Navayana-Catalog-2012-13-Low-Res1

03 Fiction Co 09 Nonfiction nt 15 Academic en 23 Art 33 Poetry ts 39 Backlist Unclaimed Terrain Ajay Navaria Translated from Hindi by Laura Brueck In Scream—the lead story in Ajay Navaria’s collection—the unnamed protagonist is told at the very beginning, ‘Crime is very seductive. And revenge a trickster.’ The narrator rejects having his identity constrained by the cruel monikers assigned by the caste Hindus of his village or the supposed refuge of the Christian church. He occupies an ‘unclaimed terrain’, as do many of Navaria’s characters. Journeying from a Dantewada village to the town of Nagpur and from there to Mumbai, the Byronic protagonist is raped, works as a masseur and then as a gigolo even while pursuing his education. The city teaches him the many meanings of labour, and he is freed—if ultimately destroyed—by its infinite possibilities for self-invention. As complex as they are political, Navaria’s characters—ranging from a brahmin servant to a dalit male ‘Navaria makes prostitute—are neither black nor white, neither clearly good nor evil. They inhabit a strong effort to a grey zone; they linger in the transitional create casteless passageway between past object and future subject, casteism and democracy. characters, much like Like James Baldwin was for American fiction, Ajay Navaria is a guerilla in the Jeanette Winterson’s Indian literary field. genderless Unclaimed Terrain heralds the arrival of a bold new voice in Indian literature. protagonist in Written on the Body’ TEHELKA Ajay Navaria has been associated with the premier Hindi literary journal, Hans. He teaches Hindu Ethics at Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi. Navaria is the author of two collections of short stories, Patkatha aur anya Kahaniyan (2006) and Yes, Sir (2012), and a novel, Udhar ke Log (2008). Laura Brueck is Assistant Professor of December 2012 Hindi Literature and South Asian Studies at ISBN 9788189059521 the University of Colorado, Boulder, US. 190 pages Hardback 5 x 7.8” Rs 295 All rights available 4 A Spoke in the Wheel A novel about the Buddha Amita Kanekar Upali, a monk and an embittered survivor of the war that made Emperor Ashoka overlord of the whole of India, hates the Emperor with all his heart. Yet it is to him that Ashoka, the self-proclaimed Beloved of the Gods, entrusts the task of recording the Buddha’s life and teachings for posterity. For the Emperor is set on a new conquest— that of Dhamma... And so begins a search for the Buddha and a struggle over the past. What really was the Buddha’s message? Ascetic renunciation? Universal salvation? Passive disengagement? ‘Strips away layer by Tolerance—even of intolerance? If his message was a critique of violence, how layer [the] fanciful did it come to be championed by the most stories surrounding successfully violent autocrats of ancient India? the Buddha and These are questions that begin to surface among the Buddha’s followers, reveals him as an fearfully and then angrily, to be viciously ordinary man who debated even as Dhamma rises to glorious imperial patronage, a patronage that will had an extraordinary sustain it for over a millennium and reach it to half the world’s populace. approach to his Set in 256 BCE, almost three hundred problems...’ DECCAN HERALD years after the death of the Buddha and four since the terrible battle of Kalinga, this is a story about the Buddha and ‘Amita Kanekar’s novel about Emperor his disciples, among them an ordinary Ashoka and the Buddhist monk Upali... monk, one of the questioners, and an successfully captures the stress and extraordinary king, who seemed to have strains of monastic life, and brings alive all the answers. It is also about how the the centuries following the death of the movement called Dhamma was born, how Buddha... An interesting mix of erudition it spread, changed lives and got changed and historical imagination’—OUTLOOK itself. A Spoke in the Wheel is an ambitious and ‘An important contribution to Indian historic erudite work of historical fiction—intricate fiction’—THE TRIBUNE in its craftsmanship, vital in its ideas and epic in its sweep. Amita Kanekar lives in Goa where she has been adopted by two cats. She teaches July 2013 architectural history when not writing. ISBN 9788189059569 All rights available 6 Father May Be an Elephant and Mother Only a Small Basket, But... Gogu Shyamala Translated from Telugu Gogu Shyamala’s stories dissolve borders as they work their magic on orthodox forms of realism, psychic allegory and political fable. Whether she is describing the setting sun or the way people are gathered at a village council like ‘thickly strewn grain on the threshing floor’, the varied rhythms of a dalit drum or a young woman astride her favorite buffalo, Shyamala walks us through a world that is at once particular and small, and simultaneously universal. Set in the madiga quarter of a Telangana village, the stories spotlight different settings, events and experiences, and offer new propositions on how to see, think and ‘...warm, sensuous be touched by life in that world. There is a laugh lurking around every other corner as images of a world the narrative picks an adroit step past the grandiose authority of earlier versions of far removed from such places and their people—romantic, our garbage-strewn, gandhian, administrative—and the idiom in which they spoke. These stories overturn traffic-choked and the usual agendas of exit—from the village, OUTLOOK from madiga culture, from these little neon-lit cities’ communities—to hold this life up as one of promise for everyone. ‘Gogu Shyamala’s luminous, moving With her intensely beautiful and sharply and funny prose is almost deceptive in political writing, Shyamala makes a clean its lightness of touch, and deftness of break with the tales of oppression and language’ —TEHELKA misery decreed the true subject of dalit writing. ‘These stories do more than make the margin the centre; they make the margin a place of vivid enchantments, rendered with idiomatic vitality’—OPEN ‘Shyamala’s greatest achievement is the note of humour and lightness that sounds through this collection’—WALL STREET JOURNAL–MINT Gogu Shyamala is a senior fellow at the Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s 2012 Studies, Hyderabad. She has documented ISBN 9788189059514 and edited dalit women’s writings in Telugu. 263 pages Hardback 5 x 7.8” Rs 350 All rights available The Place Outside Siddalingaiah Translated from Kannada by S.R. Ramakrishna Siddalingaiah, one of the founders of the Dalit Sangharsha Samiti, tracks his journey from a dalit colony on the edges of Magadi town, through the years in dalit student hostels, to a career as a political activist, public intellectual and university professor in the city of Bangalore. We see the child who would rather roam the hills and wade in rivers than attend school; we watch as the teenager develops a passion for study, sits at the feet of mentors, tastes success (and danger) as an orator, devours ‘Malgudi Days with a literature from pavement vendors; we hear the adult’s fiercely rationalist political voice critical difference... as well as his poetic voice, resonant with Megalahatti is the dreams and hauntings of dalit folklore. The Place Outside is a vivid evocation of populated by everyday life and labour, of conviviality and courage, of poverty and loss in the dalit ghosts, deities, strict colony. As critic D.R. Nagaraj says in his headmasters and Afterword, Siddalingaiah offers us a bonsai- like compression of life. ‘This is writing that wandering ascetics, makes rage pleasant. Here, anger becomes sarcasm. Ire is translated into a mischief set against rivers, that grasps the subtleties of life. What hills and forests’ might have appeared strange if turned EDUCATION WORLD into a grand narrative becomes a story of human activity. Siddalingaiah transforms wrath into mischief.’ ‘The book is full of lively anecdotes, memorable pen sketches and inimitable caricatures. But the personal and the general are so organically bound to each other that the book is as much about Siddalingaiah is a major Kannada poet. Siddalingaiah the individual as it is about He has also written two plays, and a all major social, political and cultural study of folk deities. He has served twice movements of Karnataka in the last four as member of the Karnataka Legislative decades’—THE HINDU Council. He is now chairman of the Kannada Development Authority. S.R. Ramakrishna is a journalist, music composer and translator. He lives in December 2012 Bengaluru. ISBN 9788189059552 Paperback 5 x 7.8” Rs 295 All rights available 10 Ear to the Ground Writings on Class and Caste K. Balagopal Balagopal’s writings, from the early 1980s till he died in 2009, offer us a rare insight into the making of modern India. Civil rights work provided Balagopal the cause and context to engage with history, the public sphere and political change. He wrote through nearly three tumultuous decades: on encounter deaths; struggles of agricultural labourers; the shifting dynamics of class and caste in the 1980s and thereafter in Andhra Pradesh; the venality and tyranny of the Indian state; on the importance of re-figuring the caste order as one that denied the right ‘As a human rights worker active since of civil existence to vast numbers of its 1981, and slightly older than Balagopal, constituents; the centrality one ought to I remember him as a magical figure. The grant patriarchy in considerations of social writings in this volume help interpret the injustice; and on the destructive logic of often chaotic developments in Andhra development that emerged in the India of Pradesh, and provide a model tool for the 1990s, dishonouring its citizens’ right understanding other regional realities of to life, liberty and livelihood.

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