What the Body Remembers


Shauna Singh Baldwin - 1999
    So she is elated to learn she is to become the second wife of a wealthy Sikh landowner in a union beneficial to both. For Sardaji’s first wife, Satya, has failed to bear him children. Roop believes that she and Satya, still very much in residence, will be friends. But the relationship between the older and younger woman is far more complex. And, as India lurches toward independence, Sardarji struggles to find his place amidst the drastic changes.Meticulously researched and beautifully written, What the Body Remembers is at once poetic, political, feminist, and sensual.

How India Sees The World


Shyam Saran - 2017
    In this magisterial book, Saran discerns the threads that tie together his experiences as a diplomat.In his book, part memoir and part thesis on India’s international relations since Independence, Shyam Saran discerns the threads that tie together his experiences as a diplomat. Using the prism of Kautilya’s Arthashastra and other ancient treatises on statecraft, Saran shows the historical sources of India’s worldview. He looks at India’s neighbourhood and the changing wider world through this lens and arrives at fascinating conclusions — the claims that the world is hurtling towards Chinese unipolarity are overblown; international borders are becoming irrelevant as climate change and cyber terror bypass them; and India shouldn’t hold its breath for a resolution to its border disputes with China and Pakistan in the foreseeable future. The book also takes the reader behind the closed doors — from Barack Obama popping by a tense developing-country strategy meeting at the Copenhagen climate change summit to the private celebratory dinner thrown by then US President George W. Bush for then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the success of the nuclear deal.Praise For The Book - ‘Part history, part memoir, How India Sees the World is an illuminating and at times controversial insight into the thinking of one of India’s great diplomats and civil servants. A vigorous defender of India’s national interests, Shyam Saran offers us a unique and candid view of policy deliberations at the highest levels of the Indian government. He rightly argues for a deeper understanding of China and the historic factors which inform and shape its strategic behaviour today. Moreover, Ambassador Saran provides a timely overview of the contemporary challenges facing global politics, including but not limited to cyberspace, climate change and outer space. This is a strong contribution from a fine strategic thinker’ – *Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia*‘As an insightful, acute and erudite description of the well-springs of Indian foreign policy, Shyam Saran’s How India Sees the World is unmatched. Drawing on his deep experience in crucial positions and his undoubted intellectual gifts, this book is required reading for anyone interested in India’s role in the world, and the future of Asia and the world. His familiarity with traditional Indian statecraft, and his focus on China - a country he is familiar with and has studied for over forty years - makes for fascinating and thought-provoking reading. A must read and an essential addition to any library on modern India’ – *Shivshankar Menon, former national security advisor of India*

Untouchable


Mulk Raj Anand - 1935
    This novel describes a day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, as he searches for a meaning to the tragic existence he has been born into - and comes to an unexpected conclusion.

1984: India's Guilty Secret


Pav Singh - 2017
    The sheer scale of the killings exceeded the combined civilian death tolls of other conflicts such as Tiananmen Square and 9/11. In Delhi alone 3,000 people were killed. Thirty-three years on, the full extent of what took place has yet to be fully acknowledged.Based on victim testimonies and official accounts, this book exposes how the largest mass crime against humanity in India’s modern history was perpetrated by politicians and covered up with the help of the police, judiciary and media.A book that posits fundamental questions, it will shake you to the core.

BOSE OR GANDHI: Who Got India Her Freedom?


G.D. Bakshi - 2018
    The author has painstakingly analysed the documents now available in the British Transfer of Power Archives. He has methodically identified the key British decision makers in London and New Delhi in the critical period from 1945-1947, and examined their letters and reports about the INA trials and their violent aftermath (November-December 1945) and then the mutiny in the Royal Indian Navy (February 1946). Relevant letters from the Viceroy and military appreciation of the situation by Fd Mshl Auchinleck, alongwith reports from the Governors of the various provinces, as also the report of the Director IB, have been reproduced in the original alongwith Letters from the Prime minister Lord Clement Attlee and Secretary of state for India, Pethik Lawerence. The documentary paper trail is chillingly clear. The British were shaken by the wide spread violence in support of the INA and the serious question mark it raised about the continued loyalty of some 2.5 million Indian soldiers then being de-mobilized after the war. There were less than 40,000 British troops in India then. They were war-weary and home-sick. How could they have quelled a revolt by 2.5 million combat hardened Indian Soldiers? It was this stark maths that forced the British to leave when they did. Nelson Mandela in South Africa, continued with the non-violent methods of the Mahatma. Unfortunately South Africa got its freedom only in April 1994. The unfortunate fact is that the British left but handed over power to an anglophile elite that faithfully carried on with the narratives and constructs of the Raj.

Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity


Chandra Talpade Mohanty - 2003
    This collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of transnational feminist practice toward anticapitalist struggles.Feminism without Borders opens with Mohanty's influential critique of western feminism ("Under Western Eyes") and closes with a reconsideration of that piece based on her latest thinking regarding the ways that gender matters in the racial, class, and national formations of globalization. In between these essays, Mohanty meditates on the lives of women workers at different ends of the global assembly line (in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States); feminist writing on experience, identity, and community; dominant conceptions of multiculturalism and citizenship; and the corporatization of the North American academy. She considers the evolution of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and Race and Ethnic Studies; pedagogies of accommodation and dissent; and transnational women's movements for grassroots ecological solutions and consumer, health, and reproductive rights.Mohanty's probing and provocative analyses of key concepts in feminist thought—"home," "sisterhood," "experience," "community"—lead the way toward a feminism without borders, a feminism fully engaged with the realities of a transnational world.

The Way We Never Were: American Families & the Nostalgia Trap


Stephanie Coontz - 1992
    Placing current family dilemmas in the context of far-reaching economic, political, and demographic changes, Coontz sheds new light on such contemporary concerns as parenting, privacy, love, the division of labor along gender lines, the black family, feminism, and sexual practice.

Provoked


Kiranjit Ahluwalia - 2007
    The next 10 years were to be a nightmare, on a daily basis of physical, mental and sexual abuse. This book is her story, and how a group of women got together to petition against the sentence, and ultimately succeeded in helping her.

ABSOLUTE POWER - Inside story of the National Stock Exchange’s amazing success, leading to hubris, regulatory capture and algo scam.


Sucheta Dalal - 2021
    

Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West


Benazir Bhutto - 2008
    Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West

The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work


Miliann Kang - 2010
    Encounters like this occur thousands of times across the United States in nail salons increasingly owned and operated by Asian immigrants. This study looks closely for the first time at these intimate encounters, focusing on New York City, where such nail salons have become ubiquitous. Drawing from rich and compelling interviews, Miliann Kang takes us inside the nail industry, asking such questions as: Why have nail salons become so popular? Why do so many Asian women, and Korean women in particular, provide these services? Kang discovers multiple motivations for the manicure-from the pampering of white middle class women to the artistic self-expression of working class African American women to the mass consumption of body-related services. Contrary to notions of beauty service establishments as spaces for building community among women, The Managed Hand finds that while tentative and fragile solidarities can emerge across the manicure table, they generally give way to even more powerful divisions of race, class, and immigration.

Unlikely Hero: Om Puri


Nandita C. Puri - 2009
    Discover the Om Puri no one knows about - the tongue-tied actor from Punjab with stars in his eyes; the incorrigible flirt in drama school; the connoisseur of food and expert cook; and the complete family man. Featuring amusing anecdotes with his family, shocking episodes with the stalwarts of Indian and British cinema, and the nail-biting suspense of his love life, the tale is complemented by rare and unusual photographs. Told with wit, honesty, and élan, this book is a fitting tribute to the inspirational tale of Om Puri - one of the most talented actors of India.

Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression


Tithi BhattacharyaSerap Saritas Oran - 2017
    While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression.In this book, leading writers such as Lise Vogel, Nancy Fraser, David McNally and Susan Ferguson reveal the ways in which daily and generational reproductive labour, found in households, schools, hospitals and prisons, also sustains the drive for accumulation.Presenting a more sophisticated alternative to intersectionality, these essays provide ideas which have important strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists and feminists attempting to find a path through the seemingly ever more complex world we live in.

Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story


Martin Luther King Jr. - 1957
    Although it attempts to interpret what happened it does not purport to be a detailed survey of the historical and sociological aspects of the Montgomery story. .This is not a drama with only one actor. More precisely it is the chronicle of 50,000 Blacks who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth. It is the story of Negro leaders of many faiths and divided allegiances, who came together in the bond of a cause they knew was right. And of the Negro followers, many of them beyond middle age, who walked to work and home again as much as 12 miles a day for over a year rather than submit to the discourtesies and humiliation of segregated buses. .There is also another side to the picture: it is the white community of Montgomery, long led or intimidated by a few extremists, that finally turned in disgust on the perpetrators of crime in the name of segregation. The change should not be exaggerated...Yet by the end of the bus struggle it was clear that the vast majority of Montgomery whites preferred peace and law to the excesses performed in its name. And even though the many saw segregation as right because it was the tradition, there were always the courageous few who saw the injustice and fought against it side by side with Blacks.

Medieval India - From Sultanat to the Mughals - Part One - Delhi Sultanat (1206-1526)


Satish Chandra - 2007
    The author has tried to bridge the gap between historical research and popular perception of this controversial phase in Indian history.