Tulika Books

Social Scientist completed forty years of publication in the year 2012. To mark this occasion, it is planned to bring out a number of volumes containing articles on specific themes from past issues of the journal. The present book is a part of this series. It contains a set of thirteen essays written by Professor Venkatesh Athreya (under the pseudonym A.V. Balu) to provide readers with an introduction to Marxian political economy, which were published in issues of Social Scientist during the years 1976–78. They are mainly concerned with Volume I of Karl Marx's Capital, with a focus on the origin of surplus value which is the key to the anatomy of capitalism.

These essays had attracted wide attention at the time they were published, and were used extensively in Marx study circles all over the country. What distinguished them was the fact that they were authored by an outstanding professional economist, familiar with frontier research not only in Marxist economics but in bourgeois economics as well, and with a rare mastery over mathematical and statistical techniques. They were therefore written with a panache and sureness of touch that one often finds lacking in standard textbooks.

Since the 1970s, when these essays were written, there have been dramatic changes in the world capitalist system which are of far- reaching economic, political and ideological significance. However, they are being presented in this book exactly as they were when first published. The central reason for this is that they did not deal with capitalism as it existed at the time they were written, except for passing references. Instead, they are an exposition of Marx's ideas as presented in Volume I of Capital, intended for lay readers and students with an inclination to analytical thinking as well as interest in progressive thought. The book does, however, include an introduction by the author explaining the changed context.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Caste is an institution of oppression and social discrimination specific to South Asia, more so to India. Central to the caste system were the status assigned to the Dalit people and the criminal practice of untouchability. Caste is embedded in production relations. It is an impediment to the growth of the productive forces, and a bulwark against the revolutionary overthrow of the ruling classes. Although there have been, in recent years, new scholarship and new attempts to understand the socio-economic conditions of life of Dalit people and households in India, it is still true, as a leading scholar in the field has written, that 'very few empirical studies have tried to study the phenomenon of economic discrimination'.

This book is an attempt to contribute to the study and understanding of economic deprivation and exclusion among Dalits in rural India. The first section deals with poverty and group discrimination. The second section has case studies – from Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal – on historical aspects of land, caste and social exclusion. The third section deals with contemporary fieldwork-based economic analyses from Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. The last section has studies of Dalit households in village economies; the empirical base for these studies comes from the village-level data archive of the Project on Agrarian Relations (PARI) being conducted by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies.The articles in the book are evidence, in some cases, of direct discrimination, and in others of what has been described as differential impact discrimination. Most of all, they reflect cumulative discrimination and disadvantage.

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.

Karl Marx's articles in the New York Daily Tribune constitute a separate genre among his works, being originally published in English and based on events in various countries in the world. There is no doubt that the work Marx undertook for his Tribune articles not only influenced his later theoretical work (one major result being his incorporation of colonialism as a factor in the genesis and expansion of capitalism), but also gave him an opportunity to apply the general principles of his method of historical materialism to the study of complex circumstances prevalent in different parts of the world. The perception of pre-colonial and colonial India that he put forth in the Tribune is a classic product of such application. The sheer boldness of Marx's explanation of India's pre-colonial 'non-history'; the remarkable insight into the nature of colonial rule which made it so different from all previous conquests of the country; the lucidity of the exposition of the dialectics of colonial impact; the passionate sympathy for the suffering of the Indians, and, at the same time, the utterly dispassionate account of the historical course that opened up before the country, entirely independent of the will and consciousness of the colonial rulers themselves; all these combine to make the Tribune set of articles a real classic on Indian history.

Iqbal Husain has established the text of Marx's articles from the original files of the newspaper in which they appeared. He has also collected the extracts relating to India from the Marx–Engels correspondence during the period of the articles. Prabhat Patnaik has written a special Appreciation of what Marx's articles on India add to our understanding of his ideas and approach.

This volume on Andhra Pradesh covers the period 1324 to 1724, which witnessed the rise of large regional state powers such as the Vijayanagara kingdom, the Bahmanis, Gajapatis, Musunuris, Recherlas, Reddis, and Later Gangas. The political formations of the period were military-centered as witnessed by the well-organized nayamkara system, which revolved around the creation of nayamkaras or military chiefs, and was the mainstay of the Vijayanagara rulers. There was large-scale expansion of agriculture with the introduction of new crops like tobacco, tomato, potato and chillies, and phenomenal growth of trade in commodities like cotton and indigo. The trading and artisanal communities were organized in powerful guilds. The constant flux of peoples of different languages, faiths, cultural modes, and professions led to a liberal spirit of tolerance. Telugu literature flourished, and new genres were introduced in which outstanding works were created.

A significant feature of the times was the evolution of a composite Dakhni (Deccani) culture. Rulers, Hindu and Muslim alike, patronized religious institutions but did not allow religion to interfere in matters relating to administration. Sri Vaishnavism, which won royal support during the reign of Saluva Narasimha, was established in the royal house and court during Krishnadeva Raya's rule. Numerous royal grants were given to Vaishnava temples and mathas. During Aravidu rule, the Tirumala temple occupied a premier position. Ahobalam was another centre in western Andhra that wielded great influence. The patronage of ruling chiefs of Shudra varna to Sri Vaishnava acharyas and temples fundamentally influenced their social and ritual ranking. The sixteenth-century temple was an organized complex of sanctuaries and mandapas. Tadipatri, Lepakshi and Ahobalam deserve mention as examples. Placing a chariot in stone in the temple complex was a contribution of the Vijayanagara period. The Aravidu period contributed the gopura as a dominant feature of the temple complex. The detached gopura of Govindarajaswami Temple, Tirupati, is a fine example. The rulers of medieval Andhra seldom violated established norms of dharma, thereby ensuring the security and stability of their kingdoms.

As a tribute to Javeed Alam and his exemplary life, some of his close friends and admirers have come together in this volume with reflections on the range of themes that he pursued in his work with such intelligence and relish for some four decades: the nature of capitalism and the various angles of a Marxist response to it, the nature of secularism and liberalism and the forms of modernity which they usher in, and Gandhi's political ideas in the context of Indian society and India's own unfolding modernity.

Javeed Alam was born on 12 August 1943 to Khadija and Alam Khundmiri in what was then the State of Hyderabad. His first memories are of independence and the struggle of the Telangana peasantry in which his family was involved. His early thinking and his commitments were much influenced by his father who was a philosopher of high distinction, and his mother who along with her husband was a keen activist in Left politics in Hyderabad. He studied in Hyderabad's Alia School and then completed his BA and MA degrees at Osmania University, getting a gold medal for standing first in the MA. He went to Delhi to do his PhD at the Indian School of International Studies, eventually getting his doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University. He started his career teaching at Delhi University's Salwan College, where his stand against the administration, which had terminated his services for marrying a Hindu, led to a larger agitation that successfully defended the secular character of the University. From 1973 to 1999 he taught at Himachal Pradesh University. A popular teacher who inspired generations of students, he also played a vital role in building Left politics in that state. His writings on Indian politics, political theory, federalism, democracy, modernity and Left politics have helped to shape many of the academic and political debates of the past three decades. He returned to Hyderabad in the late 1990s and taught at the English and Foreign Languages University from which he retired in 2005. He was Chairman of the Indian Council for Social Science Research from 2008 to 2011. In his retirement, he lives in Hyderabad with his wife Jayanti.

Destruction of the Babri Masjid: A National Dishonour is a sequel to The Babri Masjid Question 1528–2003: 'A Matter of National Honour', published in 2003 in two volumes – a compilation by A. G. Noorani of documents and primary source material on various aspects of the Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid dispute, covering the demolition of the Masjid on 6 December 1992, and the legal proceedings in the civil suits and criminal cases up to mid-2003. The present volume brings the narrative up to date. It covers the three Allahabad High Court judgments, the Liberhan Commission Report, the tortuous course of the criminal cases, and disclosures and developments in the last decade – from 2003 till the end of 2013.

An introduction surveys the events before and after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, and analyses the judgments delivered by the three judges of the Allahabad High Court in 2010.

"In the courts of law and justice, the civil and criminal cases concerning the title to the Babri Masjid and accountability for its destruction, on 6 December 1992, have all but run their course. Neither legality nor justice has been conspicuous in the proceedings or in the many judgments delivered. On past form, there is little hope for redress in legal proceedings after that grave and utterly wasteful crime.... The forces of India's secularism can ignore the challenges ahead only at the nation's peril. At stake is the survival of India's democracy and its corollary, secularism." (From the author's preface)

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.

The fifty-one essays compiled in this book were written over a forty-year period by India's leading independent filmmaker. They provide new insights into a turbulent era in modern India's cultural history.

Although known primarily as a filmmaker, Kumar Shahani has taught, spoken and written on a variety of subjects over this period, that include the cinema, but also politics, aesthetics, history and psychoanalysis. In these essays Shahani addresses diverse political issues, aesthetic practice, questions of artistic freedom and censorship. There are also personal essays on filmmakers and artists including his teachers and colleagues. Shahani's often polemical positions, as they occur in several previously unpublished essays and presentations, are essential contributions to film and cultural histories of the Indian cinema as well as of the New Cinema worldwide.

The book includes a comprehensive introductory essay, "Kumar Shahani Now," by Ashish Rajadhyaksha.

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas distinguished himself by his ceaseless passion for revolutionary politics, which he expressed through his writings and films. He was a visionary who strongly believed that creative and artistic interventions are indispensable to nation-building. Bread Beauty Revolution, spanning the years 1914 to 1987, encapsulates Abbas's work, ideas, and ideals. It also provides an insight into the beginnings of modern India. The volume encapsulates 74 books, 40 films, 89 short stories and 3,000 pieces of journalistic writing byAbbas. His work flows in three languages – Urdu, Hindi, and English – and he translated his own writings freely from one language to another.

The volume is in ten parts: (i) 'Abraham and Son', about Abbas's birth and upbringing; (ii) 'I Write as I Feel', which includes Abbas's first and best known short story 'Ababeel' (Sparrows), the story of Abbas's struggle after the publication of his short story 'Meri Maut' (also called 'Sardarji'), and Mulk Raj Anand's letter celebrating his literary genius; (iii) 'My First Love Affair', on his lifelong relationship with and unabashed admiration for Jawaharlal Nehru; (iv) 'Naya Sansar', the witnessing of the birth of an independent India; (v) 'Dharti ke Lal', recounting Abbas's love–hate relationship with the Left movement of which he was an outspoken advocate as well as fearless critic, his account of the birth of IPTA, writing the play Zubaidah and being invited to make the film Dharti ke Lal; (vi) 'Bambai Raat ki Bahon Mein', about another love that gripped his mind and soul, the Indian film industry; (vii) 'Reminiscences', containing personal accounts by people whose lives Abbas influenced, as well as a short story by him, 'Achchan ka Aashiq' (Achchan's Lover); (viii) 'Jagte Raho', an account of Abbas's fight against the censorship imposed on his film Char Shehar Ek Kahani (Four Cities, One Story), 1968, which led to the famous case, K.A. Abbas versus the Union of India, and the landmark judgment in his favour holding that pre-censorship of cinema was a violation of freedom of expression; (ix) 'Ek Aadmi', Abbas's 'beginning' as well as his 'end': his review of Shantaram's film Aadmi which brought him to the film world, and Ek Aadmi, his last film, which had a posthumous birth; andfinally, (x) 'Rahi', named after the eponymous movie Abbas made in 1953 about tea garden workers.

In November 2014, representatives from over 170 governments, together with leaders of inter-governmental organizations and civil society – including non-governmental organizations, researchers, the private sector, and consumer representatives – converged in Rome for the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2). ICN2 was organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to mobilize and unite the international community for the protracted struggle against malnutrition. The conference and its preparatory process provided a forum in which the world community, led by governments, affirmed its shared commitment to eradicating malnutrition by adopting the Rome Declaration and reaching agreement on a comprehensive, harmonized Framework for Action.

Ending Malnutrition: From Commitment to Action aims to make available the insights and judgments that emerged from ICN2 to practitioners across the world. It begins with a review of current evidence on the prevalence and incidence of malnutrition across the globe. It then presents analyses of the most salient policy issues to be confronted in a concerted global effort to end malnutrition: strengthening food systems as the core of a sustainable nutrition strategy; promoting social protection to address underlying inequities as well as immediate needs that contribute to malnutrition; using fortification and supplementation, especially, to address micronutrient deficiencies; and ensuring improved access to water and sanitation for an effective nutrition strategy. A concluding chapter focuses on the indispensable role that multilateral institutions can play in accelerating and sustaining global momentum on nutrition, and to secure a place for nutrition at the forefront of the post-2015 sustainable development agenda. Throughout, the emphasis is on practical steps that can be taken by governments and their partners to end malnutrition in all its forms.

The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on 30 January 1948 was a declaration of war and a statement of intent. For the forces who conspired in the killing, the act was a declaration of war with the secular, democratic Indian state and all those who stood to affirm these principles, as well as an announcement of a lasting commitment to India as a 'Hindu Rashtra'. It was also an act to signal the elimination of all that India's national movement against imperialism stood for. Beyond Doubt is a dossier of historical and critical documents that aims to contextualize the politics, motivations and circumstances behind the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Attempts to legitimize the act of killing and to celebrate the killers have re-doubled since May 2014, following the coming to power of the new regime in New Delhi. The time is right, therefore, to set the record straight.

The visceral hatred directed against Gandhi and the denigration of everything he stood for need to be recounted if we are to understand the political nature of that dastardly act. This book attempts to weave together archival documents from Government of India records relating to developments after the assassination, with translation of works in Marathi, Gujarati, and Hindi deconstructing the ideology responsible for the political killing. While several of the documents have appeared before in issues of Communalism Combat, this compilation presents new material on the subject. The first English translation of Jagan Phadnis's book, Mahatmyache Akher, forms part of the dossier, as do Y.D. Phadke's analysis of attempts to legitimize Gandhi's killing and Chunibhai Vaidya's analysis of Pradeep Dalvi's play on Godse. It also covers the recent controversy over the destruction of files relating to Gandhi's assassination by Government of India. A second volume of this dossier will bring to readers the Report of the Justice Kapur Commission, constituted to investigate the Gandhi assassination, with a detailed introduction and notes.

Over the last three decades, Sheba Chhachhi has developed an art practice that traverses the fields of documentary photography, installation, video and new media, creating immersive environments and bringing the contemplative into the political, in both site-specific public art and independent works. She has created a number of large photo-based installations incorporating light, sound and the moving image, and pursued long-term photography projects such as on women-ascetics and the female body. Chhachhi experiments across the spectrum of durational mediums from pre-cinematic animated lightboxes to virtual reality interactivity, as well as in diverse sites: community centres, galleries, shopping malls, public institutions. These experiments are marked by a special interest in exploring relationships with viewers/participants. Since 1999, public art interventions have been a significant aspect of her work.

Arc Silt Dive is about the work of Sheba Chhachhi; it maps her methods, the modes of address and inquiry in her photographs, animated lightboxes, videos, and installations. Editorial anxieties circled around the unavoidable ekphrasis of translating the rich immersive experience of multidimensional installations into flat images, prose text, and verbal description. Yet this change of medium need not be reductive. Rather, it may be seen as a bound moment in the peripatetic trajectory of installations which are frequently reworked and retested at different sites, and face new formal and contextual dilemmas in each. The book folds into and extends the ekphrastic aspects of the installation as a form that can transfer or transpose the properties and functions of image and object, spatialize and visualize text, enact a tactile textualization of objects and materials, or become a performative loop that threads or sutures the formal divides of performance, literature, architecture, painting, sculpture, film, photography, and digital composition.The artworks reproduced in this book are not sequenced chronologically; rather, following arcs of connectivity and unexpected conjunction, they are reclustered thematically and visually, re-installed along some of their own overlaps, intersections or displacements. Configural worlds, cracked yet bound in/by affective relationship, the installations convey a sense of recursive reflection in the circulation of images, concepts, concerns, in which little seems to be permanently abandoned and much is reworked, often in technological mediums falling into market-induced obsolescence.

Winner, 2021 P.S. Velayudhan Memorial Award for the Best Book On History, Kerala History Association

This study of the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP Yogam), one of the earliest social reform movements in Kerala, investigates the relationship of social reform, religion, and caste. The Yogam drew inspiration from the ideas of Narayana Guru, which suited the aspirations of the upwardly mobile Ezhava middle class, who were the main benefactors of the movement. In both religious and social matters, the Guru was a traditionalist who strove to create a modern outlook among the masses. He conceived of the temple as a social space where everybody could meet and exchange ideas. While pursuing his spiritual mission, he advocated education, industrialization, and abolition of caste as necessary prerequisites for social regeneration.

This work demonstrates that the SNDP was an organization of an emerging Ezhava middle class, which worked as both its strength and weakness. It focused on such issues as education, employment in government service, industrialization, abolition of cyclical rituals and caste, anti-alcoholism and the demand for a new law of inheritance. However, some disjunction between principles and practice led to the decline of the SNDP movement. Ironically, since the movement was largely focused on the interests of the privileged section of the Ezhava community, it achieved Ezhava solidarity only around caste. This study is a significant example of how a social reform movement turned into a caste solidarity movement.

This book covers the whole range of technology, from the tools and skills of ordinary men and women to the instruments of astronomers and the equipage and weaponry of war. Changes in technology are carefully traced and their consequences examined. Larger questions, such as those of constraints on technological development and the role of the social and economic environment, are also addressed. This volume, in line with the others of A People's History of India, gives several extracts from texts, containing significant information about specific aspects of pre-modern technology. There are special notes on technical terms, sources of the history of technology, the problem of invention versus diffusion, and the development of medieval technology outside India. It includes illustrations taken from medieval sculpture, painting and book-illustrations.

The volume is addressed to the general reader as well as the student, who would like to read about something on which conventional textbooks have little to offer. A special effort is made to keep the style non-technical without loss of accuracy. It is hoped that the theme is sufficiently interesting not only for the historian but for any citizen wanting to know what common people, men and women, did with their hands and tools in earlier times.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The National Movement: The First Phase, till 1918 deals with popular resistance to colonial rule, a special position being given to the Revolt of 1857–58, its nature and legacy; the rise of national consciousness, and the factors leading to it; the movement for social reform and political awakening among the middle classes. It examines the critique of British rule by early economic nationalists as well as the foundation (in 1885), and development as a political party, of the Indian National Congress. It considers the rise of the Extremists (as against Moderates), describes the rise of communalism and the Partition of Bengal (1905), the opposition to it and the rift within the Congress, the rise of violence and the Ghadar movement (1913–15). It also considers the effect of British measures of 1909 and 1911 on the National Movement, the Congress–Muslim League Pact of 1916, the Home Rule Movement, and, finally, Gandhiji’s arrival and the agitations of 1917–18.

The volume is authored by Irfan Habib, the general editor of the A People's History of India series.

This volume is devoted to the economic and social history of India from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. The book consists of three long chapters, divided into numerous subchapters. The first chapter describes the agrarian order during the main period of the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1398), while the second chapter delves into the urban economy and trading world of the same period. The third chapter deals with the fifteenth century, 1398–1526, a period of political divisions. While describing the economy and social structure in north India during the century, the chapter pays special attention to conditions in the Vijayanagara empire, which flourished during this period in south India.

A special feature of the volume, as with others in the series, is the inclusion of long extracts from sources and technical and bibliographical notes appended to each chapter.

This volume is devoted to the economic and social history of India from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. The book consists of three long chapters, divided into numerous subchapters. The first chapter describes the agrarian order during the main period of the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1398), while the second chapter delves into the urban economy and trading world of the same period. The third chapter deals with the fifteenth century, 1398–1526, a period of political divisions. While describing the economy and social structure in north India during the century, the chapter pays special attention to conditions in the Vijayanagara empire, which flourished during this period in south India.

A special feature of the volume, as with others in the series, is the inclusion of long extracts from sources and technical and bibliographical notes appended to each chapter.

Born in 1945 in Odisha, India, to parents who were deeply committed to the Communist cause as members of the Communist Party of India, Patnaik is one of the most outstanding economists of his generation and a leading Marxist theoretician in the world today. Through his work as an academic, he has contributed immensely to developing a theoretical understanding of India's economy and society, and the tactics and strategy needed to change it in a socialist direction. Patnaik is better known as a leading theoretician of the Left who has kept alive the need for advancing theory to support the struggle for an alternative society. He put into practice his ideas as a heterodox economist when he successfully served as Vice-Chairman of the Kerala State Planning Board under the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala from June 2006 to July 2011.

Prabhat Patnaik's academic insights and strong political commitment have stimulated intellectual activity and inspired personal regard across a multitude of people from all walks of life. Versatile in his knowledge and mastery of different schools of thought but unflinching in his commitment to the use and extension of a Marxist approach, he has influenced several generations of social scientists through his extensive writing, his contributions to academic discourse, and his life as a tireless public intellectual. This volume brings together contributions from some who have benefited from interaction with him over decades, in a tribute and continuing conversation.

Born in 1945 in Odisha, India, to parents who were deeply committed to the Communist cause as members of the Communist Party of India, Patnaik is one of the most outstanding economists of his generation and a leading Marxist theoretician in the world today. Through his work as an academic, he has contributed immensely to developing a theoretical understanding of India's economy and society, and the tactics and strategy needed to change it in a socialist direction. Patnaik is better known as a leading theoretician of the Left who has kept alive the need for advancing theory to support the struggle for an alternative society. He put into practice his ideas as a heterodox economist when he successfully served as Vice-Chairman of the Kerala State Planning Board under the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala from June 2006 to July 2011.

Prabhat Patnaik's academic insights and strong political commitment have stimulated intellectual activity and inspired personal regard across a multitude of people from all walks of life. Versatile in his knowledge and mastery of different schools of thought but unflinching in his commitment to the use and extension of a Marxist approach, he has influenced several generations of social scientists through his extensive writing, his contributions to academic discourse, and his life as a tireless public intellectual. This volume brings together contributions from some who have benefited from interaction with him over decades, in a tribute and continuing conversation.

This study of the living conditions of Dalit agricultural laborers in Muktidih Village in southwest Bihar throws light on the problems they face in accessing the basic necessities of existence, including food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education. Their tribulations are conveyed through their own testimonies. Bihar is the poorest state in India, where the highest proportion of the population (79.3 percent), live in multidimensional poverty. They experience a range of deprivations, including deficient diet, poor health, and lack of education.

Having shown that the lives of the laborers in Muktidih are part of a much bigger picture, Anand Chakravarti argues that forces based on caste and class located in the wider political economy of Bihar are antithetical toward ameliorating the conditions of those living in poverty. An outstanding example is the reactionary stance of various regimes in Bihar on the question of land reform.

Part I (Chapters 2 to 5) covers the situation as the author found it in 2001, and Part II (Chapters 6 to 9) covers the same issues from 2009 to 2015.

There is no area in the agrarian history of eastern India that Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri has not traversed. His journey began with his 1956 contribution in Bengal Past and Present, on "Some Problems of the Peasantry of Bengal after the Permanent Settlement." His extensive opus surveys the agrarian economy of eastern India and all its protagonists: peasant households, zamindars and the state, non-peasant rural agents such as moneylenders, affluent landholders, farmers, and agrarian intermediaries (jotedars), all of whom played their decisive role in the rural agrarian structure of eastern India. His later research explored the impact of colonial rule on tribes and forest dwellers, who were in the process of transition to quasi-peasant communities by the middle of the twentieth century. In his pioneering work, The Growth of Commercial Agriculture in Bengal: 1757–1957, which developed out of his doctoral thesis, Chaudhuri discussed the two important phenomena that shaped the contours of the agrarian economy of Bengal—first, the demographic factor, namely population growth, combined with a simultaneous growth of agricultural production; second, the role of external demand that determined peasant production for the market. He placed value, additionally, on factors such as climate change, natural disasters, and political instability arising out of war and invasions, which affected agricultural production in India.

It is difficult to do justice to B. B. Chaudhuri's academic work given its depth and range. An inadequate attempt is made here under four broad heads: (i) his concept of the peasantry; (ii) the growth of commercial agriculture in eastern India; (iii) the process of 'depeasantization' by which small and marginal peasants gradually lost their land and turned into sharecroppers or hired labor; and finally, (iv) the more or less forcible induction of a large number of tribes and forest dwellers into settled agriculture, resulting in spates of rebellion. The essays in this volume are on diverse themes. A number are on different aspects of the agrarian world, the major subject of Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri's academic research. Many other papers discuss aspects of social and cultural history, which have always interested and inspired Prof. Chaudhuri. There are three essays on Rabindranath Tagore, the towering figure he venerates like most intellectuals of his generation from Bengal, and with whom he also happens to share his own birthday.

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.

There is no area in the agrarian history of eastern India that Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri has not traversed. His journey began with his 1956 contribution in Bengal Past and Present, on "Some Problems of the Peasantry of Bengal after the Permanent Settlement." His extensive opus surveys the agrarian economy of eastern India and all its protagonists: peasant households, zamindars and the state, non-peasant rural agents such as moneylenders, affluent landholders, farmers, and agrarian intermediaries (jotedars), all of whom played their decisive role in the rural agrarian structure of eastern India. His later research explored the impact of colonial rule on tribes and forest dwellers, who were in the process of transition to quasi-peasant communities by the middle of the twentieth century. In his pioneering work, The Growth of Commercial Agriculture in Bengal: 1757–1957, which developed out of his doctoral thesis, Chaudhuri discussed the two important phenomena that shaped the contours of the agrarian economy of Bengal—first, the demographic factor, namely population growth, combined with a simultaneous growth of agricultural production; second, the role of external demand that determined peasant production for the market. He placed value, additionally, on factors such as climate change, natural disasters, and political instability arising out of war and invasions, which affected agricultural production in India.

It is difficult to do justice to B. B. Chaudhuri's academic work given its depth and range. An inadequate attempt is made here under four broad heads: (i) his concept of the peasantry; (ii) the growth of commercial agriculture in eastern India; (iii) the process of 'depeasantization' by which small and marginal peasants gradually lost their land and turned into sharecroppers or hired labor; and finally, (iv) the more or less forcible induction of a large number of tribes and forest dwellers into settled agriculture, resulting in spates of rebellion. The essays in this volume are on diverse themes. A number are on different aspects of the agrarian world, the major subject of Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri's academic research. Many other papers discuss aspects of social and cultural history, which have always interested and inspired Prof. Chaudhuri. There are three essays on Rabindranath Tagore, the towering figure he venerates like most intellectuals of his generation from Bengal, and with whom he also happens to share his own birthday.

This book is the outcome of a two-year research project undertaken by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies and supported by the Rosa Luxemberg Stiftung (New Delhi). The objective of the project was to examine the socioeconomic characteristics and viability of small producers in different agro-ecological regions of India, locating them in the broader context of the capitalist development of Indian agriculture.
This book seeks to address some key questions concerning small farms and small farmers in the context of contemporary India, drawing on empirical material of exceptional quality collected through carefully designed and conducted household and farm economy surveys in seventeen villages located in nine major states of India. Chapters based on household data examine issues such as the productivity of small farms, the economic viability of small farming, the multiple sources of household income of small farmers, the patterns of input use, and the extent of labor performed by small farmers on their own holdings. While not romanticizing the role of small farmers, the book brings out the need for strong state support to enable small farmers to meet the challenges they face.

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.

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.