University of Chicago Press: New Titles from 'Zubaan Books'

Bitter Wormwood

Easterine Kire — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Kohima, 2007. A young man has just been gunned down in cold blood—the latest casualty in the conflict that has brutalized the people of Nagaland, in the neglected northeastern corner of India. Rich in culture and history, Bitter Wormwood traces the story of one man’s life from 1937 until 2007, offering poignant insight into the human cost behind the political headlines of one of India’s most beautiful regions.

In a gripping story that brings to life the processes that propel social change and transform communities, Easterine Kire skillfully renders the small incidents of Mose’s childhood, his family, and the routines and rituals of traditional village life, painting an evocative picture of a peaceful way of life, now long-vanished. The coming of radio into Mose’s family house marks the beginning of the changes that will connect them to the wider world. They learn of partition, independence, a land called America. Mose and his friends become involved in the Naga struggle for independence, and are caught in a maelstrom of violence that ends up ripping communities apart.

Contesting Nation

Angana P. Chatterji; Lubna Nazir Chaudhry — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

An innovative collection of essays on the turmoil spreading across South Asia, Contesting Nation sheds light on how violence—in wars of direct and indirect conquest—marks the present. Featuring contributions by distinguished South Asian women scholars, the book offers inspired, gendered, and contested histories of the present, exploring nation-making and its intersections with projects of militarization and cultural assertion, modernization, and globalization.

The contributors to this volume consider such turbulent events as the Gujarat carnage of 2002, post-9/11 mobilizations, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, shedding light on the force with which brutal events encompass lives and disfigure communities. This powerful book examines the very borders such brutality maintains and its intimate and lasting effects on bodies and memories.

Our Pictures, Our Words

Laxmi Murthy; Rajashri Dasgupta — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Vibrant, dynamic, spirited, and forceful. The contemporary women’s movement in India, which began in the late 1970s, fought valiantly against dark times marked by violence and misogyny. But it also celebrated—liberation, solidarity among women, and the joyous breaking away from patriarchy. Its members sang, performed, and painted, in order to draw attention to the vital issues of the time: dowry death, widow immolation, acid throwing, and rape.

Featuring over three hundred full color images, Our Pictures, Our Words delivers a lavish pictorial history of the multifaceted Indian women’s movement, conveyed through its most immediate visual representation: posters, drawings, pamphlets, reports, brochures, stickers, wall-writing, and photographs. The artwork reproduced here is part of Zubaan’s six-year Poster Women project, which has attempted to locate and archive as many posters as possible in order to visually map the diversity of women’s causes.

Over the past three decades, women’s concerns have matured and broadened to include a range of issues related to women’s health, sexuality, the environment, literacy, the impact of religion and communal violence on women’s lives, political participation, globalization, displacement, labor rights, disability rights, class and caste issues, and many more. To capture this many-faceted crusade, the posters in the book have been thematically organized and annotated in detail, with information about the date the artwork was created, the campaign it supported, the designer, the concept behind the poster, the reaction to it, and short essays to further document the richness of the movement.

Fabulous Feminist

Suniti Namjoshi — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The Fabulous Feminist brings together for the first time in one volume a vast range of renowned feminist thinker Suniti Namjoshi’s writings, starting with her most famous collection, Feminist Fables, and including excerpts from Saint Suniti and the Dragon, Mothers of Maya Dip, From the Bedside Book of Nightmares, and her series of “Aditi” books for children, such as Aditi and the Thames Dragon.

Here readers will find her fables, poetry, prose autobiography, and children’s stories, works that are both playful and deeply serious. In these beautifully composed and entertaining works, she ingeniously reworks fairytales, Greek and Sanskrit mythology, literary monsters such as Grendel’s Mother, and icons such as Saint Sebastian, all stitched together with her vivid imagination and wisdom. Writing with insight and wit about power, about inequality, and about oppression, Namjoshi brilliantly uses language and the literary tradition to expose what she finds absurd and unacceptable in modern life. This provocative and entertaining collection will be welcomed by Namjoshi’s fans and admirers of the feminist intellectual tradition.

Born in Mumbai in 1941, Suniti Namjoshi is an important figure in contemporary Indian literature in English, a writer whose deep engagement with issues of gender, sexual orientation, cultural identity and human rights infuses everything she writes.

Song Seekers

Saswati Sengupta — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In The Song Seekers, the debut novel by Saswati Sengupta, the monsoon rains wash over the city of Kolkata while 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. It is a place of mystery to Uma. Her husband’s silence about his mother’s murder 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 strange presence of the old, green-eyed Pishi—all intrigue and mystify her. 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 long-buried stories begin to emerge.

In The Song Seekers, Saswati Sengupta recasts the militant goddess Chandi as a wife and interweaves the history of the Portuguese in Bengal, the rise of print, the swadeshi movement, and the turbulence of the 1960s in Bengal. These disparate elements all come together as Uma discovers that the foundation of the mansion is not only very deep, but it also masks the stink of death.

Spectacles of Blood

Swaralipi Nandi; Esha Chatterjee — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This superb collection of essays illuminates the film portrayal of violence, masculinity, and power in a postcolonial context, showing how the cinema challenges, normalizes, or contests these major issues. Taking an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, drawing from literature, sociology, and media studies, the essays shed light on films about societal violence in postcolonial cultures, whether it be terrorism, suicide bombings, the underworld, organized crime, or mob violence.

The contributors to Spectacles of Blood look at the dynamics of the representation of these issues as cinematic plots and techniques, drawing attention to the affective value of the films in generating and foregrounding the feelings invoked by the onscreen violence, and the impact of these emotions on the formation of national and cosmopolitan identity. International in scope, covering films from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, these essays enrich both literary studies and social studies with a nuanced borrowing and intermixing of their primary texts and modes of interpretation.

Women Changing India

Urvashi Butalia; Anita Roy — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

India is changing. And at the heart of this change are its women. The change is widespread and varied, individual and collective, reflecting the full spectrum of women’s lives, whether in politics or in economics, in business, or within their daily domestic work. This book maps—in words and in one hundred and fifty marvelous color photographs—some of the changes that are both visible and invisible in India today.

In Women Changing India, six writers flesh out the stories captured by photographers Raghu Rai, Martine Franck, Olivia Arthur, Alex Webb, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Patrick Zachmann from the world-renowned Magnum Photos. These beautiful and evocative photographs focus on the world of women working with the help of microloans, participating in grassroots governance, working behind the scenes in the Mumbai film industry, and moving into new jobs, often in male-dominated fields. Together, they are making contributions in varied fields and imagining a new future for themselves and other women. Featuring contributions from leading writers, Women Changing India offers a window into the lives of women living in South Asia today, bringing to public attention their complex realities and their aspirations for a better world.