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Cast Me Out If You Will Conditions of Visibility Dark Sun and Woman Wearing a Hat The Seedling
(forthcoming)
Cast Me Out If You Will
stories and memoir
Title index
Offering a rich account of women's lives in twentieth century Kerala, these stories and the accompanying autobiographical fragments give invaluable insights into the little documented social reform movements in the south of India. Lalithambika Antherjanam's stories throb with the tormented reality of Namboodiri illam or households: unbearable social restriction, rigid sexual mores, lives ruled by the maintenance of ritual purity, the extreme oppression of widows.
     Gita Krishnankutty's selections include the disturbing early story 'The Admission of Guilt' ('Kuttassammatham') where the accused woman gives an account of her trial and ostracism on charges of sexual misdemeanour, the classic 'The Goddess of Revenge' ("Praticaradevata'), stories that reflect the pratice of fictin in mid-century Kerala and the passionately felt accounts of the trauma of Partition in Bengal and Punjab. The introduction places Lalithambika Antherjanam in the cultural history of modern Kerala.
demy octavo paperback 200pp July 1998   cover design: Proiti Roy
ISBN 81-85604-11-8    Rs 140    US rights sold; rest available		 '. . . simultaneously a work of great cultural interest . . . a courageous exploration of women's rights . . . of poignant literary merit.'
~~~ Sara Suleri Goodyear
Professor of English, Yale University

 

By Lalithambika Antherjanam (1909-1985)
A highly regarded Malayalam writer, she came from the world she depicts so dramatically in her work. She started writing as a very young girl, turning for her material to the lives of the women around her.

Translated and with an introduction by Gita Krishnankutty
An independent scholar and experienced translator of Malayalam and French. She is specially interested in Tamil literature.
Conditions of Visibility
photographic imaging in contemporary India
Title index
Elaborating new theoretical perspectives on visual hegemony, this book addresses the political processes of the photographic image. How does photography invoke an epistemology that subtly determines the scope and limit of what can be understood, said or done with images? Srivatsan uses gender, caste and class to serve as frames of reference for this very original and stimulating analysis.
    He takes into consideration a range of visual material: handpainted cinema hoardings, the modernism of Henri Cartier-Bresson, a poster of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, photographs in police records and the visual politics of advertising, news photography and the new India projected in the world of tourism.
demy octavo hardback 250pp December 1999   cover design: Sharbani Das Gupta
ISBN 81-85604-09-6    Rs 450 All rights available		 'This book will provoke and stimulate much debate among scholars working on contemporary visual cultures in India.'
~~~ Arjun Appadorai
professor of anthropology,
University of Chicago


 'This book explores, in full magnitude and virtually for the first time in India, how the social circulation of the visual image determines its meaning. From this vantage point . . . the author poses a stimulating challenge to the classic traditions of photography theory itself.'

~~~ Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Centre for Study of Culture and Society,
Bangalore


 'Srivats takes us on a breathtaking tour through advertisements, news photographs, film hoardings and police mugshots that shows us what we never knew we had seen.'

~~~ Partha Chatterjee
Centre for Study of Social Sciences
Calcutta

By R. Srivatsan
An independent scholar, a practising photographer and an engineering professional.His theoretical writing has appeared in Economic and Political Weekly and Public Culture.
Dark Sun and Woman Wearing a Hat
stories by Kamal Desai
Title index
This translation provides access to the major works of a leading Marathi writer. The stories embody a witty and subtly felt understanding of the tensions and cross-currents of an indigeneous modernity even as they deconstruct it. Kamal Desai's fiction is focused on the micro levels of inner life where experience is held together by the compelling and never predictable struggle for selfhood. Nearly always, subtle and ongoing antagonisms structure and threaten Kamal Desai's imagined communities.
    Before she can tear down the walls of the temple of the Dark Sun (Kala Surya) the protagonist must extricate herself from its tenacious and pervasive hold on her inner life. In the much acclaimed Woman Wearing a Hat (Hat Ghalnari Bai), a woman asserts her right to a Promethean venture in the face of crippling opposition. In this process the inadequacy of patriarchal constructs becomes apparent to her.
demy octavo paperback 200pp Nov 1999     cover design: Sharbani Das Gupta
ISBN 81-85604-07-X    Rs 140    All rights available		 'Moving within this text that seems like entering a Dali painting, one is shaken awake—to the fact that everything can be perceived in different ways, that the given is not the only way of looking at things.'
~~~ New Quest
'Kamal Desai's work comes to us in this exceptionally fine translation by Sukhmani Roy. It leaves no room for doubt that if Desai's name has been unknown to us, the disadvantage has been entirely ours.'
~~~ Indian Review of Books

By Kamal Desai
Born in 1928, she is a distinguished student and 
teacher of Marathi literature, and one of the reasons she never married, she says, is because she wanted to be a writer and to think independently. 
Among her major books are 
Ratrandin Amha Yudhhacha Prasanga (We Are Confronting the War Day and Night) 
Ranga (1962) Kala Surya and Hat Ghalnari Bai (1975)

Translated by Sukhmani Roy
Teaches English at a college in Mumbai. Her current research is on feminism and modernism.
The Seedling
Title index
This is an early, astonishingly radical and feminist novel in Bengali (Nabankur) from a long neglected writer. The story is set in the forties, a period of intense political activity and devastating famines. Possessing a clearly autobiographical quality, it depicts the turbulent, always questioning childhood and adolescence of Chhobi, who is in revolt against all oppression, and especially against the male-ordered destiny prescribed by the traditionalists or the left wing progressives.
demy octavo paperback approx 280pp September 2000 cover design: 
ISBN 81-85604-06-1    Rs 250    All rights available		 By Sulekha Sanyal
Born in 1928 in an impoverished family that had once been indigo planters, she became a communist while a student, but her unconventional ideas rarely met with the party's approval. At thirty four she died of leukemia, leaving a number of short stories and novels, characterized by their passion and subtlety.

Translated by Gouranga P. Chattopadhyay
Retired as Professor of Behavioural Science, Indian INstitute of Management, Calcutta. He is currently techign at the department of organizational behaviour and marketing, Swinburne University, Australia.
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