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Family, Women, And Ill-being: A Critique of the Family in Twenty-First Century Kerala
From ₹ 580This book is a feminist endeavour that seeks to retrieve what was meant to be a damning accusation—that feminists are responsible for the dissolution of the family or kutumbam kalakkal—into a source of illuminating critique. This is attempted through initiating a conversation about the convergences and divergences in the distinctly different histories of elite and non-elite Malayali families and the material and political consequences of these for women. Secondly, the book focuses on the social reproduction struggles of less-privileged women in present-day Kerala. Taken together, these strands of inquiry are essentially concerned with stripping off the quasi-natural, benign aura that continues to highlight and protect the idealised Malayali family. The book draws on interview-based research with women workers in the informal sector in the present, and on different spells of fieldwork conducted by the authors during 2006-2022, to construct a fresh conceptual vocabulary to perceive and critique the mutation of brahmanical patriarchy in late-twentieth and early twenty-first century Kerala.
______________________________________________________________________________________J Devika is a feminist teacher, researcher, social commentator, translator and writer of children's fiction based at the Centre for Development Studies, Kerala. Her research has been about the intertwined histories of gender, politics, development, and culture in twentieth-century Kerala. She brings to bear her training as a historian to make sense of contemporary events and developments. She writes in Malayalam and English. Among her many publications are New Lamps for Old: Gender Paradoxes of Political Decentralisation in Kerala (co-authored with Binitha V Thampi, Zubaan 2012) and Individuals, Householders, Citizens: Family Planning in Kerala (Zubaan 2008).Anamika Ajay is currently Principal Scientist in Gender at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai. Before joining the Foundation, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum. She holds a PhD in development studies from the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru. Her research interests lie at the intersections of gender, labour, ecology and the political economy of development. She is particularly interested in exploring questions of gender and caste in shaping traditional and new forms of work in contemporary rural and urban settings. Her work on gender has been published in both national and international journals.In stock
Living a Feminist Life
₹ 800
In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Building on legacies of feminist of colour scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique—often by naming and calling attention to problems—and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions—such as forming support systems—to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.With an introduction by Chayanika Shah.
SARA AHMED is a feminist writer, scholar, and activist. She works at the intersection of feminist, queer, and race studies. Her research is concerned with how bodies and worlds take shape; and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life worlds as well as institutional cultures. She is the author of Willful Subjects, On Being Included, The Promise of Happiness, and Queer Phenomenology.CHAYANIKA SHAH is an optimist activist at heart, a physicist by training and a teacher by choice. She has worked in areas like politics of population control, communalism, feminist studies of science, and sexuality, which seem to have no connection with each other but which have come together of late to define her as a queer feminist. Her co-authored books include No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy (Zubaan 2015); Bharat ki Chaap, and We and Our Fertility: The Politics of Technological Intervention.
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This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page “From the moment I received Sara Ahmed’s new work, Living a Feminist Life, I couldn’t put it down … Ahmed lifts us higher.” — bell hooks
"I read Living a Feminist Life with a deep sense of recognition. This is a book that feminists will find illuminating—acutely painful at times, but mostly profoundly insightful … A beautifully written, smartly provocative book that belongs on our shelves, in our classrooms, and in our daughters’ hands." — Chandra Talpade Mohanty, author of Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
SARA AHMED is a feminist writer, scholar, and activist. She works at the intersection of feminist, queer, and race studies. Her research is concerned with how bodies and worlds take shape; and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life worlds as well as institutional cultures. She is the author of Willful Subjects, On Being Included, The Promise of Happiness, and Queer Phenomenology.CHAYANIKA SHAH is an optimist activist at heart, a physicist by training and a teacher by choice. She has worked in areas like politics of population control, communalism, feminist studies of science, and sexuality, which seem to have no connection with each other but which have come together of late to define her as a queer feminist. Her co-authored books include No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy (Zubaan 2015); Bharat ki Chaap, and We and Our Fertility: The Politics of Technological Intervention.
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Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist anthology of love stories
From ₹ 490In a world governed by caste and patriarchy, Shaili, an ambitious Dalit journalist, grapples with heartbreak, disquiet, and the pernicious constraints imposed upon her desires and agency. Apurva, in love with a Dalit man from a rival sub-caste, is forcibly married to a Marxist from her own community, unleashing turmoil that reshapes her life. Pragya and Samar, a Dalit couple united by a shared passion for political activism, find their marriage strained as the fires of the street no longer ignite intimacy at home. Ambar, a rising star in the corporate world, feels doubly alienated—from both her Dalit mother’s village and her own amorous desires in the city. Meanwhile, tormented and brutalized by upper-caste oppressors, Jamna seizes justice on her own terms—transforming revenge into fierce rebellion against decades of caste terror and humiliation.
The unforgettable characters in these remarkable stories are ordinary Dalit women and men navigating passion, pleasure, power, and pain in the crucible of caste, gender, and sexuality in contemporary India. Radiantly and elegantly translated into English, and ethnographically assembled for the first time, Love in the Time of Caste is a groundbreaking anthology of Dalit-feminist creativity and repair that portrays love as a radical, anti-caste force, offering an unflinching portrait of modern India—as imagined and remade by Dalit-Bahujans—while boldly envisioning caste-annihilated futures.
______________________________________________________________________________________NIKHIL PANDHI is a socio-cultural anthropologist and queer feminist researcher, and an award-winning anti-caste literary translator from India. His translations have received international acclaim, including the inaugural PEN Presents Award from English PEN. He teaches at Dartmouth College, where he holds a postdoctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows. He earned his PhD in anthropology from Princeton University, was also a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, and completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Delhi.
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Your Stick Will Not Break My Strength
From ₹ 420Sunil Mohan's complex and moving memoir is more than just a story of transition. It’s a story that describes a deeply felt yearning, a certainty of knowledge about who you wish to be, and constant, fundamental and self-reflective questioning about what it means to be born into one body and inhabit an identity that is defined by a different body and a different set of ascribed and acceptable behaviour. As he makes the transition from ‘female’ to ‘male’, Sunil asks why he cannot choose to define his gender in his own way, why being ‘man’ should mean adopting a given, socially acceptable model of masculinity. ‘I was always uncomfortable,’ he says, ‘with “masculinity” even when I deeply felt I was a “man”….I was hesitant to identify with something I had critiqued so fundamentally.’
Honest, open, self-questioning and filled with courage and compassion, Sunil Mohan chooses to move away from the traditional and often linear trajectory of a life narrative. Instead, he turns the lens on the queer, trans, anti-caste, feminist and people’s movements of which he has long been a part. In doing so, he resolutely refuses to identify as a victim and thinks through and reflects on the politics of resistance, marking the learning that comes from friendships forged in struggle and commonality of identity, reflecting on the meanings of silence and offering thoughts on strategies for healing and reconciliation.
_____________________________________________________________________________________Sunil Mohan once led the Kerala State Women’s Cricket Team as its captain. He later completed a diploma in electrical engineering and then worked with various NGOs that advocate for the rights of marginalised sexualities and genders. Sunil documented the oral histories of LGBTI people across South India as a CCDS Open Space Pune fellow, collecting videos from 24 individuals representing marginalised identities. Alongside Rumi Harish, he initiated a study on non-discrimination at Alternative Law Forum (ALF). He co-authored the report ‘Conversations on Caste Discrimination in South India,’ conducted after over 95 conversations throughout the region. Sunil identifies as a Trans Man. In 2018, he co-founded Raahi, an organisation dedicated to the rights of marginalised genders and sexualities. In 2024, he received the Kamala Bhasin Award for his contributions to gender and sexuality rights.
Rumi Harish is a musician and a social justice and human rights activist. Since 2005, he and Sunil Mohan have worked together on a number of research studies and projects. Rumi has written four play scripts and has worked as a music director for various documentary films and theatre productions. He identifies as a queer transmasculine person. He is a regular columnist for different media outlets, including previous columns in Kannada Prabha and Agni Patrika. His biography was recently written by Dadapeer Jyman, a young writer and theatre director. In 2023, Rumi received the Karnataka State Sahitya Academy Award, Sahityasree.
Ekta co-founded Maraa, a media and arts collective in Bangalore, in 2008. She works as a practitioner, researcher, curator, and facilitator on issues of gender, labour, and caste in both rural and urban contexts. Her films, such as ‘Birha’ and ‘Gumnaam Din,’ explore the inner worlds of workers in the context of migration and have been screened at international festivals. Ekta co-founded Freeda, a theatre group led by survivors of sexual violence, which tells stories on her own terms about beauty, freedom, and desire. She is also co-developing ‘Theatre for Resilience,’ a grassroots feminist movement supporting creative practitioners from rural India.
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The Fire of Defiance
From ₹ 320
Even as the movement for Indian independence gathered momentum at the national level in the 1930s and ‘40s, a different kind of mobilization and struggle was unfolding in the Telangana region. Led by the Communist Party, the Telangana armed struggle swept through the Nizam’s dominions, targeting the exploitative practices of the doras, or landlords. Hundreds of men and women, from a wide spectrum of social locations, participated in the movement, and pictures of women wielding rifles have today become iconic.Among the many women in the movement was Mallu Swarajyam, who joined the armed squads of the movement and also became a cultural activist. Her extraordinary story, as told to three women, is captured here. In her words: “I also worked in the Kothagudem coal mines. Our informants were tribal women who went into the forest to gather mahuva flowers. On one occasion, we received information that the police were travelling in a bus along the route. I stormed onto the road, stopped the bus and punctured its tyres with my pistol.”______________________________________________________________________________________
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This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page Uma Chakravarti is a distinguished feminist historian who has taught at Miranda House College for Women, Delhi University. She writes on Buddhism, early Indian history, the nineteenth century, and on contemporary issues. Among her many publications are: Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism (1996), Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (2013), Gendering Caste through a Feminist Lens (2018) and The Dying Lineage: The Crisis of Political Power in the Mahabharata (2024). She is closely involved with the women’s movement as well as the movement for democratic rights in India, and has been part of many fact-finding teams to investigate human rights violations, communal violence and state repression.
Vimala Morthala, a women’s rights activist, is noted for her poetry and short stories, and has published several anthologies of both. She edits the Mehfil page for Mana Telangana.
S. Katyayini is a noted Telugu writer and critic and has translated extensively from Telugu to English with a large body of work that includes anti-caste literature, novels and the stories of Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay.
Purnima Tammireddy is a writer, translator and publisher, working in both Telugu and English. A techie by profession, she founded Elami Publications, an independent Telugu publishing house, and co-founded pustakam.net, a website for book reviews, in 2009. Her published works include a short story collection, Emotional Pregnancy (2022), Telugu translations of Manto’s Siya Hashiye (2022) and Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (2023) and an English translation of the Telugu novel Pampateeram (2025).
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Beneath Magnolia Skies: Writings from Sikkim and Darjeeling Hills
From ₹ 490A glimpse into the lives of women from Sikkim and Darjeeling Hills, this anthology brings together homemakers, teachers, students, professionals, cultural practitioners, researchers and artists, each offering a unique lens into everyday life in the region. Geographically connected, yet with distinct political and economic trajectories, women have very different lived experiences in both Sikkim and Darjeeling. But, like the magnolia—a shared symbol rooted in memory, culture and landscape—their lives are shaped by common cultural norms, expectations and institutions that transcend borders.
Beneath Magnolia Skies traces journeys through time, space and place, capturing moments of solace, strength, reconciliation and redemption. More than just personal reflection, this anthology is also an act of resistance, a way of claiming how the writers wish to be seen, heard and understood in their own words.
______________________________________________________________________________________MONA CHETTRI is co-founder of Reading Himalaya, a research and policy consultancy focusing on the eastern Himalayas. She has worked as a post-doctoral research fellow in India, Denmark, and Australia. Co-editor of Development Zones in Asian Borderlands (2021), author of Ethnicity and Democracy in the Eastern Himalayan Borderland: Constructing Democracy (2017), and editor of the Eastern Himalaya Series, she has published widely on borderlands, gender, environment, and development in international peer-reviewed journals, books, and magazines.
PRAVA RAI is founding director of Dumigaon Reading Room Resource and Education Foundation in Sikkim. She edited The Book Review (1981- 1984), worked at the Institute of Mass Communication in New Delhi (1984– 1986), and was part of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad team researching the ‘Nationalisation of Minor Forest Produce and Tribal Movements’. She joined PRADAN, an NGO working for rural development, edited Parmal (the Goa Heritage Action Group’s journal on culture and heritage), curated and edited a special issue on Sikkim for MARG Publications, and has edited books on the social sciences for leading publishing houses.
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Zubaan Merchandise: Set of 5 Postcards
₹ 100
Artwork by winners of the art contest conducted by Zubaan in June 2025.Artists: Saikhom Angela Devi | Kabir Singhania | Samarth Singh Chandel | Kalaa | Chanchal
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Darkness and Other Stories
From ₹ 350Razia Sajjad Zaheer’s stories are gentle and unassuming tales that describe the lives of ordinary women—a homemaker, a teacher, a writer, a sex worker—whose struggles simply to be themselves, or to make sense of the realities they see around them, mark them as extraordinary. A low caste woman shows up society’s hypocrisy in dealing with caste and, in doing so, turns the mirror on her own tendency to do the same. A working woman, a mother and writer, grapples with how to deal with her over-helpful house help, a man, who thinks he knows that when she asks for tea, he must instead serve her milk. A writer travels alone on a train at night, fearful that she may be attacked by the sinister-seeming men around her, only to find that they are fans of her writing. Every story offers a situation that readers may easily recognise and relate to, and each then suggests a complex twist or an ambivalence that is sometimes elusive and sometimes illuminating. Saba Mahmood Bashir’s competent and accessible translation brings the work of this important writer—which has thus far received little attention—to life for readers of today.
_____________________________________________________________________________________Razia Sajjad Zaheer, commonly known as Razia Apa in literary circles, was born in 1917 in Rajasthan. At the age of 20, she married Sajjad Zaheer, a member of the Communist Party and one of the founders of the Progressive Writers’ Association. She got a Master’s degree in Allahabad. Her life changed when, shortly after she married, her husband was given a two-year prison sentence for his revolutionary activities. Razia took to writing, teaching and translating to make ends meet and, over time, managed the running of the household as well. She worked hard to bring her husband’s works to public attention, and continued to write alongside. She received several awards for her work, including the Nehru Award (1966) and the Uttar Pradesh Sahitya Akademi Award (1972). She passed away in 1979.
Saba Mahmood Bashir is a poet, author, translator, and assistant professor at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She did her doctorate on the poetry of Gulzar. Her first book was a collection of poems, Memory Past (2006), and was followed by several others including I Swallowed the Moon: The Poetry of Gulzar (2013). She has also translated Gulzar’s screenplays of Munshi Premchand’s Godaan and Nirmala and Other Stories (2016) along with fiction by Premchand and Saadat Hasan Manto. Her recent books are Aandhi: Insights Into the Film and Women of Prey, a translation of selected stories by Manto.
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Other Skies, Other Stories
From ₹ 420These stories, written originally in Hindi, reveal an author who can think and create in two languages with rare fluency. With her faultless ear for the cadences of Hindustani, Sara Rai illuminates the life of small towns with details which perhaps only a bilingual writer would pick up on. Equally important to her in the landscape of human lives is the presence of trees, birds, insects, and fish. Her Zen-like meditations on the silent yet profound movements of this world are presented in a language that is pared down, spare, and evocative. She remains unseen, but her presence animates each of her characters, whether it be Surabhi from ‘Catfish’, the eponymous Nabila, or Sour Face and Shrew from ‘Golden Anniversary’. The stories are presented here in a lucid translation by Ira Pande and the author.
______________________________________________________________________________________Sara Rai is a writer, translator, and editor. She has published four collections of short stories and a novel in Hindi. The German translation by Johanna Hahn of her selected short fiction, Im Labyrinth (The Labyrinth), won the Coburg Rückert Prize 2019 and was nominated for the Weltempfänger Prize 2020. She has translated five collections of short stories from Hindi into English, most recently Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Blue is like Blue (with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra), which won the Atta Galatta Prize 2019 and the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award 2020. Her memoir Raw Umber won the Tata Literature Live Book of the Year Award 2023 in the nonfiction category.
Ira Pande taught English Literature at Panjab University, Chandigarh. She has worked at The Indian Express and later, the journals Seminar and Biblio. She was with Dorling-Kindersley and Roli Books before becoming Chief Editor of the IIC Quarterly. Her English translation of Manohar Shyam Joshi’s T’ta Professor won the Crossword and Sahitya Akademi awards in 2010. She has also written, and later translated into Hindi, Diddi: My Mother’s Voice, an acclaimed memoir of her mother, the late author Shivani.
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Walking Out, Speaking Up: Feminist Street Theatre in India
From ₹ 560
An energetic era of feminist street theatre in India: 1979 onwards. Stunning, audacious plays vividly portray abuse, murder and everyday sexism, raise profound questions, disrupting the normative. Public performance embodies resistance, shattering the mould of docile, invisible women. Rhythms of tambourines, drums, songs fill the air, stories are enacted, insights communicated, challenging entrenched patriarchies, evoking audience response, sparking change.A remarkable repertoire of plays unfolded across geographical and social contexts: Om Swaha, Ehsaas, Mulgi Zali Ho, Intezaar, Teri Meri Kahani, Hum Awaz Uthayeinge and hundreds more. Weaving social critique with intimate felt experience, they exposed dowry killings, sati, bigotry, sexual violence, overwork, discrimination and exploitation within families, workplaces, society and state—and showed rebellion brewing. This was a theatre of rage, pain, protest, in sync with the autonomous women’s movement of the time.Perceptive, outspoken women emerged out of a morass of ascribed roles to carve their own identities, remake the world. Protagonists broke many silences, told precious stories, offered alternative imaginaries. Fiction merged with documentary, searing content with rich aesthetics. Pithy dialogues articulated complex ideas in familiar idioms, heralding increasingly nuanced discourse around gender, citizenship and dissent, influencing media, academia, law and policy.Incorporating oral histories, auto-ethnography, scripts, visuals, archival material, meticulous research and multi-layered analysis, Deepti Priya Mehrotra’s carefully crafted study is an invaluable resource for understanding feminist street theatre, oppositional politics and counter-cultures in modern India.______________________________________________________________________________________Deepti Priya Mehrotra is a political scientist with trans-disciplinary interests. She has engaged with street theatre and the women’s movement since the late 1970s. Writing in English and Hindi, her books include Gulab Bai: the Queen of Nautanki Theatre, Home Truths: Stories of Single Mothers, Burning Bright: Irom Sharmila and the Struggle for Peace in Manipur, Her Stories: Thinkers, Workers, Rebels, Queens, Bharatiya Mahila Andolan: Kal Aaj aur Kal and Jaggi Devi: Svatantrata ki Raah Par. Deepti has taught political science, sociology, gender studies and media studies, variously at Delhi University, TISS-Mumbai, Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Agra, Ambedkar University, Delhi and the Institute of Mass Communication, Delhi. Currently, she is working on a photo archive of the autonomous women’s movement, teaching a course in educational philosophy, and collaborating with social organisations in activist, research and advisory roles. In her dissentful heart, she continues to dream of acting and singing, loudly in order to shatter the sorry scheme of things and remould it nearer to the heart’s desire.
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Ittehad: A Life Together
From ₹ 350Known and celebrated in her time, Guli Sadarangani, the first woman writer of Sindh, later sank into oblivion. Perhaps this was because she dared to write about a Hindu-Muslim romance that culminated in marriage. The novel that told this story, Ittehad, was first published in undivided India, and later appeared under another title, Melaapi Jeevan. Rita Kothari’s elegant and empathetic translation of the love story of Asha and Hamid teases out the nuances of their understated relationship and reveals how pre-Independence and pre-Partition India held so many possibilities of living and loving together. Perhaps that is why, the translator speculates, members of the Sindhi community trying to find their feet in post-Partition India were uncertain of showcasing a writer whose writings represented a world that no longer seemed possible.
______________________________________________________________________________________Guli Sadarangani (1906-1994) was the first woman writer of Sindh. She was a courageous writer who wrote about a difficult subject—Hindu-Muslim relations at a time when tensions between the two communities were growing and the shadow of Partition loomed. In the annals of literature in Indian languages, and more specifically in Sindhi literature, she has remained largely invisible, not only because of her choice of subject but also the language in which she wrote, Sindhi, which itself was not accorded the status of an important literary language. This is the first English translation of her work.
Rita Kothari is professor of English at Ashoka University. An accomplished writer, multilingual scholar and translator, she is also co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation. She has translated extensively from Gujarati and Sindhi into English, and vice versa. She has a body of important work on the Sindhi experience of Partition, particularly her book The Burden of Refuge: Partition Experiences of the Sindhis of Gujarat (2009). Her most recent book, Uneasy Translations: Self, Experience and Indian Literature (2022), interweaves her personal journey as an academic into reflections around self, language, and translation.
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Matriarchs, Cows and Epic Villains
₹ 499The figures in Suniti Namjoshi’s compelling stories range from shape-shifting cows to ruling mothers, from sage donkeys to epic villains. This substantial collection includes fables old and new, lyric poems and epigrams, long narratives and short introductory comments. We also complete the Ravana trilogy with ‘Shupi’s Choices’ and ‘Kumbh’. The villainous siblings are ridiculous at times, but they also show us our own shortcomings.
Funny, irreverent, tongue-in-cheek, joyful and profound, these tales are a delight to read. Matriarchs, Cows and Epic Villains is a selection of Suniti Namjoshi’s work, which continues to raise questions about how we deal with our destiny as human beings and confront our inadequacies.______________________________________________________________________________________Suniti Namjoshi is a poet, fabulist and children’s writer with over forty books to her name. After a stint in the Indian Administrative Service, Namjoshi moved to Canada where she earned a PhD at McGill University, taught at the University of Toronto for many years, and then moved on to doing what she loves best—writing. A selection of her works is published in The Fabulous Feminist (2012). Her books include Suki (2013), a memoir about her beloved cat; Foxy Aesop: On the Edge (2018), which asks point-blank whether it is the function of writers to save the world; and Dangerous Pursuits (2022), which contains ‘Bad People’, the first part of the trilogy about Ravana and his siblings.