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The Song Seekers
As the monsoon rains wash over the city of Kolkata, four women sit and read and talk in the kitchen of Kailash—the old mansion of the Chattopadhyays where Uma comes to live after her marriage in the summer of 1962. Her husband’s silence about his mother and the childhood tragedy that beckons him from the shadowy landing of Kailash, the embroidered handkerchiefs in an old soap box in her father-in-law’s room and the presence of the old, green-eyed Pishi intrigue Uma. But it is only as she begins to read aloud the traditional Chandimangal composed by her husband’s grandfather to celebrate the goddess that the smothered stories begin to emerge... The novel weaves in the history of the militant goddess recast as wife, the Portuguese in Bengal, the rise of print and the making of memories from the swadeshi movement to the turbulent sixties in Bengal as Uma discovers that the foundation of Kailash is not only very deep but also camouflages the stink of death. Published by Zubaan.
Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?
On a cold February night in 1991, a group of soldiers and officers of the Indian Army pushed their way into two villages in Kashmir, seeking out militants assumed to be hiding there. They pulled the men out of their homes and subjected many to torture, and the women to rape. According to village accounts, as many as 31 women were raped. Twenty-one years later, in 2012, the rape and murder of a young medical student in Delhi galvanized a protest movement so widespread and deep that it reached all corners of the world. In Kashmir, a group of young women, all in their twenties, were inspired to re-open the Kunan-Poshpora case, to revisit their history and to look at what had happened to the survivors of the 1991 mass rape. Through personal accounts of their journey, this book examines questions of justice, of stigma, of the responsibility of the state, and of the long-term impact of trauma.
Icky, Yucky, Mucky!
Maharaja Icky is quite the most disgusting King you’ll ever have the misfortune to meet. The ruler of the kingdom of Icktapur regales all with his utterly vile table manners. While he sits licking curry from hand to elbow and juggling rosogullas, his beloved nail-nibbling queen Maharani Yucky, joins him. Banned from using spoons or nail cutters, the people of Icktapur are at their wits’ end. But their hopes rise when the announcement comes that the Maharani is expecting a little baby... With gleefully gross illustrations by highly acclaimed children’s illustrator Anitha Balachandran, Icky, Yucky, Mucky! will have children squirming in their chairs and yelling with delight. And perhaps, learning a lesson or two in table manners! Published by Zubaan.
Dust of the Caravan
Dust of the Caravan is a selection of writings by Anis Kidwai sketching the personal and political journey of a Muslim woman through the first eight decades of the 20th century. In Kidwai’s often humorous and always incisive and compassionate telling of the travels that took her from a birth and upbringing in rural Awadh into the maelstrom of Partition and its aftermath, lies a rich tapestry of tales. Simultaneously a social history of life in rural Awadh in the early 20th century and the birth of the national movement in the region as well as an account of the traditions of mutual respect and understanding between different faiths in a shared culture and the rupture of those very traditions during Partition, this book is also the story of a woman’s journey from the home into the world and from ‘family values’ towards autonomous beliefs, friendships, and activism. In addition to its value as a literary work, Dust of the Caravan is an important resource in the fields of history, sociology, and gender studies.
Undoing Impunity
The Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia research project (coordinated by Zubaan and supported by the International Development Research Centre) brings together, for the first time in the region, a vast body of knowledge on this important - yet silenced - subject. Six country volumes (one each on Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and two on India, as well as two standalone volumes) comprising over fifty research papers and two book-length studies, detail the histories of sexual violence and look at the systemic, institutional, societal, individual and community structures that work together to perpetuate impunity for perpetrators. In this remarkable and wide-ranging study, activi...
No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy
The constructed “naturalness” of a world made up of two sexes, two genders, and heterosexual desire as the only legitimate desire has been continuously questioned and challenged by those marginalised by these norms. This forces us to ask some important questions: How is gender really understood and constructed in the world that we inhabit? How does it operate through the various socio-political-cultural structures around us? And, most crucially, how is it lived? No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy answers these questions with a research study that attempts to understand gender through the lives of queer persons assigned gender female at birth. The lived realities of the respondents, echoing ...
Intimate City
A profile of the history of sex work and the sexual economy in Mumbai, India's cultural and financial capital. In Intimate City, Manjima Bhattacharjya examines how globalization and technology have changed where and how sexual commerce is transacted. She maps offline and online geographies of sex work and unearths new perspectives: from changing red-light areas to the world of escort services; from the experiences of massage boys to men in search of casual encounters cruising the internet highways. Through these fascinating narratives, Bhattacharjya analyzes how the internet has reconfigured intimacies in the digital age. In doing so, she offers a new lens to look at long-held feminist understandings of sex work, choice, consent, and agency against the backdrop of the "maximum city" of Mumbai.
Doing Time with Nehru
The midnight knock on the door and the disappearance of a loved one into the hands of authorities is a 20th-century horror story familiar to many destined to “live in interesting times.” Yet, some stories remain untold. Such is the account of the internment of ethnic Chinese who had settled for many years in northern India. When the Sino-Indian Border War of 1962 broke out, over 2,000 Chinese-Indians were rounded up, placed in local jails, then transported over a thousand miles away to the Deoli internment camp in the Rajasthan Desert. Born in Calcutta in 1949, and raised in Darjeeling, Yin Marsh was just thirteen years old when first her father was arrested, and then she, her grandmothe...
The Fear that Stalks
This book is an attempt to understand the causes, nature and consequences of gender-based violence in public spaces. It provides a framework that locates gender based violence within the politics and dynamics of public space, and helps us to understand the commonality between these diverse forms of violence, ranging from sexual harassment, sexual assault, moral policing, 'honour' killing, acid throwing, witch hunting, parading naked, tonsuring, rape and homicide. The writers unpack and examine the idea of a 'public' space: although by and large a notional space, they begin by identifying it as the geographical space between the home and the workplace and then, go beyond this to look at the violation faced by homeless women and girls who live on the streets, as well as those who work in public spaces in the unorganised sector. Published by Zubaan.
Mahuldiha Days
Set in the forests of northern Odisha, Mahuldia Days is the moving story of a young civil servant caught between her commitment to the tribal communities she knows are the original inhabitants of the forest, and the monolithic state, oblivious to the diverse realities of life on the ground. The moonlit Brahmani river snakes through the story with a life of its own while the city of the narrator’s childhood returns to her in dreams. Agnihotri creates a poignant, intense narrative layered with an awareness of the pressures of motherhood and personal love. Praise for Anita Agnihotri: “Agnihotri draws you in with her well fleshed out characters. Their dreams, idiosyncrasies and disappointments are all too real; as are their failures.” — Aparna Singh, Women’s Web “Urgently told and precise in their direction... Each story crackles with intensity and purpose.” — Mike McClelland, Spectrum Culture “[Anita Agnihotri] sensitively and beautifully chronicles the plight of a major chunk of the country’s population.” — Abdullah Khan, The Hindu
