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About the Book'EXPERIMENTAL AND INQUISITIVE, THESE ARE POEMS THAT DEMAND AN IMAGINATION WHERE "DRAVIDIAN" IS STRUCK OUT FOR "DARWINIAN" AND "WHALE" REPLACED BY "WHILE", TIME BECOMING SPACE LIKE IT DOES ON A CLOCKFACE.' -SUMANA ROYIn his latest poetry collection, Arjun Rajendran begins by resurrecting voices and stories from 18th-century Pondicherry: of a French ship that must change its flag to render itself invisible to the English fleet, of blind men contemplating a lunar eclipse or an unfortunate condemned to the absurdity of a second execution.Then jumping across centuries, the other two sections in this book explore intimacy, travel, hauntings and generational angst.About the AuthorArjun Rajendran is the author of Snake Wine (Les Éditions du Zaporogue, 2014), The Cosmonaut in Hergé's Rocket (Paperwall, 2017) and a chapbook, Your Baby Is Starving (Aainanagar/VAYAVYA, 2017). Arjun was the Charles Wallace Fellow in Creative Writing (University of Stirling, Scotland, 2018). He is also the poetry editor at The Bombay Literary Magazine and the founder of The Quarantine Train, a poetry community that is a response to the great pandemic.

About the BookTHE MEMOIR OF ONE OF INDIA'S ICONIC WRITERS, LISTEN TO ME IS CANDID, INSIGHTFUL AND MEMORABLE Shashi Deshpande's name is synonymous with Indian writing in English. Everyone you know has read her. Deshpande's novels, with their assertive and modern themes, are as urgent today as when they were first published. Yet, little is known about her. She is famously reticent.In Listen to Me, Deshpande opens up about her life and work. She writes about being a writer and a feminist and the shaping of these selves. She draws us into her world: growing up in Dharwad as Kannada litterateur Shriranga's daughter, moving to Bombay as a student, figuring out her identity as a newly married woman and negotiating the unfamiliar world of Indian publishing-and always, always her love of reading. As she talks about influences, detractors and challenges, the genesis of her own work shines through.This book is not a fight to claim a piece of public memory, and definitely not an act of self-aggrandisement. It is an acute observation of an eventful era in Indian literature and history, and a micro-history of Deshpande's own engagement with it, through her certain and uncertain recollections. With its chiselled prose and honest self-knowledge, it revitalises that most delicate of endeavours: the writerly memoir.About the AuthorNovelist and short story writer, Shashi Deshpande has eleven novels, two crime novellas, a number of short story collections, a book of essays, and four children's books to her credit. Three of her novels have received awards, including the Sahitya Akademi award for That Long Silence. Her latest novels are Shadow Play and Strangers to Ourselves. She has translated works from Kannada and Marathi into English, and her own work has been translated into various Indian and European languages.Shashi Deshpande has participated in literary conferences and festivals, as well as lectured in universities, both in India and abroad.She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2009.

About the BookA LUCID, NECESSARY ACCOUNT OF HOW DRASTICALLY THE INDIAN STATE FAILS ITS CITIZENSThe story of democratic failure is usually read at the level of the nation, while the primary bulwarks of democratic functioning-the states-get overlooked. This is a tale of India's states, of why they build schools but do not staff them with teachers; favour a handful of companies so much that others slip into losses; wage water wars with their neighbours while allowing rampant sand mining and groundwater extraction; harness citizens' right to vote but brutally crack down on their right to dissent. Reporting from six states over thirty-three months, award-winning investigative journalist M. Rajshekhar delivers a necessary account of a deep crisis that has gone largely unexamined.About the AuthorM. Rajshekhar started his career as a business reporter in 1997. He began reporting on environmental issues as a freelance journalist in 2005. After a brief stint with the World Bank, an MA at the University of Sussex, and two years of independent research-spent studying the village-level impact of an agribusiness model in central India and the drafting process which produced India's Forest Rights Act-he joined the Economic Times to report on rural India and environment in 2010. During this period, he won two Shriram Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism (2013 and 2014).He joined Scroll.in in 2015 to do a thirty-three-month-long reporting project, Ear to the Ground, which became the substrate for this book. This series won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award (2015), the Bala Kailasam Memorial Award (2016), and two more Shriram Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism (2015 and 2016).He now writes on energy, environment, climate change, political corruption and oligarchy.

About the BookA LIVELY AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING COLLECTION OF WRITINGS ABOUT LIFE AND LITERATUREFor more than forty years, Shashi Deshpande has-as a novelist, short story writer, essayist, memoirist and public figure (in short, as a concerned and engaged citizen)-audibly contributed to the lively public debates on the role of the writer and writing in India and to an understanding of India's contemporary social, literary and political issues. She has not been reluctant to insert critical and dissenting notes into the public discourse of her nation. The essays in this volume constantly remind us that Deshpande is first and foremost a reader and a listener actively and compassionately engaged in dialogue with others. Subversions invites its readers to enter that fascinating dialogue.About the AuthorShashi Deshpande is the author of eleven novels, two crime novellas, a number of short-story collections, a book of essays, and four children's book. Three of her novels have received awards, most notably the Sahitya Akademi award for The Long Silence. She has translated works from Kannada and Marathi into English and her own work has been translated into various Indian and European languages. She has participated in literary conferences and festivals, as well as lectured in universities, both in India and abroad. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2009. Her memoir, Listen to Me, was published by Context in 2019.

About the bookTHIS MUCH-FETED BOOK RETURNS IN A STRIKING, ALL-NEW COVER! A NUANCED AND MUCH-NEEDED REPORT FROM THE GROUND ON TAMIL NADU, AND INDEED INDIA'S, ENDANGERED LIVELIHOODS.In a rapidly urbanising nation, rural India is being erased from the popular imagination. Through her five years of travelling across the villages of Tamil Nadu, Aparna Karthikeyan gets to know men and women who do exceptional-yet perfectly ordinary-things to earn a living. She documents, through ten of these stories, the transformations, aspirations and disruptions of the last twenty-five years. The people she meets force these questions of her, and her reader: What is the culture we seek to preserve? What will become of food security without farmers? How can 'development' exclude 833 million people?Including interviews with journalist P. Sainath, musician T.M. Krishna and writer Bama, among others, Nine Rupees an Hour is a critical portrayal of the drastic and systematic erosion of traditional livelihoods.These engaging narratives unravel a peoples' perspective of work and life, where creative beauty and human dignity merge to matter, even if their worth in market-obsessed economics is merely nine rupees an hour. Evocative and relevant, they jostle our comfort. Statistics and economic analyses of wages and work, juxtaposed with the lives people lead, help us understand the situation on the ground. A book all of us must read' - Aruna Roy, Social activistSustainable livelihoods provide the foundation for a happy life. We owe a deep sense of gratitude to Aparna Karthikeyan for bringing out this useful book based on real-life examples. I hope the book will be widely read. - M.S. Swaminathan, plant geneticist and agricultural scientistAparna Karthikeyan is a storyteller and an independent journalist. She volunteers for the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI) and has written for them, as well as for The Hindu, The Caravan, The Wire

About the BookLITERARY WRITERS OCCASIONALLY WRITE ON THEIR PASSION FOR SPORT. THE TRAFFIC IS SELDOM IN THE OTHER DIRECTION. THIS BOOK IS A SMALL ATTEMPT TO REDRESS THAT-A SPORTSWRITER WRITING ON A PASSION FOR LITERATURE.What do Ved Mehta, Gabriel García Márquez and Agatha Christie have in common-apart from being among the most celebrated writers in the world, that is? Their ability to hook the discerning reader and never let go. What have some of these great writers said of their own work? What, for that matter, makes a writer, or a book, 'great' and canonical while others that sold millions of copies in their own lifetimes fade into oblivion? How much of a reader's appreciation of a novel or an essay stems from their own early reading practices and friendships? And why, oh why, do they not give the Nobel to the writers who most deserve it?These are some of the thoughts that centre this eclectic collection of reflections about writers and writing. They seek out the pleasures and the techniques, the spaces and the memories, the little moments and the life-changing sentences that encompass and enrich a reader's life.About the AuthorSuresh Menon is one of the world's leading cricket writers. He became India's youngest sports editor and then one of its youngest editors with Indian Express. His books include Bishan: Portrait of a Cricketer and Pataudi: Nawab of Cricket. He is married to the sculptor Dimpy Menon, and they live in Bengaluru.

A newborn girl can expect to live to eighty in Sri Lanka, seventy-four in Bangladesh and sixty-nine in India. This is but one of a range of Swati Narayan's insights from a five-year study across four countries: India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. She found that even poorer neighbours were doing better than India on a range of social indicators: health, nutrition, education, sanitation, with more women working outside the home.Narayan's intensive, immersive research shows that India's leapfrogging neighbours have worked hard to dilute social inequalities. Land reforms, investments in schools and hospitals, and socio-political reform movements aimed at diluting caste and gender discrimination - all of these have wrought change over the decades. Excellent networks of primary healthcare clinics, village schools and household toilets have transformed the lives of citizens in these countries.In economically booming India, on the other hand, social ills like sex-selective abortion, child stunting, illiteracy and preventable deaths are rampant. Inequalities are stark here-not only between the burgeoning billionaire class and the neglected masses, but also among the northern states and their southern counterparts. However, it is in fact the successes in states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala that offer grounds for optimism-India is capable of transformation if governments commit to social welfare investments and bridging social inequities.Packed with human stories as well as hard data, and shot through with empathy and hope, Swati Narayan's Unequal is a necessary book for our times.About the AuthorSwati Narayan is an academic and activist. Previously, She is an alumna of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, School of Oriental and African Studies and London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research and opinion articles have been published in The Indian Express, The Hindu, The Telegraph, Hindustan Times, The Guardian blog, Prospect magazine, Economic and Political Weekly, Gender and Development and several other journals and publications.Swati currently lives in Haryana and Delhi.

About the BookA DEVASTATING ACCOUNT OF THE WAY IN WHICH VIOLENCE AFFECTS LIVES IN MODERN INDIAWhat makes a man stand by and watch violence being done to another? What does a woman do after her husband has killed a pregnant stranger? What latent tensions and complexes did the instigators of violence draw upon to unleash the carnage of 28 February 2002?Investigations into mass violence in India, and Gujarat 2002 in particular, have focused on the consequences, the victims, the political apparatus. The mob has always been a faceless, unidimensional machine. But the act of turning around and looking at individuals from that crowd changes everything. If we see the mob as amorphous and their hate as shifting, given to complex personal motivations and vulnerabilities, we are much closer to understanding it-and to opening up conversations that can lead to change.Revati Laul's unforgettable narrative, built on a decade's worth of research and interviews, is the very first account of the perpetrators of 2002-and a crucial new addition to the literature on violence.About the AuthorRevati Laul is an independent journalist and activist. She started her career in television with NDTV, then shifted to print, writing for publications like Tehelka, The Quint and the Hindustan Times. As an outcome of her work on political violence, she created the Sarfaroshi Foundation in the district of Shamli in Uttar Pradesh, where she now lives. This is her first book.

COMBINING PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERSTANDING AND POLITICAL INSIGHT, ROHIT CHOPRA MAKES A STRONG CASE FOR THE RELEVANCE OF THE GITA IN THE MODERN, GLOBAL WORLD.The Gita in a Global World examines a very particular claim: can the ancient text that is the Gita offer a framework to negotiate the ethical challenges of capitalist modernity? We live in a world marked by greater existential precarity, and increased political and social turbulence and violence. Could the Gita, for all its philosophical abstraction, help us navigate this space? What can it tell us about global warming and violence, inequality and suffering, pandemics and the savage oppression of vulnerable groups? Rohit Chopra's masterful examination of the Gita interrogates the relevance of its ideas and sees in its articulation of the philosophy of universal being a more just and inclusive idea of human belonging.Combining philosophical discussion, meticulous research and sharp political insight, this book does what that ancient text has done for years-illuminate and provoke while asking each of us to choose how we will act to meet the challenges of the present and future.About the AuthorRohit Chopra is Professor of Communication at Santa Clara University. His research centres on global media and identity, digital media, and the relationship between media, memory and violence. He is the author of The Virtual Hindu Rashtra: Saffron Nationalism and New Media (HarperCollins, 2019) and Technology and Nationalism in India: Cultural Negotiations from Colonialism to Cyberspace (Cambria, 2008), and co-editor of Global Media, Culture, and Identity: Theory, Cases, and Approaches (Routledge, 2011). Rohit also writes extensively in a journalistic capacity on media, politics and culture in global contexts. An expert on the role of social media in fomenting sectarian violence, he works with non-profits, think tanks, and technology and media firms on developing strategies to combat the negative effects of social media. Rohit is also the co-founder and co-host of the India Explained podcast, a conversation on matters related to India (www.soundcloud.com/indiaexplained).

About the BookA NUANCED AND POWERFUL MICROHISTORY SET AGAINST THE SWEEP OF INDIAN HISTORY.Dharmman Bibi rode into battle during the revolt of 1857 shoulder to shoulder with her patron lover Babu Kunwar Singh. Sadabahar entranced even snakes and spirits with her music, but eventually gave her voice to Baba Court Shaheed. Her foster mothers Bullan and Kallan fought their malevolent brother and an unjust colonial law all the way to the Privy Council-and lost everything. Their great-granddaughter Teema paid for the family's ruination with her childhood and her body. Bindo, Asghari, Phoolmani, Pyaari ... there are so many stories in this family. And you-one of the best-known tawaifs of your times-remember the stories of your foremothers and your own.This is a history, a multi-generational chronicle of one family of well-known tawaifs with roots in Banaras and Bhabua. Through their stories and self-histories, Saba Dewan explores the nuances that conventional narratives have erased, papered over or wilfully rewritten.In a not-so-distant past, tawaifs played a crucial role in the social and cultural life of northern India. They were skilled singers and dancers, and also companions and lovers to men from the local elite. It is from the art practice of tawaifs that kathak evolved and the purab ang thumri singing of Banaras was born. At a time when women were denied access to the letters, tawaifs had a grounding in literature and politics, and their kothas were centres of cultural refinement.Yet, as affluent and powerful as they were, tawaifs were marked by the stigma of being women in the public gaze, accessible to all. In the colonial and nationalist discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this stigma deepened into criminalisation and the violent dismantling of a community. Tawaifnama is the story of that process of change, a nuanced and powerful microhistory set against the sweep of Indian history.About the AuthorSaba Dewan is a documentary film-maker. Her documentaries have focused on issues of gender, sexuality and culture. This is her first book and has emerged from her trilogy of films on stigmatised women performers: Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi (2006) about the lives of bar dancers; Naach (The Dance, 2008) on women dancers in rural fairs and The Other Song (2009) about the art and lifestyle of the tawaifs or courtesans. The research and writing of the book was supported by a fellowship from the New India Foundation. Saba lives in Gurgaon.