Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency & India
Purnima Bose
280 pp Hb
INR 495
Organizing Empire critically examines how concepts of individualism functioned to support and resist British imperialism in India. Through readings of British colonial and Indian nationalist narratives that emerged in parliamnetary debates, popular colonial histories, newsletters, memoirs, biographies, and novels. Purnima Bose investigates the ramifications of reducing collective activism to individual intentions. Paying particular attention to the construction of gender, she shows that ideas of individualism rhetorically and theoretically bind colonials, feminists, nationalists, and neocolonials to one another. She demonstrates how reliance on ideas of the individual – as scapegoat or hero – enabled colonial and neocolonial powers to deny the violence that they perpetrated. At the same time, she shows how analyses of the role of the individual provide a window into the dynamics and limitations of state formations and feminist and nationalist resistance movements.
Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire
Mrinalini Sinha
372 pp Hb
INR 595
A huge international controversy followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an expose written by American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country’s child wive’s. The book was translated into more than a dozen languages, and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents. Mrinalini Sinha traces the controversy surrounding Mother India, explaining how the uproar became a catalyst for far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India.
Locked Homes, Empty Schools: The Impact of Distress Seasonal Migration on the Rural Poor
Smita, Photographs by Prashant Panjiar. Foreward by Amartya Sen
200 pp Hb, 8″x11″, landscaped, four colour photographs
INR 695
Every year millions of impoverished families living in the rainfed parts of India leave their homes in search of work. Forced to migrate due to a livelihoods collapse in the villages, these distress seasonal migrants shut up their spartan homes, take a few meager belongings and move, often across long distances. The large numbers of children who accompany their parents are forced to drop out of school, and in most instances, do not find schooling in the areas they move to. As a result, at work sites these children are put to work from young ages. The numbers of such children under the age of 14 years is estimated to be in the region of 9 million. This study, commissioned by the American India Foundation, draws on the work of four NGOs in different parts of India, and in different sectors: sugarcane harvesting in Maharashtra, salt pan, roof tile and charcoal making in Gujarat, and brick kiln migrations from Orissa to Andhra Pradesh. Both macro and micro aspects of distress seasonal migration are covered, including the spread and scale of the occurrence, the seasonality factor, the differing contexts, employer-labour relations, working and living conditions of migrant families, and children, and the links of such migration with child labour.
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