By the early nineteenth century the Urdu language had perfected and polished itself to such a sheen that it shone like burnished gold. It had honed its vocabulary to express the noblest emotions and refined its syntax to convey the most complicated expressions with ease and finesse. As a language, it had come of age.
Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship is a quintessentially Gandhian essay, and not simply because she is a Gandhi. It is Gandhian in its ethical surplus, in making a religion out of morality.
The core of Playing with Fire is formed by the English version of the Hindustani Sangtin Yatra (2004), a moving and powerful reflection by seven women, village-level workers and activists, on their fraught lives and work in Sitapur district, in the Awadh region of Uttar Pradesh.
An important task for all those interested in tracking the trajectory of Women’s Studies in India would be to undertake a review of the many different discourses on women generated by feminist scholarship, women’s activism and the institutionalization of Women’s Studies.
This book is a part of the series on New Perspectives on Indian Pasts edited by Saurabh Dube. The theoretical premises that underline the need for such a series are as follows: (1) that formal academic histories and historical thought have tended to authenticate given structures of power and meaning; (2) that visions of the past are rooted in contemporary political interrogations and contestations,
Billy Arjan Singh is an icon in the annals of Indian wildlife conservation. His contribution to the creation of the Dudhwa National Park and subsequently to the establishment of a Tiger Reserve there has been immense. His commitment to the cause is unquestionable.