NA Series

Aditi Rao is a poet in search of language—she looks to history and mythology, to beaches and forts and around street corners—she finds herself in this language—resurrects bones, body, but most importantly, tongue. She presents the words to us—a kind of freedom song—like the trees she writes of, who ‘wear their roots on the outside’. She is speaking. Listen. ---TISHANI DOSHIAditi Rao’s poems remind us of rites of passage and survival strategies that need to be relearned time and again: how to discern ‘the smell of high school phone calls’, how not to hide vowels under consonants, how to reclaim the right to rage, to grieve, to say no and to stand still. These are poems of love, loss and recovery by a poet who understands ‘splatter’ but also learns how to find her way back to becoming that nondomesticable beast: ‘a woman unafraid of regret’. ---ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAMWhat Aditi Rao does with vulnerability will astound you. Her resolve to overcome violence with her words is a quiet, searing spectacle unfolding on every page of this book. No one ‘decides her’ here. Her words become meteors crashing into us, slowly. She steps out, taking on cities made of ‘too many men’. She doesn’t acquit, she puts in dock. Till she reaches the scorching, right note for her freedom song. ---AKHIL KATYAL

Kyla Pasha’s poems sparkle with the rediscovery of song’s electricity while losing none of the sophisticated edge of argument. Pasha’s poems move in several directions, unconstrained by doctrinaire notions of what a poem should do and be. She speaks to present, distant or departed interlocutors; meditates on how we lose and find ourselves again through travel; brings news of war to the front lawn, speaks crisp commonsense to the robed spectres of Death and Memory. The self opens to the world, and the world to the self, in Pasha’s poems, through the realisation that we are formed by the irreducible compound of love, betrayal, forgiveness and anger that swirls constantly in the fragile crucible of the body. In the South Asian context, ‘woman poet’ is all too often a title claimed by simple appeal to physiognomy and asserted through conformity with the dictionary of a feminist cliché. Kyla Pasha is among the exception to this norm, who work to earn their title. She crafts her way through the labyrinth of language, attending sensitivity to the image and cadence, the murmur of several tongues; if her ear is tuned to the intimate tremors of the heart, it also records the epic turbulences both of South Asia and a world in ecological and political meltdown.

With the landmark Delhi High Court victory in July 2009, sexuality and the law entered mainstream, legal and public discourse in India inviting both celebration and resistance. How do we understand this conversation? The July judgement stands on the shoulders of a much longer history, argue the writers in this contemporary and critical volume on queering the law. A longer history that shapes, unsettles and challenges both legal and queer histories and begins new conversations on the intersections between bodies, politics, activism, sexuality, identity and law. Some playful, some critical and others reflective and irreverent, this unique collection of pieces brings the life, structures and institutions of law alive and shine with relevance in the contemporary moment.

Aravanis or hijras have long been the invisible yet hyper-visible subjects of a societal gaze that reduces them to stereotype. Imagined as often as looked at or talked about, simultaneously revered and cursed, they have, in the process, been refused individual histories, lives and identities, even selves. Yet the community continues to challenge and subvert this view, persistently refusing to allow itself to be shamed or victimized. Some of the greatest recent victories in this ongoing battle for rights have been won in Tamil Nadu, where the government first began to recognize many of the rights of the hijra community. The stories in this volume chronicle, in their own words, the lives of many of the aravanis who were part of this groundbreaking change. These landmark narratives-chronicles of pain and courage, of despair and triumph- are amongst the first accounts of hijra lives to be produced entirely by the members of the community themselves.

Humans in My Backyard is the marvellous tale of Thyaga, a young elephant, whose survival is threatened by thoughtless human exploitation. Accompanied by Vishal Menon's skillful wildlife photography, the book not only looks at the issue of the plundering of natural resources by the 'two-legged tormentors', but also beautifully captures the coming of age of an elephant.

Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile presents a collection of compelling essays which interrogate a variety of Indian texts and contexts along intersecting axes of gender, nation, and desire. The primary theme that weaves these varied essays together, written at different points of time with varying focal points of interest, is intertextuality. Vanita examines the way in which medieval texts speak to each other and draw on earlier canonical works, rewriting and transforming narrative in a spirit of respectful conversation. She also looks at modern texts, such as nineteenth-century poetry and twentieth-century fiction and cinema, as they converse with each other and with older texts. In doing so, she tries to explore how such pre-modern and modern texts are received in later periods or by other cultures in the same period. These captivating and intensely thought-provoking writings demonstrate the author’s superb ability to turn the norm, whether Right-wing or Left-wing, on its head, and find a fresh way to appreciate diversity and change, and the valuable dialogue they give rise to. Written in a style that is informed by scholarship yet accessible to the general reader, and boldly addressing a number of issues which South Asian society would ‘rather not talk about’, this is a timely volume which effectively narrows the looming gap between sexuality and gender.

In Chemin-des-dames, a memorial library may be found encased in a series of catacombs, while in Memorious, the living have themselves become an oral record of literature. The rules of Linearis mandate fidelity to a book till its completion, while Dermestis Lardarius houses books in a state of half-eaten incompleteness. Journey further into this world, and you will find libraries taxonomized by smell, composed of marginalia, etched in ice, and forged in nightmares. Invisible Libraries captures the sensuous, enigmatic and aesthetic world of books and libraries. Taking a cue from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the authors explore bibliophilia, especially in the way it manifests itself via our love affair with libraries.

Somewhere in the dingy lanes of north Kolkata, a young girl born to a family of idol-makers learns to carve goddesses with her own hands, a right that her artisan father had reserved for her brother. But, years later, when Ira Chatterjee—a breezy, jet-setting ethnographer born in the same neighbourhood—comes looking for the girl, no one knows where to find her.

The history of Delhi has been told and retold many times. Often the intent is to use history as an ideological tool for staking a claim to the present of the city. In Intizar Husain's retelling, it is the tale itself that becomes delectable. A popular recital that highlights the forgotten nuances of the story, Once There Was a City Named Dilli, is a celebration of the people and culture that made the city unforgettable. Forts, walled cities, bazaars, diwan khanas, durbars, and the Yamuna itself come alive in this ode to a capital serenaded and ravaged by powerful kings and chieftains over time.

In this impressive new work, Benjamin Zachariah questions the tendency to regard nationalism as a necessary, inevitable and natural basis upon which to organise the world. In doing so, he embarks on a series of reflections on a longstanding project in Indian historiography which has till today not reached successful resolution: that of ‘decentring’ the nation as the central focus of history-writing in and about India. This outstanding collection presents essays held together with one common thread: a concern with writing histories of India that cannot be subsumed within a bland and obligatory history of Indian nationalism, and a concern with not writing histories of nationalism while writing histories of absolutely anything or everything. Claiming to speak from the perspective of internationalism and celebrating the rootless cosmopolitanism of the merely human, Benjamin Zachariah urges historians to begin the completion of this incomplete yet necessary ‘decentring’ project by placing their own histories, politics, and ‘interests’ before a readership and leaving these open for scrutiny and comment.

This book describes the violence and the aftermath of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. The book has been authored by social activists Harsh Mander, Akram Akhtar Chaudhary, Zafar Eqbal, and Rajanya Bose. It is based on interviews with people who personally witnessed the violence, as well as observing the living conditions of such people.

Calcutta is the central character in each of the three stories in this book. As all Bengalis will tell you, even when the city stands quietly in the corner, not saying a word, her presence may be deeply felt by those close to her. The House and Other Stories is also about the many persons we encounter in the everyday. These are the people we pass by without a second thought. Who are these people? What stories lie locked up in each of them? Will they ever be told? Like magic, one question leads to another and soon, they no longer appear anonymous; they come alive. It is as if an entirely new world has been conjured before our eyes. And we are enchanted by the stories that have lain hidden from us for so long. Even if the stories emerge at times from the realm of the dead.

Love & Rage is a book about children, both the child in those of us who are chronologically adult, as well as the children we may be interacting with. It takes a reader for a journey into their inner world of intense, raging emotions which often goes unheeded by the outside adult world. With the trained ear of a child psychotherapist, the author listens to children’s stories as they emerge in her consulting room, through word and play, and translates them for adults. Supported by the author’s own personal associations and a bedrock of psychodynamic theory, the book throws light on what comes into a psychotherapist’s consulting room, and demonstrates that it is not unusual, bizarre or crazy. Instead, it is the ordinary stuff of everyday life, taking place in every family. That sometimes we all carry the pain of complex feelings within ourselves for all of our lives—love and rage towards the people we are closest to. This book is essential reading for anyone close to children—parents and parents-to-be, teachers, school counsellors—but also for anyone looking to attend to the child within them.

Kashmir is on a boil. Civilian protests in the form of 'stone-pelting' have become part of the valley's daily life. These protests have been characterized by an unprecedented participation of boys and girls. Indeed, for an outsider, the conflict is increasingly identified with images and stories of children throwing stones at the Indian Security forces. Purgatory in Kashmir documents how the state's criminal justice system has been utterly inadequate in addressing the alienation of Kashmir's youth while failing to respect the commitments of juvenile rights. Focusing on the institutions of the state and courts, it shows how the former has consistently failed to meet the mandate of its own laws on juvenile justice, either by not institutionally implemeting them or violating them in practice. As a result, Kashmir's children are caught in a cycle of incarceration and despondency through illegal punitive and arbitrary procedures. What emerges out of this, politico-judicial mess is a tragic picture of militarisation, surveillance and alienation by the state of Kashmir's children.

The plight of a hungry tigress and her cubs; a dog’s undying love for his friend; a domesticated nilgai lost in the woods; the wide ambit of a cow’s maternity; the pangs of separation felt by a monkey mother and her child: such emotions are explored in this unusual collection of short stories peopled by a variety of animals. Originally written in Urdu by an important but little-known early twentieth-century writer, Syed Rafiq Hussain, the stories use satire to highlight the ignominy of human conduct from the vantage point of the animals. Hussain combines keen observation of animal behaviour with deep empathy, even as he brings the Terai region of the Himalayan foothills alive in these quiet yet profound tales. Kidwai’s deft and nuanced translation in English retains the liveliness of Hussain’s idiomatic Urdu and introduces a new generation of readers to a gifted and deeply philosophical writer.

“Aditi Rao’s writing is imbued with the attentiveness of a lepidopterist, the tenderness of an epicurean and the quiet, unflinching fortitude one associates with surgeons on the battlefront. The frontlines are those of attrition and loss – of the body, of memory, of time and space, and of love – where the poems themselves are acts of resistance, of survival, and, ultimately, of celebration and transcendence. A warning: The Fingers Remember can enter and occupy crannies of the reader’s mind, humming reminders that are at once unnervingly intimate yet strangely new. And it stays.” Karthika Nair

“Before your cheek turns red beneath my slaps, a soft kiss for you. Before the whipping takes the skin off your back, two spoonfuls of pollen off the feet. Before the hired bulldozer grinds your ancestors to powder, a sacred pot. Before letting loose a salivating pack of wolves starving for three days, a courteous farewell. Before plucking your brazen eyelids out with forceps, a warm handshake, comrade. Before upending a sack of salt on your open wound, a tin of talcum. Before inserting a heated iron rod slowly up your rectum, a fragrant rose of Basrah my friend. Just like the countdown before the explosion. Welcome to the world.” Srijato’s verses shock one out of any sort of complacency with their visceral, cinema verite potency. This is poetry that makes you shift uncomfortably in your chair, but which you cannot put down. And before you know it, you are picking it up again for a second read.

The ghazal for Maaz Bin Bilal becomes a way to love as well as to remember, to dialogue as well as to critique, to mourn as well as to memorialize. It aspires to the condition of statement and song, seeking to combine a love of rhetorical flourish with tender lyricism, political assertion with whimsy, even as it acknowledges its debt to forbears who range from Gandhi to Ghalib, Adrienne Rich to Agha Shahid Ali. Seguing between the elegiac, the reflective and the playful, these poems lurch restlessly across Delhi and Belfast, Aleppo and Srinagar, in quest of the ‘inflammable’ word, driven by the ancient aspiration of poets down the ages to write ‘in fire’. — Arundhathi Subramaniam ‘Let poetry come,’ declares Maaz confidently in his opening ghazal, and come it does, in English and from Urdu, in such poems as ‘Biryani in Belfast’, destined to become a cult classic. He is attracted to the trouble spots of the world and the trouble spots of the heart, and the marriage of Hindu and Muslim consciousness could hardly be more beautifully expressed than in the translation, ‘Holi’: Cast like a gem in the name of the prophet, Each drop falls with the beat of Al-lah, Al-lah, Only he may play with these colourful dyes Who has learnt to lose himself in Allah . . . Maaz strikes a contemporary note even when paying homage to past masters: ‘Whither the way to the bar, Ghalib...’ Let's join the two of them there! — Gabriel Rosenstock

This is a book about the Kashmir valley—lacerated, wrathful, aflame. The authors travelled across it in the winter of 2016, during a journey undertaken in a spirit of solidarity with the people of the region. It is a disturbing account of children blinded by pellet guns, of a government in a bitter state of undeclared war with its own civilian populations, of the rage of stone-throwing youth and the hubris of military generals. The book also attempts a concise history of the conflict in the valley and makes a strong plea for humanity, for fairness, and for justice. The authors argue, there should be no denying a just peace to the embattled people of the valley. The concluding words of the book sum it up precisely: ‘We are told that a nation cannot be strong if it is ethical or compassionate; that these are despicable signs of weakness; that a strong state is a state that is without morality or mercy. Who will tell them how wrong they are? That it is only the weak who fell those who are weaker, whose hearts are empty of mercy, who celebrate the weeping of children. The truly strong are those who have the courage to be kind and just.’

A collection suspended in a perpetual state of homecoming. Bolger navigates the worlds she inhabits with both the feverishness of a new rasika and the familiarity of an insider’. — Arundhathi Subramaniam ' A generous and humbling collection that dances lightly between languages. Often angry and vital, Bolger sharpens her words and brings us on a journey that embraces both the sensuality and discomfort of being human. Shifting between worlds and perspectives, this is a raw exploration of what it means to be alive in a world that is as devastating as it is beautiful.' — Alvy Carragher

If you really think about it, there are only two kinds of people: those who spend the week before a trek to the Everest base camp training and eating right, and those who lie in bed agonizing over which book should make it into their backpack. Would You Like Some Bread With That Book? is about this second group of people. Join the author in bookstore aisles as she fantasizes about falling in love with men who share her love of books or is spat upon by a book-crazed gentleman who is compelled to sell his library. A collection of 14 evocative and laugh-out-loud funny essays about books and reading, this book speaks to anyone for whom books are not merely words on a page, but sites of adventure, conversation and reverie. ​

Anjali Purohit’s lovingly crafted translations of Bahinabai Choudhari’s poetry bring into English both the cadence and the ethos of this remarkable woman’s oeuvre. Bahinabai (1880–1951) was named after a 17th century saint who composed devotional abhanga poetry. Born into one farming family in northwestern Maharashtra, she was married, at an early age as was customary in her generation, into another. Her everyday life revolved around the activities of running a household in a demanding rural economy and attending to the fields. Along the way, Bahinabai began to compose ovis—a form of poetry that has been sung by women in Maharashtra for centuries, and is closely related to the rhythm of grindstone and well windlass—in a regional variant of Marathi known as Ahirani. Unlettered, she wrote nothing down. Her ovis might have been passed down orally after her death; but equally, they might have vanished from memory. Fortunately, they were transcribed and committed to print by her son, Sopandev Choudhari, in 1952. Through print, recordings, the radio and academic syllabi, they have since passed into Maharashtrian culture at large. In Bahinabai’s poetry, women’s labour receives long overdue acknowledgement, as do seemingly quotidian subjects that vanish below the radar of literary modernism: family relationships, financial difficulties, the vegetation and landscapes of the countryside, the Divine, and the challenge of leading a life of wisdom and prayer in the face of the world’s capacity for mischief. Anjali Purohit engages closely and deftly with the texture and resonances of Bahinabai’s poetry, her English shot through with Marathi as she attempts to convey as much of the oral tonality and lifeworld of the original as possible. Through this, she seems to argue that English in India cannot remain aloof from the subcontinent’s other languages, but must expand itself to include and be enriched by them.

Sabitha and Rasheed, a young couple and doctors both, leave their homeland in Kerala to work in the holy city of Mecca. The story spans the six years they spend in Mecca. Not a Muslim by birth, Sabitha had converted to Islam for marriage. In her time in Mecca, she observes, experiences and questions the restrictions to which women around her are subjected, even as she faces challengers of her own and finally understands that religion is experienced and lived differently in different parts of the world. A powerful comment on religion, gender, patriarchy and spirituality, and how the experience of religion can be different for men and women, this is the first-ever English translation of a celebrated novel in the original Malayalam by a valiant Muslim female voice.

‘Arvind and Gautam’s book weaves the threads of the LGBT movement together into a hand-nailed fist that punches hetro-normative India in its very belly… The knuckles in the book are two incredible essays by two women who tear into the construct called heterosexuality… a remarkable book that is a must for students of gender and sexual politics in India.’ Ashok Row Kawi, Sunday Hindustan Times. ‘Passionate, considered, this anthology pushes at the hypocrisies of a society that turns love into something Queer… It is a book to be read, re-read and passed on-not by people sympathetic to queer issues but by those who are not.’ Mitali Saran, Tehelka. ‘It is a collective voice of reason that comes shining through, with its definitive and inclusive spirit of the human struggle for dignity and equality.’ Mahesh Dattani, The Week ‘…this anthology expands the reach and scope, and illuminates the presence of queer politics in different spaces in India. What is most impressive, however, is that it confronts the unquestioned, “compulsory” nature of heterosexuality in India, in a language that is not restricted to the academic.’First City

A baby visits Philadelphia and looks out on his family having breakfast, on people walking down the streets. The more he looks the more he sees. A monkey finds a top hat, a bat a kite, and a kachhua a skateboard amongst the houses, trees, and parks of Defence Colony in New Delhi. A boy gets run away by a shoe, a scooter driver by a sound, and Joey by his mood. Twin girls and their brother get new clothes. Miss Hadd tells young children a frightening story—a story that could come true because all her stories are true. Look, and see.