Books published by Bloomsbury India

The Indian Ocean interregional arena is a space of vital economic and strategic importance characterized by specialized flows of capital and labor, skills and services, and ideas and culture. Islam in particular and religiously informed universalism in general once signified cosmopolitanism across this wide realm. This historical reality is at variance with contemporary conceptions of Islam as an illiberal religion that breeds intolerance and terrorism. The future balance of global power will be determined in large measure by policies of key actors in the Indian Ocean and the lands that abut it rather than in the Atlantic or the Pacific. The interplay of multiple and competing universalisms in the Indian Ocean arena is in urgent need of better understanding. Oceanic Islam: Muslim Universalism and European Imperialism is a fresh contribution to Islamic and Indian Ocean studies alike, placing the history of modern South Asia in broader interregional and global contexts. It refines theories of universalism and cosmopolitanism while at the same time drawing on new empirical research. The essays in the volume bring the best academic scholarship on Islam in South Asia and across the Indian Ocean in the age of European empire to the readers.

Populism and Its Limits is a response to the evaluative and celebratory approaches to populism in social sciences andhumanities. It seeks to study the phenomenon of populism, thoroughly consider its limits and, if possible, proposes waysout to other kinds of commitment in life, living and politics. It aims to formulate responses that take on the spurious and non-dialectical dissociation between thought and action, intellect and emotion, the people and the elite.

Locating World Cinema argues for the importance of understanding the local context of a film's creation and the nuances that it conveys to the spectator. It examines the sociocultural contexts intrinsic to cinema from milieus like the USSR/Russia, China, Japan, France, the US, Iran and India. The book analyses the works of some of the more celebrated but, at times, less than fully understood auteurs, such as Kenji Mizoguchi from Japan; Robert Bresson, Jacques Rivette and Éric Rohmer from France; Abbas Kiarostami from Iran; Martin Scorsese from the US; Zhang Yimou from China and Aleksei German from Russia.Further, it examines how the conditions of exhibition for art house cinema has transformed into the 'global art film' that attempts to bypass the local by addressing international audiences.The book deals with complex ideas but is lucidly written, making it accessible to film students and lay persons alike.

This book considers teaching in modern institutional settings, among other things, as the ethical questioning and reversal of passively accepted prejudices, particularly in contexts of diversities and inequalities. Its thematic focus is the ethics of teacher-learner and learner-learner relationships within the democratic setup, and the possibilities of critique and transformation emerging out of such a relationship.The first theme of the book is diversity and pluralism, the second is the question of inequality in such contexts of radical diversity. With respect to this question, an unavoidable phenomenon of our times is the capitalisation of education and the reductionist view of learners as customers and consumers of knowledge. The approach to education that sees students merely as skilled human resources to be readied for the job market militates against critical thinking and do not respond appropriately to the questions of diversity and inequality. Thus, a significant focus of the book is the impact of inherited inequalities of caste and race on classroom ambience and teachers' interventions in the modern institutional context. The pertinent question is the increasing unwillingness of teachers to recognise and challenge discriminatory views and play their role in social transformation. In this regard, the teaching and learning of the humanities is also investigated. Teaching and the traditional classroom, it is often said, may not be required in the future as machines and remotely located teachers/explicators might claim their place. Hence, another question of focus is whether such a future would be hospitable to the critical task of education to cultivate young citizens of democracies.

The Sikhs have been a people in transition. Unwanted displacements, willing movements and a changing world have led them through demographic, occupational and experiential shifts. While this has led to the evolution of new facets within the community, it has also evoked mixed responses from outside.As new generations of Sikhs engage with the world through sensibilities defined by their contemporary contexts, they find themselves constructed in images dissonant with their lived realities. The Sikh Next Door: An Identity in Transition traces these changes while also making an incisive analysis of old stereotypes-some heroic, some menacing and some farcical.It simultaneously brings into focus the real people behind these images, their varying social stances and their collective commitment to a common religious identity.The work attempts to reframe the Sikhs, bending a few existing narratives and offering an impetus for a more nuanced understanding of the community.

Decolonizing Theory: Thinking across Traditions aims at disentangling theory from its exclusively Western provenance, drawing insights and concepts from other thought traditions, connecting to what it argues is a new global moment in the reconstitution of theory. The key argument, which is the point of departure of the book, is that any serious theorizing in the non-West should be fundamentally suspicious of any theory that only gives you one result-that four-fifths of the world does not and cannot do anything right. Everything in the non-West, from itsmodernity and secularism to its democracy and even capitalism, is always seen to be deficient. In other words, all it tells us is that we do not live up to the standards set by Western modernity. From this point of departure, it seeks to create a conceptual space outside (Western) modernity and capitalism, by insisting on a rethink of non-synchronous synchronicities. The book takes three key themes around which the whole story of modernity can be unraveled, namely the question of the political, capital and historical time, and secularism for a detailed discussion. It does so by bracketing, in a sense, the autobiographical story that Western modernity gives itself. In each case, it tries to show that past forms never simply disappear, without residue, to be fully supplanted by the modern, and merely applying theory produced in one context to another is, therefore, very misleading.

The book will focus upon the growth of a Hindi Dalit literary culture at its formative stage in the 1920s and the 1930s, and the significant role played by Swami Acchutanand and Chandrikaprasad Jigyasu, in this process. The book introduces the Dalit public sphere in the United Provinces in the early decades of the twentieth century. It tracks the growth and the development of a Dalit print culture in the United Provinces during the 1920s and the 1930s. The book centres on the figures of Swami Acchutanand and Chandrikaprasad Jigyasu, anti-caste intellectuals, and the most eminent figures in the Hindi Dalit world of letters during that era.The purpose of the proposed book is to rescue Swami Acchutanand and Chandrikaprasad Jigyasu from undeserved obscurity and accords to them the importance that they merit in any chronicle of the Dalit cultural movement in North India.

Remember, Repeat, Inhabit looks at three questions in relation to the idea of the viewer: What happens when one reads someone else's reading of someone else?What happens when something repeats itself in Kieslowski's work?Is there a possibility of an ontology of space?The book attempts to understand the idea of 'viewing' from the inside, not simply as an ontological premise but definitely affected by it. Three differing contexts are looked at-a French madman's notion of the 'self', a Polish filmmaker's notion of the 'everyday' and an Indian performance artist's notion of 'memory'. Through these on-the-surface contrasting artists and texts, a particular idea of a 'viewer' emerges. This viewer is the key to an understanding of something almost elemental in the nature of the idea of 'viewing' in the contemporary context of twenty-first-century Delhi.

Democratic Accommodations: The Minority Question in India analyses the complex story of the accommodation of claims, interests and rights of minorities in India. It aims at what India-being one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse nations of the world-can offer to other nations, particularly to the countries of Europe that are confronted with ethnocultural and ethno-religious assertion. The authors have endorsed the argument that all plural democracies-and all democracies can only be plural in the present historical conjuncture despite the attempts by regimes to make them majoritarian-must work out their own strategies of accommodation by evolving a policy matrix that is suited to the dynamics of their own societies. The book is organised along four rubrics-laws, institutions, policies and political discourse-to understand Indian democracy's distinct response to diversity. The rich and nuanced exploration of the Indian approach to the minority question presented in this book will advance the international debate on diversity and multiculturalism and help policymakers in pluralistic democracies to develop their own particular strategies to deal with minority claims.

Few other Hindu gods guide a regional consciousness, pervade walks of everyday life and define a collective psyche the way Lord Jagannath does in Odisha and its contiguous areas. Jagannath is metonymic of Odisha and the Odia way of life, arguably much more than any other god for a particular geography or its peoples.While not derecognising the historical and the spiritual aspects of Jagannath, Bonding with the Lord attempts to look at the deployment of Jagannath in contemporary cultural practices involving the sensorium in the widest sense. The project of a cultural Jagannath not only materialises him in people's everyday practices but also democratises scholarship on him. The expansion of the scope of research on Jagannath to cultural expressions in a more encompassing way rather than confining to 'elitist' religious/literary sources makes him an everyday presence and significantly enhances his sphere of influence. Jagannath's 'tribal' origin, his association with Buddhism and Jainism and his avatari status make him an all-encompassing, multilayered symbol and a treasure trove for multiple interpretations.

Narrated by some of the most celebrated doctors from across the world, Dear People, with Love and Care, Your Doctors weaves together inspirational and personal stories of medical excellence and brilliance, interjected with feelings of triumph, loss, fear, strength, valour and empathy.

Debating Women's Citizenship, 1930-1960 is about the agency of Indian feminists and nationalists whose careers straddle the transition of colonial India to an independent India. It addresses some of the critical aspects of the encounter, engagement and dialogue between the Indian state and its women citizens, in particular, how this generation conceptualised the relationship between citizenship, equality and gender justice, and the various spheres in which the meaning and application of this citizenship was both broadened and narrowed, renegotiated and pursued. The book focuses on a cohort of nationalists and feminists who were leading members of the All India Women's Conference (AIWC) and the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW). Drawing on the richness and depth of life histories through autobiography and oral interviews, together with archival research, this book excavates the mental products of these women's lives, their ideas, their writings and their discourse, to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the feminist political personas of this generation, and how these personas negotiated the political and social terrains of their time. The book attempts to produce a new picture of this era, one in which there was far more activity and engagement with the state and with civil society on the part of this generation than previously acknowledged.

Heiress Kamila Mughal is humiliated when her brother's best friend snubs her to marry a social climbing nobody from Islamabad. Roya discovers her fiancé has been cheating on her and ends up on a blind date on her wedding day. Beautiful young widow Begum Saira Qadir has mourned her husband, but is she finally ready to start following her own desires? Inspired by Jane Austen and set in contemporary Pakistan, Austenistan is a collection of seven stories; romantic, uplifting, witty, and heartbreaking by turn, which pay homage to the world's favourite author in their own uniquely local way.

There are at least 239 stories waiting to be told at length - those of the families of 239passengers of MH370, how their lives took a turn on March 8th 2014 when MH370disappeared.This is the story of one person, Naren, who lost his wife, Chandrika on that flight.The probability of survivors diminished with each passing day. As the months went by,Naren remained pre-occupied, wrestling over what to believe. Some friends arguedinsistently against doomsday conclusions and spoke of their dreams as the basis tokeep up hope. Many others, including Naren's daughter, preferred silence overpredictions. The one argument against which there was no counter was: Where is theevidence? Where is the debris? Where are the passengers?Life After MH370 documents Naren's experience with loss, grief, trauma and sorrow.The struggle with 'ambiguous loss' morphs into a ceaseless search, for the scent of acover-up, for the truth, for that explanation that satisfies and helps one move on. A lossthat meant critically resizing shared dreams, reconfiguring relationships and attemptingto find a purpose that anchor him in the present.There is the hint of a promise in KS Narendran's story - of existential truths about livingand dying that might help anyone who comes upon this book.

Taking India by storm, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been one of the most talked about figures all around the world. His enigmatic persona and his forceful leadership have created a polarized world where some idolize him, while others question his motives and methods. In an attempt to break the myths around who Narendra Modi really is, the author attempts to take us through a journey of the leader''s life, his political aspirations, his growth within the party, his remarkable stint in Gujarat and his performance over the last two years in Delhi. The author identifies the many formidable challenges Modi faces as the leader of the world''s largest democracy that is in the midst of a complex transition and recommends measures that Modi must implement to deliver on his promises, thereby enabling India to realize its true potential.

For the young English educated Indian, from the big cities to the small towns, across gender and across all classes, India''s BPO boom changed their lives. They found themselves in the throes of an industry that matched their energy and insatiable hunger for action. Satindra Sen who was part of the team that set up one of the country''s first offshoring ventures writes an engaging tale tinged with sharp humour and piercing insight of how things were and how they turned out to be.

Passion, purpose, potential, perseverance are the qualities required to make great achievers and leaders. This book tells you how to ┬╖ turn people into leaders ┬╖ build trust and confidence ┬╖ make you reach your destiny ┬╖ transform your organization