Food Journeys is a powerful collection that draws on personal experiences, and the meaning of grief, rage, solidarity, and life. Feminist anthropologist Dolly Kikon and peace researcher Joel Rodrigues present a wide-ranging set of stories and essays accompanied by recipes. They bring together poets, activists, artists, writers, and researchers who explore how food and eating allow us to find joy and strength while navigating a violent history of militarization in Northeast India. Food Journeys takes us to the tea plantations of Assam, the lofty mountains of Sikkim, the homes of a brewer and a baker in Nagaland, a chef’s journey from Meghalaya, a trip to the paddy fields in Bangladesh, and many more sites, to reveal why people from Northeast India intimately care about what they eat and consider food an integral part of their history, politics, and community. Deliciously feminist and bold, Food Journeys is both an invitation and a challenge to recognize gender and lived experiences as critical aspects of political life.
Catagory: Society & Social Sciences
Who Is Equal
In 1950, we, the people of India, gave ourselves a constitution that promised justice, liberty and equality to all its citizens. Decades later, as a nation, we still struggle with inequality in various forms—religion, sex, caste, gender. As we forge ahead, it is imperative to ask, ‘who is equal?’, and ‘is the idea of equality elusive to achieve?’
In his new book, Saurabh Kirpal, a senior Supreme Court lawyer, seeks to untangle the philosophical and practical tangents of inequality prevalent in our country. He presents to the readers the explanation and understanding of the existing laws and discusses theories that allow a close inspection of concerns over a spectrum. Well-researched, insightful and drawn from experience, Who is Equal?, positions India at the intersection of equality and inequality, and delivers a perspective that is retrospective and contemporary.
Ravana’s Lanka
The story of the kingdom that Ravana had ruled lay over the island like a fading, antique map. The edges of the story were frayed and there were lines disconnected by time, but the landscape it traced, exists.
Demonized as he was after his death, the reign of King Ravana of Lanka, and his ancestors, the powerful Mayuranga, has long been obscured and shrouded in myth. Once, their kingdom is believed to have reached beyond the shores of the island, capturing lands across the seas—a kingdom of that magnitude was never seen again on Lanka. In a bid to shed light on this lost era, Sunela Jayewardene travelled through Sri Lanka, and listened to the storytellers and poets, researched Sri Lanka’s folklore, sifted through race and religion . . . to stitch together a history of a forgotten landscape.
This remarkable, vivid book is the story Sunela learnt of King Ravana and the kingdom that he lost.
Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora
Hindu nationalism is transforming India as an increasingly dominant ideology and political force. But it is also a global phenomenon, with sections of India’s vast and influential diaspora drawn to, or actively supporting, right-wing Hindu nationalism. Indians overseas can be seen as an important, even inextricable, aspect of the movement. This is not a new dynamic—diasporic Hindutva has grown over many decades.
This book explores how and why the movement became popular among India’s diaspora from the second half of the twentieth century. It shows that Hindutva ideology and its plethora of organizations have a distinctive resonance and way of operating overseas; the movement and its ideas perform significant, particular functions for diaspora communities.
Edward T.G. Anderson argues that transnational Hindutva cannot simply be viewed as an export: this phenomenon has evolved and been shaped into an important aspect of diasporic identity, a way for people to connect with their homeland. He also sheds light on the impact of conservative Indian politics on British multiculturalism, migrant politics and relations between various minority communities.
Superstar India
‘Vintage Shobhaa Dé, with scathing take-offs on everything, from the caste system to male chauvinism, from sex to social pretension . . . in other words, it’s all great fun’-Economic Times
Watching the preparations for independent India’s 60th birthday in 2007, Dé-poised then to enter her own sixth decade-was struck by the thought, ‘Surely my life has taken the same trajectory as the country’s!’ While she reflected on this, many more questions arose: Does India really deserve to congratulate itself? Has it lived up to the early promises it made to its people? Does Dé herself believe in India?
In Superstar India, an intimate confession to her readers, Dé answers these questions and discovers a jawan-young-India, ready to find its place in today’s world. Witty, passionate and gloriously opinionated, Superstar India celebrates the spirit of a nation that is certainly not about to lose its glow.
Treasures of India: From Antiquity to Modernity
A visual exploration of the cultural history of India through its greatest treasures.
An exquisite collection of artefacts, sculptures, and historically significant treasures from across India.
If the captivating bronze dancing girl of Harappa denoted sophisticated early civilization, the stunning Sanchi Stupa symbolized the peak of Buddhist religion in India. If the world-renowned Taj Mahal was a testament to the wealth of the Mughal empire, Tipu’s Tiger, an intricate, almost life-sized mechanical toy, represented the king of Mysore’s resistance against the East India Company. Whether it is the striking sculptures of the famed city of Hampi, the beautiful folios from religious texts, the breathtaking Konark wheel, the famous Koh-i-Noor, or the elegant paintings of Raja Ravi Varma, these artefacts, monuments and artworks are intimately woven into the history and culture of India and revered for their beauty and artistry. Ranging from the extraordinary to the ordinary, from the remarkable to the traditional, these objects capture moments, reflect changes, and remain grounded in the many lived realities of India.
The richly illustrated Treasures of India navigates the history of India, through the early civilizations, formation of kingdoms, religious movements, the establishment of empires, the struggle for Independence, and the emergence of a democracy and republic through more than 100 objects and monuments, exploring the fascinating and unique stories behind each of them.
Gendered Bodies and Worlds of Labour
This book presents a brilliant reading of the unanimous decision of the nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India in the case of Justice KS Puttaswamy (Retd.) and Another vs. Union of India and Others (‘Puttaswamy’). The 2017 judgment protects the right to privacy as
a fundamental right, and guarantees the right to life with dignity, the right to personal liberty and the right to move the court against unconstitutional actions by the state.
The authors examine the implications of Puttaswamy to understanding labouring bodies (in their multiplicity) and their worlds of work. They explore the gendered dimensions of the right to privacy and its relation to labour rights, sexual safety, and bodily integrity, offering a dynamic interpretation of the right to privacy and related rights of dignity, liberty, and equality. Using the Constitution, Kannabiran and Jagani anchor labour rights in Puttaswamy to advance claims-making and emphasise collective struggles for justice and resistance to oppression as the most productive route to conceptualising an idea of justice in the realms of labour.
Further, the monograph emphasises the need to popularise constitutional conversations beyond the courts and holds valuable lessons for women’s and labour rights movements. Drawing from a range of scholarly works and case law to offer a fresh understanding of labour that doesn’t rely on gender binaries, the authors initiate conversations on human dignity, intersectional discrimination, and resistance to reinstating labouring bodies in workplaces. This work opens up new opportunities for feminist and labour studies scholars, trade unions, and courts to explore interdisciplinary intersections and frame claims for more just, fair, and equal working environments.
Kalpana Kannabiran and Devi Jagani’s work inspires both hope and anxiety, as they challenge us to build intellectual and on-ground solidarities that cross disciplinary boundaries, to support those who are most marginalised.
— Navsharan Singh, independent researcher, writer, and activist
The Life and Work of Moovalur Ramamirtham Ammaiyar
Moovalur Ramamirtham Ammaiyar spent almost her entire life fighting against the devadasi system in Tamil Nadu, a practice that dedicated young girls to temples, where they were meant to be available for the sexual needs of priests and landowners. Sold off by her parents, and brought up to dedicate herself as a dasi, she managed to escape this fate and make a life for herself. Her battle against the devadasi system was met with considerable resistance, not only by those with vested interests in keeping the devadasis inside temples, but often by the devadasis themselves. But Moovalur persisted, taking her cause, and its wider ramifications into the broader politics of the Congress party, and later the Self-Respect Movement. Despite this, in the annals of recent Tamil history, she was hardly known, until the publication, in 2006 of Moovalur Ramamirtham: Vazhvum Paniyum (translated here as The Life and Work of Moovalur Ramamirtham Ammaiyar). Put together through interviews with her surviving relatives and fragments garnered from a handwritten manuscript, this is the first book to document the ‘braveheart’ of Dravidian history, Moovalur Ramamirtham Ammaiyar.
Why Would I Be Married Here?
Why Would I Be Married Here? examines marriage migration undertaken by rural bachelors in North India, unable to marry locally, who travel across the breadth of India seeking brides who do not share the same caste, ethnicity, language, or customs as themselves.
Combining rich ethnographic evidence with Dalit feminist and political economy frameworks, Reena Kukreja connects the macro- political violent process of neoliberalism to the micro-personal level of marriage and intimate gender relations to analyse the lived reality of this set of migrant brides in cross-region marriages among dominant-peasant caste Hindus and Meo Muslims in rural North India.
Why Would I Be Married Here? reveals how predatory capitalism links with patriarchy to dispossess many poor women from India’s marginalized Dalit and Muslim communities of marriage choices in their local communities. It reveals how, within the context of the increasing spread of capitalist relations, these women’s pragmatic cross-region migration for marriage needs to be reframed as an exercise of their agency that simultaneously exposes them to new forms of gender subordination and internal othering of caste discrimination and ethnocentrism in conjugal communities. Why Would I Be Married Here? offers powerful examples of how contemporary forces of neoliberalism reshape the structural oppressions compelling poor women from marginalized communities worldwide into making compromised choices about their bodies, their labour, and their lives.
Rethinking India: The Politics of the Marginalized
The Rethinking India series, spearheaded by the Samruddha Bharat Foundation and Penguin Random House India, objectively rethinks the current socio-economic, political and cultural paradigms, and poses disruptive ideas addressing structural problems. Leveraging the unique intellectual vantage points of India’s foremost thinkers and practitioners, the three books included in this box set critically reflect on the lived realities of the Dalit, Shudra, Adivasi and Denotified communities. Sensitively juxtaposing ‘what should have been’ with ‘what is’, the books propose a visionary blueprint that will both deepen and further India’s constitutional promise for these communities. This is a must-have set for politicians, policymakers, academics, activists, journalists, students and anyone working on issues of social justice, equality, fraternity, liberty and welfare in India.