The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales - Marques De sade

Title: The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales
Author: Sade, Marquis de
ISBN: 9780199540426
Binding: Paper
Date: 2008, reprint
Publisher: Oxford
Number of Pages: 282
Price: INR 295/-

Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation

Title: Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation
Author: Tariq Ramadan
ISBN ISBN13: 9780195331714, ISBN10: 0195331710
Binding: Hardback
Date: Oct 2008
Publisher: Oxford USA
Number of Pages: 384
Original price: $29.95

Our Price: INR 775/-

Tariq Ramadan has emerged as one of the foremost voices of reformist Islam in the West, notable for urging his fellow Muslims to participate fully in the civil life of the Western societies in which they live. In this new book, Ramadan addresses Muslim societies and communities everywhere with a bold call for radical reform. He challenges those who argue defensively that reform is a dangerous and foreign deviation, and a betrayal of the faith. Authentic reform, he says, has always been grounded in Islam's textual sources, spiritual objectives, and intellectual traditions. But the reformist movements that are based on renewed reading of textual sources while using traditional methodologies and categories have achieved only adaptive responses to the crisis facing a globalizing world. Such readings, Ramadan argues, have reached the limits of their usefulness. Ramadan calls for a radical reform that goes beyond adaptation to envision bold and creative solutions to transform the present and the future of our societies. This new approach interrogates the historically established sources, categories, higher objectives, tools, and methodologies of Islamic law and jurisprudence, and the authority this traditional geography of knowledge has granted to textual scholars. He proposes a new geography which redefines the sources and the spiritual and ethical objectives of the law creating room for the authority of scholars of the social and hard sciences. This will equip this transformative reform with the spiritual, ethical, social and scientific knowledge necessary to address contemporary challenges. Ramadan argues that radical reform demands not only the equal contributions of scholars of both the text and the context, but the critical engagement and creative imagination of the Muslim masses. This proposal for radical reform dramatically shifts the center of gravity of authority. It is bound to provoke controversy and spark debate among Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Tariq Ramadan is a Research Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford University and the Lokahi Foundation (London). He is the author of Western Muslims and the Future of Islam; Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity ; and To Be a European Muslim .

BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND NATION: GENDER AND MILITARISATION IN KASHMIR

Title: Between Democracy and Nation: Gender and Militarisation in Kashmir

Author: Seema Kazi
ISBN: 978-81-88965-46-5
Binding: Hardback
Date: 2009
Publisher: Women Unlimited
Number of Pages: 222
Price: INR 375/-

This book focuses on the militarisation of a secessionist movement involving Kashmiri militants and Indian military forces in Jammu and Kashmir. In contrast to the conventional approaches that distinguish between inter- and intra-state military conflict, this analysis of India’s external and domestic crises of militarisation is located within a single analytic frame: it argues that both dimensions have common political origins.
Highlighting the intersection between the two the author argues that the heaviest and the most grevious price of using the military for domestic repression and for the defense of Kashmir is paid by Kashmir’s citizens and society. Drawing on women’s subjective experience of militarisation, she examines the relationsip between state military processes at the national level and social transformations at the local/societal level. By way of conclusion, she manitains that Kashmir's humanitarian tragedy — exemplified by its gender dimensions-underlines has failed either to ensure 'security for the state, or security and justice for Kashmiris.

Publish and be Damned

Title: Publish and be Damned
Author: Rajeev Dhavan
ISBN: 978-81-89487-45-4
Binding: Hardback
Date: 2008
Publisher: Tulika books
Number of Pages: 312
Price: INR 595.00

The essays collected in this volume explore the relationship between political and social censorship, and, more significantly, the rise of an insidious communal censorship that seeks to divide civil society and intimidate all those who value the gift of self-expression. They show how the forces of censorship in our society use lumpen power to threaten this gift of free speech as they burn books, silence dissent, destroy works of art, and intimidate the artist, researcher, writer, film-maker, actor and free thinker.The author reflects on how free speech in India has been compromised by state censorship through 'slapp' suits in court, and on issues of official secrecy, contempt of court, and censorship by intolerance in civil society and government. More specifically, he examines the uses and abuses of the law, the case of harassing Husain, the Danish 'Toon' controversy and the right to strike.The author argues, unrepentantly, that free speech has to be preserved in the overcrowded spaces of the media, on the streets and in the open spaces of our mind, against the onslaught of corporatism, doubtful governance and invidious divisiveness. Freedom of the mind and the right to self-expression and argument can only survive if intolerance is met with tolerance, and tolerance is not seen as weakness.Rajeev Dhavan was educated in Allahabad, Cambridge and London. He has taught at various universities, written several books and articles and is now a Senior Advocate practicing in the Supreme Court of India, having participated in some of the many campaigns described in this volume.

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

Title: Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Author: Eduardo Galeano

Forward : Isabel Allende
ISBN: 81-88789-66-6
Binding: Paper
Date: October 2008
Publisher: Three Essays Collective
Number of Pages: 317
Price: INR 375/-

"The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing" - thus Galeano begins this history of Latin America from Columbus to Castro and there is no doubt as to what side the continent is on. It is "a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity," "at the service of others' needs," forced to work "as a menial" first for Britain and then for the U.S.A. while within itself the larger nations prey upon the smaller and the cities suck the rural areas. Latifundia - and also minifundia, their opposite - are "bottlenecks choking the growth of agriculture"; prosperity generated by mono-"plunder-cultures" (sugar, tin, cacao) vanishes when boom turns to bust; industrial development in the cities leads to greater urban poverty. What is urgently needed, in lieu of a "creative bourgeoisie" which these countries never had and never will, is an agrarian-based, Fanon-type revolution with a Castro as caudillo. Galeano affirms that Cuba (its dependence on Russia ignored) is using its sugar-culture "as an instrument of development"; the people work from "enthusiasm," not out of greed or hunger, since socialist societies do away with both as motives. Ideological propinquities becloud other assessments - of the British abolitionists or birth control campaigns - but one cannot say entirely nay; this horrific history, graphically and indignantly portrayed, is sadly how it was and is. (Kirkus Reviews)

A superbly written, excellently translated, and powerfully persuasive exposé which all students of Latin American and U.S. history must read. - ChoiceWell written and passionately stated, this is an intellectually honest and valuable study. - Library JournalA dazzling barrage of words and ideas. - History

Eduardo Galeano’s analysis of the effects and causes of capitalist underdevelopment in Latin America presents a clear, passionate account of almost 500 years of Latin American history. Galeano shows how foreign companies reaped huge profits through their operations in Latin America. He explains the politics of the Latin American bourgeoisies and their subservience to foreign powers, and how they interacted to create increasingly unequal capitalist societies in Latin America. 'Open Veins' continues to speak to generations of people who want to understand capitalism and exploitation in Latin America, and in the rest of the world. – ELIZABETH DORE, University of Southampton, author of Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua

He has more first-hand knowledge of Latin America than anybody else I can think of, and uses it to tell the world of the dreams and disillusions, the hopes and the failures of its people.…Galeano denounces exploitation with uncompromising ferocity, yet this book is almost poetic in its description of solidarity and human capacity for survival in the midst of the worst kind of despoilation. … This almost superhuman talent for storytelling is what makes 'Open Veins of Latin America' so easy to read. The book flows with the grace of a tale; it is impossible to put it down– ISABEL ALLENDE, from the Foreword

The Myth of the Holy Cow

Title: The Myth of the Holy Cow
Author: D.N. Jha
ISBN: 9788189059163
Binding: Paper
Date: 2009
Publisher: Navayana
Number of Pages: 208
Price: INR 200/-

With additional material: B.R. Ambedkar on beef-eating and untouchability.

In this book, historian Dwijendra Narayan Jha argues that the ‘holiness’ of the cow is a myth and its flesh played an important part in the cuisine of ancient India. Citing Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina religious scriptures, he underlines the fact that beef-eating was not Islam’s ‘baneful bequeathal’ to India. Nor can abstention from it be a mark of ‘Hindu’ identity, notwithstanding the averments of Hindutva forces who have tried to foster the false consciousness of the ‘otherness’ on the followers of Islam.

This new Navayana edition features an excerpt from Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s 1948 work on the connections between untouchability and beef-eating. Ambedkar marshals evidence to argue that in the Vedic period, ‘for the Brahmin every day was a beef-steak day.’

“While cow veneration and vegetarianism may be the hallmarks of Hinduism today, Jha compiles copious evidence that this has hardly always been the case.” — New York Times

“Jha draws on an amazingly wide range of material … an enlightening endeavour, demonstrating a critical understanding of a popular misconception.” — Journal of Asian Studies

“Jha traces the history of the doctrine forbidding the eating of cows… soundly and thoroughly covering both the classic texts and cutting-edge scholarship, Indian and European.” — Times Literary Supplement

“This little gem of a book provides a wealth of evidence exposing myth creation and the way symbols are used politically to divide people.” — Socialist Review