us to completely rethink the nature of nationalism.

It does so by arguing the importance of interregional arenas for extra-territorial and universalist anti-colonialism. This current of ideas, Bose powerfully demonstrates, coexisted and contended with territorial nationalism. He illuminates the interplay of nationalism and universalism in the thought and politics of a wide range of nationalists and patriots—both exalted and subaltern.

This fascinating history of mobile peoples around the Indian Ocean also retrieves the nuances of patriotism in diasporic public spheres by focusing on the many fragments that trespassed the borders of colonies and would-be nations. The pilgrimage experience of Muslims from India, Malaya, and Java to Mecca and Medina; the overseas voyages of Tagore and Gandhi; and the diaries and epistolary records of ordinary travellers collectively reveal the reality of the Indian Ocean as a cultural ecumene, a distinguishable zone which inspired ideas and aspirations that challenged Europe’s hegemonies.

This pioneering exploration of the oceanic dimension of anti-colonialism and religious universalism frees the study of nationalism from its landlocked state. By elucidating ideas that wafted across the Indian Ocean, Bose makes a rich and persuasive argument, namely that the intellectual history of the age of empire may best be studied in the framework of multiple and competing universalisms rather than mutually exclusive and conflicting cultural relativisms.

‘Sugata Bose has brought together social, culturaland political history to create a superb study of the peoples of the Indian Ocean littoral duringthe age of European imperialism and anti-colonial nationalism. This is a major contribution to the history of India, Southeast and West Asia, and it provides a critical plane of analysis between histories of “globalization” and histories of regions.’—C.A. Bayly

‘Sugata Bose presents a lyrical, subtly contentious blend of poetry, political economy, and accounts of pilgrims, capitalists, writers,workers, imperialists, soldiers, scholars, and revolutionaries, to analyse the modern Indian Ocean as an ever-changing, transregional space and to formulate a judicious historical critique of territorial nationalism, US empire, and popular ideas about globalization.’—David Ludden

SUGATA BOSE is Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard. Educated at Presidency College, Kolkata, and St Catharine’s College, Cambridge (where he was also a Fellow and Reader in History), his books include Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (2004, with Ayesha Jalal); Nationalism, Democracy and Development (1997, edited with Ayesha Jalal); Credit, Markets and the Agrarian Economy of Colonial India (1994); Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital (1993); South Asia and World Capitalism (1990, as editor); and Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics (1986).

PAPERBACK / 350PP / Rs 395 / SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS / ISBN 81-7824-280-X / winter 2009
COPUBLISHED WITH HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

WEALTH OF LEARNING ON HEALTH

HEALTH AND POPULATION IN SOUTH ASIA

From Earliest Times to the Present

Sumit Guha

Over the past millennium old world populations and their new world colonies have expanded enormously. The history of human populations acquires a new interest in an epoch when human beings are aware of the burden they are placing on the ecosystem. Asia has long contained a major fraction of world population, and East and South Asia have accounted for most of that fraction. This book focuses on various aspects of the poulation of South Asia over the past twenty-five centuries.

An introduction highlights the book’s points of contact with the debates in the population history of Asia, Europe and the Americas. This leads into a major chapter on the population of South Asia from 200 BC to 1900 AD. This offers an unprecedentedly long time-series for South Asia, and it is likely to be the standard reference for some time to come. Its importance may be gauged by the fact that very few scholars have ever discussed the period before 1800 AD, and no one has produced an empirically defensible estimate for the population earlier than 1600.

The later chapters in the volume are more narrowly focused on specific aspects of the interaction between demography, climate, health, medicine and culture. One chapter examines the variation in household structures in western India over 200 years, another offers a novel explanation (climatic fluctutation) for unusual features of South Asian demography in the early modern era.

A rare document on vaccination is translated for the first time and used to illustrate the interaction of cultural codes and medical techniques. Immensely detailed data on military population before 1920 is used to generate important conclusions regarding the efficacy of knowledge and hygiene in improving health. The book includes a compact survey of the evolution of environmental hygiene in India through the twentieth century.

SUMIT GUHA was educated at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the University of Cambridge. He has taught at St Stephen’s College, the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum, and the Delhi School of Economics. He is currently Professor of History at Rutgers University in the USA.

200pp / ISBN 81-7824-282-6 / Rs 295 / World rights

JUST AWARDED: BEST FIRST BOOK IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS PRIZE

CHRISTIAN LEE NOVETZKE
History, Bhakti, and Public Memory
Namdev in Religious and Secular Traditions

WINNER OF THE 'BEST FIRST BOOK IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGION', AWARDED BY THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION

Namdev is a central figure in the cultural history of India, especially within the field of bhakti. Born in the Marathi-speaking region of the Deccan in the late thirteenth century, Namdev is remembered as a simple, low-caste Hindu tailor whose innovative performances of devotional songs spread his fame widely. He is central to many religious traditions within Hinduism, as well as to Sikhism, and he is a key early literary figure in Maharashtra, northern India, and Punjab.

In the modern period, Namdev appears throughout the public spheres of Marathi and Hindi and in India at large, where his identity fluctuates between regional associations and a quiet, pan-Indian, nationalist-secularist profile that champions the poor, oppressed, marginalized, and low caste. Christian Lee Novetzke considers the way social memory coheres around the figure of Namdev from the sixteenth century to the present, examining the practices that situate Namdev's memory in multiple historical publics. Focusing primarily on Maharashtra and drawing on ethnographies of devotional performance, archival materials, scholarly historiography, and popular media, especially film, Novetzke vividly illustrates how religious communities in India preserve their pasts and, in turn, create their own historical narratives.

‘This erudite study is an important contribution to several important issues in contemporary social theory, especially the relations of memory, history, and community through the past thousand years of the vernacular millennium. Deeply grounded in manuscript sources, it never loses sight of the living context of performance where the texts originated.’—Sumit Guha, Rutgers University

‘ … Novetzke lets us see the processes that allow the songs and stories of a fourteenth-century saint to live vibrantly today. His book might be called the “many lives of Sant Namdev” a saint (or sant) very important in Marathi and Hindi but neglected in English. With a discussion of “public memory” and a thorough explanation of the way in which orality influences literacy and performance trumps permanence, Novetzke brings the cultural world of Namdev to life. He breaks new ground in the field of bhakti studies in his use of many kinds of evidence, from the hand written badas used for several centuries by those who perform the song sermon called kirtan to the film industry …’ —Eleanor Zelliot, Carleton College

Hardback / 336pp / Rs 695 / ISBN 81-7824-259-1 / For sale only in South Asia / June 2009 / Copublisher: Columbia University Press

NEW IN PAPERBACK

THE LANGUAGE OF THE GODS IN THE WORLD OF MEN: SANSKRIT, CULTURE AND POWER IN PREMODERN INDIA

by SHELDON POLLOCK

WINNER OF
The Coomaraswamy Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies

The 32nd Lionel Trilling Award, Columbia College and Flora Levy Foundation of Lafayette, LA.

The 2006 Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division Awards for Axcellence in Literature, Language, & Linguistics, The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers

In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India’s ancient language, as a vehicle for poetry and polity by tracing the two great moments of this transformation. He asks whether the very different histories of these two moments challenge current theories of culture and power and suggest new possibilities for practice.

“Truly breathtaking in its scope and originality”
The Telegraph

“Magisterial . . . The kind of scholarly synthesis and insightful interpretation that comes along, at most, once in a generation or two”
Journal of Asian Studies

“An intriguing study of classical and medieval India, but also a useful contribution to the theoretical literature . . . A grand narrative”
Journal of American Academy of Religion

Rs 695 / 702 pages / ISBN 81-7824-275-3 / for sale in South Asia only / Copublished with Columbia University Press

NEW IN PAPERBACK

PARTISANS OF ALLAH

JIHAD IN SOUTH ASIA


AYESHA JALAL

“Based on a vast command of the relevant literature, wide-ranging, meticulous research, fine-tuned analysis, and deep critical thinking, Partisans of Allah traces the history of ideas about jihad and its ethical practice from the early days of Islam to the present”
David Ludden, New York University

“It is difficult to imagine a timelier or a more thoughtful book on this subject. Jalal’s subtle reinterpretations sweep away many of the misconceptions fostered both by Western commentators and contemporary Muslim publicists”
C.A. Bayly, Cambridge University

“Jalal restores the much-used concept of jihad to its enabling history of radical self-examination in the pursuit of justice and freedom, treading a fine balance between religious faith and secular belief. This is a courageous and brilliant book for a hopeful future beyond the quagmire of those who believe in the clash of civilizations”
Homi Bhabha, Harvard University

“An erudite and thought-provoking study of the interplay of religion and politics”
Kamila Shamsie, The Guardian

“Ayesha Jalal renders a service by her erudite study of jehad in Islam”
A.G. Noorani

Rs 395 / 400pp / ISBN 81-7824-274-5 / South Asia only / Co-published with Harvard University Press

Véronique Benei
Schooling India
Hindus, Muslims, and the Forging of Citizens

This book explores an important yet often overlooked aspect of nationalism—its embodied and emotional dimensions. It does so by focusing on a neglected area, that of elementary education in the modern state.

Through an ethnographic study of primary schools in western India, Véronique Benei examines the idioms through which teachers, students, and parents make meaning of their political world. She articulates how urban middle- and lower-class citizens negotiate the processes of self-making through the minutiae of daily life at school and extracurricular activities, ranging from school trips to competitions and parent gatherings.

To document how processes of identity formation are embodied, Benei draws upon historical and cultural repertoires of emotionality and language-use. Her book shifts the normal focus of attention away from apocalyptic communal violence—she looks instead at everyday or ‘banal nationalism’. Attentive to the formulation of ‘senses of belonging’, she explores the sensory production and daily manufacture of nationhood and citizenship, as well as how nationalism is nurtured in a nation’s youth.

Historians, sociologists, students of politics and nationalism as well as educationists will be enriched by this careful and detailed study of the often ignored nuances involved in the making of communities such as Hindus and Muslims within the framework of the Indian nation.

VÉRONIQUE BENEI is Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, Department of Anthropology where she has taught since 1997, and holds a permanent position as Senior Research Fellow with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (LAIOS/IIAC). She has also taught at Princeton University and Yale University.

“Benei's compelling ethnography is much more than a book about schooling; it’s about schooling in the service of the nation, how schooling functions to create citizens, and how nationalism is inculcated in our youth. I have seldom read a more powerful, beautifully written book.”—Susan Wadley

“ … a major contribution to the study of nationalism and to the burgeoning field of anthropology of emotions … a rich ethnographic study of mundane educational practices based on a deep understanding of their historical context. She pays meticulous attention to the details of language use, to songs and to the everyday disciplines of schooling … analyses emotions and the corporeal, while also reminding us that language is at the heart of cultural and political passions: what matters is how, when, and in which style, one declares one's love for the nation.” —Thomas Blom Hansen

“ … examines the role played by schooling in the production of nationalist identities … a highly nuanced account of political acculturation. She skilfully illustrates how her ideas mesh with other theoretical work and intersperses her detailed account with reflections on the wider comparative implications of her study … looks beyond the immediate and sometimes superficial changes that accompanied the rise of Hindu Nationalism …”— Craig Jeffrey

Hardback / 368pp with 19 b/w pix / Rs 695 / ISBN 81-7824-263-X / South Asia rights / Copublished with Stanford University Press / June 2009

THE FOUNTAINHEAD OF THE SUBALTERN MOVEMENT

RANAJIT GUHA
The Small Voice of History
Collected Essays
Edited and with an Introduction by
PARTHA CHATTERJEE

At A CEREMONY IN HONOUR OF RANAJIT GUHA ON 2 MAY 2009 IN KOLKATA, THE GREAT MAN WAS PRESENTED THE FIRST COPY OF HIS BOOK BY PARTHA CHATTERJEE. LATER, RG AUTOGRAPHED NEARLY 50 COPIES FOR BUYERS IN THE AUDIENCE

Ranajit Guha is arguably the Indian historian whose writings have had a massive and formative impact on contemporary scholarship in several disciplines throughout the world: on postcolonial studies in literature, in anthropology, in history, in cultural studies, in art history.

Guha first became known as the practitioner of a critical Marxism that ran parallel to the work of British and French Marxist historians of the 1960s and 1970s but which, instead of re-creating a ‘history from below’, sought active political engagement with the present by deploying insights drawn from Gramsci and Mao. More recently, Guha’s writings have drawn attention to the phenomenological and the everyday, and been noticed for their sustained critique of the disciplinary practices of history-writing.

Guha’s reputation rests most famously on his international role as founder and guiding spirit of Subaltern Studies, the series of essays and monographs that have, over the past three decades, critiqued colonialist and nationalist historiographies. While spawning new ways of thinking about history in Europe, Latin America, and the USA, these have created a ferment richer than anything else emerging out of modern South Asia, even as they have unsettled many existing frameworks of thought.

Guha’s fascinatingly diverse historical and political writings, dating from the 1950s and tucked away in obscure journals and collections, have been virtually inaccessible: they are brought together for the first time in the present volume, which comprises his Collected Essays in English, forty-four in number.

These writings have been put together by Partha Chatterjee, whose long association with Guha as a founder-member of the Subaltern Studies editorial board is complemented by his own international stature as a historian, political theorist, and public intellectual. Chatterjee’s Introduction sketches the professional life and intellectual trajectory of India’s most profoundly influential modern historian.

Every serious student of South Asian history, politics, and anthropology will be enriched by the astonishing diversity of insights and learning within this book.

RANAJIT GUHA, renowned as the founding father of Subaltern Studies, is the author of several pathbreaking works, including A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963), Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983), and Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (1997).

PARTHA CHATTERJEE’s many influential books include Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1986), The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), and A Princely Impostor: The Kumar of Bhawal and the Secret History of Indian Nationalism (2002; arguably the most readable and thrilling book ever written by any historian of India).

ISBN 81-7824-255-9 / hardback / 676pp / Rs 895 / May 2009

FIRST PERMANENT BLACK BOOK TO WIN THE COOMARASWAMY PRIZE

THE MANY LIVES OF A RAJPUT QUEEN Heroic Pasts in India, circa 1500-1900
by RAMYA SREENIVASAN

THIS BOOK HAS WON THE PRESTIGIOUS ANANDA KENTISH COOMARASWAMY PRIZE FOR 2009

THE CITATION READS
"This wide-ranging monograph effortlessly traverses regions and genres to study the evolution of a historical memory. The Padmini story of a beautiful queen who is desired by a powerful enemy and who finally immolates herself rather than surrender has been current in South Asian folk and high literary traditions for over five centuries. In the colonial and post-colonial era it has been appropriated by Hindu nationalists as a narrative of purity and virtue. Rather than accept this recent retelling, Sreenivasan analyzes Padmini's story through its entire narrative trajectory, deploying at once the skills of a historian who combines an understanding of religious thought and social history and those of a literary scholar deeply familiar with gendered tropes in narrative and discourse.

The Padmini story featured largely in Tod's early colonial history. Sreenivasan goes beneath that colonial discourse to recover previous (and parallel) indigenous narratives, and she goes into the archive to show how James Tod and others actually worked. She tracks how nationalists -- both religious and secular -- have appropriated the same theme. Sreenivasan is never reductionist. She consistently locates and situates the texts she analyses in the conjunctures in and for which they were produced, whether by North Indian Sufis, Arakanese kings, Jain businessmen and literati, Rajput lords or Bengali bhadralok. She thereby undercuts the recent heroic narratives of the colonial and post-colonial era that have taken the Padmini story out of context in order to sustain the credibility of Hindu fundamentalism and the discourse of Islamic separatism."


AND ACCORDING TO ONE EMINENT SCHOLAR:
"Ramya Sreenivasan’s study of the multiple narrative traditions surrounding Rajasthan’s legendary fourteenth-century queen Padmini is a masterful and admirable scholarly achievement. The tale of Padmini, as it is widely known in Indian popular culture, portrays a fabled beauty around whom a fatal chain of intrigue, plot, counterplot, and battle ultimately leads to massive heroic deaths, including the celebrated jauhar, or collective self-immolation, of Padmini and her female companions. In the end, the deluded sultan of Delhi, Alauddin, who sought to possess Padmini, attains only the ashes of victory when he finally enters Chitor. You can read this sad and dusty saga in the lobby of the Government Tourist Bungalow in Chitor, and—as Sreenivasan notes on her first page—in the Amar Chitra Katha comic book series as well. However, the plot soon thickens.

Sreenivasan’s singular accomplishment in this meticulously researched account is to demonstrate more convincingly and thoroughly than I have ever seen done before the wonderfully complex entanglements of literature and politics, of history and legend. She adroitly tracks the ways in which apparently infinite narrative permutations may both reflect and influence real events. Padmini herself probably never existed, as we learn in passing early on, but that is of little significance. The queen’s story in its “many lives”—as religious allegory, royal selfaggrandizement, colonial confabulation, nationalist inspiration, patriarchal parable—is likely more compelling than any actual historical personage’s ever could be." -- Ann Grodzins Gold, Journal of Asian Studies


Hardback / 286pp / ISBN 81-7824-185-4 / Rs 650 / Published in October 2007 for South Asia / Copublished by the University of Washington Press

O.K. TATA TO HINDUTVA

THE MODERNITY OF SANSKRIT by Simona Sawhney

IF YOU THOUGHT that Sanskrit and its canonical texts validate the Hindutva worldview, this book will make you think again. It shows how writers such as Tagore and Gandhi deployed the Indian literary and religious canon to argue broadly liberal positions, and how it is both possible and necessary to view the possibilities of political plenitude within texts misappropriated by the Hindu Right.

“A passionate plea, made with erudition and conviction, for taking new stock of the modern engagement with Sanskrit, not only in Hindi lyric, drama, and essay, but also in the new political readings of texts as safely ‘classical’ as the Bhagavadgita.” —Vasudha Dalmia, Professor of Hindi, University of California, Berkeley

“Three predictions come to mind upon reading The Modernity of Sanskrit. First, it will blow the current field of Sanskrit Studies apart. Second, it will wake up practitioners of various literary studies disciplines — particularly the one that is conventionally and comfortably called Comparative Literature — to the existence of literature written in the Sanskrit language and a genetically linked literature, that written in Hindi. Third, it will show just how salient, sensible, and stimulating scholarly discourse on South Asia can be.” —Clinton B. Seely, University of Chicago

“The Modernity of Sanskrit is a brilliant and beautiful study of canonical works in the Sanskrit tradition. The prose is consistently engaging, moving, and convincing, and Sawhney’s close readings are a delight.”—Henry Schwartz, Georgetown University

ISBN 81-7824-253-2 / Hardback / 226pp / For sale in South Asia only / Rs 495 / April 09 / Copublished by the University of Minnesota Press

MAJOR CONTRIBUTION TO INDIAN SECULARISM

The Crisis of Secularism in India
edited by Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

“Philosophical, historical, and contemporary at the same time, these essays add a new dimension to global discussions of liberalism and the politics of the religious Right.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty

Essays by Flavia Agnes, Upendra Baxi, Shyam Benegal, Akeel Bilgrami, Partha Chatterjee, V. Geetha, Sunil Khilnani, Nivedita Menon, Ashis Nandy, Gyanendra Pandey, Gyan Prakash, Arvind Rajagopal, Paula Richman, Sumit Sarkar, Dwaipayan Sen, Shabnum Tejani, Romila Thapar, Ravi S. Vasudevan, and Gauri Viswanathan.

Collectively, the essays consider the history of secularism in India; the relationship between secularism and democracy; and shortcomings in the categories “majority” and “minority.” They examine how debates about secularism play out in schools, the media, and in popular cinema. And they address two of the most politically charged sites of crisis: personal law and the right to practice and encourage religious conversion.

ISBN 81-7824-256-7 / paperback / Rs 450 / 410 pages / For sale in South Asia only / April 09 / Copublished by Duke University Press

THE BOOK THAT MADE SOME MEN VERY ANGRY

THE UGLINESS OF THE INDIAN MALE AND OTHER PROPOSITIONS
by Mukul Kesavan

A dazzling collection of Mukul Kesavan’s essays on cinema, writing, travel, the media, politics.


‘Whatever [Kesavan] writes about carries within it the germ of his political beliefs which include, of course, the notion that it is right and proper for writers to express their opinions vigorously and fearlessly; that this has not yet ceased to be a nation where it is possible to do so without being fearful about the consequences.’ Manjula Padmanabhan, Outlook

‘Kesavan’s knowledge of the Hindi film is deep, and deeply felt....The essay on the Urdu connection with the Hindi film is fascinating. His travel writing and political commentary is acute and compelling.’ Keshav Desiraju, The Hindu

‘... whether its Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, or Konkana Sen’s latest role, there is an unmasking of a false cosmopolitanism and an improving upon of the public notions of secularism and pluralism.’ Rehan Ansari, DNA

ISBN 81-7824-252-4 / 312pp / Rs 295/ BLACK KITE / Paperback / Published February 2009

SCIENCE YESTERDAY

JAGADIS CHANDRA BOSE AND THE INDIAN RESPONSE TO WESTERN SCIENCE by Subrata Dasgupta

‘ ... an important examination of the science of Jagadis Chandra Bose ... Dasgupta distances his account from nationalist historiography ... His reading complements the histories and biographies that have emphasized the sociocultural history of science in India.’—Dhruv Raina in Isis

‘Scholars interested in science and society issues as well as lay readers will find the narrative fascinating.’—Deepak Kumar in The Book Review

‘ ... a book that has filled a void in the history of science in India.’—Prajit Basu in Science, Technology and Society

‘ ... a thorough, critical, dispassionate, objective and lucid synthesis of an enormous amount of information ... a valuable contribution to the history of science, especially Indian science.’—R.L. Bijlani in Indian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology

ISBN 81-7824-251-6 / Rs 350 / 320pp / Paperback / Spring 2009

SALAAM BOMBAY CINEMA

BOMBAY CINEMA: AN ARCHIVE OF THE CITY by Ranjani Mazumdar

"Mazumdar's experience as a filmmaker allowed her to offer significant readings of not just the narratives and character development in the films, but of the cinematography, mise-en-scene, and other technical and performance aspects of production. As scholar and filmmaker, Ranjani Mazumdar effectively combined her two disciplines in the book, which is accessible and useful to scholars of South Asia and film." Journal of Popular Culture

“This is not simply a book about how Bombay movies have re-presented the ambivalent site of the city in post-Independence India. More profoundly, Mazumdar is giving us an alternative history of Indian modernity, a history in which 'the urban experience' only comes fully into focus through the sensuous mediation of the popular cinema.” Visual Anthropology Review

“Mazumdar has a great capacity to discuss Indian cinema, with a brilliant grasp of its political, historical and aesthetic developments, but equally she is well attuned to the interests and ruptures in the academic discourse of film and cinema studies.” Film International

“Mazumdar develops her work thoroughly and consistently, such that contemporary Bombay cinema is easily accessible to the general reader and the academic scholar alike ... takes us through the cinematic city as character, as spectacle, as spatial dynamic, as performative motor and above all as an invaluable archive of urban experience in contemporary India.” The Book Review

"Departing from the obsession that Film Studies in India has displayed with the idea of cinema as a national allegory, the book convincingly argues for the need to examine the city's hidden archive as one that cannot be subsumed within the sign of the national." Biblio

“...an exciting and important contribution to a field that has, to date, been under researched and under theorized. Lively, provocative and richly suggestive, it will also serve as a surefire incentive to watch those films all over again”
Screen

"...at once about Hindi films, spatial practices, urban modernity and globalization...the strength of the book lies in bringing all of them together in a productive conversation.”
Economic and Political Weekly

“Here, at last, is a book [that] walks the streets where the films are set, looks at shop windows, publicity material, costumes, fashion, architecture, telecommunications and the concrete materiality that surrounds the film object.”
Seminar

“This is a fascinating book about the city of Bombay (now Mumbai) and its place and role in Indian cinema. Ranjani Mazumdar has provided us with a lucid picture of the city and its relationship with cinema ... a much needed contribution in understanding the role of Hindi films in the cinematic city. The book also challenges the idealisation of the Indian village as constructed by the Indian nationalist movement.” Information, Society, and Justice

"... a landmark study - carefully researched, well organized and offering refreshingly uncondescending and strikingly insightful discussions of mainstream films - that deserves to be read by anyone interested in India's popular cinema or its contemporary urban life." Journal of Asian Studies


Published August 2007 / hardback / 296PP / Rs 595 / ISBN 81-7824-205-2 / South Asia rights / Copublished by the University of Minnesota Press

NEW LIGHT ON FORGOTTEN STATESMAN

GANDHI’S CONSCIENCE KEEPER
C. RAJAGOPALACHARI AND INDIAN POLITICS
by Vasanthi Srinivasan

'Dr Srinivasan’s study is a tour-de-force, exhibiting all the signs of a mature thinker who is confident of her intellectual and spiritual bearings' Peter Emberley

'This work will be widely appreciated and will also set off useful debates' Rajmohan Gandhi

Hailed by Mahatma Gandhi as his conscience keeper, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari (1878–1972; better known as Rajaji) epitomized the practical wisdom, religious tolerance, and statesmanship that Gandhi brought to the nationalist movement.

Vasanthi Srinivasan presents Rajaji’s vision as that of a theocentric liberal. Examining his political ideas and actions alongside his literary works, as well as in relation to statesmen-ideologues such as Nehru and Periyar, she shows how Rajaji steered clear of ideological dogma and charted an ethic of responsibility.

VASANTHI SRINIVASAN is a Reader in Political Science at the University of Hyderabad.

ISBN 81-7824-246-1 / Hardback / 290pp / Rs 695 / published in association with the New India Foundation / January 2009

NEW BOOK BY TANIKA SARKAR

REBELS, WIVES, SAINTS
Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times
by TANIKA SARKAR

Tanika Sarkar’s writings on women, religion, and nationhood in the context of colonial Bengal have been pathbreaking. In this book, she again deploys to great effect her trademark focus on the small, the specific, and the emotive defining moment in history to arrive at larger, compelling pictures which show us how people actually felt and experienced life in that period.

The colonial universe outlined in this book centres around woman as both defiled and deified (woman as widow, woman as goddess); the nation as woman-goddess within a country comprising plural traditions; male reformers battling Hindu conservatives; a Hindu novelist idealizing nationalism as the demolition of Muslim symbols; male-dominant social norms threatening principles of softness and femininity; theatre and censorship; and the sometimes contrasting worldviews of Bankim and Rabindranath.

This accessible and enthralling book will consolidate Tanika Sarkar’s international reputation as one of India’s finest historians.

TANIKA SARKAR is the author of Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation (Permanent Black paperback, 2001). She has co-edited (with Sumit Sarkar) Women and Social Reform in Modern India (Permanent Black, 2008). She is currently professor of history at JNU, New Delhi, and has taught at the University of Chicago as well as at several campuses in the USA and Europe.

ISBN 81-7824-247-8 / Hardback / 356pp / Rs 695 / Publishing end 2008 / For sale in South Asia only

LETTERS FROM A CELL

Subhas Chandra Bose
IN BURMESE PRISONS: Correspondence May 1923 - July 1926
edited by Sisir K. Bose

Subhas Chandra Bose’s exile in Burmese prisons from 1924 to 1927 witnessed the transformation of a lieutenant into a leader. During the non-cooperation movement and its aftermath he had wholeheartedly accepted Deshbandhu Chitta Ranjan Das as his political mentor. The apprenticeship was cut short by Deshbandhu’s death in June 1925. When Subhas received this terrible news as a prisoner in Mandalay, he felt “desolate with a sense of bereavement”, as he wrote to his friend Dilip Kumar Roy.

Netaji’s letters cover a very wide array of topics—art, music, literature, nature, education, folk culture, civic affairs, criminology, spirituality, and, of course, politics. He bore the rigours of prison life with a combination of stoicism and humour.

This volume is indispensable to an understanding of India’s greatest revolutionary leader and will interest all historians of modern India.

ISBN 81-7824-250-8 / Paperback / 380pp / 4 b/w photos / Rs 350/ Publishing end 2008

SEPTEMBER 2008 EVENTS

PERMANENT BLACK and THE INDIA INTERNATIONAL CENTRE, NEW DELHI are
delighted to invite you to an illustrated talk on THE LIONS OF INDIA
by Dr Divyabhanusinh. The talk will take place at the India
International Centre, 40 Max Mueller Marg, New Delhi, on Thursday, the
11th of September 2008, at 6.30 pm. It will be chaired by Dr Mahesh Rangarajan.

THE LIONS OF INDIA is published by Permanent Black and Black Kite, in
hardback, at Rs 395.

WRITERS AT WORK

A CONCISE HISTORY OF INDIAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH
edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

This is an updated, text-only version of AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF INDIAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH.

CHOICE magazine of the USA chose the illustrated version as its OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE OF THE YEAR.

This is what the critics said
‘A delightful journey through Indian writing in English from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the boom in fiction we’re witnessing now.’ Padmini Mongia, Biblio

‘This is the best kind of history . . . it deserves a place on the bookshelves of anyone who has an inquiring mind.’ Nilanjana S. Roy, The Hindu

‘. . . an amazing volume . . . A rigorous book, with a brilliant introduction, this compendium joins K.R. Srinivas Iyengar’s legendary Indian Writing in English.’ P. Venkateswaran, Choice

‘A useful and detailed guide to a varied body of writing.’ Siddhartha Deb, Times Literary Supplement

Hardback / Rs 595 / 460pp / ISBN 81-7824-240-0 / Publishing in winter 2008

FLOWER-EATERS

PUMPKIN FLOWER FRITTERS AND OTHER CLASSIC RECIPES FROM A BENGALI KITCHEN by Renuka Devi Choudhurani


THIS IS A BOOK FOR ANYONE WHO ENJOYS GOOD FOOD: THE COOKING OF IT, THE EATING OF IT, THE SHARING OF IT.


Some of these recipes have fed and delighted Jawaharlal Nehru and Sarojini Naidu. All of them have provided nourishment and comfort to generations of Bengali families. Now for the first time, these time-tested recipes are available in English.

Renuka Devi Choudhurani (1910–1985) was married off at the age of ten into a zamindari family. That was when her culinary education began, mainly from her father-in-law, but also from itinerant bawarchis and specialist cooks. As her interest in good food developed, she took to collecting and recording recipes. Ultimately, she published a two-volume Bengali work containing about 400 vegetarian and 300 fish- and meat-based recipes. From the simplest dal to the most elaborate biryani, her recipes are easy to follow, and produce delicious results.

This book contains a wide-ranging selection from the original Bengali work. It covers all the courses that might normally be served in a Bengali meal: starters, fritters, vegetables, lentils, rice, fish, meat, chutneys, dessert. Renuka Devi’s eloquent autobiographical introduction is also included here.

Paperback / Rs 295 / ISBN 81-7824-236-2 / A Black Kite Book / Publishing in November 2008

BANNER HEADLINES

A NATIONAL FLAG FOR INDIA, by ARUNDHATI VIRMANI

"The long and difficult elaboration of the Indian national flag, the diverse and sometimes contrary expectations that built up around this object during half a century with their stakes profoundly rooted in the social world: these essential aspects of the historian’s work are masterfully unravelled in this book." Jacques Revel

Unearthing the complex history of the making of the Indian national flag, Arundhati Virmani reveals cultural processes that imposed a set of values and sentiments on an incredibly diverse and scattered body of people. She shows that the Indian flag had strong roots in the ethos of colonialism. It was a major resource for the nationalist movement, a tool that allowed large social diversities to assert the compelling necessity for a new political culture with secular nationalism as the unifying pole. This viewpoint was contested by the Muslim League, the Sikhs, the Indian princes, and Hindu nationalists. So how, in the end, did the Indian flag come to fly as it does today? And how, in contrast, was the flag of Pakistan created?

ARUNDHATI VIRMANI was Reader in History at Delhi University until 1992, when she moved to France, where she teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Marseille. She has published an essay in Past and Present, as well as two books.

HARDBACK / ISBN 81-7824-232-1 / 370pp + 4pp in colour / Rs 750 / Publishing in October 2008

RAMACHANDRA GUHA BATS FOR PERMANENT BLACK

Ramachandra Guha once said he writes on history for a living and on cricket to live. The States of Indian Cricket marries the craft of history to the life of cricket in India and is described by its author as ‘the product of a lifelong addiction to the most sophisticated sport known to mankind.’

Guha draws upon the memories of several generations of cricket lovers to give us wonderful sketches of India’s cricketers, the forgotten as well as the famous: from C.K. Nayudu and Vinoo Mankad to Saurav Ganguly and Anil Kumble. Using the device of imaginary all-time India Elevens, he provides rich insights into the cities and states in which Indian cricket was forged.

We thus have here, for the first time within the covers of a single volume, an informal, anecdotal, and immensely readable history of Indian cricket, a book which complements Guha’s celebrated work on the sport’s social history, A Corner of a Foreign Field (2002).

Ramachandra Guha is one of India’s most distinguished historians and biographers. His many awards and distinctions include the Daily Telegraph/Cricket Society Book Award and the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History. His most recent book is the widely acclaimed India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy.

ISBN 81-7824-241-9 / Rs 295 / paperback / 320pp / Published in Sept 08 / A Black Kite book

Music in paperback

RAGA 'N JOSH: STORIES FROM A MUSICAL LIFE 

by Sheila Dhar

This book is a classic. The hardback edition sold out three printings and has been replaced by this Black Kite paperback. 

Sheila Dhar’s stories, essays, and memoirs include Begum Akhtar, Siddheshwari Bai, Fayyaz and Niaz Ahmed Khan, Kesar Bai Kerkar, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, and Bhimsen Joshi. No writer has ever conveyed the ethos of this world and the quirks of its denizens with such wit, irreverence, perceptiveness, and empathy.

As a part of Delhi’s political elite, Sheila Dhar is also inimitably observant about celebrities as diverse as Indira Gandhi, the economist Joan Robinson, the film director Richard Attenborough, and Her Supreme Royal Highness the Queen of Tonga who, when asked what she does in her spare time, says with regal common sense, 'I just bees.'

Incisive intelligence, self-deprecating humour, and an original propensity to manipulate the English language for Indian contexts combine to make this book an absolute delight.

SHEILA DHAR (1929–2001) studied at Hindu College, Delhi, and obtained her MA in English (summa cum laude) from Boston University. She was a renowned storyteller, musician, and authority on Hindustani classical music.

ISBN 81-7824-244-3 / Rs 295 / 320pp / paperback / Published end 2008 / A Black Kite book

Garden Notes

A SAHIB'S MANUAL FOR THE MALI by ALICK PERCY-LANCASTER, edited by Laeeq Futehally

Amateur gardeners and those who like gardens but cannot tell phlox from petunia: Alick Percy-Lancaster’s delightful guide is for everyone. It explains not only the What and the How but also the all-important Why. Even as he dispenses practical gardening tips, the leisurely charm of Percy-Lancaster’s writing evokes an India far away and long ago.

He takes us through garden work month by month: follow his advice, and whatever space you have—terrace or balcony, kitchen window or rambling lawn—will be full of leaf and flower.


Alick Percy-Lancaster was the last Englishman to hold the post of Superintendent of Horticultural Operations, Government of India. After Independence, his chores included maintaining 15,000 avenue trees on roads and clipping 150 miles of hedges.


ISBN 81-7824-242-7 / Rs 250 / 230pp / paperback published end 2008 / A Black Kite book

NEW IN PAPERBACK

THE INDISPENSABLE VIVEKANANDA: An Anthology for Our Times

edited by AMIYA P. SEN



A hundred years after Swami Vivekananda’s oratory, essays, and philosophical writings offered substantial modifications and refinements to modern Hinduism, he remains a key figure in any proper understanding of the religion of India’s largest majority. This anthology showcases those aspects of Vivekananda that seem indispensable even today.

In his Introduction, the editor provides, first, a general introduction to the life and work of the Swami; and second, a critical appraisal of the various aspects of his social and philosophical ideas.

The second half of the book contains selections from Vivekananda’s writings organised around topics dealing with ‘Contemporary India and her Problems’, ‘Religion and the Human Revolution’, ‘Vedanta and the Future of Mankind’, and ‘The Spiritual Ends of Man’. A list of suggested readings concludes this volume.

AMIYA P. SEN is Tagore Professor, Rabindra Bharati, Santiniketan. He is the author of Hindu Revivalism in Bengal: Some Essays in Interpretation (1993); Swami Vivekananda (2000); Three Essays on Sri Ramakrishna and His Times (2001); and, as editor, Social and Religious Reform: The Hindus of British India (2003).

ISBN 81-7824-239-7 / 250pp / Rs 295 / July 2008

THE MAKING OF BOOKS

MOVEABLE TYPE: Book History in India
edited by ABHIJIT GUPTA and SWAPAN CHAKRAVORTY



Book history is an emerging discipline in India. Moveable Type brings together a wider variety of the best recent work on the subject, combining compilation of primary data with rigorous historical analysis. Contributions range from a magisterial history of censorship in colonial India to reflections on the social construction of texts. Several essays focus on the study of historically symptomatic cases, such as the making of a Tamil encyclopaedia and the special number of a Hindi periodical. This collection is the latest in a series that promises to be an indispensable resource for future research in history, literature, textual scholarship, editorial theory, and cultural studies.



Hardback / 270pp / Rs 595 / ISBN 81-7824-217-6 / October 08

THE POLITICS OF WORK

CAPITAL, INTERRUPTED: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India by VINAY GIDWANI


"Capital, Interrupted provides a thoughtful and compelling study of the convoluted ways in which capital operates in the modern world. Gidwani illustrates his theoretical points with examples from fieldwork in one sub-district of Gujarat, all carried out with great sensitivity." David Hardiman, Professor of History, University of Warwick

“In Capital, Interrupted social theory combines felicitously with rigorous empirical analysis, and the result is narrated in thoughtful and elegant prose. The colonial lineages of development, and the emergence of Lewa Patel agrarian capitalists as economic and cultural forces in the Gujarat countryside are presented with an expository flair uncommon in scholarly writing. Vinay Gidwani has brilliantly elucidated the way both work and development came to be understood in social and political theory, and in modern Indian history, by the end of the last millennium.” K. Sivaramakrishnan, Professor of Anthropology, Yale University

Hardback / 368pp / Rs 750 / ISBN 81-7824-245-1 / September 08 / For sale in South Asia only / Copublished by the University of Minnesota Press

OTHER HISTORIES

History in the Vernacular
edited by RAZIUDDIN AQUIL and PARTHA CHATTERJEE

Was there history writing in India before the British? Looking closely at vernacular contexts and traditions of historical production, this book questions the assumption that there was no history writing in India before colonialism. It suggests that careful readings reveal distinctly indigenous historical narratives. These narratives may be embedded within non-historical literary genres, such as poems, ballads, and works within the itihasa-purana tradition, but they are marked by discursive signs that allow them to be recognized as historical.

Vernacular history traditions in Assam, Bengal, the North-East, Kerala, the Andhra-Tamil region, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh are examined here with fresh archival material and new insights, making this a valuable book for historians, sociologists, and South Asianists.

RAZIUDDIN AQUIL is a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. PARTHA CHATTERJEE, a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, is also a professor at the Anthropology Department, Columbia University, New York, and the author of A Princely Impostor: The Kumar of Bhawal and the Secret History of Indian Nationalism (permanent black paperback) -- arguably the most readable and accessible book ever written by any historian of India.

Hardback / 512pp / Rs 795 / ISBN 81-7824-225-7 / August-September 2008

FROM THE EDITORS, IN RANIKHET

Sunset view of Trishul (extreme left) and Nanda Devi (extreme right) from the Permanent Black office, Ranikhet



Thought-provoking signboard at golf course, Ranikhet. (It sets the editorial mind racing.)



THIS BLOGSPOT HAS BEEN AROUND FOR ABOUT A YEAR, and Permanent Black for 9 years. Over these years we've published 275+ books, hardbacks and paperbacks combined. In the current financial year (i.e. April 2008 to March 2009) we published our usual 25 or so books. We're very proud of our list: our books are by some of the best writers in their areas of learning, and in several instances they are the first books of writers you may see a lot of in the years to come.

Partha Chatterjee and Raziuddin Aquil's HISTORY IN THE VERNACULAR was among our big fat books this year; less fat but also very academically big were Tanika Sarkar's REBELS, WIVES, SAINTS, and Arundhati Virmani's A NATIONAL FLAG FOR INDIA.

Mukul Kesavan’s The Ugliness of the Indian Male and Other Propositions, gave rise to violent situations even at otherwise staid editorial desks at some national dailies (we cannot name our sources), with people fiercely divided over the aesthetic (non)appeal of the Indian male. This was the second title published under our new imprint, Black Kite, which we launched some months back for non-academic books. The hardback printing flew off the shelves and a paperback is now out. Also out in Black Kite are Amit Chaudhuri’s brilliant collection of essays, Clearing a Space, Divyabhanusinh’s fascinating anthology, The Lions of India, and Ramachandra Guha’s The States of Indian Cricket (paperback).

AUGUST 2008: NEW BOOK FROM AMIT CHAUDHURI

CLEARING A SPACE: REFLECTIONS ON INDIA, LITERATURE AND CULTURE, by Amit Chaudhuri

To the many admirers of his fiction, Amit Chaudhuri seems all the more remarkable because of the excellence and accessibility of his non-fiction. Clearing a Space brings together many of Chaudhuri’s best essays, written over the past decade in journals such as the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. This body of his work has been widely praised and reveals a literary project of great value in understanding Indian and global modernity.

‘This extraordinary and wide-ranging collection, through a series of highly-focused aperçus, puts in question the key terms of self-understanding of much modern literature. This and much else makes this book a treasure trove of acute and thought-provoking perceptions.’ Charles Taylor

‘Amit Chaudhuri...asks hard questions of himself as well as others, and he engages us as readers with the warmth and acuity of his observations across a wonderful range of writing.’ Gillian Beer

‘... a wonderful key to the understanding of the vitality and specificity of Indian modernity and of the modern transformation of Indian civilization...worth the serious attention of scholars in the social sciences as well as the humanities.’ Shmuel Eisenstadt

‘Whether making music or writing prose, Amit Chaudhuri offers a distinctive spiritual history of modernity. These collected meditations—which are as elegantly fastidious as they are intellectually adventurous—confirm him as one of our most provocative and consistently interesting artists.’ Pankaj Mishra

A BLACK KITE BOOK / ISBN 81-7824-237-0 / Rs 395 / 325pp / Hardback / August 2008 / For sale in South Asia only / Copublished with Peter Lang

NEW IN PAPERBACK!

THE SCANDAL OF EMPIRE: INDIA AND THE CREATION OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN, by Nicholas B. Dirks

‘This is a brilliant work of historical excavation … Dirks shows that, contrary to the imperialist ideologues then as now, the scandals of conquest, violence, and oppression were at its center, not its incidental sideshow. Civilizing the “native” necessarily entailed the practice of barbarism, the assertion of imperial sovereignty required the exercise of despotism.’ Gyan Prakash

‘…this lucid and masterful interpretive essay serves as a timely reminder that modern empires, caught in ideological contradictions of their own making, are fundamentally unpleasant, oppressive, and immoral formations. A stimulating contribution to contemporary debates.’ Dipesh Chakrabarty

ISBN 81-7824-238-9 / Rs 395 / Copublished with Harvard University Press / For sale in South Asia only

CINEMA AND SECULARISM

LIMITING SECULARISM: THE ETHICS OF COEXISTENCE IN INDIAN LITERATURE AND FILM by Priya Kumar

“Limiting Secularism is a book for our times. Though scrupulously specific to the context of post-Independence India—and invaluable for that reason—its provocations resonate well beyond the boundaries of the unique nation-space. Working through but pushing well beyond the secularism debates in India, Kumar asks the vital question that few have as yet attempted: what vision and modality of the ethical life will enable those of opposed faiths to live well together?

A work of this kind is not undertaken lightly. Kumar’s assumption of responsibility is everywhere apparent in the seriousness with which she engages the reality of religious violence at multiple levels, theoretical, historical and critical, as the urgent reason for exploring the imaginative possibilities of living otherwise. Intellectual work at such a level of challenge and commitment does nothing less than open the doors of the mind.” Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

"Limiting Secularism is part of the emerging discourse on rethinking secularism in the wake of fundamentalisms of all stripes. Priya Kumar’s cogent, historically grounded, theoretically sophisticated, comparative readings of South Asian literary texts and films makes a significant contribution to contemporary cultural engagements with religion, cosmopolitanism, secularism, and ethics. Kumar’s book is truly superlative in terms of the writing—the clarity, the fluidity, the effortlessness with which dense material is presented is quite an accomplishment.” Sangeeta Ray

ISBN 81-7824-234-6 / Rs 695 / 320pp / hardback / published May 2008 / Co-published by the University of Minnesota Press / For sale in South Asia only

MEERA KOSAMBI'S THIRD BOOK WITH PERMANENT BLACK

FEMINIST VISION OR 'TREASON AGAINST MEN'? Kashibai Kanitkar and the Engendering of Marathi Literature

edited and translated by

Meera Kosambi

Kashibai Kanitkar (1861–1948) was the first major woman writer in Marathi. She was largely self-taught and keenly conscious of the benefits of women’s education. She promoted this and other emancipatory measures for women through her prolific and wide-ranging writings—both fiction and non-fiction—deploying them as a mode of social reform discourse.

The present book includes translations of most of Kashibai’s works: both her novels (in abridged form); a review of Pandita Ramabai’s American travelogue; long extracts from Kashibai’s episodic autobiographical narrative as well as from her biography of India’s first woman doctor, Dr Anandibai Joshee; and an article tracing the history of women’s education in Maharashtra.

A comprehensive introduction by Meera Kosambi contextualizes these texts and situates Kashibai within her social and literary milieu.

Rs 595/ hardback / 390pp / ISBN 81-7824-216-8

THE BIRTH OF A CLASSICAL TRADITION

NEW IN PAPERBACK!

TWO MEN AND MUSIC: NATIONALISM IN THE MAKING OF AN INDIAN CLASSICAL TRADITION by Janaki Bakhle

“A pioneering book that helps to relocate the towering Hindu nationalists Bhatkhande and Paluskar—from the restricted world of music grammarians to the wider social history of colonial India. A very important contribution.” Partho Datta

“Janaki Bakhle’s book opens up a completely new area of research in modern South Asian history. This pioneering history of the making of modern North Indian classical music is exemplary for the very fine sense of balance with which it holds together both respect and criticism for the past it so brilliantly restores.” Dipesh Chakrabarty

Rs 350 / 350pp / paperback / ISBN 81-7824-235-4 / for sale in South Asia only / Copublished by Oxford University Press, New York

A NEW BLACK KITE

THE LIONS OF INDIA, a collection edited by Divyabhanusinh

Lions are associated mainly with the African grasslands. Few people know that in India they once roamed the plains of Haryana and Punjab, wandered as far as Bihar in the east and above the Narmada in the south, and walked the grasslands and scrub forests around Delhi. Today, the Asiatic lion has been reduced to one tiny population in a single forest of Gujarat.

Has the Asiatic lion been so spectacularly unfortunate because it is not secretive enough to survive hunters and poachers? Is its survival the outcome of one prince’s efforts? Could a single epidemic wipe it out forever?

This book celebrates an animal whose magnificent beauty has been the cause of its tragic destiny. The earliest extract included here dates from 1884 and is about shikar; the newest, written in 2008, analyses the implications of politics for the lion’s survival. Some pieces charm and entertain with their vivid literary style and their close observation of nature; others explain population patterns and genetic reduction. The editor’s erudite Introduction provides a historical overview.

Hardback / ISBN 81-7824-213-3 / 275 pp / Rs 395 / A BLACK KITE BOOK

LANDSCAPES AND THE LAW

LANDSCAPES AND THE LAW: ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS, REGIONAL HISTORIES, AND CONTESTS OVER NATURE by Gunnel Cederlof


Landscapes and the Law is situated at the crossroads of environmental, colonial, and legal history. It examines the role of law in consolidating early colonial rule from the perspective of people’s access to nature in forests and hill tracts. It is concerned thus with the social history of legal processes and the making of law.

The book is focused equally on the multitude of colliding claims to land and resources, and the complex ways by which customary rights in nature are redefined and codified for the purpose of securing and legitimizing colonial sovereign rule.

Hardback / 316 pp / ISBN 81-7824-208-7 / Rs 695 / World rights

PEASANT PASTS

PEASANT PASTS: HISTORY, POLITICS, AND NATIONALISM IN GUJARAT by Vinayak Chaturvedi

Peasant Pasts is an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to writing histories of peasant politics, nationalism, and colonialism. Vinayak Chaturvedi’s analysis provides an important intervention in the social and cultural history of India by examining the nature of peasant discourses and practices during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Through rigorous archival study and fieldwork, Chaturvedi shows that peasants in Gujarat were active in the production and circulation of political ideas, establishing critiques of the state and society while promoting complex understandings of political community. He argues that nationalists in Gujarat established power through the use of coercion and violence, as they imagined a nation in which they could dominate social relations.

Hardback / 324 pp / ISBN 7824-226-2 / Rs 695 / South Asia rights only / Co-published with the University of California Press.

INDIA'S NEW CAPITALISTS — now in paperback

INDIA'S NEW CAPITALISTS: CASTE, BUSINESS, AND INDUSTRY IN A MODERN NATION by Harish Damodaran

‘Business in India has grown today to being no longer limited to a few castes or families ... Damodaran’s book makes a seminal contribution to understanding the link between diverse entrepreneurial capital and the development of societies ...’—NANDAN NILEKANI

‘Damodaran presents a richly insightful analysis of the deepening of India’s business class in recent decades.' RAMACHANDRA GUHA and SUNIL KHILNANI

In tracing the modern-day evolution of business communities in India, this book is the first social history to document and understand India’s new entrepreneurial groups. Written accessibly, and combining analytic rigour with journalistic flair, it also contains fifteen individual case studies that embellish its general findings.

365 pp / Rs 395 / Paperback / ISBN 81-7824-258-3 / For sale in South Asia only / Copublished by Palgrave Macmillan, London / April 09

BIRTH CONTROL AND WOMEN

REPRODUCTIVE RESTRAINTS: BIRTH CONTROL IN INDIA, 1877-1947
by Sanjam Ahluwalia

Reproductive Restraints traces the history of contraception use and population management in colonial India, while illuminating its connection to contemporary debates in India and birth control movements in Great Britain and the United States.

Sanjam Ahluwalia draws attention to the interactive and relational history of Indian birth control by including Western activists such as Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes alongside important Indian campaigners. In revealing the elitist politics of middle-class feminists, Indian nationalists, Western activists, colonial authorities, and the medical establishment Ahluwalia finds that they all sought to rationalize procreation and regulate women while invoking competing notions of freedom, femininity, and family.

Ahluwalia’s remarkable interviews with practising midwives in rural northern India fill a gaping void in the documentary history of birth control and show that the movement has had little appeal to non-elite groups.

266 pp / Rs 595 / Hardback / ISBN 81-7824-229-X / For sale in South Asia only / Copublished by the University of Illinois Press / April 2008.

MERCHANTS, TRADERS, ENTREPRENEURS

MERCHANTS, TRADERS, ENTREPRENEURS: INDIAN BUSINESS IN THE COLONIAL ERA by Claude Markovits

The merchant world represents a relatively neglected area in South Asian history. Merchants were important actors in the economic, political, social, and cultural life of India, and deserve more attention than they have been given. This book bridges that gap by bringing together a number of issues which deal with the Indian mercantile world in colonial India, and its relationship with politics and society.

Written by one of the major contributors to the socio-economic history of modern India, this book will interest all South Asianists, students of colonialism, and historians of Indian economy and society over the past two centuries.

300 pp / Rs 695 / Hardback / ISBN 81-7824-188-9 / For sale in South Asia only / Copublished by Palgrave Macmillan, London / Published in April 2008.

INDIAN SECULARISM

INDIAN SECULARISM: A SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 1890-1950 by Shabnum Tejani

Secularism has been the subject of much debate. Scholars have argued that recent Hindu nationalism is the symptom of a crisis of Indian secularism and have blamed this on a resurgence of religion or communalism. Shabnum Tejani argues here for a more complex and historically informed understanding. Her book is a history of how the idea of secularism emerged in India.

This book will interest all students of Indian democracy, politics, and history, as well as of political philosophy and the sociology of caste.

320 pp / Rs 695 / Hardback / ISBN 81-7824-212-5/ For sale in South Asia only / Copublished by Indiana University Press / Published in Summer 2008.

SUMIT SARKAR and TANIKA SARKAR team up

WOMEN AND SOCIAL REFORM IN MODERN INDIA: A READER

edited by SUMIT SARKAR and TANIKA SARKAR

The subject of social reforms has routinely formed a part of Indian history texts. The word ‘reforms’ conjures up the names of a few great individuals: always Hindu, always upper-caste and educated, always from cities, and always--apart from one or two memorable exceptions--men. These are the icons around whom the story of social change is written.

The editors of the present work argue the need to understand the history of social reforms from a much wider array of perspectives: for example, the connections between specific social abuses on the one hand, and, on the other, systems or traditions of gender practices across times, classes, castes, and regions. For instance, when we look at widow immolation or widow remarriage practices, we need to look also at the larger domain of gender relations which sanctified immolation or which outlawed widow remarriage. What arguments were used? What aspects of these practices did the reformers ignore? How did the orthodox practitioners defend such traditions?

There are also, say Sumit and Tanika Sarkar, other curious omissions in the existing literature: ‘Most reforms passed through the grid of state legislation. Yet, there is little engagement even with the law-making machinery ... and far less with the judicial courts that enforced the laws and dealt with disputes around the new laws.’

Such omissions are addressed, and many interesting questions raised and discussed, in this impressive collection of writings.

Published in Feb 2008 / ISBN 81-7824-199-4 / hardback in 2 vols / 870 pp / Rs 1495 for two-volume set.

GREAT INDIAN PUBLISHER: RAVI DAYAL

Permanent Black began life in an informal partnership with Ravi Dayal Publisher. We copublished many books together and loved our editorial and accounting meetings in odd places-- gardens, the hills, living rooms--which never felt like work. Ravi Dayal died in June 2006. This article celebrates him and his publishing. If you click on each image, it will enlarge enough for you to read the essay.

ISLAM AND HEALING

ISLAM AND HEALING: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition 1600–1900

SEEMA ALAVI

Indo-Muslim medicine—or the Unani tradition—developed in South Asia alongside Mughal political culture. While it healed the body, it also had a profound bearing on the social fabric of the region. Seema Alavi’s book shows the nature and extent of this Islamic healing tradition’s interaction with Indian society and politics from roughly 1600 to 1900.

Drawing on Persian texts for the pre-colonial phase, Alavi moves beyond the standard colonial archive to deploy unused Urdu texts, pamphlets, local newspapers, and private family records. Alavi shows precisely how, in the period of high colonialism, established practitioners kept their tradition alive. Their struggles to preserve and recast the Mughal legacy, control knowledge, and consolidate doctrinaire languages of power when confronting print culture and Western education are compellingly documented and analysed. In the present context, where West-dominant globalization demonizes both Islam and cultural alternatives, the implications of this book are profound.

SEEMA ALAVI is a professor of history at Jamia Milia Islamia. Her Cambridge PhD was revised and published as THE SEPOYS AND THE COMPANY many years back, and she has published several books and learned essays since then, as well as been a visiting fellow at Harvard.

81-7824-195-1 / Hardback/ Rs 695 / 400pp / Published in Dec 07 / For sale in South Asia only / Copublished by Palgrave Macmillan, London

NEW BOOK BY MUKUL KESAVAN

THE UGLINESS OF THE INDIAN MALE AND OTHER PROPOSITIONS by Mukul Kesavan


‘Some years ago I was struck by the contrast between the beauty of Hindi film heroines and the ugliness of Hindi film heroes. After researching the matter I concluded that the explanation was straightforward: leading men in Hindi films were ugly because they were Indian men and Indian men were measurably uglier than Indian women ... While my observation was accurate and the data I had gathered reliable, I made the mistake of attributing the ugliness of the Indian male to nature. I know now that Indian men aren’t born ugly: they achieve ugliness through practice. It is their habits and routines that make them ugly. If I was to be schematic, I’d argue that Indian men are ugly on account of the three Hs: hygiene, hair, and horrible habits ... Why are Indian men like this? How do they achieve the bullet-proof unselfconsciousness that allows them to be so abandonedly ugly? I think it comes from a sense of entitlement that’s hard-wired into every male child that grows up in an Indian household. That, and the not unimportant fact that, despite the way they look, they’re always paired off with good-looking women.’


Mukul Kesavan’s entertaining writings crackle with cerebral wit and originality. A historian by profession, he is distinct from his tribe because his prose ploughs a lonely furrow: it is a sparkling, accessible, aphoristic, and uncommonly elegant cocktail of serious thinking and unserious fun, often standing commonly held notions on their heads.

This collection of essays is a distillation of his thoughts on some of the central concerns of our time. They are outrageously funny, profoundly cosmopolitan, and devotedly ‘pseudo-secular’ all at once.

BLACK KITE / Rs 395 / 312pp / Hardback / ISBN 81-7824-206-0 / World rights

ULLAS KARANTH WINS MAJOR PRIZE

Leading conservationist and wildlife biologist Dr K. Ullas Karanth has won the prestigious J. Paul Getty Award for Conservation Leadership. Dr Karanth has been awarded the prize for his pioneering and outstanding leadership in conservation science through a long and distinguished career. This prize has earlier gone to--among others--Salim Ali and Jane Goodall.

Permanent Black has reason to celebrate too. A couple of years ago,we published Dr Karanth's A VIEW FROM THE MACHAN: HOW SCIENCE CAN SAVE THE FRAGILE PREDATOR. It is a fascinating set of essays on saving the tiger, on how Dr Karanth was himself saved from a career in engineering, and on wildlife people like Kenneth Anderson, whom Dr Karanth knew. He did in the book what few scientists can do: he made science comprehensible to lay people.

The book was reviewed favourably all over the world and is now available in paperback. Dr Karanth is also one of two series editors for our Nature, Culture, Conservation series in which many distinguished writers have published their books.

Paperback/ Rs 195 / ISBN 81-7824-224-8

LEELA PRASAD WINS PRESTIGIOUS PRIZE

LEELA PRASAD's ETHICS IN EVERYDAY HINDU LIFE: Narrative and Tradition in a South Indian Town has been awarded the American Academy of Religion's 2007 prize for the "Best First Book in the History of Religions." In this book she draws on a decade of ethnography in Sringeri, the pilgrimage town in South India, to explore relationships between oral narrative, ethical discourse, and the poetics of everyday language.

Leela Prasad is Associate Professor of Ethics and Indian Religions at Duke University, and is currently writing her second monograph, titled ANNOTATING PASTIMES: Cultures of Narration in Colonial India.

Hardback / 290 pp / ISBN 81-7824-192-7 / Rs 595 / Copublished with Columbia University Press.

MAKERS OF A DISCIPLINE

ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE EAST: Founders of Indian Sociology and Anthropology
edited by Patricia Uberoi, Nandini Sundar, and Satish Deshpande

Anthropology and sociology have long histories in India. Yet, with the exception of fieldwork experience, there is neither much available on the institutional and material contexts of these disciplines, nor on the practices of pioneering anthropologists and sociologists.

The present book fills an important gap. While the sociology of India is not purely a national phenomenon (scholars and centres studying India exist outside), and while Western theories have been important, this book shows that local influences and personalities played a major role in shaping the field.

The volume spans a century of life and work, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, and focuses on scholars with varying research trajectories. However, it also shows the threads that bind these scholars: their common concern with nation-building, social reform, and the value of science.

Published in October 2007/ ISBN 81-7824-190-0 / Hardback/ 568 pp / Rs 795/ For sale in South Asia only.

BOOK FACTORY

AN EMPIRE OF BOOKS: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India, by Ulrike Stark

The history of the book and the commercialization of print in the nineteenth century remain largely uncharted areas in South Asia. This major monograph on the legendary Naval Kishore Press of Lucknow (est. 1858)—then the foremost publishing house in the subcontinent—represents something of a breakthrough. It analyses an Indian publisher’s engagement in the field of cultural production with a detail and rigour hitherto unknown.

Describing early centres and pioneers of print in North India, the author traces the coming of the book in Hindi and Urdu. The career of Munshi Naval Kishore (1836–95) is viewed as exemplifying the publisher’s rise to prominence in the colonial public sphere. Ulrike Stark examines the publishing house in its roles as commercial enterprise and intellectual centre. Against a backdrop of cultural, social, and economic developments, she analyses the production of scholarly and popular books, identifying the contributions of individuals associated with the press.

Hardback / 606 pp / Rs 795 / ISBN 81-7824-196-X / Published in October 2007

BLACK KITE BOOKS

In September 2007 Permanent Black launched a new imprint, BLACK KITE, which will publish books aimed at those who read for pleasure. There will be intelligent, thought-provoking, unusual writing from writers known and unknown. We'll publish essays, translations, biography, memoir, and anything else that catches our fancy as long as the writing is superlative.

The first Black Kite book is a rambunctious romp through nineteenth-century Calcutta, a translation of Hootum Pyanchar Naksha (literally ‘Sketches by Hootum the Owl’), a set of satirical portraits so popular that it has never been out of print since its publication in 1862. This is its first ever translation.

The writing is so vivid that there is within these pages a sense of walking through a decadent Dickensian city as fishwives call out their wares, housewives hurry to the river for baths, thieves pick pockets, and carriages creak through slush and rotting banana peel carting passengers high on ganja.

THE OBSERVANT OWL: Hootum's Vignettes of Nineteenth-century Calcutta, by Kaliprasanna Sinha. Translated by Swarup Roy. Published in September 2007.
ISBN 81-7824-198-6/ paperback / Rs 295 / 216 pages, with sketches. (Distributed by Rupa & Co.)

THE SEA! THE SEA!

IMPERIAL CONNECTIONS: India in the Indian Ocean Arena 1860-1920, by Thomas R. Metcalf

An innovative remapping of empire, Imperial Connections offers a broad-ranging view of the workings of the British Empire in the period when the India of the Raj stood at the centre of a newly globalized system of trade, investment, and migration.

Metcalf argues that India itself became a nexus of imperial power that made possible British conquest, control, and governance across a wide arc of territory stretching from Africa to eastern Asia. His book, offering a new perspective on how imperialism operates, emphasizes transcolonial interactions and webs of influence that advanced the interests of colonial India and Britain alike.

September 2007 / Hardback / Rs 650 / ISBN 81-7824-209-6 / For sale in South Asia only / Copublished by the University of California Press, Berkeley

HOW INDIA BECAME ONE COUNTRY

BEYOND BELIEF: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism, by Srirupa Roy

Beyond Belief rethinks the formation and consolidation of nation-state ideologies. Analysing the first two decades after Indian Independence, Srirupa Roy shows how nationalists were turned into nationals, subjects into citizens, and the colonial state into a sovereign nation-state.

The idea that nations come into being as 'imagined communities' is not adequate when you look at India. Here the state makes itself more than manifest as the only possible glue for diverse communities to stick through thick and thin, like it or not, leaving very little for these communities to imagine.

Hardback / 260 pages / ISBN 81-7824-211-7 / Rs 595 / For sale in South Asia only / Published in September 2007 / Copublished by Duke University Press

SUBTERRANEAN STRUGGLES

BEHIND THE VEIL: Resistance, Women, and the Everyday in Colonial South Asia, edited by Anindita Ghosh

For some time now, scholars have been working on the theme of dissent and struggle among women in in colonial South Asia. But the focus so far has been on the educated and the outstanding—either female public figures or relatives of important male personalities. This book unearths a narrative of deeper and perhaps more enduring subterranean resistance offered by less extraordinary women in their daily lives.

CONTRIBUTORS
Tanika Sarkar, Geraldine Forbes, Clare Anderson, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Anindita Ghosh, Nita Verma Prasad

Hardback / 244 pages / Rs 595.00 / 81-7824-201-X / for sale only in South Asia
COPUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, LONDON

NEW BOOK IN THE 'OPUS 1' SERIES

CREATIVE PASTS: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960 by Prachi Deshpande

The ‘Maratha period’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a defining era in Indian history. Prachi Deshpande examines this period for various political projects in the country at large, including anticolonial Hindu nationalism and the non-Brahman movement, as well as popular debates throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries over the meaning of tradition, culture, colonialism, and modernity.

A study of quite extraordinary penetration and breadth, Creative Pasts mines Maratha history and Marathi sources as never before.

HARDBACK / 320PP / RS.650.00 / SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS / August 2007
COPUBLISHED BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

AFTER GANDHI WHAT? THE NEVER PUBLISHED DISCUSSION

GANDHI IS GONE. WHO WILL GUIDE US NOW?
Nehru, Prasad, Azad, Vinoba, Kripalani, JP, and Others Introspect,
Sevagram, March 1948
Translated by Gopalkrishna Gandhi and Rupert Snell

As India became free on 15 August 1947, and Jawaharlal Nehru became the first prime minister of the country, the larger ‘Gandhi family’, comprising the political and non-political associates of the Mahatma, needed to think through their future equations. The Mahatma had planned a discussion on this and, in his meticulous manner, identified the venue and date for the meeting, which he intended to attend in Sevagram on 2 February 1948.

30 January 1948 intervened. Gandhi was assassinated.

But thanks primarily to Rajendra Prasad and Vinoba Bhave, the proposed conference did take place.

Published here for the first time sixty years on, the discussions of that conference remain amazingly pertinent, stimulating, and challenging today. This book is indispensable for anyone interested in Gandhi, his legacy, and the history of modern India.

The English translation is followed by the text of the Hindi original.

Hardback / 200pp / ISBN 81-7824-189-7 / Rs 295 / World rights

TWO GREAT WORKS OF NARRATIVE HISTORY

If Indian historians have generally seemed wary of writing contemporary (post-1947) history, they have seemed even more sceptical about writing narrative history with a distinct story line that makes their work accessible and attractive to serious lay readers outside academia. Permanent Black has therefore been exceptionally fortunate in having published perhaps the two most outstanding recent works in this genre. Partha Chatterjee’s landmark history—and, by any measure, stupendously gripping account—of the strange case of the ‘Bhawal Sannyasi’ who returned from the dead (a la Natalie Zemon Davis’s ‘Martin Guerre’) to reclaim his ancestral property is entitled A Princely Impostor? The Kumar of Bhawal and the Secret History of Indian Nationalism; now in paperback and strongly recommended to anyone who thinks Indian history has no connection with great murder mysteries.

Nayanjot Lahiri has made the dead come to life as well, in her brilliantly recounted history of how the Indus Valley civilization was unearthed and its puzzles pieced together by John Marshall, Daya Ram Sahni, Rakhaldas Banerjee, and other pioneering officers of the Archaeological Survey of India. Her book, Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered, has been enormously well-received.

Curiously, both these books centre themselves around almost the same time period: the first three decades of the twentieth century.

DO HUMANS MATTER IN ECONOMICS OR IS IT JUST NUMBERS?

THE RETREAT OF DEMOCRACY AND OTHER ITINERANT ESSAYS ON GLOBALIZATION, ECONOMICS, AND INDIA, by Kaushik Basu


‘This is a rare book that combines the wisdom of market economy with social upliftment. Basu shows he is a clear and deep thinker with his heart in the right place.’—N.R. Narayana Murthy

‘This creative, lucid and forthright collection of essays is a joy to read, even where one disagrees. It will be of great value in sensitizing economists to political realities, and others to economic realities.’—Jean Dreze

‘Kaushik Basu is that triply rare being—an Indian intellectual who is open-minded, an economic theorist who is interested in human beings, and an American academic who has a sense of style. ' —Ramachandra Guha


For sale in South Asia only, hardback, Rs 450.

MANY CASTS OF MIND

Caste in colonial India, caste in South India, caste discrimination as experienced by Dalits, the life and philosophy of an ur-Brahmin--here are the books to read:
The Last Brahmin, by Rani Siva Sankara Sarma, hardback, 200 pages, Rs 395
Plain Speaking, by A.N. Sattananathan, hardback, 235 pages, Rs 395
Brahmin and Non-Brahmin, by M.S.S. Pandian, hardback, 286 pages, Rs 650.

There's also Nicholas Dirks's Castes of Mind for a history of the construction of caste in colonial India. (Paperback, 380 pages, Rs 350.)

EVERY YEAR THERE'S LESS AND LESS

WATERSCAPES edited by Amita Baviskar

The wars of the future are already here: wars over water. As a resource central to life and livelihood, water has always been at the centre of intense social action. Waterscapes uses the analytical framework of cultural politics to examine questions of power and inequality, conflicts and compromises around water. It reflects the growing recognition that managing water, as much as land and biomass, is going to be a critical challenge for future economic growth and ecological sustainability. It is a major contribution by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists, leading scholars in the field, who bring original ethnographic and archival research to bear on the cultural politics of a key natural resource.
hardback/ Rs 695/ 376 pages/ for sale worldwide

PERMANENT PAPERBACKS

BY SUMMER 2008, SEVENTY of our books will be in paperback. Mridu Rai's book on Kashmir, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects, is one of those seventy. All our paperbacks are beautifully produced and are priced much lower than our hardbacks. Have a look at our full list of paperbacks on www.orientlongman.com and you'll be surprised by its range.

CAN WILDLIFE AND HUMANS SURVIVE EACH OTHER?

MAKING CONSERVATION WORK, edited by Ghazala Shahabuddin and Mahesh Rangarajan

Wildlife today is competing with some of India’s most underprivileged people for survival. This apart, commercial and industrial pressures from far outside park boundaries reverberate within these fragile ecological oases, making them vulnerable in a way they never have been before. Reconciling the question of preserving what little wildlife remains with the needs of humans has never seemed as tangled.

Shahabuddin and Rangarajan's new book, which is about to be released, brings together the thoughts of many new scholars on this urgent issue--is this a battle in which either nature or humans will survive? Must it be a battle?
hardback; Rs 595; for sale worldwide.

NEW BOOK BY INDIA'S BEST-KNOWN PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

TIME TREKS: THE UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF OLD AND NEW DESPOTISMS, by Ashis Nandy

IN THIS companion to his earlier book Time Warps, Nandy uses the metaphor of the future—imagined utopias, conceptions of cultural possibilities, social critiques of things to come—and redefines the present. His effort is to demonstrate that, in a world increasingly dominated by a narrow range of ideologies, one must affirm that social ethics and a more humane society can be based on grounds other than those framed for the past 200 years by political and psychological forces that have tried to flatten and homogenize the world and reduced the possibility of diverse futures.


Hardback, Rs 495, 228 pages, for sale in South Asia only. (Published for the rest of the world by Seagull Books, London and New York.)

GENDER STUDIES FROM PERMANENT BLACK

We've published some of India's most highly reputed scholars on gender. Permanent Black's gender studies list traverses law, culture, sexuality. See below.


Meera Kosambi
CROSSING THRESHOLDS
Feminist Essays in Social History
HB/ 350PP + 7 B/W PICTURES / RS 695.00 / WORLD RIGHTS

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
THE SCANDAL OF THE STATE
Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India
HB/ 350PP/ RS 595.00




Nivedita Menon
RECOVERING SUBVERSION
Feminist Politics Beyond the Law
HB / 275PP / RS 595.00 / SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS / 2004





Charu Gupta
SEXUALITY, OBSCENITY, COMMUNITY
Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India
HB / 400PP, 30 ILLUSTR. / RS 350 / SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS / 2005




Tanika Sarkar
HINDU WIFE, HINDU NATION
Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism
PB/ 280PP / RS 295 / SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS

Ratna Kapur
EROTIC JUSTICE
Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism
HB/ LARGE FORMAT / 210PP / RS 595.00 / SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS


Jörg Fisch
IMMOLATING WOMEN
A Global History of Widow-burning from Ancient Times to the Present
PB/ 600PP, + 25 B-W PIX / RS 495.00/ SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS

Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan, editors
SUBALTERN STUDIES XI
Community, Gender and Violence
PB/ 360 PP / RS 325.00 / SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS

Nazir Ahmed
THE BRIDE’S MIRROR
a translation by G.E. Ward of the first Urdu bestseller, Mirat ul-Arus
by Maulvi Nazir Ahmad, with an Afterword by Frances W. Pritchett
HB / 250PP / RS 350.00 / WORLD RIGHTS

Meera Kosambi, editor and translator
RETURNING THE AMERICAN GAZE
Pandita Ramabai’s The Peoples of the United States (1889)
HB/ 300PP + 4 B/W PICTURES / RS 595.00

THE 'REAL' STORY OF CHIPKO?

FOREST FUTURES: GLOBAL REPRESENTATIONS AND GROUND REALITIES IN THE HIMALAYAS

by Antje Linkenbach

Just out from Permanent Black is a book that re-examines the Chipko movement of the 1970s and 1980s because of which struggles over forest rights in the Garhwal Himalayas drew worldwide attention. To a large extent, this also entailed a subsuming of local experiences under global discourses: many of the messages and meanings of the Chipko movement’s varied struggles were homogenized, changed, and rewritten.

Antje Linkenbach persuasively argues that global representation took away narrative control from local actors and removed Chipko from the specificity of its locale, from its village contexts. Her attempt is to relocate forest issues and struggles by revisiting the perspectives of leading activists and local residents.

Hardback, Rs 695.00, 348 pages, South Asia rights

Copublished outside South Asia by Seagull New York

A STRING OF FINE BOOKS BY RAMACHANDRA GUHA

Ramachandra Guha's association with Permanent Black editor Rukun Advani is as old as his writing career. Guha has done a vast amount to make Permanent Black better known, and directed several fine young scholars towards us. Alongside Sunil Khilnani, he has begun a series with us called THE INDIAN CENTURY which aims to bring in works of Indian history that refuse to stop at 1947. Guha's own recent academic work for scholarly audiences has for the past seven or so years been often published by Permanent Black: we have most recently published his How Much Should a Person Consume? Thinking Through the Environment (South Asia rights [copublished by the University of California Press], hardback, Rs 595, 275 pages); and earlier two collections of his essays, An Anthropologist Among the Marxists and The Last Liberal, as well as The States of Indian Cricket. Guha's combative stress on academic prose being accessible and jargon-free has stirred controversy, but there is no doubting the fact that his pioneering work on environmental history, cricket history, and most recently political history has served the laudable cause of reaching history to large audiences outside university enclaves.

SOME OF OUR AUTHORS!

A.M. Shah—A.N. Sattanathan—Abhijit Gupta—Agha Shahid Ali—Amit Chaudhuri—Amita Baviskar-—Amiya Sen—Ania Loomba—Anindita Ghosh—Antje Linkenbach—Arvind Krishna Mehrotra—Ashis Nandy—Ayesha Jalal—Bill Aitken—Thomas Blom Hansen—Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya—Brigid Keenan—Bruce Lawrence—C.M. Naim—Charu Gupta—Chitra Joshi—Chitralekha Zutshi—Christophe Jaffrelot—Claude Markovits—D.K. Chakrabarti—D. Venkat Rao—David Arnold—David Hardiman—David Ludden—Dhriti K. Lahiri Choudhury—Dipesh Chakrabarty—E.H. Aitken—Emma Tarlo—Frances Pritchett—Francesca Orsini—Francis Robinson—Ghanshyam Shah—Ghazala Shahabuddin—Gopal Gandhi—Gyanendra Pandey—Harish Damodaran—Heinrich von Stietencron—Hew McLeod—Ian Bryant Wells—Ian Talbot—Indrani Chatterjee—Jackie Assayag—Janaki Bakhle—Joerg Fisch—Jon Lang—Jyotika Virdi—K. Sivaramakrishnan—K. Ullas Karanth—Kapil Raj—Kaushik Basu—Kaushik Roy—Leela Gandhi—Leela Prasad—Lucy Rosenstein—M.S.S. Pandian—Madhav Gadgil—Mahesh Rangarajan—Mahmood Mamdani—Manu Goswami—Mark Baker—Martha Nussbaum—Meera Kosambi—Meera Nanda—Michael Fisher—Monica Juneja—Mridu Rai—Mukul Kesavan—Muzaffar Alam—Nandini Sundar—Nayanjot Lahiri—Nicholas B. Dirks—Nivedita Menon—P.K. Datta—Partha Chatterjee—Partha Sarathi Gupta—Patricia Uberoi—Peter Heehs—Peter van der Veer—Prachi Deshpande—Pratik Chakrabarty—Priya Kumar—Rajendra Vora—Rajeswari Sunder Rajan—Rajit Mazumder—Ramachandra Guha—Raminder Kaur—Ramya Sreenivasan—Ranjani Mazumdar—Ratna Kapur—Ravi Kanbur—Richard Wolf—Rosie Llewellyn Jones—Rudrangshu Mukherjee—S. Percy Lancaster—Salim Ali—Sambudha Sen—Sanjay Subrahmanyam—Seema Alavi—Shabnum Tejani—Shail Mayaram—Sharad Chari—Sheila Dhar—Sheldon Pollock—Shonaleeka Kaul—Simona Sawhney—Srinath Raghavan—Srirupa Roy—Stuart Blackburn—Subrata Dasgupta—Sudipta Kaviraj—Sugata Bose—Sujoy Das—Sumathi Ramaswamy—Sumit Guha—Sumit Sarkar—Sunil Kumar—Sunil Sharma—Suvir Kaul—Swapan Chakravorty—Swarup Roy—Tabish Khair—Tanika Sarkar—Tapati Guha Thakurta—Tara Gandhi—Thomas Blom Hansen—Thomas Metcalf—Tony Ballantyne—Ulrike Stark—Uma Dhupelia Mesthrie—Upinder Singh—Valmik Thapar—Vasant Saberwal—Vasanthi Srinivasan—Vasudha Dalmia—Veena Naregal—Velcheru Narayana Rao—Veronique Benei—Vijay Tendulkar—Vinayak Chaturvedi—Yasmin Saikia—Zai Whitaker.