Another India tells the story of the world's biggest religious minority. Weaving together vivid biographical portraits of a wide range of Indian Muslims--elite and subaltern, secular and clerical, activist and apolitical--it brings the experience of the country's Muslims under a single focus; and, by throwing light on the Indian Muslim condition during the first thirty years of independence, reflects on the true character of democratic India. What we have here is a rather different picture from received accounts of the 'world's largest democracy'. Challenging traditional histories of Nehru's India, Pratinav Anil shows that minority rights were neglected right from independence. Despite its best intentions, the Congress regime that ruled for three decades was often illiberal, intolerant and undemocratic. Muslims had to contend with discrimination, disadvantage, deindustrialization, dispossession and disenfranchisement, as well as an unresponsive leadership. Anil demonstrates how the Muslim elite encouraged depoliticization, taking up seemingly noble but largely inconsequential causes with little bearing on the lives of ordinary members of the community. There was no room for mass protests or collective solidarity in this version of Muslim politics. Another India explores this elite betrayal, whose consequences are still felt by India's 200 million Muslims today.

"Examines both the roots and the resonance of Neema Avashia's identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, and gun culture"--

Another Reason is a bold and innovative study of the intimate relationship between science, colonialism, and the modern nation. Gyan Prakash, one of the most influential historians of India writing today, explores in fresh and unexpected ways the complexities, contradictions, and profound importance of this relationship in the history of the subcontinent. He reveals how science served simultaneously as an instrument of empire and as a symbol of liberty, progress, and universal reason--and how, in playing these dramatically different roles, it was crucial to the emergence of the modern nation. Prakash ranges over two hundred years of Indian history, from the early days of British rule to the dawn of the postcolonial era. He begins by taking us into colonial museums and exhibitions, where Indian arts, crafts, plants, animals, and even people were categorized, labeled, and displayed in the name of science. He shows how science gave the British the means to build railways, canals, and bridges, to transform agriculture and the treatment of disease, to reconstruct India's economy, and to transfigure India's intellectual life--all to create a stable, rationalized, and profitable colony under British domination. But Prakash points out that science also represented freedom of thought and that for the British to use it to practice despotism was a deeply contradictory enterprise. Seizing on this contradiction, many of the colonized elite began to seek parallels and precedents for scientific thought in India's own intellectual history, creating a hybrid form of knowledge that combined western ideas with local cultural and religious understanding. Their work disrupted accepted notions of colonizer versus colonized, civilized versus savage, modern versus traditional, and created a form of modernity that was at once western and indigenous. Throughout, Prakash draws on major and minor figures on both sides of the colonial divide, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nationalist historian and novelist Romesh Chunder Dutt, Prafulla Chandra Ray (author of A History of Hindu Chemistry), Rudyard Kipling, Lord Dalhousie, and John Stuart Mill. With its deft combination of rich historical detail and vigorous new arguments and interpretations, Another Reason will recast how we understand the contradictory and colonial genealogy of the modern nation.

Asking what Indian readers chose to read and why, In Another Country shows how readers of the English novel transformed the literary and cultural influences of empire. She further demonstrates how Indian novelists writing in English, from Krupa Satthianadhan to Salman Rushdie, took an alien form in an alien language and used it to address local needs. Taken together in this manner, reading and writing reveal the complex ways in which culture is continually translated and transformed in a colonial and postcolonial context.

‘A product of immaculate scholarship, refined rumination and humane sensibility — drawing upon little known or forgotten bits of history, mythology, literature, and personal encounters with exceptional individuals, this excellent book urges us to reflect on our predicament as a people.’ GEETANJALI SHREE ‘Another India is a metaphor for rich cultural diversity. It is a tapestry that lucidly marks the criss-crossing of intellectual currents which run through people, memories and events — between the regions and the nation, between the particular and the universal.’ GOPAL GURU ‘This collection of essays, informed by an immersion in the texture of South Indian literary life and a vigorous humanism, provides an unusual and wonderful introduction to the diverse lineages of Indian cultural and intellectual experiences.’ PRATAP BHANU MEHTA ‘Few books in the social sciences can connect culture, policy, politics and folklore and yet remain playful. Chandan Gowda’s Another India represents such a cultural anthropology at its best. Effortlessly weaving the topical and the classical, and traversing the world of women Sufis, barbers, akhadas and also providing wonderful anecdotes and insights about legends like Ambedkar, Kuvempu and Lohia, this anthology is a festival of Indian diversity at its best. This is a brilliant book of insights, a book that elaborates how culture, people and creativity add to the making of the democratic imagination.’ SHIV VISVANATHAN ‘This playful assemblage of slices of local and translocal cultures of India — including the mythic and the folk — are accompanied by glimpses into some of the country's finest minds. Together they give the book a certain charm that is matched by the author's easy, empathic, non-judgemental style.’ ASHIS NANDY “Ram is the perfection of the limited personality, Krishna of the exuberant personality and Siva of the non[1]dimensional personality.” Lohia’s elaboration of these “categories of perfection” is an absolute delight. During his entire career, Sir M Visversvaraya carried two pens on him, one of which belonged to the government and the other to him. He always used the former pen for office work and the latter for personal work. After possessing a devotee, a deity called Doddaswamy would start whistling with his fingers in his mouth. His devotees are to address him only through whistles. Another deity from Gulbarga district, Gajalakshmi, expected her devotees to bare all their teeth in her presence. Free ranging, delightful and erudite, Another India opens up the varied dimensions of the past, discloses the subtle facets of religious cosmologies, reveals the plurality within Hinduism and suggests ways of reengaging tradition. It shares exciting stories about lesser-known and well-known figures in our country, from Bhimavva and Mastani Maa to Gandhi and Tagore. This book brings to you the many events, thoughts and people that have been waylaid in our frequent quests for single, mainstream narratives. It brings to you the intricate cultural universe of India, where creative dissent has shaped the ethos, where rich visions and values of living together continue to hold sway in our constant striving to be a better, more just polity and society.

Almost Sixty Years Ago, Nehru Spoke Of India S Tryst With Destiny At The Dawn Of Independence. In The Constitution Of The New Republic That Was Framed A Few Years Later, The Goals And Values Of That Vision Were Unfolded. How Far Have We Progressed Since Then And What Is It That Destiny Now Holds For Tomorrow S India? The Present Volume Of Essays Surveys The Scene Past-Forward And Paints A Picture Of What Has Been Accomplished And What Remains To Be Done. There Is Pride And Satisfaction In Particular Over India S Vibrant Democracy And Progress In Many Directions. This Is Nonetheless Tinged With Concern, For There Are Nagging Problems Of Governance And Shortfalls In Human And Infrastructure Development, As Well As Social Deficits In The Matter Of Rights, Corruption And Sectoral And Regional Imbalances. All These Must Be Squarely Faced And Speedily Overcome If The Nation Is To Grow In Keeping With Its Increasingly Recognized Potential As A Rising Great Power. It Has Been Widely Forecast That Within Thirty Years India, Together With The United States And China, Will Constitute The Three Largest Economies In The World. The Wellsprings Of Growth Are There. However, As More Than One Author Points Out, Mere Economic And Technological Growth Is Not Enough. In This Globalizing World The Market Is Not All. The Citizen Must March Hand In Hand With The Consumer In A Sharing And Caring Society. The Twenty-Four Essayists Who Write Of Tomorrow S India Do So In Celebration Of The 125Th Anniversary Of Their Alma Mater, Delhi S St Stephen S College. Their Themes Relate To Diplomacy And Security; The Economy And Technology; Governance; Society S Watchdogs; Ideology And Values; Social Change; And Culture And Heritage. The Authors Represent A Galaxy Of Public Figures, Academics, Professionals And Social Workers. What They Have To Say Makes Compelling Reading, With Penetrating Insights And Critiques. Contributors Include George Abraham, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Rukmini Banerji, Ranjit Bhatia, Ravi Dayal, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Sagarika Ghose, Navina Haidar Haykel, Prem Shankar Jha, Manoj Joshi, Mukul Kesavan, Arun Kumar, Sarwar Lateef, Arun Maira, Harsh Mander, Deepak Nayyar, Bunker Roy, Vikramjit Sen, Kapil Sibal, Dilip Simeon, K. Natwar Singh, N.K. Singh, B.G. Verghese And Sitaram Yechury

The book weaves through an intricate tapestry of ideas relating to pan-Asianism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and friendship, and positions the early modernist tensions of the period within—and against—the spectre of a unified Asia that concealed considerable political differences. The book draws on pan-Asian works such as The Ideals of the East and The Awakening of the East, in counterpoint to Tagore's radical Nationalism. The book, offering new insights into the ways in which the Orient travelled within and beyond Asia stimulated by emergent modes of vernacular cosmopolitanism, will appeal to students and scholars of cultural studies, South Asian postcolonial literature, literary theory, and performance studies, as well as general readers.

In its history since Independence, India has seen widely different economic experiments: from Jawharlal Nehru's pragmatism to the rigid state socialism of Indira Gandhi to the brisk liberalization of the 1990s. So which strategy best addresses India's, and by extension the world's, greatest moral challenge: lifting a great number of extremely poor people out of poverty? Bhagwati and Panagariya argue forcefully that only one strategy will help the poor to any significant effect: economic growth, led by markets overseen and encouraged by liberal state policies. Their radical message has huge consequences for economists, development NGOs and anti-poverty campaigners worldwide. There are vital lessons here not only for Southeast Asia, but for Africa, Eastern Europe, and anyone who cares that the effort to eradicate poverty is more than just good intentions. If you want it to work, you need growth. With all that implies.

With a foreward by Montek Singh Ahluwalia Beautiful Country is a journey towards understanding India. From the rarefied world of the Jalpaiguri tea estates to the crowded bylanes of Varanasi, from the pristine forests of Andamans to the seething valley of Manipur, from the scattered habitations of Ladakh to the flooded villages of Barmer - these are the roads less travelled. A woman and a girl set out to see India, lugging along the baggage of their pasts. On the way, they meet: Maimunisa, the ancillary weaver from Banaras who has only been able to feed her three-year-old son 'sabudane ka paani' (tapioca water); young doctors from AIIMS who have left behind hefty pay packages and the comfort of city life to provide health care to tribals in the hinterlands of Chhattisgarh; village women who have been able to significantly reduce the number of infant deaths in the tribal peripheries of Maharashtra. The duo chance upon the story of Bon Bibi and Shah Jangolee in the swamps of the Sundarbans, as also the natural, historical and cultural wonders that dot the Indian landscape. This book compels you to experience the hope and despair, misery and triumph, failures and innovations of 'real India' - an India that remains invisible to most Indians and does not make it to the front pages of newspapers, and has not been captured by the roving cameras of the 24x7 media channels.

For a long time - too long - the mirror that India held to its face was made elsewhere. 'What writer about the country would you recommend I read?' first-time travellers to India would ask, and in the late twentieth century the answer was still Forster or Naipaul or even the long-dead Kipling. In fiction, that changed with Rushdie. Now it has changed in all kinds of non-fiction. Narrative history, reportage, memoir, biography, the travel account: all have their gifted exponents in a country perfecting its own frank gaze. In this special issue, Aman Sethi's 'Love Jihad' gives us insight into the riots, religious fractiousness, mob mentality and political manipulations that have come to define day-to-day life in Uttar Pradesh; Samanth Subramanian investigates the legacy of postcolonialism among Mumbai's elite at one of the city's oldest exclusive clubs; Raghu Karnad reveals the secret and terrible history of a great Delhi monument; Amitava Kumar brings us with him into a richly detailed world of grief at his mother's funeral pyre on the banks of the Ganges; and Sam Miller follows Gandhi's footsteps through Victorian London. Photographer Gauri Gill and artist Rajesh Vangad take a fresh look at an Indian village and embellish its present with its past, and Katherine Boo introduces the photographs that helped her write Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Hari Kunzru imagines an Indian future where inequality is taken to an all-too-imaginable extreme; the 'English Summer' of 1985 is brought to life in an excerpt from Amit Chaudhuri's Odysseus Abroad; and Anjali Joseph invites us into the mind of an ageing cobbler as he splices together the loose strands of his memories. Granta 130: India features more fiction by Upamanyu Chatterjee, Deepti Kapoor, Kalpana Narayanan, Vivek Shanbhag, Neel Mukherjee; a story by one of India's finest - and unduly neglected - prose writers, Arun Kolatkar; and poetry by Tishani Doshi, Anjum Hasan, Vinod Kumar Shukla and Karthika Nar.