Vibrant, dynamic, spirited and forceful. The contemporary women’s movement in India, which began in the late 1970s protested against the dark times, the violence and the misogyny. It also colourfully celebrated liberation, solidarity among women and breaking the shackles of patriarchy. It sang, performed and painted, to draw attention to the burning issues of the time: dowry death, widow immolation, acid throwing and rape. Over the past three decades, the women’s movement has matured and broa...

‘Women are often the worst affected by militarisation but their stories rarely get heard. Garrisoned Minds, which brings together insights and analysis from some of the major conflict zones of South Asia, is a welcome and valuable corrective, one which must be read by both policy-makers and the public.’— Siddharth Varadarajan, Founding Editor of thewire.inMilitarisation and violence as a response to conflict are now part of the glo...

Mainstream feminist discourse has failed to fully engage with commercial sex work. In a series of groundbreaking, previously unpublished essays, The Business of Sex corrects this lacuna. Moving beyond the traditional feminist focus on slavery and trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and other health issues, the contributors to this volume engage fully with the political and theoretical implications of sex work. Dismissing old antagonisms, they argue that feminism thanks to its role in revolutionizi...

Indians wryly admit that ‘India grows at night’. But that is only half the saying, the full expression is: ‘India grows at night… when the government sleeps’, suggesting that the nation may be rising despite the state. India’s is a tale of private success and public failure. Prosperity is, indeed, spreading across the country even as governance failure pervades public life. But how could a nation become one of the world’s fastest-growing economies when it’s governed by a weak, ineffective sta...

Sunil Khilnani’s exciting book addresses the paradoxes and ironies that have surrounded the project of inventing India—a project that has brought Indians considerable political freedom and carried their enormous democracy to the verge of being Asia’s greatest free state but that has also left many of them in poverty and that is now threatened by divisive religious nationalism. Khilnani’s superb historical analysis conveys modern India’s energy, fluidity, and unpredictability—in its democracy ...

In this comprehensive and authoritative study of terrorism in Sri Lanka, K.M. de Silva turns the spotlight on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and its role in Sri Lanka’s upheavals over the last few decades. While tracing the emergence of this separatist group and the events that led to its recent collapse, de Silva also seeks to explore the complex relationship between the so-called moderates in Sri Lankan Tamil politics and the Tamil terrorist groups. What emerges is a layered po...

THE WORLD THROUGH A FEMINIST LENS For Nivedita Menon, feminism is not about a moment of final triumph over patriarchy but about the gradual transformation of the social field so decisively that old markers shift forever. From sexual harassment charges against international figures to the challenge that caste politics poses to feminism, from the ban on the veil in France to the attempt to impose skirts on international women badminton players, from queer politics to domestic servants’ union...

The conventional wisdom in Bihar’s political circles was that development did not win votes. Nitish Kumar challenged that assumption and changed the face of the state. Born into a humble family in Bakhtiyarpur; Nitish joined the Lohiaite Socialist Party and built his constituency; literally day by day; forgoing a stable job to travel to distant villages; suffering both financial hardship and ridicule for the eight years it took him to win people’s confidence. Veteran journalist Arun Sinha tel...

Twenty years ago India was still generally thought of as an archetypal developing country, home to the largest number of poor people of any country in the world, and beset by problems of low economic growth, casteism and violent religious conflict. Now India is being feted as an economic power-house which might well become the second largest economy in the world before the middle of this century. Its democratic traditions, moreover, remain broadly intact.How and why has this histor...

Hidden behind the much-touted success story of India’s emergence as an economic superpower is another, far more complex narrative of the nation’s recent history, one in which economic development is frequently countered by profoundly unsettling, and often violent, political movements. In Democracy against Development, Jeffrey Witsoe investigates this counter-narrative, uncovering an antagonistic relationship between recent democratic mobilization and development-oriented governanc...

The Indian constitution seeks to prevent the perpetuation of caste and build a casteless social system. But this has not happened over the fifty-odd years since Indian independence, and shows little sign of happening in the near future. Therefore no understanding of Indian politics is possible without a thorough understanding of the complexities of caste. The aim of this book is to bring about such an understanding. This volume offers state-of-the-art essays on the subject of caste and pol...

India has one of the fastest growing economies on earth. Over the past three decades, socialism has been replaced by pro-business policies as the way forward. And yet, in this 'new' India, grinding poverty is still a feature of everyday life. Some 450 million people subsist on less than $1.25 per day and nearly half of India's children are malnourished. In his latest book, Atul Kohli, a seasoned scholar of Indian politics and economics, blames this discrepancy on the narrow nature of the r...