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 broadened to include a gamut of issues related to women's health, sexuality, the environment, literacy, the impact of religion and communalism on women's lives, political participation, labour rights, disability rights, class and caste issues, and many more. Indeed, feminism meant looking at the world through women's eyes.

This book constructs a pictorial history of the complex and multi-layered women's movement through its visual representation: posters, drawings, pamphlets, reports, brochures, stickers, all writing and photographs. The posters reproduced here are part of Zubaan's Poster Women project, which has attempted to locate and archive as many posters of the movement as possible to be able to visually map the women?s movement and its concerns.

The Poster Women archive can be accessed at www.posterwomen.org.

Kohima, 2007. A young man has been gunned down in cold blood - the latest casualty in the conflict that has scarred the landscape and brutalised the people of Nagaland. Easterine Kire's new novel traces the story of one man's life, from 1937 to the present day. The small incidents of Mose's childhood, his family, the routines and rituals of traditional village life paint an evocative picture of a peaceful way of life, now long-vanished. The coming of a radio into Mose's family?s house marks the beginning of the changes that would connect them to the wider world. They learn of partition, independence, a land called America. Growing up, Mose and his friends become involved in the Naga struggle for Independence, and they are caught in a maelstrom of violence - protest and repression, attacks and reprisals- that ends up ripping communities apart. The herb, bitter wormwood, was traditionally believed to keep bad spirits away. For the Nagas, facing violent struggle all around, it becomes a powerful talisman: "We sure could do with some of that old magic now." Bitter Wormwood gives a poignant insight into the human cost behind the political headlines from one of India's most beautiful and misunderstood regions.

"Easterine Kire is the keeper of her people's memory, their griot. She is a master of the unadorned language that moves because of the power of its evocative simplicity." -- Paul Pimomo

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 Ickhtarpur 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!

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A stunningly illustrated picture book that tells the tale of King Icky, the slobbish King of Ickhtarpur.

Two prominent protests in Manipur by women in recent years, one an individual one and the other a collective one, have brought to national attention the brutalities committed by the armed forces on ordinary citizens under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.
This essay highlights what those protests mean for peace in Manipur, and how women have played a critical role in exposing the impunity with which human rights are violated under the exceptional circumstances created by the AFSPA. It also questions the unethical nature of militarization and the patriarchal nature of the State.
Broadly containing two segments, it gives a background to Irom Sharmila’s protests and her reasons for choosing hunger strike as her method of protest. The discourse of conscience and Satyagraha that Sharmila evokes is brought out through interviews. This is followed by an analysis of the 2004 public disrobing by the Meira Paibis, in protest against the rape and murder of a young woman by the personnel of the Assam Rifles.
The essay shows the inversions brought about by both protests via a comparison between Irom Sharmila’s prolonged hunger strike against an exceptionally violent law, and the Indian Army Rape Us protests by the Meira Paibis. Both challenge the division between the public and the private, holding the state publicly accountable for atrocities committed in private. Food and clothing, one a biological necessity and the other an important social norm, are given up by the protestors. According to Mehrotra, this shows the power of the human body generally, and the female body particularly, to formulate and transmit subversive messages. She finds that underlying the protests is a common thread of rebuilding Manipur out of all the chaos.

In 2008, when the Azad Foundation, an NGO based in Delhi, began training poor women to become drivers of commercial and private vehicles, most people thought they were somewhat out of touch with reality. Poor, illiterate  women, many of them from violent homes, some of them single mothers,  others from families and communities which had never allowed women to  step out of the home – how could these women take the wheel, drive around  in unsafe cities, be confident and competent, earn money? At the time, there  was only one known woman auto driver in Delhi. When Azad turned to radio  cab companies to suggest they take in women drivers, there wasn’t much  interest. Today, more than 300 women drivers have received training from  Azad and are on the roads of several cities. Nine years after radio companies  turned Azad away, special services or women with women drivers are being  introduced within these same companies. In 2015, the Delhi Transport  Corporation got its first woman driver, and in 2016, the Delhi Commission  for Women recruited 25 women drivers to be part of their women’s helpline.  Clearly, things are changing.

Lady Driver maps the journeys of twelve women from poor, marginalized  communities who have transformed their lives by taking up the challenge  of becoming women drivers. Each story is unique; there’s no Cinderella effect  here. Reality does not change overnight. Instead, as the women featured  here painstakingly claim a relationship with the road, it translates into claims  for identity, for dignity, for a livelihood. Their stories are about beginnings,  but have no endings – there is still quite a way to drive. OR – there are many  kilometres to drive yet.

In the early nineteen thirties Ayi Tendulkar, a young journalist from a small town in Maharashtra, travelled to Germany to study. Within a short time he married Eva Schubring, his professor's daughter. Soon after the short-lived marriage broke up, Tendulkar, by now also a well-known journalist in Berlin, met and fell lin love with the filmmaker Thea von Harbou, divorced wife of Fritz Lang, and soon to be Tendulkar's wife.

Many years his senior, Thea became Tendulkar's support and mainstay in Germany, encouraging and supporting him in bringing other young Indian students to the country. Hitler's coming to power put an end to all that, and on Thea von Harbou's advice, Tendulkar returned to India, where he became involved in Gandhi's campaign of non-cooperation with the British and where, with Thea's consent, he soon married Indumati Gunaji, a Gandhian activist.

Caught up in the whirlwind of Gandhi's activism, Indumati and Tendulkar spent several years in Indian prisions, being able to come together as a married couple only after their release -- managing thereby to comply with a condition that Gandhi had put to their marriage, that they remain apart for several years 'to serve the nation?. In this unique account, Indumati and Tendulkar's daughter, Laxmi Tendulkar Dhaul, traces the turbulent lives of her parents and Thea von Harbou against the backremove of Nazi Germany and Gandhi's India, using a wealth of documents, letters, newspaper articles and photographs to piece together the intermeshed histories of two women, the man they loved, their own growing friendship and two countries battling with violence and non-violence, fascism and colonialism.

"Few children are capable of writing about their parents' lives with empathy and clinical precision." --Somak Ghoshal, Live Mint

PLEASE NOTE: This copy is discounted at 70% and is in saleable but not pristine condition. It may show signs of age or wear.

Imelda Connor is a classic Irish lass—a fiery, red-headed beauty, quick to anger and fiercely protective of her younger siblings. Growing up on a small farm in the rolling hills of County Cork, she thinks she has her life completely mapped out. But Imelda soon finds that life doesn’t always go according to plan.

Everything is turned upside-down when Imelda moves to England and happens to meet a dashing Bengali man named Shu Bose. Shu is captivated by Imelda’s natural beauty and charm, and the two embark on a whirlwind romance. At the age of eighteen, in the spring of 1932, Imelda boards a ship bound for Calcutta—and a very different life to the one she had always imagined.

Milty Bose’s writing transports readers back to pre-Independence India, to London between the wars, and to the genteel life of bhadralok Bengali high society. From Cork to Calcutta tells the true story of Bose’s parents, their eccentric and unforgettable family, the trauma of loss, and the triumph of one woman’s remarkable spirit.

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 idea that one day she might own her own house is a daring dream. Her father has spent his life, slaving away selling scrap metal so that his children might ‘jump the fence of poverty and illiteracy’. Fateema dreams not only of owning her own house, but of higher education, a better job, a wider world. Her brother, Kareem, is persuaded down a very different path – to join the jihad, to become a holy warrior.

Ila Arab Mehta’s moving and sharply observed novel follows one woman’s struggle to find her way in a world torn by communal violence, to reconcile her conflicting loyalties to her family and friends, to find a place that she can ultimately call ‘home’, a place where fences –between communities, between people – are no longer necessary.

PLEASE NOTE: This copy is discounted at 70% and is in saleable but not pristine condition. It may show signs of age or wear.

From the heart of a well-known family of Hyderabad to life in a single room with the barest of necessities, Shaukat Kaifi's memoir of her life with the renowned poet Kaifi Azmi speaks of love and commitment. A marriage of over a half a century, a life steeped in poetry and progressive politics, continuing involvement with the Indian People's Theatre Association, the Progressive Writers Association, Prithvi Theatre... all of these and more inform this beautifully told tale of love. Shaukat Kaifi's writing details life in a communist commune, a long career in theatre and film and a life spent bringing up her two children, cinematographer Baba Azmi and actor Shabana Azmi. Nasreen Rehman's deft and fluent translation brings this luminous memoir alive with warmth and empathy. "To say that this is a lovely book would be an understatement. It is an enchanting recollection of the life of a hugely talented and sensitive human being, shared with a great poet." -- Amartya Sen.

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, activist and historian V. Geetha unpacks the meanings of impunity in relation to sexual violence in the context of South Asia. The State’s misuse of its own laws against its citizens is only one aspect of the edifice of impunity; its less-understood resilience comes from its consistent denial of the recognition of suffering on the part of victims, and its refusal to allow them the dignity of pain, grief and loss.

Time and again, in South Asia, the State has worked to mediate public memory, to manipulate forgetting, particularly in relation to its own acts of commission. It has done this by refusing to take responsibility, not only for its acts but also for the pain such acts have caused. It has done this by denying suffering the eloquence, the words, the expression that it deserves and papering over the hurt of people with routine government procedures.

The author argues that the State and its citizens must work together to accord social recognition to the suffering of victims and survivors of sexual violence, and thereby join in what she calls ‘a shared humanity’. While this may or may not produce legal victories, the acknowledgment that the suffering of our fellow citizens is our collective responsibility is an essential first step towards securing justice. It is this, that in a fundamental sense, challenges and illuminates the contours and details of State impunity and positions impunity as not merely a legal or political conundrum, but as resolute refusal on the part of State personnel to be part of a shared humanity.

A postman turns up with an unexpected letter one rainy afternoon in Cherrapunji, a letter that will turn fourteen-year-old Saphira’s world upside down.

Dalinia’s life seems perfect, with a successful husband, beautiful children and a well-appointed home. But the arrival of a handsome competitor on the manicured greens of the Shillong golf course brings back a flood of unwanted memories of her troubled past.

Told in a simple, lyrical style, Bijoya Sawian’s collection of ten short stories is not only an enthralling read but, like her debut novel Shadow Men, transports the reader to a place little known to outsiders: Meghalaya.

Strains of love, loss and longing run through all these stories, whose endings are not mere shocks, but revelations. Both her books should be read for a better understanding of India’s Northeast – its communities, its landscape, and in particular, the lives of the women who live there.

“Love, loss and longing are the predominant emotions in these tales. With a touch of Blakesian magic, Sawian’s songs of innocence and experience are lyrical and pantheistic. [The] stories, like vintage wine, have a mature blend of wit and irony, sense and sensibility and the ability to stay with the reader long after the covers are closed.”—Sudipta Bhattacharjee, Telegraph

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 delightful folktale from Bhutan is retold by one of the country's leading writers, Kunzang Choden. 
One day, a poor young orphan girl finds unexpected riches when she topples down a mousehole and is befriended by its charming occupant. But when a spoilt, rich brat tries to replicate the experience, her gifts are quite the opposite!

Along with Room in Your Heart, these charming picture books will make perfect bedtime reading for youngsters, and are beautifully illustrated with evocative watercolours of the Bhutanese landscapes and people by Pema Tshering.

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A heartwarming tale about the importance of kindness.