permanent black

THE DISCREET CHARMS OF A FILMI DIALOGUE

2012-01-28T22:09:00.003+05:30

The two most recent books in Film Studies published by Permanent Black are
Ravi Vasudevan's THE MELODRAMATIC PUBLIC

and Monika Mehta's CENSORSHIP AND SEXUALITY IN BOMBAY CINEMA.

Below, the two authors converse with each other about their books and related matters:

RAVI VASUDEVAN ASKS MONIKA MEHTA …

1. RV:     Censorship is often considered a negative act, as something which cuts out images and sounds. Could you outline the rather different theoretical premises of your book? I’m particularly interested in the way you pose the relationship between censorship laws and practices, and film-making's own relationship to the acts of cutting, selecting, and classifying.
MM: As you mentioned, censorship is most associated with the practice of cutting, and the censors’ are seen as film “cutters” or “hackers,” who distort a “complete” film or a “director’s vision.” My task in the book is to draw attention to other practices of censorship, namely, certification and classification in order to show how they frame our understanding film, impact film-going practices and define a film’s potential audience.   In addition, I wish to show that these practices also are central to film production and distribution. After all, editing (i.e. cutting) is central to film-making and to the production of meaning. This editing is done both keeping in mind and actively soliciting distributors, reviewers, and now, audiences’ opinions. Editing also helps craft or undermines stars’ careers. More recently, the practice of including deleted scenes on DVDs cultivates cinephilia and autership as well as generates profits.

2. RV:       How would you position your book in relation to recent feminist interventions in censorship debates in India, especially regarding issues of sexuality?
MM: I am indebted to the recent feminist censorship on censorship. For example, both Ratna Kapur and Shohini Ghosh’s work has been very important to me in terms of thinking about women as sexual agents as opposed to sexual victims. More generally, their work, along with work of other feminist scholars, has informed my thinking on agency and resistance to practices of censorship. Like most feminist work on censorship, my work is interested in thinking through how female sexuality is produced through the process of cutting (state censorship and film production); it extends feminist scholarship by examining how practices of certification and classification produce normative notions of sexuality. To that extent, my work conceives of sexuality not only as “exposure”, “nudity”, genital acts or their anticipation, but also as reproduction of tradition (e.g. kinship relations).

3.    RV:     Your book undertakes novel research through its ethnography of the censorship process, shifting, or at least expanding focus beyond the realm of laws, official decisions and so on. How does this complicate our understanding of censorship?
MM: By spending time at the Central Board of Film Certification, speaking with officials and Examining Committee members, I realized that certification was central to process and practice of censorship. Also, I saw varied hierarchies at play when members along with the Regional Officer viewed films. I observed that context, language, and class played significant roles in their assessments of films. Class was not only central to how they conceived of the potential viewing audience, but also to their interactions with one another. Thus, I came away with a more complicated understanding of the operations of a state institution.   I also discovered the conversations amongst the members’, and the reasons for particular decisions were radically reduced and edited in the official records.   It alerted me to the potential silences in the official documents.

4. RV:      Could you outline the archival resources we need to research censorship as a process, not only in terms of policy and institutional history, but as a history of the pressures it has been subject to, and of the strategies exhibitors and viewers use to circumvent its authority?
MM: The records, which would provide a macro-view of state censorship, include government acts, reports commissioned by various governments on cinema (1927, 1951, 1969, 1981), supreme court and high court judgments on cases, and parliament debates and discussions on censorship. To understand the micro-practices of state-censorship, one would need to look at the Central Board Film Certification’s records on each film. These records generally include information about film’s certification, cuts, classification, and a summary of examining committee’s discussion. In cases that are controversial, the files also include internal memos and letters, letters from the public supporting or protesting a film, and legal documents. These documents reveal that the state is not a monolith; in addition, the letters from public both show alignment with and resistance to state practices. The film and its visual cuts would also be important to view. Film magazines and newspapers provide insight into the industry’s views and audiences’ opinions on this process. Finally, I think it would be useful to examine exhibition practices—considering both interpolation and cutting—often occurs at these sites.

5.    RV:    For some time now you have been interested in a more global history of Bombay’s Hindi cinema, looking at the emergence of new genres and modes of address, but also how Hindi film has exercised a presence in other film-making contexts. This is arguably a major current nowadays, with several articles, books, and anthologies devoted to “Global Bollywood”. What is your perspective on the study of contemporary global film cultures?
Studies of “Global Bollywood”, transnational Chinese films, Iranian films produced in exile (to name a few) expand our understanding of globalization and film production, de-centering Hollywood as an authoritative site. These studies help to demonstrate that globalization is not a one or two way street, with Hollywood always occupying a central role. Benny Toratis’ Israeli film, Kikar Ha-Halomot/ Desperado Square, which I have written about, draws our attention to different routes of film circulation and the distinctive pleasures of Hindi cinema. Most importantly, it shows that the transnational circulation of Hindi cinema is not a phenomenon of the present. The film both remakes and visually quotes Raj Kapoor’s Sangam. I very much appreciate the fine textual analyses which consider how family, diaspora, and desire have been addressed and represented in post-liberalization Hindi films as well as ethnographic studies have thoughtfully considered the current reception of Hindi films at various diasporic locations. These studies largely focus on the present. In doing so as a whole, they suggest that globalization and the transnational circulation of Hindi films are contemporary phenomena. I hope future scholarship examines earlier histories (of not only Hindi cinema’s) but Indian cinema’s circulation.

6.     RV:       Name 6 books, outside your field, which have been important to you.
MM: I’m going to cheat a little on this one because in addition to film, postcolonial and partition studies have been important research and teaching fields for me: Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade; Raymond Williams, What I Came to Say; Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land; Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark; Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Khol Do” and “Sharifan;” Gyan Pandey’s The Construction of Communalism in North India.

MONIKA MEHTA ASKS RAVI VASUDEVAN …

1. MM: The concept of melodrama has been central to your scholarship. Why does this concept appeal to you?
RV: In the early 1980s three films, seen in very different contexts, made a strong impression on me. These were Mukaddar Ka Sikandar (Prakash Mehra, 1978), Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957), and Subarnarekha (Ritwik Ghatak, 1962). They're very different movies, but I recall being startled by their capacity to capture, without inhibition, deeply felt emotions, of loss, of marginality, of victimhood. These movies developed strong expressive registers, if in different ways; and they were shot through with all sorts of contrivances at the level of plot, most notably of coincidence. What looks like contrivance from one angle comes across as relentless fate from another. The performance style, heightened form, and relentless, almost ruthless logic laid bare by these movies urge us to consider how destinies and histories, public and private, are entwined; how large historical transformations can be captured through individual lives. The method may be foolhardy in its bid to convey large, often inchoate feeling, but the results can be fascinating. What I discerned instinctively when watching these films evolved into more systematic analysis and reflection, prompted by reading Thomas Elsaesser, and then Peter Brooks and Christine Gledhill on the phenomenon of melodrama. Often seen as realism’s other, melodrama emerged as mode of story-telling and expressive form intimately tied to realism but refusing realist protocols of plausibility, causal logic, actorly restraint. Its appeal and interest lies in its recourse to a certain grandness of design, its breaking of boundaries between the public and the private, and its bid to engage the big picture of historical change. Melodrama is then a key to understanding how the world has changed in the modern epoch, and international scholarship suggests how productive it has been as a category with which to explore the film cultures across the world.

2. MM: The Melodramatic Public refers to films that traverse almost a century of Indian cinema. In what ways has the use of melodrama in Indian cinema shifted or changed? More specifically, what role has technology played in re-crafting melodrama?

RV: One of the issues I wanted to stress is that melodrama and popular cinema are not the same thing. The popular is a compendium of things that have appealed to audiences over time, including song, dance, comedy and so on. Melodrama intervenes in the popular format to facilitate a form of navigation, to cultivate a narrative architecture which shapes spectatorship as an emotional experience. Crucially, the private public axis, the home, its dispersal in the world, and its recovery, provide a key narrative itinerary. Melodrama could cross genres, as I try to suggest in examples from social, historical, and even mythological and devotional films. The public/private architecture is key to melodrama, and my argument is that while melodrama is often seen to be contrived in the way it personalizes big events and historical change, its architecture ensures that the personal is not properly personal, for it’s always publicly rendered. This comes across in various ways: in the failure of the couple to separate out into a nuclear unit, or the implication that such privatized resolution is inadequate to the larger, inclusive drives
demanded of justice. There is publicness not only in terms of narrative architecture, but also in the way characters express themselves and scenes are staged, with a higher pitch and resonance. More privatized forms of melodrama, centred on the household rather than on the wider public realm, did emerge, especially in Bengal, and cultivated more fine-grained sentiment. And this has tended to develop in the contemporary epoch, with new genre formation, as I'll discuss later.

Technology is a fascinating subject in melodrama studies. In the first instance, I think stage technology contributes significantly to film, and the sensational components of the so-called Parsi theatre, documented by Kathryn Hansen, Anuradha Kapur, and others, suggest lines of influence on film melodrama: painted backdrops in studio sets, miracle scenes motivated by divine manifestation, and as the continuing tradition of Andhra’s Surabhi theatres shows – very much inthe tradition of the Parsi plays – the influence cuts both ways, with theatre simulating cinematic effects of the dissolve and parallel editing. If theatre affords one node of technological intersection, then the radio and gramophone seem important reference points for the particular musical and dialogue structures – sentimental and declamatory – which compose melodramatic form, and which for which playback is particularly important. We will observe, especially from the 1950s, various other stylistic intersections, including American noir chiaroscuro and Soviet montages “horizon” shots. All of these lend a particular global period specificity to Bombay melodramas. These issues need to be better explored, as does the use of zoom shots that emerged from the 1960s and gave melodrama’s sensational qualities a new fillip, sometimes tediously so. In the book, I try and develop an argument about how digital formats and their challenge to cinema’s association with realism provide new challenges to rethinking melodrama’s symbolic drives.

3. MM: Discussions on spectatorship (and formal analyses of film texts) have assumed that the spectator is an “individual” or a singular entity. In contrast, The Melodramatic Public invites us to think about spectatorship in terms of a community, or a “public”. Could you comment on how this theoretical move expands our understanding of spectatorship? Through this theoretical move, do you seek to question a conventional disciplinary division between the film spectator (the domain of film theorists) and audiences (the domain of mass communication or more recently, anthropology and sociology)? If so, what do you find problematic about the division?
RV: Film Studies developed a disciplinary space from the mid-1990s in India by working in close dialogue with a cultural studies in which a post-colonial political theory had a strong presence, There was a fairly sustained complication of the idea that the sovereign individual subject and citizen defined the horizon of historical possibility. Community often emerged as a key alternative frame; I think this works sometimes for cinema, as in the notion of a community of readers/viewers/listeners who share cultural references and way of making meaning. But to suggest that subjectivity was defined or bounded by trans-individual sense of self failed to engage a more complicated spectrum. The alternative idea of a cinematic public, solicited by a kind of ‘direct’ address from the screen, offered to me this possibility of a spectrum, where different ways of engaging the spectator – individual, communal, social – could have a coexistence. And yes, this move seeks to explore on-screen and off-screen discourses to connect better with the variety of things that an audience was simultaneously exposed to. Recently, the work of Sabeena Gadihoke, on a well-known 1960s scandal, explores how a public is constituted through multiple registers, including tabloid sensationalism, photojournalism and film narrative; Ranjani Mazumdar is another scholar expanding the way we can think about cinema by situating it alongside technologies of visualization and travel, of fashion and interior design and urban planning. And a quite different sense of publicness emerges from Shikha Jhingan, whose work on the film song, sound and interiority suggest that the cinematic public can, in some instances, be a very intimately conceived one, too. All of this holds onto a film's textuality but avoids too inward a disciplinary discourse by expanding the frame of reference and research.

4. MM: The Melodramatic Public points to new genres which have emerged in
post-liberalization India. What industrial and political changes have made possible these new genres? What new elements in film form or grammar have these genres introduced? Do these genres assume and constitute new publics? If so, which ones?

RV: I draw attention to how new genres, including gangster films, erotic thrillers, ghost movies, road films, and so on have emerged. None of this is meant to suggest that other, hoarier genres such as the family social film have been displaced, and, as we know, it was this genre which attracted most attention and spectacular box office returns when it was revamped by the Chopras and Karan Johar to target audiences abroad and in India. The multiplex, offering possibilities of targeting niche audiences in small auditoria for longish runs is one part of the story, a possibility exploited both by smaller players and by corporates who realised the importance of product differentiation. The other part relates to the multiple revenue streams now available, moving beyond theatrical exploitation and the sale of music rights, onto a spectrum of televisual and dvd related returns, which the small player could utilise as much as the big producer. Formally, some of the new genre work mirrored elements of comparable Hollywood genres, but never in quite the same way. Often centred on the modern couple, and models of romance, household economy and consumption profile associated with them (cars, condos, supermarkets), it’s very rare that they can resolve matters within the precincts of the couple, or reproduce its space as autarchic. They often carry a sense of unease with new lifestyles. Politically, this may relate to the continuing uncertainty of urban transformation, the question Partha Chatterjee poses when he asks, rhetorically, “are Indian cities finally becoming bourgeois?” The parallel question, have Indian films finally achieved their aspiration to be like Hollywood, leaves a similar trail of imponderables that arise from the glaring inequities within which we live.

5. MM: Could you tell us about your current research on documentaries? What lines of inquiry are you pursuing and what methodologies are you adopting? Through this research, which concepts in film studies are you interested in re-thinking or developing?

RV: Well, I’m really enjoying this new project, without really always knowing where it’s going. My plan was to explore non-fiction films in all their diversity, from official films such as newsreels, propaganda films, wartime films by army units, through to a host of short film and non-fiction genres, with names like “topicals” and “actualities”, as well as films made for and about industrial processes, promotional films for particular industries and products, travel films, cultural films, training films, instructional films, educational movies, many of which would be shown outside theatres, in classrooms, factories,
corporate offices, army barracks, clubs, associations, trade unions. I’m particularly interested now in amateur films, a term which needs to be complicated as there were significant intersections between the amateur, the official and the professional. I suppose the project is about how film came to acquire such a presence at so many different levels and contexts, from the most public to the most intimate, how it in a sense becomes continuous with life in the twentieth century, and what this means. In the process I hope to contribute to an emerging trend in Film Studies scholarship, which is to look at the way an infrastructure emerged, based on the circulation of technology, industrial organisation, state intervention, and the movement of practitioners across different spaces. Many of these issues overlap in crucial ways with so-called mainstream film culture, as infrastructures are shared amongst different types of cinema, and I
hope there will be interesting connections which might ask us to think afresh what going to see a movie meant.

6. MM: Name 5 or 6 favorite books outside your core research areas.
RV: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Scandinavian crime novels, (Sjowall/Wahloo, Mankell, Larrsen, Nasser,
Nesbo)

Glaswegian crime novels (Rankin, Denise Mina)
The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson
A Princely Imposter? By Partha Chatterjee
Writing Social History by Sumit Sarkar
Cultural History: Between Representations and Practices by Roger Chartier
The Birth of the Modern World by Christopher Bayly

INGLISTAANI

2012-01-17T14:22:00.075+05:30

Rashmi Sadana

English Heart, Hindi Heartland

The Political Life of Literature in India

English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi’s postcolonial literary world—its institutions, prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighbourhoods in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English.

Rashmi Sadana places internationally recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, and Vikram Seth in the context of debates within India about the politics of language, and alongside regionally recognized writers such as K. Satchidanandan, Shashi Deshpande, and Geetanjali Shree. She undertakes an ethnographic study of literary culture, probing the connections between place, language, and text in order to show what language comes to stand for in people’s lives.

In so doing she unmasks a social discourse rife with questions of authenticity and the cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion. She illustrates how the notion of what is considered authentic not only obscures larger questions relating to caste, religious, and gender identities, but that the authenticity discourse itself is continually in flux. To extract cultural capital from India’s linguistic hierarchies, writers deploy what Sadana calls ‘literary nationality’.

Her book argues that English in India, and the way it is positioned among the country’s other languages, does not represent a fixed pole, but rather serves to change political and literary alliances among classes and castes, often in surprising ways.

Rashmi Sadana lives in Delhi and is working on a book about the Delhi Metro.

Hardback / 230pp / Rs 595 / ISBN 81-7824-349-0 / South Asia rights / Feb 2012

Copublished with the University of California Press, Berkeley

To coincide with the appearance of this book, Permanent Black asked Vasudha Dalmia and Rashmi Sadana to converse with each other. Both have worked at Berkeley, have focused on cultural history, and have collaborated with each other. (Dalmia's classic monograph, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions, appeared in a new paperback edition some months ago, see here.) Their conversation appears below.

Rashmi Sadana to Vasudha Dalmia …

1. RS: After writing your dissertation on Brecht and drama in modern India, what took you back to the nineteenth century and to Bharatendu, the “father” of modern Hindi?

VD: I encountered Bharatendu while working on Brecht, while trying to trace the history of modern Hindi drama. He stood at the fountainhead, so to speak, and he had the same irreverence, the same ready wit as Brecht. He lived extravagantly, transgressed every known boundary, squandered the family fortune in the process, and yet broke new ground, creating a new language for literature and creating works that outlived him. He managed to do a prodigious amount in his thirty-five years. When I finally came to write on him, I had, ironically, to exclude drama, it would have added another seventy pages to a book that was already spilling out of its covers. Rukun Advani [who edited the book] would not have allowed it. That had to wait another ten years and for another book.

2. RS: Could you explain how your research took you from the study of literature to the study of religion, from “Hindi” to “Hindu”?

VD: I was literally forced to. I was quite unprepared to handle what I discovered while wading through Bharatendu’s collected works and his dynamic new journals, tucked away in mouldering recesses of the city. He was a leading light, he found the formulations for a reconfigured Hinduism, articulated now in a Vaishnava context, to figure out which I had to go back in time, in order to understand where he came from and then to understand what Western Indology was doing with the texts under consideration, and what nationalists such as Bharatendu were making of that. I learnt on the job, so to speak.

3. RS: From the start, your book draws on and qualifies Ranajit Guha’s notion of the “third idiom” as a way to understand the forces of cultural assimilation and resistance by Indians in the colonial period. Now, fifteen years on, do you still believe it is an important way forward for scholarship on India’s colonial modernity? Is it relevant to contemporary scholarship on India?

VD: It was the most useful heuristic device for understanding what was happening in nineteenth century India, as new terms came into being and older terms were put to new uses. To fit into some frame that sense of excitement, at times overwhelming, of encountering a new world, of melding it with the already known. It was the best way, I found, of getting rid, once and for all, of the tradition-modern binary. I am surprised that the three idioms have not found more currency in scholarship today.

4. RS: What is your relationship to Banaras in the years since writing your book? Do you feel you are walking among ghosts – the 19^th-century writers and institutions you wrote about? What about the present-day city inspires you intellectually or otherwise?

VD: Initially, I went back to Banaras to find the missing pieces of my Bharatendu work. But then, somewhat to my own amazement, I found myself going back in order to discover the radically different world of Premchand, who returned to the city insistently in his fiction. And later still, to look at a world not unrelated to his, that of theosophy and the theosophists, foreign and Indian, and the modernization and politicization that, perhaps surprisingly, often went hand in hand with the occult. Apparently one lifetime is not enough to exhaust the fascination that the city can hold for people once they get hooked.

5. RS: I know you are now at work on a book about the Hindi novel of the 20^th century. How does this new work relate to or depart from your study of Bharatendu?

VD: I’ve spent so many years in the nineteenth century, it has come to form my base. In my present work, I begin once again with a late nineteenth-century novel, when Hindi was still struggling to define itself, and a nascent Hindu middle class was beginning to emerge. The rest of the novels I take up, at least as I plan the work now, three before independence and four after, become a kind of discovery, almost a self-discovery, of what happened, culturally and politically, to these Hindi-Hindu middle classes, as they came into being in the great urban centers of North India, Delhi, Agra, Banaras, Allahabad, Lucknow and Lahore, themselves entirely re-configured after the great destruction of 1857.

6. Name six books unconnected with your academic interests that have influenced you deeply.

VD: When Brecht was asked to name the single work that had made the most impact on him, he replied: ‘You’ll laugh, the Bible’. I begin then with Tulsidas’s beautiful and moving Ramcharitmanas; it would be the single work, were I asked to name only one. We learnt large stretches of it by heart as children. The same holds true for Shakespeare; many of his plays are now ingrained in my memory, Hamlet, if picking one. Ditto Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Agyeya’s Shekhar ek Jivani. Hertha Mueller’s The Land of Green Plums, on the power of poetry in dark times.

Vasudha Dalmia to Rashmi Sadana …

1. VD: You grew up in Los Angeles, studied in Berkeley and SOAS; it would be easy to imagine that you would become interested in Anglophone literature and explore its antecedents. What moved you to write on English and Hindi?

RS: I had been exposed to Hindi through my family and relatives growing up and on visits to Delhi, and was always aware that if I had been growing up in India rather than in the U.S. I would have had a much more naturally multilingual life. I think that prompted me to take Hindi as an undergraduate at Berkeley, and then in my last year of college, I took a course on Indian women writers where most of what we read was in translation, not only from Hindi, but also Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, Kannada and others. This was the early 1990s and the “boom” in Indian fiction was in full swing. But, as we know, this was an English-only phenomenon. It seemed to me that something was missing. I knew from all the time I had spent in Delhi that the languages around me, at home and in the street, were Hindi and Punjabi. I wanted to find out what got lost - not in translation, but in transnational literary production. Why was India only being represented by English? Surely this writing existed in a multilingual context, but looking at how Indian novels in English were read and received in the U.S. and the U.K., you would never know it.

2. VD: Do you feel you have to defend the place of English in India?

RS: Not at all. Just about everyone will agree that English is a language of opportunity, aspiration, and exclusion - and not only in India, but in many parts of the world. There is a hierarchy of languages in different Indian contexts, depending on the languages in use, but even these hierarchies shift according to different situations. English is the language of the elite, but it can also be an underdog at times. Hindi is also a language of elites in that there is an elite discourse in Hindi. But Hindi is also popular in a way English is most certainly not. And yet, English more and more is “popularly” desired. It is a complex situation that seems simple on the surface. That's what drew me to write about it.

3. VD: Of the various situations and people you encountered in the years you worked on this project, which do you think provided you with the most immediate insight into the Hindi-English relationship in the nation’s capital?

RS: Actually there is no one person or situation that encapsulates the relationship for me. What was fascinating for me while I was doing my research was how each person I spoke to offered a different angle on the question of language politics based on his or her work and personal history. Geetanjali Shree showed me a novelist's intimacy with language and emotion, whereas the bookseller Amar Varma shed light on what it meant to promote Hindi books internationally. Ashok and Arun Maheshwari and then Ravi Dayal made the worlds of Hindi and English publishing appear like completely different ones with different histories, yet operating side-by-side. Ashok Vajpeyi and K. Satchidanandan were fascinating to listen to because they understood the politics of the multilingual literary landscape and helped shape them, yet as poets, they were also incredibly sensitive to the wide gap between the world of politics and that of contemplation and creativity. I was intrigued by how they dwelled in that gap.

4. VD: Alok Rai, in his widely acclaimed Hindi Nationalism, dealt with quite another aspect of Hindi, the relationship of official “Hindi” to Hindi, as actually spoken. How do you place your work vis-à-vis his?

RS: Alok's book was foundational for me; it came out during my first major research stint in 2001 and became a kind of intellectual guidebook I toted around. It brought the political and cultural history of the Hindi-Urdu divide that Amrit Rai and Christopher King had written about in regard to the 19th and early 20th centuries, into the post-Independence context - with such passion and sense of immediacy. My book looks at the competition between English and Hindi elites from an ethnographic view. I interview figures from Delhi's literary establishment and place them in relation to one another and the larger field of literature and politics. Perhaps because of my insider-outsider perspective, these figures stood out for me, even though they are mostly known and regularly featured in the Indian press. I make the ideologies that Alok Rai maps out come alive through contemporary figures in the literary world. In the process, some of these ideologies get refined, re-tuned, debunked, or emboldened, enabling me to make new arguments about such vexing topics as cultural authenticity, literary nationality, and the postcolonial / global status of English.

5. VD: Could you say something about the range of authors whose works you analyze? What moved you to include the works of Chetan Bhagat, a writer who would ordinarily be excluded from the galaxy?

RS: The texts I write about emerge from what I saw and experienced “on the ground.” My book begins with me reading the slush pile at Granta in London, since that is how I very literally found my subject. In India, it was seeing books being sold on pavements and at stoplights that initially brought me into the realities of language, class, and caste. Living in Old Delhi for a time made me reflect more deeply on Delhi’s linguistic history and led me to write about Twilight in Delhi and In Custody. I wrote about the Hindi translation of A Suitable Boy (“Koi Accha-sa Ladka”) because it came up in a debate I witnessed at the Sahitya Akademi. I conclude the book by reflecting on Chetan Bhagat because it is impossible to ignore the impact he's had on English in a popular context. His books draw readers into the “having made it” world of IITs, and aspirational worlds of call centers, bank jobs, and love marriages, through a more simple, manageable English. My book is motivated by the story of English vis-à-vis Hindi and the bhashas more generally, and Bhagat's novels speak to that. I was also teaching at IIT Delhi when I wrote the conclusion to the book, so I was thinking about my students and the range of Englishes they spoke.

6. VD: Name six books unconnected with your academic interests that have influenced you deeply.

RS: The exciting thing about reading a new book is that, when you begin it, you don't know how it might influence you, and then when you finish it, you can never be sure exactly how it will influence you. Everything I read probably affects my intellectual life in some way, but if I were to name some of my cherished, non-academic books, those that moved me and shook me up in some way, I would include: Ovid's Metamorphosis, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Ismat Chughtai’s short stories, Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, and just about everything by J.M Coetzee. Wait, was that seven?

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra on remembering and translating

2011-12-23T11:51:00.000+05:30

Arvind K. Mehrotra is characteristically acerbic and thought-provoking in an interview in the Times of India today where he discusses his essays in Partial Recall and his original, brilliant translations of Kabir's poetry. Read the interview here.

DIVINE HISTORY: CLASSIC MARATHI TEXT NOW IN ENGLISH

2011-12-22T19:56:00.001+05:30

Ramchandra Chintaman Dhere

The Rise of a Folk God

Vitthal of Pandharpur

Translated from the Marathi by Anne Feldhaus

Vitthal, also called Vithoba, is the most popular Hindu god in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. He is also among the best-known gods outside India. His temple at Pandharpur attracts one of the largest and most elaborate annual pilgrimages in the world.

This book is the foremost study of the history of Vitthal, his worship, and his worshippers. First published in Marathi in 1984, it remains the most thorough and insightful work on Vitthal and his cult in any language, and provides an exemplary model for understanding the history and morphology of lived Hinduism.

Vitthal exemplifies the synthesis of Vaishnava and Shaiva elements that not only typifies Maharashtrian Hindu religious life but also marks Vitthal’s resemblance to the prominent South Indian god Venkatesh of Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh.

Dhere's analysis highlights Vitthal’s connection with pastoralist hero cults, and demonstrates the god’s development from a god of shepherds to a god of the majority of the population. In addition, Dhere explores the connections of Vitthal with Buddhist and Jain traditions.

The book’s final chapter presents a culminating stage in the evolution of the worship of Vitthal: the interpretation in spiritual terms of the god, his temple, the town of Pandharpur, and the river that flows past the town.

RAMCHANDRA CHINTAMAN DHERE is widely known as the foremost scholar of religious traditions in Maharashtra. He has published a large number of books on this subject. The many awards he has received for his scholarly work include the highly coveted Maharashtra State Prize and the Sahitya Akademi award.

ANNE FELDHAUS is Foundation Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University, Tempe, where she teaches Hinduism, Sanskrit, and religious geography.

Hardback / 370pp 33 b&w halftones 1 map / Rs 795 / isbn 81-7824-344-X / South Asia rights / 2012 / Copublished with Oxford University Press, New York

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!

2011-12-22T16:14:00.002+05:30

SEX AND THE CITY

2011-12-21T19:34:00.003+05:30

Monika Mehta

Censorship and Sexuality

in Bombay Cinema

India produces an impressive number of films each year in a variety of languages. Here, Monika Mehta breaks new ground by analyzing Hindi films and exploring the censorship of gender and heterosexuality in Bombay cinema.

She studies how film censorship on various levels makes the female body and female sexuality pivotal in constructing national identity, not just through the films themselves but also through the heated debates that occur in newspapers and other periodicals. The standard claim is that the state dictates censorship and various prohibitions, but Mehta explores how relationships among the state, the film industry, and the public illuminate censorship’s role in identity formation, while also examining how desire, profits, and corruption are generated through the act of censoring.

Committed to extending a feminist critique of mass culture in the global south, Mehta situates the story of censorship in a broad social context and traces the intriguing ways in which the heated debates on sexuality in Bombay cinema actually produce the very forms of sexuality they claim to regulate. She imagines afresh the theoretical field of censorship by combining textual analysis, archival research, and qualitative fieldwork. Her analysis reveals how central concepts of film studies, such as stardom, spectacle, genre, and sound, are employed and (re)configured within the ambit of state censorship, thereby expanding the scope of their application and impact.

MONIKA MEHTA is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, SUNY. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature and film; globalization, diaspora, and cultural production; gender and sexuality; cinema in South Asia; and the state and the entertainment industry.

Hardback / 318pp / Rs 750 / ISBN 81-7824-345-8 / South Asia rights / 2012

Copublished with the University of Texas Press

'PROVINCIALIZING' INDIAN BOOK HISTORY!

2011-12-05T12:29:00.011+05:30

A.R. Venkatachalapathy

The Province of the Book

Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu

A.R. Venkatachalapathy, though still a young scholar by Indian standards, has been hailed as a savant of sorts for his knowledge of the culture, politics, and history of Tamilnadu. Of his wide and varied reading there is no lack of evidence within his new monograph just published by Permanent Black. This work, which focuses on the history and culture of books, book publishing, and book reading in Tamilnadu from the time of parchment to the time of Pagemaker, is interesting from the word go: it starts with four satirical epigraphs, three of which run as follows:

In this age, when printing machines have become legion and the business in paper has expanded, novels have started to proliferate like termites.—review in Lakshmi (1924)

Brother, listen to me. Take up some other occupation: never pursue this wretched profession of writing. Show me one person [in Tamilnadu] who has grown rich writing books and essays. How does it matter to us that Shaw and Chesterton have become millionaires by writing?—Kalki (1931)

Two books sell the most in our society: one, the almanac; the other, the railway timetable.—C.N. Annadurai (1950)

Sumit Sarkar and Ramachandra Guha have this to say about Venkatachalapathy and his book:

This is a pioneering work of a kind of social history that has been all but non-existent in our country, and [A.R. Venkatachalapathy] has brought to it a combination of scholarly diligence, command over extremely diverse kind of sources, a perceptive and analytical mind, and considerable awareness of international trends in history-writing.—Sumit Sarkar

In this superb work, A.R. Venkatachalapathy explores the diverse but interlinked worlds of the printing, publishing, patronage, and reading of books. These worlds are treated with attention and care, as well as located within a wider social history of the Tamil country. Not least among the book’s many pleasures is its skilful decentring of Indian historiography away from the over-studied province of Bengal and towards other regions that are as interesting. This model work of scholarship will confirm Venkatachalapathy’s standing as the most accomplished historian of his generation. —Ramachandra Guha

To coincide with the appearance of this book, which is utterly absorbing and seems certain to be recognized as a classic contribution to Indian cultural history, we asked Paula Richman, renowned Tamil scholar and Danforth Professor at Oberlin College, to converse briefly with Venkatachalapathy. Their conversation appears below.

PR: Tell us about your experiences as librarian-cum-steward of books at the Maraimalai Atikal Library in Chennai (1987-1990). What made the library special to you?

ARV: In 1987, I had finished college, and was looking to do an M.A. in history. Given the state of social sciences in Tamilnadu institutions I’d no intention of studying in any of them. My idea was to take a distance education degree and then try to get into JNU.

I had first visited Maraimalai Adigal Library in 1982. Maraimalai Adigal (1876–1950) played a pivotal role in the Tamil ‘renaissance’, and was an astounding scholar, and ran his own printing press and journal. After his death – and some litigation – his fabulous collection of books passed on the publishing house Saiva Siddhanta Kazhagam, which has a central place in Tamil publishing history. V. Subbiah Pillai and his heir apparent R. Muthukumaraswamy had built this library over the years as the place for Tamil imprints, a status it has sadly lost now. For a library run by staunch Saivites the library itself is amazingly non-sectarian.

I first went to this library looking for primary source material on V.O. Chidambaram Pillai (1872–1936) – whose biography I’ve been writing for the last 30 years! – and was amazed to locate his letters and a journal he had edited, apart from many first editions of his books. In 1984 I edited and published a volume of his letters, and R. Muthukumaraswamy kindly gave me permission to reproduce the letters in the library’s holdings. I remember meeting him on a rainy day dressed in a mud-spattered school uniform of khaki trousers and white shirt! It’s still a mystery to me that he should permit a school student to make copies and publish rare historical material.

The assistant librarian was in-charge of the library as R. Muthukumaraswamy, the librarian and secretary, managed the Saiva Siddhanta Kazhagam. This position was usually vacant as it was poorly paid, and incumbents used this as a stepping stone to better positions. I resolved to spend the years of my distance education study to work at the library. When I sounded Muthukumaraswamy through my mentor Tha. Kovendhan, he gladly agreed. The three years at the library were the single most important education of my life.

PR: How did your work at the library influence your decision to write a monograph on Tamil print culture?

ARV: Apart from being the storehouse of resources – early imprints, rare collections, back volumes of journals, private papers – the library attracted scholars from far and wide. It gave a ringside view of the world of Tamil scholarship. There was a time when no serious work on any aspect of Tamil society could be written without acknowledging the library. One afternoon the Chicago scholar Norman Cutler dropped in. The bulk of Sumathi Ramaswamy’s Passions of the Tongue was researched in this library at this time. I made friends with many scholars who researched there. I met my friend and collaborator P. Athiyaman dressed in bellbottom pants and a shirt with huge bow collars and oily hair on my first day at the library.

The library was open from 9 to 7 with a two-hour lunch break. As my home was at some distance I would spend the whole day there devouring books. The library was the equivalent of chocolate mountains and treacle streams.

When I went to the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, for my PhD I was not inclined to continue with my earlier research on early nationalism or the history of the Dravidian movement. I wanted to start on something fresh so that I could get a proper training in the theory and practice of history. As I’d always been fascinated by print – quite incomprehensible in this age of desktop printers – I decided to work on its history.

PR: What were a couple of the Tamil books most influential to you when you worked there and why? And which books while you were doing your research for this book and why?

ARV: For a historian, sitting in the midst of a library embodying the history of Tamil literary culture – the library was then housed in Mannady the centre of Tamil publishing from the time of World War II until the 1980s, and it was in that very building that the great poet and seer Vallalar Ramalinga Adigal, in the early 1830s had given his first public discourse at the age of 9 – it’d have been surprising if he did not think of writing on print culture. Reading a compilation of the editorial prefaces of the great nineteenth-century scholar-editor C.W. Damodaram Pillai, the copious biographical and autobiographical work of the outstanding scholar-editor U.V. Swaminatha Iyer, and the Tamil University’s chronological edition of Bharati’s poems – perhaps acted as the immediate trigger.

At the beginning of my JNU years, Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre was the academic rage. I loved that book, and was green with envy at his access to police records on writers in revolutionary France. But somewhat unfashionably, the inspirational books for me were his ‘biography’ of the French Encylopaedia, The Business of Enlightenment, as well as his collection of exciting essays, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. (As a fellow at Harvard in 2010 I wanted to pay homage to Darnton in person, but he did not have the time to even reply to my mail seeking an appointment.)

Now, the Indian archive has no equivalent of the archive of the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel – the Naval Kishore Press records that Ulrike Starke hit upon pales before this. I had to make do with tantalizing bits of information gleaned from book wrappers, blurbs, advertisements, review, prefaces and forewords, biographies and autobiographies, and the like. It gave me immense delight when Sumit Sarkar as the [PhD] examiner, and now Rukun Advani as the publisher, noticed this.

PR: Tamil was the first language to be printed in Indic characters and the world's first language to appear in non-roman characters. Why do you think that these two "firsts" are not more widely known to historians of the book?

ARV: Perhaps, this is because it’s one of those ‘false dawns’ that Graham Shaw, the distinguished bibliographer of the British Library, refers to. It’s a question that early modern historians, with a grounding in the European languages of the time, should explore.

PR: Recently, Ulrike Stark published a history of the Naval Kishore Press in Lucknow. Does any Tamil institution wield the same influence as that in the Tamil world? Perhaps the South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society? Or, if there is no equivalent, can you tell us why you think the situation is so different?

ARV: Fortunately not. There’ve been many divergent streams in Tamil publishing and that explains its vibrancy. Especially at this time, when there’s a boom. Even though the Saiva Siddhanta Kazhagam was a major player with a unique corporate identity, its focus was on the Tamil classics and Saiva religious literature, with some nice pickings from textbook publishing. It had, for instance, no truck with modern expressive writing that was flowering at that time. Paula, you’ll remember the great modern writer Pudumaippithan’s ridiculing of Kazhagam that I unearthed from his contemporary journalistic writings.

PR: You devote half a chapter to Subramania Barathi’s writings and their print career, then part of another chapter to the intense surveillance he encountered, yet still argue that British control was fairly limited. So tell us what made Barathi such an exception and why?

ARV: Bharati is an exception because he’s Bharati! Though it might be academically unfashionable to say so. Historical context alone cannot explain genius fully. There are few parallels to Bharati in colonial India – here I’m not quite unaware of Tagore; Bharati can hardly match Tagore’s range of artistic achievements, but in terms of poetic intensity it’s a different matter altogether … Bharati’s life was short. The prime ten odd years of his adult life were spent holed up in a small town under quite taxing surveillance. If he had lived longer and written in the Gandhian era of mass, non-dangerous politics, it could have been a different story.

PR: Many scholars of the history of the book do not take into account the way that print in India is central to British print history. For example, Gauri Viswanathan's work has shown that the British literary canon came into being at least partly because English literature was required reading for Indians studying in institutions of higher education in colonies. How do you think your book can broaden the thinking of European historians of the book or suggest new questions that they need to ask?

ARV: It’s striking, and distressing, that European historians show so little interest in the history of the book in India. Darnton is once again an exception. His two essays on book history themes in India are impressively competent considering how weak historians usually are outside their geographical specialty. But even then these essays do not talk to his main concerns in Enlightenment Europe. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s analysis of the characteristics of print culture would have been so much richer if only she had looked at India with its rich history of orality and literacy, surfeit of manuscripts, transmission of knowledge mediated by caste, etc. The work of Priya Joshi and Rimi B. Chatterjee is important in this respect. Priya Joshi shows how India was rather important to the circuit of English popular novels. Rimi shows how OUP’s India operations impacted on the mother firm.

The central lesson I’d say is that there’s no one triumphant template of print’s success. The history of the book in India – in its many languages – is a great laboratory to understand the power of print.

PR: Could you give a short list of 5-6 books, outside your areas of academic interest, that have meant a lot to you or influenced your life.

ARV: Scouting for Boys by Baden-Powell
Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
Neruda: Selected Poems (Penguin edition)
Ways of Seeing by John Berger
Pudumaippithan Varalaru (Biography of Pudumaippithan) by

Ragunathan
J.J. Sila Kurippugal by Sundara Ramaswamy

A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK AND THE AUTHOR:

The first Indian language book ever to be printed was in Tamil, in 1577. After many fits and starts and some spectacular achievements, print and the culture of book publishing became well-recognized facets of Tamil society during the late colonial period. The Province of the Book explores the wonderful world of scholarly and subaltern publishing—especially popular fiction and street literature—in its heyday.

The basis of Tamil book publishing was, to begin with, the patronage of writers by the local nobility and affluent Hindu monastic orders. Such patronage was eroded by the socio-economic transformations which came with colonialism. During the period of transition which resulted, attempts were made to create a market for Tamil books, with local writers not knowing where to turn for a living. It was only with the rise of the novel and a reading middle class—including young women and housewives—which finally broke the stranglehold of patronage, allowing Tamil publishing to grow into the market venture that it is today.

This is a brilliant and pioneering work which reconstructs a universe hitherto unknown— the world of the Tamil book. It shows famous and unknown authors at work, the religious literati with its cortège of students, radical nationalist poets such as Subramania Bharati rousing the masses and being crushed in the process, humble scribblers eking out a livelihood writing bazaar pamphlets, successful scribes compiling anthologies for students and astrological wisdom for the credulous, and the ubiquitous English official surrounding them all—censoring, adjudicating, dictating.

The book also looks closely at reading practices, modes of reading, and the nature, numbers, and composition of book readers. Its epilogue traces the broad contours of Tamil publishing from the time of Independence to the present and speculates on the future of the Tamil book.

Monographs on the history of the book in India are seldom as conversant with the international literature on the subject as this one. A.R. Venkatachalapathy’s work dazzles because he is au fait not just with the history and culture of publishing in Tamilnadu but equally in France, Britain, and the USA. The archives he has mined reveal government documents, pamphlets, tracts, periodicals, manuscripts, catalogues, bibliographies, reviews, advertisements, letters, and even account ledgers.

In short, this book will fascinate anyone interested in history, sociology, cultural studies, and the media, and prove indispensable for students of book history and publishing cultures.

A.R. VENKATACHALAPATHY is Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. He has taught at Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli; Madras University; and the University of Chicago; and has held research assignments in Paris, Cambridge, London, and Harvard, and served as ICSSR Professor at the National University of Singapore. An accomplished Tamil writer, he has published widely on the social history of Tamilnadu. His publications include In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History; and, as editor, Chennai, Not Madras; In the Tracks of the Mahatma: The Making of a Documentary; and Love Stands Alone: Selections from Tamil Sangam Poetry.

Hardback / 320pp / Rs 795 / ISBN 81-7824 - 331-8 / World rights / December 2011

Environmentalism and the Hindu Right

2011-11-21T21:57:00.001+05:30

Mukul Sharma

Green and Saffron

Hindu Nationalism and Indian Environmental Politics

This book examines contemporary environmental issues and movements in independent India on the one hand, and the development of Hindu conservative ideology and politics on the other. It includes the first thorough investigation of Anna Hazare’s movement in Maharashtra.

Mukul Sharma argues that these two social currents—environmental conservation and Hindu politics—have forged bonds which reveal the hijacking of environmentalism by conservative and retrograde worldviews. This, he says, constitutes a major aspect of hinterland political life which neither academics nor journalists have seriously analysed. Environmentalism and politics cannot be seen as separate from each other, for environmental issues are being defined in new ways by an anti-secular form of Hinduism. In turn, Hindu ideologues are gaining mileage for their ideology by espousing major environmental projects.

Anna Hazare’s impact is studied in detail through a careful field investigation of his environmental initiative in Ralegan Siddhi. Sunderlal Bahuguna’s opposition to the Tehri Dam in the Garhwal Himalaya is outlined with great anthropological subtlety. And the regeneration of Vrindavan’s urban and riverine hygiene by internationally funded NGOs is subjected to a historical scrutiny that includes an examination of how Lord Krishna has been redefined as the great god of conservation.

Sharma discusses Nazi Germany and fascist appropriations of environmentalism in Europe to contextualize Hindu conservative nationalists within a larger universe. By pinpointing the communal and authoritarian discourses within some of the new social movements, his book alters the way in which we look at everyday life in the subcontinent. For, says Sharma, at stake in this intermeshing of environmental Green and Hindu Saffron is nothing less than the way Indians understand their humanity.

Hardback / 324pp / Rs 795 / ISBN 81-7824-340-7 / World rights / December 2011

And below

MUKUL SHARMA in conversation with

K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

Mukul Sharma’s new book, GREEN AND SAFFRON: HINDU NATIONALISM AND INDIAN ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS is the first serious scholarly study of both Anna Hazare in Ralegan Siddhi, as well as the interpenetration of environmental movements with Hindutva. To coincide with the book’s appearance, K. Sivaramakrishnan (Professor of Anthropology at Yale and a major historian of Indian environmentalism) converses with Mukul Sharma. Their conversation, below, contextualizes the book and provides insights into the author’s core interests.

How did you come to focus on the connections between religious and environmental values and the associated patterns of political mobilization in environmental movements?

Between 1990 and 2001, I happened to do at least three kinds of fieldwork, in different regions, with diverse agendas, and these led me for the first time to begin asking questions about the emerging interrelationships between religious and environmental values and a certain kind of conservative, nationalistic politics in India.

First, as a member of an environment journalists team, organized by the Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi, I visited Ralegaon Siddhi village and met Anna Hazare, to write on an ideal green village and an environmental crusader. I published three positive reports on this in the Hindi newspaper Navbharat Times, I was a special correspondent with them at that time. However, uneasy memories, notes, and documents on the use of Bharat Mata, Shivaji, Vande Mataram, army rules, religious symbols, codes and conduct in the village, along with publications by the then prominent leaders of the Rastriya Swamsevak Sangh portraying the village and its leader as a model for the country, continued to haunt me.

Second, I had been covering the anti-Tehri dam movement in Garhwal for long, and in one of my visits to the dam site in the late 1990s, where Sunderlal Bahuguna was sitting on a long fast, I met a group of sadhus distributing pamphlets that anchored the religious and environmental values of Ganga not only as a pivot against the dam, but also against alleged ‘enemy’ symbols and people of the country: i.e. mosques and Muslims.

And third, when in 2000 I began working with the political foundation of the Green Party of Germany and had an opportunity to visit the country a couple of times, I found a troubled past and present regarding the relationship between the environment and certain kinds of political and religious beliefs. I also felt that environmentalists in the Green Party Foundation were reluctant to formally discuss these linkages. These experiences led me to think in a more concrete and focused fashion on the connections between religious and environmental values, and the associated patterns of political mobilization in environmental movements.

How would you respond to the assertion that books on religion and ecology, often by scholars of religion, have focused on the realms of culture and spirituality as they reflect ideas of nature or information on ecological relations in the natural world. Such scholarship takes little interest in the political realm or the politics present in cultural constructions of nature or sacred objects in nature. On the other hand, the social science of environmental politics often lacks insight into the affective and devotional dimensions through which individuals and groups may relate to nature and thereby find affinity to the natural world in the form of a religious experience. If you agree with this formulation, is it your interest to bridge this divide?

Most works on religion and ecology, in the specific context of India and Hinduism, are often banal and unidimensional. They usually explore Vedic and Brahmanic understandings of religion, and apply them to the natural world. Leave aside the political realm, they do not even have space for contesting visions of religion and environment. Let me give an example from my village Vishwaspur, in Bhagalpur district of Bihar, where there is a thakur vadi (place of God), owned and nurtured by us, a few Brahmin families, in the name of the whole village. The religious values and practices associated with this place have a robust conservationist and protectionist streak concerning the ponds, trees, and water bodies in its vicinity. However, this religious place, its fruits and ceremonies, are closed to the Dalits of the village. The ‘sacred’ trees of the complex can only be worshipped and used by the Brahmins and Thakurs. So what kind of religious and spiritual values of the environment are we talking about, and by and for whom? I have also been finding many such instances in the state of Rajasthan—where there has been much hype around religiously and culturally celebrated ponds and water bodies—in the course of my new research on Dalit environmentalism. We need to dissect the various forms and content of religion in the environmental arena so that their regressive and liberatory aspects are understood simultaneously. Howsoever, worthy the religious beliefs and practices of an individual or a group may be for the environmental world, my interest lies in seeing it through the spectrum and cross-section of caste, class, gender, justice, and equity, and not as a stand-alone point of reference. Green and Saffron reflects precisely such a politics of the environment. It explores the cultural, ethnic and sectarian dimensions of green issues in India. This also underscores the intermeshing of identity, power, and nature.

How did your earlier career in journalism and subsequent career in the world of civil society organizations come to influence your research and writing of scholarly work?

As a journalist, I gained experience doing intensive and regular field work on the environment and rural issues at several critical sites in India and abroad. Tags like ‘rural’, ‘environment’ and ‘labour’ journalist came later, invented narrowly by media organizations. Some of the habits and practices developed at that time—going to the field and staying there, spending time listening to a cross-section of people, gathering diverse facts and documents, cross-checking, visiting local libraries, and most critically seeing a particular environmental or rural issue not only from the lens of a subject but also from a cross-cutting of subjects and articulations—have influenced my present work.

After that, my continuing career in the world of civil society organizations made me conscious of the slippery and often shallow nature of research undertaken, and how not to do an academic and serious research work. Also, civil society organizations, working particularly in the field of the environment, made me more alert to its political implications. I have seen here, for example, how the notion of ‘sustainable development’ has frequently been stripped of cogent meanings and how incongruous actors, from power-driven governments and profit-making corporations to indigenous people and city-action groups, have couched their intentions in the language of sustainable development.

Indian writing on environmental topics, even by people who wish to contribute to scholarly debates, or those who ultimately become academics, has often originated in activism or public concern around a specific issue. Do you find these ties between political engagement and scholarship limiting the kind of topics and perspectives environmental scholarship in India has taken up? Are there consequent gaps in the scholarship? What might they be?

I find Indian environmental scholarship, otherwise very rich and path-breaking, thin in terms of its political engagement in post-Independent India, especially in comparison with other parts of the world. There are only a few specific arenas, like dams, water, forests, and gender, where ties between environmental scholarship and political engagement have produced significant studies. Such concerns have expanded environmental horizons, including its subject, actors, and writers. However, there is still too little politics in environmental scholarship and too much rhetoric in political writings on the environment. We are yet to see nuanced and rich understandings of ecological politics in India, in all its dimensions. Studies on the politics of a particular moment and movement, of a community and its leader, of an area and its tradition, are not enough to fill the lacuna of a broader and wider understanding of ecological politics in the country. There is a vast and vibrant political canvas of secularism and communalism, nationalism and authoritarianism, democracy and political parties, capitalism and socialism, Dalit and Brahmin, red and blue, superpower and regional power, which impinges on environmental politics, and vice versa.

This book, Green and Saffron, has been long in the making. In what ways is it different from the project you originally embarked on?

I would respond in two parts: how is it different from my earlier works, and from its earlier conception. The making of this book reminds me of the story of the rabbit and the tortoise, narrated to us since childhood: to win the race, the rabbit runs fast, but the tortoise carries on slowly and steadily. If my journalism was the run of the rabbit, this book has been the slow-steady walk of the tortoise. Where my journalism ended, this book began. It also has a distinctive feel because, since its inception, I have been working formally and informally with some brilliant environment scholars and historians. Editors normally publish. However, academics make it difficult (at times impossible) to publish. And this gave me a robust/difficult discipline, and style of writing and publishing. Also, my other projects like Contested Coastlines (co-worked with Charu Gupta) were more environmental and human-rights oriented in nature, while this work is more political and sensitive. Here I was journeying with some well-established people and vibrant movements in tumultuous political times, attempting to chart a relatively unexplored territory. This long painstaking path was slow in the making and also difficult to pen.

When I initially conceived this project, some ten years back, I saw fragmentary and inadvertent links between Green and Saffron. However, as this work progressed, these faint associations became more concrete and wider. Further, I earlier envisioned the work largely in the context of the present and the contemporary. However, later I also dwelt on its deeper historical, social, and political roots.

Could you name and discuss five or six books that, over the years, have influenced your thinking or shaped your writing?

The readings that have shaped my writings have ranged from footpath literature, pamphlets, to journalistic works and scholarly books. However, if I were to pick five or six books, though difficult, I would choose the following: Rahi Masoom Raza’s Hindi novel Aadha Gaon, which narrates the story of a village in Uttar Pradesh at the time of partition and independence, and how Muslim and Hindu families were torn apart. The novel is a powerful testament of how communal politics weaves itself into our everyday existence. Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano for the ways in which it rejects a straight-jacketed chronology and instead traces Latin America’s exploitation and impoverishment through a history of its principal commodities over five centuries. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice has great resonance for me for its ideas of reconciliation between freedom and equality, justice as fairness, and distributive justice. Ramachandra Guha’s The Unquiet Woods has a continuing influence on me for its in-depth and path-breaking study of Himalayan social protests. I consider Richard P. Tucker’s work, especially his Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Decline of the Tropical World, a landmark study on modern global environmental history. It opens up new areas for me to study any ‘empire’ in the environment. A Field of One’s Own by Bina Agarwal has also been a regular companion.

A PUBLISHING PERSPECTIVE ON THE A.K. RAMANUJAN CONTROVERSY

2011-11-07T09:04:00.001+05:30

The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! — Bible, 2 Samuel 1: 19

A consequence of the debate generated by Delhi University’s removal of A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayan from its history syllabus has been, ironically, to confirm the value of Ramanujan’s unusually exhilarating and accessible scholarship. People who may never have heard of Ramanujan have now, because of the furore, read him. Less established and debated has been the role of Ramanujan’s publisher, at one moment complimented by progressive academics for publishing works of genius, at another dragged to hinterland regional courts by the dogmatic for the offence of publishing these same works.

Imagine a scenario in which the publisher of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species were taken to court by a Hindu fanatic for hurting his religious sentiments by casting doubt on Hindu beliefs about creation. Or one in which Einstein’s publisher were taken to court by some other variety of religious fundamentalist for disproving his belief in a universe divinely ordered. Given the latitude offered to the frivolously aggrieved by the Indian lower judiciary, these scenarios aren’t as fictitious as they seem. Legally, a publisher in India who has offended a fellow Indian by republishing the views of Darwin and Einstein can find himself being asked to appear in a mofussil court in Kargil or Kanyakumari. The number of offended Indians is legion, and growing by the day, and many of these bleeding-heart illiberals can reach an arrangement with a sub-judge on the need for self-publicizing litigation against any publisher whose size suggests a generous settlement out of court.

Although in theory publishers indemnify themselves against litigation costs in their contracts with authors, in practice it is they more than the author who are answerable in court. This is even more so in cases where the author is dead, or inaccessible because he is a foreigner. Given this, the position the publisher takes in court, and in the world at large, during times of legal assault by conservatives or fanatics is crucial in three ways: it outlines the publisher’s worldview, ideology, and attitude; it lays bare what the author has written and whether or not his work should continue to be published and disseminated; it either reassures or disillusions the reading public of the worth or absence of it in both author and publisher.

In the Ramanujan case, what should the publishing institution that took on his book (and thereby bought itself respect and made good money) say to his ghost, and to the serious reading public for which it was set up to publish such books in the first place? How would secular, progressive and sane sections of the reading public expect the publisher under attack to respond? Even if we forget the book’s commercial success — academic books sell in small numbers — isn’t there a publishing ethic that requires a publisher, specially a big publisher, to stand by a book and author he has taken on, and defend them, if not to the death, at least legally, vocally, and reasonably strongly? Such expectation would only be strengthened if the publisher happened to be a reputed university press claiming that the very purpose of its existence was to promote learning. How would it look if, instead of standing its ground and defending its authors, such a press were to cave in, whine out an apology to medievalists for having caused unintended hurt to their religious views and promise never again to reprint supposedly offensive books?

Cut from the domain of the imagination to the realm of the real. A.K. Ramanujan, a scholar so formidable that he was, for several years after his premature death in 1993, considered irreplaceable by his department at the University of Chicago (he was replaced many years later by D.R. Nagaraj), writes a pathbreaking essay on the Ramayan. In it he documents the popularity of the epic by showing how its influence on the Indian imagination is evident in the diversity of narratives and regional versions which it has generated. He publishes the essay, alongside many others which argue the same view — oddly, these other essays are not deemed offensive merely because Delhi University happens not to prescribe them — with the University of California Press, from which the Oxford University Press in India buys rights of republication for South Asia.

Indonesian stage performance of the Ramayana

A history department prescribes it. A hurt Hindu, his sentiments backed up by the sort of antagonism to ideas in which only cretinous Indian vice-chancellors specialize, takes the publisher to court. And what does the publisher do? Instead of preparing for a siege and sticking his Oxford Blue banner into the battleground, the publisher grovels. He agrees that what he has published can cause religious offence, and that by publishing Ramanujan he has caused it. He promises in court that he will renounce Ramanujan and not reprint the offensive essay.

Are such reactions by a major publisher acceptable? Is this the way in which even a small-time press, lacking the resources to fight legal battles but intent on retaining its self-respect, would react — never mind one of the world’s phenomenally resource-rich publishing multinational organizations? Has OUP India not heard of Penguin’s successful defence of D.H. Lawrence against State censorship? Or an Italian publisher’s defence of Roberto Saviano for exposing the Sicilian mafia?

I ask this in part because I was, 20 years back, the editor who acquisitioned and published the Indian edition of Paula Richman’s Many Ramayanas. And because I am, like many thinking academics and readers, dismayed by the position taken by the book’s Indian publisher. I also ask this because, being now a small independent publisher of scholarly books, I recognize the enormous difficulties that mischievous litigation can cause; and therefore, in principle, I am in fact sympathetic to any press besieged by fanatics.

But it is one thing to be a little publisher in a garage beset by the mob; it is quite another to be a corporation with offices in every continent and equipped with a whole legal department experienced in dealing with hurlers of footwear. Its press is Oxford University’s single largest donor to the university coffers. If the OUP were on sale, even Rupert Murdoch would have to check with his bank if he had the money to buy it. If the OUP were a bank, it would be asked to rescue Greece and save the euro. Given its financial worth, how can such a publisher seem so oblivious of its own intellectual and cultural worth, specially in India, a country with universities round every corner but without even one functioning university press? Why doesn’t this, of all publishers, empty its massive coffers just by the little that’s required to employ a security agency, protect its employees, put steel on its windows — and a little into its spine?

The Ramanujan case is not, unluckily, the only instance which shows OUP India crawling when asked to bend. A brief foray into publishing history shows a consistency in their response pattern when assaulted by numbskull vice-chancellors and their ilk. A few months before I left the OUP, I had signed on an excellent legal monograph by the German legal sociology scholar, Hans Dembowski. In 2001, soon after publishing his book, Taking the State to Court, OUP India apologized to the Calcutta High Court and withdrew the book instead of defending either it or the author (a first-rate German scholar who later put the book online). Two years later came the James Laine controversy. Same brick-throwers, same response: book withdrawn, apology tendered, academics left feeling betrayed.

The case for mounting a defence of Dembowski and Laine earlier, and Ramanujan now, is not just very strong, it is absolutely required. It ought to be any self-respecting press’s first response to say it will defend what it has published. Unfortunately, the OUP’s actions in court, and vis-à-vis its own scholarly constituency, seem to suggest the philosophy of a myopic accountant who sees books as fodder for a cash till, not as ideological artefacts by great writers who can feel either supported or betrayed. In all these cases, the publisher’s instinctive reaction seems to have been to apologize and withdraw the book. In fact, both the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court threw out Maharashtra state’s case against Laine —but much after OUP’s instant apology and withdrawal of the book. It would seem excusable, though far from commendable, if a small press were to try worming its way out of prolonged and crippling litigation; but if, in addition to being big, you’re the pre-eminent scholarly publisher in your world, your every move is a statement of your ideology and must be carefully thought through. If a publisher with enormous resources sidles apologetically out of court, it will be interpreted as having said: “Let fascism rule, we haven’t the stomach to fight it.”

To say this, even implicitly, can enormously injure a publishing reputation. And this is damage that cannot be compensated for by the size of a publisher’s holdings — as Rupert Murdoch has been finding out. OUP India, which celebrates its centenary next year, is unlikely to become India’s News of the World. But when quite a lot of people even begin to exclaim, “How are the mighty fallen!” it would be sensible for any publisher to listen carefully: a trickle can grow suddenly into a deluge.

READ THE ARTICLE IN THE TELEGRAPH, WHERE IT WAS PUBLISHED

Farina Mir wins the AHA's RICHARDS BOOK PRIZE

2011-10-28T14:06:00.004+05:30

FARINA MIR

The Social Space of Language Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab

(South Asia Across the Disciplines Series)

In December 2002, it was announced that Farina Mir's dissertation titled 'The Social Space of Language' was joint winner of the Sardar Patel Dissertation Award for that year. The award is given to the best doctoral dissertation in modern Indian studies at any American university. (Click here for more details.) Now, confirming the stature and importance of Farina Mir's scholarship, comes the news that for the revised version of her dissertation, published jointly by Permanent Black and the University of California Press, she is the recipient of the prestigious American Historical Association's RICHARDS BOOK PRIZE for 2011 (the prize commemorates the work of the historian John F. Richards).

This rich cultural history set in Punjab examines a little-studied body of popular literature to illustrate both the durability of a vernacular literary tradition and the limits of colonial dominance in British India.

Farina Mir asks how qisse, a vibrant genre of epics and romances, flourished in colonial Punjab despite British efforts to marginalize the Punjabi language. She explores topics including Punjabi linguistic practices, print and performance, and the symbolic content of qisse.

She finds that although the British denied Punjabi language and literature almost all forms of state patronage, the resilience of this popular genre came from its old but dynamic corpus of stories, their representations of place, and the moral sensibility that suffused them.

This multidisciplinary study reframes inquiry into cultural formations in late-colonial north India away from a focus on religious communal identities and nationalist politics and towards a widespread, ecumenical, and place-centred poetics of belonging in the region.

FARINA MIR is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
Hardback / 294PP / RS 695 / ISBN 81-7824-307-5 / South Asia rights / October 2010
Copublished by the University of California Press, Berkeley

“Mir's archival work covers and foregrounds the breadth of the story-telling or qissa tradition, great and little, high and low, Sufi, Sikh and Hindu, showing its wide dissemination. Mir’s findings are of immense significance, given the turbulent history of the region in post-independence India and the political turmoil today, particularly on the Pakistani side of the border. Punjabi seldom finds this kind of focus in cultural history.”—Vasudha Dalmia, University of California, Berkeley

“Farina Mir has given us an outstanding work of literary and cultural history. She skilfully unravels the many versions of the famous folk-tale about Heer and Ranjha to illuminate gender, class and community relations in Punjab. This book will compel historians to rethink the links between language, religion and power and to reconsider the contingencies of union and partition in late colonial India.”—Sugata Bose, Harvard

“Mir makes creative use of archival and folkloric material to tell the history of a composite, modern, and gendered Punjabi self in colonial India that was sadly lost in the welter of partition politics and violence. The story of the legendary lovers Heer and Ranjha haunts her narrative like an artistic lament about a lost Punjabi self without in any way compromising the academic quality of her research and the rigour of her exposition. A very significant contribution to South Asian history.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty, The University of Chicago

“This is a pioneering study. Mir draws upon largely unfamiliar material and suggests new approaches to religio-cultural questions of great importance to South Asianists across a wide disciplinary spectrum.”—Christopher Shackle, SOAS, University of London

SUMIT SARKAR IN CONVERSATION WITH JAYEETA SHARMA

2011-10-18T08:53:00.002+05:30

This month, PERMANENT BLACK is publishing Jayeeta Sharma's long awaited monograph on Assam, Empire's Garden.

To coincide with its publication, we requested Professor Sumit Sarkar to ask his former student a few key questions about her book and professional interests. Their conversation is given below.

SUMIT SARKAR: How far wasyour choice of Assam as research area conditioned by your affiliation to theplace? Apart from the personal involvement, what else shaped your choice ofAssam and its plantations -- especially as you are not a tea drinker yourself,if I remember correctly.

JAYEETASHARMA: As a young bookworm in Guwahati, I read all the history books that Icould find, whether Gibbons or Gait. But I couldn’t stand the dates-and-eventshistory the provincial Assam Board forced on students. Then I learnt that atDelhi University I could study social, cultural, and economic history. The nextfew years were a revelation, especially in my MA courses. When I began to doresearch, I did want to write about Assam someday. However, I wasn’t ready todo so for my M.Phil degree. Finding source materials for Assam was a problem,especially with little funding. Also, the Mandal-Masjid events impelled metowards looking at caste-class issues among Delhi’s Balmiki sweepers. Later, Ilearnt of the rich trove of vernacular sources at the British Library andapplied for scholarships to do a PhD on Assam. Tea plantations were not yet onmy mind, since I envisaged a history of vernacular cultures and regionalidentity at that point. Incidentally, I could not escape altogether fromtea-drinking at Delhi University addas but I gave it up for more interestingbeverages once I got to Cambridge, ironically, just as I brought tea into myacademic frame of reference!

SUMIT SARKAR: Do youconsider your book to be primarily a contribution to labour history or is it morea contribution to studies of regional identities and nationalism? How do thetwo concerns inflect each other?

JAYEETASHARMA: I see the book as both, and again, this is shaped by the way it cameabout. As I began reading for my PhD, I often came across an unsatisfyingdichotomy in historical scholarship: between literary-and-nation-centred works,and ‘labour and migration’-wallahs. I found it frustrating that so many workson ‘vernacularization’ or ‘public sphere’ had little to say about the mixedvernacular realities that labour migration and imperial policies created.Plantation studies and labour history in turn, often took little account ofvernacular sources and differing regional cultures. Gradually, I conceptualizedmy study of Assam as a cultural history inflected by the study of labour, aswell as a history of vernacular regions that would focus on empire’s workings.I started to view the colonial economy and plantation sector as economic andcultural actors that shaped the making of Assam and of India, as did the ideasand artifacts of the printing press and of associational bodies, and that bothsets of processes impinged upon, interacted, and influenced each other, albeitto differing degree.

SUMIT SARKAR: What is thesignificance of the sequence of terms, 'jungle', 'garden', and 'plantation'?

JAYEETASHARMA: Terms such as 'jungle' and 'jungli' have referred to Assam and itsdenizens all the way from Sanskrit texts to Gandhi (he eventually apologized).I got interested in the way 'garden' was strategically deployed to replace 'jungle'by so many actors with differing agendas, from Assam Company employees toAmerican missionaries to pioneering Assamese intellectuals. At a wider level,of course, 'garden' has a long historical and literary lineage. I found avariety of scholarly works, on botanical gardens or food studies or onplantation labour, helpful to think through how tea became a metaphor for somany different improving projects.

Today, inAssam, the English word 'garden' is often used to refer to 'plantation' whetherone speaks in English or in Assamese. Yet, as in the other 'garden' of SouthAsian history, that of Kashmir, it is the people who live and work on theplantations who are often elided when their picturesque surroundings come intoview. My book’s title “Empire’s Garden” I hoped would bring to mind not justhow the term Assam itself became a signifier via the imperial tea economy, butall these larger historical and political connections that it acquired.

SUMIT SARKAR: Do you intendto work further in this area? If so, where would you want to take it? If youplan on something else, how has this first study prepared you for the newtheme?

JAYEETASHARMA: I certainly continue to be interested in labour and culture, and thecirculatory flows between elite and subaltern histories. My next project isalready well underway, and focuses on a region adjacent to Assam, the EasternHimalayas. The chronological frame is late-19^th century to late-20^thcentury. There are two main connections to my first book. One arises from aconnection to tea planters since I write about mixed-race children who wereborn of relationships between British tea planters and local women, and theneducated in Himalayan schools. These were illicit relationships andconventional sources are virtually silent, so it is quite a challenge. Anotherconnection is a focus on labouring and migrant groups: Darjeeling tea workers,as well as load-bearing coolies from Nepal and Tibet. I examine the culturalworlds and colliding spaces of various Himalayan groups, including of course, eliteand middle-class hill residents. In terms of vernacular histories, I ventureout beyond Assamese and Bengali sources to incorporate sources in Nepali,Hindi, and Tibetan. I believe that South Asian history needs more studies thatspeak across regions and specific language groups, and this project is apartial attempt in that direction.

SUMIT SARKAR: Can youdiscuss some books or events unconnected with your discipline that have beenimportant to you?

JAYEETASHARMA: I think I’ll talk about events if that is all right.

The initialset of events I’ve already mentioned: the mobilizations to oppose the BabriMosque destruction and the caste prejudices exposed by the anti-Mandalmovement. Till then, I had not really made the connection between my studiesand the world, but the realization of these religious-caste-class fissures mademe wish to go deeper into history in order to better understand presentrealities.

Another setof events is the mass mobilizations to express dissent with the Iraq war andthe prevailing ‘new imperialism’ in the early 2000s. Those movements and theintroduction they provided for a fledgling ‘diasporic intellectual’ to groupssimilar to those who had inspired me to become a historian, served as mypersonal and political lifelines at that time and still do so.

And lastly,an event that has altogether changed life and and work is the birth of mychild. It is somewhat of a cliché to say parenthood changes a person, buthaving heard this all my life, I now constantly realize its truth. The worldlooks a different place when one brings a living sentient being into it. So dothe study and writing of history, when one sees the vulnerabilities of humanchildhood at firsthand, not to mention the impact on one’s routines and plans,especially as regards archival and library travel.

BEYOND VANDE MATARAM

2011-10-05T14:09:00.001+05:30

Amiya P. Sen, editor

Bankim’s Hinduism

An Anthology of Writings by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay

The great novelist and thinker Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94), associated with his famous hymn ‘Vande Mataram’, is sometimes seen as mainly a creator of Hindu nationalist icons. This is unfortunate, for Bankim was an enormously learned man, a deep and subtle thinker. A relatively unknown side of his work comprises his religious and philosophical thought, in particular his carefully argued ideas on Hinduism.

This collection of Bankim’s writings—many translated into English for the first time and excerpted from the author’s Complete Works in the Bengali original—brings out some of the inner anxieties and ambivalence within the novelist-intellectual’s work on religion, ethics, and philosophy.

By reading this book one may detect in Bankim a rational-functionalist approach to religion, as also a deepening faith and piety transcending that intellectual perspective. Bankim anticipates contemporary scholarship in claiming that Hinduism is the common name given to a variety of religious thoughts and practices; and yet, paradoxically, his writings—all penned in the colonial era of Indian subjecthood—also argue for a common Hindu heritage, as well as a unified religious and cultural world for contemporary Hindus.

A substantive Introduction and detailed annotations help to situate Bankim’s life and thought in his times.

AMIYA P. SEN was educated at St Stephen’s College, Delhi. He is Professor of Modern Indian History, Department of History and Culture, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He has been Agatha Harrison Fellow at the University of Oxford, and Visiting Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. His several publications include Hindu Revivalism in Bengal: 1872–1905: Some Essays in Interpretation; Explorations in Modern Bengal c.1800–1900; and, as editor, The Indispensable Vivekananda: An Anthology for Our Times.

Hardback / 392pp / ISBN 81-7824-323-7 / Rs 795 / World rights / November 2012

On the Cup that Cheers

2011-10-05T14:04:00.000+05:30

Empire’s Garden

Assam and the Making of India

Jayeeta Sharma

In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the north-eastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labour from central India. In the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods.

In Empire’s Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region’s social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea labourer catalyzed a process by which Assam’s gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space. Various linguistic and racial claims allowed these elites to defend their own modernity while pushing the burden of primitiveness onto “non-Aryan” indigenous tribals and migrant labourers. As vernacular print arenas emerged in Assam, so did competing claims to history, nationalism, and progress that continue to reverberate in the present.

“Jayeeta Sharma’s subject is the creation of the notion of ‘Assam’ during the pre-colonial and colonial periods, both as a literary artefact and as a region defined by its relationship to the wider India. She wants to know how, when, and why the Assamese came to see themselves as different, particularly from Bengalis and from the Muslims of what is now Bangladesh. She is also interested in how some subordinate groups within the province were incorporated into the idea of a Hindu Assamese identity and others not … Dr Sharma has made a major contribution to the reassessment which is now under way of what might be called ‘regional patriotisms’, both in India and throughout Asia. Her wider theoretical and historical interests in the emergence of ‘ethnicities’ or ‘micro-nations’ also put her work in the vanguard of developments in the social sciences more generally.”—C.A. Bayly

“Empire’s Garden is a new departure for the historical study of Assam, extraordinarily wide-ranging, with important things to say not only about Assam but about India, South Asia, and themes ranging from colonialism, nationalism, and regionalism to ethnicity, elite formation, migration, and economic development. It will anchor histories of Assam for years to come.”—David Ludden

“This rich history of Assam fills a void in scholarship. Assam is an area of South Asia that has received little attention from serious historians of the subcontinent, except those working on the tea industry. Jayeeta Sharma provides us with fascinating details of Assam’s history. More importantly, she relates local themes to larger issues of South Asian history: colonial ideologies of race and the importance of these ideologies to the political economy, the structure of colonial rule, the development of the public sphere, and the reformulation of identities under colonial circumstances. Empire’s Garden also helps us to understand the historical dimensions of contemporary conflicts in the region, without making the conflicts seem predetermined by what happened in the colonial period.”—Douglas E. Haynes

JAYEETA SHARMA is Assistant Professor of History, University of Toronto.

Hardback / 348pp / Rs 750 / ISBN 81-7824-343-1 / October 2011 / South Asia rights

COPUBLISHED WITH DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Paperbacking Hardiman and Hardy Woman

2011-09-06T13:10:00.003+05:30

New in Paperback

Now in Paperback

One More from the Enfant Terrible of Med Ind and the Med Cosmos ...

2011-09-03T15:12:00.000+05:30

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Three Ways to be Alien

Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World

This book looks atindividual trajectories in an early modern global context. It draws on the lives and writings of a trio ofmarginal figures who were cast adrift from their traditional moorings into anunknown world.

The subjectsinclude

v a “Persian” prince of Bijapur in Central India heldhostage by the Portuguese at Goa

v an English traveller and global schemer whosewritings reveal a nimble understanding of realpolitik in the emerging world ofthe early seventeenth century

v an insightful Venetian chronicler of the MughalEmpire in the later seventeenth century who drifted between jobs with theMughals and various foreign entrepôts, observing all but remaining the eternaloutsider

In telling thefascinating story of floating identities in a changing world, Subrahmanyaminjects humanity into global history and shows that biography still plays animportant role in contemporary historiography.

“Throughcase-studies of three quite remarkable ‘aliens’ and ‘border-crossers’ SanjaySubrahmanyam has given us a startling new vision into the intricacies and theday-to-day realities of the always unsteady, always conflictual nature ofcultural ‘encounters’ across and within the European and Muslim empires of theearly-modern world. With his wry humor, keen eye for detail, and gift forstartling juxtaposition, no one can match him.”—Anthony Pagden

“Integratingbiography, microhistory, and world history in the study of cultural bordercrossers, Subrahmanyam’s book will probably initiate a whole new generation ofstudies in the field of cultural encounters in which individual lives figureprominently. Few scholars in the world can match his mastery of the politicaland economic history of the Early Modern empires of Asia and Europe, or theease with which he crosses historiographical traditions to bring their historytogether in this lucid and innovative study.”—Stuart B. Schwartz

Hardback / 248pp / Rs595 / ISBN 81-7824-339-3 / South Asia rights / 2011

Copublishedwith Brandeis University Press

HINDUISM: SANSKRIT SCHOLAR SETS THE RECORD STRAIGHT

2011-08-30T10:22:00.001+05:30

Unifying Hinduism has won the 2011 award for Best First Book in the History of Religions from the American Academy of Religion

ANDREW J. NICHOLSON
Unifying Hinduism
Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History
South Asia Across the Disciplines Series

A Short Interview with Andrew J. Nicholson
whose new book Unifying Hinduism is a brilliant exploration of some of the central genealogies of Hinduism:

Q1: Would it be true to say that your book provides a prehistory of modern Hindu thinkers we’re familiar with, such as Vivekananda, Gandhi and Radhakrishnan? Can we get a better sense of their intellectual genealogy by reading your book?

A1: Yes, one of my goals in writing this book was to do just that. As important as I think Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism is for South Asian Studies, we are in a period when the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. Said criticized Orientalists like Bernard Lewis for insisting that the modern history of Asian societies can only be understood in reference to the essential character of the society—which, for Lewis, would mean that medieval Islamic theology is the key to understanding the current upheavals in Egypt, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. That, of course, is nonsense.

But it is also a mistake to think that the arrival of the British in South Asia led to an almost instantaneous and complete erasure of pre-modernity. In particular, I focus on certain new ideas that gained currency between the 14th and 17th centuries among Sanskrit intellectuals. Perhaps the most significant of these ideas was that certain philosophies—particularly Advaita Vedanta, but also the Samkhya and Yoga schools, along with various theistic traditions such as Ramanuja’s in Tamil Nadu and Abhinavagupta’s in Kashmir—are in fundamental agreement with one another. It was only in this late medieval period that such schools were together labeled “orthodox” (astika) and contrasted with the Buddhist and Jain “heterodox” (nastika) schools. The notion that these schools were in basic agreement was a precursor of the idea that “Hindooism,” or Hinduism as we call it today, is a single unified tradition. Without these earlier developments, Vivekananda could not have spread his Hindu gospel of “practical Vedanta” across the United States and Europe.

Q2: Two recent works on Hinduism from the USA which have greatly interested our readers have been Sheldon Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men and Simona Sawhney’s The Modernity of Sanskrit. Does your work link with theirs, and is it part of a wider trajectory taken in recent years by the study of Hindu philosophy in the West?

There is no doubt that Sheldon Pollock’s work has influenced mine. He was, after all, my mentor at the University of Chicago! One of his important recent initiatives is the research project “Sanskrit Knowledge-Systems on the Eve of Colonialism,” undertaken in order to shift attention to the late medieval period. Traditionally, Indologists have had a fetish for origins, trying, for instance, to reconstruct the authentic philosophy of the early Upanisads or of the historical Buddha. According to Orientalist historiography, everything went downhill from there, particularly after the Muslims came and destroyed everything of value in Indian society. But this degeneration narrative is false. The school of New Logic (Navya Nyaya) is one well-documented example of the extraordinary vitality of Indian philosophy in the 14th century. Other scholars have shown similarly important new developments in Sanskrit poetics, grammar, and in Mimamsa hermeneutics in the late medieval period. But no one before me had undertaken a revisionist history of Vedanta philosophy; perhaps the Orientalists’ understanding of Vedanta as existing unchanged since the time of the Upanisads was just too powerful of a narrative. So updating our knowledge of Vedanta, especially late Vedanta, was one of my main objectives.

Sawhney’s book focuses largely on the uses to which Sanskrit texts have been put in the modern period, often to further certain ideologies that have little to do with those texts themselves. Although my book focuses primarily on the medieval period, I also make brief forays into the modern period to discuss universalist interpretations of Hindu tradition such as by Aurobindo and Radhakrishnan. For instance, many Hindus regard the phrase sanatana dharma to be a synonym for “Hinduism,” and believe that the notion of a single sanatana dharma, or “eternal religion,” goes back at least to the Rg Veda. Few people are aware that this phrase was popularized first in the writings of Aurobindo. He borrowed the notion of Hinduism as sanatana dharma from the theosophist Annie Besant’s 1903 book Sanatana Dharma: An Elementary Text-book of Hindu Religion and Ethics. There is a great deal of misinformation nowadays about Hinduism and Indian history, and I think that Sanskrit scholars have a responsibility to act as public intellectuals in order to bring clarity to these debates. So, for instance, I gave a lecture in Varanasi recently on the topic of the history of yoga, another one of my interests. Contrary to opinions one finds on the internet, yoga was a pan-Indian phenomenon shared by Buddhists, Jains, Hindus, and even some Muslims. It was certainly never the “intellectual property” of Hinduism.

Q3: In what new ways do you think your work opens up Hindu philosophy to historians, sociologists, political philosophers, and serious readers of scholarship on Indian intellectual traditions?

There is a stigma surrounding the study of Vedanta philosophy that has caused it to fall out of favor with a certain type of 21st century intellectual. In earlier times Vedanta was a favorite of the Orientalists who sought to portray Sankara’s idealist philosophy as the essence of the Indian mind. Nowadays it is one of the favorites of some new age movements who have re-interpreted Advaita Vedanta as a quantum mysticism proving that the physical world doesn’t exist. I try to dispel some of these bizarre and mistaken ideas about Vedanta by grounding my investigations in India’s intellectual history, and by showing that most Vedantic schools are not “idealist” in their outlook.

As Dipesh Chakrabarty has suggested, the rehabilitation of non-Western philosophies is an important part of the project of “provincializing Europe.” I argue that Buddhist and Hindu philosophers can be important theoretical resources for the critique of neo-liberal capitalism. Specifically, concepts common to Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain thinkers such as aparigraha (non-acquisition) are powerful tools to debunk the idea that human beings are rational agents striving to maximize their individual self-interest through the accumulation of goods. Pre-modern intellectuals understood that desire unchecked leads to suffering, not happiness. I am especially interested in some of the realist Vedanta traditions in pre-modern India that, contrary to the Orientalist portrayal of Vedanta as idealist and world-negating, were profoundly concerned with karma and our ethical engagement with other beings in the world.

Q4: Could you tell us something about your own early life and education which drew you to this area of study, and anything illuminating or insightful that your personal everyday experience of Indian life has provided to your study of Hindu thought?

A4: I started practicing yoga in 1987 as a teenager in the midwestern United States. I was fascinated by Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, and by their connections to philosophy in Europe, especially in Germany. I arrived in college certain that I wanted to study Sanskrit and travel to India. I made it to India first in 1992, staying in Bihar, and expecting to see everyone chanting OM and sitting in lotus position. Needless to say, seeing the economic conditions there was the beginning of my true education. And being in India during the event in Ayodhya on December 6 and its violent aftermath led to a political awakening. As an American, I was aware of the way that some modern Christians re-interpret religion to make it a vehicle of hate, but I hadn’t realized how similar Islamic fundamentalism and Hindu nationalism are to the Christian fundamentalism that continues to influence politics in my native country. As I remark in the final section of my book, one of the jobs of the historian is to fight against the superimposition of modern ideologies onto pre-modern history, whether they be ideologies of the right or of the left.

Q5: What is next in your plans? Do you have any other projects in the works that you would care to share?

A5: Scheduled for publication in 2012 is my next book, entitled Isvara Gita: The Secret Yoga of Lord Siva. Not many people are aware that there are dozens of “Gitas” other than the Bhagavad Gita. This book is my translation of and commentary on an eighth century Sanskrit text, “The Song of Lord Siva” (Isvara Gita). The text contains some fascinating passages describing yoga practices that should help dispel the idea that yoga is all about withdrawal inside oneself (or “enstasis,” as suggested by Mircea Eliade). Instead, in Indian history yoga was more often understood as a way of “linking” oneself to other beings. (The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit verb yuj, “to yoke.”) The notion of yogis in India as being quietistic or passive is utterly false, especially given what we now know about ascetic orders in India and their roles in politics, economics, and even military history. The group who composed the Isvara Gita was known as the Pasupatas. Among other things, they were responsible for introducing the worship of Siva to Varanasi and introducing the idea that Varanasi is a particularly holy place.

This translation came out of a larger research project, a book tentatively entitled Spiritual Exercises: A History of Yoga from Ancient India to the Contemporary World. My original idea was a new history that seeks to understand yoga in light of the theories of Pierre Hadot, Peter Brown, and the later works of Foucault. This gets back to my interest in how the recovery of yogic philosophies can act as a remedy for much of what makes us miserable in the early 21st century: the ever-accelerating commodification of human and non-human beings and the insistence that all intellectual production must be “useful” (in other words, contributing to enhanced economic productivity or enabling us to gratify our innate individual desires). And ironically, yoga itself has become a commodity. There are yoga boutiques in New York selling hundred-dollar moisture-wicking pants to help yogis and yoginis show off their assets during class. The practitioners in yoga studios in New York and New Delhi are generally more interested in their triceps than they are in self-transformation. But perhaps we are in a “teachable moment,” as the educators say.

A SHORT DESCRIPTION OF WHAT'S INSIDE THE BOOK
Some postcolonial theorists argue that the idea of a single system of belief known as “Hinduism” is a creation of nineteenth-century British imperialists. Andrew J. Nicholson introduces another perspective: although a unified Hindu identity is not as ancient as some Hindus claim, it has its roots in innovations within South Asian philosophy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. During this time, thinkers treated the philosophies of Vedanta, Samkhya, and Yoga, along with the worshippers of Visnu, Siva, and Sakti, as belonging to a single system of belief and practice. Instead of seeing such groups as separate and contradictory, they re-envisioned them as separate rivers leading to the ocean of Brahman, the ultimate reality.

Drawing on the writings of philosophers from late medieval and early modern traditions, including Vijnanabhiksu, Madhava, and Madhusudana Sarasvati, Nicholson shows how influential thinkers portrayed Vedanta philosophy as the ultimate unifier of diverse belief systems. This project paved the way for the work of later Hindu reformers, such as Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, and Gandhi, whose teachings promoted the notion that all world religions belong to a single spiritual unity. In his study, Nicholson also critiques the way in which Eurocentric concepts — like monism and dualism, idealism and realism, theism and atheism, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy — have come to dominate modern discourses on Indian philosophy.

ANDREW J. NICHOLSON is Assistant Professor of Hinduism and Indian intellectual history in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University.

Hardback / 280pp / Rs 750 / ISBN 81-7824-328-8 / South Asia rights / 2011
Copublished by Columbia University Press

THE ACADEMIC LOWDOWN ON MEDIEVAL HINDUS AND MUSLIMS

2011-08-27T20:03:00.001+05:30

Finbarr B. Flood

OBJECTS OF TRANSLATION

Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter

Congratulations to Finbarr B. Flood: his book, published for South Asia by Permanent Black alongside Princeton University Press, has just won the 2011 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies, South Asia Council.

Objects of Translation has been praised as “[A] brilliant, far-ranging study [...] This book is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ encounter.” –John E. Cort, Religious Studies Review

The prize is awarded to the best English-language work in South Asian Studies, with a preference for “broad scholarly works with innovative approaches that promise to define or redefine understanding of whole subject areas.”

According to the Selection Committee Citation: “Finbarr Flood’s Objects of Translation is a magisterial study of material culture and community identity in South Asia from the eighth to the early thirteenth century … Objects of Translation is a timely contribution to medieval Indian historical studies, a major addition to translation theory and historical-cultural studies, and a field-changing work of art history. It is a landmark.”

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

Some Very Civil Lines

2011-08-09T17:09:00.002+05:30

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Partial Recall

Essays on Literature and Literary History

India’s poets have been among the finest writers of English prose—earlier, Henry Derozio and Toru Dutt; more recently, Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes, and Adil Jussawalla. Writers of this kind, representing the ‘common reader’ tradition of unpretentious and jargon-free writing about literature and life, are something of a rarity in India. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra—renowned poet, critic, translator, editor, and anthologist—enriches an uncommon stream with this brilliant collection.

The essays gathered here, rich in literary detail and accessible insight, were written over the past thirty years. Among them are Mehrotra’s homage to his friend and fellow poet Arun Kolatkar; a perceptive appreciation of A.K. Ramanujan; a scathing scrutiny of R. Parthasarathy; a radical redefinition of the modern Indian poem; a literary-historical view of Kabir; and a wide-ranging introduction to the entire corpus of Indian writing in English from 1800 to the present.

Mehrotra, who has lived much of his life in Allahabad, writes also about the provincialization of India’s middle-sized cities, the decimation of cultural heritage across urban north India, and the joys and pains of growing up in a small town where everyone knew everyone.

Forthright in manner and cosmopolitan in their references, Mehrotra’s writings are an exceptional mix of the autobiographical and the literary, an antidote to the everyday annihilation of English prose by journalists at one end and literary critics at the other.

This is a book to be enjoyed, savoured, dipped into, and read—again and again.

ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA was born in Lahore in 1947 and educated at the universities of Allahabad and Bombay. He has published four collections of poetry, two volumes of translations, and edited several books, including An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. He lives in Allahabad and Dehra Dun.

Hardback / 300pp / Rs 650 / ISBN 81-7824-310-5 / World rights / October 2011

Brilliant essay by Sheldon Pollock

2011-07-28T13:19:00.005+05:30

There aren't many (actually we can't think of any) Sankritists of Sheldon Pollock's subtlety, scholarship, complexity and renown who can write accessibly for non-specialist readers. Read Professor Pollock's essay here for a fresh understanding of the classics. And then turn to his book.

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

THE VIDEO OF SHELDON POLLOCK'S KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT THE JAIPUR LITERATURE FESTIVAL 2011 IS HERE.

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

Once upon a time, 'The Word' was with Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha. Now ...

2011-07-02T13:25:00.007+05:30

MAHESH RANGARAJAN AND

K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN, EDITORS

India’s Environmental History
Vol. 1: From Ancient Times to the Colonial Period
Vol. 2: Colonialism, Modernity, and the Nation

Environmental history in India has generated a rich literature on forests, wildlife, human–animal conflict, tribal rights and commercial degradation, displacement and development, pastoralism and desertification, famine and disease, sedentarism and mobility, wildness and civility, and the ecology versus equity debate.

This reader brings together some of the best and most interesting writing on India’s ecological pasts. It looks at a variety of the country’s regions, landscapes, and arenas as settings for strife or harmony, as topography and ecological fabric, in the process covering a vast historical terrain.

Vol. 1 provides an antidote to the existing historiography, which barely takes notice of the era before 1800. The essays here range from prehistoric India to the middle of the nineteenth century. They provide insights on forest and water disputes, contests over urban and rural space, struggles over water and land, and frictions over natural wealth which have led to a reinterpretation of source materials on early and medieval India.

Vol. 2 shows how colonial rule resulted in ecological change on a new scale altogether. Forests covering over half a million sq km were taken over by 1904 and managed by foresters. Canal construction on a gigantic scale gave British India perhaps more acreage than any other political entity on earth. Similar new forces were at work in relation to the animal world, with species being reclassified as vermin to be hunted down or as game to be selectively shot.

For all who are interested in the diverse and detailed findings of the best scholarship on India’s environment, this two-volume set is essential.

MAHESH RANGARAJAN is Professor of Modern Indian History at the University of Delhi. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, from where he got his PhD. His books include India’s Wildlife History: An Introduction (2001), and (as co-editor) Environmental History as if Nature Existed (2007) as well as Making Conservation Work (2007). He chaired the Elephant Task Force in 2010, is a well-known commentator on politics in the Indian media, and (soon to become) Director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.

K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN is Professor of Anthropology, and Forestry and Environmental Studies, at Yale University. His research covers both historical and contemporary environmental issues in India, as well as development and state formation. His several books include (as co-editor) Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods and Identities in South Asia (2006).

HARDBACK / VOL. 1 472PP, VOL. 2 628PP / RS 1850 FOR SET OF 2 VOLS / ISBN 81-7824-316-4 / WORLD RIGHTS / 2011

WAS THERE LIFE BEFORE BOLLYWOOD?

2011-06-30T19:31:00.011+05:30

Stages of Life

Indian Theatre Autobiographies

KATHRYN HANSEN

“These four autobiographies of artists and writers who shaped early Indian theatre during its most creative period are as riveting as the fare that the theatre itself provided. Kathryn Hansen’s lifelong and perceptive involvement with that rumbustious enterprise infuses every word of her translation of these texts.”

—Girish Karnad

By the end of the nineteenth century, Western-style playhouses were found in every Indian city. Professional drama troupes held crowds spellbound with their spectacular productions.

From this colorful world of entertainment come the autobiographies in this book.

The life-stories of a quartet of early Indian actors and poet-playwrights are here translated into English for the first time.

The most famous, Jayshankar Sundari, was a female impersonator of the highest order. Fida Husain Narsi also played women's parts, until gaining great fame for his role as a Hindu saint. Two others, Narayan Prasad Betab and Radheshyam Kathavachak, wrote landmark dramas that ushered in the mythological genre, intertwining politics and religion with popular performance.

These men were schooled not in the classroom but in large theatrical companies run by Parsi entrepreneurs. Their memoirs, replete with anecdote and humor, offer an unparalleled window onto a vanished world. India’s late-colonial vernacular culture and early cinema history come alive here. From another perspective, these narratives are as significant to the understanding of the nationalist era as the lives of political leaders or social reformers.

This book includes four substantive chapters on the history of the Parsi theatre, debates over autobiography in the Indian context, strategies for reading autobiography in general, and responses to these specific texts. The apparatus, based on the translator’s extensive research, includes notes on personages, performances, texts, vernacular usage, and cultural institutions.

KATHRYN HANSEN is a leading scholar of South Asian theatre history, especially the Hindi and Urdu traditions of North India. Her work has highlighted heroic women in myth and history, theatrical transvestism in the nationalist period, composite culture and cosmopolitanism, and community formation through theatrical performance. She has authored Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India, translated The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development, and co-edited A Wilderness of Possibilities: Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective. Having taught at the University of British Columbia, the University of Chicago, and Rutgers University, she is now Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Kathryn Hansen has given us a special kind of book—one with many voices, on many layers, which cohere in a single, satisfying picture. Autobiographical accounts of early pioneers of the Parsi theatre are enriched by the author’s considerable knowledge of this theatre, its performance styles and people and languages. This well-produced book includes original thinking about a number of topics, including autobiographical writing in India, its history in India and first-person narratives as a form of cultural memory. The narratives themselves, which lie at the heart of the book, are lovingly translated, combining humour, flare and intimacy. They read as they were written and bring us inside this world where stages of life were sung and danced and spoken under the lights.”—Stuart Blackburn

Click HERE for an interview with Kathryn Hansen in TimeOut Mumbai

HARDBACK / 392PP / RS 750 / ISBN 81-7824-311-3 / SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS / AUGUST 2011

1001 QUESTIONS ... ON THE SPREAD OF ISLAM

2011-04-30T17:19:00.001+05:30

RONIT RICCI

Islam Translated

Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia

South Asia Across the Disciplines Series

The spread of Islam eastward into South and Southeast Asia was one of the most significant cultural shifts in world history. As it expanded into these regions, Islam was received by cultures vastly different from those in the Middle East, incorporating them into a diverse global community that stretched from India to the Philippines.

In Islam Translated, Ronit Ricci uses the Book of One Thousand Questions—from its Arabic original to its adaptations into the Javanese, Malay, and Tamil languages between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries—as a means to consider connections that linked Muslims across divides of distance and culture. Examining the circulation of this Islamic text and its varied literary forms, Ricci explores how processes of literary translation and religious conversion were historically interconnected, mutually dependent, and creatively reformulated within societies making the transition to Islam.

Islam Translated will contribute to our knowledge of this region of the Muslim world that remains crucially important to world affairs.

RONIT RICCI has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan and is a lecturer at the Australian National University. Her interests include South and Southeast Asian cultures, literary transmission, and conversions to Islam.

“combines scrupulous examination of textual shifts, concepts, imagery, and genre with a tremendously persuasive argument and a stimulating reading of the differences in translation process between languages and cultures. This book helps us to understand the differing ways in which Arabic and Arabic writings moved into other literatures and takes readers through a rich and detailed journey of imagery and language”—Michael C. Gilsenan, New York University

“a trail-blazing study about the dynamics of writing within the Arabic cosmopolis around the Indian Ocean”—Hendrik Maier, University of California, Riverside

HARDBACK / 312 PAGES + 4 HALFTONES AND 3 MAPS / RS 750 / ISBN 81-7824-333-4 / SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS / JUNE 2011 / COPUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

An Interview with Tanika Sarkar

2011-04-29T21:08:00.009+05:30

TANIKA SARKAR
Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University

answers six questions sent to her by Permanent Black.

TANIKA SARKAR

Here, first, is Dipesh Chakrabarty on Tanika Sarkar: “Tanika Sarkar is arguably the most prominent feminist historian today writing on Bengal and India. She also belongs to a tiny band of Indian scholars whose interests embrace both history and literature. Her many different books and essays on women's histories—notable as much for their breadth of interests as for their sensitive and imaginative handling of a wide variety of Bengali and English-language sources from the colonial times and before—show her to be an intellectual whose work is both attentive to the messiness of the past and at the same time deliberately resistant to what she sees as unsatisfactory, schematic interpretations of many postcolonial scholars. This gives her writing a polemical edge but it is not consumed by polemics. In the end, much of it is indeed pioneering, imaginative, and wonderful history from someone completely engaged with what goes on around her.”

Question 1
These three short extracts below are from Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation (Permanent Black and Indiana University Press, 2001), and Rebels, Wives, Saints (Permanent Black and Seagull, 2009) the two books which, it seems broadly agreed, established you as a world-class historian:

“... the consciousness of the colonised is [mistakenly] divested of all claims to an autonomous life and made parasitic upon the master discourse of colonialism”

“... there is very often an exaggerated account of this [colonial] impact within postcolonial studies which denies any substantive autonomy or authenticity to modern Indian discourses ... Indian history becomes rather too strongly a site for the work of the West rather than for the activities of Indian people”

“... The success of the theatre depended significantly upon lower-middle-class themes and preferences. While the classical themes and chaste language of Madhusudan Dutt’s early plays were displayed to depressingly empty halls, the fortunes of the lately established Bengal Theatre picked up and flourished in the early 1870s with the performance of a popular farce—Mohanter Ei Ki Kaj. This play enacted a scandal that had rocked the popular imagination when the mohunt of the Tarakeswar pilgrimage seduced a young girl who was, later, murdered by her husband”

Would it be fair to say that these extracts show us the core historical themes which your work on colonial times investigates: individual autonomy and agency; popular culture; women’s victimhood? What biographical and intellectual factors brought you to these themes, which seem a departure from your less unconventional first monograph on political protest, Bengal 1928–1934 (1987)?

Answer 1
I did not entirely depart from the concerns of my first monograph. I reworked the Jitu Santal narrative in my last book and I am now writing on aspects of Bengal’s labour history that I had touched on briefly there. But for a long time I did write on entirely different themes that focused almost entirely on gender and culture. You are so very right in selecting those citations as they precisely sum up my acute discomfort with the very hegemonic postcolonial studies framework that dominated history writing, especially on gender and culture, in the 1980s and 1990s. I am afraid that mine was a very kneejerk response which should have been theorized at some point. But I was troubled by the reduction of messy and profoundly dialectical processes into a single and very simple query about what was derived from the West and what resisted it. What little I knew of Western history also made me question the singularization of the West, and what I definitely knew of Indian history made me certain that its complexities would be impossibly steamrollered by the question, whose answer was, in any case, prefabricated, already known.

Also, while I strongly oppose the earlier nationalist and Indian Renaissance frameworks as equally reductive, if not more so, I was troubled by the cultural nationalism that was insistent on reconfiguring our modernity as a dark age when we lost our selfhood—because this was a time when so many dalits, women, and workers were, in different ways, articulating a very strong sense of selfhood. That seemed to be the most significant historical question, not the one about what is West and what is non-West in us.

If I did not theorize my own starting point and my disagreements beyond a simple polemic, I did try to choose themes that conveyed some sense of messy complications in the historical processes that I have referred to.

I would disagree with one of the points you make: I did not want to see the woman as victim alone, but more as a person who wrote and acted politically as never before. My standpoint was different there from that of the hegemonic feminism of those times which saw her as being endlessly recast into different patriarchal frames, Indian and Western. Since a lot of our feminist studies focussed on images of women in patriarchal texts, I wanted to see, instead, what they wrote and how they worked. I also wanted to attend to the writings by men which struggled to develop very different, very transgressive, notions of women. I suppose, E.P. Thompson’s approach was crucial here, however ill digested. Or Marx's point about men making their own history, but under circumstances not of their own choosing.

Question 2
You seem to have perfected, in particular, a wonderful narrative technique in many of the essays comprising both Hindu Wife and Rebels, Wives. You focus on the specific victimhood of a particular woman with whom you make us identify, or on the tragic circumstances of an individual life, and then, having engaged our empathy in the manner of a fine storyteller, you enmesh us within larger and larger stories of the economy, culture, legal ethos, etc. which made that individual tragedy possible. The specificity of that tragedy is made to expand, via your historian’s voice, into something that has a socially representative character for that period. Each essay offers a broad social landscape, but it is a picture which you have coloured over by that one particular tragedy. This technique seems a way of enriching the historian’s normal focus on community and class with the tragedian’s art. It gives your essays a peculiarly emotive or affective quality, making them seem genealogically connected both with Ranajit Guha’s classic essay ‘Chandra’s Death’ and your own father (the Presidency College scholar-teacher) Amal Bhattacharji’s legendary knowledge of classical tragedy (his Four Essays on Tragedy appeared posthumously from the Clarendon Press in 1977). Could you say something about your early life, your education, your family circumstances, etc. which may show us how and why you arrived at this uniquely literary and emotionally involving way of giving us history?

Answer 2
This is difficult to answer. My father never taught me literature but he sometimes read out from Shakespeare. Once, when I was very small, he read out all of Macbeth. I saw him trying to teach himself Greek as he wanted to work on Greek tragedies and, out of curiosity, I would pick up his collection of the translated plays now and then. I was transfixed by what I read, though I did not understand much. I cannot understand why I never asked him to explain things to me.

The only time I read a bit of literature systematically was when I did my A levels in Cambridge. We had a most wonderful teacher who communicated his somewhat Leavisite enthusiasm for the texts to the class—an enthusiasm that was, however, much contradicted and tempered in him by the influence of Raymond Williams. It was interesting to see within him an uneasy cohabitation of the two compulsions.

An inescapable sense of the tragic came to me when my father died a very slow and painful death at the age of fifty—especially painful because he so wanted to live. It seemed that the tendency to ascribe all tragic situations to social problems, to problems of power, was not entirely adequate. Nor could one invariably sustain an infinitely affirmative stance towards life and history. So I read the plays again, especially King Lear. However, since I am a historian, social and political problems are inevitably my field of enquiry. I suspect a seepage of that deep affinity with literary works on tragic human predicaments into situations that are made tragic by social and poitical power does happen: somewhat inappropriately, I guess.

Of course, there was also the tragic collapse of hopes in actually existing socialisms that happened relentlessly as I was growing up. This was sometimes complicated by a revival of hope in plebeian struggles as we also lived through the era of the Vietnam wars. So, despair was never translated into cynicism. Together, world events made it impossible either to hope or to despair about the course of human history—or, they made many of us determined not to accept the inevitable. Which, again, is a tragic predicament.

I have now revealed myself hopelessly as a person who is made by Western texts of power. Let me hasten to add that the Bengali translation of the Mahabharata is just as important to me.

Question 3
Your distinction as a historian lies partly in your interest in exploring deeply emotional and dramatic moments or events in individual lives that reveal what it was like to be alive at that time in history, and this interest seems to take an unusual turn in two of your essays because of their focus, in different but related ways, on the ‘child as god’ — on the emotions aroused by very small children. In your essay ‘The Child and the World’, which looks at Tagore’s writings for children, you say: “I think he [Tagore] worked with four important sources. Memories of his own childhood; observing children, especially his own, in their infancy; early learning with his father; and looking at forms of folk literature addressed to the child.” And in your essay on the Balakdashi sect you say of the child Vaishnav saint Balak: “He accorded pre-eminence to an earlier phase of Krishna’s leela, when a naughty and bewitchingly beautiful child-Krishna lived out a rich relationship with his adoring mother Yashoda. The appropriate form of raganuga or emotional response to this phase would be vatsalya, or parental love for the deity, as prescribed by Gaudiya Vaishnavism, which spelt out a range of emotional stances to Krishna and privileged them over vaidhi or ritualistic devotion.” If at one level your work fuses history with elements from literature, to what extent do you think it also fuses, consciously or subconsciously, your Marxism with elements of Freudianism? Or are these not so much the product of intellectual currents as of your own experiences as daughter and mother?

Answer 3
You are so right to think that the theme of the child is very important to me. I am now working further on holy infancy in Vaisnava literature as well as on the making of a domain of childhood through Sati and widow remarriage debates. I also wrote something on Rabindranath’s old age text on his childhood which I want to develop further. This interest probably comes from reading Rabindranath’s works for the child in my own childhood as well as other significant Bengali writings on children's literature—Abanindranath, Leela Majumdar, and many others. These were such rich ways of living in a world of children and in a world which imagines children in different ways. I periodically reread them as routes back to my own childhood as well as a way of establishing a relationship with the child as an adult.

A second source: my rage against the world that we live in, one that is made by capitalism, flows most strongly when I think of how it has blocked and distorted so many lives of children.

And, of course, having mothered a baby makes me happiest when I think or write about children. However, doomed to be a historian, I cannot find many situations when I can write happily about the child. That is why I so enjoyed writing the piece on the child in Tagore's writings.

Question 4
You have taught and lectured at St Stephen’s, JNU, and Cambridge, and given a shared course with Martha Nussbaum at Chicago University. Could you say something about (a) a few of the highlights or memorable moments of your career as a teacher and supervisor; (b) how you have changed or developed as a teacher over the years.

Answer 4
Teaching, especially at Stephen’s and JNU, has given me a deep sense of how little I know and how inadequately I can handle the questions that pour in from students. Every time I try to answer one of their questions, I think sadly that if only I had known much more about related themes, I would have been able to open up new worlds of awareness and interest. These students—or many of them—are so alarmingly well read, so efficiently argumentative, and so humblingly thoughtful that I am always left with a sense of ‘if only I could have walked that extra mile’.

There is another sense of inadequacy, especially with supervision. It is impossible to get to the research level in History without being able to read and write fairly fluently in English and so many of our students do not really know the language. Sometimes they do have interesting ideas which they cannot really articulate, nor can the ideas be fully formed as thinking has to be done within language and they have to read important works on History in order to know how to think. And, so many of these books are in English. They really need professional language teaching and we are not trained to provide that. So, most of the time, supervision means correcting sentences and not engaging with ideas. I feel a bit of a fraud when I supervise such students. Had there been one or two of them, a constuctive effort could have changed a lot of things, but at all times we are loaded with scores.

Let me give a couple of instances when a student’s question wrought important changes in my own thinking. Once, a first year undergraduate at Stephen’s interrupted my lecture on the Opium Wars in China where I was churning out a pretty efficient explanation of the Wars in terms of the economic calculations of Western imperial powers. She asked: why opium? When I asked her to explain herself, she said: ‘So far you have told us why the Western powers wanted to foist opium on China. But you have not told us why so many Chinese people wanted opium so badly at that point of time. Is that not important to know?’ That made me think, over many years, that the history of the colonized is never fully explained by what the colonizer does to them.

At Witwatersrand University in Johannesberg, where I taught Indian history, a student asked me when the British had passed a law to ban interracial marriage. I said there never was such a law, and they were astonished. Their surprise made me think about why interracial marriages were legal but intercaste marriages were not, for most of our colonial history. That, in turn, made me think seriously about colonial complicity with indigenous structures of power which, in specific cases, outweighed the structures of racial domination and discrimination.

At Chicago, I was lucky to share a course with Martha Nussbaum on texts of Indian modernity. Students came from many disciplines and most knew nothing about India, or about Tagore who was the central figure for the course. At the beginning, I was very pessimistic about the prospects of teaching them over an entire semester and I thought that the wall of strangeness between students and the course would remain impenetrable. But, amazingly, slowly, they began to grope through the maze of unknown and unthinkable people and situations and through cultural strangeness, and taught themselves to engage very intensely with the writings. The last class was based on his novel Jogajog, translated as Relationships by Supriya Choudhury. When they came for the class, they looked stunned by what they had just read. One of them then read out his essay on the novel and the level of understanding was so profound—so suffused with the tragedy which was not merely one of patriarchal power—that I was amazed. I also learnt a lot, along with the students, from Martha’s lectures on Western political philosophical texts that were relevant for an understanding of Tagore. I learnt a lot, too, from her infinite patience and gentleness with, and her deep interest in, her students, her ability to extend questions that seemed trivial into a discussions of things important and interesting, all without leaving the question behind.

Question 5
Despite living mostly in Delhi, like many Bengali intellectual-activists you’ve been very involved with Singur, Nandigram, and the contemporary Maoist insurrections. How does a historian of deeply emotional moments make you look at these deeply affecting situations within your own lifetime?

Answer 5
That was a supremely difficult time. We have been so committed to the Left government in Bengal, given the growth of right wing forces elsewhere, that we did not really want to know too much, we did not want to disturb our comfortable anchorage. For instance, much to our shame now, we did not respond at all to the hideous massacres of low-caste refugees at Marichjhanpi—it was not that we actually ever defended inexcusable acts but that we hardly ever publicly condemned them.

When we heard of Singur, we went there, initially to prove the Left’s claims were right. And we walked staright into a classic peasant rebellion of the sort that we have read about and written about and even dreamed about—but one targeted against the wrong party, it seemed, and one also supported by the wrong party. We had to make a choice. Should our leftism consist of support to subaltern movements for justice and rights, or of support to a party that calls itself Left? We also felt that private grumbling about the Left’s policies—which many of our friends engaged in—was hardly enough and what we had to say must be said in public. At one stroke, we lost the only party we had some faith in and we lost most of our friends.

What we saw in Singur and Nandigram made us realize the importance of ethnographic work, seeing for ourselves, as nothing else would have brought home the actual meaning of two sets of argument—the small peasant’s argument about the relative viability of their form of livelihood, as all alternatives without a toehold in land would pauperize them and destroy them morally and culturally, vs. the neo-liberal argument about the necessity to foster market and capital in the cause of development and not to think twice, or even once, about livelihoods and the lives of those who do not have capital or power over markets. We also saw for ourselves the sheer cussed peasant determination to hold on to land at all cost—something that we have only read about, almost as inspiring myths. We realized, too, that it was not only an innate peasant heroism that animated their struggles against the combined powers of transnational capital and an extremely well entrenched and ruthless state power; in fact they were speaking a literal truth when they said that without land their lives would not be human lives. That, again, reinforced what we read about taking peasant rationality seriously. Ananya Roy’s work on the Calcutta poor confirmed the truth of what Nandigram peasants said about a landless future. It also made us recall that, historically, Indian industries have grown only through a circular relationship with villages which reproduced the labour force and gave workers shelter against old age, accidents, retrenchment, and unemployment.

It also made us rethink the trajectory of early Subaltern Studies writings on peasant struggles. There is a great problem about narrativizing such movements if we do not or cannot see them only as instances of heroic resistance against deprivation. For there will be layers of contradiction within such struggles—of internal class, caste, or gender power, for instance. It seems that one can either ignore these problems and romanticize the struggles or one can focus on the contraditions and debunk them, expose their complicities with other forms of power even as they claim to resist power. Or, to say that since power exists even within resistance, an insurrectionary situation is inherently problematic for it will breed new forms of power. So, how to develop a language which would do justice to the magnitude of the effort to resist as well as to its necessity, and yet would lay out the internal contestations, without one compromising the other?

Maoist politics is even more of a dilemma especially since one knows so little about what actually happens, where state infiltration and propaganda end and where actual Maoist work begins. In the first place, I have no faith in their starting point—the inevitability of seizure of state power through violence and terror. But I cannot honestly think of any alternative form of struggle that will be more democratic and that is immediately effective at the same time. The large social movements in many parts of the country that resist development by displacement have a massive potential but they resist immediate problems of survival. The structural problems of the entire system are so very critical, and seemingly so impossible to resolve within the existing frame of parliamentary democracy, that it is difficult to be clear about what one can say beyond a very general condemnation of all forms of violence, state and Maoist. Yet, thinking of such a politics is absolutely essential.

Question 6
If you had to list five or six non-scholarly books that have meant a great deal to you, books you’d want to recommend to everyone, which would they be?

Answer 6
This is a really difficult one as one at times cannot think of a single such book and at others, one can think of at least a hundred. May I pass it by?

Kosambi, Kosambi, and Kosambi

2011-04-03T20:11:00.005+05:30

Everyone's heard of the pioneering D.D. Kosambi, the Marxist founding father of Ancient Indian Studies.

Not everyone knows about the incredible life lived by D.D. Kosambi's father, Dharmanand Kosambi, the great scholar of Buddhism who travelled from penury in village Goa to renown as a Harvard scholar and friend of Mahatma Gandhi. This is because, until recently, when Meera Kosambi set about translating them, the major portion of the writings of Dharmanand Kosambi were only available in Marathi.

Now, for the first time, readers of English can marvel at arguably the most moving and spellbinding autobiography ever written by any Indian scholar. Dharmanand Kosambi's granddaughter Meera Kosambi -- the feminist historian famous for her work on Pandita Ramabai, Kashibai Kanitkar, and Maharashtra's women writers -- has provided a wonderful translation with contextualizing annotations.

Permanent Black is privileged to publish
NIVEDAN The Autobiography of Dharmanand Kosambi Edited, Translated from the Marathi, and with an Introduction by Meera Kosambi

Born in rural Goa, Dharmanand Kosambi (1876–1947) came under the spell of the Buddha’s teachings during his adolescence. At an early age he set off on an incredible journey of austere self-training across the length and breadth of Britain’s Indian Empire, halting to educate himself at places connected with Buddhism.

His sojourns included living in Sri Lanka to master Pali, in a Burmese cave as a bhikshu, and in some viharas of North India—begging for monastic sustenance—as well as in Nepal and Sikkim which he reached after arduous, sometimes barefoot, treks. Over these itinerant years Dharmanand acquired such mastery of the Buddhist canon that he was variously appointed to teach and research at Calcutta, Baroda, Harvard, and Leningrad.

As a thinker Dharmanand blended Buddhist ethics, Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of truth and non-violence, and the ideals of socialism. He exchanged letters with the Mahatma, worked for his causes, and died in the approved Buddhist/Jain manner by voluntary starvation at Sevagram ashram. Arguably, no Indian scholar’s life has been as exemplary as Dharmanand’s, or has approximated as closely to the nobility and saintliness of the Mahatma’s.

MEERA KOSAMBI’s Introduction contextualizes the life, career, and achievement of one of modern India’s greatest scholar-savants. Her many books include Dharmanand Kosambi: The Essential Writings (edited, 2010), Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History (2007), and Feminist Vision or ‘Treason against Men’? Kashibai Kanitkar and the Engendering of Marathi Literature (2008).

paperback / 204pp / Rs 295 / ISBN 81-7824-325-3 / World rights / Summer 2011

Permanent Black Publisher's Serious and Spoofy Views of Academic Publishing

2011-04-03T12:16:00.004+05:30

For a change we're featuring not one of our authors, but our publisher, interviewed here by the Times of India. He discusses academic publishing in India, how he acquisitions books, what distinguishes academic publishing from other kinds of publishing, and so on. Read the interview to find what masala the hottest selling scholarly book might contain.

The distinct possibility exists that you'll need yawn-suppressant medication after ploughing through the above worthy interview. In which case, the publisher can offer you laughter medicine in the shape of two parodies he wrote on the art of writing Indian history.

These parodies on Indian history-writing have been universally condemned, making them compulsory reading for all who wish to be seen as well read, as well as for those who wish to understand how Indian history is now written. It is also meant as a career guide for budding historians in India, all of whom—like all Indians generally—wish to migrate to the USA in order to make a vast fortune there by perfecting the art of writing unhyphenated postcolonial criticaltheoretic marxistfeminist subalternstudies histoires of revolting peasants and other such texts that are believed to inhabit the thirdworld. Dollar $alaries for such historians are now upward of $ 100 million per annum, and rising—in proportion with the degree of incomprehensibility achieved. These parodies are the most lucid demonstration available of how to achieve that nirvanic state of academic bliss known as ‘the Incomprehensible Sublime in the Ivy League’.

Read the full parodies by clicking here.

Never Say Die: The Swadeshi Movement Strikes Again

2011-04-01T20:02:00.017+05:30

Sumit Sarkar

The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal

Widely hailed by historians as the first great and pioneering monograph in Modern Indian History (many maintain it has never been surpassed) Sumit Sarkar's The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (1973) was unavailable for nearly fifteen years before its republication in a new edition in 2010 by Permanent Black. This was thanks very substantially to the efforts of Tanika Sarkar in obtaining copyright back from the original publisher ... but that's another story (it should feature in Tanika Sarkar's autobiography, if she writes one).

The new Permanent Black edition has been freshly typeset and looks much more elegant than the first edition. It also contains plenty of great new material in the form of a long new preface by Sumit Sarkar reflecting on changes in Indian historiography over the 35 years since he wrote his first major book, as well as two brilliant essays contextualizing and outlining the importance of this book by Neeladri Bhattacharya of JNU and Dipesh Chakrabarty of Chicago.

The hardback having sold out, the paperback is publishing in the summer of 2011 with the beautiful new cover design above (including a rare photo of Sumit Sarkar at the time that he wrote Swadeshi Movement).

This coincides happily with the first paperback printing of Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar's edited reader in two volumes, Caste and Social Reform in Modern India, which has sold out two hardback printings.

As is well known in the academic world, Sumit Sarkar fell very ill a couple of years back and his survival and wonderful recovery have been something of a miracle. You can say the same for his Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, a book that needs to be read by every student and scholar of Indian history.

Swadeshi Movement: paperback / 506pp / Rs 450 / World rights

Caste and Social Reform: paperback / 940pp in 2 vols / Rs 895 for set of 2 vols / South Asia rights

Muslim Subjects, Hindu Rulers, new in paperback

2011-04-01T19:47:00.004+05:30

Chitralekha Zutshi

Languages of Belonging
Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir

“Languages of Belonging is a quantum leap forward in Kashmir studies and will make one of the best histories of ‘regional’ identities and economies in India yet produced. The work brings forward a great deal of new and important material and provides a new framework for understanding regional identities in South Asia”—C.A. Bayly, Cambridge University

“This is an outstanding book. Based on massive archival research in Delhi, Jammu and Srinagar and the unearthing of rare Kashmiri literary sources, it skilfully uncovers the religious sensibilities that underlay the formation of Kashmir’s regional identity in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century … Languages of Belonging will light up new ways of understanding the formation of identities in South Asia’s regions”—Sugata Bose, Harvard University

“Rarely has Kashmir received sustained scholarly attention that goes beyond the issues of rival territorial claims and policy studies. Drawing on a rich vein of sources, this book breaks new ground … A monograph of exceptional rigour and insight, a must for specialist and lay person alike”—Mahesh Rangarajan, Delhi University

Chitralekha Zutshi has a Ph.D. in South Asian History from Tufts University. She has been Visiting Lecturer at Yale University, and Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Alabama. She is currently Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, USA.

paperback / 366pp / Rs 395 / ISBN 81-7824-334-2 / South Asia rights / summer 2011

Can Fundamentalism Release the Secular Impulse? Yes ...

2011-03-30T12:35:00.003+05:30

HUMEIRA IQTIDAR
Secularizing Islamists?
Jama‘at-e-Islami and Jama‘at-ud-da‘wa in Urban Pakistan
South Asia Across the Disciplines Series

Secularizing Islamists? provides a thorough analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama‘at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa, widely blamed for the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai. Basing her findings on ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore, Humeira Iqtidar says that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently oppose secularism.

This book offers a fine-grained account of the workings of both parties. It challenges received ideas about the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization.

Iqtidar illuminates the impact of women on Pakistani Islamism while arguing that these Islamist groups are inadvertently supporting secularization by forcing a critical engagement with the place of religion in public and private life. She highlights the role that competition among Islamists, as well as the focus on the state as the center of their activity, play in assisting secularization.

The result is a significant contribution to our understanding of emerging trends in Islam and politics within South Asia.

HUMEIRA IQTIDAR is a lecturer in politics at King’s College, London. Her research is in social and political theory relating to secularism, citizenship, religion, the state, and the market.

“The real strength of Secularizing Islamists? is the depth of its empirical research, both historical and anthropological—there is no other work that brings such a range of materials to a study of Islamism in contemporary Pakistan. Here, Humeira Iqtidar offers a compelling historical argument that demonstrates how Islamist movements in Pakistan have long relied upon processes of social and political secularization. This important book will have a wide readership across the social sciences and humanities and will be of interest to students of South Asian history and culture, the history of secularism, modern and contemporary Islamic studies, as well as policy professionals worldwide who are concerned with Islamic radicalism.”—Aamir Mufti

“At the heart of this book is an incongruous question: what would happen if we analyzed Islamists (who define themselves in almost polar opposition to ‘secularism’) as products of a process of ‘secularization’? What happens is not a definitive new interpretation of Islamism, but rather the suggestion of a range of new questions and perspectives for looking at Islamist thinking in its political and everyday contexts. Broad, original, and interdisciplinary, this book will find an important audience among a large number of scholars who have long struggled to make sense of the Islamist phenomenon.”—David Gilmartin

“Based on rich ethnography and written with historical and theoretical imagination, this riveting book offers a timely and subtle contribution to our understanding of the place and impact of religion in public life. Humeira Iqtidar’s resonant accounts of the origins, diversity, and role of gender in Pakistan’s Islamist movements, and her deep insight that secularization can be underpinned by social forces that combat secularism, force a reconsideration of long-held concepts and convictions about politics and belief.”—Ira Katznelson

HARDBACK / 232PP / RS 595 / ISBN 81-7824-332-6 / SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS / May 2011
COPUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

In Flight Reading Material (on a Monumental Scale)

2011-03-18T07:54:00.000+05:30

BIRDS IN BOOKS

Three Hundred Years of South Asian Ornithology A Bibliography

Aasheesh Pittie

READ A FEATURE ON IT HERE

The history of South Asian ornithology spans three centuries and records over 1200 species of birds. This is the passionate work of hundreds of amateur and professional ornithologists. The popular as well as scientific documentation of this region’s avifauna is prodigious. For the first time, this vast body of work is brought together here, in this detailed, meticulously researched, and annotated bibliography. Over 1700 books are listed, covering the ornithology of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tibet—a region encompassing the Oriental and Palaearctic realms. The bibliography embraces various types of work: from travelogues, field guides, species monographs, country handbooks, regional avifaunas, multi-volume ornithological works, and folios of art, to simple checklists. In addition, it provides brief glimpses into the lives of over 200 ornithologists. For comprehensive accessibility, it includes three indexes enabling readers to reach specific items of information with ease.

AASHEESH PITTIE is an amateur ornithologist, bibliophile, and bibliographer. He is interested in the history of South Asian ornithology, and has compiled a database of over 27,000 ornithological publications for the South Asian region. He has written several articles and papers on Indian birds, and edits the bi-monthly journal Indian Birds.

‘Aasheesh’s bibliography is an outstanding work of scholarship … a source of inspiration and a vital window to a wealth of knowledge.’ —Edward Dickinson, editor of The Howard and Moore Complete Checklist of the Birds of the World (2005)

Hardback / 868pp / Rs 795.00 / ISBN 81-7824-294-X / World rights / June 2010

Great Kolkata Scholar interviewed

2011-03-15T16:52:00.014+05:30

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO
Partha Chatterjee

If you exclude Nobel laureates, India's most major intellectual export to the West is arguably Partha Chatterjee. Many would say there is no need to exclude the Nobel laureates when maintaining this proposition. Kolkata rejoices in the fact that Partha Chatterjee prefers to remain very much a part-time export: he only spends about 3-4 months being professor at Columbia; the rest of the time he is mainly to be found in dhoti-kurta within his natural habitat. His devotion to Kolkata and his self-location within the city are evident from his speech at the Fukuoka Prize of 2009 ceremony in Japan, during which he speaks partly in Bengali to praise Kolkata as the city which made his kind of scholar possible. It's worth experiencing the integrity and dignity of his address at this link.

Two incidental details in connection with the Fukuoka Prize: among scholars, this has only been won earlier by two Indians, Romila Thapar and Ashis Nandy (both ordinarily resident in New Delhi). It is awarded to scholars whose influence has been widely recognized as profound and monumental. Second, Partha Chatterjee had asked that the prize be bestowed on him at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, and the awarding body had agreed. Unfortunately, Chatterjee fell very seriously ill and had to be briefly hospitalized over the Kolkata dates, and the ceremony on the youtube video was held in Fukuoka, Japan.

Partha Chatterjee was instrumental in shifting Subaltern Studies from OUP to Permanent Black in 2000. He has, since, quietly and steadfastly supported Permanent Black, both via giving us his own books to publish, and by advising scholars and students to look seriously at Permanent Black. Most recently, Chatterjee was responsible for bringing to fruition the publication of Ranajit Guha's collected English essays, The Small Voice of History (Permanent Black paperback).

This short interview with Partha Chatterjee reveals some facets of one of contemporary Bengal's most reputed scholar-intellectuals, whose two new books, THE LINEAGES OF POLITICAL SOCIETY (see blog lower down) and THE BLACK HOLE OF EMPIRE, will be published by Permanent Black, Columbia University Press, and Princeton University Press.

Q: Your concept of ‘political society’ in your book The Politics of the Governed, and now in your next work, The Lineages of Political Society, adds a new dimension to our understanding of how non-Western democracy functions. Could you explain this concept simply, and how you came upon it?

A: Liberal political theory has always had a concept of political society to go along with civil society. While civil society meant the associative public sphere of economic and cultural life, political society was the sphere of political organization of citizens’ demands through representation, voting, political parties, etc. Liberal theory insists that the same principles – those of freedom, equality, rule of law, etc. – must prevail in both spheres. It is from my repeated readings of Antonio Gramsci that I first got the idea (though Gramsci himself does not state this in as many words) that there might be a disjuncture between the two spheres. My attempts to understand the evolution of Indian democracy in the 1990s led me to formulate this as a disjuncture within the democratic process itself that, while deviating from liberal norms, was not necessarily a retarded or corrupt form of democracy. I now think there was a fair amount of conceit in my giving the name ‘political society’ to a domain of activity characterized by illegality and deviation from norms. I was trying to point out that the constitutionally ordained norms of civil society, drawn from the particular history of Western liberal democracy, were actually incapable of ensuring justice or fairness for all citizens in a country like India and that the gap was being filled, in the absence of an alternative normative order, by improvised deviations, even illegalities.

To put it simply, political society is a domain of politics where particular population groups organize to press upon governmental authorities their specific demands for basic necessities such as housing, food, livelihood, daily amenities, and so on, which they have thus far provided for themselves by violating the law or administrative regulations or established civic norms. Thus, they may be squatters on public land, or ticketless commuters on public transport, or illegal users of water and electricity, or hawkers on city streets, or manufacturers in the informal sector violating pollution or taxation or labour regulations. Such groups use the space of democratic politics to make their demands.

Governmental authorities too frequently respond to such demands not by clamping down on the illegalities but accommodating them as exceptions within the general structure of normative regulations. That is because political authorities realize that it would be impossible to provide for the basic demands of all within the strict limits of legal and civic propriety and yet the pressure not to alienate large numbers of such voters forces them to do something for them. It is my contention that a great deal of democratic politics in India is about these negotiations. They are not always pretty; sometimes they are violent. But they must not be dismissed as pathological.

Q: In what ways does Lineages of Political Society complement your earlier work, The Politics of the Governed? Does it also develop out of Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World and link in some ways with The Nation and Its Fragments?

A: LPS complements PTG in two ways. First, it explores the historical genealogy of ‘political society’ back into the eighteenth century, the Indian responses to colonial forms of government, and certain strands within anti-colonial politics such as the traditionalists (who did not appreciate Western forms of civil society) or Tagore who was strongly critical of nationalism. Second, it elaborates on certain aspects of political society that were insufficiently discussed in PTG – for instance, populism or the informal sector of production or the role of violence. In doing this I also respond to some of the criticisms that have been made of PTG.

As for links with my earlier work on nationalism, I can’t see any. Certainly, when I wrote those books, I had not formulated the problem of political society. But perhaps there are connections that others may discover.

Q: In what ways have living, teaching, and working in Kolkata been vital to the trajectory of your intellectual life and to the specific ideas you’ve outlined in your writings?

A: I am sure the experience has been central to my intellectual formation. The Kolkata I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s was often described as the most horrifying example of urban degradation anywhere in the world. I vividly remember as a college student waiting at bus stops besieged by begging mothers with infants in their arms; vast swathes of the city’s pavements were inhabited by homeless people from the countryside. When I started working in Kolkata from the early 1970s, the political climate was tense, with severe repression against the Left, especially Naxalites. It was at that time that, in association with my colleague (the late) Hitesranjan Sanyal, I began making regular trips into the Bengal countryside, interviewing several hundred rural people involved in the nationalist movement. This was perhaps the most valuable parts of my education as a social scientist. I also think the relative isolation of Kolkata in the academic life of India and its lack of well-endowed universities and institutes actually helped me to stay out of the obligations and temptations to which those located in Delhi, for instance, are subject. I had the chance to improvise, innovate, and think outside the prevailing orthodoxies.

Q: Do you support the anti-CPM political current sweeping across Bengal? Do you foresee improvement or worsening for the state with the removal of the CPM?

A: I have always been strongly influenced in my thinking by various currents of Marxist scholarship and have considered myself part of the Left in Bengal. However, I have been a frequent critic of the CPI(M) in the last four decades. I am not surprised by the spate of popular opposition to the Left Front that is sweeping West Bengal right now. At the same time, I am not hopeful that the parties that are likely to defeat the Left have a credible alternative to offer. In fact, I will not be surprised if they replicate many of the same forms of intolerance and sectarianism that have characterized the CPI(M).

Q: Could you list five or six non-scholarly books that have meant a great deal to you?

A: This is a difficult question to answer. I can think of Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land that set me thinking about using the historical archives to construct a fictional account of a long lost world and comparing that account with current ethnography. I suspect my reading of Amitav’s book had something to do with the birth of Princely Impostor. I can also think of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul which absolutely captivated me. It would be far-fetched to claim that it has any resemblance to my soon-to-be-published The Black Hole of Empire but somewhere, I suspect, there is a trace. As for other books, I once used to read books about science, and two of them are my all time favourites – Brighter Than a Thousand Suns by Robert Junck, and One, Two, Three … Infinity by George Gamow. Another bestseller I still find thoroughly intriguing is Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. A book by a philosopher that I think is exemplary for its innovativeness and lucidity is Ian Hacking’s The Taming of Chance, but I don’t know if you’ll think of it as entirely non-scholarly. Finally, the non-scholarly and unstoppably influential book of all time for me is The Communist Manifesto. Even today, reading it gives me a thrill.

AN INTERVIEW WITH KAUSHIK BASU

2011-03-13T07:19:00.008+05:30

KAUSHIK BASU'S book
The Retreat of Democracy
(permanent black paperback)

comprises scintillatingly readable and unexpectedly witty essays. Economists are usually dry-as-dust scholars dabbling in statistics and equations beyond our ken. How come Kaushik Basu is quite a different sort of economist? This interview provides a picture of someone with a quite unusually wide range of interests:

Q: Most topnotch economists teach economics and write mathematical economics comprehensible only to their peers. By contrast, The Retreat of Democracy, your third book of popular essays (following Economic Graffiti and Of People, Of Places), shows literary elegance, a philosopher’s wit, and an uncommon ability to communicate economic ideas to newspaper readers, suggesting that your intellectual links are with left-leaning economic philosophers such as Sen, Keynes, and Krugman. Who do you see as your major icons? And have you consciously forged your trajectory to be much more than that of a professional economist?

A: The inability to communicate is so often treated as a hallmark of scholarship that I hope I am not being foolish in treating your observation as praise. Thank you. Thank you also for associating me with these three economists for whom I have great admiration. I do consider myself left-leaning, while being fully aware that the “establishment” left would not consider me so. I find it very difficult to owe allegiance to a dogma or a party line. I owe my intellectual awakening to Bertrand Russell and revere his irreverence for tradition. My most major icon may well be David Hume. I grew up on and have endless admiration for Rabindranath Tagore, though not as a philosopher. My preference is for deductive philosophy and Tagore’s was far from that. But with his multiple talents, ranging from literally all genres of writing to expressionist art, when expressionism was only beginning to appear in Europe, he was iconic indeed. I don’t think I have consciously forged any trajectory. Excepting these last 15 months in government, I have been completely wayward in pursuing whatever my heart desired. I know that that can lead people to ruin. I have just been lucky … thus far.

Q: Among the most captivating things about your popular essays is the ability to reveal links between economic theory, political problems, and everyday lived realities in India. A brilliant essay shows neighbourhood street game strategies in Kolkata underpinning the sorts of games politicians play in the arena of international relations and within the United Nations. Others explain Indian labour laws, trade policies in relation to the WTO, alternative voting systems which can pre-empt hung parliaments, and the impact of cultural norms on economic functioning in Norway and India. Could you tell us something about your upbringing and early life which seem to have predisposed you so clearly towards ethical concerns as well as disciplinary diversity?

A: Where I come from is difficult to answer. So let me get over with the physical part of it. I was born in a small, over-crowded, joint-family home in North Kolkata. A few years later, as my father’s legal career took off, we moved to a spacious home in the southern part of the city. I stayed there all through my school years and moved to Delhi only to go to college—St. Stephen’s. Despite this relatively sedentary start, I am lucky that I find myself easily at home wherever I happen to be. I don’t know how it came to be this way but I consider myself a natural anthropologist. I love to watch the customs, follies, and foibles of human beings. I have written somewhere that I was born in a setting to get to which many an anthropologist would spend huge amounts of time and money. I was lucky I got there free of cost. The huge cast of characters around me—loving, warm and displaying a fascinating range of social and cultural mores and every endearing eccentricity you can think of—may have been a factor stirring the amateur anthropologist in me. But the number of kids born in North Kolkata in the early fifties, when India’s population growth was at its peak, was huge and on doing a head-count of anthropologists it is obvious that my explanation is not too compelling.

Q: Martha Nussbaum says your appointment as Chief Economic Advisor in India suggests “the real empowerment of good intellectuals” in the country. Yet given that, first, the dominant interest of economists serving the Indian state is GDP and ‘growth’, rather than ‘capabilities’ (a term associated with Nussbaum and Sen), and second, that such empowerment also seems to function as a façade behind which to cover up incredible levels of political corruption, do you feel like a fish out of water? Or are you in your element?

A: In the larger political setting and the rough and tumble of graft and greed, I do feel a fish out of water. But I have been lucky that most of my immediate dealings are with people I respect a lot. Once one is in the belly of the beast called government, it quickly becomes evident that the majority of human beings at the helm of politics and policymaking are decent people and committed professionals. But one also learns from this that it takes only a few to vitiate the whole atmosphere. Fortunately, the challenge of designing good policy is so exciting that I do get a lot of adrenalin rush from my current job as Chief Economic Adviser. At the same time I miss my academic life—both the teaching and the life on the cutting-edge of research acutely—and, though I am enjoying my present life on the frontiers of policymaking immensely, I hope to get back to academe before long.

Q: You’ve been a professor in the Delhi School of Economics and at Cornell. What have been some of the differences in your teaching experiences here and there?

A: They were surprisingly similar. The best students at both places were first rate. They kept you on your toes, made you give your best. Both institutes were totally egalitarian. The treatment was the same whether you were a starting lecturer or senior professor. Ideas propounded by either could be challenged, admired, or castigated. The one advantage the Delhi School had was the coffee house, where we spent hours, chatting, developing new ideas, and also wasting plenty of time. This had no equivalent at Cornell. On the other hand, a pleasure I found at Cornell in large measure was PhD students. Because of the large exodus of students after the MA, Delhi had a very slender PhD program. In my 17 years there, I supervised only 2 students. At Cornell, I supervised 18 students in 15 years. Working closely with teams of PhD students was one of the great joys at Cornell.

Q: Could you list five or six books outside professional economics that have meant a lot to you, and which you’d recommend to all your friends?

A: If I had to recommend six books, these would be it.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. There are few lives so miserable and so majestic at the same time.

—Catherine Tait’s My Father Bertrand Russell. Though if you were to read only one book on Russell, it would be a toss up between this and Russell’s own Autobiography.

—Any one P.G. Wodehouse.

—Manohar Shyam Joshi’s T’ta Professor.

—Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Or maybe his The Castle, though since I lost my copy before I reached the end of the book, I never found out if the Castle actually exists.

—In case you can read Bengali, I would highly recommend, Sharatchandra Chatterjee’s Srikanta, especially volume 1.

And please note that I did not include in this list the Economic Survey 2010-11, even though by the criterion of “it meant a lot to me” it fits the bill for it swallowed up the better part of my life these past few months.

The Ugliness of the Hindu Male and Other Propositions

2011-03-11T19:06:00.006+05:30

CHANDRIMA CHAKRABORTY
Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism
Past and Present Imaginings of India

This book analyses the links between religion, masculinity, and asceticism in Indian political and cultural history.

Through an examination of nationalist discourse in the writings of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Raja Rao, V.D. Savarkar, M.S. Golwalkar, and many others, Chakraborty reveals how ideas about masculinity and Hindu asceticism came to be reworked for cultural and political purposes. Over the colonial period, Indian leaders and the literati were impelled to contest colonialist views of Hindu effeminacy. In the process, asceticism became a critical site for notions of masculinity.

Chakraborty also argues that the politics of the contemporary Hindu Right relies heavily on selective and manipulated images of Hindu asceticism and manliness, drawn from such writers in line with their political agenda. Inaccuracies and distortions within Hindu Right politics are shown up by careful analysis of the many different ways in which masculine asceticism was actually imagined and written about.

Ignoring disciplinary divisions, this book cuts through politics, history, cultural studies, and literary analysis to offer an excellent view of concepts such as aggression, effeminacy, manliness, spirituality, asceticism, and nationalist virtue as these have been configured and reconfigured over the past century and a half.

CHANDRIMA CHAKRABORTY is Associate Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, Canada. Her research is on South Asia, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies.

hardback / 276pp / Rs 695 / ISBN 81-7824-298-2 / Opus 1 Series / World rights / May-June 2011

PARTHA THE PROLIFIC (but can he overtake the Tambrams Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Ram Guha?)

2011-03-11T08:27:00.014+05:30

Topnotch social scientists within South Asian Studies do not average more than three or four books over their career. Among the major exceptions are Partha Chatterjee, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Ram Guha. Everything Chatterjee writes makes a big impact across the disciplines. Political philosophers, social theorists, historians, and students of cultural studies all grapple with his ideas and paradigm shaking interventions. Permanent Black and Columbia University Press are jointly publishing Chatterjee's next pathbreaking exploration of his concept of "political society", a term as hotly debated as '"Subaltern Studies" two decades earlier ...

PARTHA CHATTERJEE
Lineages of Political Society
Studies in Postcolonial Democracy

In Lineages of Political Society the eminent political theorist Partha Chatterjee reveals the emergence of a new theory of postcolonial democracy. As against earlier ideas about the nature of democracy—which grew predominantly out of notions and practices in the West—Chatterjee powerfully argues that the theory now in evidence is not merely a record of the imperfections and immaturity of democracy in the non-Western world. On the contrary, it has devised concepts and analytical tools to understand the formation of new democratic practices. In doing so, it has also shown up histories of modern political institutions which are not part of the genealogy of Western democracy.

In the course of making these arguments Chatterjee revisits several themes introduced in his acclaimed earlier work, The Politics of the Governed (2004). To those themes he now adds historical depth and contemporary empirical detail. And although most of the examples in Lineages of Political Society are drawn from India, the arguments within it afford comparisons with countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Chatterjee also here clarifies the location of his work in relation to liberal political theory, understandings of contemporary capitalism, and theories of nationalism and populism. In several chapters he joins the lively and ongoing debate over his concept of “political society”.

This work will be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand the nature and history of democracy, its practices and functionings within the contemporary non-West, and the major expansion in political thought being brought about by one of the world’s most fertile political philosophers.

PARTHA CHATTERJEE has been a founding member of “Subaltern Studies” and director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), Kolkata. He is presently professor of anthropology at Columbia University and honorary professor at the CSSSC. His many books include Empire and Nation: Essential Writings 1985–2005 (2010), A Princely Impostor? The Kumar of Bhawal and the Secret History of Indian Nationalism (2002), and The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993).

hardback / 290pp + 24 colour illustrations / Rs 750 / 81-7824-317-2 / South Asia rights / June 2011 / copublished by Columbia University Press

Madrasi Meets Madrasa

2011-02-25T17:16:00.006+05:30

Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Writing the Mughal World

Studies in Political Culture

In this book, two leading historians of early modern South Asia present nine jointly authored essays on the Mughal empire, framed by a long Introduction which reflects on the imperial, nationalist, and other conflicted trajectories of history-writing on the Mughals. Using materials from a large variety of languages—including Dutch, Portuguese, English, Persian, Urdu, and Tamil—they show how this Indo-Islamic dynasty developed a sophisticated system of government and facilitated an era of profound artistic and architectural achievement, setting the groundwork for South Asia’s future trajectory.

In several ways the joint work of Alam and Subrahmanyam, best represented here, provides the most significant innovation, expansion, and rethinking about the Mughal imperium for many decades. The present book intertwines political, cultural, and commercial themes while exploring diplomacy, state-formation, historiography, religious debate, and political thought. It focuses on confrontations between a variety of source materials that are then reconciled by the authors, enabling readers to participate both in the debate and the resolution of competing claims.

Interdisciplinary and cutting-edge, this work adds rich dimensions to research on the Mughal state, early modern South Asia, and the comparative history of the Mughal, Ottoman, Safavid, and other early modern empires.

MUZAFFAR ALAM is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India and The Languages of Political Islam in India: c. 1200–1800.

SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM is professor and holder of the Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair of Indian History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of several books, including The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama and the two-volume Explorations in Connected History.

Alam and Subrahmanyam have jointly edited The Mughal State 1526–1750 and coauthored Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800.

Hardback / 536pp / Rs 850 / ISBN 81-7824-309-1 / South Asia rights / May 2011 / copublished by columbia university press

Two Permanently Blackened Cornell Wallahs in New Paperback Editions

2011-01-08T12:50:00.015+05:30

KAUSHIK BASU is a professor of Economics at Cornell who has taken leave to be chief economic advisor to the government of India.

According to Professor Martha Nussbaum, “In the US, you rarely see real empowerment of good intellectuals. Someone like Kaushik Basu, for instance, would never be made part of the government in America because he’s just too heterodox — a real intellectual interested in thinking through the theoretical plane.”

paperback / 290pp / Rs 325 / Spring 2011

SUVIR KAUL's PhD is from Cornell. He is now a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He usually works on some Gray areas of the literature of the eighteenth century (such as Thomas Gray) and took leave from his interest in arcana to edit this scintillating collection.

Of this collection the historian Indivar Kamtekar says: “The articles in this book, taken together, succeed remarkably well in broadening the treatment of the Partition of India. Scholars will, as usual, flesh out some of the ideas and flush away others. But the originality of these articles will ensure that the book becomes essential reading for specialists, as well as providing entertainment to the general reader who enjoys listening to echoes of the past.”

paperback / 320pp / Rs 350 / Spring 2011

EVENT, METAMORPHOSIS, MEMORY: OPENING THE CURTAIN ON A MINORITY VIEW OF PARTITION

2011-01-05T21:22:00.012+05:30

A short interview with Neeti Nair

whose book titled

CHANGING HOMELANDS: HINDU POLITICS
AND THE PARTITION OF INDIA
(hardback / 356pp / Rs 750)

will be published in Spring 2011
by Permanent Black and Harvard University Press

Q: Partition history, like Holocaust history, is a terrain well trodden by some big-name Indian historians, and the archives on it have been considerably mined. What personal reasons and professional ambitions impelled you, a very young historian writing her PhD, to venture David-like among the Goliaths? And which historians/teachers (of Partition or otherwise) did you find most inspiring when setting about becoming a historian yourself?

A: My first seriously inspiring teachers were the Menon brothers—Siddhartha Menon in Rishi Valley School and Shivshankar Menon at St Stephen’s College. Both were able to communicate their love for history, for the unexpected and the complicated. They tended to be tentative in their conclusions, aware that history was open to several interpretations. At Tufts, where I did my MA and PhD, Sugata Bose taught a historiography seminar. I enjoyed his open approach to different schools of historiography and later appreciated his understated approach to publishing: “There is a difference between the thought process and the exposition.”

In my second year of the MA, Ayesha Jalal joined Tufts. She was intellectually rigorous, fiercely combative, provocative, and very different from anyone else I’d studied with. I was working on a seminar paper for her class on ‘Islam in South Asia’ when I became curious about how Punjabi Hindus negotiated their status as minorities in Muslim-majority Punjab. I looked at the secondary literature: there was nothing. I decided to work on it. I had just about decided I wanted to pursue a PhD and this topic began to have a life of its own. Initially I had intended it to be a social history around memories of Lahore, but the kind of material I encountered in the National Archives of India, Nehru Memorial Library, Delhi State Archives, and Punjab State Archives in Chandigarh and Patiala made it more political than social history. Yes, I saw some very illustrious names ahead of mine and it is an intimidating field. But it was simply old-fashioned curiosity that led me down this path, nothing as grand as ambition!

My most important mentor has been Jeanne Penvenne, a scholar of Southern Africa who introduced me to the world of oral history. From the late Gerald Gill, a scholar of African-American history, I learnt how a sensitive teacher might handle heated discussions among students. Finally, Amitav Ghosh allowed me to audit his seminar on narrative writing at Harvard. I’ve never seen a scholar listen as carefully and humbly to his students’ ideas.

Q: From the fact that Partition happened, historians often work their way backwards to show why what happened was more or less inevitable. Would it be true to say that by contrast the central argument of your book, by focusing on a relatively neglected minority—namely, the Hindu Punjabi elites—is that the ‘inevitability’ argument on Partition is part teleology, part myth, and part selective history?

A: Absolutely!

Q: In your Introduction you outline a counterfactual: “Although written in a chronological vein, my narrative treats [the] less-known ... Only such a narrative can reveal how close Indians were to achieving a negotiated political settlement that would preserve a united India, on the eve of Partition.” And in fact among the many fine things in your history of Partition is an ability to explore events and personalities that have been forgotten or seen as marginal, such as the Kohat riot, the pendulum swings in the career of Lajpat Rai, and what might be called Shraddhanand’s “pseudo-secularism”. Would you say therefore that your work also sets out to rewrite the history of presentday Hindu nationalism?

A: Oh dear! I’d never use the word “pseudo-secular” to describe Shraddhanand (earlier Munshi Ram). You know, it is hard to write with certainty about ourselves, leave alone the dead. But I do believe the brand of communal love, loyalty, and suspicion articulated by a Shraddhanand is very, very different from the kind of unmitigated nonsense spouted by so-called intellectuals of the Hindu Right today. Also, the word “pseudo-secular” has grown out of a very late-twentieth-century context and it would be unfair to impose it on an early-twentieth-century figure, a little like using the word “secular” to describe good old Akbar!

Hindu nationalism has a history, to be sure. I argue that some of its strongest proponents came from regions where Hindus were the minority, not the majority. Consider Bhai Parmanand’s views before the Round Table Conferences. Here was a man articulating the ‘two-nation theory’, in speech and pamphlet, eleven years before the Lahore Resolution of 1940.

And I would add Bhagat Singh to your question. I reinterpret the actions of Bhagat Singh, apart from rereading very closely some of the writings of Lajpat Rai, Shraddhanand, and other key actors in the 1940s.

Q: Apart from working as a historian digging material out of the archives, the richness of your book lies in your complementary work as an anthropologist interviewing a “tribe” (the Punjabi Hindus) and collecting/collating its memory before the tribe dies out altogether. Were there any specifically anthropological frameworks and paradigms that you found useful in framing your narrative? Or do you see your work more specifically as political history?

A: I tried very hard to listen before drawing any conclusions. The “tribe” is internally very differentiated, more than I had anticipated, and some of the richness you allude to comes from the internal diversity that I was fortunate to capture in my interviews. This was easily the most fulfilling part of my research experience. I did take a course on oral history methods with Jeanne Penvenne where we read a lot of articles by anthropologists in Southern Africa. The course was crucial to alerting me to many of the pitfalls untrained quasi-academics and polemicists fall into, but I also had to think on my feet when I was all by myself in Delhi, and later Lahore.

Changing Homelands is a work of political history. However, although my interviews appear to be contained in the final chapter, in fact my interviewees’ questions spilt over the entire manuscript, forcing me to ask different questions of the materials I collected from official archives. The interviews also get their traction from the earlier part of the book; indeed I don’t believe they make sense unless read together with the rest of the book.

Q: Among the most emphatic assertions in your book is this: “I argue that Partition violence had little to do with religious fanaticism: it was, in essence, a tragic consequence of a breakdown in political negotiations that had been anticipated by British officers at the highest levels. Their failure to impose martial law and unwillingness to stay until proper powersharing arrangements were negotiated between the Congress and the League endows them with much of the responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of lives lost ...” This indictment of the wilfully negligent state as the “onlie begetter” of large-scale violence provides a kind of preview of Narendra Modi vis-à-vis Gujarat’s Muslims or Rajiv Gandhi vis-à-vis the Sikhs after his mother’s assassination. But surely there is a strong incitement to political correctness here in you as a secular historian? Surely communal hatreds cannot be stoked unless they also substantially pre-exist? How would you react to charges such as these, which are bound to be made against your book both by anti-secularists and ordinary ‘common sense’ viewholders, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim?

A: Did centuries of anti-Semitism render the Holocaust inevitable? The state always has much to answer for, here or there.

There is a world of difference between everyday communal prejudice, communal jealousy, and rivalries on the one hand, and hatred that translates into murder on the other. I would urge my would-be critics to read the subsection on the Punjab Boundary Force in chapter five and reflect on the statements made by eyewitnesses such as Justice G.D. Khosla, Emmet Alter, and Saadat Hasan Manto.

Q: What do you enjoy reading other than academic work? Could you name five or six non-academic books that have changed the way you think and feel?

A: Books that have touched me enormously include Agha Shahid Ali, The Country Without a Post-Office: Poems; Mahasweta Devi, Breast Stories; Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace; Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet; Fakir Mohan Senapati, Six Acres and a Third; Vikram Seth, Two Lives.

TWO ACADEMIC MOGULS: 'MADRASI' JOINS HANDS WITH 'MADRASA'

2011-01-04T11:08:00.010+05:30

A short interview with

SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM (left) and MUZAFFAR ALAM (right)

whose new, jointly authored book titled
Writing the Mughal World (510pp / hardback / Rs 850)
will be published in Spring 2011 by Permanent Black
and Columbia University Press

Q: Your book begins by saying that academic collaborations resulting in jointly authored or essays are rare in history (though common in economics, for example). What were some of the academic reasons that impelled this unusual partnership?

A: There were multiple reasons, but the main one was that we have quite different but complementary skills which could be brought together profitably around a common set of interests. For whatever reason, in the past generation—say since 1960—no single historian has used the gamut of materials that we have deployed here jointly. Those who use Persian materials usually don’t venture much beyond them, as we see even in the work of our friend J.F. Richards. Those like the late Ashin Das Gupta (a brilliant and witty scholar whom both of us admired) who used the Dutch archives to study aspects of the Mughal world did not use Persian materials. So at one level, it is as simple as that. The second reason is that collaboration leads us by its very nature to ask new questions which we might not have asked as individuals. Often, our essays are motivated by our excitement at having found new materials that no one has really used; but sometimes they also arise because we find there is a big question that no one has asked or properly answered, and we then go out and look for materials to answer it. Careful readers will see that these essays often result from long discussions between us, where we work out our own differences to arrive at a ‘samjhauta’ (or compromise). To this extent, there is a process of consensus-building behind the scenes here which is crucial to understand how we historians really work in order to arrive at acceptable conclusions—acceptable to our ourselves and to others.

Q: Professor Alam collaborated earlier with Seema Alavi, and Professor Subrahmanyam with David Shulman, V. Narayana Rao, C.A. Bayly, Jorge Flores, etc. over other academic book or essay projects. What were some of the similarities and differences in your experiences between those earlier collaborations and this one?

A: Each collaboration is different and happens for different reasons. Most are short-term and based on a convergence of interests at a relatively brief moment on some subject. (This was the case with the Subrahmanyam-Bayly ‘portfolio capitalists’ essay of 1988, and it is how most economists work.) Our collaboration is more like the Rao-Shulman-Subrahmanyam one in that it is a deep and long-term process which has gone on for some two decades. The subjects and themes have shifted gradually but the collaboration has continued. Like the other one, it is also based on close friendship and mutual indulgence. The big difference is that the Rao et al. collaboration is an intervention in a quite low-key field, namely that of South Indian history. Ours on the other hand is in a much more debated and controversial area, that relating to the Mughals. This is more like working in a war zone or minefield rather than the vast and thinly occupied maidan of South Indian history. Incidentally, we have contemplated a four-part Alam-Rao-Shulman-Subrahmanyam collaboration but it has not happened (or has not yet happened). If we did that, it should logically be about the Deccan, where we all converge geographically.

Q: Writing the Mughal World comprises linked chapters that in earlier forms were essays which you had jointly authored. Was it a problem to suggest an overall coherence of perspective in such a book, or do you feel the overall structure does not matter too much because each chapter works like a strong and autonomous essay?

A: We did work somewhat towards coherence, especially in response to some very good referees’ comments. One question was whether to present the essays in the chronological order in which they appeared, or to group them thematically in clusters, or to do what we finally did—namely, order them broadly along a time line from 1530 to 1800 or so. We hope that readers will see that there are some running themes here, which are our ongoing preoccupations, including with first-person narratives, with the nature of scribal and literati cultures, and with the long-term trajectory of an imperial political culture.

Q: In what ways does your long, and very strong new Introduction to this book, extend or diverge from your views on the constraints placed on Mughal historiography which you outlined many years back in the Introduction to your jointly edited ‘reader’ The Mughal State? In what basic ways do you think the historiography of the medieval and early modern eras has moved forward (or backward) between that edited volume and this jointly authored one?

A: In that Introduction (of 1998), we focused quite a lot on three issues: comparisons (especially with the Ottomans), the question of centre and regions, and the question of neglected and not-so-neglected time periods. Here we decided instead to take up a more genealogical approach, and look back on our own ancestry, so to speak. We hope this will be fruitful for readers but we also thought it was important to dispel certain persistent myths that have been created and sustained in Indian history circles since about 1960. The big historiographical fact since 1998 is the relative decline of Aligarh. This is something we feel conflicted about, and to an extent saddens us. One of us [Professor Alam] was partly trained in Aligarh, and both of us have a lot of respect for the tradition of scholarship that came from there, despite our numerous well-known differences with them. In fact, one of these essays was offered by us as a contribution to Professor Irfan Habib’s festschrift and published there because of our respect for his work. Still, it can be said that the relative decline of Aligarh has taken place at the same time as the emergence (or re-emergence) of Mughal studies in other places. So there is now a proliferation of viewpoints and methods. A central focus on fiscal (so-called ‘economic’) history has given way to a greater interest in cultural, social and literary themes. We have contributed to some of these trends, and may even believe (a bit immodestly) that in some instances, we have helped to initiate them. If you look at the articles on Mughal history published in the last five years in major journals such as the IESHR, Modern Asian Studies, and JESHO, you will get a proper sense of that.

Q: Biographies and popular literature around famous monarchs or political figures and their times are a big genre in the West, less so in India. However, academically oriented writers have recently written some very readable books accessible to non-academics, alongside historical fiction. Would you say that the Indian academic’s earlier attitude of amused disdain for such work is very much a thing of the past?

A: This is a complicated issue. First of all, no doubt readable and accessible books of popular history should be written, not only in English but in other Indian languages. So the old disdain is actually unjustified. But they need not be conventional biographies of monarchs and great men, which are often just potboilers. Neither of us would want to write a biography of say, Akbar, Shahjahan or Dara, though this was proposed to us (in a series edited by Patricia Crone). Second, such readable books cannot replace or do away with the proper academic monograph, which is based on textual or archival research, and can’t be read that easily by non-academics (or even given to your family members as a gift). Once in a blue moon, a book comes along like The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, which does both things—the rigours of research, and total accessibility. But this is not very often. In our own collaboration, we have not tried to write easy and flowing narratives for popular accessibility. That’s partly because it is collaboration and partly because we are constantly trying to push the frontiers of research, rather than those of readability. Perhaps that is a failure on our part, and we could have done that with our work on Mirza Azfari, for example. But we really don’t make things unnecessarily hard or complicated for their own sake either. Thirdly, and finally, the job of the historian (as of any intellectual) is not simply to adapt to prevalent conditions (whether it’s what your seniors or dissertation advisors want you to say, or what the market wants to hear), but to say things even when they are unpopular, because that’s what you happen to believe is correct. And happily, there are people like you who publish our books even when we say these things.

NOW AVAILABLE AGAIN

2010-12-14T11:49:00.002+05:30

Pumpkin Flower Fritters, a banquet of Bengali recipes, is available again in paperback after a brief interruption. It is distributed by Orient Blackswan and is published by Permanent Black. Another old favourite, A Sahib's Manual For the Mali is similarly available again. Have a look, get your copies now, in the best season for cooking and gardening.

BLACK KITE & HACHETTE INDIA

2010-12-14T11:45:00.003+05:30

Black Kite, an imprint of Permanent Black, will be publishing a few books every year in collaboration with Hachette India. A resissue of Ramachandra Guha's bestselling, thought-provoking HOW MUCH SHOULD A PERSON CONSUME is the first of them. More to come from Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Partha Chatterjee, (the late) Sheila Dhar, Nayanjot Lahiri, and others.

ROLL OVER, TOLSTOY (JUST ONCE MORE) FOR THE PAPERBACK OF ...

2010-11-19T18:34:00.006+05:30

AMONG THE MOST HIGHLY ACCLAIMED WORKS IN MODERN INDIAN HISTORY, POLITICS, AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

“Srinath Raghavan has set the standard for future work”
Kanti Bajpai, Seminar

“In this important and readable book, Srinath Raghavan breaks new historical ground with a thorough and acute analysis of Nehru’s foreign policy”
Sir Lawrence Freedman

“A remarkable analysis, based on meticulous scholarship ... an important contribution to current debates in India and elsewhere”
Sunil Khilnani

“Will influence scholarly debates for years to come”
Ramachandra Guha

“Not only allows us to make a more informed assessment of our national security strategy under Nehru, but also provides a sound basis to reflect on the kind of framework that must guide India”
C. Rajamohan, Indian Express

“A brilliant historical account of India’s strategy and foreign policy in the initial years after independence”
Pranay Sharma, Outlook

“Thoroughly researched and extremely lucidly written ... a major contribution to the making of contemporary India”
Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Telegraph

“A worthy addition to the literature”
Salman Haidar, Economic and Political Weekly

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. War and Peace in Modern India challenges and revises our received understanding of his 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.

Cover: Jawaharlal Nehru and General Ayub Khan, the second president of Pakistan, photograph by Homai Vyarawalla. Courtesy of Sabeena Gadihoke, author of Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla

paperback / 384pp / Rs 395 / 81-7824-320-2 / Jan 2011

For sale in South Asia / Copublished by Palgrave Macmillan London

NEW IN PAPERBACK

2010-11-11T19:47:00.013+05:30

FOUR NEW paperbacks -- THE CASTE QUESTION; THE GRASSROOTS OF DEMOCRACY; THE INDIAN ARMY AND THE MAKING OF PUNJAB; BEHIND THE VEIL -- comprise a rich harvest for scholars, students, and readers of serious writings on aspects of India

Publishing in Winter 2010

Classic Monograph on India's first great Dalit icon

2010-10-20T14:18:00.006+05:30

ROSALIND O’HANLON

Caste, Conflict, and Ideology

Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India

This is the first Indian reprint, with a new preface by the author, of a classic work which was first published in 1985.

The nineteenth century saw the beginning of a violent and controversial movement of protest amongst western India’s low and untouchable castes, aimed at the effects of their lowly position within the Hindu caste hierarchy. The leaders of this movement were convinced that religious hierarchies had combined with the effects of British colonial rule to produce inequality and injustice in many fields, from religion to politics and education.

This study concentrates on the first leader of this movement, Mahatma Jotirao Phule. It shows him as its first ideologist, working out a unique brand of radical humanism. It analyses his contribution to one of the most important and neglected social developments in western India in this period—the formation of a new regional identity.

This process of identity formation is studied against the background of the earlier history of caste relations, and contributes important evidence about the relationship between ritual status and political power. The author draws extensively on vernacular language materials and evidence about popular culture from oral traditions.

ROSALIND O’HANLON is Professor of Indian History and Culture in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. Her publications include A Comparison Between Women and Men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India, and numerous articles on the social history of colonial and early modern India.

FOR SALE ONLY IN SOUTH ASIA
PAPERBACK / 346PP / RS 395 / ISBN 81-7824-313-X / SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS ONLY / December 2010

Triple Whammy on Politics, Ideas, and Indian Democracy

2010-09-19T12:32:00.011+05:30

SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ

The Enchantment of Democracy and India Politics and Ideas

Sudipta Kaviraj has long been recognized as among India’s most thoughtful and wide-ranging political thinkers and analysts, one of the subtlest and most learned writers on Indian politics. Paradoxically, this has remained something of a state secret, because Kaviraj’s writings have remained scattered in journals difficult to access.

The essays in this volume, the third in a linked trilogy, try to approach Indian democracy from different angles. It is wrong to believe, Kaviraj argues, that with the rise of modernity human societies suffer complete disenchantment: modernity creates new forms of enchantment, and democracy is, in fact, part of the political enchantment of modernity.

Focusing on Indian democracy, Kaviraj shows the limits of marxist and liberal political analyses. In its Indian incarnation, he says, liberal democracy has had to inhabit an unfamiliar cultural and historical world whose peculiarities are very different from the peculiarities of European societies. Viewed by conventional political theory, Indian democracy appears inexplicable. It defies all the preconditions that theory lays down for the success of democratic government—namely, a strong bureaucratic state, capitalist production, industrialization, the secularization of society, and relative economic prosperity. The durability of Indian democracy shows that instead of asking how Indian democracy has survived, we need to ask if those are in fact preconditions for democracy.

These and many other fascinating issues of democracy’s relationship with religion, identity, development, inequality, and culture comprise the themes that link the essays in this brilliant and insightful collection.

SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ is a professor of Indian politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. Earlier he taught for many years at SOAS, London University, following a long teaching stint at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has been a fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as at the University of Chicago. Kaviraj's earlier essay collections, The Imaginary Institution of India and The Trajectories of the Indian State, are also available from Permanent Black.

HARDBACK / 352PP / RS 695 / ISBN 81-7824-296-6 / WORLD RIGHTS / DEC 2010

BEST OVERVIEW OF MODERN INDIAN ARCHITECTURE

2010-08-22T17:26:00.008+05:30

A Concise History of
Modern Architecture in India

paperback edition

Jon Lang

This is an invaluable book for those who want to understand the geography of their cities, as well as for students of Indian architecture. In lucid language that speaks to laymen and architects alike, Jon Lang provides a history of Indian architecture in the twentieth century.

He analyses its tangled developments from the founding of the Indian Institute of Architects during the 1920s to the present diversity of architectural directions. He describes the often contradictory tugs of the international and the local as he reviews architects’ efforts to be up-to-date in their work. Lang examines the early influences on Indian architecture both of movements like the Bauhaus as well as prominent individuals like Habib Rehman, Jawaharlal Nehru, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. He looks at monuments, museums, resettlement colonies, housing, offices and movie halls all over India in his wide-ranging survey. Over 150 photographs and line drawings explain and illustrate concepts outlined in the text.

Jon Lang was born in Calcutta. He has been Professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and earlier, Director of the Urban Design Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1970 to 1990. He has coauthored (with Madhavi Desai and Miki Desai) Architecture and Independence: The Search for Identity (1997). He is also the author of Creating Architectural Theory (1987) and Urban Design: The American Experience (1994).

Paperback / large format / 214pp / Rs 695 / ISBN 81-7824-305-9 / World rights

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK

2010-08-03T13:17:00.003+05:30

And you don't have to be a Facebook member to view the page.

If you are a member, click Like and you'll get all our updates and be able to participate in discussions and comment on our posts. So come and join, we'd like to hear from you.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/New-Delhi-India/Permanent-Black/142468512432665

INDIA'S NEW CAPITALISTS wins R.D. GOENKA Non-Fiction Award

2010-07-23T16:30:00.002+05:30

INDIA'S NEW CAPITALISTS
Caste, Business, and Industry in a Modern Nation

by Harish Damodaran

WINNER OF THE RAMNATH GOENKA NON-FICTION AWARD 2009

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2010/07/23/stories/2010072351302200.htm

‘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

Of Sanskrit Kavyas and Punjabi Qisse

2010-07-22T10:35:00.008+05:30

Two young scholars examine literary genres ...

FARINA MIR & SHONALEEKA KAUL

The Social Space of Language
Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab
by Farina Mir

&
Imagining the Urban
Sanskrit and the City in Early India
by Shonaleeka Kaul

When you think of India’s ancient cities, you think of khaki archaeologists digging crumbling structures out of ancient mud. Urban spheres, from this perspective, often look as dull as the dust from which they emerge.

But the early Indian city wasn’t like that at all, says Shonaleeka Kaul; it was certainly not only brick-and-mortar, nor merely an agglomeration of built-up space. In Sanskrit literature these cities were alive, vibrant, teeming with variety. Kaul examines Sanskrit kāvyas over about a thousand years to see what India’s early historic cities were like as living, lived-in, entities. She looks at ideologies, attitudes, institutions, and practices in ancient urban areas, showing the ways in which they often cohered into a worldview, a mentalité.

This is also a book about Sanskrit literature. Scholars have long argued for a nuanced use of literary texts to achieve a more rounded understanding of ancient history, and Kaul achieves exactly that. She takes forward the idea of a Sanskrit ‘literary culture’, arguing that genres influence methods of historical representation. Her book gives us a fresh view of the early city, showing distinctive urban ways of thought and behaviour which relate in complex ways to tradition, morality, and authority. In advocating Sanskrit kāvyas as an important historical source, it addresses not just ancient India specialists but also scholars of literary history: the kāvyas rework history, says Kaul, providing us with ‘transhistoricity’ rather than ‘ahistoricity’.

By asking new questions about early Indian cities and ancient Indian texts, this book asks to be read by every scholar of history, urbanism, cityscapes, literary history, Sanskrit writings, and South Asian antiquity.

SHONALEEKA KAUL teaches in the Department of History, University of Delhi. She was at Jawaharlal Nehru University for her PhD. As part of visiting faculty, she has also taught at Yale.

Hardback / 290pp / Rs 595 / ISBN 81-7824-278-8 / South Asia rights / August 2010
Copublished by Seagull New York

FARINA MIR
The Social Space of Language
Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (South Asia Across the Disciplines Series)

This rich cultural history set in Punjab examines a little-studied body of popular literature to illustrate both the durability of a vernacular literary tradition and the limits of colonial dominance in British India.

Farina Mir asks how qisse, a vibrant genre of epics and romances, flourished in colonial Punjab despite British efforts to marginalize the Punjabi language. She explores topics including Punjabi linguistic practices, print and performance, and the symbolic content of qisse.

She finds that although the British denied Punjabi language and literature almost all forms of state patronage, the resilience of this popular genre came from its old but dynamic corpus of stories, their representations of place, and the moral sensibility that suffused them.

This multidisciplinary study reframes inquiry into cultural formations in late-colonial north India away from a focus on religious communal identities and nationalist politics and towards a widespread, ecumenical, and place-centred poetics of belonging in the region.

FARINA MIR is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

Hardback / 294PP / RS 695 / ISBN 81-7824-307-5 / South Asia rights / October 2010
Copublished by the University of California Press, Berkeley

“Mir's archival work covers and foregrounds the breadth of the story-telling or qissa tradition, great and little, high and low, Sufi, Sikh and Hindu, showing its wide dissemination. Mir’s findings are of immense significance, given the turbulent history of the region in post-independence India and the political turmoil today, particularly on the Pakistani side of the border. Punjabi seldom finds this kind of focus in cultural history.”—Vasudha Dalmia, University of California, Berkeley

“Farina Mir has given us an outstanding work of literary and cultural history. She skilfully unravels the many versions of the famous folk-tale about Heer and Ranjha to illuminate gender, class and community relations in Punjab. This book will compel historians to rethink the links between language, religion and power and to reconsider the contingencies of union and partition in late colonial India.”—Sugata Bose, Harvard

“Mir makes creative use of archival and folkloric material to tell the history of a composite, modern, and gendered Punjabi self in colonial India that was sadly lost in the welter of partition politics and violence. The story of the legendary lovers Heer and Ranjha haunts her narrative like an artistic lament about a lost Punjabi self without in any way compromising the academic quality of her research and the rigour of her exposition. A very significant contribution to South Asian history.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty, The University of Chicago

“This is a pioneering study. Mir draws upon largely unfamiliar material and suggests new approaches to religio-cultural questions of great importance to South Asianists across a wide disciplinary spectrum.”—Christopher Shackle, SOAS, University of London

A PLACE FOR EVERYONE

2010-07-19T20:08:00.006+05:30

CONSERVATION AT THE CROSSROADS

Science, Society, and the Future of India's Wildlife

Ghazala Shahabuddin

India faces an ecological crisis of crippling proportions. The overexploitation of the country’s forests and wetlands is eating away at vital ecological processes. Rapid and unplanned economic development threatens to fragment and devour what little wildlife habitat survives. Plant and animal species are joining the ranks of the critically endangered faster than ever before.

India’s dominant conservation paradigm is one of control and exclusion, where animals and ecosystems are sought to be protected by guns, guards, fences. This book argues that environmental justice and improved governance have to be as much a part of the conservation agenda as sound ecological science and practice. It surveys alternative approaches to conservation which attempt to reconcile social equity with biodiversity goals.

Using the Sariska Tiger Reserve as an anchor, the author analyses the historical, socio-political, and biological contexts of nature conservation in the country in an effort to identify the causes of India’s ecological crisis. She provides detailed data to demonstrate that a broad-based participatory approach to conservation is necessary if we are to see India’s extraordinary wildlife survive into the next century.

The product of years of travel and research in remote places, this book combines rigour, logic, and passion. It will alert every reader to the danger that the wildlife and ecosystems we hope to preserve may have been ravaged beyond repair by the time we accept the need for change in our conservation strategies.

GHAZALA SHAHABUDDIN is Associate Professor, School of Human Ecology, B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi. After her PhD in conservation biology from Duke University in 1998, she has worked and published extensively on habitat fragmentation, sustainable forest management, the human impact on biodiversity, and conservation-induced displacement.

Hardback / 254 pp / Rs 595 / ISBN 81-7824-264-8 / World rights / 2010