Mark Juergensmeyer

382 pages | Rs 400 | Demy Octavo | Paperback | 9788189059200

In this pioneering work, Mark Juergensmeyer, professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, chronicles the history of the Ad Dharm movement based on extensive field research, sociological surveys and interviews that weave the life stories of dalit leaders into the history of the movement.

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A Stake in the Nation

Edited and Selected by Bhagwan Das
. With annotations.

228 pages | Rs 390 | 7 x 7 in | Hardback | 9788189059262

This is the first ever annotated edition of Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s speeches. The twenty speeches in the first of volume of Thus Spoke Ambedkar showcase the wide range of issues that Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar engaged with as one of the founders of modern India.

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A memoir. With DVD of One-Hour Documentary Feature.

Bhagwan Das

86 pages | Rs 175 | 7 x 7 in | Paperback | 9788189059255

This memoir offers a dalit perspective on key events in modern Indian history: Das viewing independence as ‘Hindu Raj’; his unambiguous critique of Gandhi; and his unmasking of the ‘valmikisation’ of the sweeper community as nothing but fiction.

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Imagining a Place for Buddhism

Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India

Anne E. Monius

272 pages | Rs 350 | Paperback | 9788189059194 | For sale only in South Asia

Focusing on two extant Buddhist Tamil texts, Anne Monius sheds light on the role of literature and literary culture in the formation, articulation and evolution of Tamil Buddhist religious identity and community.

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Myth of the Holy Cow

D.N. Jha

(With additional material: B.R. Ambedkar on beef-eating and untouchability)

208 pages | Rs 200 | Paperback | 9788189059163 | For sale in South Asia only

Citing Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina religious scriptures, historian D.N. Jha argues that the ‘holiness’ of the cow is a myth and that its flesh played an important part in the cuisine of ancient India.

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Anand Teltumbde

210 pages | Rs 190 | Paperback | 9788189059156 | All rights available

Anand Teltumbde reconstructs one of post-independence India’s worst caste atrocities and tells us how and why Khairlanjis are always around us.

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Seeking Begumpura

The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals

Gail Omvedt

304 pages | Rs 400 | Hardback | 9788189059118 | All rights available

Gail Omvedt contrasts the subaltern utopias envisioned by India’s dalit-bahujan intellectuals—the Begumpura of Ravidas, the Bali Rajya of Phule, the Dravidastan of Periyar and Ambedkar’s Prabuddha Bharat—with Gandhi’s village utopia of Ram Rajya, Nehru’s hindutva-laced socialism and Savarkar’s Hindu Rashtra.

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Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land

Dignity of Labour in Our Times

Kancha Ilaiah

108 pages | Rs 150 | Paperback | 9788189059095
Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and Malayalam rights sold. Other rights available.

Kancha Ilaiah, with illustrations by Gond artist Durgabai Vyam, throws light on the science, art and skill of adivasis, cattle-rearers, leatherworkers, potters, farmers, weavers, dhobis and barbers, and documents the contributions to the betterment of human life by castes and communities despised as ‘lowly’ and ‘backward’.

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Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underworld

Poems 1972-2006

Selected, introduced and translated from the Marathi by Dilip Chitre. With photographs by Henning Stegmüller.

180 pages | Rs 350 | Hardback | 9788189059101 | All rights available

“I am a venereal sore in the private part of language.” That’s Namdeo Dhasal, the maverick Sahitya Akademi award-winning Marathi poet whose explosive, high-voltage poetry reveals the gastrointestinal tract of the Mumbai underworld. This selection, drawn from eight volumes of poetry published over the last four decades and accompanied by stunning black-and-white photographs, offers the perfect introduction to Dhasal’s work.

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India Stinking

Manual Scavengers in Andhra Pradesh and Their Work.

Gita Ramaswamy

108 pages | Rs 100 | Paperback | 9788189059064 | All rights available

As of 2005, India employs 6.76 lakh manual scavengers in 96 lakh dry latrines, even though the practice was constitutionally banned in 1993. In Andhra Pradesh, home to over two lakh dry latrines, the Safai Karamchari Andolan led by Bezwada Wilson launched a demolition drive in 2004, demolishing the foundations of their indignity. This book documents the efforts of the SKA and offers a historical understanding of the problem of manual scavenging.

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Dalits in Dravidian Land

Frontline reports on anti-dalit violence in Tamil Nadu (1995-2004)

S. Viswanathan

318 pages | Rs 300 | Paperback | 9788189059095 | All rights available

Since the 1990s, India has witnessed a spurt in violence against dalits. Tamil Nadu, home to the nonbrahmin movement, has been projected as fertile soil for social justice. However, the Dravidian movement’s empowerment agenda left the dalits—19 percent of the population—almost untouched, and they have been subjected to the worst forms of violence, from being forced to consume human excreta to being murdered for contesting local body elections. S. Viswanathan has chronicled this violence over a decade in the pages of Frontline, the fortnightly newsmagazine.

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Dalit Diary: 1999–2003

Reflections on Apartheid in India

Chandra Bhan Prasad

264 pages | Rs 225 | Paperback | 9788189059040 | All rights available

A selection from Chandra Bhan Prasad’s column in The Pioneer, the only weekly column by a dalit in any Indian newspaper. With an introduction by Robin Jeffrey, author of India’s Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian-Language Press.

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Touchable Tales

Publishing and Reading Dalit Literature

edited by S. Anand

Rs 45 | Paperback | 9788189059002 | All rights available

There has been a surge in publishing dalit writing in translation. Bama, Narendra Jadhav, Sharankumar Limbale, Omprakash Valmiki are in the news. But who decides what gets published? Who are these interlocutors? Why are autobiographies prioritized? While dalits in Tamil Nadu are being forced to consume shit and piss, who are the consumers of dalit literature in English? In Touchable Tales, those involved with the publishing, teaching, and creation of dalit literature debate the issues.

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Ambedkar: Autobiographical Notes

B.R. Ambedkar

31 pages | Rs 40 | Paperback | 9788189059019 | All rights available

In six autobiographical sketches written in 1935, B.R. Ambedkar, India’s foremost civil rights leader, reminiscences his experiences of untouchability. In his introduction, Ravikumar, activist-theoretician of the dalit movement, tries to understand the complex manner in which the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ operate for a dalit person. He situates our lack of access to Ambedkar’s private in this binary of the dalit self.

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Brahmans and Cricket

Lagaan’s Millennial Purana and Other Myths

S. Anand

60 pages | Rs 60 | Paperback | 9788189059033 | All rights available

Cricket unites Indians. Cricket is nationalism. Cricket is religion. We are told cricket is also secular. A leftist and a hindutvawadi equally celebrate an Indian victory. However, till recently, a cricket team comprised a majority of brahmans: sometimes 8 out of 11 players. How did a priestly class-soft, even effeminate-come to dominate a sport? Why does such dominance not extend to hockey or football? In Brahmans and Cricket, S. Anand seeks answers to unasked questions.

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Postmodernism and Religious Fundamentalism

A Scientific Rebuttal to Hindu Science

Meera Nanda

88 pages | Rs 55 | Paperback | 9788189059026 | All rights available

The promotion of an anti-Enlightenment and anti-modernist view of the world by the seemingly left-wing, postmodernist scholars with indigenist sympathies has ended up affirming the common sense of rightwing fundamentlalist movements. Hindutva, Meera Nanda demonstrates, speaks the same language as academic postmodernism popularized in India by the neo-Gandhian and postcolonial critics of modernity. The secularization of science—the hard-won freedom of science from churches, brahmans and mullahs—is under threat.

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First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

Slavoj Žižek

156 pages | Rs 200 | Paperback | 9788189059217 | For sale in S. Asia only

“The title of this book is intended as an elementary IQ test for the reader: if the first association it generates is the vulgar anti-communist cliché —“You are right—today, after the tragedy of twentieth-century totalitarianism, all the talk about a return to communism can only be farcical!”—then I sincerely advise you to stop here. Indeed, the book should be forcibly confiscated from you, since it deals with an entirely different tragedy and farce, namely, the two events which mark the beginning and the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century: the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the financial meltdown of 2008.”

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Abnormal

Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–75

Michel Foucault

400 pages | Rs 490 | Paperback | 9788189059224 | For sale in S. Asia only.

“The figure of the masturbator appears at the end of the eighteenth century with a number of specific characteristics distinct from those of both the monster and the individual to be corrected. The first is that the masturbator is not at all an exceptional figure in eighteenth-century thought, knowledge, and pedagogical techniques; he is, rather, a frequently encountered individual. He seems to be an almost universal individual. Now this absolutely universal individual, or rather, the practice of masturbation that is recognized as being universal is, at the same time, said to be an unknown or ignored practice that no one has spoken about, that no one knows and whose secret is never revealed. Masturbation is the universal secret shared by everyone but disclosed to no one.”

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The Future of the Image

Jacques Rancière

160 pages | Rs 200 | Paperback | 9788189059231 | For sale in S. Asia only

“To resemble was long taken to be the peculiarity of art, while an infinite number of spectacles and forms of imitation were proscribed from it. In our day, not to resemble is taken for the imperative of art, while photographs, videos and displays of objects similar to everyday ones have taken the place of abstract canvases in galleries and museums. But this formal imperative of non-resemblance is itself caught up in a singular dialectic. For there is growing disquiet: does not resembling involve renouncing the visible? Or does it involve subjecting its concrete richness to the operations and artifices whose matrix resides in language?”

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Political Interventions

Social Science and Political Action

Pierre Bourdieu

416 pages | Rs 490 | Paperback | 9788189059248 | For sale in S. Asia only.

“We must bear in mind that there is not just one racism, but several: there are as many racisms as there are groups that need to justify existing as they do—which is the invariant function of all racisms. It strikes me as very important to bring analysis to bear on those forms of racism that are undoubtedly the most subtle, the most open to misrecognition, and thus the most rarely denounced, perhaps because those who usually denounce racism themselves have some of the properties that incline people towards these forms of racism. I have in mind racism of the intelligence.”

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The Blindness of Insight

Essays on Caste in Modern India

Dilip M. Menon

189 pages | Rs 200 | Paperback | 9788189059071 | All rights available

Is communalism a deflection of the violence and inegalitarianism within Hindu society? How has the deployment of violence against an internal Other, the dalit, come to be transformed into aggression against an external Other, the Muslim? Does the dalit have the right to life in modern India? In four essays that position caste as the central faultline of modern India, Dilip Menon argues why the use of violence in the maintenance of caste hierarchy remains the central occluded fact of Indian society: so present, yet so invisible..

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The Rupture with Memory

Derrida and the Specters that Haunt Marxism

Nissim Mannathukkaren

116 pages | Rs 150 | Paperback | 9788189059088 | All rights available

As we walk into another night of the newest phase of imperialism, this book asks: What is the Marxists’ quarrel with Derrida, especially with Specters of Marx? Why do they seem panic-ridden when Derrida seeks to resurrect the ghosts of Marx? Though Derrida moves far beyond what his deconstructive brief would allow him, certain readings view Specters merely as a work of deconstruction/poststructuralism. This, argues Nissim Mannathukkaren, the Marxists can do only at their own peril.

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The Threat to Reason

Dan Hind

194 pages | Rs 200 | Paperback | 9788189059149 | For sale in South Asia only

The Threat to Reason is a vital defence of the Enlightenment as a democratic force against state and corporation and a striking atheist attack on ‘fundamentalist’ atheists such as Richard Dawkins.

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The Sublime Object of Ideology

Slavoj Žižek

256 pages | Rs 240 | Paperback | 9788189059132 | For sale in South Asia only

In this provocative book, the author takes a look at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish Joke, Žižek’s acute analyses explores the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion that make up human society.

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The System of Objects

Jean Baudrillard

240 pages | Rs 225 | Paperback | 9788189059125 | For sale in South Asia only

The System of Objects ranks as one of the most important books of poststructuralist cultural criticism. Pressing Freudian and Saussurean categories into the service of a basically Marxist perspective, Baudrillard offers a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society.

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