Bhimayana
Experiences of Untouchability

Art: Durgabai Vyam, Subhash Vyam

Story: Srividya Natarajan, S. Anand

Nov 2010 | 9788189059170 | 9 x 7.5 in, pp 100, colour | Rs 340
All Rights Available

What does it mean to be an untouchable in India? Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), one of India’s foremost revolutionaries, recounts his experiences of growing up untouchable and being routinely discriminated against: in a school at the age of 10, in Baroda after his return from Columbia University, and while traveling. Experiences similar to Ambedkar’s continue to haunt a large section of India’s 170 million dalits. They are still denied water, shelter and the basic dignities of life. In this ground-breaking graphic book, Pardhan-Gond artists Durgabai Vyam and Subhas Vyam interweave historical events like the Mahad satyagraha with contemporary atrocities.

Says Joe Sacco, author of Palestine, “Heavy in symbolism and motifs, Bhimayana is challenging in all the right ways and still conveys with flair who Ambedkar was and why his revolutionary ideas about the caste system still matter so much to the India of today.” Says John Berger, “This extraordinary book… [offers] a conference of corporeal experience across generations, full of pain and empathy, and nurtured by a complicity and endurance that can outlive the Market.”

The Persistence of Caste

The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid

Anand Teltumbde

Aug 2010 |9788189059286 | Demy Octavo Pb, 192 pp | Rs 200

All Rights Available

In this fully revised, new edition of the bestselling and critically acclaimed work Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop, Anand Teltumbde dissects the history, politics and society that produces an atrocity like Khairlanji, where mother and daughter Surekha Bhotmange and Priyanka Bhotmange were gang-raped and along with sons Roshan and Sudhir bludgeoned to death in full view of people of the village. In a work that Arundhati Roy says ‘exposes the gangrenous heart of Indian society’, Teltumbde makes you face a truth you cannot turn away from.

Embodying Difference

The Making of Burakumin in Modern Japan

Timothy Amos David

Oct 2010 | 9788189059293  | Demy Octavo, Hb | Rs 490

All Rights Available

Japan’s largest minority group, Burakumin, are generally understood to be an ‘untouchable’ outcaste group descended from premodern occupational groups (eta and hinin) who engaged primarily in tanning and leatherwork and were discriminated against by mainstream society. This book demonstrates, however, through a close investigation of original archival documents, published primary and secondary material, critical literature, ethnographic fieldwork, and in-depth interviews, that this master narrative is built upon empirically and conceptually questionable foundations overlooking the important ideational role Burakumin and other parties play in its creation and maintenance.

Dispersed Radiance

Caste, Gender & Nationalism in Modern Physics in India

Abha Sur

Nov 2010 | 9788189059323 | Demy Octavo, Hb | Rs 490

All Rights Available

Sur’s book is an extremely important contribution in the social history of science. It provides a nuanced and critical understanding of the role and location of science in the construction of the Indian imaginary, modernity, and social stratification in the colonial and postcolonial contexts. It is timely and useful for not just academics but also policy making because there is a growing interest in scientific and technological research and development in India.

In the Tiger’s Shadow
The Autobiography of an Ambedkarite

Namdeo Nimgade

September 2010 | 9788189059309 | Demy Octavo, Pb, 300 pp | Rs 350

All Rights Available

In this inspiring autobiography Namdeo Nimgade recounts his association with Babasaheb Ambedkar, first as a young bodyguard during the momentous Kalaram Temple satyagraha, and then as a scholar in Delhi who often consulted with Ambedkar. Nimgade happens to be the first dalit from India to have acquired a PhD in an American university after Ambedkar. Nimgade writes with equal flair about being a subaltern witness to history and about his personal travails. He played an instrumental role in ensuring the first ever statue for Ambedkar in Parliament House in 1966. Often Nimgade’s writing sparkles with humour and uncanny intelligence–such as when he reflects on how his own family surname probably deriving from the neem tree, known for its healing properties; and how Khobtragade, Ambagade and Jamgade similarly were arboreal names that had Buddhist origin sans caste.

The Buddha’s Way to Human Liberation

A Socio-Historical Approach

Nalin Swaris

Dec 2010 | 9788189059316 | Demy Octavo, 430 pp | Rs 540

All rights (except Sri Lanka) available

A refreshingly new reading of the early Buddhist discourses from a multidisciplinary perspective that foregrounds the social elan of early Buddhism. Based on a doctoral dissertation at the State University of Utrecht in 1997, this study attempts to apply the core teaching of the Buddha: Impermanence (anicca); nonself, non-substantiality (anatta) and conditional co-arising (Paticca Samuppada) for understanding the causes of suffering at the personal and social levels.