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Faced with many disappointments within the Communist Party to which he had dedicated his life and in the realm of politics beyond, P.C. Joshi turned to a deep and life-long engagement with the party's history. It was an engagement that led to the creation of a rich archive on the complex history of the Indian Left. On 1 December 1970, this collection was formally acquired by Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Joshi himself was the Director of this archive for the first five years, ably assisted by K. Damodaran. In 1974, the archive was set up as an adjunct to the School of Social Sciences, JNU.

The materials in the 'P.C. Joshi Archives on Contemporary History' consist primarily of documents and papers from the personal collection of P.C. Joshi. They include rare magazines and journals, publications of communist parties and various other Left groups from several parts of the globe; and books, pamphlets, photographs, and copies of important files and letters relating to the Communist Party of India. P.C. Joshi himself had long been writing on a wide range of issues, commenting on contemporary political developments, Party positions and strategies, historical events and processes, and on debates and concerns among workers and peasants, artists and writers, students and the youth. Many of these were published in the journals with which he was associated, though some important reflections remained unpublished. This volume contains a selection from Joshi's large body of writing, which will serve as an introduction to the man, his writings and his times. The articles are presented here in a chronological framework, starting with excerpts from Joshi's memorable deposition in the Meerut Conspiracy Case and continuing to his last writings before he fell critically ill. The first chapter, titled 'In His Own Words', is an autobiographical note that he wrote on 7 November 1970. In addition to a selection of Joshi's writings, the volume contains invited articles by scholars/writers which evaluate and contextualize Joshi and his times.

In 1820, an unusual letter was published in the Bengali newspaper Samachar Darpan. It was a plaintive appeal from the rats of the city of Calcutta saying they were being unfairly displaced from their ancient dwellings. Calcutta was indeed going through momentous changes – new roads and neighborhoods were being planned, channels for draining were being dug, new structures were coming up and existing buildings refurbished. These changes were not random. A new spatial order was coming into its own backed by the powerful ideology of town planning. Planning encompassed not only the regulation of physical spaces, but also the multiple concerns of health, policing, and commerce.

Planning happened largely in the guise of 'improvement' and the intervention of the colonial government was important. Despite resistance and skepticism, and some reversals, the task of imposing a rational urban order on the city continued. The history of this colonial initiative can be traced through three sets of archival documents which have so far been sparingly used by historians of Calcutta. Lord Wellesley began the process with his prescriptive Minute on Calcutta in 1803, which led to the setting up of the Lottery Committee in 1817 – so called because funds for the city were raised through public lotteries. The investigation of the Fever Hospital Commission followed in the 1830s and, as the name suggests, the locations of epidemic fevers determined areas for urban restructuring. The Municipality, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, had to reckon with bustis which housed the labouring poor. But it was only after the plague epidemic in 1897 that an autonomous organization to plan the city came into being: the Calcutta Improvement Trust was set up in 1911.This book examines and assesses the continuity of colonial urban policy and its impact, particularly in terms of the social costs to the displaced population and its implications for understanding planning history generally.

These essays are among the political pieces written since the catastrophic events of 9/11. Massive violence against humanity is a recurrent theme in modern, industrialized societies. But the same societies also gave rise to impressive forms of popular resistance. 9/11 signaled a change in the agenda. Under the leadership of the United States, advanced industrial states had developed colossal instruments of propaganda and violence to throttle popular resistance. Vast sections of working masses were basically disenfranchised.

In the absence of mass movements, forms of terror have taken over the role of resistance. The presence of this terror is now used as a new pretext for controlling domestic populations, targeting specific communities and launching wars of aggression abroad. As the twin terrors confront each other in a spiraling cycle of violence, the democratic space for the unarmed humanity – in fact, the chance of survival of the human race – diminishes. What options for resistance are now available to arrest what otherwise looks like an inevitable course to doom?

These essays are a fragile and essentially personal effort to come to grips with this overwhelming question. This is not meant to be theoretical exercise; there are no blue-prints. These are expressions of anguish and anger directed at mounting insanity, celebration of little glimmers of hope, attempts to analyse, understand, expose, locate the ground and act.

Portal: The Curious Account of Achintya Bose, conceptualized, compiled and reproduced by Shan Bhattacharya, recipient of the Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Grant for Photography, 2015 (instituted by the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation), presents the personal diary of the owner of a small photography studio in Calcutta, India, maintained sporadically from 1994 to 1996, before his sudden unexplained disappearance. The diary is a fictional ‘found archive’ that contains his collection of photographic prints, letters, torn pages from books, newspaper and magazine cuttings, declassified police records, polaroids and print advertisements obtained from different sources. Through these documents spanning the twentieth century, he attempts to trace photographic ‘evidence’ and information about an elusive woman who seemingly does not age through a century. Mr Bose’s search is also a journey through the local history of vernacular photography and regional publications that reflect popular culture, politics, fashion, design, advertising and other iconography, and their transformations over time.

In this book, images serve both as the primary objects of interest and a narrative device. The cover plot interrogates the veracity of photographs – the way they are used as indices and evidence of a person’s existence in spatio-temporal reality. These images are staged in variously contrived scenarios, often taking cues from the several utilitarian subsets of twentieth-century photography–the wedding portrait, the convocation photo, the vacation/holiday photo, candid snapshots, product advertisements–as though taken by different fictional photographers using different image-making aesthetics, techniques and formats appropriate to the time/place/visual cultures that those prototypes historically belong to. Referring to the genre of historiographic metafiction, fictional text and visual elements based on real events and characters are introduced to enable this ‘found archive’ assume certain characteristics of a hoax.

Published in association with Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation

Project Cinema City is an anthology of text and image essays, documentation transcripts, maps, graphics, annotated artworks, and films on various configurations of the cinema and the city of Bombay/Mumbai. This volume has evolved out of and is the culmination, in a sense, of Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices – an expansive project initiated by Majlis, a center for multidisciplinary art initiatives in Mumbai, and developed over five years, from 2008 to 2012. The contributors to the book include filmmakers, visual artists, designers, architects, photographers, historians and other social scientists.

Project Cinema City is primarily a set of inquiries into the labor, imagination, desire, access, spaces, locations, iconization, materiality, languages, moving peoples, viewing conventions, and hidden processes that inform the cinemas the city makes, and also the cities its cinema produces. The inquiries are based on the hypothesis that cinema in the terrain of cinema city is as much everyday practice as it is a part of a speculative desirescape. Hence this volume presents cinema as a manufacturing enterprise that alters through shifts in materials, technologies, labor inflow, distribution territories, demographic patterns and development policies, and the city as a phenomenon that continuously evolves through the interface between lived reality and the reality perceived in cinema. The main aim of this volume is to convey the richness of documentation made through the parent project – a richness that, hopefully, will also convey to the reader the scale and diversity, and the crisis and creativity of the relationship between cinema and city in Bombay. In its free mixing of images, graphics, field notes, information and commentary, the book, quite like the parent project, maintains a work-in-progress status.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, Mapping Imaginations: Terrains, Locations, deals with the spatiality, materiality and habitability of the cinema city. The second section, Performing Labour: Bodies, Network, is about the act of producing and the labor that produces – skill, work, character, aspiration, dissent, transgression, duplication, ancillaries – and the myriad ways in which they populate the cinema city. With the death of manufacturing industries in Bombay, the service and entertainment sectors have become the mainstay of aspiration-induced migration to the city. The third section, titled Viewing Limits: Narratives, Technologies, deals with the multiple niches and varied strategies through which cinema is arranged and rearranged in the everyday life of the city and its citizens.

Ramkinkar Vaij (1906-1980), a significant artist of twentieth century India, is regarded as the first major figure in modern Indian sculpture. Born into a poor family in Bankura district, Bengal, he enrolled himself as a student in Santiniketan, at the university founded by Rabindranath Tagore, at the age of 19. Having made his home and found his creative métier there - as a student first and a teacher later - he was one of the pioneering trio of artists, along with Nandalal Bose and Benodebehari Mukherjee, who made Santiniketan the most important center for art in India between 1920 and 1947. Ramkinkar, as he was popularly known, was a man who had enormous gifts but never aired them; an artist who was single-minded in his pursuit of work but treated the results with philosophic unconcern. Indifferent to success, fame and money, he lived an unworldly and capricious life. His works reflect a great zest for the gifts of nature and deep concern for the conditions of poor and laboring people.

The subject of this book is Ramkinkar's sculptures as seen through the photographic lens of Devi Prasad, supplemented by discussions on the artist's life and work in his own words and through the eyes of his students, friends and associates. Devi Prasad, who was a student at Kala Bhavan during 1938-44, went back to Santiniketan as a Visiting Professor in the year 1978. During his stay there, he undertook a photographic study of 60-odd sculptures of Ramkinkar. Towards the end of that year, during the seventh Pous celebrations, he exhibited nearly 150 of these photographs in three halls of Kala Bhavan. Ramkinkar himself, though in poor health by then, inaugurated the exhibition; he was deeply moved to see such a large photographic representation of his works.This book on Ramkinkar's sculptures by Devi Prasad is published as a tribute, to mark the artist's birth centenary year.

Written during a period of tumult and gestation in India's history, the essays in this book provide an intellectual's serious commentary on nascent nationhood. What makes this collection interesting is not just its historical value, but also its very evident contemporary relevance. Rare is the mind that can look critically at the present and read available signs to organize and project a picture of the future. Rarer still is the ability to pinpoint the exact issues that will define the grounds of national debate over the next half century. Written during the 1930s and 40s, these essays view problems of communal division, economic disparity, social injustice, neocolonialism, and disunity in the Left with both an intellectual and a human eye. Mukerji sets forth a new kind of humanism, reflecting an understanding of troubled times and indicating ways of possible resolution.

Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji (1894–1961) was a major social scientist. He was professor of economics and sociology at Lucknow University from 1949 to 1954 (having started teaching there in 1922), and then professor of economics at Aligarh Muslim University from 1954 to 1959. A man of great erudition, his interests were so wide-ranging that he might have said, with Bacon, 'I have taken all knowledge to be my province.' Apart from being a social scientist, Mukerji was a novelist, essayist, and critic of note in his mother tongue, Bengali. He was a connoisseur of the arts, especially of music, on which he wrote several books, one co-authored with Tagore. His other publications include Personality and the Social Sciences, Basic Concepts in Sociology, Modern Indian Culture, and Diversities.

Written in the 1820s, Sair-ul-Manazil, as far as we know, is the first attempt to systematically list the monuments of the city of Delhi. Apart from public buildings like mosques, temples, shrines, and tombs, it lists wells, gardens, houses, shops, and stray graves. This was in itself a formidable task, and one that might easily have resulted in a very dry and tedious document. The author, however, considerably enlivens it by a description of the various localities of the city, of the people who lived and worked there in his time, social activities and fairs, and historical anecdotes connected with places and people.

The original was written in Persian by a person variously known as Sangin and Sangin Beg, and the volume is translated from an Urdu translation by the late Nausheen Jaffery, with an introduction by Swapna Liddle. It also includes maps and sketches which will both illustrate the narrative and bring a visual life to it.

This volume is a collection of papers based on the idea that the concept of similarity could offer a new, alternative approach in culture studies, as compared to the hitherto dominant paradigm of difference. The concepts of identity and otherness are both becoming ever more questionable, not least due to global political events of the last few decades. The assumption of distinct cultural identities in the era of postmodern migratory flows seems increasingly inadequate. Though the postcolonial critique of identity has emphasized alterity and hybridity, this has remained within the paradigm of difference as an overall perspective. For these reasons, it is important not only to discuss, but also to reflect upon whether a concept of similarity can be developed alongside the concept of difference which has hitherto dominated culture studies. The category of similarity offers an alternative for examining our complex cultural world.

This book seeks to introduce and explore important and exemplary interpretations of similarity for research in culture studies. The essays presented here come from literary and cultural studies, from philosophy, political science, sociology, ethnology, and history. The essays are arranged according to their systematic perspectives: the first part of the book deals with conceptual attempts to establish the relevance of similarity for culture studies, while the second part is devoted to testing different areas and models of application. The book explores the theoretical range of the concept of similarity in historical and systematic terms. Similarity is seen not only as a heuristic concept, but also as an argument and an alternative option in cultural practice. That is why it was discredited by suggesting that it supported an assimilationist position leading to a forceful adjustment of cultures, gender, or religion. In addition, similarity and thinking in similarity were supposedly part of a premodern way of thinking belonging to other times and places, part of primitive stages of culture or a premodern epoch, and therefore part of a different order of things which was distinct from a rationalist modern epoch in which only exact concepts are valid. Thinking in similarity does in fact oppose the desire to draw precise borders and exact definitions. But this supposed drawback can be an advantage when dealing with complex phenomena of culture where fluid transitions, multiple overlappings, and broad spatial borders are given. The specific epistemological achievement of the category of similarity consists in offering new ways of seeing the diffuse dynamics and fuzzy relations characteristic of our contemporary complex and entangled world. Thinking about similarity opens different possibilities for dealing with the problems of complex societies than do methodologies focused on differences. Thinking about similarity should not be (mis-)understood as a false form of harmonization or leveling of differences. Rather, considerations of similarity contain a subversive potential to expose the claimed antagonisms and radical incompatibilities of opposition, differences, as nothing more than ideology.

In 2005, the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS) initiated the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI), with the aim of studying village-level production, production systems and livelihoods, and the socio-economic characteristics of different strata of the rural population by means of detailed village surveys. The present volume is the third in a series of field reports on surveys conducted by FAS in three villages in Karnataka: Alabujanahalli in Mandya district, Siresandra in Kolar district, and Zhapur in Gulbarga district. A census survey was conducted in the three selected villages. A unique feature of these surveys is the estimation of household incomes based on detailed information on income from crop production, animal resources, agricultural and non-agricultural wage labor, salaries, business and trade, rent, interest earnings, pensions, remittances, scholarships and other sources.

The two previous volumes in the series, Socio-Economic Surveys of Three of Three Villages in Andhra Pradesh: A Study of Agrarian Relations and Socio-Economic Surveys of Two Villages in Rajasthan: A Study of Agrarian Relations, have been published by Tulika Books.

This book reports findings from surveys conducted by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies’ Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI) in different agro-climatic regions in three villages in West Bengal in June–July 2010 and in May–June 2015. The villages studied were Panahar in the old alluvial region in Bankura district, Amarsinghi in new alluvial region in Malda district and Kalmandasguri in Terai region in Koch Behar district. The chapters in the book portray the production conditions, incomes, employment, poverty, and human development of rural households in West Bengal at an important juncture in the state’s development and political trajectory.

Published in association with Foundation for Agrarian Studies.

Sex selection and commercial surrogacy are practices pursued in the full glare of exposure, demystification, and critique. The female-child sex ratio continues to decline while commercial surrogacy has become a fledgling (trans)national industry. Both practices produce new subjects and agents of self-directed violence, and can be tied to the inequities of 'growth' without redistribution. Yet sex selection is usually represented as a fixture of tradition and commercial surrogacy is recast as a libertarian story of market empowerment.

The book attempts, first, to work through and against the common perceptions, rationales, and imaginaries that underwrite these practices, and to analyse the familial, social and market practices, the state policies, the agential modes and retraditionalizing processes which connect them. Second, it attempts to seize the formative conjunctions in the restructuring of patriarchal familial, state and (trans)national market regimes, and to define the confluences and contradictions between them. The argument revolves around the crystallization of a (trans)national reproductive formation grounded in conception and contraception that can be mapped on the relations between waged and non-waged domestic–procreative labor which converge in accumulation processes in the transition to a neoliberal economy. It considers the implications of post-Fordist redistributions of labor, manufacture and services, as well as of familial constraint and market emancipation. Given the transnational shaping of social reproduction, and of social and postsocial bodies, it asks if patriarchal practices can be defined solely on national or regional lines, and argues that neoliberal capitalism puts both fixities and flexibilities into play. The book shows how the implications of selective procreation extend far beyond the domestic domain, and reformulates the ground of left-feminist critique towards theorizing an 'open contemporaneity' that can still account for systemic structures.

This book is a collection of essays written in tribute to N. Ram, journalist, writer, and person of the Left. Its title reflects Ram’s concern that journalism, and indeed intellectual endeavor, be both informative and credible and committed to the social good.

The contributors to the book are: Venkatesh Athreya, Wayne Barrett, C. P. Chandrasekhar, John Cherian, Noam Chomsky, P. Jacob, T. Jayaraman, Kumari Jayawardena, Prakash Karat, C. T. Kurien, Parvathi Menon, Prabhakara S. Motnahalli, Suresh Nambath, Prabhat Patnaik, V. K. Ramachandran, Alan Rusbridger, Nirmal Shekar, M. S. Swaminathan, and Romila Thapar.

Drawing on a range of visual archives and personal collections, this book casts Rabindranath Tagore as the "Dancing Poet"—in whom the contours of a pan-Indian diversity seek to merge, albeit selectively, with that of the world, eschewing most emphatically the territorial borders of the nation-state while reiterating civilizational strands. The book outlines the contradictions and possibilities in such aspirations, central to the new cultural texts that Tagore seeks to produce in lyric, songs, dance, image, or narrative. These are strategic juxtapositions that may yet yield new insights into our old debates on modernity.

Focusing on the first four decades of the twentieth century, the book evokes an international backdrop of Europe, Asia, and the Americas between the World Wars—movements, revolutionary and reactionary, whose thrust is on putting "the people" center stage. It takes as a comparative frame cultural fronts emerging in locations as disparate as Russia, Japan, and Germany alongside movements in colonial India. Overall, it marks a period when experiments are being made to weave together the hitherto exclusive discourses of education, art, and entertainment in self-consciously alternative locales, often with a founding guru at the center of activities. The locus of this work continues to be the performing woman and the creation of new publics. Dance is the great signifier in this exercise. In the idiom of performance–dance, attempts are made to resolve anxieties about the erotic, to sublimate sexuality, and new dimensions explored in multiple modes of physical culture. Masculinities, whose other need not be femininity, figure prominently in these narratives.

The Ghazal Eros studies the movement of language and society in the old ghazal, i.e. the poetry of eros in Urdu, Persian and Arabic. It revisits scenes from the millennium-long literary history of the ghazal as an expression of masculine passion (ishq) for the masculine beloved which the author calls ‘lyric queerness’. The neglect of this movement of lyric queerness in not only mainstream cultural history but also LGBTQ history, the book argues, screens from us a lyric corpus that was historically aware, linguistically evolving and suspicious of mystical interpretation.

This corpus is represented here by the ghazal of the Indian subcontinent: its major poets from the eighteenth century, Vali, Abru, Naji, Siraj and Mir; the antecedent figures of lyric queerness, al-Hallaj and Ibn Davud from tenth-century Baghdad and Sarmad from seventeenth-century Delhi; and, finally, Altaf Husain Hali, Muhammad Husain Azad and Abul Kalam Azad, our first modern writers to recognize the true significance of the ghazal’s lyric queerness.

This book was first published in Hindi under the title Hindi Alochana mein Canon-Nirman ki Prakriya in 2015. It was acclaimed as one of the first critical studies of the processes of canonization (pratimanikaran) in Hindi. Indeed, the word ‘canon’ was used by the author to ask a new set of questions about the development of languages of criticism in Hindi, moving beyond the available vocabulary of man (worth), mulya (value), pratiman (epitome), and manak (evaluation). In the process, the theological roots of canon formation were shown to be foundational in the making of the Hindi critical lexicon and canon.

This book presents a systematic but critical account of the beginnings, development and history of the process of canonization in Hindi via such exemplary figures as George Grierson, Garcin de Tassy, Ramchandra Shukla, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Ram Vilas Sharma, Muktibodh, Namwar Singh, Nirmal Verma, and Vijaydev Narayan Sahi. It proposes an intellectual history of Hindi criticism in the twentieth century, which today faces the challenges of a decanonization move in the form of feminist and Dalit thought.

The discipline of history in India is under attack—not only from those who adopt a pseudo-historical mode to popularize a mythical version of the past colored with their ill-concealed political objectives, but also from those who, posing methodological challenges through unbridled theoretical relativism emphasizing cultural specificity and difference, end up reorientalizing the Orientals. What is left unquestioned in both approaches is the hegemony of forms of thinking which underlie social and economic inequalities in the present.

This book is a collection of essays – both published and unpublished – about the creation of Brahmanical hegemony through the institutions of caste, gender, and religious ideology in the history of early India. The essays focus on the role played by religion and mythology in the making of this hegemony. The studies in this book argue that myths reveal the stories of domination and resistance if we give attention to the process of their production and not take them as factual historical narratives. The idea is not to dismiss myths as false, distorted, or bad history but to examine the kind of reality they represent, to delve into the dynamics of their formation and their impact, and account for elements of continuity and change in them. Pursuing this line of argument, these essays build on the author's earlier classic study, The Origin and Development of Vaishnavism.

The book has three thematic divisions: studies on caste-related social differentiation drawing on the sources for the history, society, and polity of early India as well as reviewing the work of R.S. Sharma, the eminent historian of the period; studies about the gendered development of Brahmanical hegemony; and studies on the historical valences of the various mythological incarnations in Vaishnava theology: Rama, Narasimha, and Hayagriva.

The discipline of history in India is under attack—not only from those who adopt a pseudo-historical mode to popularize a mythical version of the past colored with their ill-concealed political objectives, but also from those who, posing methodological challenges through unbridled theoretical relativism emphasizing cultural specificity and difference, end up reorientalizing the Orientals. What is left unquestioned in both approaches is the hegemony of forms of thinking which underlie social and economic inequalities in the present.

This book is a collection of essays – both published and unpublished – about the creation of Brahmanical hegemony through the institutions of caste, gender, and religious ideology in the history of early India. The essays focus on the role played by religion and mythology in the making of this hegemony. The studies in this book argue that myths reveal the stories of domination and resistance if we give attention to the process of their production and not take them as factual historical narratives. The idea is not to dismiss myths as false, distorted, or bad history but to examine the kind of reality they represent, to delve into the dynamics of their formation and their impact, and account for elements of continuity and change in them. Pursuing this line of argument, these essays build on the author's earlier classic study, The Origin and Development of Vaishnavism.

The book has three thematic divisions: studies on caste-related social differentiation drawing on the sources for the history, society, and polity of early India as well as reviewing the work of R.S. Sharma, the eminent historian of the period; studies about the gendered development of Brahmanical hegemony; and studies on the historical valences of the various mythological incarnations in Vaishnava theology: Rama, Narasimha, and Hayagriva.

Historically, much of economic thought, especially until the 1960s, has been preoccupied with the central concerns of development economics. It is thus contemporary mainstream economics - dominated by those with a touching faith in the virtues and infallibility of the market - that emerges as almost exceptional when viewed in a longer-term perspective. Although economics has gone through many changes over the centuries, the original developmental concerns of economists have persisted until relatively recently - diminishing, ironically, only as development economics emerged as a sub-discipline in the post-war period.

This book reviews the history of economic thought to highlight these enduring developmental concerns in earlier economic discourses. This survey also shows that various schools of economic thought, over the years, have pointed to the role of the state in leading and coordinating economic transformation and progress. In the second half of the twentieth century, often static, abstract and formal approaches displaced historically informed and institutionally nuanced discourses. Thus, the narrow approaches of contemporary economics have marginalized greater appreciation of history and other social sciences.

In the first three chapters of the book, Erik and Sophus Reinert offer fascinating surveys of mercantilism, the Italian tradition associated with its city-states, and the later German economic tradition. Mushtaq Khan surveys the historical debate over capitalist transformation. Jaime Ros reviews the impact of modern growth theory on pioneering development economists, while Amitava Dutt considers the role of international trade in early development economics. Alfredo Saad-Filho assesses Latin American structuralism and dependency theory. Finally, Tamas Szentes discusses development in the history of economics.

The period from the mid-1930s to the end of the 1950s in India saw the cultural expression of a wide range of political sentiments and positions around imperialism, fascism, nationalism, and social transformation. It was a period that covered a crucial transitional phase: from colonialism to a postcolonial context. This transitional period in India coincided with a vibrant radical ethos in many other parts of the world where, among numerous political issues, the aesthetics–politics relationship came to be articulated and debated in unprecedented ways. No history of this period can be written without giving an account of the departures, inventions, and reinventions made by the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) in the fields of drama, music, and dance. Yet music, a very important part of the IPTA's creations as well as the connecting link between the various artistic forms, has not been studied as part of the history of the IPTA movement.

This book attempts to fill this gap in knowledge about the vast musical repertoire of the IPTA. It is about the IPTA tradition's music in a national as well as specifically regional contexts (Bengali, Malayalam, Telugu, Assamese, and Hindu/Urdu in particular), situated within the overall cultural and political context of the transitional period in India, and in the context of a radical impulse emergent in many parts of the world from the beginning of the twentieth century. The book is the culmination of an archiving-cum-documentation project of music in the IPTA tradition undertaken by the author. It can also be read as a songbook, including lyrics and musical scores, revivifying the songs and music of a radical impulse in South Asia.

The decline of trade unionism and the absence of labor unions in the public sphere in India as well as at the global level has generated much discussion. In the era of neoliberalism, trade unions are perceived as marginalized and ineffective, replaced by other institutions and alternative forms of labor organization. The chief questions addressed in this volume are: In labor politics today, is there a perceptible shift away from the classical paradigm of labor politics, which was derived from the European historical experience, to a vernacular discourse in surrogate voluntary organizations, including social and cultural associations, non-government organizations, activities nucleating around primordial identities including ethnicity, and a great many organizations which are not explicitly trade unions of workers In a shift from the language of class to the language of community, is the agency taken away from trade unions by a plurality of organizations which are purportedly not for employees' negotiation with the employer, but for serving a whole range of objectives ranging from environmental concerns and women's liberation from social oppression to celebration of festivals or welfare of residents of workers' settlements Is this vernacular mode totally new or were there anticipations of it in the past

This volume brings together papers from the Tenth International Conference on Labour History, organized by the Association of Indian Labour Historians and the V.V.Giri National Labour Institute. These scholars have added significantly to the literature on labor politics, moving away from the primacy of categories derived from the discourse of the European and international labor movement of the late nineteenth century and, emphasizing the recent assertion of vernacularity.

The Zakir Husain Memorial Lecture, held at Zakir Husain College each year, honours an eminent educationalist, nationalist, and distinguished President of India. Dr. Zakir Husain was well aware of the historical contribution and contemporary significance of the College for higher education in modern India. The Memorial Lecture commemorates the vital role he played in the governance of the College in the pre- and post-Independence periods.

It is said that the twentieth century closed with the 'end of history', the demise of ideologies and many certanties. However, a view has also emerged that the proclaimed demise of all certainties in itself has turned into a new orthodoxy thereby necessitating the need to critically engage with all forms of received knowledge, old and new. The twelve Zakir Hussain Memorial Lectures collected in this volume seek to do precisely this - that is, interrogate a range of ideas that continue to inhabit and shape our contemporary intellectual space. These lectures grapple with critical issues that are at the heart of contemporary life: the nation-state, capitalism, modernity, globalization, and a variety of representations - linguistic, cultural, pedagogical, and historical. The writers are experts from different disciplines; they are firmly rooted in their subjects but they possess the vision to make connections with broader processes, expecially globalization, identity formation, and democratization.

This book is an investigation of movement, particularly dance. What kind of movement is dance? What is dance in India? And, what is it to dance in India? It recognizes the diversity and complexity of practice in India, but also of the contingent (institutional) circumstances through which performances emerge and become visible.

This volume assembles writing that combines description with analytics of movement practices in India in our time. Essayists include performers, theorists, historians and cultural critics. The essays are discursive interventions on a wide variety of topics that concern the many fields of dance practice. The themes range from questions of periodization to the temporal, the archive, the proximate body and its potentialities, spaces and audiences, and policy interventions on behalf of performance.

This collection of essays is the outcome of a conference, organized by the Association of Indian Labour Historians in collaboration with the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, on the histories of work, from the long-term and comparative perspective. Why did the conference organizers and participants propose to look beyond 'labor history' to look at 'the history of work'? Perhaps because at this moment of history we are in the midst of a huge change which compels our attention to turn to the notion of 'work' as distinct from that of 'labor'. This change appears to us in the form of a technological transformation that affects not just our view of history, but our life itself.

Every time we use the computer or the internet or the cyber networks we experience this transformation – which brings home to us the fragility of the conventional boundary between 'labor' and 'work'. The information technology revolution has created a new space for some workers as a result of the relocation and dispersal of work, often to the home of the workers. In fact, this situates such information technology workers in a position analogous to that of the late medieval or early modern European artisans – an interesting recursive pattern in labor history. Moreover, in the less developed countries where capitalist relations do not exhaustively define all production relations, we have a large proportion of the economically active population without being in someone's employment, and thus it seems that the term 'worker' possibly accommodates them better than the term 'laborer'. Further, when we consider the long run of history, the same proposition holds for the workers of the pre-capitalist era in many countries – i.e. the artisans and others who remained self-employed even if they were tied to a dependency network. The term 'laborer' appears to be inappropriate, as some authors in the present volume have argued, to people of that class in the pre-modern period in India or elsewhere. There are many other issues which need rigorous re-thinking in the agenda of constructing a 'history of work'. In considering how the nature of 'work' is being transformed, the term 'work' needs to be defined because in common parlance it means many things. If value addition to a marketed product or service is the criterion, a pro tem working definition accepted since Adam Smith, there are problems to sort out. For instance, there may be work which is socially useful but not marketed, e.g. the homemaker's or housewife's work, a vital question from the gender history point of view. These and many other questions surface in this volume.

Nilima Sheikh's art practice from 1969 to 2012 forms the subject of Trace Retrace. The book is structured in three parts: visual, discursive, and a combination of the two. The largest narrative is visual – a selection from Nilima Sheikh's paintings in diverse formats, chosen to signal the artist's commitment to process, and to indicate the way her paintings slide into, work with and against each other, and propose a meandering seriality. The often extensive reproduction of details from these paintings introduces the unexpected, eliciting not only a flitting or looping gaze but also surprise.

The complexity of Nilima Sheikh's art practice lends itself to other forms of engagement, as is evident in the second part of the book comprising three diverse readings: "Ruptures, Junctures, Returns: (un)lived histories, feminist propositions and Nilima Sheikh" by Kumkum Sangari; "A Counter-Archive of Pain and Loss: Nilima Sheikh's evolving Kashmir series" by Ananya Jahanara Kabir; and "Passages in Reverie: Nilima Sheikh, modernity and the history of Kashmir" by Kaushik Bhaumik.

The last section of the book indexes the range and diversity of Nilima Sheikh's exhibited works, interleaved with the artist's own voice in different tenors: autobiographical snippets, acknowledgements of her training and teachers, glimpses of her work methods and process, and meditations on her collaborative practice. These are dotted with quotations from texts that are significant to her: folk-songs, poems, stories. In this section, a cross-disciplinary intertextuality is repositioned as a coeval medium at once outside and inside Nilima Sheikh's painted images, which not only adds a layer that extends beyond the art-historical frame but redeems the solitude of written words.

Social Scientist completed forty years of publication in the year 2012. To mark the occasion, collections of essays on specific topics, culled from past issues of the journal, are being published –under a series titled 'From the Pages of Social Scientist'.

The present book, Tributes, is a collection of obituary articles published in the journal from 1983 to 2013. For reasons that are not very clear, Social Scientist published no obituaries until 1983, that is, for the first eleven years of its existence. And even after it started publishing obituaries, it was not systematic in paying tribute to all those who deserved homage. Sometimes, those entrusted with the task of writing the obituary could not produce it in time; sometimes the lags in publication were such that an obituary seemed pointless as it would appear too long after the death of the person being remembered; sometimes there simply was nobody who could be successfully approached to write an obituary; and sometimes the person being remembered was too important a figure on the Left for a potential obituary writer to feel equal to the task.

The list of omissions is striking. There are, for instance, no obituaries on intellectual stalwarts of the Left political movement like B.T. Ranadive, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, P. Sundarayya and M. Basavapunnaiah. And the coverage of the lives of artists and creative writers has been generally very poor. The former set of omissions could be because potential authors thought that the task itself was quite daunting; the latter set of omissions could be because the number of persons capable of writing insightfully about such creative personalities was limited. The tributes collected in this book are also of very uneven lengths, scope and quality. Some, as in the case of Susobhan Sarkar, Ravinder Kumar and Kitty Menon, are long and wide-ranging, while others, even for persons of great importance for the Left, are extremely brief. Nonetheless, the volume, for all its omissions and oddities, celebrates the contributions of some of the most remarkable men and women who have shaped the life of this nation, or helped the formation of the Left intellectual tradition.

This collection of Sashi Kumar's contributions to various journals and magazines for over three decades is informed by his exposure to, quest and passion for, practice in, and contemplation on the media as a broad category of culture and the ecology, and including film, print, television, radio and the net. It is informed too by the author's brief engagement, in between, with advertising across different media, and an entrepreneurial phase of establishing and running a satellite and cable television enterprise at the cusp of the transition from the analogue to the digital.

This is broadly a reflective collection of essays on the media, mediated culture and film/cinema that is Indian and international in its scope. It is not, or about, daily retail journalism. It provides perspective to the agency of the media; aspects of freedom of expression and creativity; coercive and persuasive forces at work in the media and in culture; filmic genres and the oeuvre of distinctive filmmakers; the art, craft and aura of cinema; the emerging media ecology; cognitive shifts triggered by technology; the push and pull of convergence and digitization; the rampantly unequal media order and the rise of digital capitalism; and the new mutuality of the writerly, readerly, aural and oral.

This book is a compilation of texts that were written as a response to different compulsions. As the title indicates, it contains diary entries, seminar papers, catalog essays, and in addition, excerpts from a series of nine books that were part of the outcome of an extended project undertaken between 2002 and 2012. Woven together, as they are, they create a narrative that exceeds the sum of its parts.

The practice of painting entails decisions prompted by a belief in the journey as opposed to purely professional constraints. It seems necessary to underscore this in the light of the pragmatism which the culture industry forefronts. Therefore, the author writes, as she paints, to break the skin of the everyday, to create ruptures that provide access to the timeless space and infinite dimensions of a life lived through the practice of art. Diaries and journals record thoughts that are doorways to a kind of becoming that never ceases and are closest to lived experience, to the moment even as it passes, leaving little scope for obfuscation or concealment. They create loops that one can enter any time and still feel a sense of being in the present, and dare say, the truth?

Published in association with Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation.

Belonging to a generation of figurative artists that emerged from the Baroda School in the early 1960s, Vivan Sundaram has consistently and passionately engaged with the historical and political particularities of his own position as a subject in India and in the world at large. Ruth Rosengarten explores how, from the 1990s, Sundaram’s practice has become paradigmatic of a mode of work that might be defined at one level as curatorial—where the location of production and that of public display converge. He began using photography as a more active agent in his work in the 1990s; a change that coincided with his abandonment of painting as a practice and his engagement with installation. Rosengarten highlights the fact that incorporation of photography into his installations is only one aspect of Sundaram’s simultaneous recruitment of multiple sources, materials, and technologies. Moreover, the idea of photographs as archival documents sits alongside his engagement with other forms of archival material through which he (re)assembles and orders the past.

It is in the context of his fascination with the found object and then the readymade—and the intersecting procedures of collage/assemblage/montage—that Sundaram has incorporated photography into his practice. Diverse activities and objects coalesce in complex works: History Project (1998); Gagawaka (2001) + Postmortem (2014), and Trash (2008), are all huge, multilayered projects, entailing the disposition of spaces, materials, and technologies in intricate arrangements, with a vast spatial and temporal spread.

This book is an intensive reconsideration of the very first site-specific installation staged in India. Vivan Sundaram, one of India's most innovative artists, located his History Project, marking fifty years of Indian independence, in a hugely visited and popular public institution, the Victoria Memorial and Museum in Kolkata. The artist's choice of setting was by way of a challenge: to 'occupy' an imperial edifice and change its orientation; to reflect India's struggle for independence and the emerging nation's stake in modernity through an anachronistic mirror; and to engage with postcolonial contradictions through recursive narration. It needed an artwork scaled to the proportion of these issues and the book examines how Sundaram met this challenge. His ideology and aesthetic, his formal choices and method, are critically investigated in a series of essays contributed by distinguished authors: cultural theorists, art and architectural historians. The book carries abundant, well-annotated illustrations of the complex installation.

Early twentieth-century Calcutta was not just a point of passage within the British Empire, but a key center of colonial power; a crucial laboratory of imperial repressive practices cultivated and applied elsewhere. Histories of the Komagata Maru or the Ghadar Movement offer rewarding perspectives on Punjabi Sikh migrants, but fail to adequately investigate why the ship was brought to Bengal; why overwhelming locally organized imperial vigilance was imposed on ships that arrived soon afterward; and the extent to which the operation of the repressive colonial state apparatus influenced the intersections of anticolonial strands in Calcutta and its surroundings during 1914–15.

This monograph traces this early wartime clash of positions and the organized postwar transmission of the memory of the Komagata Maru as a symbol of resistance among the Sikh workers in the industrial centers of southwest Bengal. It acts as a link in a chain of scholarship that has hitherto traced the spread of radical anticolonial currents among the Punjabi Sikh diaspora that connected Punjab with Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Americas.

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated human suffering and economic devastation across the world – but these reflect not just the impact of the disease but the policy failures of governments. Further, the trajectory of the disease and the human and economic outcomes has varied greatly, again because of how governments have responded and the institutional context. This volume brings together analyses of the public policy responses from many different countries, to evaluate what has worked and what hasn’t, what has been done and what could have been done – and the potential directions for the future.

Published in association with Society for Social and Economic Research (SSER) and International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs).