This remarkable study focuses on the relationship between forms of prostitution, discourses on law making, and law enforcement practices.

Across the 19th and early 20th centuries, the colonial government in Bombay city formulated laws on prostitution that were enormously repetitive. Activities such as soliciting men, pimping and procuring women and girls for prostitution were banned in identical ways in multiple eras. Across the same hundred years, commercial sex grew vast in scale, and Bombay became a node in a transnational sex trade circuit.

This book argues that while the expansion of Bombay's sex trade over the past century might suggest that laws were simply ineffectual, law making was instead a productive process that sustained particular forms of prostitution. In examining this dimension of colonial governance, Tambe evaluates the uses and limits of Foucault's approach to law and sexuality.

In the last couple of decades, violence as an analytic category has loomed large in the historical, literary, and anthropological scholarship of South Asia.

The challenge of thinking violence in its gendered incarnations fully and in all its complexity is not only theoretical or critical but also irreducibly ethical and political, given the proliferation of civil wars, pogroms and riots, fundamentalist movements, insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, and new technologies of violence and injury. All of these simultaneously feature and help constitute gendered actors and gendered scripts of violence.

States of Trauma seeks to examine this terrain by staging a set of questions. How are we to think about the moral charge that accrues to violence? What is the relationship between violence and non-violence? In considering the moral and affective economy of violence, how may we speak of the seductions of the idioms and practices of militarism and sexualized violence for women? How are these seductions/pleasures distinct from those proffered to men, if indeed they are distinct?

Although there have been notable gains for women globally in the last few decades, gender inequality and gender-based inequities continue to impinge upon girls’ and women’s ability to realize their rights and their full potential as citizens and equal partners in decision-making and development. In fact, for every right that has been established, there are millions of women who do not enjoy it.

In this book, studies from Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are prefaced by an introductory chapter that links current thinking on gender justice to debates on citizenship, entitlements, and law and development. A concluding chapter situates the discussion of gender justice, citizenship, and entitlements in current development debates on poverty alleviation and social exclusion. The book brings together multidisciplinary perspectives from leading feminist scholars of sociology, political science and legal studies, among others, and in doing so, provides new insights for both advocacy and research.

MAITRAYEE MUKHOPADHYAY is the Area Leader for Social Development and Gender Equity in the Department of Development Policy and Practice at the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam.

NAVSHARAN SINGH is Senior Program Officer in the Women’s Rights and Citizenship Program of IDRC, and is based at IDRC’s office in New Delhi.

Following from huge success of Ghose's Tales of Historic Delhi , this is a fun-filled activity book for children from age 5 and up, featuring the popular cast of animal characters that Premola is famous for. A package of fun and education, the book is full of activities with simple instructions and information about Delhi, monuments and history.

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A fun activity book for children with puzzles to learn about the city of Delhi.

This little poori does not want to be eaten!

Buddhu's mother is too busy wiping his nose to notice that the poori she is cooking is almost burnt.

But is this fearless little poori going to hang around waiting to be eaten? 'Bet you can't catch me!' she taunts and she's off!

Outrunning the farmer and his friends, outwitting the rabbit, and outfoxing the fox, Poori thinks she can never be caught! But can she?

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The Magic Key Series

The Magic Key is a series of illustrated folktales retold by India's third President, Dr Zakir Hussain. 'For all children,' he wrote, 'the first books they read are the key to the magic of the world.' Translated into English by the author's great-granddaughter Samina Mishra, these books will delight anyone learning to read for the first time, and are perfect for parents and teachers to read aloud.

The Reproduction and Child Health policy (RCH) in India has been in force since 1995. Coming after the Cairo conference, 1994, the RHC was expected to usher in  'paradigm shift' in India's population policy. From a family welfare programme that has historically been top-down, even coercive, the Indian government projected the RHC to be a participatory, women-centered reproductive health service. Ironically, the policy was devised barely four years after the start of Indian State's tryst with the market development, and was launched into a political environment in ideological transition. This book provides a political analysis of RHC policy, tracking how neo-liberal and purportedly, women-centered reproductive health discourses are positioned against each other.

This wide-ranging collection of voices from India's Northeast is now available in a brand new paperback edition as part of the Zubaan Classics series to celebrate Zubaan's 10th anniversary

When Thangjam Manorama was arrested and killed by the Assam Rifles in July 2004 in Manipur, it unleashed a protest likes of which no one had witnessed before. This was one of the triggers for this collection - to provide a space for women and men from the 'Northeast' to tell us about the issues that confronted them daily, to talk about the pressures, the insecurities, the uncertainties confronting them in an area that has been facing low intensity warfare for decades.

The anger and the frustrations of the Manipuri women who staged that dramatic protest after Manorama's killing have in many ways been vindicated. Each essay in this book brings to mind that troubling image, each contributor points to the Manipuri women, holding them up as a flag of rebellion, of protest, of questioning. Each essay questions issues of nation, identity, of what makes the people of the Northeast so alienated from the 'mainstream'.

Many contributors are writers, academics or activists from the Northeast but there are many are, like the editor, 'outsiders'. But outsiders who share a passion for the region and an intense desire to see change, to see peace.

"It's impossible to cover the import of all the essays in the span of one review. But in short, the book is a brave attempt to cover just about everything there is to know about the region from a concerned citizen's point of view."-- Susan Abraham, DNA

In The Sexual Life of English, Shefali Chandra examines how English became an Indian language. She rejects the idea that English was fully formed before its life in India or that it was imposed from without. Rather, by drawing attention to sexuality and power, Chandra argues that the English language was produced through conflicts over caste, religion, and class. Sentiments and experiences of desire, respectability, conjugality, status, consumption and fashion, came together to create the Indian history of English. The language was shaped by the sexual experiences of Indians and by native attempts to discipline the normative sexual subject. Focusing on the years between 1850 and 1930, Chandra scrutinizes the English-education project as Indians gained the power to direct it themselves. She delves into the history of schools, the composition of the student bodies, and disagreements about curricula, the way that English-educated subjects wrote about English and debates in English and Marathi popular culture. Chandra shows how concerns over linguistic change were popularly voiced in a sexual idiom, how English and the vernacular were separated through the vocabulary of sexual difference, and how the demand for matrimony naturalized the social location of the English language.

The Self-Respect Movement launched by Periyar (E.V.Ramasami Naiker) in 1926 questioned the ways in which the lower castes were systematically excluded from the Indian nation and constructed as the 'Other' by the Brahmin elites. While Periyar's role within the movement has received critical and scholarly attention, women Self-Respecters and the issues they raised have gone largely unnoticed. This collection of essays and fiction by women Self-Respecter translated from the Tamil could serve as the material basis for writing an alternative history of the writing an alternative history of the movement. In mapping the voices of women who identified with movement this anthology helps us arrive at a different and richer understanding of what the Self-Respect movement stood for. There is an urgent need not only to improve upon existing Self respect histories but also to critique the ways in which they have so far been written. This anthology provides a basis for such critique.

“ … the strength of the volume lies in its ability to mesh its diverse theoretical concerns with rich empirical data from all across India …” -- Seminar

This timely volume brings together the work of some of India’s leading feminist economists, historians, political scientists, journalists and anthropologists to investigate the contemporary situation of women in India. It focuses on four broad domains: the cultural, the social, the political and the economic. The writers argue that despite apparently positive indicators of progress in education and paid employment, women’s status has not improved.

Karin Kapadia has taught at the London School of Econmoics, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and at the Unviersities of Sussex and Durham. Her publications include Siva and Her Sisters: Gender, Caste and Class in Rural South India, The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour (co-edited) and Rural Labour Relations in India (co-edited). From January 1999 to November 2001 she worked at the World Bank, Washington D.C., as the South Asia Region Coordinator for Gender and Development.

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.

Set in late 19th century Assam, The Bronze Sword of Tengphakhri Tehsildar is the heroic tale of a Bodo freedom fighter who was, arguably, the first woman revenue collector in British India. It was Indira Goswami's last work of fiction and this is the first-ever English edition, powerfully and sensitively translated from the Assamese by Aruni Kashyap.

"Indira Goswami is one of the pre-eminent literary figures in India and a woman of remarkable courage and conviction... She has also been an important voice in championing women's causes, and has done much to highlight the plight of widows. [She] is one of those rare figures whose achievements as a writer are closely paralleled by their accomplishments as a social and political activist." - Amitav Ghosh

Winner of the Joan Kelley Memorial Prize in Women's History

A huge international controversy followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an expose written by American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country's child wives. The book was translated into more than a dozen languages, and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents. Mrinalini Sinha traces the controversy surrounding Mother India, explaining how the uproar became a catalyst for far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India.

Mrinalini Sinha is Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies at Penn State University.