Search results for ""zubaan""

Nepal, because it was never directly colonized, is seen as something of an outlier on the subcontinent, but the country could not remain totally immune to the influence of colonialism in its neighborhood. A Difficult Transition shows that, in addition to home-grown feudal patriarchal structures, it is the larger colonial and postcolonial context of the subcontinent that has enabled the structuring of inequalities and power relations in Nepal, which today allow for widespread sexual violence and impunity. Recent years have seen an increase in public discussion about sexual violence in Nepal, and the state has created legislation and action plans to address the problem. And yet, impunity for perpetrators remains intact and justice elusive. What are the structures that enable such impunity? And what can be done to change and radically transform these structures? How must states understand the search for justice for victims of sexual violence? Part of the Zubaan Series on Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia, the essays in this volume attempt to trace a history of sexual violence in Nepal, look at the responses of women's groups and society at large, and suggest how this serious and wide-ranging problem may be addressed.

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The culmination of research undertaken in the rural panchayats of Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, A Foot in the Door brings the voices of Dalit women to the forefront of the ongoing conversation about their political oppression. The authors examine the patriarchal and caste-based barriers to Dalit women’s political participation in Panchayati Raj, explaining clearly that without a more holistic approach, the panchayats will only continue to reinforce existing and undeniably violent hierarchies of caste and gender. Dalit women’s political participation remains a risky endeavor and involves very little actual transfer of power. Getting ‘a foot in the door’ is not enough—the affirmative action that secures a Dalit woman’s right to enter the panchayats often still silences them in the process of seeking active participation. An essential read for feminist and Dalit scholars working on issues of gender, caste, and political participation, A Foot in the Door argues that there is a need for deep, systemic change at every level of governance—only then can equal and meaningful participation be ensured.

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"Why didn't you save the world?" This is the Sprite's cry. Meanwhile, Aesop tries to save his skin, make up his fables, and just live his life. Given the pitfalls of human nature, are these fables some kind of instruction manual for staying out of trouble? What about morals, reform, and the castigation of social evils? As she nags and cajoles Aesop, Sprite--along with the reader--begins to wonder how much power the writer truly has in the world. Foxy Aesop offers a virtuoso display of how one can use the building blocks of a fable in a variety of ways. It is witty, it is satirical, and the Sprite herself is a comical figure. However, when she must return to her own time at the book's end--that is, to our time in our broken world--her central question suddenly seems less absurd and far more urgent. Eccentric, darkly comic, and wryly amusing, Suniti Namjoshi's fable will surprise and delight any fans of Angela Carter or Margaret Atwood.

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Fault Lines of History is the second volume in Zubaan's Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia series, to focus on India. This volume addresses the question of state impunity, arguing that when it comes to the violation of human and civil rights, particularly in relation to sexual violence, the state of India has played an active and collusive role, creating states of exception, where its own laws can be suspended and the rights of its citizens violated. Drawing on patterns of sexual violence in Kashmir, Northeast India, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, and Rajasthan, the contributors focus on the histories of militarization in regions of conflict, as well as the histories of caste violence that are often ignored out of convenience. The essays come together to offer an urgent call for action. Though the contributors acknowledge the difficult odds facing the victims and survivors of sexual violence, they urge resistance and an end to silence as the most important weapons in the fight to hold accountable the perpetrators of sexual violence.

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Imelda Connor is a classic Irish lass-a fiery, red-headed beauty, quick to anger, and fiercely protective of her younger siblings. Growing up on a small farm in the rolling hills of County Cork, she thinks she has her life completely mapped out. Here in Ireland she will live an enchanted life with the perfect Irish husband, devoting herself to her family and to her livestock. But Imelda soon finds that life doesn't always go according to plan. Everything is turned upside-down when Imelda moves to England and happens to meet a dashing, rakish Bengali man named Shu Bose. Shu, whose knowledge of Ireland stops at James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, is captivated by Imelda's natural beauty and vivacious charm, and the two quickly embark on a whirlwind romance. At the tender age of eighteen, in the spring of 1932, Imelda boards a ship bound for Calcutta-and a very different life to the one she had always imagined. From Cork to Calcutta by Milty Khanna transports readers back to pre-Independence India, to London between the wars, and to the genteel life of bhadralok Bengali high society. It's the intimate and true story of Khanna's parents and their unconventional love-story that crosses class, nationality, and cultural boundaries.

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Even in a realm that would seem to be as far removed from issues of gender as natural resource management, gender bias is pernicious and persistent, especially in India. Genderscapes looks at the reasons for this bias from a number of angles, including the socialization of attitudes, the shaping of community ideologies, and the construction of disciplines and research methodologies. Sumi Krishna puts forward the novel concept of "genderscapes" to reflect the totality of women's life worlds, and she builds her use of the concept on a group of rich case studies, including the caring practices of forest-dwellers, women's knowledge of biodiversity, and their widespread responsibility for farming and food production. Women's economic needs cannot be separated from their sociopolitical interests, Krishna shows-and only by looking at them as a whole can we solve the problem of discrimination.

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Originally published in Marathi in 1989, this contemporary classic details the history of women's participation in B. R. Ambedkar's Dalit movement for the first time. Focusing on the involvement of women in various Dalit struggles since the early twentieth century, the book goes on to consider the social conditions of Dalit women's lives, daily religious practices and marital rules, the practice of ritual prostitution, and women's issues. Drawing on diverse sources, including periodicals, records of meetings, and personal correspondence, the latter half of the book is composed of interviews with Dalit women activists from the 1930s. These firsthand accounts from more than forty Dalit women make the book an invaluable resource for students of caste, gender, and politics in India. A rich store of material for historians of the Dalit movement and gender studies in India, We Also Made History remains a fundamental text of the modern women's movement.

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Researcher and activist Sahba Husain has been working in Kashmir for two decades, and in this personal, passionate account of that state and its people, she documents her deeply engaged and empathetic involvement with Kashmir’s politicized terrain. We join her as she meets—and, crucially, listens to—people who carry all of the anger, despair, and helplessness of a people caught in conflict and violence. Forming deep friendships through this process, Husain finds herself questioning her own “Indian” identity. It is those relationships that form the backdrop of this book, in which Husain focuses on certain key areas: the health of a people, militancy and its changing meanings for local people and the state, impunity and the search for justice, migration and the longing for homes left behind, and women’s activism along the faultlines of nation-state and community. A book of difficult subjects, but one that finds surprising beauty in its engagement with human relationships, of love for a land and a people and of hope for a future free of violence, Love, Loss, and Longing in Kashmir is a compelling and necessary read.

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The Tamil text Nilakeci, published between the first and fifth centuries, deals with Jaina philosophy through the use of an unusual literary technique: retrieving a pey, or possessing spirit (usually a woman), from the folk tradition and casting it in a new image. Thus a demon becomes a philosopher, for example and if that is possible, then anyone can transform themselves into someone new, a redeemed self, by following the Jaina tenets. This is a profoundly subversive idea within the tradition, as is the use in Nilakeci of a female persona to debate with the most prominent teachers, all but one of them male, from the various schools of thought prevalent at the time. This book places Nilakeci within a historical context while nonetheless maintaining its status as a singular, radical work, using translations of selected excerpts to make a powerful case.

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Feminist Subversion and Complicity brings together contributions from women in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and India, who, while working at diverse kinds of institutions, are all closely involved in the intersection of development policy and gender. They offer critical feminist perspectives on governmental education and health projects, as well as legal reforms in these regions. As a whole, the essays reveal that, in general, feminist politics are not merely assimilated into governmental projects, but as part of the process of assimilation, they often serve as a subversive interruption, destabilizing and contesting orthodox meanings and assumptions.

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As both the bedrock of human survival and an unchallenged part of the "normal" female life, motherhood expects and even compels women to be mothers both symbolic and corporeal. Motherhood and non-motherhood is not just physiological. As the pivot to a web of heteronormative institutions like marriage and family, motherhood bears an overwhelming and decisive influence on women's lives. In the face of tradition and sociopolitical discourse and policies, Motherhood and Choice explores how women as embodiments of multiple identities can live stigma-free, authentic lives without having to abandon reproductive self-determination. Amrita Nandy asks the difficult questions here: How can women live fully? If autonomy is a basic human right, why do many women have little or no choice when it comes to motherhood? Do women know they have a choice? Through remarkable research and searing analysis, Nandy brings an important addition to feminist debates on the conflation of woman and mother, political and personal.

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In this collection of short stories, Avinuo Kire tells powerful tales of women overcoming violence and repression. In The Power to Forgive, many of the stories are told against the backdrop of the long drawn-out conflict and militancy of the struggle for Nagaland's independence from India. Yet it is the finely drawn portraits of ordinary people that resonate most in this unusual collection. Culled from folk and tribal traditions of Naga life, Kire's collection takes us into a world where spirits converse with humans and where unsuspecting people are drawn into forces greater than themselves. Among others, we find a man dying quietly of cancer, a mother questioning her choice to give her a child a name she didn't intend, and a survivor reflecting on the ways that a traumatic event has shaped nearly two decades of her life. A fresh voice from a region of India renowned for its writers, Avinuo Kire offers a promising and moving debut.

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Ila Arab Mehta is an award-winning Gujarati author, perhaps most noted for her explorations of feminist thinking. In this new translation by Rita Kothari of her beautiful and skillfully crafted novel Fence, we meet Fateema Lokhandwala, a young Muslim woman in present-day Gujarat. Fateema lives in a divided world, where religion and class split society. A member of the Muslim minority, she struggles to carve out a place for herself, seeking her true identity, and encountering triumph and tragedy along the way. Fence is a powerful critique of the damage caused by Indian identity politics. It is also a classic coming-of-age story and a lively, yet tender, exploration by Mehta, a Hindu writer, of the dreams and aspirations of her Muslim sisters.

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Mainstream feminist discourse has failed to fully engage with commercial sex work. In a series of groundbreaking, previously unpublished essays, The Business of Sex corrects this lacuna. Moving beyond the traditional feminist focus on slavery and trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and other health issues, the contributors to this volume engage fully with the political and theoretical implications of sex work. Dismissing old antagonisms, they argue that feminism - thanks to its role in revolutionizing perspectives on sexuality and labor - is a natural ally for the sex workers' rights movement. In the process, these innovative scholars provocatively critique the dominant moral paradigm of heterosexual monogamy, which has created a pervasive "victim" discourse and limited our understanding of sex work's complex realities. Drawing on firsthand stories of sex workers and prostitutes, this volume gives voice to newly articulated movements such as "whore feminism" and "queer feminism" - feminisms that have the potential to move discussions about sex work onto new and fruitful terrain.

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In the early 1930s. Ayii Tendulkar, a young journalist from a small town in Maharashtra, traveled to Germany to pursue a doctorate in statistics. In Berlin, Ayii became a well-known journalist, and he met and fell in love with the renowned filmmaker Thea von Harbou, the writer of the classic films "Metropolis" and "M" and former wife of legendary director Fritz Lang. They later married. In this unique account, Laxmi Tendulkar Dhaul - the daughter of Ayii and his third wife, Indumati Gunaji - traces the turbulent lives of her parents and that of Thea von Harbou against the backdrop of Nazi Germany and Gandhi's India. The book describes how Thea, many years Ayii's senior, became his support and mainstay in Germany, helping him in his attempts to bring young Indian students to the country. Hitler's rise to power put an end to that effort, and, on Thea's advice, Ayii returned to India, where the outspoken journalist became involved in Gandhi's campaign of noncooperation with the British, and where, with Thea's consent, he soon married Indumati, a Gandhian activist. Caught up in the whirlwind of Gandhi's activism, Indumati and Ayii spent several years in Indian prisons, unable to live as a married couple until their release, managing thereby to comply with a condition Gandhi himself had put on their marriage - that they remain apart for several years. Using a wealth of documents, letters, newspaper articles, and photographs, including personal papers, "Berlin to Gandhi" weaves together the tangled histories of two women, the man they loved, and two countries battling violence and nonviolence, fascism and colonialism.

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In 1960s Karachi, a place of ever increasing violence and political and social uncertainty, a beautiful and talented artist, Tahira, tries to hold her life together as it shatters around her. Her marriage is quickly revealed to be a sham, a trap from which there is no escape. In a world of stifling conformity, Tahira must fight for her very identity: as a woman, and as a painter. Tragedy strikes when her family and friends are caught up in the brutally repressive regime. Faced with horror and loss, she embarks upon a series of paintings entitled 'The Empty Room', filling the blank canvases with vivid colour and light. Lyric, poetic, and powerful, The Empty Room is an important addition to contemporary Pakistani literature and is a moving account of the dilemma faced by all women who must find their own creative path against the odds.

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On February 6, 2003, Anjum Zamrud Habib, a young political activist from Kashmir, was arrested in Delhi, convicted under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and sentenced to five years in Delhi's notorious Tihar jail. Her crime? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as well as being the Chairperson of the Muslim Khawateen Markaz and a member of the Hurriyat Conference, which disputes India's claim to Jammu and Kashmir. In this passionate and rare first-hand account by a Muslim woman in Tihar jail, Habib describes the shock and bewilderment of arrest; the pain of realizing that there would be no escape for years; the desperation for contact with the outside world; and the sense of deep betrayal at being abandoned by your political comrades. Prisoner No. 100 provides an inside perspective on the impact of the Kashmir conflict on real people's lives and offers a searing indictment of draconian state policies, while telling the courageous story of one woman's extraordinary life.

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Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay was a remarkable woman a gifted writer and an activist central to the making of the modern Indian nation. India's representative to the Global South for many years after independence, Kamaladevi figured prominently in discussions of and studies on Indian women and independence. But in more mainstream histories she remains relatively unknown. A Passionate Life brings together for the first time a collection of Kamaladevi's writings on the subjects closest to her heart. These essays include a close look at the lives of tribal peoples in India, the sustaining of handicrafts and handicraft workers, and issues of history. In doing so, the volume questions not only our methods of writing and recovering history which leave out lives as important as hers but also shows how the surfacing of histories like Kamaladevi's can enrich, expand, and add nuance to our understanding of the making of modern India. Crucial new essays and commentary by the editors accompany Kamaladevi's writings.

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It’s midnight and there are fists pounding on the door. Authoritative voices shouting, “We’re coming in! Get on the floor!” A few terrorized minutes later a family member is dragged out by armed men, disappearing into the night. This scenario is the greatest fear of many twentieth-century families—and to the unlucky, it’s a lived reality. For the ethnic Chinese who had been settled in Northern India for many years, 1962 was filled with moments of terror like these. After the Sino-Indian Border War broke out in 1962, on the authorization of Prime Minister Nehru more than two thousand Chinese-Indians were torn from their homes and placed in local jails before being transported more than one thousand miles to the Deoli internment camp in the Rajasthan desert. Born in Calcutta in 1949 and raised in Darjeeling, Yin Marsh was just thirteen years old when first her father was taken and then she, her grandmother, and eight year old brother were forcibly removed from their home and thrown first into Darjeeling Jail. Upon arrival in Deoli, Yin and her family were assigned to the same bungalow where Prime Minister Nehru himself had done time during India’s war for independence. Eventually released, Yin emigrated to America with her mother. She attended college, married, and raised her own family, all without telling the story of her emotional trauma. It wasn’t until her own college-age daughter began to ask questions and when a friend’s wedding would require her to return to her homeland that Yin was finally able to face what had happened to her and her family. In the fascinating memoir Doing Time with Nehru, the little-known history of how the Chinese were treated in post-Independence India is brought to light and through Yin’s story, readers can glimpse the hardship, cruelty, and harsh lessons required for survival.

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Breaching the Citadel, part of the Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia series, supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada, puts India in focus, showcasing new and pathbreaking research on sexual violence and impunity. Bringing together both young and established scholars, the book explores medical protocols, the functioning of the law, the psychosocial making of impunity, histories of sexual violence in places like Kashmir, the media, and sectarian violence, among other timely topics. The essays Urvashi Butalia has collected here were developed through comparative research and a series of workshops, so each entry is peer-reviewed and on the cutting edge of the field. Breaching the Citadel breaks new ground as it uncovers and analyzes the link between sexual violence and the structures and institutions that enable perpetrators to act with impunity.

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First published in 1966 by award-winning Marathi writer Anuradha Vaidya, A Ragdoll for My Heart is a unique free verse novella now making its English debut [?]. The lyrical work, translated by Shruti Nargundkar, tells an age-old story: that of a woman's longing for a daughter and the relationship they subsequently come to share. The story traces a mother-daughter relationship that begins first with unquestioning love and over time transforms into one of distance and tension. Setting out life as a game with predetermined moves and rules that are meant to be twisted or negotiated, Vaidya deftly engages readers in a playful connecting of the dots, drawing us deeper and deeper into the lives of the characters. She employs beautiful allegorical imagery on each page of the poetic narrative and makes many allusions to life as a game played on the board of the globe-complete with her characters who act as pawns in the sprawling world of the narrative.

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Published in 1899, Muhammad Hadi Ruswa's famous novel "Umrao Jaan Ada" created a sensation when it came out, with its candid fictionalized account of the life of Umrao Jaan, based on a renowned Lucknow courtesan and poetess of the same name. Considered by many to be the first Urdu novel, it remains highly popular today and has been the basis of three films and a Pakistani television serial. But despite Ruswa's notoriety, few know that a month after he wrote "Umrao Jaan Ada", he penned a sly novella entitled "Junun-e-Intezar", in which "Umrao" avenges herself on her creator, Ruswa, by narrating the story of his life. Blurring the lines between truth and fiction, narrator and character, this clever narrative strategy gives the courtesan a voice. While "Umrao Jaan Ada" is still celebrated, "Junun-e-Intezar" has been completely forgotten - until now. The "Madness of Waiting" redresses this imbalance, featuring both the Urdu original and a superb English translation. The book also includes a critical introduction that rethinks "Umrao Jaan Ada" and the Urdu literary milieu of the late-nineteenth-century Lucknow courtesan.

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India is changing. And at the heart of this change are its women. The change is widespread and varied, individual and collective, reflecting the full spectrum of women's lives, whether in politics or in economics, in business, or within their daily domestic work. This book maps - in words and in marvelous color photographs - some of the changes that are both visible and invisible in India today. In "Women Changing India", six writers flesh out the stories captured by photographers Raghu Rai, Martine Franck, Olivia Arthur, Alex Webb, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Patrick Zachmann from the world-renowned Magnum Photos. These beautiful and evocative photographs focus on the world of women working with the help of microloans, participating in grassroots governance, working behind the scenes in the Mumbai film industry, and moving into new jobs, often in male-dominated fields. Together, they are making contributions in varied fields and imagining a new future for themselves and other women. Featuring contributions from leading writers, "Women Changing India" offers a window into the lives of women living in South Asia today, bringing to public attention their complex realities and their aspirations for a better world.

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A revolutionary take on the classic dystopian science fiction novel, Clone inaugurates a new kind of writing in India. Priya Sarukkai Chabria weaves the tale of a fourteenth-generation clone in twenty-fourth-century India who struggles against imposed amnesia and sexual taboos in a species-depleted world. With resonant and allusive prose, Chabria takes us along as the clone hesitantly navigates through a world rendered unfamiliar by her expanding consciousness. This slow transformation is mirrored in the way both she and her world appear to the reader. The necessary questions Chabria raises revolve around a shared humanity, the necessity of plurality of expression, the wonder of love, and the splendor of difference. Clone’s adventurous forays into vastly different times, spaces, and consciousness—animal, human, and post-human—build a poetic story about compassion and memory in the midst of all that is grotesque.

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Jeumon has a complicated story stuck in her head: her family’s. In the newly-drawn boundaries of Assam and Meghalaya in 1972 India, young Jeumon wonders how she should define herself. Is she Assamese, like her father, or Khasi, like her mother? As a researcher and writer, she speaks with passion of the oral narratives and folk tales shared by the people of the hills and plains, those of different tribes, and those with different languages. To herself, she wonders: if stories can do this, why can’t people? Why must they be trapped in singular identities? In this moving narrative of change, Tilottoma Misra tells the story of one family to explore how lives are impacted by sweeping geographical partitions and how human relationships morph under the weight of political turmoil.

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Manipur has a rich tradition of folk and oral narratives, as well as written texts dating from as early as in eighth century AD. But it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that women began writing and publishing their works. Today, women's writing forms a vibrant part of Manipuri literature, and their voices are amplified through their coming together as an all-woman literary group. Put together in discussions and workshops by Thingnam Anjulika Samom, Crafting the Word captures a region steeped in conservative patriarchy and at the center of an armed conflict. It is also a place, however, where women’s activism has been at the forefront of peace-making and where their contributions in informal commerce and trade hold together the economy of daily life.

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In this new collection by Nighat Gandhi, the private worlds of women open themselves up to the reader. Inside their homes, women are trapped in a state of continuous limbo, waiting for change; young girls struggle for the “purity” that religion demands of them; new mothers wonder at the absence of desire. Outside, the seasons change—trees shed their leaves, the sky becomes overcast, and rain falls. Sounds float inside, and the women wonder about the meaning of life. Each story elicits a new, sometimes troubling, question about living as a woman in the world today. The characters’ nuanced descriptions and unsparing truthfulness leaves readers with a sense of discomfort as they confront their own demons. With subtle force, Waiting explores love, longing, loss, aging, survival, hope, and self-invention—the most powerful realities of life.

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Though the northeastern region of India contains eight ethnically diverse, politically complex, and historically different states, it is often homogenized into a problematic category called “the northeast.” Many stereotype it as a region of conflict clouding India’s periphery. The diversity of the region, its rich histories, its many literatures, and its women—who run businesses, fight for peace, and battle their men as rights-bearers—all of these admirable elements of the region tend to disappear in the face of such stereotyping. Centrepiece brings together twenty-one women from across the northeastern states of India to reflect on the personal nature and meanings of work through their own words and pictures. Whether they are brewing beer, carrying cow dung on their heads, or selling food in the streets, these women confront, love, reject, and laugh at their men in myriad ways. Visually stunning, with full-color images, Centrepiece illustrates how traditional tribal art and modern sensibilities can intersect to create a new visual language for these women to share untold stories. They tell their tales here with both gravity and joy, bringing alive their cultures and showing us how to see a fresh perspective of this region and its people.

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Acts of sexual violence are often committed with impunity—perpetrators do not consider their actions consequential. Yet throughout history, impunity for sexual violence has been challenged by fearless, just, and compassionate speech—both in courts of justice and outside of them. Those who speak out not only advance a politics of accountability, but also an ethics of recognition, suffering, and hurt.Undoing Impunity explores the contours of the politics and ethics pertaining to sexual violence in contemporary South Asian communities. Using a historical lens, V. Geetha closely examines explicitly feminist responses from the region and, drawing from them, suggests that sexual violence and the impunity it claims for itself are best understood in relation to cultural attitudes towards sexuality. In all, Undoing Impunity is an important and timely look at the social, psychological, and legal conditions that allow perpetrators to act without fear of responsibility or guilt. The book forms part of the Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia series, supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada.

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The Partition of British India into the nations of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the further redrawing of the borders in 1971 to create Bangladesh were major, wrenching events whose effects are still felt today in the everyday lives of people in all three nations in fundamental ways-yet these events have never been explored in all their aspects. This volume gathers essays from scholars in a variety of fields that explore substantial new ground in Partition research, looking into such understudied areas as art, literature, migration, and, crucially, notions of "foreignness" and "belonging," among many others. It will be required reading for any scholars of the recent history, politics, and culture of the subcontinent.

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Kohima, 2007. A young man has just been gunned down in cold blood - the latest casualty in the conflict that has brutalized the people of Nagaland, in the neglected northeastern corner of India. Rich in culture and history, "Bitter Wormwood" traces the story of one man's life from 1937 to 2007, offering poignant insight into the human cost behind the political headlines of one of India's most beautiful regions. In a gripping story that brings to life the processes that propel social change and transform communities, Easterine Kire skillfully renders the small incidents of Mose's childhood, his family, and the routines and rituals of traditional village life, painting an evocative picture of a peaceful way of life, now long-vanished. The coming of radio into Mose's family house marks the beginning of the changes that will connect them to the wider world. They learn of partition, independence, a land called America. Mose and his friends become involved in the Naga struggle for independence and are caught in a maelstrom of violence that ends up ripping communities apart.

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From an early focus on rape, dowry, and sati - self-immolation - feminist struggles against violence to women in India have now moved to a wider terrain that includes issues rarely considered in the early days of the Indian feminist movement in the 1980s. In "Nine Degrees of Justice", second- and third-generation feminists shed light on these contemporary concerns, sharing their perspectives on violence against women through a series of thought-provoking essays. The contributors to "Nine Degrees of Justice" look specifically at whether the legal system has led to justice for women who have been the victims of violence. What does "justice" mean for an individual survivor? Among the topics discussed are issues of violence in public spaces and cyberspace, women in armed conflict, lesbian suicides, a woman's right to choose, and prostitution. Together, these essays make the case that justice for Indian women still has a long way to go.

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The Naga people of the troubled northeastern region of India have endured more than a century of bloodshed in their struggle for an independent Nagaland and a national identity. It is against this uneasy backdrop that the stories in this unusual collection are set. Exploring how ordinary people cope with violence, negotiate power, and seek safe havens amid terror, the stories of Temsula Ao detail a way of life under attack by the forces of modernization and war where no one - not the ordinary housewife, nor the willing accomplice, nor the young woman who sings even as she is being raped - can escape the violence. Their stories spring from the internal fault lines of the Indian nation-state. An important activist, writer, and commentator on issues in northeastern India, Ao speaks movingly of home, country, nation, nationality, and identity. A touching - and at times harrowing - glimpse into this little-known conflict zone in India's northeast, These Hills Called Home burns with urgency and leaves its reader profoundly changed.

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Over the last several years, regular evaluation of development programs has become essential in measuring and understanding their true impact. Feminist and gender-sensitive evaluations have gradually emerged, drawing attention to existing inequities—gender, caste, class, location, and more—and the cumulative effect of these biases on daily life. Such evaluations are also deeply political; they explicitly acknowledge that gender-based inequalities exist, show how they remain embedded in society, and articulate ways to address them. Based on four years of research, Voices and Values offers critical insight into how gender, class, and nationality inflect and affect sociological research. It examines how feminist evaluations could make an effective contribution to new policy formulations oriented to gender and social equity. The essays here focus centrally on the structural roots of inequity: giving weight to all perspectives; adding value to marginalized groups and people under evaluation; and taking forward the findings of evaluation into advocacy for change. In doing so, each essay advances the understanding of feminist evaluation both conceptually and as practice.

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