LATEST FROM YODA PRESS

 

This new edition of Devotional Islam and Politics in British India brings to readers once again Usha Sanyal’s nuanced study of the Sunni scholar Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi, his writing and the Ahl-e Sunnat movement. During the formative period of this movement, between the 1880s and 1920, the debates in which the Ahl-e Sunnat ‘ulama engaged with other north Indian ‘ulama’ pertained mainly to religion. The ‘ulama tried to inculcate in individual Muslims a stricter adherence to the shari’a or law to bring about reform or to engage in tajdid (renewal of faith). This effort at renewal was inspired in many instances by the example of the Prophet Muhammad. Their efforts at reform resulted in the opening of schools, the publication of tracts and journals, and the writing of fatwa’s (legal rulings) on concrete problems raised by members of the community with the ‘ulama emerging in the process as an important source of authority in the absence of Muslim state power.

‘… the book is an exceedingly interesting and informative study of how the Muslim mind had been working in pre-partition India under the impact of the religious resurgence of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.’

The Journal of Religious Studies

Usha Sanyal has taught at Rutgers University and now teaches at Queens University of Charlotte. She is the author of Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi: In the Path of the Prophet (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005). Currently, she is working on a book about Barelwi women’s texts, and is coediting, with David Gilmartin and Sandria Freitag, a volume of essays entitled Muslim Voices: Community and the Self in South Asia.

Extent: 392 pp.
Price: Rs 395
Size: Demy Octavo
Binding: Paperback
ISBN 978-81-906668-6-2
Rights: Available

 

‘McLeod has done more for Sikh history than anyone now alive. In fact, if there is a Father of Sikh History, it is Hew Mcleod.’

Rukun Advani, The Hindu

‘It is because of a few writers, and Hew McLeod above all, that the world has any inkling of Sikhism as an independent religion, with a unique, universal and timeless world view. He brought Sikhism to Western academia.’

Jaideep Sarin, Thaindian News

‘Hew was renowned for his openness and his readiness to answer any question and to read any manuscript. This generosity, together with his precocious embrace of email, placed him at the centre of an international scholarly community.’

Tony Ballantyne, The Guardian

Extent: 380 pp.
Price: Rs 350
Size: 7.75”x5”
Binding: Paperback
ISBN 978-81-906668-7-9
Rights: Available

 

Saurabh Dube:
‘‘Saurabh Dube’s has been an extraordinarily articulate voice providing distinctive perspectives on a wide range of subjects in modern Indian history for over two decades. After Conversion offers diversely focused but conceptually integrated and characteristically ambitious essays.…’

ANN GOLD

‘Dube’s writings have always been characterized by a stylish verve and the ability to approach old issues in interesting and intriguing ways, and that is again the case here. … By decentering the conventional privileging of the moment of conversion, Dube provides a very differently nuanced understanding of conversion….This is going to be a book that will be valuable to scholars across disciplines because of the patience, theoretical rigour, and empirical wealth with which it pursues its questions.’

AJAY SKARIA

After Conversion imaginatively addresses issues of modernity and its margins, based upon an interplay between a variety of Western and non-Western perspectives. Saurabh Dube critically considers questions of conversion by examining colonial writings of a vernacular Christianity and by tracking the transformations of caste and sect in South Asia. He provides personal portraits of his anthropologist father as well as of an important visual artist in order to convey the dense sensuousness and moving contradictions of everyday worlds. Together, Dube incisively explores the mutual intersections between culture and power and the past and the present, while prudently unravelling the ways in which academic categories and social worlds come together yet fall apart.

Saurabh Dube is Professor of History, Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México, Mexico.

Extent: 224pp. + 8pp. colour section
Price: Rs 325
Size: Demy Octavo
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-81-906186-6-3
Rights: Available
Series: New Perspectives on Indian Pasts

 

'Kyla Pasha's poems sparkle with the rediscovery of song’s electricity while losing none of the sophisticated edge of argument. Pasha’s poems move in several directions, unconstrained by doctrinaire notions of what a poem should do and be. She speaks to present, distant or departed interlocutors; meditates on how we lose and find ourselves again through travel; brings news of war to the front lawn, talks crisp commonsense to the robed spectres of Death and Memory. The self opens to the world, and the world to the self, in Pasha’s poems, through the realisation that we are formed by the irreducible compound of love, betrayal, forgiveness and anger that swirls constantly in the fragile crucible of the body.

In the South Asian context, ‘woman poet’ is all too often a title claimed by simple appeal to physiognomy and asserted through conformity with the dictionary of feminist cliché. Kyla Pasha is among the exceptions to this norm, who work to earn their title. She crafts her way through the labyrinth of language, attending sensitively to image and cadence, the murmur of several tongues; if her ear is tuned to the intimate tremors of the heart, it also records the epic turbulences both of South Asia and a world in ecological and political meltdown.

Ranjit Hoskote

Kyla Pasha is a poet, journalist and occasional playwright based in Lahore.

 

Powerful and poetic, this feminist telling of the disturbing stories of women who have survived domestic abuse, chooses to highlight resilience rather than victimhood. Nighat Gandhi’s tender, involved narration of their voices plunges the reader helplessly into their worlds, into their introspection, their strength and their vulnerability. In the best traditions of feminist scholarship, Nighat puts her own self and politics at risk in the process, immersed as she is in ‘the beauty and sadness of feminism’ that denies us the comfort of settled answers to ethical dilemmas.

Nivedita Menon

In conversation with eight women who survived lives of abuse, Nighat M. Gandhi draws attention to the unexpected fact that despite years of suffering, many abuse survivors can and do live enhanced lives and experience personal growth. Once these eight women find the sources of help which enable them to leave the abusive situations they are in, there are significant changes in the women’s thoughts, beliefs, and behaviour with respect to gender-based violence. Refreshingly, these eight women are unanimous in their refusal to return to their previously abusive families. They value their newfound independence much more than their previously socially-approved, limiting roles and duties as wives, daughters-in-law and daughters. Most of them report a greater degree of satisfaction and well-being with the new lives they have built. Nighat reflects upon her own ‘privileged’ status as an educated middle-class woman living in a small town in North India as she records these poignant and empowering encounters with valiant women who confirm that women are thriving and discovering the joys of building new lives when old ones have let them down.

Extent: 164pp.
Price: Rs 225
Binding: Paperback
Size: Demy Octavo
ISBN: 978-81-906668-3-1
Rights: Available