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Unclaimed Terrain
Ajay Navaria
Translated from Hindi by Laura Brueck
4
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
prostitute—are neither black nor white,
neither clearly good nor evil. They inhabit
a grey zone; they linger in the transitional
passageway between past object and
future subject, casteism and democracy.
Like James Baldwin was for American
fiction, Ajay Navaria is a guerilla in the
Indian literary field.
Unclaimed Terrain heralds the arrival of a
bold new voice in Indian literature.
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
Hindi Literature and South Asian Studies at
the University of Colorado, Boulder, US.
‘Navaria makes
a strong effort to
create casteless
characters, much like
Jeanette Winterson’s
genderless
protagonist in Written
on the Body’ Tehelka
December 2012
ISBN 9788189059521
190 pages Hardback 5 x 7.8” Rs 295
All rights available

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?
Tolerance—even of intolerance? If his
message was a critique of violence, how
did it come to be championed by the most
successfully violent autocrats of ancient
India?
These are questions that begin to
surface among the Buddha’s followers,
fearfully and then angrily, to be viciously
debated even as Dhamma rises to glorious
imperial patronage, a patronage that will
sustain it for over a millennium and reach it
to half the world’s populace.
Set in 256 BCE, almost three hundred
years after the death of the Buddha and
four since the terrible battle of Kalinga,
this is a story about the Buddha and
his disciples, among them an ordinary
monk, one of the questioners, and an
extraordinary king, who seemed to have
all the answers. It is also about how the
movement called Dhamma was born, how
it spread, changed lives and got changed
itself.
A Spoke in the Wheel is an ambitious and
erudite work of historical fiction—intricate
in its craftsmanship, vital in its ideas and
epic in its sweep.
‘Strips away layer by
layer [the] fanciful
stories surrounding
the Buddha and
reveals him as an
ordinary man who
had an extraordinary
approach to his
problems...’ Deccan Herald
‘Amita Kanekar’s novel about Emperor
Ashoka and the Buddhist monk Upali...
successfully captures the stress and
strains of monastic life, and brings alive
the centuries following the death of the
Buddha... An interesting mix of erudition
and historical imagination’—Outlook
‘An important contribution to Indian historic
fiction’—The Tribune
6
Amita Kanekar lives in Goa where she has
been adopted by two cats. She teaches
architectural history when not writing.
July 2013
ISBN 9788189059569
All rights available

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
be touched by life in that world. There is a
laugh lurking around every other corner as
the narrative picks an adroit step past the
grandiose authority of earlier versions of
such places and their people—romantic,
gandhian, administrative—and the idiom in
which they spoke. These stories overturn
the usual agendas of exit—from the village,
from madiga culture, from these little
communities—to hold this life up as one of
promise for everyone.
With her intensely beautiful and sharply
political writing, Shyamala makes a clean
break with the tales of oppression and
misery decreed the true subject of dalit
writing.
‘...warm, sensuous
images of a world
far removed from
our garbage-strewn,
traffic-choked and
neon-lit cities’ Outlook
‘Gogu Shyamala’s luminous, moving
and funny prose is almost deceptive in
its lightness of touch, and deftness of
language’ —Tehelka
‘These stories do more than make the
margin the centre; they make the margin a
place of vivid enchantments, rendered with
idiomatic vitality’—Open
Gogu Shyamala is a senior fellow at the
Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s
Studies, Hyderabad. She has documented
and edited dalit women’s writings in Telugu.
‘Shyamala’s greatest achievement is the
note of humour and lightness that sounds
through this collection’—Wall Street
Journal–Mint
2012
ISBN 9788189059514
263 pages Hardback 5 x 7.8” Rs 350
All rights available

The Place Outside
Siddalingaiah
Translated from Kannada by
S.R. Ramakrishna
10
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
literature from pavement vendors; we hear
the adult’s fiercely rationalist political voice
as well as his poetic voice, resonant with
the dreams and hauntings of dalit folklore.
The Place Outside is a vivid evocation of
everyday life and labour, of conviviality and
courage, of poverty and loss in the dalit
colony. As critic D.R. Nagaraj says in his
Afterword, Siddalingaiah offers us a bonsailike
compression of life. ‘This is writing that
makes rage pleasant. Here, anger becomes
sarcasm. Ire is translated into a mischief
that grasps the subtleties of life. What
might have appeared strange if turned
into a grand narrative becomes a story of
human activity. Siddalingaiah transforms
wrath into mischief.’
Siddalingaiah is a major Kannada poet.
He has also written two plays, and a
study of folk deities. He has served twice
as member of the Karnataka Legislative
Council. He is now chairman of the
Kannada Development Authority.
S.R. Ramakrishna is a journalist, music
composer and translator. He lives in
Bengaluru.
‘Malgudi Days with a
critical difference...
Megalahatti is
populated by
ghosts, deities, strict
headmasters and
wandering ascetics,
set against rivers,
hills and forests’
Education World
‘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 the individual as it is about
all major social, political and cultural
movements of Karnataka in the last four
decades’—The Hindu
December 2012
ISBN 9788189059552
Paperback 5 x 7.8” Rs 295
All rights available

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
of civil existence to vast numbers of its
constituents; the centrality one ought to
grant patriarchy in considerations of social
injustice; and on the destructive logic of
development that emerged in the India of
the 1990s, dishonouring its citizens’ right
to life, liberty and livelihood. This volume
comprises essays—largely drawn from
the Economic & Political Weekly—that deal
with representations and practices of class
power as they exist in tandem with state
authority and caste identities.
Inspired by naxalism in the late 1970s,
intellectually indebted to D.D. Kosambi’s
writings on Indian history and society, and
politically and ethically attentive to the
politics of feminist and dalit assertion in
the 1990s, Balagopal refused dogma and
shrill polemics just as he refused theory
that did not heed the mess of history and
practice.
‘As a human rights worker active since
1981, and slightly older than Balagopal,
I remember him as a magical figure. The
writings in this volume help interpret the
often chaotic developments in Andhra
Pradesh, and provide a model tool for
understanding other regional realities of
India’—Binayak Sen
‘For students
and activists of
three generations,
Balagopal’s voice
was an ethical and
political compass’
Biblio: A Review of Books
A mathematician by training, Kandala
Balagopal (1952–2009) was associated
with the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties
Committee for two decades. In 1998, he
became one of the founder-members of
Human Rights Forum in which he was
active till his death.
‘Every article shines with the originality of
his insight and the fury of his concern’
—Wall Street Journal–Mint
ISBN 9788189059408
488 pages Paperback 6 x 9.25” Rs 550
All rights available

12
In The Tiger’s Shadow
The Autobiography of an Ambedkarite
Namdeo Nimgade
Born into a family of landless bonded
labourers in the dustbowl of Sathgaon
in western India, Namdeo Nimgade is
14 when he finally manages to attend
his village school where, being an
‘untouchable’, he has to stand on the ‘hot
verandah and listen to lessons through
a window’. Inspired by Dr B.R. Ambedkar,
he steadfastly pursues his education.
Graduating from Nagpur, Nimgade goes on
to complete his PhD in soil science from the
University of Wisconsin in 1962—perhaps
the first dalit after Ambedkar to earn a
doctorate in an American university. In
the 1950s, as an associate at the Indian
Agriculture Research Institute in Delhi,
Nimgade gets to spend time with Dr
Ambedkar. Throughout his life, Nimgade
remains singularly committed to the
ambedkarite movement.
Nimgade narrates incidents in his life
with candour and delightful humour—
whether recounting his great-grandfather
Ganba’s combat with a tiger in a forest, or
his ‘forbidden’ love for a non-dalit woman.
Moving away from the framework of
victimhood narratives, Nimgade’s life is an
inspiring story of triumph against odds.
‘Our family name Nimgade probably
derives from the neem tree, which is
known for its healing properties and
health benefits. Many people from our
untouchable community bear names
referring to trees or plants, such as my
brother-in-law, Khobragade—which refers
to a coconut. There’s similarly Ambagade,
referring to mango, Jamgade to guava and
Borkar to berry. Quite likely, these arboreal
names derive from the peaceful Buddhist
period in Indian history, and are cited
as further evidence that many of India’s
untouchables were previously Buddhist.’
‘This book must be
read not only by all
those who want to
understand the dalit
universe but also by
those who enjoy a
good Indian book in
English’ DNA, Mumbai
ISBN 9788189059309
310 pages Paperback 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 350
All rights available

The Persistence of Caste
The Khairlanji Murders & India’s
Hidden Apartheid
Anand Teltumbde
While the caste system has been formally
abolished under the Indian Constitution,
according to official statistics, every
eighteen minutes a crime is committed on
a dalit. The gouging out of eyes, the hacking
off of limbs and being burned alive or
stoned to death are routine in the atrocities
perpetrated against India’s 170 million
dalits. What drives people to commit such
inhuman crimes?
The Persistence of Caste uses the
shocking case of Khairlanji, the brutal
murder of four members of a dalit
family in 2006, to explode the myth
that caste no longer matters. Analysing
context and crime, it seeks to locate
this event in the political economy of
the development process India has
followed after Independence. Teltumbde
demonstrates how caste has shown
amazing resilience—surviving feudalism,
capitalist industrialisation and a republican
Constitution—to still be alive and well
today, despite all denial, under neoliberal
globalisation.
‘Anand Teltumbde’s
analysis of the
public, ritualistic
massacre of a
dalit family in
21st century
India exposes the
gangrenous heart of
our society’ Arundahti Roy
‘I would hope to see it read by every Indian
activist and also foreigners who do not see
how odious the caste system is’—Samir Amin
‘Teltumbde bears witness to the
degradation of Indian democracy’
—Vijay Prashad, Himal
Anand Teltumbde is a civil rights activist.
He teaches at the Indian Institute of
Management, Kharagpur, and is a
columnist with the Economic & Political
Weekly.
ISBN 9788189059286
192 pages Paperback 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 200
World English rights: Zed Books;
published in Kannada and Telugu
All other rights available

Against the Madness of Manu
B.R. Ambedkar’s writings on
Brahminical Patriarchy
Selected and introduced by Sharmila Rege
A brahmin ‘mega convention’ in
contemporary Pune reasserts faith in
endogamy for ‘national interest’, and
imposes new codes on brahmin women.
A brahmin Congress leader suggests that
a dalit chief minister be raped and paid
compensation. That the caste system
thrives by its control of women and that
caste is a product of sustained endogamy
was an insight offered by the 25-year-old
Ambedkar in 1916, in his paper “Castes in
India”. Since then, till the time he piloted
the Hindu Code Bill that sought to radicalise
women’s rights in the 1950s, Ambedkar
deployed a range of arguments to make
his case against brahminism and its twin,
patriarchy.
While Ambedkar’s original insights
have been neglected by sociologists,
political theorists and even feminists,
they have been kept alive, celebrated and
memorialised by dalit musical troupes
and booklets in Maharashtra. Sharmila
Rege, in this compelling selection of
Ambedkar’s writings on the theme of
brahminical patriarchy, illuminates
for us his unprecedented sociological
observations. Rege demonstrates how and
why Ambedkar laid the base for what was,
properly speaking, a feminist take on caste.
‘A brilliant and
timely intervention
in feminist
scholarship in India,
dalit studies,
legal sociology,
and the sociology
of caste’
Kamala Visweswaran, Associate
Professor of Anthropology,
University of Texas, Austin
‘In this volume, Sharmila Rege provides us
a theoretically advanced interpretation of
Babasaheb’s thinking on the interstices of
the caste and feminist questions. Rege’s
work assumes significance especially in
the context of limited engagement with
caste in mainstream feminism’—Gopal Guru,
professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University
16
Sharmila Rege is a sociologist who heads
the Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s
Studies Centre, University of Pune. She is
the author of Writing Caste/Writing Gender:
Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios.
December 2012
ISBN 9788189059538
290 pages Paperback 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 350
All rights available

A Rogue and Peasant Slave
Adivasi Resistance 1800–2000
Shashank Kela
18
Why do adivasi societies defend
themselves so desperately against the
state? What is it that sparks so much
protest and conflict in India’s adivasi
regions? These are some of the questions
this book seeks to answer. The first part
shows how the bhils of western Madhya
Pradesh were affected by colonialism,
the perceptions and notions that shaped
colonial policy, its effects on material life
and politics, how bhil groups adapted to
these developments—and resisted them.
A social history cast as narrative
—a narrative of blindness and rancour,
resistance and change—it charts the
emergence of an unjust and oppressive
social order.
The second part is a reflection on adivasi
politics in the twentieth century. It begins
with the (understandably suspicious)
adivasi response to nationalism, and goes
on to examine India’s development policies
and their effect upon adivasi societies.
It looks at the emergence of an adivasi
middle class and the contradictions of its
political role, as well as collective modes
of protest and adaptation. A Rogue and
Peasant Slave challenges the current
academic consensus on the relationship
between adivasi societies and the castebased
agrarian order, and seeks to place
them in the context of a wider agrarian and
ecological history. It reveals the intimate
connection between the past and the
present, and shows how some of India’s
most pressing contemporary conflicts
can only be understood with reference to
a history whose consequences are still
working themselves out.
Shashank Kela worked as an activist in a
trade union of adivasi peasants in western
Madhya Pradesh between 1994 and 2004.
This is his first book.
‘Succeeds in
bringing alive, with
great sympathy, the
histories of those
who reject our ways
of life’ Wall Street Journal–Mint
‘Well argued, cogently written—fills a major
lacuna in the existing literature on adivasi
pasts and futures in mainland India’
—Mahesh Rangarajan, Director, Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library
‘Chronicles the devastating impact of
colonialism on adivasi societies in India
continuing to the present engagement of
the state with the forest communities’
—The Hindu
‘Contributes to the scholarship on tribal
societies and adds to the voices speaking
out against the neglect and exploitation of
adivasi people’—India Today
2012
ISBN 9788189059361
392 pages Hardback 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 595
All rights available

Ambedkar’s World
The Making of Babasaheb
and the Dalit Movement
Eleanor Zelliot
This is a re-issue of a classic monograph on
the rise of the Mahar movement in western
India. While Eleanor Zelliot has published
three books and eighty articles on caste,
untouchability and the dalit movement, her
1969 PhD thesis has remained unavailable.
Ambedkar’s World documents the
social and political forces that shaped
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (b. 1891), the
greatest leader of dalits in India, and the
manner in which Ambedkar shaped the
destiny of the dalits of Maharashtra and
India. The Mahar army tradition, the cult
of Cokhamela, the Mahad satyagraha,
temple-entry movements, the various
newspapers Ambedkar edited, the Round
Table Conferences, the question of
conversion, the political parties Ambedkar
founded—Zelliot chronicles them all. Using
a wide array of primary sources she offers
a rich history of one of modern India’s most
defining movements.
In its scope and depth as a singlecaste
history, this work remains as yet
unsurpassed.
‘Eleanor Zelliot, the doyenne of historians
of untouchability, that senstitive student of
contemporary Maharashtra who is widely
admired by the scholars and activists... has
both captivated and influenced me’
—Ramachandra Guha, historian
‘Eleanor’s historical
work on Ambedkar,
on the Buddhist conversion of the
Dalits... and on the subsequent
cultural and literary movements
has changed the
paradigm in the
study of South
Asia’— Citation, 1999 Award for
Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies
from the Association for Asian Studies
Eleanor Zelliot pioneered the study of the
dalit movement in India in the 1960s. She
was Laird Bell Professor of History (1969–
1997) at Carleton College, Minnesota. She
is the author of From Untouchable to Dalit:
Essays on the Ambedkar Movement.
December 2012
ISBN 9788189059545
280 pages Paperback 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 295
All rights available

20
The Buddha’s Way
A Socio-Historical Approach
Nalin Swaris
In this magisterial study of the
social élan of early Buddhism, Nalin
Swaris argues that the radical thrust of
the Buddha’s teaching is based on his
realisation that ‘the individual’ is a fiction
of human craving. The Buddha’s decision
to found a community of compassion and
sharing was the practical expression of
his conviction that individualism is the
principal obstacle to human happiness.
The Buddha’s Way was not discovered
and preached in a social vacuum.
Orthodox Hinduism classifies its sacred
traditions into srutis (sacred truths
of the Vedas ‘heard’ by ancient rishis
while in a trance) and smritis (codes of
conduct). In deliberate counterpoint to
the brahman tradition, the majority of
the Buddha’s discourses begin with the
declaration: Evam me sutam—‘Thus have
I heard’.
Swaris argues persuasively that
Buddha’s teachings are not esoteric, but
grounded in everyday life. The Dhamma is
not a revealed truth that humans could not
have discovered by themselves. It is like a
light brought into a darkened room so that
people could see what is already there,
once the fog of delusion is dispelled.
In a style that would appeal to both lay
readers and scholars, Swaris shows how
the Buddha anticipated Marx, Derrida and
Foucault by centuries.
Born in Colombo, ordained a Catholic
priest in 1962 in Bangalore, Nalin
Swaris completed his PhD on the “Buddha’s
Way” at the State University of Utrecht in
1997 with summa cum laude. Swaris was
also a human rights activist and the author
of Buddhism, Human Rights and Social
Renewal.
‘This highly original
work uses a multidisciplinary
perspective to determine the original
message of Shakyamuni Buddha. Critiquing
the usual belief that the Buddha’s ideal
of human liberation ‘is to be realised
in solitude, away from the everyday
concerns of ordinary men and women,’
Swaris demonstrates
that the Buddha’s
path to awakening
is oriented towards
social liberation.
His main argument offers a
different (and persuasive) way of
understanding anatta, the doctrine of
non-self and non-substantiality. He argues
that anatta provides the perspective from
which to understand the meaning and
significance of all other Buddhist doctrines,
especially those relating to the theory and
practice of the Buddhist moral life. This is in
sharp contrast to the usual interpretations
of early Buddhist teachings now current in
academic Buddhology’—David R. Loy, author
of A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack
2011
ISBN 9788189059316
388 pages Hardback 6 x 9.25” Rs 590
All rights available

Dispersed Radiance
Caste, Gender, and Modern Science
in India
Abha Sur
This book is a step towards writing a
socially informed history of physics in India
in the first half of the twentieth century.
Through a series of micro histories of
physics, Abha Sur analyses the confluence
of caste, nationalism, and gender in
modern science in India, and unpacks
the colonial context in which science was
organised. She examines the constraints
of material reality and ideologies on the
production of scientific knowledge, and
discusses the effect of the personalities of
dominant scientists on the institutions and
academies they created.
The bulk of the book examines the
science and scientific practice of India’s
two preeminent physicists in the first half
of the twentieth century, C.V. Raman and
Meghnad Saha. Raman and Saha were—in
terms of their social station, political
involvement, and cultural upbringing—
diametric opposites. Raman came from an
educated Tamil brahmin family steeped
in classical art forms, and Saha from an
uneducated rural family of modest means
and underprivileged caste status in eastern
Bengal. Sur also reconstructs a collective
history of Raman’s women students—
Lalitha Chandrasekhar, Sunanda Bai, and
Anna Mani—each a scientist who did not
get her due.
Dispersed Radiance makes an important
contribution to the social history of
science. It provides a nuanced and critical
understanding of the role and location
of science in the construction of Indian
modernity and in the continuation of social
stratification in colonial and postcolonial
contexts.
‘Sur has woven a
meticulous account
of the subaltern
history of physics
in India during the
first half of the 20th
century’ Science
‘This scholarly study of the social and
political framework in which some leading
scientists worked and interacted in India in
the first half of the 20th century brings to
the fore facts that outsiders would hardly
suspect—a subtle dissertation on caste
and gender hegemony in India’—Choice
‘A fascinating account of the play of caste
and gender in science and in scientific
institutions in India’—The Hindu
Abha Sur teaches in the MIT Program in
Women’s & Gender Studies in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
2011
ISBN 9788189059323
286 pages Hardback 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 495
All rights available

Finding My Way
A Gondwana Journey
Venkat Raman Singh Shyam
A third-field artist renders his life in art
that is as rooted in Gond expression as
it is animated by an experience of the
contemporary.
‘Although I don’t consider myself famous
or important, I think my life story is
unusual and I want to tell it in a new
way—using both pictures and words.
In certain ways this will also be an
illustrated story of my community. I will
walk you through Gond creation myths;
my dreams of riding a winged horse;
the first toy-cart my father made for
me; my first bicycle ride; stories about
my grandfather, Prasadi Lal Uikey, who
could stop tigers in their tracks and
birds in their flight; my aversion to the
straightjacket of school; my life in Delhi
as a rickshaw puller, as a cook, as a
painter of signs; my latter-day encounters
with doors that open automatically and
water that flows without our having
to touch the tap; and my personal
experience of two internationally
momentous events: the 2008 Mumbai
terrorist attacks, and two years later
the many days I spent marooned at the
Frankfurt airport owing to volcanic ash.’
‘Represents an
emergent third field
of artistic production
in contemporary
Indian culture that is
neither metropolitan
nor rural, neither
(post) modernist nor
traditional, neither derived from
academic training nor inherited without
change from tribal custom. Indeed, thirdfield
artists draw their energies from the
adroit, dynamic management of knotty
paradoxes’—Ranjit Hoskote, curator, Indian
Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2011, on Venkat Shyam’s
fellow-artists from Madhya Pradesh
Venkat Raman Singh Shyam, nephew of
the legengary Jangarh Singh Shyam, is
one of the torchbearers of contemporary
Gond art. Mentored by Jangarh and the late
Jagdish Swaminathan, he has exhibited
widely in India, the US and Europe.
24

Nov 2013
ISBN 9788189059576
All rights available

Bonbibi and the Tiger
Story: Annu Jalais
Art: Baharjaan Chitrakar and
Sumon Chitrakar
A holy man who pined for human flesh took
the form of a tiger and began attacking
those who made a living from the forest.
In another part of the world, a young girl,
Bonbibi, was raised by a deer after her
mother abandoned her in the forest. One
day, she heard Allah-talla tell her to protect
fishers, honey-collectors and woodcutters
from the jaws of the man-eating tigerdemon
of the ‘land of the eighteen tides’—
the Sundarbans.
What happens when Bonbibi goes to
meet the tiger-demon, Dokkhin Ray?
Using stunning organic dyes, Patua artists
Baharjaan Chitrakar and Sumon Chitrakar
pour life into a popular Bengali folk story.
Annu Jalais’ retelling, about how a single
woman makes her way in the world, brings
to light the intricately linked worlds of
humans and animals.
Annu Jalais is an anthropologist and
Assistant Professor at National University
of Singapore. She is the author of Forest
of Tigers, on the Sundarbans. Baharjaan
Chitrakar, 66, has taught many young
Patuas their art. She was drawn to the
story of Bonbibi and drew particularly
moving pictures of the legend. Sumon
Chitrakar, 22, the husband of Baharjaan’s
granddaughter, was fascinated by Bonbibi’s
legend calling Muslims and Hindus to be
one family.
26

Oct 2013
ISBN 9788189059583
All rights available

Bhimayana
Experiences of Untouchability
Art: Durgabai Vyam, Subhash Vyam
Story: Srividya Natarajan, S. Anand
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956),
one of India’s foremost revolutionaries,
grew up untouchable. Battling against
the odds, he gained multiple doctorates,
campaigned against social discrimination
and the caste system and went on to draft
the Constitution of India. Throughout his life
Ambedkar faced routine discrimination: in
school at the age of 10; in Baroda after his
return from Columbia University; and while
travelling in later life. The discrimination
experienced by Ambedkar continues to
haunt a majority of India’s 170 million dalits
as many are still denied water, shelter and
the basic dignities of life.
In this ground-breaking work, Pardhan-
Gond artists Durgabai Vyam and Subhash
Vyam interweave historical events with
contemporary incidents, infusing fresh
energy into the graphic idiom through their
magical art.
‘An extraordinary book’—John Berger
‘Beautiful... unforgettable’—Arundhati Roy
‘Distinctive... challenging in all the right
ways’—Joe Sacco
‘Highlights one of
the biggest denials
of human rights still
in existence on the
planet. Among the
Top 5 political comic
books’ CNN.com
28
Durgabai Vyam, who has illustrated a
dozen books and won the BolognaRagazzi
award in 2008 for The Night Life of Trees,
says Bhimayana is her most accomplished
work yet. Subhash Vyam began as a
sculptor before turning to painting. They
live in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. Srividya
Natarajan is a dancer and novelist; she
lives in London, Canada. S. Anand is the
publisher of Navayana.
‘Evocative masterpiece’—The Hindu
‘Ambedkar’s plea for justice can be
heard again through this compelling
documentary’—Times Literary Supplement
Hardback ISBN 9788189059354 Rs 995
Paperback ISBN 9788189059170 Rs 395
108 pages 4-colour 8 x 11”
Rest of the world English: Tate Publishing, UK
French: Editions MeMo; Korean: Darun; Spanish:
Sextopiso. Published in Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi,
Marathi, Telugu and Kannada

Where will
I go? Who
will take
me in?
Ahyou’ll
stay with
friends.
Nonot
with
friends.
An untouchable
has no friends among
other castes. If I
claim a friendship, and
am rejected, it will be
embarrassing and
painful on both sides.
Then
make sure
you stay at
a good Hindu
hotel.
To stay in a
Hindu hotel, I’ll
have to pretend
to be upper
casteand if I get
caught, I’ll get
beaten up, maybe
killed.
63

A Gardener in the Wasteland
Jotiba Phule’s Fight for Liberty
Story: Srividya Natarajan
Art: Aparajita Ninan
Jotirao Govindrao Phule wrote Slavery
(Gulamgiri)—a scathing and witty attack
on brahmanism and the slavery of India’s
‘lower’ castes that it engendered. Unlike
Indian nationalists, Phule (1827–1890)
saw the British as people who could tame
the local elite—the brahmans who wielded
power simply on the basis of birth. Inspired
by Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and the
ideals of Enlightenment philosophers,
Phule mounted a critique of the vedas as
idle fantasies of the brahman mind. With
the objective of liberating the sudras and
atisudras, he founded the Satyashodak
Samaj (Society of Truthseekers).
Phule dedicated Slavery ‘to the good
people of the United States as a token of
admiration for their sublime, disinterested
and self-sacrificing devotion in the cause
of Negro Slavery.’ Written in the form
of a dialogue between Dhondiba and
Jotiba—reminiscent of Buddha’s suttas,
of Socrates’ dialogues—Slavery traces
the history of brahman domination in
India, and examines the motives for and
objectives of the cruel and inhuman laws
framed by the brahmans.
This revolutionary text remains relevant
today, and given Phule’s rather graphic
imagination lends itself almost naturally to
graphic art—the first time a historical work
has been interpreted as a graphic book
in India. Srividya Natarajan and Aparajita
Ninan also weave in the story of Savitribai,
Jotiba’s wife and partner in his struggles,
who started a school for girls in Pune in
1848, despite social opprobrium.
‘Bracing. This book wakes you up like a
punch in the face’—Business Standard
‘Not just a book, but a declaration of
war... The Indian comics scene, presently
submerged in mythologicals, desperately
needs more books like A Gardener in the
Wasteland’—Indian Express
‘Reminiscent of
Marjane Satrapi’s
Persepolis. Brings
smack into the
foreground
something
unequivocally evil’
‘You should get yourself a copy... before
some right-wing militant organisation gets
its dander up’—Timeout
Hindustan Times
30
Srividya Natarajan is a dancer and the
author of the novel, No Onions Nor Garlic,
a comic satire on caste, and Bhimayana.
Aparajita Ninan is a graphic designer from
Delhi. This is her first book.
2011
ISBN 9788189059460
128 pages Paperback 7 x 9.5” Rs 220
Kannada rights sold. All other rights available

A Second Sunrise
Poems by Cheran
Edited and translated from Tamil by
Lakshmi Holmström and Sascha Ebeling
34
The sea swallowed the sun
splitting open, spraying
crimson blood
over the clouds.
A Second Sunrise showcases the best
poems of Cheran, an accomplished poet
of our times. The Sri Lankan civil war
looms over much of his work. Poems of the
precariousness of love are interwoven with
poems of war. The idyllic seascape of 1977
when
Waves lap along the shore
spreading
within me
the sea
is ruined forever by the experience of war
(1981–89). These are followed by poems
of exile and the experience of the diaspora
(1993–2003).
Now there is left
only a great land
wounded.
No bird may fly over it
until our return.
Finally, 2004 onwards, there are poems
that take us to the devastation of May
2009, by when
The sea has drained away
Tamil has no territory
Kinships have no name.
With such a wide range, translators
Lakshmi Holmström and Sascha Ebeling
treat each poem both as fresh in its
particularity and as part of the poet’s
oeuvre. Their English renditions capture
the resonances and rhythms that connect
Cheran to a long Tamil poetic tradition that
spans over two thousand years.
Cheran is a major Tamil poet. Lakshmi
Holmström is an award-winning translator
of Tamil fiction and poetry. Sascha Ebeling
is an assistant professor of Tamil at the
University of Chicago.
‘The poems are like
mini-bombs set to
blow a hole through
your heart. They
bear witness to the
tragedy of the Sri
Lankan civil war’
The Hindu
‘Cheran’s poetry... is deeply human, direct
and moving without being sentimental;
political without being loud. The translators
have been able to capture the mood and
the tone and help us imagine the idiom of
the original’—Indian Express
2012
Hardback ISBN 9788189059491 Rs 295
Paperback ISBN 9788189059507 Rs 195
160 pages 8 x 5.25”
All rights available

Ms Militancy
Meena Kandasamy
Meena Kandasamy’s full-blooded and
highly experimental poems challenge the
dominant mode in contemporary Indian
poetry in English: status-quoist, depoliticised,
neatly sterilised. These caustic
poems with their black humour, sharp
sarcasm, tart repartees, semantic puns
and semiotic plays irritate, shock and sting
the readers until they are provoked into
rethinking the ‘time-honoured’ traditions
and entrenched hierarchies at work in
contemporary society.
The poet stands myths and legends on
their head to expose their regressive core.
She uses words, images and metaphors
as tools of subversion, asserting, in the
process, her caste, gender and regional
identities while also transcending them
through the shared spaces of her socioaesthetic
practice. She de-romanticises
the world and de-mythifies religious and
literary traditions by re-appropriating the
hegemonic language in a heretical gesture
of Promethean love for the dispossessed.
The poet interrogates the tenets of a
solipsistic modernism to create a counterpoetic
community speech brimming with
emancipatory energy.
‘As a woman
dalit poet, Meena
Kandasamy writes
angrily, often
eloquently, about
the politics of the
body and caste
in contemporary
Indian society’ The Hindu
‘When she tells the self-proclaimed
arbiters of morality and decency and
religious practice where to get off in
“Should You Take Offence...”, you want to
stand up and cheer’—Timeout
‘...a sharp eye for detail, a grasp of worldly
insight, and an appetite for phrasal shapeshifting’—Biblio:
A Review of Books
Meena Kandasamy is a poet and translator
who has performed widely in venues
across the world. She is currently working
on her novel, Gypsy Goddess. She lives in
Chennai.
2011
ISBN 9788189059347
64 pages Paperback 6.5 x 8.5” Rs 150
All rights available

Give Us This Day A Feast of Flesh
N.D. Rajkumar
Poems from Tamil translated by
Anushiya Ramaswamy
Where the word becomes flesh, where
reason is dazzled and magic reigns
supreme: in that world delves Rajkumar.
Sensuous and ferocious, the poetry of
Rajkumar cracks open a world that offers
the modern reader stunning glimpses into
a magic-drenched, living dalit history. Born
into a traditional shaman community in
a border town between Kerala and Tamil
Nadu, Rajkumar revels in his ability to
claim disparate discourses as his poetic
subjects. His angry goddesses of unreason
and excessive emotion embody unfettered
power, independence and freedom—
elements excised from the daily life of the
dalit.
Anushiya Ramaswamy, through her
inspired translations, and in an essay that
locates Rajkumar’s insurrections in a global
literary context, shows how the poet is not
writing for inclusion into a centre: he has
re-drawn the lines in such a way that the
centre itself is meaningless. The centre has
the right of it to fear the Other, the Mohini,
the darkness, the Isakki, the mother with
her breasts full of the poisonous essence,
for
We who cannot experience
The Brahmam
Link hands and walk
With our Jungle Gods.
‘Powerful
liminalities,
threshold moments
of transit and
transformation, are
at play in the poems
of N.D. Rajkumar’
Biblio: A Review of Books
‘As a member of the kaniyar caste among
the dalits in Tamil Nadu, Rajkumar uses the
shamanistic, magical and supernatural,
with which the kaniyars are associated,
to fashion an aesthetic that can seem
anarchic and is certainly destabilising in its
effects on the reader’—DNA, Mumbai
36
N.D. Rajkumar has published four volumes
of poetry in Tamil. He works as a daily wage
labourer in the Railway Mail Service in
Nagercoil. Anushiya Ramaswamy teaches
at the Department of English, Southern
Illinois University, Edwardsville, US.
2011
ISBN 9788189059330
110 pages Paperback 6.5 x 8.5” Rs 180
All rights available

A Current of Blood
Namdeo Dhasal
Poems selected and translated from
Marathi by Dilip Chitre
‘I am a venereal sore in the private part
of language.’ That’s Namdeo Dhasal, the
maverick Marathi poet who hardly had any
formal education. Born in 1949 in a former
‘untouchable’ community in Pur-Kanersar
village near Pune in Maharashtra, as a
teenage taxi driver he lived among pimps,
prostitutes, petty criminals, drug peddlers,
gangsters and illicit traders in Bombay/
Mumbai’s sinister and sordid underworld. In
1972, he founded Dalit Panther, the militant
organisation modelled on Black Panther.
The same year he published Golpitha that
belongs to the tradition in modern urban
poetry beginning with Baudelaire’s Les
Fleurs du Mal. Since then, he has published
eight collections of poems from which this
representative selection is drawn.
In 2004, India’s national academy of
letters, Sahitya Akademi, honoured Dhasal
with the only Lifetime Achievement
Award it gave during its golden jubilee
celebrations. Dhasal’s long-time friend
and bilingual poet Dilip Chitre, acclaimed
for his translations of the seventeenth
century Marathi poet-saint Tukaram,
considers Namdeo Dhasal to be one of the
outstanding poets of the twentieth century.
‘This is Mumbai
without her makeup,
her botox, her power
yoga; the Mumbai
that seethes,
unruly, menacing,
yet vitally alive’
‘This elegant book is a journey through the
bowels of those quarters over which we
have constructed robust mental flyovers’
—The Sunday Times of India
The Hindu
‘Chitre succeeds in reproducing the images
and metaphors of Dhasal’s work, and his
unmistakable, hard-hitting voice’—Outlook
Dilip Chitre (1938–2009) was a poet,
painter, translator, and filmmaker. He wrote
more than fifteen volumes of poetry in
Marathi and ten in English. His film Godam
won the Prix Special du Jury in Nantes in
1984.
‘Dhasal employs an aesthetic of fracture...
towards writing into existence the
continuing alienation of dalits seduced
by the shiny assurances of a still-new
nation’—Biblio: A Review of Books
2011
ISBN 9788189059385
120 pages Paperback 6.5 x 8.5” Rs 180
All rights available

Embodying Difference: The Making of Burakumin in Modern Japan
Timothy D. Amos
ISBN 9788189059293 Hardback 302 pages 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 495
The book attempts to rethink the boundaries of buraku history and the
category of the outcaste in Japan. ‘A clear and readable account
of the
contingencies of buraku identity in Japan.’—Elyssa Faison, Associate
Professor of Japanese History, University of Oklahoma
(Rights sold to University of Hawi‘i Press)
In Pursuit of Ambedkar: A Memoir
Bhagwan Das (with DVD)
ISBN 9788189059255 Paperback 86 pages 7 x 7” Rs 175
A meeting with Ambedkar in 1943 defined the trajectory of Das’ life, and inspired him
in his single-minded pursuit of Babasaheb’s ideals. This memoir, and the DVD of a
documentary feature that accompanies it, offer a dalit perspective on key events and
figures of modern Indian history.
Thus Spoke Ambedkar, Vol. 1: A Stake in the Nation
Ed. Bhagwan Das
ISBN 9788189059262 Hardback 228 pages 7.5 x 7.5” Rs 395
ISBN 9788189059279 Paperback 228 pages 7.5 x 7.5” Rs 295
The twenty speeches (with annotations) showcase the wide range of issues that
Dr B.R. Ambedkar had engaged with. They unravel a story otherwise jettisoned by
mainstream ‘nationalist’ narratives that valorise a rather Hinduised ‘idea of India’.
The Rupture with Memory: Derrida and the Specters that Haunt Marxism
Nissim Mannathukkaren
ISBN 9788189059088 Paperback 116 pages 5 x 7.5” Rs 150
The author argues the Marxists need to engage with Derrida to rebuild strategies for
mounting a challenge to the evangelical neo-liberal hegemony and to other religious
fundamentalisms. ‘A clear-headed study of Jacques Derrida’s venture into Marxist political
theory.’—Frontline
The Blindness of Insight: Essays on Caste in Modern India
Dilip M. Menon
ISBN 9788189059071 189 pages Paperback 5 x 7.5” Rs 200
Exploring the intimate relation between the discourses of caste, secularism and
communalism, Dilip Menon argues that communalism in India may well be the
return of the repressed histories of caste. ‘An elegantly argued book... It offers a
provocative thesis.’—New Indian Express
40
Waking is Another Dream: Poems on the Genocide in Eelam
Cheran, Jayapalan, Yesurasa, Latha, Ravikumar
Ed. Ravikumar
Trans. Meena Kandasamy and Ravi Shanker
ISBN 9788189059378 Paperback 68 pages 6.5 x 8.5” Rs 180
What is the poetry that can emerge from a ‘wounded landmass’ where ‘no bird is able to
fly’, where people ‘ate death’? Five frontline Tamil poets from Eelam lament the loss of
their land, their language and thousands of people. ‘Evokes the ravaged world of the Sri
Lankan Tamil.’—DNA, Mumbai

Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land: Dignity of Labour in Our Times
Text: Kancha Ilaiah Illustrations: Durgabai Vyam
ISBN 9788189059095 Paperback 108 pages 9 x 9” Rs 200
This book—with stunning illustrations by Durgabai Vyam—is the first
ever attempt to inculcate a sense of dignity of labour among India’s
children. ‘It’s a hugely important book. Every Indian child should read
it.’—UNICEF India
People Without History: India’s Muslim Ghettos
Jeremy Seabrook and Imran Ahmed Siddiqui
ISBN 9788189059446 Paperback 272 pages 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 295
(S. Asia only)
This book is about life in the inner-city areas of Kolkata’s mainly Muslim settlements. It
asks a simple question—how do the vast majority of Muslims, especially the poor, live,
work, love and die? ‘Inevitably, stories of neglect, deprivation, disease and addiction
unfold.’—The Telegraph
The Myth of the Holy Cow
D.N. Jha
ISBN 9788189059163 Paperback 208 pages 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 200
(S. Asia only)
Historian D.N. Jha argues that the ‘holiness’ of the cow is a myth
and its flesh played an important part in the cuisine of ancient
India. Includes an essay by B.R. Ambedkar on beef-eating and
untouchability. ‘Jha traces the history of the doctrine... covering
both the classic texts and cutting-edge scholarship.’—TLS
Religious Rebels in the Punjab: The Ad Dharm Challenge
to Caste
Mark Juergensmeyer
ISBN 9788189059200 Paperback 382 pages 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 400
This pioneering work chronicles the history of the Ad Dharm movement by weaving
in the life stories of dalit leaders. ‘Juergensmeyer takes one bold step forward from
conventional social history, and he deserves our unqualified praise for that.’
—T.K. Oommen, Contributions to Indian Sociology
Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste
Intellectuals
Gail Omvedt
ISBN 9788189059453 Paperback 304 pages 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 295
Omvedt emphasises the continued relevance of the vision of the
anticaste intellectuals in the era of globalisation. ‘Marks a watershed
in the battle to uncover the hearts and minds of the oppressed and
powerless —the ‘subalterns’ of the Subcontinent’s history.’—Himal
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
Saidiya Hartman
ISBN 9788189059392 Paperback 288 pages 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 350 (S.
Asia only)
Undertaking a personal journey, the author retraces the history of the Atlantic slave

trade. ‘Hartman’s mix of history and memoir has the feel of a good novel, told with charm
and passion, and should reach out to anyone contemplating the meaning of identity,
belonging and homeland.’—Publishers Weekly
The Business of Words
André Schiffrin
ISBN 9788189059477 Paperback 296 pages 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 295 (S. Asia only)
A passionate account of the collapsing standards of contemporary publishing,
across the world. ‘Schiffrin’s careful tracing of the growth of independent and
committed publishing holds many lessons for India.’—Urvashi Butalia, publisher,
Zubaan
Un/Common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural
Difference
Kamala Visweswaran
ISBN 9788189059415 Paperback 354 pages 6 x 9.25” Rs 450 (S. Asia only)
This book offers an incising critique of the idea of culture at the heart of
anthropology. ‘A major intervention in cultural studies, anthropology, and feminist and
South Asian studies.’—R. Radhakrishnan, author of History, the Human, and the
World Between
Imagining a Place for Buddhism
Anne E. Monius
ISBN 9788189059194 Paperback 272 pages 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 350 (S. Asia only)
In this pioneering study, focusing on two extant Buddhist Tamil texts, Anne
Monius, Professor of South Asian Religions at Harvard Divinity School, sheds
light on the role of literature and literary culture in the formation, articulation and
evolution of Tamil Buddhist religious identity and community.
Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–75
Michel Foucault
ISBN 9788189059224 Paperback 400 pages 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 490 (S. Asia only)
In the lectures comprising Abnormal, Foucault shows how and why defining
‘abnormality’ and ‘normality’ were prerogatives of power in the nineteenth
century, shaping the institutions—from the prison system to the family—meant
to deal in particular with ‘monstrosity’.
The Future of the Image
Jacques Rancière
ISBN 9788189059231 Paperback 160 pages 5 x 7.5” Rs 200 (S. Asia only)
The author offers a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing
how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. ‘Rancière’s writings offer
one of the few conceptualisations of how we are to continue to resist.’—Slavoj Žižek.
42
Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action
Pierre Bourdieu
ISBN 9788189059248 Paperback 416 pages 6.25 x 9.25” Rs 490 (S. Asia only)
For Bourdieu, sociology is ‘a combat sport’. In this comprehensive collection he is at his
combative best. ‘France’s leading sociologist, its most influential intellectual—and one of
its angriest men.’—London Review of Books

The System of Objects
Jean Baudrillard
ISBN 9788189059125 Paperback 240 pages 5 x 7.5” Rs 225 (S. Asia only)
This book offers a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society, classifying the
everyday objects of the ‘new technical order’. He subjects home furnishing and interior
design to a celebrated semiological analysis. ‘A sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-
Marxist left.’—New York Times
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
Slavoj Žižek
ISBN 9788189059217 Paperback 156 pages 5 x 7.5” Rs 200
(S. Asia only)
In his analysis, Slavoj Žižek frames the moral failures of the
modern world in terms of the epoch-making events of the
first decade of this century. ‘Žižek leaves no social or cultural
phenomenon untheorised, and is master of the counterintuitive
observation.’—The New Yorker
The Sublime Object of Ideology
Slavoj Žižek
ISBN 9788189059132 Paperback 256 pages 5 x 7.5” Rs 280
(S. Asia only)
In this provocative book, Slavoj Žižek takes a look at the question of human agency in
a postmodern world. His analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and
exclusion that make up human society. ‘Žižek will entertain and offend, but never bore.’—
The Stranger
Women, Race and Class
Angela Y. Davis
ISBN 9788189059422 Paperback 284 pages 5.5 x 8.5” Rs 295 (S. Asia only)
This powerful study of the women’s movement in the U.S. from abolitionist days to the
present demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist
biases of its leaders. A classic.
Are prisons obsolete?
Angela Y. Davis
ISBN 9788189059439 Paperback 128 pages 5 x 7” Rs 150 (S. Asia only)
Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in
American life: the abolition of the prison. ‘Angela Davis swings
a wrecking ball into the racist and sexist underpinnings of
the American prison system.’—Cynthia McKinney, former
Congresswoman, US.

etc
Navayana offers excellent editorial,
typesetting, and production
services out of India. We have done
prepress work and printed editions
for Tate Publishing, London; Zed Books,
UK; and for the University of Hawai‘i Press, US.
Prepress work and production are cheaper
in India, but one ought to know how to get quality
work done and whom to trust it with. Navayana
provides reliable publishing solutions—
from editing a manuscript (in English) to
shipping finished copies of the book to you.
Navayana also offers quality design work by
Akila Seshasayee—our covers and book design
bear testimony to this.
Navayana
155, 2nd Floor, Shahpur Jat
New Delhi, India 110049
anand@navayana.org
+91-11-26494795
www.navayana.org
Navayana titles are distributed in India by IPDA
Independent Publishers’ Distribution Alternatives
35A/1 Shahpur Jat
New Delhi, India 110049
+91-11-26491448 / 26492040
ipd.alternatives@gmail.com

‘Navayana has chosen to embrace
literary practices that have been
marginalised by mainstream
publishing...A young alternative
publishing house, Navayana
combines its dedication to an
Ambedkarite perspective on Indian
society with an infectious
enthusiasm for contemporary
cultural theory’
Biblio: A Review of Books
‘If there’s a contemporary
heir to Seagull, it may
be Navayana, set up to
challenge the invisibility
of many kinds of Indian
writing, from works
by dalit authors to
poetry...the catalogue
is politically engaged,
challenging and often
unsettling’
Business Standard
www.navayana.org