NEW BOOKS
3 titles
NEW BOOKS
3 titles
 Towards
a Non Brahmin Millennium |
Dhamma |
From
Caste to Religion |
 Towards
a Non Brahmin Millennium
from Iyothee Thass to Periyar Title
index
Recapturing the momentous decades when the world of the Tamils was stood on its head and the age old brahmin hegemony suffered irreparable damage, the authors present a critical analysis of the Non-Brahmin movement from its gestation at the end of the nineteenth century to E.V. Ramaswamy Periyar's Self-Respect Movement of the late twenties and thirties. The authors present forgotten texts and voices, especially of Dalit-Buddhist scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the observations of women participants who debated on a range of issues from the uses of Non-Cooperation to the politics of housework; carnivalesque denunciations of caste, Brahmin priesthood and the nation by youthful non-Brahmins. The book not only records for the first time in English what the non-Brahmins were saying about themselves, but also portrays the sensibility of the Tamil Brahmin in the early twentieth century. It privileges the Dalit contribution to the movement and ends with the anti-Hindi agitation that inaugurated a new era inTamil politics. demy octavo hardbound 572pp August 1998 cover design: Sharbani Das Gupta ISBN 81-85604-37-1 Rs 400 All rights available |
'Using a vast and rich array of Tamil sources,
[the book] seeks to delineate the discrete strands of the non-Brahmin movement
. . . [i]t is in exploring the making of the new ideology and the coalescence
of the new consciousness that the book . . . makes a powerful statement.'
~~~ The Telegraph
~~~Indian Review of Books
By V. Geetha
|
| Dhamma
the political philosophy of Gautama Buddha Title
index
This book is the second by Kancha Ilaiah to be published by Stree after his acclaimed Why I Am Not a Hindu. In it he will present his assessment of Gautama Buddha as a political thinker, and examine whycommentators both ancient and modern have been too ready to pigeonhole Buddha as a religious leader and reformer, rather than attempt to see him as a theorist, thinker and activist. Dr Ilaiah marshals impressive evidence to make his case and provides an exhaustive account of Buddha's recorded teachings, social surroundings, life trajectory and circumstances. Coming at a time when interest in Buddha, fuelled by Ambedkar's identification of him as the champion of the underclass in ancient India, is reaching new heights, Dr Ilaiah's book should thorw new light on the debate around Buddha's place in the canon of Indian political thinking. demy octavo hardback approx 300pp September 2000 cover design: ISBN 81-85604-?-? Rs 400 All rights available |
By Dr Kancha Ilaiah
Reader in Political Science, Osmania University. Also an activist in the Dalitbahujan and civil liberties movements. |
| From Caste to Religion
the colonial judiciary and the construction of unitary religious communities Title
index
Contemporary political preoccupations require that we urgently examine the construction of unitary religious communities which are contingent on the destruction of the governance of collectives based on smaller panths, jamats and sampradays. The legal arena was one of the primary locales for this displacement of governance. Post-1857, the laws and judiciaries of of the presidencies of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were unified, and groups like the Khojas and the Pushtimargis, hitherto separate polities, lost their individual distinctions from the religious tradition they identified with---Islamic and Hindu, respectively. Instead, they were defined within a unified religion administered by the colonial judiciary. The definitions of religious communities in court privileged a nuclear family which retained exclusive rights to control female sexuality. Taking two famous legal trials in Bombay, the Aga Khan case where the Khojas contested the Aga Khan's authority and lost, and the Maharaj Libel case which disestablished the Maharajs as the gurus of true Pushtimargis, the author shows that the court worked with a specific notion of group membership. She further asserts that the colonial judiciary's denial of the polities' ability to govern themselves and their simultaneous governance by the colonial state meant that individuals were identified in law or in the courts with a marked religious community. Such a legal system defines society as 'religious' and traps social groups into wider and fundamentalist religious identifications. demy octavo hardbound 150pp September 2000 cover design: ISBN 81-85604-43-6 Rs 250 All rights available |
By Amrita Shodhan
Ph.D. in South Asian Languages and Civilization, University of Chicago Independent scholar and activist |