What the Nation Really Wants to Know: The JNU Nationalism Lectures, edited by JNUTA
In February 2016, sections of the television, print and social media turned the country into a choric chamber of hate, riveting national attention. The proliferating ‘charges’ produced great disquiet in the JNU community of students and teachers. As a creative response, the Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers’ Association organized a teach-in for a month. These lectures soon gained unanticipated audiences across India and in international forums, and echoed well beyond the ‘Freedom Square’, the area in front of JNU’s Administrative Block, which became the space of this intellectual and political occupation. The book, therefore, is both an archive of that historic moment and a tribute to the effort that succeeded in refocusing national attention on the university as the space for sustaining serious, well-historicized and critical thought.
‘When the house of history is on fire, journalists are often the first-responders, pulling victims away from the flames. Deep Halder is one of them.’ – Amitava Kumar
Journalist Deep Halder reconstructs the buried history of the 1979 massacres through his interviews with survivors, erstwhile reporters, government officials and activists with a rare combination of courage, conscientiousness and empathy.
An extraordinary account of ordinary people in troubled times.
In 2001, a calamitous earthquake struck Gujarat, followed by communal carnage the nation had not seen since the Partition. For Robin David, then an assistant editor with the Times of India, the two events engendered a tectonic shift in his own life. A decade later, the wounds have not healed. At a time when the memory of the riots has already faded in the minds of many, City of Fear documents the varied forms of fear that people in Gujarat experienced during that period, especially those of the author’s own Indian Jewish Bene Israeli family.
Lalgarh & The Legend of Kishanji by Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
Kishanji was indeed the face of the Maoist movement in India – until the tables turned. Snigdhendu Bhattacharya was on the ground in Lalgarh, meeting Kishanji, speaking to Maoists and reporting on one of the bloodiest Naxal uprisings as it unfolded, right up to its sudden, chilling end. This is an epic tale of war not only between the state and the Maoists but also between a callous state and its desperate citizens.
Where India Goes by Dean Spears and Diane Coffey
Coffey and Spears tell an unsanitized story of an unsanitary subject, with characters spanning the worlds of mothers and babies living in villages to local government implementers, senior government policymakers and international development professionals. They write of increased funding and ever more unused latrines. Where India Goes is an important and timely book that calls for the annihilation of caste and attendant prejudices, and a fundamental shift in policy perspectives to effect a crucial, much overdue change.
The End of Karma by Somini Sengupta
The End of Karma explores India through the lens of young people from different worlds: a Maoist rebel; a woman killed because she married the ‘wrong’ man; a teenage girl who needles her dad to let her become a police officer. Driven by aspiration – and thwarted by state and society – they are making new demands on India’s democracy for equality of opportunity, dignity for girls, and civil liberties.
The writer paints a powerful, gut wrenching portrait of how both the military and the militants have spilled enough blood to turn the cheerful golden hue of the maize harvested in the Kashmir valley into a dark crimson red. – Amazon.in Editorial Reviews
Red Maize is a searing chronicle of the relentless siege of Kashmir, of the human cost of war, and of a way of life, forever lost.
Mohanaswamy by Vasudhendra, translated by Rashmi Terdal
‘Much like the great James Baldwin, the acclaimed Kannada writer Vasudhendra has transformed his personal experience of bigotry, shame and tragedy into harrowing but magnificent truth-telling. His work will leave you impatient with other writers.’ – Siddharth Dube, author of No One Else
A coming out of the closet for Vasudhendra himself, these stories of homosexual love and lives jolted Kannada readers out of their notions of the literary and the palatable. The gritty narratives of Mohanaswamy explore sexuality, urbanization and class with nuance and an unflinching honesty that will both unnerve and move readers in English, and serve as a fine introduction to one of the strongest voices in Kannada literature.
India Misinformed by Pratik Sinha, Dr Sumaiya Shaikh and Arjun Sidharth
India Misinformed: The True Story, written by the team of Alt News, a fact-checking website that debunks fake information – and edited by Pratik Sinha, Dr Sumaiya Shaikh and Arjun Sidharth – identifies the purveyors of fabricated news, exposes the propaganda machinery and familiarizes readers with techniques to detect these menacing stories.
Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandasamy
Brilliantly original, ferociously angry and, at times, laugh-outloud funny, The Gypsy Goddess is both a novel about a true-life massacre and a novel about the impossibility of writing a novel about a true-life massacre. Treading the line between powerful fiction and fearsome critique, Meena Kandasamy leads us through a rapidly modernizing India and, along the way, points out injustices of privilege, hypocrisies of authority and the unforgivable politics of turning a blind eye.
Elections in India by RobinAge
Election time in India is like a festival – there is the same colour, excitement and celebration! As we gear up for the 2019 elections, this book helps the kids understand why elections are important and how to be better equipped to perform the all-important task of choosing a government to the world’s largest democracy.
Sometime in 2015, news of unsustainable bad debts (non-performing assets or NPAs) in the Indian banking sector started to first trickle out, and then became a flood. In the forefront were some of India’s largest government banks, and a series of tycoons who were running their empires on unpaid debts. The banks’ problems landed on the table of Urjit Patel when he became Governor of Reserve Bank of India in September 2016. Based on thirty years of macroeconomic experience, he worked out the ‘9R’ strategy which would save our savings, rescue our banks and protect them from unscrupulous racketeers. In this book, he explains the problem and how it blew up; and how he would have resolved it if he had not been prevented.
Resurgent India by Bimal Jamal
Resurgent India, a sequel to Dr Bimal Jalan’s book Emerging India (2012) looks ahead and analyses what needs to be done in light of the significant advances made in politics and governance in one of the fastest-growing developing countries in the global economy. The book identifies the key priorities that can – and should – be implemented by the new government in national interest, irrespective of the political agenda of the party (or parties) that come to power.
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