Dear All,

A Very Happy New Year!

Zubaan announces three new publications and two book launches in Chennai, Tamil Nadu and Ahmedabad, Gujarat, respectively. The three books are Fragments of a Life: A Family Memoir by Mythily Sivaraman; Speech and Silence: Literacy Journeys by Gujarati Women translated by Rita Kothari and the South Asian edition of Women, Citizenship and Difference (Eds.) Nira Yuval-Davis and Pnina Werbner.

Fragments of a Life: A Family Memoir
Mythily Sivaraman
Foreward by Githa Hariharan and Afterword by Uma Chakravarty
208pp Hb o Rs.395 o ISBN 81 89013 11 4 o All Rights available

Mythily Sivaraman’s grandmother, Subbalakshmi, lived in the early years of the twentieth century. Married at11 and a mother by 14, Subbalakshmi lived a hard life, dealing with her husband’s frequent absences, with illness and neglect. Over the years, she became more and more reclusive, focusing on the one thing that perhaps gave her hope: her fierce desire to read. In this meticulously researched and loving book, Mythily reconstructs her grandmother’s life from the fragments of papers and notes, and an occasional diary that she left behind in a tin trunk. In doing so, she explores the silences that surround women’s innermost feelings. Subbalakshmi records even the most mundane of activities such as going to hospital, embroidering things for her daughter, but remains silent on the many other important things in her life.

Mythily’s painstaking research into both the wider context and the intimate details of Subbalakshmi’s life sheds light on the Tamil Brahmin culture with its strong silencing of women and denial of their thoughts and feelings. It explores the ways in which silence and secrecy often becomes an armour and a survival strategy for women. The book directs the reader to new archives for seeking out history, for with women, silence and speech, the written and the unsaid, the occasional fragment, the odd noting, the library ticket, the shopping list… all of these provide pointers to their lived lives and locations. In its portrayal of the life of one woman, the author weaves together different strands to give the reader a rich and complex book that contributes to new ways of approaching women’s history.

Mythiliy Sivaraman, a political and social activist of thirty years standing is currently the national Vice-President of the All India Democratic Women’s Association. She is Subbalakshmi’s daughter.

Fragments of a Life: A Family Memoir will be released at the Asian School of Journalism, Chennai on Saturday, 7th of January 2006 at 4:30pm.

Speech and Silence: Literacy Journeys by Gujarati Women
Translated by Rita Kothari
200pp Pb o Rs.195 o ISBN 81 86706 98 4 o All Rights available except Gujarati

This anthology is not only about what Gujarati women speak, but also what they don’t. In a state that registers increasing cases of violence against women, what kind of truths does its literature embody? If “malestream” writing in Gujarat seldom mirrors its everyday truths, do the women risk unpleasantness? Kothari’s introduction builds upon such premises and leads the reader to a trajectory of women writers from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day, starting with the journal entries of a dancer at the end of the nineteenth century, to the journal entries of an academic woman at the end of the twentieth century. The wide range of stories and fictional excerpts show how Gujarati women inhabit their fictional worlds. The trajectory hints at an imperceptible shift from muffled voices to more candid ways of being, and yet it never loses completely the middle-class genteelness that characterizes literary discourses in Gujarat.

Rita Kothari teaches at St. Xavier’s College, Ahmedabad. Her publications on literary sociology of Gujarat and translation include Translating India, Modern Gujarati Poetry: A Selection, Coral Island: Poems by Niranjan Bhagat, Angaliyat (a Gujarati Dalit novel). Her forthcoming book is on the Sindhi Hindus of Gujarat.

Speech and Silence will be released on Sunday, 8th of January 2006 at the Crossword Book Store, Ahmedabad, Gujarat at 11:00 am.

Women, Citizenship and Difference
Nira Yuval-Davis & Pnina Werbner (Eds.)
272pp Hb o Rs.495 o ISBN 81 89013 33 5 o South Asian Edition
(Originally published by Zed Books, London, UK)

This book makes an important contribution towards an understanding of citizenship as mediated by other collective, historically determined identities: of gender, ethnicity, class and national status. It brings together a group of prominent international scholars from moral philosophy, law, political science and sociology to offer a major reconceptualization of the idea of citizenship. The contributors demonstrate how the growing ambivalence of State sovereignty in the face of multinational capitalism and the absence of political accountability structures are complicit in the definitions of gendered citizenship. Against these, women’s communal mobilization and political activisms are considered in terms of their power effects and political potentialities.

Nira Yuval-Davis is Professor and Postgraduate Course Leader in Gender and Ethnic Studies at the University of Greenwich, London.

Pnina Werbner is Reader in Social Anthropology at Keele University and Research Administrator of the International Centre for Contemporary Cultural Research (ICCCR) at the Universities of Manchester and Keele.

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Cheers,
JAYA BHATTACHARJI