Social Science Press

2011-12-28T13:04:00.001+05:30

JUST PUBLISHED

REBELS FROM THE MUD HOUSES

Dalits and the Making of theMaoist Revolution in Bihar

George Kunnath

‘This book succeeds in competentlypresenting the dynamics of Dalit mobilization and demobilization incontemporary Bihar. The distinctive aspect of this book is that it makes a necessaryorganic connection between the category of Dalit and peasant particularly in thecontext of caste configuration and class relation as unfolding in Bihar.’

Professor Gopal Guru

Centre for Political Studies, School ofSocial Sciences,

Jawaharlal Nehru University

265pp 215x140 mm Hardback 12 illustrations

Published price Rs 625

ISBN 978-81-87358-52-7

SOCIOLOGY, ANTHROLOGY, DALIT STUDIES, POLITICS

Pubdate 2012

Dalitsparticipate in the Maoist Movement in a variety of ways – as party cadres,guerrilla fighters, loyal suppliers of food and shelter, and as both active andpassive members of a host of revolutionary mass organizations.

Why did theDalits of the Magadh region of South Bihar and, in particular, the district ofJehanabad, infamously termed ‘the killing fields’ join the Maoist Movement?Were they trapped between ‘two fires’ – the

revolutionaryand counter-revolutionary violence? Did all Dalit castes support the Maoists orwas there any particular Dalit caste at the forefront of the struggle? What didthey achieve through the Maoist Movement? What reasons do they give for theircurrent state of demobilization? Rebelsfrom the Mud Houses: Dalits and the

Making of the Maoist Revolution in Bihar examinesDalit mobilization and the transformation of rural power relations in thecontext of intense agrarian violence involving Maoist guerrillas and uppercaste militias backed by state forces in Bihar in the 1980s. The bookinvestigates why thousands of Dalits took up arms and participated in theMaoist Movement. It explores the dynamic nature of Dalit response whichinvolved a

movementfrom relative quiescence to mobilization and armed resistance, and eventually,to demobilization and alternative assertions based on caste identities.

Rebels from the Mud Houses highlightsthe specificities of Dalit participation in the Maoist Movement and develops ananthropology of the Maoist Revolution in India.

Contents

1.Introduction: Maoist Revolution in Perspective

2. Submerged Violences:Dalits, Landlessness and Subordination in Bihar

3. From the Mud Houses of Magadh: Revolutionary Murmurings and Dalit Militancy

4. Bonded Labourer to Maoist Guerrilla: Life Story of a Dalit Revolutionary

5. Negotiating Powers: Dalits and Shifting Mobilizations

6. Production and Reproduction of Violence:State, Senas and Maoists

Conclusion: AnAnthropology of Revolution

Index

George J.Kunnath is Research Fellow atAnthropology Department, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His researchinterests include Marxist and Maoist guerrilla movements, caste and classrelations, Dalit and Adivasi identity politics, development-conflict nexus,violence and research ethics.

2011-12-28T12:33:00.004+05:30

JUST PUBLISHED

BEHINDTHE BACKLASH

MuslimAmericans after 9/11

Lori Peek

“Oneof the most devastating effects of a widespread disaster is its ability tocreate shifts in the prevailing cultural climate of an entire countryside andto change the way the various peoples of the countryside relate to each other. Behind the Backlash is a compelling,perceptive, and sensitively drawn portrayal of what happened to MuslimAmericans, among the most loyal of national groups, when the dark shadow knownas 9/11 passed over our land. A truly important study.”

—Kai Erikson,

ProfessorEmeritus of Sociology and American Studies, Yale University

“Whilerelating the stories of Muslims struggling for acceptance in America in thewake of 9/11, Behind the Backlashoffers analytic insights that demonstrate many of the social dynamics at workin Muslim marginalization and traumatization, as well as in their constructiveresponses. What Peek describes has important implications for all Americansconcerned for minority groups that suddenly become suspect.”

—Peter Gottschalk,

Professor ofReligion, Wesleyan University;

coauthor of Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy

“In Behind the Backlash, Lori Peek weavestogether the voices of American Muslims who tell of life lived in a post-9/11world with the demagoguery of the media, official reports, and history. Herfinished tapestry is a compelling dialogue between the human experiences ofbigotry and the abstract forces that drive it. Behind the Backlash challenges each of us to reexamine theimportance of tolerance in a civilized society. This book will be widely readand discussed. Bravo.”

—Steve Kroll-Smith, Editorof Sociological Inquiry;

Professor ofSociology, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

RIGHTS NOT AVAILABLE

222 pp 215x140 mm Hardback

Published price Rs 595

ISBN 978-81-87358-67-1

SOCIOLOGY,DISASTER STUDIES,

Pub Date 2012

As Americatried to absorb the shock of the 9/11 attacks, Muslim Americans were caught upin an unprecedented wave of backlash violence. Public discussion revealed thatwidespread misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Islam persisted, despitethe striking diversity of the Muslim community. Letting the voices of 140ordinary Muslim American men and women describe their experiences, Lori Peek'spath-breaking book, Behind the Backlash,presents moving accounts of prejudice and exclusion. Muslims speak of beingsubjected to harassment before the attacks, and recount the discrimination theyencountered afterwards. Peek also explains the struggles of young Muslim adultsto solidify their community and define their identity during a time of nationalcrisis. Behind the Backlash seeks toexplain why blame and scape-goating occur after a catastrophe. Peek sets thetwenty-first century experience of Muslim Americans, who were vilified andvictimized, in the context of larger sociological and psychological processes.

Contents

1. Introduction

2. UnderAttack

3. EncounteringIntolerance

4. Backlash

5. Repercussions

6. Adaptations

7. Conclusion

Notes

Index

Lori Peek is AssistantProfessor of Sociology and Co-director of the Center for Disaster and RiskAnalysis at Colorado State University. She has published widely on vulnerablepopulations in disaster and is co-editor of Displaced:Life in the Katrina Diaspora.

2011-10-19T11:45:00.001+05:30

Everyday Life of Political Struggles
Series editor Alpa Shah

WINDOWS INTO A REVOLUTION

Ethnographies of Maoism in Indiaand Nepal

Edited by Alpa Shah and Judith Pettigrew

352 pp215x140 mm Hardback 11 illustrations

Published price Rs 695

ISBN 978-81-87358-49-7

SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS,HISTORY

Pub date October 2011

‘Lines of fearand conflict cross what is already a changing and disrupted social life. Byrevealing how people live, every day, with violence and fear of both sides in acivil war, the authors show how they suffer and also how they create their own new relations, sharing suspicions, fears andpleasures. This is a new kind of political writing. Out of intensive localfieldwork in difficult and often dangerous circumstances, this writing has anauthority that none of the others, including those of the state and of itsenemies, do because it is so much better informed and never loses its loyaltyto the local people.’

Professor Stephan Feuchtwang

London School of Economics and Political Science

‘What is it liketo live through a revolution? This important collection brings together superb,hard-won anthropological insights from field sites all the way from Pashupatito Tirupati (from Nepal to Andhra Pradesh). It is essential reading for anyonewho wants to know about Maoism in South Asia.’

Professor David N. Gellner

University of Oxford

‘In a context inwhich there is no end of misinformation and disinformation about the Maoistmovements of South Asia, the articles in this collection - all based on richethnography - provide an invaluable resource, illuminating the complexities ofthe many different local experiences of Maoism in both India and Nepal. Windows into a Revolution is a vitallyimportant contribution both to South Asian studies and to the comparative anthropologicalstudy of revolutionary politics.’

Professor John Harriss

Simon Fraser University, Vancouver

Everyday Life of Political Struggles reflects the subaltern experiences of politicalstruggles, which are sometimes explosive but at other times silent, invisibleand unnoticed by many commentators. The books in this series explore thetensions and constraints of class, race, gender, caste and religion withinthese struggles. They draw on fine-grained research, detailed description andrigorous analysis to bring clarity to the confusion of information emergingfrom various sources. The series draws on the works of historians, politicalscientists, anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, activists andjournalists.

Windows into aRevolution, edited by Alpa Shahand Judith Pettigrew, the first book in the series offers glimpsesinto the spread of Maoism in India and Nepal by tracing some of its effects onthe lives of ordinary people living amidst the revolutions. Weaving through thenostalgic reflections of former Bengali Naxalites; the resurgence of ancestralconflicts in the spread of the Maoists in the remote hills of western Nepal;the disillusionments of dalits of central Bihar in the policies of thecadres; to the complexities of the interrelationship between non-alignedcivilians and insurgents in central Nepal, the book offers a series of windows intodifferent stages of mobilization and transformation into what are, were or maybecome, revolutionary strongholds.

Contents

1. Windows in to a Revolution: Ethnographiesof Maoism in India and Nepal - Alpa Shah and JudithPettigrew

2. InSearch of Certainty in Revolutionary India - Alpa Shah

3. The Formation of Political Consciousnessin Rural Nepal - SaraShneiderman

4. Smouldering Dalit Fires in Bihar - George Kunnath

5. Reflectionsof a One-time Maoist Activist - Sumanta Banerjee

6. Radical Masculinity: Morality, Socialityand Relationships through Recollections of Naxalite Activists - Henrike Donner

7. Women’sEmpowerment and Rural Revolution: Rethinking “Failed Development” - Lauren G.Leve

8. From Ancestral Conflicts to LocalEmpowerment: Two Narratives from a Nep aleseCommunity - Anne de Sales

9. Terror in a Maoist Model Village inMid-western Nepal - Marie Lecomte -Tilouine

10. Fear and Everyday Life in Rural Nepal - JudithPettigrew and KamalAdhikari

11. Anti-‘anti-witchcraft’ and the Maoist Insurgency in RuralMaharashtra - AmitDesai

12. ThePurification Hunt: The Salwa Judum Counterinsurgency in Chhattisgarh - Jason Miklian

13. The Social Fabric of the Jelbang Killings - DeepakThapa, Kiyoko Ogura and JudithPettigrew

2011-07-15T16:16:00.000+05:30

‘WHEN THE WAR BEGAN WE HEARD OF SEVERAL KINGS’

South Asian Prisoners in World War I Germany

‘Soldiers don’t speak; they are spoken to. In this fascinating collection of disturbing essays Indian soldiers who survived the killing fields of World War I (serving a colonial King and Country) are made to speak to us directly as POWs from German camps. … A stunning achievement of empathetic modern German scholarship. Going to India Gate in New Delhi (built to commemorate the Indian soldiers of the Great War) will never be the same again.’

Shahid Amin
Delhi University

‘This is a valuable collection of articles that gives access to a rich archive in the German language, which had remained largely inaccessible to an Anglophone readership . The use of that archive can help broaden the approach to the problem of the participation of Indian soldiers in the First World War on the Western front, a topic which has not yet attracted sufficient scholarly attention.’

Claude Markovits
Centre d'Etudes de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

282 pages 215x140 mm Hardback with illustrations CD-ROM included

Published price: Rs 695

ISBN 978-81-87358-43-5

HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS, GERMAN STUDIES, WAR STUDIES

Pub Date July 2011

The age of catastrophe devoured lives from many parts of the globe. Yet the ‘Great War’ also occasioned new encounters and experiences. Never before had ten thousands of non-elite South Asians moved across Europe. About two thousand of them, mostly sailors and soldiers who hailed from villages in Bengal, Nepal, the Northwest Frontier and Punjab, were held for years in German prison camps. They attracted the close attention of army officers, diplomats and secret agents, of emigrant revolutionaries like Har Dayal and Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, of German artists, academics and industrialists. The captives made sense of these unusual encounters in their own ways. This volume approaches their difficult engagements from various angles. It introduces and makes available rich German archives as yet unknown to the non-German speaking world.

The CD Rom attached to this book goes beyond the written word. It includes the Hindi and Urdu editions of the propagandistic camp journal Hindostan, transcripts of sound recordings in which the sailors and soldiers speak in their native tongues about their experiences as they are taken from place to place, perhaps in the hope that these might reach their families. There is nostalgia in their voices as they sing songs about their homes, while acutely critical comments on their lives in ‘vilayat’ give the lie to the notion of the apolitical peasant-soldier.

The CD Rom also includes pictorial documents of paintings by the soldiers, and some powerful photographs of war camps in Zossen and Wünsdorf. The CD Rom also carries the Bibliography which is a special feature of this book. It is both extensive and rich, covering rare books which will be of enormous value to scholars and interested readers.

Contents
Introduction: Franziska Roy, Heike Liebau

Part I: Histories of the Prisoners
Lost Engagements? Traces of South Asian Soldiers in German Captivity, 1915 -1918: Ravi Ahuja
South Asian Civilian Prisoners of War in First World War Germany : Franziska Roy
The German Foreign Office, Indian Emigrants and Propaganda Efforts Among the ‘Sepoys’ : Heike
Liebau
German Perceptions of Enemy Colonial Troops, 1914–1918 : Christian Koller
South Asian Soldiers and German Academics: Anthropological, Linguistic and Musicological Field Studies in Prison Camps: Britta Lange

Part II: Histories of the Sources
Recordings of South Asian Languages and Music in the Lautarchiv of the Humboldt University Berlin :
Jürgen Mahrenholz
Indian Prisoners of War in World War One – Photographs as Source Material: Margot Kahleyss
Hindostan - A Camp Newspaper for South-Asian Prisoners of World War One in Germany: Heike Liebau Short Biographies
Archival Collections
Abbreviations
Index of Persons
Index of Places

CD ROM
Introduction
The Camp newspaper Hindostan Hindi edition
The Camp newspaper Hindostan Urdu edition
Voices of the Prisoners: Files and Recordings from the Lautararchiv, Berlin
List of Recordings and Personal Details of South Asian Prisoners in the Lautarchiv, Berlin
Photos from the Prisoner of War Camps in Zossen and Wünsdorf
Bibliography

Franziska Roy is doctoral candidate at the Department of History of the University of Warwick.
Heike Liebau is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Modern Oriental Studies (Berlin).
Ravi Ahuja is professor of modern Indian history and the director of the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen.

2011-03-09T11:08:00.003+05:30

JASSA SINGH AHLUWALIA (1718-1783)
The Forgotten Hero of Punjab
Sumant Dhamija

‘Sumant Dhamija has written a wonderful, well researched and entertaining biography of Jassa Singh…and in the process has brought 18th century Punjab to life.’
Liaquat Ahamed,
Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for History
for Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

___________________________________________

378 pages 215x140 mm Hardback 38 illustrations
Published price Rs 950
ISBN 978-81-87358-45-9
HISTORY, SIKH STUDIES
Pub date February 2011

____________________________________________

In Jassa Singh Ahluwalia (1718-1783): The Forgotten Hero of Punjab, Sumant Dhamija describes the riveting history of Punjab’s struggle for freedom and sovereignty. A key role was played by Jassa Singh and his fellow misl sardars who came into conflict, principally, with Ahmad Shah Abdali ‘Durrani’ (1724-72), King of Afghanistan, regarded as the greatest conqueror of his time. Inspired by Guru Gobind Singh, Jassa Singh united the panth, leading the Dal Khalsa, the Sikh army, to ultimate victory. The people of Punjab looked up to him as the warrior-saint. This victory puts Jassa Singh in the front ranks of the heroes of Indian history.

Sumant Dhamija is a freelance writer. He was educated at Mayo College, Ajmer, King’s School, Canterbury and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He lives in Delhi with his wife Iqrup. They have two children Ritika and Udai. As President of The Oxford and Cambridge Society of India, he organized the history lecture, ‘Jassa Singh Ahluwalia of Punjab: from Sevak to Sovereign’, after which the book was born.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Punjab in 1718–1723
2. Jassa Singh’s Childhood: His Birth and Ancestry
3. Jassa Singh’s Delhi 1723–1729
4. Influence of Sikh Gurus
5. The Making of a Warrior: 1730–1739
6. Jassa Singh the Warrior
7. The Mughals and the Sikhs 1739–1748
8. Amritsar and the Rise of Jassa Singh
9. Jassa Singh’s Greatest Adversary: Ahmad Shah Abdali, King of Afghanistan
10. Sikh Territorial Consolidation: Alliance with Marathas
11. The Marathas and Abdali
12. Jassa Singh’s Military Strategies: Conquest of Lahore 1761
13. Jassa Singh’s Defeat and Victory
14. Defeat of Abdali
15. Expansion of Sikh Territory under Jassa Singh
16. Jassa Singh’s Relationship with the Jats, Rajas of Patiala and Mughals
17. Jassa Singh’s Invasion of Delhi
Epilogue
Appendices
Chronology
Glossary
Bibliography

2011-01-13T13:20:00.004+05:30

UNRULY HILLSNature and Nation in India’s Northeast
Bengt G. Karlsson

‘This wonderful ethnography of Meghalaya’s natural resource politics, of nature and nation, makes engrossing reading. Deforestation, mining, the drying up of rivers, climate change as well as insurgency and sovereignty are words that trip easily off policy makers’ tongues, but too often, they lack engagement with real life. Here is a book that brings flesh and passion to these issues showing what they mean to the people affected. Balancing multiple actors and institutions, from the Supreme Court of India which banned timber felling in the Northeast to the Khasi Student’s Union which is protesting against uranium mining to ordinary men and women who recount myths about their sacred hills, this volume fills a critical gap in the environmental history and ethnography of both Northeast India and the current moment of resource management.’
Nandini Sundar, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University

‘Unruly Hills is one of the most original and provocative books on environment and politics in India. Communities supposedly control most land, forests and other natural resources in the hills of Northeast India. However capitalist transformations have rendered the hill communities quite powerless: they are hardly able to control the local resource base. Behind the legal fictions of community ownership lie the ugly reality of a ‘resource frontier’ where there is massive privatization and accumulation of land by local elites and serious environmental degradation as the result of the crude exploitation of forests, water, and mineral resources. Karlsson’s book brims with fresh insights on the crisis of legitimacy of India’s democratic institutions in this border region.’
Sanjib Baruah, Bard College, New York and Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

_____________________________________________

350 pp 215x140 mm Hardback 14 illustrations
SSP-OBS joint publication
Published price Rs 695
ISBN 978-81-87358-59-6
Pub date Jan 2011

____________________________________________

Unruly Hills examines the intersection of environmental and ethnic politics in the Indian state of Meghalaya. Based on extensive fieldwork, the author traces the entanglements of forest management, mining and territorial conflicts with local demands for indigenous sovereignty and rebellious aspirations for ethnic homelands. Massive extractions of limestone; controversies over uranium deposits; and the Supreme Court ban on logging apply to the cases specifically explored.
The book will be of interest to students of anthropology, political ecology and environmental history as well as to those concerned with development and the rights of indigenous peoples.
ContentsIntroduction
1. Nature and Nation
2. Elusive Forests
3. Shifting Land Rights
4. Mining Matters
5. Indigenous Governance
6. Political Ecology at the Frontier
Bibliography
Index

Bengt G. Karlsson is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. His main research interests concern the politics of nature and identity, especially in relation to indigenous peoples’ movements in India. He is author of Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People’s Struggle for Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal (2000) and co-editor of Indigeneity in India (2006) with T.B. Subba.

2010-11-25T12:11:00.003+05:30

MARRIAGE, LOVE, CASTE AND KINSHIP SUPPORT
Lived Experiences of the Urban Poor in India
Shalini Grover

‘This book provides a new and welcome perspective on contemporary marriage and co-habitation patterns among the Indian urban, low-caste poor. This is a subject on which little previous anthropological research has been done; consequently, much that has been written on it is replete with stereotypes. The rich ethnography, with its large number of extended case studies of the marital experiences of individual women and married couples, is one of the work’s strong points. It should be widely read by anyone interested in the Indian family and kinship structure or in issues of poverty, marriage, and urban life more generally.’
- Professor (Emerita) Sylvia Vatuk, University of Illinois

‘This book deserves a large audience. With fascinating case studies and detailed ethnographic material, Shalini Grover enriches our understanding of how poor urban women in Delhi negotiate their married lives, move in and out of relationships, and mobilise support from their kin or from women-led informal courts. Using her data to argue robustly against the many unfounded presumptions about gender politics, love, marriages, intimacy, and married women’s relationships with their families of origin, she makes important interventions into wider debates about gender, marriage and kinship.’
- Professor Patricia Jeffery, University of Edinburgh‘Shalini Grover’s ethnography of marriage, re-marriage and arbitration in an urban squatter colony makes a significant contribution to recent feminist and anthropological research on marriage, kinship and law in India. Grover provides rich vignettes of cultural negotiations around marriage: gender- and caste-inflected ideologies of roles in marriage, the cushion provided by kin support, conjugality in the shadow of the law. We see the ways in which marriage is dynamically shaped through kin and labour demands, and legal pluralities emerging through innovative NGO and caste council actions. My favourite is the chapter on mahila panchayats, “women’s courts” which work to change the adversarial contours of marital disputes but are nonetheless embedded in normative gendered scripts.’
- Professor Srimati Basu, University of Kentucky

Also available as ebook at: http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/marriage_love_caste_and_kinship_support/

______________________________________________________

256 pp 215x140 mm Hardback 9 illustrations
Published price Rs 595
ISBN 978-81-87358-56-5
Pub date November 2010

__________________________________________________

Marriage, Love, Caste and Kinship Support: Lived Experiences of the Urban Poor in India makes use of interesting case studies and photographs to describe the everyday life in a squatter settlement in Delhi.
The book helps to understand the marital experiences of these people most of whom belong to the Scheduled Caste and live in one identified geographical space. The author describes the shifts within their marriages, remarriages and other kinds of unions and their striking diversities, which have been described with care. Shalini Grover also examines the close ties of married women with their mothers and natal families.
An important contribution of the book lies in the unfolding of the role of women-led informal courts, Mahila Panchayats, and their influence in conflict resolution. This takes place in a distinctly different mode of community-based arbitration against the backdrop of mainstream legal structures and male-dominated caste associations.
The book will be of interest to students of sociology and social anthropology, gender studies, development studies, law and psychology. Activists and family counsellors will also find the book useful.

Shalini Grover is author of several papers on marriage and kinship including ‘Lived Experiences: Marriage, Notions of Love and Kinship Support Amongst Poor Women in Delhi’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 43(1), 2009. This book was written during her tenure as a Sir Ratan Tata Fellow in Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi.

ContentsForeword by Professor Patricia Uberoi
Acknowledgements
Glossary
1: Mapping the Debate on Marriage
2: Revisiting Arranged Marriages: Marital Roles, Conflict and Kinship Support
3: Courtships and Love Marriages
4: Secondary Unions and Other Conjugal Arrangements
5: Informal Dispute Settlement: The Mahila Panchayats
6: Towards the Democratization of Marriage and Relationships: ConclusionAnnexure
Bibliography
Index

Reissued: Cultural History of Modern India

2010-11-01T11:26:00.002+05:30

READINGS IN HISTORY
CULTURAL HISTORY OF MODERN INDIA
Edited by Dilip M. Menon

______________________________________________

197 pages 215x140 mm 13 b/w photographs
First Edition Paperback 2006
Second impression 2011 Rs 195
ISBN 978-81-87358-25-1
HISTORY, CULTURE STUDIES, SOCIOLOGY
Pub date 2011

______________________________________________

THE HISTORY of modern India has been narrated largely in terms of the nationalist movement, personalities and what has been seen as the ‘high’ politics of the state. Recent shifts in history writing have tried to bring in subordinated histories of regions and of groups. We are moving towards a wider understanding of politics, history and of the ordinary people who make history. This collection tries to push the emerging paradigm further by moving away from conventional notions of the history of the nation and indeed of the political.

The six essays in this collection present original and pioneering forays in the study of cricket, oral history, gender studies, film, popular culture and Indian classical music. Whether looking at issues of caste on the seemingly level playing field of cricket in early twentieth century India; or how a nineteenth century housewife comes to pen the first autobiography by an Indian woman; calendar art reflecting deeper notions of religion and community; or how an idea of ‘pure’ classical music faces the challenge of technology, these essays show how ideas of self, community and art are formed within a larger politics. Moreover, culture far from being a refuge from the political is also the space within which politics comes to be worked out.

Contents
Introduction
Cricket and Caste: The Heroic Struggles of the Palwankar Brothers – Ramachandra Guha
A Book of Her Own, A Life of Her Own: The Autobiography of a Nineteenth-century Woman – Tanika Sarkar
The Past in the Present – Rustom Bharucha
National Identity and the Realist Aesthetic – Sumita S. Chakravarty
‘Unity in Diversity’? Dilemmas of Nationhood in Indian Calendar Art – Patricia Uberoi
Guru and Gramophone: Fantasies of Fidelity and Modern Technologies of the Real – Amanda Weidman

Dilip M. Menon is Mellon Chair in Indian Studies and Professor of History at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

New in Paperback The Enigma of the Kerala Woman

2010-11-01T11:08:00.004+05:30

The ENIGMA OF THE KERALA WOMAN
A Failed Promise of Literacy
Edited by Swapna Mukhopadhyay

'I am very interested to learn about your book on Kerala women which you have just published. I look forward to getting hold of a copy and reading it. ...I know Swapna’s work and expect it to be very interesting and good. ...I will, ... personally benefit greatly … [from] the book.'
AMARTYA SEN,
Nobel Laureate and Lamont University Professor, Harvard University

‘The strength of this book is its methodological pluralism and combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The photographs and narratives support the essays by providing a glimpse into the everyday processes of the social construction of gender. … It is an important resource for the body of research which demonstrates that only policies that are informed by an understanding of entrenched power structures and explicitly target it can produce transformative and empowering outcomes. Its wide-angled overview drawing upon a range of recent academic work on Kerala opens up many possibilities for further detailed research.’
JANAKI SRINIVASAN,
Economic and Political Weekly

203 pages 215x140 mm Paperback 14 b/w photographs (visual anthropology)
First Hardback edition in 2007
Rs 295
ISBN 978-81-87358-44-2
SOCIOLOGY, DEMOGRAPHY, GENDER STUDIES, ECONOMICS
Pub date 2011

The Enigma of the Kerala Woman: A Failed Promise of Literacy consists of multi-disciplinary research carried out on various aspects of gender relations in Kerala by scholars from a range of social science disciplines under The Gender Network, a regional network of researchers investigating the phenomenon of gender under varied social and economic settings. The introductory chapter provides an overarching framework for the individual studies. Breaking new ground in analytical and methodological dimensions of Women’s Studies, the papers collectively seek to provide an answer to the ‘enigma’ of the Kerala woman.

The book comes alive through two separate sections. The first one is devoted to case studies of women from the area of research and the second to photographs of Kerala women in various social settings with detailed anthropological captions. The two sections complement each other in supporting the main theme of the book. The book has a rich body of data which provides comparative figures relating to development indices for Kerala in relation to some other states as well as India as a whole.

Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Section 1
1. Understanding the Enigma of Women’s Status in Kerala: Does High Literacy Necessarily Translate into High Status? - Swapna Mukhopadhyay
2. Gender Disparity in Kerala: A Critical Reinterpretation - S. Irudaya Rajan and Sreerupa
3. Mental Health, Gender Ideology and Women’s Status in Kerala - Swapna Mukhopadhyay, Jayanti Basu and S. Irudaya Rajan
4. Re-forming Women in Malayalee Modernity: A Historical Overview- J. Devika and Avanti Mukherjee
SECTION 2
5. Living as a Woman: Some Case Studies
SECTION 3
6. Gender Disparity in Kerala: Some Visual Images
Index

Swapna Mukhopadhyay is former Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth and former Director at the Institute of Social Studies Trust, New Delhi. She is currently involved as an advisor in some international development projects and occasionally teaches courses in Economics at various universities in the city. She also plays the violin and teaches Western classical music at the Delhi School of Music.

New in Paperback: India and China in the Colonial World

2010-08-19T11:28:00.006+05:30

INDIA AND CHINA IN THE COLONIAL WORLD
Edited by Madhavi Thampi

______________________________________________

266 pages 215x140 mm Paperback
Rs 295
ISBN 978-81-87358-53-4
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, HISTORY, POLITICS, ECONOMIC HISTORY

______________________________________________________

India and China in the Colonial World brings together thirteen essays by eminent Indian and Chinese scholars as well as young researchers who look at the multidimensional interaction between the two countries. This interaction was of many kinds and took place at various levels. This volume casts new light on some of the problems that have confronted the relations between India and China as new states and, in doing so, challenges stereotyped images of this relationship.

The major areas of India-China relationships covered in this book include some aspects of the situation during and after World War II. Some papers, such as those on the importance of Shanghai in Sino-Indian trade, the presence of the Chinese community in India and Indians in China; Indian fighters in the Taiping Rebellion; Gandhi and the Chinese in South Africa; and ties between south-west China and north-east India during World War II; present the findings of new research. Others such as those pertaining to India-China relations in the period, such as the opium trade; the controversial visit of Rabindranath Tagore to China; and the complexity of Subhash Chandra Bose’s position with relation to both China and Japan have been put in a new light.

The essays in this book are particularly relevant as they help to understand the relationship between India and China in the context of a historical perspective.

Madhavi Thampi teaches Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Studies of Delhi University. She is the author of Indians in China, 1800-1949 (Delhi, 2005) and co-author of China and the Making of Bombay (Mumbai, 2009). She is an Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi, and Associate Editor of China Report.

Contents
Introduction - Madhavi Thampi
TRADE AND ECONOMIC INTERACTIONS
Pathways of the Poppy: India’s Opium Trade in the Nineteenth Century - Asiya Siddiqi
Shanghai: A Window for Studying Sino-Indian Relations in the Era of Colonialism and Imperialism
- Chen Zhilong
CHINESE IN INDIA, INDIANS IN CHINA
The Chinese Community of Calcutta: Their EarlySettlement and Migration - Ramakrishna Chatterjee
The Indian Community in China and Sino-Indian Relations - Madhavi Thampi
CULTURAL INTERACTION
The Controversial Guest: Tagore in China - Sisir Kumar Das
Turning Point of India-China Relations in the Twentieth Century: The Linkage Role of Tan Yun-shan
- Huang Chih-lien
NATIONAL AND REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS IN INDIA AND CHINA
The 1857 Rebellion and Indian Involvement in the Taiping Uprising in China - B.R. Deepak
Gandhi and the Chinese Community in South Africa - Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea
Nehru, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Second World War- Avinash Mohan Saklani
Subhash Chandra Bose’s Perspective on China - Girish Chandra Maiti
EMERGENCE OF A NEW RELATIONSHIP
Links between Yunnan and India during the Second World War- Ge Yikun and Li Wei
Indian Perceptions of the Emergence of the People’s Republic of China - Shalini Saksena
Perceptions and India–China Relations at the End of the Colonial Era - Surjit Mansingh
Appendix
Index

2010-08-16T14:41:00.005+05:30

TELECOMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY IN INDIA
State, Business and Labour in a Global EconomyDilip Subramanian

‘This is an impressive achievement that fills a major gap in the literature, that is genuinely inter-disciplinary, and that calls on a range of Francophone literature on the sociology of industry and work that is seldom cited in studies of Indian industry.’
Jonathan Parry, FBA
Emeritus Professor of Anthropology,
London School of Economics and Political Science

‘[The work]… has the potential to become a benchmark study in government-business-labour relations during the import-substituting industrialization era in India…. The proposed work evidently has a global readership….’
Tirthankar Roy,
London School of Economics and Political Science

Also available as ebook at: http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/telecommunications_industry_in_india/

690 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Published price Rs 895
ISBN 978-81-87358-42-8
BUSINESS HISTORY, LABOUR HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY OF WORK, POLITICS
Pub Date July 2010
Telecommunications Industry in India represents the first comprehensive study of a state-run enterprise in the telecommunications industry. The study traces over a period of half a century (1948-2009) the growth and decline of Indian Telephone Industries (ITI). At the heart of the monograph stands one central interrogation: How does the socio-technical system of production in a state-controlled firm shape the relations linking the four main actors: the state, management, union and workers?

The original contribution of this book lies in combining business history and labour history within a single conceptual framework. The author evaluates the broader conclusions about the telecommunications industry and public sector through the lens of an individual firm to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of change in the globalizing Indian economy.

The work is well in command of the literature on the global business history counterparts of ITI in the telecommunications industry. It is further strengthened by the use of French material on the subject which is now accessible for the first time in English.

Dilip Subramanian is Associate Professor at the Reims Management School and is affiliated to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

ContentsIntroduction1. The Construction of a Monopoly
2. The History and Politics of Technological Change
3. The Burden of Monopoly and State Regulation
4. The Advent of Competition: Fallout of Global Telecommunications Deregulation
5. Market Forces in Full Play: Management Gains or Losses for Labour?
6. Spheres of Practice: An Ethnography of Printed Circuit Board Assembly Work
7. Workers and Independent Unionism
8. Rank-and-File Challenge to Union and Management Authority
9. Passions of Language and Caste
ConclusionEpilogue
Index

2010-06-22T09:11:00.006+05:30

NATURE, CULTURE AND RELIGION AT THE CROSSROADS OF ASIA
Edited by Marie Lecomte-Tilouine

‘A rich and wide-ranging collection that should be consulted by anyone who wants to know what meaning “nature” has in Asian world religions and in many contemporary Asian societies.’
David N. Gellner
Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Oxford

‘This interdisciplinary book is a significant, original and valuable contribution to…the Himalayan environment. …The book will appeal to students of the Himalaya and of the environment generally and…to scholars in religious studies. Several of the essays will work well in courses in Himalayan anthropology and religion as well as in environmental studies.’
Arjun Guneratne
Macalester College
____________________________________________________________________
388 pages 215x140 mm 14 illustrations Hardback
Published price Rs 750
ISBN 978-81-87358-46-6
CULTURE STUDIES, HIMALAYAN ANTHROPOLOGY, RELIGION, ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
Pub date June 2010
____________________________________________________________________________

Nature, Culture and Religion at the Crossroads of Asia explores how ethnic groups living in the Himalayan regions understand nature and culture. The first part addresses the opposition between nature and culture in Asia’s major religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Shamanism. The second part brings together specialists of different representative groups living in the heterogeneous Himalayan region. They examine how these indigenous groups perceive their world. This includes understanding their mythic past, in particular, the place of animals and spirits in the world of humans as they see it and the role of ritual in the everyday lives of these people. The book takes into account how these various perceptions of the Himalayan peoples are shaped by a globalized world. The volume thus provides new ways of viewing the relationship between humans and their environment.
Marie Lecomte-Tilouine is Senior Researcher in Social Anthropology at CNRS, France, and teaches at the Institut National des Langues Orientales, Paris. She has recently published Hindu Kingship, Ethnic Revival and Maoist Rebellion in Nepal (Collected Essays), Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2009.

Contents
Introduction - Marie Lecomte-Tilouine
PART I – Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Shamanism
At the Articulation of Nature and Artifice - Charles Malamoud
Nature and Culture in Tibetan Philosophy - Stéphane Arguillère
Allah, Saints and Men in Islam - Marc Gaborieau
Variations in Shamanist Siberia - Roberte N. Hamayon
PART II – Himalayan Case Studies
To be more Natural than Others - Marie Lecomte-Tilouine
Subjectivity and Governance in the Himalayan Environment - Ben Campbell
Political Aspects of the Territorial Cult among the Mewahang Rai - Martin Gaenszle
‘Wilderness of the Civilization’ - Subhadra Mitra Channa
Love and Vengeance in Indus Kohistan - Claus Peter Zoller
Conceptions on Tibetan Relics - Rachel Guidoni
Plant Growth Processes and Animal Health in Northwest Yunnan - Andreas Wilkes
Terrace Cultivation and Mental Landscapes in Southern Yunnan - Pascal Bouchery
The Sacred Confluence, between Nature and Culture - Chiara Letizia
____________________________________________________________________________

SSP-OBS Publication

2010-05-20T10:38:00.003+05:30

EDUCATION, UNEMPLOYMENT AND MASCULINITIES IN INDIA
Craig Jeffrey, Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery

"...[T]hrough close ethnographic work, the authors throw new light on larger debates about development, education and employment in India, and raise important issues and questions that demand further exploration and debate by sociologists and policymakers alike."

Economic & Political Weekly

"The focus on masculinity, education, modernity, and social status among rural young men in northern India highlights the problems with education in India. The authors explore the mindset of those for whom rural education is a system that often fails, demonstrating a volatile mix of disenfranchisement on the one hand and underemployment on the other."

Susan S. Wadley, Syracuse University

"The book is important for both academics and policy makers: 'we question accounts of education as an unproblematic social good within development academia'. Not quite the condemnation of education as causing the problem, but a warning that education on its own will not achieve its goals, and that with some people in some contexts, it can have its 'dark side'."

Alan Rogers, University of East Anglia

Social Science Press-Orient BlackSwan Joint Publication
256 pp 215x140 mm Hardback
ISBN 978-81-87358-58-9
Published price Rs 695
Pub Date May 2010
DEVELOPMENT STUDIES, SOCIOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY, POLITICS

Education, Unemployment and Masculinities in India re-evaluates debates on education, modernity, and social change in contemporary development studies and anthropology. Education is widely imputed with the capacity to transform the prospects of the poor. But in the context of widespread unemployment in rural north India, it is better understood as a contradictory resource, providing marginalized youth with certain freedoms but also drawing them more tightly into systems of inequality.
The book advances this argument through detailed case studies of educated but unemployed or underemployed young men in rural western Uttar Pradesh. This book draws on fourteen months' ethnographic research with young men from middle caste Hindu, Muslim, and ex-Untouchable backgrounds. In addition to offering a new perspective on how education affects the rural poor in South Asia, Education, Unemployment and Masculinities in India includes in-depth reflection on the politics of modernity, changing rural masculinities, and caste and communal politics.
Contents
1 Introduction
2 The Political Economy of Uttar Pradesh
3 Masculinity on a Shoestring?
4 From Canefield to Campus (and Back Again): The Social Strategies of Educated Jats
5 Dalit Revolution? New Politicians in Uttar Pradesh
6 Muslims’ Strategies in an Age of Insecurity
7 Down and Out in Nangal and Qaziwala: The Cultural Politics of Resentment
8 Conclusions
Bibliography
Index

Craig Jeffrey is Associate Professor in Geography and International Studies at the University of Washington. He has published widely, including papers in World Development, Modern Asian Studies, Annals of the Association of American Geographers and Development and Change.
Patricia Jeffery is Professor of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her recent books include (with Roger Jeffery) Don’t Marry Me to a Plowman: Women’s Everyday Lives in Rural North India (Westview Press and Vistaar, 1996).
Roger Jeffery is Professor of Sociology of South Asia at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His recent books include (with Patricia Jeffery) Population, Gender and Politics:Demographic Change in Rural North India (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

2010-03-25T10:03:00.004+05:30

LITERATURE AND NATIONALIST IDEOLOGY
Writing Histories of Modern Indian LanguagesEdited by Hans Harder

400 pp 215x140 mm Hardback
Published price Rs 695
ISBN 978-81-87358-33-6
Tentative Pub Date March 2010
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, LINGUISTICS, HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY

‘This volume takes on…big questions, making a sophisticated and significant contribution to the great tradition of assessing the emergence of literary modernity in South Asia.’- Vasudha Dalmia, Professor of Hindi and Chair of the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California

Also available as ebook at: http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/literature_and_nationalist_ideology/

Writing histories of literature means making selections, passing value judgments, and incorporating or rejecting foregoing traditions. The book argues that in many parts of India, literary histories play an important role in creating a cultural ethos. They are closely linked with nationalism in general and various regional ‘sub-nationalisms’ in particular.

Literary historiography helps to establish a national literature in a way that is not always unproblematic: systematic representation of literary works and authors is as much part of this story as conscious omissions or political spins in the making of a literary heritage.The contributors to this volume look at a great variety of aspects of the historiography of modern regional languages of India. The approach excludes classical languages of India from this approach, except Tamil which is considered a modern and a classical language at the same time. It includes the late yet undoubtedly successful arrival of English in the nation’s literary corpus.

Hans Harder teaches Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany.

Contents
Introduction - Hans Harder
1. Shaping a Literary Space: Early Literary Histories in Malayalam and Normative Uses of the Past - Udaya Kumar
2 Drowning in the Ocean of Tamil: Islamic Texts and the Historiography of Tamil Literature - Torsten Tschacher
3. From Scattered Archives to the Centre of Discourse: Histories of Telugu Literature in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Heiko Frese
4. Beyond the Nation: A Comparatist’s Thoughts on some Foundational Categories in the Literary Historiography of ‘Post’-colonial South Asian Literatures- Ipshita Chanda
5. Dinesh Chandra Sen’s ‘The Folk Literature of Bengal’: The Canonization of Folk and the Conception of the Feminine - Sourav Kargupta
6. Ethics or Aesthetics? Obscenity as a Category for Evaluating the Hindi Public Sphere in Colonial North India - Charu Gupta

7. George Abraham Grierson’s Literary Hindustan - Ira Sarma
8. The Impact of Sectarian Lobbyism on Hindi Literary Historiography: The Fascinating Story of Bhagvadacharya Ramanandi - Purushottam Agrawal
9. The Politics of Exclusion?: The Place of Muslims, Urdu and its Literature in Ramchandra Shukla’s ‘Hindi Sahitya ka Itihas’ - Navina Gupta
10. A Discourse of Difference: ‘Syncretism’ as a Category in Indian Literary History - Thomas de Bruijn11. Unscripted: The People of Arunachal Pradesh in Literary and other National Histories - Stuart Blackburn
12. Indian Literature in English and the Problem of Naturalisation - Hans Harder
13. The Mahatma as Proof: The Nationalist Origins of the Historiography of Indian Writing in English - Snehal Shingavi

2010-02-04T11:42:00.005+05:30

THE MANY WORLDS OF SARALA DEVI: A DiaryTranslated from Jeevaner Jharapata
Sukhendu Raywith an Introduction by Bharati Ray&

THE TAGORES AND SARTORIAL STYLES: A Photo EssayMalavika Karlekar

Also available as ebook at: http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/the_many_worlds_of_sarala_devi_and_the_tagores_and_sartorial_styles/

228 pp 215x140 mm Hardback 15 illustrations
Published price Rs 550
ISBN 978-81-87358-31-2
Pub date January 2010

This charming book The Many Worlds of Sarala Devi and The Tagores and Sartorial Styles, as the titles suggest, contain two separate but related writings on the Tagores. The Tagores were a pre-eminent family which became synonymous with the cultural regeneration of India, specifically of Bengal, in the nineteenth century.
The first writing is a sensitive translation of Sarala Devi’s memoirs from the Bengali, Jeevaner Jharapata, by Sukhendu Ray. It is the first autobiography written by a nationalist woman leader of India. Sarala Devi was Rabindranath Tagore’s niece and had an unusual life. The translation unfolds, among other things, what it was like to grow up in a big affluent house Jorasanko, that had more than 116 inmates and a dozen cooks! The second writing by Malavika Karlekar is a photo essay, creatively conceived, visually reflecting the social and cultural trends of the times, through styles of dress, jewellery and accoutrements. The modern style of wearing a sari was introduced by Jnanadanandini Devi, a member of the Tagore family.
The introduction by the well-known historian, Bharati Ray, very perceptively captures the larger context of family, marriage, women’s education and politics of the time which touched Sarala Devi’s life. She points out that if memoirs are a kind of social history then women’s diaries record social influences not found in official accounts and are therefore, a rich source of documentation.

Sukhendu Ray has published several translations from Bengali literature of which the more recent ones are, The Winged Horse from Thakurmar Jhuli (OUP, 1997); Rabindranath Tagore’s Chokher Bali (Rupa, 2006) and Sukanta Chaudhuri ed. Selected Writings for Children: Rabindranath Tagore (OUP, 2006).
Bharati Ray is Honorary Professor, Department of History, Calcutta University. She is the author of Early Feminists in Colonial Bengal: Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (OUP, 2002); From Independence Towards Freedom: Indian Women since 1947 (OUP, 1999) and From the Seams of History: Essays on Indian Women (OUP, 1995).
Malavika Karlekar is Editor, Indian Journal of Gender Studies and the Curator of Re-presenting Indian Women 1875-1947: A Visual Documentary. Her recent publications include Remembered Childhood: Essays in Honour of André Béteille co-edited with Rudrangshu Mukherjee (OUP, 2010); In So Many Words: Women’s Life Experiences from Western and Eastern India co-edited with Aparna Basu (Routledge, 2008) and Re-visioning the Past: Early Photography in Bengal 1875-1915 (OUP, 2005).

Joint publication SSP-OBS

2010-01-20T11:52:00.002+05:30

THE SUNDARBANS
Folk Deities, Monsters and Mortals
Sutapa Chatterjee Sarkar

212 pages 215x140 mm Hardback 10 illustrations
Published price Rs 550
ISBN 978-81-87358-35-0
HISTORY, ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, ETHNOGRAPHY, ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY
Pub Date January 2010

The lower deltaic Bengal, the Sundarbans has always had a life of its own, unique in its distinctive natural aspect and social development. Geographical and ecological evidence indicates that most of the area used to be once covered with dense, impenetrable jungle even as patches of cultivation sprang intermittently into life and then disappeared. A continuous struggle ensued between man and nature, as portrayed in the punthi literature that thrived in lower deltaic Bengal between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

The construction of a permanent railroad connecting Calcutta to Canning further facilitated the influx of new ideas and these, subsequently, found expression in the spreading of co-operative movements, formation of peasant organizations, and finally culminated in open rebellion by the peasants (Tebhaga Movement). The struggle between men and the dangerous forests was therefore overshadowed by the conflict among men.

This book will be of great interest to students of history, sociology, anthropology and economic geography.

Sutapa Chatterjee Sarkar is Reader, Department of History, West Bengal State University.

Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
Maps
Abbreviations
1. The Sundarbans Folk Deities, Monsters and Mortals: Introduction
2. Fearsome Forests and Rising Tides: A Historical Geography of the Sundarbans
3. The Sundarbans in punthi Literature
4. Tilman Henckell: An Advocate of Colonial Paternalism
5. Land Reclamation from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century
6. Development of the Port at Canning and Gosaba Co-operative
7. Tebhaga in Kakdwip
8. The Sundarbans in Modern Bengali Fiction
9. The Mangrove and the Man: A Conclusion
Glossary
Index

In Paperback: Religious Division and Social Conflict

2010-01-09T10:38:00.005+05:30

RELIGIOUS DIVISION AND SOCIAL CONFLICT
The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in Rural IndiaPeggy Froerer

316 pages 215x140 mm Paperback 8 b/w photographs
Rs 295
ISBN 978-81-87358-51-0
SOCIOLOGY, ETHNOGRAPHY, RELIGION, POLITICS

Pub date December 2009

Also available as ebook at: http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/religious_division_and_social_conflict/

Religious Division and Social Conflict: The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in Rural India is an ethnographic account of the emergence of Hindu nationalism in a tribal (adivasi) community in Chhattisgarh, central India. It is argued that the successful spread of Hindu nationalism in this area is due to the involvement of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a militant Hindu nationalist organization, in local affairs. While active engagement in 'civilizing' strategies has enabled the RSS to legitimize its presence and endear itself to the local community, the book argues that participation in more aggressive strategies has made it possible for this organization to fuel and attach local tensions to a broader Hindu nationalist agenda.

ContentsAcknowledgements
Note on Transliteration
Glossary of Selected Words
1. Introduction
2. Adivasi Hindus and the RSS
3. Adivasi Christians and the Church
4. Health, Biomedicine and the RSS
5. Local Corruption and the Politics of Inclusion
6. Land Relations and Local Tensions
7. Liquor Disputes and the Communalization of Local Tensions
8. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Peggy Froerer is Lecturer in Anthropology, School of Social Sciences, Brunel University, UK.

2009-11-27T13:19:00.003+05:30

THE EVERYDAY STATE AND SOCIETY IN MODERN INDIA
Edited by C. J. Fuller and Véronique Benei

231 pages 215x140 mm Paperback
Rs 350
ISBN 978-81-87358-57-2
SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS, GENDER STUDIES

Also available as ebook at: http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/the_everyday_state_and_society_in_modern_india/

The Everyday State and Society in Modern India focuses on how the large, amorphous and impersonal Indian state affects the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. All the eight essays in this book are original contributions and are based on empirical research. They dwell on a variety of issues, such as riot control, the Emergency, corruption, irrigation, rural activism and education and cut across academic disciplines.

Written lucidly on themes which preoccupy most people, these essays lend clarity and cogency to the confusion of everyday life, contributing to a better understanding of the Indian social and political environment.
C. J. Fuller is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Indian Society (Princeton University Press, 2004); The Renewal of the Priesthood: Modernity and Traditionalism in a South Indian Temple (Princeton University Press, 2003) and has co-edited (with Jackie Assayag) Globalizing India: Perspectives from Below (Anthem Press, 2005).

Véronique Benei is Visiting Senior Fellow in Anthropology at the LSE . She is also Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (IIAC/LAIOS) and holds an Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches from Paris University. She is the author of Schooling India: Hindus, Muslims, and the Forging of Citizens (2009) and several papers in edited volumes and scholarly journals.

2009-09-01T09:42:00.002+05:30

Follow us on Twitter.com/beteillessp

2009-08-31T12:26:00.008+05:30

INDIA’S ECONOMIC FUTURE
Education, Technology, Energy and EnvironmentEdited by Manmohan Agarwal

294 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 595
ISBN 978-81-87358-17-6
EDUCATION, ECONOMICS, POLITICS, BUSINESS STUDIES
Pub Date September 2009

Also see:http://www.cigionline.org/publications/2009/8/indias-economic-future-education-energy-and-environment

Available as ebook at http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/indias_economic_future/

The Indian economy continues to grow rapidly, taking in its stride poor harvests and rising oil prices. Industrial output, which had tended to be relatively low, has increased to double-digit levels, accompanied by rising levels of savings and investment. India’s healthy export performance has resulted in increased amounts of foreign exchange reserves, insuring against a large balance of payments (BOP) deficit in the future. An important factor in this process has been India’s relative political stability. Democracy is well entrenched and changes of government occur reasonably peacefully.

Is there a fly in the ointment? Could the growth process slacken or can it be accelerated further? What are the constraints to maintaining a high rate of growth over the next decade or two? These questions acquire special significance as we try to understand long-term growth in the current context of global economic slowdown. The papers in this volume seek to answer these questions.

Manmohan Agarwal former Professor, Centre for International Trade and Development, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), is Senior Visiting Fellow at The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), Canada. He has a long and distinguished record of expertise in international trade, development and economics as it relates to Asia, and especially to India.
Contents:
Introduction by Manmohan AgarwalSECTION I: MACRO POLICY, TECHNOLOGY AND GROWTHMaintenance of a High Rate of Growth: A Macroeconomic Perspective by Manmohan Agarwal
Emerging through Technological Capability? Analysing India’s Technological Trajectory by Amit Shovon Ray
Determinants, Constraints and Impact of Foreign Direct Investment: India–China Comparison by N. S. Siddharthan
Agricultural Development Policies and Growth of Indian Agriculture by Ramesh Chand
SECTION II: EDUCATION
School Education: A Constraint to the Sustainability of High Growth Rate in India by Muchkund Dubey
Dream India: Is Its Education Competitive Enough? By P.V. Indiresan
Reservations and the Idea of Fairness: Quotas for OBCs in Higher Education by Gurpreet Mahajan
SECTION III: SUSTAINABILITY, ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTEnergy and High Growth in India: Sustainability Issues by Yoginder K. Alagh
Sustainability of India’s Economic Growth by Aparna Sawhney

2009-08-05T13:14:00.014+05:30

REFLECTIONS ON CAMBRIDGEAlan Macfarlane

243 pages with 20 illustrations 215x140 mm

Indian edition: Hardback Rs 450 ISBN 978-81-87358-48-0

International edition: Paperback $24.95 ISBN 978-81-87358-50-3
ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, HISTORY

Pub Date August 2009

"... the Cambridge book - full of wisdom, warmth and great stories, a kind of manifesto for the liberal arts as well as a song of love for a place. "

- Michael Chaplin, film producer and writer

Also available as ebook at: http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/reflections_on_cambridge/

Also check out

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/cambridge-companions/507641/

http://www.thehindu.com/2009/08/25/stories/2009082550280200.htm

http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/FILES/camb-book.htm

http://www.cambridge-india.org/research/humanities/humanity.html

The traditions and creativity of Cambridge University have survived 800 years. In celebration, this first-ever combined historical and anthropological account explores the culture, the customs, the colleges and the politics of this famous institution. As professor there for nearly forty years, the author sets forth on a personal but also dispassionate attempt to understand how this ancient university developed and changed, and how it continues to influence those who pass through it. This book delves into the history and architecture as well as the charm and the ghosts of Cambridge presenting a valuable resource for anyone who studies, teaches, visits, or is intrigued by this great intellectual centre.

Alan Macfarlane is Professor of Anthropological Science, University of Cambridge, and Life Fellow, King’s College Cambridge. In 1986 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He was born in Assam, India, and his work covers Britain, India, China and Japan. Throughout his distinguished career, Alan Macfarlane has published widely in history and anthropology. His publications include Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (1970,1999) Routledge, London; Resources and Population (1976) CUP; The Origins of English Individualism (1978) Blackwell, Oxford; A Guide to English Historical Records (1983) CUP; The Culture of Capitalism (1987) Blackwell, Oxford; The Savage Wars of Peace (1997) Blackwell, Oxford; Green Gold: The Empire of Tea (2003) (with Iris Macfarlane) Ebury Press, London.

Contents:PrefaceSection I: HISTORY
Strange Survival
The Changing Same
Section II: CULTURE
Charm and Ghosts
Culture
The Culture of Politics
Rhythms
Section III: SOCIETY
Customs
Colleges
Community
Associations
Section IV: IDEAS
Education
Creativity
Discovery

2009-01-30T12:04:00.005+05:30

THE POLITICS AND CULTURE OF GLOBALIZATION

India and Australia
Edited by Hans Löfgren and Prakash Sarangi

358 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Tentative price Rs 625
ISBN 978-81-87358-22-0
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, BUSINESS STUDIES, ECONOMICS, POLITICS, CULTURE STUDIES

Pub Date January 2009

‘An important contribution to the critical discourse on globalisation it is a unique Indo-Australian intellectual endeavour grappling incisively with deeper issues of philosophy and policy in the contemporary world.’

Manoranjan Mohanty,Council for Social Development, New Delhi

‘With its cogent analysis and lucid style, this volume is a valuable addition to critical readings on globalisation…The focus on process – governance, institutions, and area studies – is an added strength... With its analytical depth and empirical stretch, it will be a valuable addition to this important field.’
Subrata K Mitra,
University of Heidelberg, Germany‘It will be a very useful volume for all the graduate students who are trying to understand [the] complex and multi faceted nature of the phenomenon of globalisation.’Rajen Harshe,
Vice Chancellor, University of Allahabad

Also available as ebook at: http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/the_politics_and_culture_of_globalisation/

WE EXPERIENCE the culture of globalisation every time we visit a Tandoori restaurant in Chicago, or a Pizza Hut in Hyderabad, or as we watch Bollywood films in Australia. Globalisation is a label used for a wide range of political, social and cultural phenomena, many of which are explored in this volume.

The Politics and Culture of Globalisation: India and Australia brings together Indian and Australian experts in the fields of political science, international relations, philosophy, cultural theory and political economy. Its timeliness and unifying theme derive from comparisons between Indian and Australian perspectives, and analyses by Australian writers on developments in India. Indian-Australian relations are explored in several chapters.

The neo-liberal form of globalisation is a key focus of critique in this volume. Several chapters examine the search for alternative forms of governance as the nation-state undergoes profound change due to global interconnectedness.
Hans Löfgren is Director of the Master of Politics and Policy Program at Deakin University, Australia. He has published extensively on the politics and economics of pharmaceuticals, for example in New Political Science (2007), Australia and New Zealand Health Policy (2007) and Social Science & Medicine (2004).

Prakash Sarangi is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hyderabad. His publications include Liberal Theories of State: Contemporary Perspectives (1996) and Political Exchange and Public Policy: A Cross-National Analysis (1990).

ContentsIntroduction: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Globalisation – Hans Löfgren and Prakash Sarangi

Section I Making sense of globalisationJustice, Globalisation and Diverse Conceptual Worlds – Michael Leahy
Ontology of Permanence and Change: A Critique of Globalisation – A. RaghuramarajuNeo-liberal Hyperglobalism in Australian Political Thought – Geoffrey StokesHyperglobalisation’s Casualty: The Numerical Small – Purushottama Bilimoria
Section II Governance and globalisationGlobalization and Indian Federalism: Re-assertion of States’ Rights – Harihar BhattacharyyaChallenges of Globalisation in Urban Local Governance – Sudha Mohan
Understanding Community Governance and Rural Regeneration in a Globalised World – Kevin O’Toole
Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals in South India: ‘Sun-rise’ Industrialisation or Global Cost-shifting of Dirty Goods Manufacturing – G.VijayIndia’s Drug Multinationals: Growth Strategies and Global Industry Dynamics – Hans Löfgren

Section III Experiencing globalisation

‘The Good Australians’: Anglo-Indians, Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism – Glenn D’Cruz
Cosmopolitanism and Tolerance – Stan van Hooft
Late Marxism and Parliamentary Government: Indian Communism Today – Geoff Robinson
Section IV Globalisation, Foreign Relations and SecurityIndo-Australian Relations in the Post-Cold War Period – Y. Yagama Reddy and Ken BoutinIndo-Australian Relations: Beyond Indifference – Gary SmithTerror, Power and Protest – Andrew Vandenberg

Globalisation, ‘Glocalisation’ and South Asian Insecurity – B. Ramesh Babu

2008-12-29T14:22:00.004+05:30

REBUILDING BUDDHISM
The Theravada Movement in Twentieth-Century NepalSarah LeVine and David N. Gellner

Social Science Press-Orient Blackswan joint publication
390 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 795
ISBN 978-81-87358-39-8
RELIGION, SOCIOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY, POLITICS
Pub Date December 2008

'a significant ethnographic contribution... a splendidly rendered ethnography that advances a wealth of informed analysis about Buddhist renewal in Nepal while suggesting many insights into the process of Buddhist revitalization throughout the region.'
Ingrid Jordt, American Anthropologist
Rebuilding Buddhism 'will remain the standard reference on Theravada Buddhism in Nepal for a long time to come... It is a long time since I have been so enchanted by a book (for a scholarly book – it is sad how seldom one can say this – it is written in an engaging and fluent way) and it is a long time since I learnt so much as from reading this monograph.'
Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz, Anthropos

'[T]he book is an excellent investment for anyone who wants to understand what is going on in Nepal today and what the future might hold not only for the Newar community but for all the peoples of Nepal.'
John Locke, S.J., Contributions to Nepalese Studies

Rebuilding Buddhism describes in evocative detail the experiences and achievements of Nepalis who have adopted Theravada Buddhism. This form of Buddhism was introduced into Nepal from Burma and Sri Lanka in the 1930s, and its adherents have struggled for recognition and acceptance ever since. With its focus on the austere figure of the monk and the biography of the historical Buddha, and more recently with its emphasis on individualizing meditation and on gender equality, Theravada Buddhism contrasts sharply with the highly ritualized Tantric Buddhism traditionally practiced in the Kathmandu Valley.
Based on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and historical reconstruction, the book provides a rich portrait of the different ways of being a Nepali Buddhist over the past seventy years. At the same time it explores the impact of the Theravada movement and what its gradual success has meant for Buddhism, for society, and for men and women in Nepal.
Contents
1: The Origins of Modernist Buddhism
2: Theravada Missionaries in an Autocratic State
3: Creating a Tradition
4: Charisma and Education
5: The Changing Buddhist Laity
6: Organizing and Educating the Monastic Community
7: Raising the Status of Nuns
8: Winds of Change
9: Other Buddhist Revival Movements
10: Nepal’s Theravadins in the Twenty-first Century
Appendices
Glossary
Notes and References
Index
Sarah LeVine is Associate in Sanskrit and India Studies, Harvard University. She is also the author of Mothers & Wives: Gusii Women of East Africa (University of Chicago Press, 1979), Dolor Y Alegria: Women and Social Change in Urban Mexico (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), and The Saint of Kathmandu: Tales of the Sacred in Distant Lands (Beacon Press, 2008).

David N. Gellner is Professor of Social Anthropology and Fellow of All Souls, University of Oxford. Among his other books are Resistance and the State: Nepalese Experiences (Social Science Press, 2003), The Anthropology of Buddhism and Hinduism: Weberian Themes (OUP, 2001), Contested Hierarchies: A Collaborative Ethnography of Caste among the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal (OUP, 1995), and Monk, Householder and Tantric Priest: Newar Buddhism and its Hierarchy of Ritual (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

2008-11-07T10:07:00.006+05:30

‘GOOD WOMEN DO NOT INHERIT LAND’
Politics of Land and Gender in IndiaNitya Rao

‘… Rao's book is good development anthropology with deep ethnographic insights about gender empowerment. … the Santals ...[are] a distinct part of the peasantry in a de-peasantizing world!’
- Anjan Ghosh, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta

368 pages 215x140 mm Hardback 10 photographs
Social Science Press-Orient BlackSwan joint publication
Rs 795
ISBN 978-81-87358-24-4
SOCIOLOGY, SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY, HISTORY, GENDER STUDIES
Pub Date November 2008

‘Good women should not claim a share in the inheritance, even if they have no brothers….’ Notions such as this have, in their own way and over time, given the women in the Santal Parganas the resolve to wrest what is rightfully theirs.

This is a powerful book in the way in which it unfolds the lives and anxieties of Santal women in Dumka district, Jharkhand. Several case studies bring these women alive through the pages of the book. Land for the Santal women stands for security, social position and identity, and in this men have a distinct advantage. The use of personal narrative by the author brings out the similarities between the experiences of a woman brought up in a city and those of the tribal women in Jharkhand.
As the account unfolds, the reader is made aware that the use of a ‘community’ identity as adivasis has also been responsible for denying women rights to land in the context of the movement for political autonomy of Jharkhand.

Based on rich ethnographic material, this sensitive book lays bare the reality of being an adivasi and an adivasi woman, in all its nuances, in the modern globalized world.

Nitya Rao is Senior Lecturer, School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

ContentsChapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: A Personal Journey
Chapter 3: Faces of Poverty: The Villages Profiled
Chapter 4: Reinventing Tradition: Agrarian Movements in History
Chapter 5: Land as a Productive Resource
Chapter 6: Locating Identities
Chapter 7: Women’s Claims to Land
Chapter 8: Custom and Courts: Bargaining with Modernity
Chapter 9: Development Interventions: Can One Size fit all?
Chapter 10: Conclusions
Bibliography
Index

2008-09-18T15:39:00.005+05:30

RESISTANCE AND THE STATENepalese Experiences
Revised Edition
Edited by David N. Gellner

For South Asia only
392 pages 215x140 mm Paperback Revised edition
Rs 360
ISBN 978-81-87358-41-1
SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

'…an excellent contribution to our understanding of Nepal's current situation and worth the attention of anyone seriously interested in the subject.'
- JOHN WHELPTON in European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 27 [2004]

Resistance and the State: Nepalese Experiences uses ethnographic case studies to explore healthcare programmes, forestry, national parks, political parties, and ethnic revivalism. This fascinating and readable book also gives a graphic description of conflicts over the interpretation of history, and various perspectives on the Maoist insurgency that has taken control of large parts of rural Nepal since 1996. This is arguably the longest and most widespread Marxist rebellion that South Asia has known.
The contributors to this volume illuminate the complex relationship — sometimes wary, sometimes accommodative, and sometimes violent — between a modernizing, developmentalist state, and the people it professes to represent and benefit. This book will be of immense value both to experts — political scientists, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists — and to the general reader.
David N. Gellner is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls.

2008-07-24T17:22:00.011+05:30

NEW MANSIONS FOR MUSICPerformance, Pedagogy and Criticism
Lakshmi Subramanian

182 pages 215x140 mm Hardback 8 illustrations
Social Science Press-Orient Longman Joint publication
Rs 425
ISBN 978-81-87358-34-3
MUSIC, HISTORY, CULTURE STUDIES, SOCIOLOGY
Pub Date July 2008

THE ESSAYS in New Mansions for Music: Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism look at one of the most ancient and rigorous classical musical traditions of India, the Karnatik music system, and the kind of changes it underwent once it was relocated from traditional spaces of temples and salons to the public domain. Nineteenth-century Madras led the way in the transformation that Karnatik music underwent as it encountered the forces of modernization and standardization. This study also contributes to our understanding of the experience of modernity in India through the prism of music. The role of Madras city as patron and custodian of the performing arts, especially classical music offers an invaluable perspective on the larger processes of modernization in India.

In an immensely readable book peppered with anecdotes and conversations with leading musicians and critics of the day, as well as humorous visual representations, part caricature, part satirical, the author describes a rapidly changing society and its new look in early-twentieth-century Madras.
Contents:Introduction
Chapter 1: The Katcheri: Living Laboratory or Enchanted Space
Chapter 2: Articulating an Aesthetic: The Emergence of the Music Critic in Modern South India
Chapter 3: From the Gurukula to the University: Initiatives in Music Education
Chapter 4: The Lighter Side of Entertainment

On the History of Music: A Bibliographical Essay
Glossary
Index

Lakshmi Subramanian is Professor, Department of History and Culture, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her earlier publications include From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India, O.U.P, Delhi, 2006.

2008-07-24T17:20:00.004+05:30

WRITING HISTORY IN THE SOVIET UNION
Making the Past Work
Arup Banerji

342 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Social Science Press-Orient Longman Joint publication
Rs 695
ISBN 978-81-87358-37-4
HISTORY, POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Pub Date June 2008

THE HISTORY of the Soviet Union has been charted in several studies over the decades. These depictions have failed to draw attention to the political and academic environment within which these histories were composed. Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work is aimed at understanding this environment.

The book seeks to identify the significant hallmarks of the production of Soviet history by Soviet as well as Western historians. The book surveys the rich abundance of writing the Russian Revolution generated as well as the divergent approaches to the history of the period. The conditions for research in Soviet archives are described as an aspect of official monitoring of history writing. Another instance of this is the manner by which history textbooks have, through the years, been withdrawn from schools and others officially nursed into circulation. This intervention, occasioned in the present circumstance by statements by President Putin himself, in the manner in which history is taught in Russian schools, continues to this day. In other words, over the years, the regime has always worked to make the past work.

Arup Banerji teaches Russian, Soviet and West European History at the Department of History, University of Delhi. He has published a study of private trade and traders during the 1920s, Merchants and Markets in Revolutionary Russia, 1917-30, and has written on politics and economic issues in the Russian Federation as well as on the Silk Routes.

Contents:Preface
Introduction: Inherited Traditions of Historical Scholarship
Chapter 1: The Histories of History in the Soviet Union
Chapter 2: The Impact of Glasnost on the Writing of History
Chapter 3: Histories of the Communist Party as Histories of the Soviet Union
Chapter 4: Depictions and Revisions: The Russian Revolution in History
Chapter 5: The Historical Archive
Chapter 6: History in Russian Schools
Bibliography
Index

2008-07-24T17:05:00.005+05:30

PARTNERS IN DEVELOPMENTIndia and Switzerland
Richard Gerster

171 pages 160x250 mm Hardback 75 colour photographs
Rs 450
ISBN 978-81-87358-40-4
DEVELOPMENT STUDIES, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Pub Date April 2008

THIS ABUNDANTLY ILLUSTRATED, accessible and perceptive account of the Indo-Swiss cooperation in India’s development programme is a remarkable book. The cooperation dates back to 1958, and it is not widely known that Switzerland was the first country to enter into a treaty of friendship with the then newly independent India on 14 August 1948.

Partners in Development, as the title suggests, brings out the rare quality of a partnership between a donor and a recipient country. Written with a dispassionate assessment of this dynamic relationship which has undergone changes as India has itself become a donor country, the book throws open many important questions relating to development programmes in India today. The book states candidly that however important in specific instances, development cooperation should not be overestimated and that the Indo-Swiss development cooperation has benefited both sides. Nevertheless it comments that India is indeed a world economic power today, and Switzerland, jointly with other foreign agencies, has contributed to this success.
The book begins with an excellent introduction of the country’s brief history from independence to the present day, and concludes that India’s ‘economic miracle’, however important, is not as impressive as the survival and vitality of the country’s democratic institutions. This idea has been echoed by Gerster and other contributors to this volume.
It then moves on to dwell on areas where the cooperation has been successful as well as where it has not. The important areas of success have been in vocational training, animal husbandry and dairy farming, biotechnology and microfinance and methodology.

Richard Gerster is the winner of several development policy awards and has authored numerous books and articles on development policy He is the Director of Gerster Consulting, Switzerland (see www.gersterconsulting.ch).

2008-07-24T16:57:00.009+05:30

POLITICAL THEOLOGIESPublic Religions in a Post-Secular World
Edited by Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan

RIGHTS NOT AVAILABLE
Social Science Press-Orient Longman joint publication
360 pages 180x240 mm Hardback
Rs 795
ISBN 978-81-87358-36-7
THEOLOGY, POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIOLOGY
Pub Date January 2008

“There is no more important topic today than the role of religion in public life. It is vital in both peace and war, debate and consensus, democracy and repression, nationalism and transnational humanitarian action. For anyone wishing to survey the range of theoretical perspectives on this theme, this collection by Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan is indispensable. It offers the single best assemblage of sources for understanding not only political theologies, but issues of pluralism, secularism, and contending ideas of the human that they raise.”

—CRAIG CALHOUN, President, Social Science Research Council

“The wholly unanticipated reemergence of religion into the realm of politics and public policy, which is happening all over the world, is puzzling and worrisome to some people. Many explanations for this surprising development have been advanced, none fully satisfactory. Now this volume brings together some of the keenest and best-informed analysis yet available, from a variety of disciplines and perspectives. It sets a new gold standard for future attempts to understand the growing role of religion in the twenty-first century.”

—HARVEY COX, Hollis Professor of Divinity, Harvard University

IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD, how can one bridge the private lives of individuals and public cultures or ways of life? In what ways does religion, with regard to words, gestures, and things, exert a pressure on structures of governance? Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-secular World opens an inquiry concerning the engagement of religion with politics.

Religion, in its local and global form, is perceived as a ‘problem’ to which intellectuals, policy-makers, cultural critics and economists direct their attention. A society is ‘post-secular’ if it reckons with the diminishing but enduring – and hence, perhaps, ever more resistant – existence of the religious.

The seventeen papers in this volume examine interrelationships between the political, economic and cultural characteristics of the ‘age of globalization’ on the one hand and the vision of society and structures of governance developed over millennia by religious traditions on the other. It explores the possibility that religion might give people a chance to lead better lives in the modern milieu.
The volume will be of great interest to students of religion, politics, sociology and philosophy, as well as the interested general reader.

Hent de Vries is Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at The Johns Hopkins University and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of: Philosophy and the Turn to Religion; Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida; and Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas. He is the editor, with Samuel Weber, of Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination and Religion and Media.

Lawrence E. Sullivan is Professor of World Religions at the University of Notre Dame. The author of Icanchu’s Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions, he was for many years director of Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions, and he has served as President of the American Academy of Religion (AAR).

2008-07-24T16:55:00.007+05:30

REGULATION, INSTITUTIONS AND THE LAW
Edited by Jaivir Singh

256 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 595
ISBN 978-81-87358-28-2
ECONOMICS, POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL LABOUR LAWPub date November 2007

The twelve papers in Regulation, Institutions and the Law try to understand the specific context within which regulation has unfolded in a country like India, which is different in many ways from that of the United States and Western Europe. The volume also dwells on how these regulatory issues flow across national boundaries and affect the international arena in this age of globalization.

While some papers discuss conceptual issues others engage with how the political economy affects regulation both in terms of domestic political economy and in relation to pressures from international organizations. Banning the import of carpets, which use child labour, is a case in point. Yet other papers discuss some specific sectors in the economy, which are regulated, such as, finance, telecommunications and competition policy, in relation to the problem of regulation itself.

Jaivir Singh teaches at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has published articles on the economics of labour law, competition policy, regulation, legal procedure, judicial activism and separation of powers, and is the author of ‘Central Government Policies: Interface with Competition Policy Objectives’ in Pradeep S. Mehta ed., Towards a Functional Competition Policy for India (Jaipur: CUTS International 2005).

2008-07-24T16:52:00.005+05:30

GLOBALIZATION AND THE MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALSNegotiating the ChallengeEdited by Manmohan Agarwal and Amit Shovon Ray

280 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 675
ISBN 978-81-87358-32-9
ECONOMICS, SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Pub date September 2007

GLOBALIZATION is a controversial subject. While some argue that it promotes economic growth that translates into social progress, others believe that it is detrimental to social advancement.
Globalization and the Millennium Development Goals brings together conceptual and empirical insights into the interaction of globalization and the social sectors, focusing especially on the MDGs. Some of the papers included here explicitly look at the Indian experience with social progress in the context of globalization. The volume with introductory remarks by Meghnad Desai, reflects the multifarious views regarding the interplay between economic development and social progress and attempts to answer the question: Can globalization have a human face?

Manmohan Agarwal is Professor of Economics at the Centre for International Trade and Development at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Amit Shovon Ray, FRSH, is Professor of Economics (and currently the Chairman) at the Centre for International Trade and Development at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health.

2008-07-24T16:50:00.003+05:30

READINGS IN HISTORYCULTURAL HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL INDIAEdited by Meenakshi Khanna

282 pages 215x140 mm 10 illustrations
Paperback Rs 230
ISBN 978-81-87358-30-5HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY, CULTURE STUDIES
Pub date July 2007

Cultural History of Medieval India is a part of the series, Readings in History. The books in this series have been edited and put together by eminent historians for their students.
This anthology of readings seeks to explore Indian culture in the medieval period through five themes: kingship traditions, social processes of religious devotion, inter-cultural perception, forms of identities, and aesthetics.

Written by well-known scholars, the eleven essays in this book present sub-cultures in diverse regional settings of the subcontinent. These readings introduce a new way of understanding medieval Indian history by engaging with interdisciplinary methods of research on issues that are significant to everyday existence in a plural society like that of India.
This book will be of great value to students of history, as well as to other readers interested in the culture of the medieval period in India.

Meenakshi Khanna is Reader in History, Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi.

2008-07-24T16:37:00.004+05:30

READINGS IN HISTORY
DELHI: ANCIENT HISTORY
Edited by Upinder Singh

250 pages 215x140 mm
Paperback Rs 220
ISBN 978-81-87358-29-9
HISTORY, ARCHAEOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY
Pub date July 2006

NOT MANY people know that the busy and bustling capital city of Delhi and its surroundings have a long past, going back thousands of years. Prehistoric stone tools have surfaced here and many ancient remains have been found, sometimes accidentally by farmers tilling their fields, and at other times by archaeologists carrying out systematic excavations. A mound one passes everyday or a narrow strip of stream tells a story of ancient times. Centuries of history coexist with metro stations and plush cars.

The readings in this book give us glimpses of the lives of people who lived in the Delhi area over the centuries, and how these details have been pieced together by historians. It brings into focus the importance of the historian’s method and the sources of information found in ancient texts, archaeology and even legends and folklore, sometimes hanging on the thread of a slender historical fact.

The editor of the volume, points to the urgency of further exploration and documentation to fill in the still all-too-meagre details of Delhi’s ancient history. However, she ends on a note of caution, bordering on alarm, when she points out that invaluable evidence of the city’s past is being extensively destroyed due to quarrying and the construction of new roads and buildings. Such activities are an integral part of the modernization of a living city but the balance between modernization and the preservation of ancient remains is indeed very fragile and needs to be maintained from an informed and realistic perspective.
This collection of essays has been put together by a teacher for students of history, but will also be of enormous value to a large number of other interested readers.

Upinder Singh teaches ancient Indian history at the University of Delhi.

2008-07-24T16:19:00.004+05:30

UNBECOMING MODERN
Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities
Edited by Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube

‘…an indispensable read on the inextricable relation of modernity to coloniality.’

Sara Castro-Klaren,
Johns Hopkins University

266 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 675
ISBN 978-81-87358-23-7
HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS, CULTURE STUDIES
Pub date January 2006

IN THIS VOLUME well-known scholars from India and Latin America – Enrique Dussel, Madhu Dubey, Walter Mignolo and Sudipta Sen to name a few – discuss the concepts of modernity and colonialism, and describe how the two relate to each other.
Unbecoming Modern: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities explores the vital impact of the colonial pasts of India, Mexico, China and the even the Unites States on the processes through which these countries have become modern.

The collection is unique as it brings together a range of disciplines and perspectives. The topics discussed include the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico, the image of the South in recent African-American literature, the theories of Andre Gunder Frank about the early modernization of Asian countries, and the contradictions of the colonial state in India.

Saurabh Dube is Professor of History, Centre for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México, Mexico City.
Ishita Banerjee-Dube is Associate Professor, Centre for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México, Mexico City.

2008-07-24T16:13:00.004+05:30

AFTER THE IRAQ WAR The Future of the UN and International Law
Edited by Bernhard Vogel, Rudolf Dolzer and Matthias Herdegen

228 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 595
ISBN 978-81-87358-21-3
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, POLITICS, LAW

Pub date July 2005

After the Iraq War: The Future of the UN and International Law opens up a powerful debate on the future of the world order.

The military occupation of Iraq by the United States and their allies in Spring 2003 has confronted the United Nations with new and fundamental questions concerning its authority, prestige, working methods, efficiency, even the justification of its existence in the future. Besides the United Nations, it concerns the general international law as such, especially the rules concerning the maintenance of peace and the prohibition of the use of force, which are also the central provisions of the United Nations Charter and the fundamental norms of customary international law. Contemporary general international law is inextricably linked to the fate of the United Nations. The very foundations of the post-war world order, which were established during the summer months of 1945 after the end of the Second World War, have been shaken. As regards the evaluation of the new situation since 2003, there is no unanimity among the various nations of the world. This divergence of fundamental positions on the future of international order, which runs right through the members of the Security Council, causes structural uncertainties and tensions to an extent that was not anticipated.

The purpose of this volume is to reappraise the findings on the current situation and to give a differentiated picture of the international debate on the future international order.

Professor Dr Bernhard Vogel is Minister President of Thuringia (retd.), Chairman of the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation.

Professor Dr Rudolf Dolzer is Director, Institute of International Law, University of Bonn.

Professor Dr Matthias Herdegen is Director, Institute of International Law, University of Bonn; Visiting Professor at the Global Law School, University of New York and Sorbonne University, Paris; Honorary Professor at University of Santafé de Bogotá.

2008-07-23T13:23:00.005+05:30

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC PROFILE OF INDIAPeeyush Bajpai, Laveesh Bhandari and Aali Sinha

185 pages 277x212 mm Hardback Full Colour 84 colour-coded maps
Rs 1495
ISBN 978-81-87358-16-9
ECONOMICS, DEMOGRAPHY, SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS, GENDER STUDIES
Pub date June 2005

Also available as ebook at: http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/social_and_economic_profile_of_india/

Social & Economic Profile of India is the only book of its kind on India in Economic Geography. According to a reviewer, ‘there are some strong GIS systems, and there are strong spatial databases. This book is the first time these have come together in a satisfactory fashion.’

A singular contribution of Social & Economic Profile of India lies in the quality of its presentation. A very complex and a very wide range of data and analysis has been put forward with remarkable clarity and in a very reader friendly way. This state of the art data and analysis (which offers many surprises), gives an almost complete picture of the socio-economic conditions of India in just 173 pages. These 173 pages consist of 84 colour coded maps with a corresponding text in colour. This text is both brief, lucid, and to the point. This book is the work of great scholarship but made accessible to a wide section of readers. It tells the story of what India has achieved since 1991. The information on India’s development is of great relevance in the international scene today.

The subjects covered are of enormous public interest and also extremely useful for the framing of public policies. This book is equally indispensable to all the state departments of the government and to Indian companies wishing to invest in particular areas as well as foreign corporate organisations that wish to invest in India. It goes without saying that the researcher will find this comprehensive body of data and analysis very useful. Anyone wishing to go deeper into a particular problem has been directed to go to the relevant sources.

Peeyush Bajpai is author of many reports and studies on Indian economic geography.

Laveesh Bhandari has taught in the Boston University and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.

Aali Sinha is a researcher at Indicus Analytics.

‘An attractively packaged new volume of single-page notes on various social and economic indicators brought out by the Social Science Press….’
-Business Standard, 18 August 2005‘Social Science Press has done an equally remarkable job of bringing world-class paper and printing to bear on this problem. As little as five to ten years ago, it was not possible to envision a book like this about India, but this has now become a reality…’
- Economic and Political Weekly, 22 April 2006

2008-07-23T13:11:00.004+05:30

LIVED ISLAM IN SOUTH ASIAAdaptation, Accommodation and Conflict
Edited by Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld

334 pages 215x140 mm Hardback

Rs 695
ISBN 978-81-87358-15-2
SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS, RELIGION, CONFLICT, ETHNIC STUDIES
Pub date 2004

Also available as ebook at: http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/lived_islam_in_south_asia/

Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation and Conflict is an extremely timely and important publication. Fourteen interesting papers, based on intensive fieldwork in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India, explore a highly controversial subject. They touch on the everyday religious lives of the Muslims in these countries.

The book argues that Islam cannot be understood through the works of theologians alone, for whom it is a formal, uniform and rigid system of beliefs and practices. Popular Islam, or Islam as it is practised by millions of Muslims in South Asia, has an empirical validity and is a dynamic process of adjustment and accommodation as well as conflict with other religions, with which it coexists.

Imtiaz Ahmad is former professor of Political Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Helmut Reifeld is India representative of Konrad Adenauer Foundation, New Delhi.‘The articles…provide rich documentation of groups many regionally based, that may not be well known. They not only document ‘lived Islam’ but they are a fruit of ‘lived’ experience on the part of the authors themselves… .’

Biblio, Vol X, nos 7 & 8

2008-07-23T13:07:00.002+05:30

SIKKIM HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2001

Mahendra P. Lama

127 pages 277x212 mm Paperback Text in two colours
Rs 595
ISBN 978-81-87358-04-6
ECONOMICS, SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS, DEMOGRAPHY, DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

VERY LITTLE is known about Sikkim. This book outlines its development since it became a part of the Indian Union in 1975. It covers subjects such as population, poverty and planning; health, education and the status of women; land and agriculture; forest and environment; infrastructure for development such as industry, power and state finance; and governance for sustainable human development.

Mahendra P. Lama is Professor, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

2008-07-23T12:36:00.004+05:30

TAMIL NADU HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT

350 pages 277x212 mm Paperback Text in two colours
Rs 630
ISBN 978-81-87358-14-5
ECONOMICS, SCOIOLOGY, POLITICS, DEMOGRAPHY, DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

THIS IS Tamil Nadu’s first Human Development Report. Tamil Nadu has fared very well in human development among the states in India. It needs to be noted, however, that there are vast variations in the indicators of human development within the state itself.

Factors contributing to human development are disaggregated in this Report, and analysed at the district level. This will enable readers to understand the regional disparities in Tamil Nadu and the reasons behind them. The Report not only puts within one cover, all the various aspects of human development in Tamil Nadu but also seeks to explain why the state has fared well in certain areas and not in others. It also highlights the policy interventions that will be required to correct the imbalances.

Tamil Nadu Human Development Report is a balanced and objective account of the state’s performance and as such, will be of immense value to those planning for growth, social justice and equity in the state, as well as researchers and students of social sciences in university departments and other institutions.

2008-07-23T12:32:00.002+05:30

REFORMING INDIA’S SOCIAL SECTORPoverty, Nutrition, Health And Education
Edited by K. Seeta Prabhu and R. Sudarshan

337 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 690
ISBN 978-81-87358-10-7
ECONOMICS, SOCIOLOGY, HEALTH, EDUCATION, DEMOGRAPHY, GENDER STUDIES

It is widely believed that economic reforms widen inequalities in societies which are already highly unequal and the impact of economic reforms on social sectors, particularly in developing economies like India, has therefore been a subject of great concern These economies, it is argued, face the double problem of poverty, deprivation and inequality on the one hand and cutbacks in fiscal expenditures (to prune budgetary expenditures) on the other. This book addresses this problem, drawing out the debates in each of the themes of poverty alleviation, nutrition, health and education with the use of theoretical and empirical analysis.

K. Seeta Prabhu is Professor of Development Economics, University of Mumbai and Head, Human Development Resource Centre, UNDP, New Delhi.
R. Sudarshan is Adviser, Access to Justice, Oslo Governance Centre, Oslo.

2008-07-23T12:25:00.004+05:30

DYNAMICS OF BANK DEPOSITSThe Developing States in India
Debesh Roy

200 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 595
ISBN 978-81-87358-11-4
ECONOMICS, SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS

Dynamics of Bank Deposits: The Developing States in India points out that there is ample scope for faster mobilisation of deposits in the rural centres – the unbanked and underbanked areas – where bank deposit is the only profitable savings instrument available. The data presented in this book is enriched by a comparative analysis of the growth of bank deposits in ten selected economically developed states, and in ten developing areas for the years 1973 and 1999.

The economically developed states studied were Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Delhi and the developing areas examined were Assam, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Orissa, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

Debesh Roy is a Ph.D in Economics and has a vast experience in the financial sector. He is manager at National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD).

2008-07-18T16:48:00.005+05:30

HUMAN SECURITY IN SOUTH ASIAGender, Energy, Migration and GlobalisationEdited by P. R. Chari and Sonika Gupta

200 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 630
ISBN 978-81-87358-09-1
POLITICS, HUMAN RIGHTS, ENERGY, MIGRATION STUDIES

THE WORD SECURITY has a military connotation and refers to the activities involved in protecting or defending a country, in which the state has a central role. This book argues that the state provides as well as threatens security. Therefore, it needs to be checked and balanced by broadening the concept of security to include both military and non-military threats such as those related to social, economic, ecological and political causes.

P.R. Chari is Director, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi and Visiting Fellow Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

Sonika Gupta is Research Officer, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies.

2008-07-18T16:45:00.002+05:30

WTO AGREEMENT AND INDIAN AGRICULTUREEdited by Anwarul Hoda

235 pages 215x140 mm Hardback

Rs 660
ISBN 978-81-87358-07-7
ECONOMICS, POLITICS, TRADE, LAW, AGRICULTURE

IN INDIA, the WTO Agreement has been dogged by controversy from the very beginning.

This volume attempts to capture this ongoing debate. An interesting feature of this book is that it is interactive. Nine papers on the subject have been interspersed with arguments and counterarguments on them to flesh out the various strands in the controversy making it comprehensible to the interested reader while placing a wealth of data before the expert.

Anwarul Hoda, former Deputy Director-General in the WTO, and Professor, the Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations (ICRIER), New Delhi.

2008-07-18T16:41:00.002+05:30

TRADE, FINANCE AND INVESTMENT IN SOUTH ASIAEdited by T. N. Srinivasan

487 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 780
ISBN 978-81-87358-05-3
ECONOMICS, FINANCE, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, TRADE, POLITICS

THIS BOOK contains an important set of papers covering subjects such as the impact of changing global trade policies on India; charting a free trade area in South Asia; India’s informal trade with Bangladesh and Nepal; India-Bangladesh bilateral trade; a plan to strengthen regional trade cooperation in South Asia with special reference to India and Pakistan; a comparative analysis of the Chinese and Indian experience of multinational and expatriate foreign direct investment; foreign direct investment and economic integration in the SAARC region and health policy challenges for India.

All these papers are then placed within an overall perspective in an original paper by T. N. Srinivasan ‘Issues in Trade and Finance in South Asia’.

T. N. Srinivasan is Samuel C. Park Jr Professor of Economics at Yale University.

2008-07-18T16:38:00.002+05:30

MIDDLE CLASS VALUES IN INDIA AND WESTERN EUROPEEdited by Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld

250 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 510
ISBN 978-81-87358-13-8

COMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

THIRTEEN EXTREMELY interesting essays discuss what constitutes the middle classes, and distinguishes their values and way of life in France, Germany and India.

Imtiaz Ahmad is former professor of Political Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Helmut Reifeld is India representative of Konrad Adenauer Foundation, New Delhi.

2008-07-18T16:30:00.004+05:30

THE EVERYDAY POLITICS OF LABOURWorking Lives In India’s Informal EconomyGeert De Neve

365 pages 225x145 mm Hardback
Rs 795
ISBN 978-81-87358-18-3

SOCIOLOGY, ECONOMICS, GENDER STUDIES

The Everyday Politics of Labour : Working Lives in India’s Informal Economy presents an analysis of contemporary labour politics in India’s informal economy. Following increased integration in global economic networks, India’s informal sectors, in some parts of the country, have expanded drastically over recent decades and are employing an increasing number of the country’s working population.

The book presents a powerful critique of simplifying representations that portray workers’ politics in this informal sector as marked by low levels of class consciousness, limited abilities for resistance, and ruled by ‘primordial’ relations of caste, kinship and patronage.
Drawing on detailed ethnographic accounts of three textile industries in Tamil Nadu, collected during two and a half years of fieldwork between 1995 and 2000, the author describes everyday labour activism, explores the character of trade unionism and individualized forms of resistance, and depicts the political culture of the shop floor. A recurrent theme of the book is that a preoccupation with relations of production (or class relations) has for too long marginalized the study of relations in production. The latter focuses on the ways in
which relations of hierarchy, authority, class and gender are enacted on a day-to-day basis
within the workplace, and how they intertwine with neighbourhood and community relations.

Interesting case studies illustrate how labour politics have been shaped both by the social mobility of some communities and the increased feminization of some occupations.
While castes in the dyeing industries, which were considered to be polluting, have become owners of dyeing factories, gender patterns in the handloom factories have been reversed as men have moved out to power loom sectors in search of better-paid jobs.

Geert De Neve is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex.

‘With this book, de Neve has established himself as a skilled analyst, able to relate the fine detail of workers’ daily lives to the big debates about development and progress.’

Barbara Harriss-White in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 13, 2007

2008-07-18T16:01:00.001+05:30

CHILDREN’S LIFEWORLDSGender, Welfare and Labour in the Developing World
Olga Nieuwenhuys

‘Children’s Lifeworlds is a landmark. It represents a depth of fieldwork exploration that enables the author… to challenge current definitions of child labour and to offer insights based on the analysis of details of children’s work…’
- Pamela Reynolds

Olga Nieuwenhuys is a staff member of the Amsterdam Research School on Global Issues and Development Research (AGIDS) and teaches at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands).

RIGHTS NOT AVAILABLE
228 pages 232x155 mm Hardback
Rs 510
ISBN 978-81-87358-01-5
SOCIOLOGY, HUMAN RIGHTS, GENDER STUDIES, LABOUR LAW

2008-07-17T14:41:00.001+05:30

VIRAMMALife of a Dalit
Viramma, Josiane Racine, Jean-Luc Racine

RIGHTS NOT AVAILABLE
331 pages 232x155 mm Paperback
Rs 325
ISBN 978-81-87358-19-0
SOCIOLOGY, GENDER STUDIES, CULTURE STUDIES

THIS IS THE first Indian edition of this remarkable book which created a great impact in France and was subsequently translated into English and Italian. This edition carries a fresh Afterword by Jean-Luc and Josiane Racine.
Viramma, an untouchable woman by birth, and listed as one of the authors, narrated the story of her life over a period of ten years to Josiane Racine, a Tamil-born ethnomusicologist educated in France. This book is the result of that conversation.

Viramma, was an untouchable woman, an agricultural labourer, grandmother, and until recently lived in Karani in Tamil Nadu. She died in November 2000.
Josiane Racine researches popular culture in South India.
Jean-Luc Racine is Senior Fellow, Centre for Indian Studies, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

2008-07-17T14:38:00.001+05:30

RELIGION AND PERSONAL LAW IN SECULAR INDIAA Call to Judgement
Edited by Gerald James Larson

RIGHTS NOT AVAILABLE
376 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 630
ISBN 978-81-87358-06-0
SOCIOLOGY, RELIGION, LAW

THIS BOOK provides a comprehensive look into the issues and challenges that India faces as it tries to put a uniform civil code into practice. Scholars representing a wide range of disciplines, from both North America and India, provide perspective on complex issues of multiculturalism that characterizes Indian society and identities. Readers seeking a deeper understanding of Indian history and culture will find a sensitive handling of the tensions between religious law and the claims of a modern, secular state in this timely volume.

Gerald James Larson is Rabindranath Tagore Professor of Indian Culture and Civilization, and Director of India Studies programme at Indiana University, Bloomington.

2008-07-17T14:29:00.001+05:30

RESISTANCE AND THE STATENepalese Experiences
Edited by David N. Gellner

RIGHTS NOT AVAILABLE
365 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 630
ISBN 978-81-87358-08-4
SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

THE CONTRIBUTORS to this volume illuminate the complex relationship – sometimes wary, sometimes accommodative, sometimes violent – between a modernizing, developmentalist state and the people it professes to represent and benefit. This book covers subjects such as state, development and local politics, state and ethic activism, and state and Maoist insurgency. It also contains an important introductory paper on the transformation of the Nepalese state by David N. Gellner.

David N. Gellner is Lecturer, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford.

2008-07-17T14:14:00.000+05:30

INCOME-POVERTY AND BEYONDHuman Development in India
Edited by Raja J. Chelliah and R. Sudarshan

RIGHTS NOT AVAILABLE
221 pages 215x140 mm Hardback
Rs 510
ISBN 978-81-87358-00-8
SOCIOLOGY, ECONOMICS, GENDER STUDIES, POLITICS

THE BOOK emphasizes the need to go beyond the conventional definition of poverty and look at the various human aspects of the problem. Eminent social scientists study poverty in its wider sense, in the light of the latest data available for India.

Raja J. Chelliah is Professor Emeritus, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi and Chairperson, Madras School of Economics.
R. Sudarshan is Adviser, Access to Justice, Oslo Governance Centre, Oslo.