‘Aruna Roy reflects on [a] life of deep engagement, weaving the personal and [the] political. A great inspiration.’ – Amartya Sen & Jean Dreze
‘A brilliant and riveting feminist manifesta for social change.’ – V (Formerly Eve Ensler)
‘There are many who speak, but very few who act. This book is a testimonial to the fact that change comes only with action and reinforces the proverb Actions are the best words spoken”.’ – Perumal Murugan
Magsaysay Award-winning social activist Aruna Roy’s remarkably forthright memoir is the story of two parallel journeys—a fifty-year-long engagement with public action in India, and a personal narrative that traces how the author has striven to convert her ideological convictions into practice.
For long decades, Aruna Roy has lived with and worked for the benefit of marginalized communities in rural India, fighting for the right to survive in a hostile environment. Alongside accounts of the plight of the vulnerable and the transformative power of mass-based grassroot social movements, her recollections are marked with stories of resilient individuals and communities and their extraordinary resistance to oppression.
Roy recounts a powerful lesson learnt from her extraordinary life: that every issue, whether it is poverty, discrimination, inequality or corruption, has personal as well as political ramifications. It is only by connecting the personal and the political, Roy says, that each one of us can make a difference.
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More than three decades after Operation Blue Star of June 1984 and the anti-Sikh riots later that year, a young man is given the task of researching the violence. What he finds devastates him. Among the many oral testimonies, one crucial constituency has remained silent. Hundreds of Sikh women witnessed hell coming to life that year. These included women who were stranded inside the Golden Temple, who stood by their militant men, and those who were, at one time in their lives, militants themselves.
They are rape survivors. They are among the murdered. They are the forgotten. Sanam Sutirath Wazir's research has taken him across north India to meet the women who lived to tell the tale, many of whom are still fighting invisible battles for justice.
Based on interviews and extensive historical research, in The Kaurs of 1984, Wazir weaves together scattered stories of grief, betrayal and loss that finally brings Sikh women out of the shadows of contemporary Indian history.
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Since May 2014, under a resurgent Bharatiya Janata Party, the Nehruvian-read liberal, secular, scientific-Idea of India appears to have come utterly undone. Institutions of governance that weathered great turbulence in the past are now disintegrating. The economy, once the celebrated 'India story', is in a shambles. Large sections of the media genuflect to the ruling dispensation. Meanwhile, the grand old party of India remains trapped in its glorious yesterday and unsure about its future.
In 2014, named after the year the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance first came to power under Narendra Modi, Sanjay Jha takes a long, hard look at what all of this means for India. What are the reasons for the Congress's acute lack of Oppositional ability? Can the party look beyond the easy fallback of the Gandhi-family charisma and embrace transformational change? Can it sell its vision-of inclusive growth and social justice-to a nation that seems mesmerised by a polarising rhetoric and the rise of muscular, populist nationalism?
Though Jha asks tough questions of the government and his former party, he has not lost faith in Mahatma Gandhi's India. He writes of renewal, of hope. And the Congress, he firmly believes, is central to that revival of India.
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Discover the inspiring voices that have changed our world, and started a new conversation, with speeches from Olly Alexander, Sir Elton John, Alison Bechdel, and more.
A sister title to Great Women’s Speeches (2021), and the pocket edition of Loud and Proud (2020), Great LGBTQ+ Speeches is a pioneering collection of over 40 empowering and influential speeches that chart the history of the LGBTQ+ movement.
These powerful speakers draw on all aspects of LGBTQ+ life from equal marriage to the AIDS crisis, bullying to parenthood, the first 19th century campaigns through to trans rights allyship today.
We are stronger when we stand together, and this collection from award-winning activist Tea Uglow encourages us to do just that whilst celebrating the beauty of our differences.
Pour through a pioneering collection of talks, declarations and lectures, from people whose voices have too often been marginalised and the allies that support them;
Find over 40 empowering and influential speeches that chart the history of the LGBTQ+ movement up to the present day;
Each speech is presented with a striking photographic portrait and an insightful introduction, offering essential context, fresh insights and a nuanced understanding that brings each character and their words to life.
The voices: Audre Lorde; Olly Alexander; Harvey Milk; Munroe Bergdorf; Sir Elton John; Sir Ian McKellen; George Takei; Sylvia Rivera; Bayard Rustin; Elizabeth Toledo; Alison Bechdel; Loretta E. Lynch; Hanne Gaby Odiele; Vito Russo; Tammy Baldwin; Hillary Rodham Clinton; Barak Obama; Senator Karl Heinrich Ulrichs; Robert G. Ingersoll; Theodora Ana Sprungli; Franklin "Frank" Kameny; Sally Gearhart; Harry Hay; Sue Hyde; Mary Fisher; Essex Hemphill; Simon Nkoli; Urvashi Vaid; Eric Rofes; Justice Michael Kirby; Evan Wolfson; Paul Martin; Ian Hunter; Dan Savage; Terry Miller; Rabbi Kleinbaum; Penny Wong; Arsham Parsi; Anna Grodzka; Debi Jackson; Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir; Lee Mokobe; Ban Ki-moon; Geraldine Roman; Cecilia Chung.
This volume collects twenty-one stories of women and men who, simply because they were born poor, or a particular gender, or into a certain caste or religion, fell prey to the many atrocities and indignities endemic to contemporary India. Some resisted, survived, and soldier on. Some did not.
Lachmi Kaur, who lost nearly all male members of her family in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, overcame despair to singlehandedly bring up her children and grandchildren with fierce love and pride. With great courage of conviction, Krishan Gopal, a Dalit man from Nimoda in Rajasthan, built his own shrine to Hanuman when forbidden from the village temple by his upper-caste neighbours. The persecution, violence and exile that followed lasted all his life. At 28, Dandapani defied his family—which could not accept him for what he was—left home, and underwent a sex-change operation. Now known as Dhanam, she lives with her extended family of eunuchs in a Chennai shanty. The family of Pehlu Khan, lynched for ‘cattle smuggling’ in Alwar, tells its harrowing tale of battling a hostile state, bent on shielding the killers and punishing the victims for a crime they did not even commit. Thangboi Singset of Imphal, when he was similarly reminded of being born to the ‘wrong’ group, found an unusual way of resisting the hate.
Fatal Accidents of Birth is a powerful, challenging book. It tells us of the many ways in which we inflict violence upon each other—most of all by simply choosing to not see. And as it does so, this necessary book ensures that these stories will find their rightful place in our consciousness.
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Identity formation in non-western societies involves paradox, as doctrines are frequently overridden by actual practices. The essays in this volume discuss different ways in which identities are constructed in unique ‘Indian’ contexts.The emergence of deras in Punjab reflects how continuing caste inequality and divergence over spiritual leadership has affected the egalitarian spirit of Sikhism, contradicting a basic feature of the faith—the tradition of common worship. In the matrilineal Khasi community, men—looking to gain equal inheritance rights—use arguments of ethnic purity and indigenous rights to downsize women’s autonomy and undermine the commanding socio-economic position that their own tradition gives them.
For male sex-workers, their profession, paradoxically, becomes a means of sexual autonomy in the otherwise heteronormative world that they inhabit. A different kind of paradox marks the social lives of many Indian women: in Assam for instance, celebration of menstruation coexists with prohibition on menstruating women’s entry into temples and participation in auspicious events.
Workplace violence exemplifies how private biases infiltrate public spaces, reinforcing traditional marginalities, undeterred by legal safeguards. Similarly, the plight of indentured plantation workers in Malaysia demonstrates the operation of traditional patriarchy inside a foreign and highly sequestered workspace of plantations—within these spaces, women experience ‘double marginalization’. And the government and middleclass response to the COVID-19 pandemic across India demonstrated the persistence of traditional biases which perpetuate inequality and oppression in the world’s largest democracy.
Comprising these and other discussions on the everyday lived realities of individuals and communities in India and the Indian diaspora, Ways of Being Indian is a remarkable, eye-opening collection.
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‘Not just a dry-as-dust series of interviews, these are real-life stories of real people, living all around us, yet feeling separate from the mainstream… This book gives them a voice.’—The Tribune
The twenty-six interviewees in Whistling in the Dark represent a cross-section of India’s LGBTQI+ community—poets, artists, professors, students, activists, clerks, and auto-rickshaw drivers; family men, gay couples, unmarried people, and divorcees. The probing and intelligent questions put to the respondents tease out narratives that go beyond the conventional and provide rare insight into the private lives of queer people in urban and small-town India.
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How is justice conceptualized? Does it appear as a distinct guiding normative principle in Indian intellectual traditions? How does it relate to other concepts like equality and responsibility? What are the ground realities of justice in India? Are there competing normative orders? Are there forms of compliance or are there discrepancies between normative rules of justice and the everyday practices of social actors? Are ideal rules ignored modified adapted in everyday practices according to the particular contextual realities? Could we identify particular arenas of (in)justice like class caste gender or natural resources? Is justice something that is continuously being ‘realized’ in shifting historical and social contexts? These questions compel us to reconsider interlinked fields essential to theorizations of modernity – the autonomous individual extraordinary kinds of agency and knowledge equality aspiration and choice. Such theorizations of the individual in the context of defining modernity and justice have deep implications in how the political world is organized and imagined that in turn inform the ideas of citizenship democracy and secularism that underlie modern political systems such as the nation state but also entrenched forms of institutional social and personal violence inequality and discrimination. This book provides a penetrating novel approach to an understanding of the ideas concepts meanings and practices surrounding justice and its related concepts in the past and in contemporary India. The authors base their analysis either on meticulous and extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted among different communities in rural and urban milieus by focusing on oral narratives ritual and religious contexts local historical accounts and the experience of marginalized communities or on a deep rigorous textual analysis of modern and premodern written sources such as early Sanskritic texts dealing with law recent legal documents inscriptions and land deeds among others. About the Author Antje Linkenbach a sociologist and social anthropologist is longterm Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies University of Erfurt. She has widely published in the fields of social theory development critique environmental justice and social movements. Aditya Malik is Founding Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Plaksha University. His research and publications focus on oral traditions and ritual performance religion social justice and law historiography as well as the intersections of humanities social sciences and technology.
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Discover Many Ramayanas Many Lessons by Anand Neelakantan a profound book offering unique perspectives on Ramayana stories. Available online at Sriina this book is perfect for readers exploring diverse lessons from Indian epics. Buy now to enjoy deep insights at an affordable price. Shop today to add this enriching read to your collection.
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Discover Many Ramayanas Many Lessons by Anand Neelakantan, a profound book offering unique perspectives on Ramayana stories. Available online at Sriina, this book is perfect for readers exploring diverse lessons from Indian epics. Buy now to enjoy deep insights at an affordable price. Shop today to add this enriching read to your collection.
... Read more Read less