Uneasy Translations: Self, Experience and Indian Literature interweaves the personal journey of an academic into reflections around self, language and translation with an eye on the intangibly available category of experience. It dwells on quieter modes of being political, of making knowledge democratic and of seeing gendered language in the everyday. In an unusual combination of real-life incidents and textual examples, it provides a palimpsest of what it is to be in a classroom;...

Fateema opened her diary and began writing: “Jihad as mentioned by the Prophet is a war against injustice and oppression. Islam means peace and surrender. Islam does not recommend killing innocent people. The Prophet released hundreds of slaves from bondage and sent themback to their native land.”There was a lot more she could write. She would one day. Not for others, but to her own people she would explain the meaning of the word ‘Islam’.For a bright young woman like Fateema Lokhandwala, the...

How does India live through the oddity of being both a nation and multilingual? Is multilingualism in India to be understood as a neatly laid set of discrete languages or a criss-crossing of languages that runs through every source language and text? The questions take us to reviewing what is meant by language, multilingualism, and translation. Challenging these institutions, A Multilingual Nation illustrates how the received notions of translation discipline do not apply to India. It prov...

Unlike most partition narratives, the narratives of the Sindhis is not marked by violence and bloodshed. The Hindus of Sindh came to India by ship, camel and train, and were unharmed most of the time. The Burden of Refuge is about Partition, and the resettlement and fragmentation of the Sindhi Hindus of India. Rita Kothari traces the trajectory of the Sindhi Hindus from Sindh to India, specifically to Gujarat. The Burden of Refuge tells the story of the Sindhi Hindus of Gajarat beginning w...

Situated in northern Kutch in Gujarat, the Banni grasslands lie on the border dividing India and Pakistan. It is home to diverse communities; while Muslim pastoralists form the majority, one also finds Dalit Hindus, and a community that is neither Hindu nor Muslim. Banni’s people, have for centuries, moved freely between Sindh (Pakistan) and Kutch (India)—a reason why, perhaps, the Indo-Pak border has not been able to produce a sense of bounded citizenship in them. While still referring to ‘S...

The cultural universe of urban, English-speaking middle class in India shows signs of growing inclusiveness as far as English is concerned. This phenomenon manifests itself in increasing forms of bilingualism (combination of English and one Indian language) in everyday forms of speech - advertisement jingles, bilingual movies, signboards, and of course conversations. It is also evident in the startling prominence of Indian Writing in English and somewhat less visibly, but steadily rising, ...

The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies innovatively combines the ways in which scholars from fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology, religious studies, literary studies, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics have integrated the study of Sikhism within a wide range of critical and postcolonial perspectives on the nature of religion, violence, gender, ethno-nationalism, and revisionist historiography. A number of essays within this collection also provide a mor...

This book brings together new approaches to the study of Sikh religion, culture and ethnicity being pursued in the diaspora by Sikh academics in western universities in Britain and North America. An important aspect of the volume is the diversity of topics that are engaged - including film and gender theory, theology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, semiotics and race theory - and brought to bear on the individual contributors' specialism within Sikh studies, thereby helping to explode previ...

A Nobel Laureate offers a dazzling new book about his native countryIndia is a country with many distinct traditions, widely divergent customs, vastly different convictions, and a veritable feast of viewpoints. In The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen draws on a lifetime study of his country's history and culture to suggest the ways we must understand India today in the light of its rich, long argumentative tradition.The millenia-old texts and inter...

Renowned as the predominant farmers and landlords of Punjab, and long possessed of an autocthonous agricultural identity, Jat Sikhs today often live urban and diasporiclives. Rural Nostalgias and Transnational Dreams examines the formation and meaning of Jat Sikh identity in the contemporary Indian city.Nicola Mooney describes a number of Jat Sikh social practices and narratives through which contemporary notions of identity are developed. She contextualizes these elements...

**New York Times Best SellerLonglisted for the Man Booker PrizeNamed a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Amazon, Kirkus, The Washington Post, Newsday, and the Hudson GroupA dazzling, richly moving new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The God of Small Things**The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey of many years across the Indian subcontinent—from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and th...

**National Book Award FinalistWinner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction AwardWinner of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation AwardWinner of the Anisfield-Wolf AwardWinner of the Bard Fiction PrizeOne of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the YearOne of Granta’s Best Young American NovelistsA Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the YearPEN Cente...