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Freedom Fables: Satires and Political Writings
From ₹ 198
From Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), the writer of the feminist utopian fantasy ‘Sultana’s Dream’, come these tales of gumptious wit, describing the twists and turns of India’s two-hundred-year relationship with the imperial British.Freedom Fables begins with the two eponymous fables, both compact in form but temporally vast. The first story ‘Muktiphal’ (translated in this volume as ‘The Freedom Tree’) traces the rise of and divisions within India’s Congress party. ‘Gyanphal’ or ‘The Tree of Knowledge’, the second fable, begins in the Garden of Eden and moves swiftly to an idealised Kanakadwipa where a trading company beguiles the prosperous country and proceeds to ruin it. Throughout both, the fantastic floats easily over mere facts. Adam and Eve, the Almighty, djinns, paris, demons, and Mayavi magicians: these classic characters play decisive, intriguing roles.These major political satires are accompanied in this edition by six essays and two poems, which the intrepid Hossain wrote over a period of seventeen years. Interwoven through her writings are ideals that endure even today: education and emancipation for women, dignity for those living in the subcontinent, and freedom from colonial rule and influence.
ROKEYA SAKHAWAT HOSSAIN was a feminist activist and writer, as well as a visionary campaigner for women’s education. Born in 1880 in Rangpur (in what is contemporary Bangladesh), Hossain—also known as Begum Rokeya—wrote prolifically on issues of women’s liberation and against British colonial rule over India. Her ‘Sultana’s Dream’, written in 1905, is arguably the first work of feminist science fiction from Asia. Hossain founded the Muslim Women’s Association in 1916 to fight for women’s education and employment. She remained fiercely engaged in feminist debates and conferences until her death in 1932.KALYANI DUTTA is an award-winning translator. Her translations from Bengali to English form a part of The Essential Tagore, published by Harvard University Press in 2011. She is also the co-author of Women, Education, and Politics: The Women’s Movement and Delhi’s Indraprastha College which brings together her twin interests, women’s studies and education.
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This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page “It was perhaps in the rancorous tumult of the breaking and making of nations that Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s word and vision was lost.” — Rafia Zakaria, Dawn
“You can feel Hossain’s anger... and her scathing criticism of a system that allows what she saw as lazy, violent men to dominate while their gentler, wiser female counterparts are marginalized.” — Tahmima Anam, NPR
"“Hossain slyly pointed out back in 1905 what is often discussed now, particularly in the subcontinent—why should women be taught to stay safe, when men are not taught to not threaten or abuse or rape or be a danger to women?” — Mahvesh Murad, Tor.com
ROKEYA SAKHAWAT HOSSAIN was a feminist activist and writer, as well as a visionary campaigner for women’s education. Born in 1880 in Rangpur (in what is contemporary Bangladesh), Hossain—also known as Begum Rokeya—wrote prolifically on issues of women’s liberation and against British colonial rule over India. Her ‘Sultana’s Dream’, written in 1905, is arguably the first work of feminist science fiction from Asia. Hossain founded the Muslim Women’s Association in 1916 to fight for women’s education and employment. She remained fiercely engaged in feminist debates and conferences until her death in 1932.KALYANI DUTTA is an award-winning translator. Her translations from Bengali to English form a part of The Essential Tagore, published by Harvard University Press in 2011. She is also the co-author of Women, Education, and Politics: The Women’s Movement and Delhi’s Indraprastha College which brings together her twin interests, women’s studies and education.
Kaifi and I: A Memoir
From ₹ 235
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.
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This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page "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.
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Marketing Reproduction: Political Rhetoric and Gender Policy in India
From ₹ 198During the current COVID-19 surge we are shipping orders from Delhi once per week. Please allow 8-10 business days for delivery.
The Reproduction and Child Health policy (RCH) in India has been in force since 1995. Coming after the Cairo conference, 1994, the RCH 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 RCH 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 RCH policy, tracking how neo-liberal and purportedly, women-centered reproductive health discourses are positioned against each other.
Books, Books from the North East, Books from the North East, e-Books, Feminism In India Recommends, Feminism In India Recommends, Fiction, Fiction
The Power to Forgive and Other Stories
From ₹ 198
Avinuo Kire is a fresh, young voice from Nagaland, in India's northeast.In "The Power to forgive", the title story of this strong collection. Avinuo Kire tells the moving story of a rape survivor who, at the threshold of a new life, looks back on the incident that has shaped nearly two decades of her life and wonders if she made the right choice. Called from folk and tribal traditions of Naga life, Kire's stories take us into a world where spirits converse with humans, unsuspecting people are drawn into the movement for Naga independence, a man dies quietly of cancer, a mother wonders if she did the right thing in giving her child a name different from the one she intended...With insight and compassion, Avinuo Kire draws fine portraits of ordinary people in Naga society.
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Biographies, Biographies, Books, Books from the North East, Books from the North East, e-Books, Feminism In India Recommends, Feminism In India Recommends, Non-Fiction, Non-Fiction
The Maharaja’s Household: A Daughter’s Memories of Her Father
From ₹ 198
Part memoir, part oral testimony, part eyewitness account, Binodini's The Maharaja's Household provides a unique and engrossingly intimate view of life in the erstwhile royal household of Manipur in northeast India. It brings to life stories of kingdoms long vanished, and is an important addition to the untold histories of the British Raj.Maharaj Kumari Binodini Devi, who wrote under the single name of Binodini, published The Maharaja's Household as a series of essays between 2002 and 2007 for an avid newspaper reading public in Manipur. Already celebrated across the state for her award-winning novel, short stories, and film scripts, Binodini entranced her readers anew with her stories of royal life, told from a woman's point of view and informed by a deep empathy for the common people in her father's gilded circle.Elephan hunts, polo matches and Hindu temple performances form the backdrop for palace intrigues, colonial rule and White Rajahs. With gentle humour, piquant obersavations and heartfelt nostalgia, Binodini evokes a lifestyle and era that is now lost. Her book paints a portrait of the household of a king that only a princess - his daughter - could have written.
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The Story of Felanee
From ₹ 315
The Story of Felanee is based on real life events. It is a story of courage, of survival, of ethnic conflict and violence that tears people and communities apart in the most brutal, savage way. Set in Assam, which has seen two major agitations that have crippled the economy, this is a story that will shock the reader by its sheer passion, and its brutal honesty. The callousness and utter disregard for human life, the ugly play for power, for electoral gain, the sham and petty hypocrisies, the bloody horror of ethnic violence all lie exposed in this powerful novel written by one of Assam’s leading fiction writers.The story revolves around the experiences of one woman: Felanee. Her name means ‘thrown away’—so called because as her mother lay dying in the burning riot-torn village, Felanee was thrown into a swamp and left to die. But against all odds, Felanee—and thousands like her—survived.Like the reeds that grow in such profusion along the bank of Assam’s rivers, the rootless inhabitants of the refugee camps and makeshift shanties, whose stories form the core of Felanee, are swept along by the wind and thrown onto new hostile terrain but they cling on with tenacity to take root again and again.
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Words to Win: The Making of a Modern Autobiography (Zubaan Classics)
From ₹ 198
The first full-length autobiography in Bengali, Amar Jiban (My Life) was written in the early nineteenth century by an upper-caste rural housewife named Rashundari Debi. Published in 1868 when she was 88 years old, the book is a fascinating snapshot of life for women in the nineteenth century. Debi, who gave birth to eleven children—her first was born when she was 18-years-old, the last when she was forty-one—ruminates on her very individual understanding of bhakti as well as the new times that were unfolding around her.Offering a translation of major sections of this remarkable autobiography, Words to Win is a portrait of a woman who wants to compose a life of her own, wishes to present it in the public sphere, and eventually accomplishes just that. The words, in the end, win out. First published in 1999, the book is a must-read for anyone interested in nineteenth-century Indian history. The classic text is reissued here in a new paperback format.
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This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page "Sarkar's dissection of the text - the autobiography of an upper-caste East Bengali widow from a family of landlords, who teaches herself to read and write in secrecy as it's a taboo to do so - yields a cracking yarn of social history." -- Pothik Ghosh, Outlook
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Waves in the Hinterland: The Journey of a Newspaper
From ₹ 198
Khabar Lahariya, an eight-page newspaper published every fortnight since 2002 from Uttar Pradesh's Chitrakoot district, covers the news that mainstream media forgot. It is brought out by an all-women team. Most of them are Dalit. Some of them, barely literate. Waves in the Hinterland takes you on a journey through women's lives in feudal Bundelkhand, on dusty pot-holed roads, through caste prejudice, water shortages, police stations, polling booths, and the world of small-town journalism to tell the story of the extraordinary women behind this extraordinary newspaper.
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Books, e-Books, Feminism In India Recommends, Feminism In India Recommends, Non-Fiction, Non-Fiction, Young Zubaan
The Yellow Book: A Parent’s Guide to Sexuality Education
From ₹ 235
The essential guide to the who, why, what, when, where and how of sexuality education.Talking to children and young people about sexuality is never easy. This non-nonsense, straightforward and accessible guide will help adults get across the necessary information in the best way possible. Since 1996, TARSHI has been counseling and supporting people - young and not-so-young - on issues to do with sexual health.Building on the success of the highly popular Red Book (for 10-14-year-olds) and Blue Book (for 15+), the team have put together The Yellow Book specifically for parents and teachers. The Yellow Book is full of tips and tools, information and advice to help you talk to your children about sexuality at every stage of their lives.
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The Song Seekers
From ₹ 198
As the monsoon rains wash over the city of Kolkata, four women sit and read and talk in the kitchen of Kailash-- the old mansion of the Chattopadhyays where Uma comes to live after her marriage in the summer of 1962. Her husband's silence about his mother and the childhood tragedy that beckons him from the shadowy landing of Kailash, the embroidered handkerchiefs in an old soap box in her father-in-law's room and the presence of the old, green-eyed Pishi intrigue Uma. But it is only as she begins to read aloud the traditional Chandimangal composed by her husband's grandfather to celebrate the goddess that the smothered stories begin to emerge...The novel weaves in the history of the militant goddess recast as wife, the Portuguese in Bengal, the rise of print and the making of memories from the Swadeshi movement to the turbulent sixties in Bengal as Uma discovers that the foundation of Kailash is not only very deep but also camouflages the stench of death.
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The Search
From ₹ 198
Talaash is the second novel of the Bangladeshi writer Shaheen Akhtar. It captures the brutalities of the 1971 war of liberation and its contingent afterlife -- more specifically, the scars it has left on women. For thirty long years, Mariam, the protagonist of the novel, lives with memories of a war that refuses to end for her. The analeptic and proleptic shapings of Shaheen's prose travel in and through those shattered memories (and their public use) to construct a devastating archive of pain and anguish, far beyond the pale of cause and effect.Shaheen Akhtar's mesmerizing and moving novel, set against the background of the Bangladesh war of independence, explores the violence done to women, their courage and heartbreak, their search for love and their betrayal. Taalash (The Search) was awarded the Prothom Alo Literary Prize in 2004.
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The Madness of Waiting: Junun-e-Intezar
From ₹ 315
Published in March of 1899, Muhammad Hadi Ruswa's famous novel Umrao Jaan Ada created a sensation when it came out, with its candid account of the life of Umrao Jaan, a semi-fictional, possibly real, Lucknow courtesan. Subsequent translations and films based on the book have further extended the fame of both the book and Umrao, the character.What is less known, however, is that a month after he wrote Umrao Jaan Ada, Ruswa penned a short text, a novella entitled Junun-e-Intezar (The Madness of Waiting, April 1899) in which Umrao avenges herself on her creator, Ruswa, by narrating the story of his life.Blurring the lines between truth and fiction, narrator and character, this clever narrative strategy gives the courtesan a speaking voice. While Umrao Jaan Ada, continues to evoke interest, this paratext has been completely forgotten. Here, translators and editors Krupa Shandilya and Taimoor Shahid, one a scholar from India and the other from Pakistan, attempt to redress this with their translation of Ruswa's novella and their critical introduction which rethinks Umrao Jaan Ada and the Urdu literary milieu of late nineteenth-century Lucknow.This book contains both the Urdu text (in facsimile) and its translation for the bilingual reader.
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