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03. 04. 2020
India’s Tryst with the RSS
By Aijaz AhmadThe following article is a review and comparison of two books: Read More
LEFTWORD BOOKS
LeftWord Books is a New Delhi-based publishing house that seeks to reflect the views of the left in India and South Asia. We publish critical and analytical works on a range of subjects, and pay special attention to works on Marxist theory. We project the interests of the working people and movements for social transformation.
IN DELHI?
Check out the May Day Bookstore, with its fabulous collection of books. Next door is the theatre space Studio Safdar, created by Jana Natya Manch
EVENTS
Celebrating the life and art of Safdar Hashmi
MARCH 4, WEDNESDAY
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read moreWe are now witnessing the rise of a neo-fascist menace. This menace has turned its attention to left books – with attacks on left bookshops and with murders and threats of left writers and publis ...
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जिस समय नागरिकता संशोधन क़ानून और राष्ट्रीय नागरिकता रजिस्टर का विरोध पूरे...
In 1953, Chief Minister C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) introduced The Modified Scheme of Elementary Education in rural schools in Madras State. Based on the Gandhian model of Basic Education, it propo...
R.B. More (1903–1972) was a leader in Babasaheb Ambedkar’s movement, a trade unionist and a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). More’s life, narrated in his words and those of h...
This is not a story of death. It is a story of life. The luminous life of Safdar Hashmi, extraordinary in all its ordinariness.
On New Year’s Day in 1989, Jana Natya Manch – Janam – t...
राज्य और उसके क़ानून की निगाह में सभी नागरिकों की समानता का आदर्श स्थापित कर...
मई 2019 में नरेंद्र मोदी के नेतृत्व में हिंदुत्ववादी दक्षिणपंथी भारतीय जनता ...
The RSS can’t stand this book. When it was first published in Marathi, RSS cadres made a public bonfire of it in Pune.
Raosaheb Kasbe presents an incisive critique of M.S. Golwalkar’s ...
In May 2019, the party of the Hindu Right, Bharatiya Janata Party, under Narendra Modi, won a spectacular electoral victory.
The victory seemed to defy common sense – why did conversations ...
जिन्हें लगता है कि बाबासाहेब आंबेडकर साम्यवाद या मार्क्सवाद के खिलाफ थे व...
In the first years after the 1917 Russian revolution, a bold new cry was heard around the world, ‘Liberate the Colonies!’ It was voiced in Moscow by Marxists combating tsarist oppression of Asi...
Across the Third World, people grew up reading inexpensive, beautifully-produced books from the Soviet Union – children’s books, classics of world literature, books on science and mathematics, ...
मार्क्सवाद एक ऐसी विचारधारा है जो सिर्फ दुनिया का विश्लेषण ही नहीं करती बल...
Only People Make Their Own History
Samir Amin's primary concern as an economist is the form that imperialism takes in the last hundred years – driven at first by capitalist monopolies and later by what he calls generalized monopol...
Shujaat Bukhari was one of the most vital, balanced and well-informed voices in Kashmir. Perhaps for this reason, the 50-year-old journalist was shot dead by motorcycle-borne gunmen in Srinagar on ...
The RSS feed on fears. Fighting them requires depriving them of it. Pinarayi Vijayan, Chief Minister of Kerela, was born in Kannur, ground zero of RSS terror. He has seen the worst that they have t...
This book tracks the place of Hindustani or north Indian music in Mumbai in the long twentieth century, as the city moves from being a seat of British colonial government built on the profits of th...
Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo
This book brings together renowned scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas to celebrate the lifelong and seminal contribution of Professor Sam Moyo to the social sciences. Sam Moyo was ...
Vasanth Kannabiran, noted feminist, activist, and writer gathers the many strands of her “helter-skelter” life to pen a feminist memoir that recounts not only the milestones in her own journey,...
“Once upon a time in Arabia, there was a loving, close-knit family. Muhammad cherished his daughter, Fatima, son-in-law, Ali and his grandchildren, Hasan, Husain and Zainab. Though they were poor...
On August 16, 2005, the Maharashtra government summarily banned dancing by bar girls in Mumbai’s 1,250 dance bars. The amended Bombay Police Act prohibited dancing in any establishment where alco...
We, the Rejected People of India
We, the Rejected People of India is an anthology of Marathi Dalit poems in which a dilemma of being a Dalit in the elite spaces is very much visible. Read them, and you will have a differe...
Days Will Come Back is probably the first Punjabi Dalit poetry collection which has been translated into English. Poems in it are simmering with the smell of revolution that the soil of Pu...
This volume (People’s History of India, No. 31) takes up the story of the Indian National Movement from 1919, when the first nationalist struggle took place on an all-India scal...
Displacement and Citizenship: Histories and Memories of Exclusion intends to capture the crises of forced migration, internal displacement due to conflict situations and development-induce...
There are different sizes of bodies. There are different shades of the mind. There are different states of mind in distress. Side Effects of Living presents the words and verses of survivors, write...
In this witty, accessible study, the prominent Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton launches a surprising defense of the reality of evil, drawing on literary, theological, and psychoanalytic sources to s...
Flowers on the Grave of Caste by Yogesh Maitreya is the first English Dalit short story collection in India. In India, adding to the development of Dalit literature in the Eng...
In this characteristically concise, witty, and lucid book, Terry Eagleton turns his attention to the questions we should ask about literature, but rarely do. What is literature? Can we even speak o...
Award-winning novelist Randa Jarrar’s new story collection moves seamlessly between realism and fable, history and the present, capturing the lives of Muslim women and men across myriad geographi...
Jacinta Kerketta has in a short time succeeded in becoming acclaimed in the Hindi literary world due to her consistent creativity. The alertness and efficiency with which she has introduced a parti...
This specific volume of the TAS series attempts to unravel key constitutive elements of a 'perspectives from within' in Tribal and Adivasi Studies. This being a subject area not sufficiently explor...
Liya, a young Santal, is a regular girl from an Adivasi village in Assam, with regular struggles, aspirations and experiences, who finds herself in a journey through life against the backdrop of et...
Ram Dayal Munda, Ratan Singh Manki
In the present context of concern for the environment, the relevance of this story is self-evident. The current global warming and consequential fear of rain—fire and deluge is not mythical but r...
At the heart of the Ship of Sorrows is a group of young friends, men and women, Hindu and Muslim, living in Lukhnow at the cusp of Indian Independence. Like the rest of the country, their ...
Virginia Woolf once described modernist fiction as “a thing you could ruffle with your breath, and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses”. That precisely captures R. Chudamani’...
Identities and their Struggles in North East
The immediacy of social experience in the life of tribes, conceived as fundamental to their existence, is the foundation of all knowledge that concerns them. Articulating from varied social locat...
"I think beautiful Indigenous bodies on the land, living our cultures, singing our political systems, and animating the lifeways of our ancestors is revolutionary in the face of on-going hydro-el...
"This is a marvellously brave book. I know Jasmine has swum against the tide of publishers wanting her to fit her book into their agenda, and her refusal to do so testifies to her faith in her book...
"If David Laibman had done no more than bring the distinguished journal Science & Society safe and sound into the twenty-first century he would have earned our deepest admiration. But as the co...
The People of Asia Say No to Nuclear Power
Nuclear energy has long been promoted as a solution to Asia's growing energy demands with little attention to its often debilitating impact on host communities. Composed by the grassroots organizat...
M. Mohsin Alam Bhat, Suroor Mander
Kashmir is on a boil. Civilian protests in the form of 'stone-pelting' have become part of the Valley's daily life. These protests have been characterized by unprecedented participation of boys and...
In 1940/41 a young Punjabi woman, ‘Mrs A.’, ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist, Dev Satya Nand, for an experiment in his new met...
Dalits and the Democratic Revolution
This important book traces the history of the Dalit movement from its beginning in the 19th century to the death of its most famous leader, B.R. Ambedkar, in 1956. Focusing on three states – Andh...
Magadh, Shrikant Verma's crowning achievement, was published in Hindi in 1984 and is one of the key works of late 20th century Indian poetry. Speaking both archly and urgently through unre...
Five Movements in Praise is a fictional work that brings together images and text. Here, the landscape and the human have equal presence, and the pleasures of the book are not in the fulfi...
Ranjani Murali's lines are usually triggered by immediate experience or by an experience intentionally recollected to stress its immediacy: what actually happened, what body and mind experienced at...
Baroni is a real person. Baroni is a fictional character. This novel demonstrates that the two statements are not contradictory. The real person is Rafaela Baroni, a renowned popular artist who liv...
Aneesh Pradhan, Kunal Ray, Shubha Mudgat
Socio-Economic Surveys of Three Villages in Tripura
The fourth in the Socio-Economic Survey series of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS), this book is a field report on agrarian relations in rural Tripura. It is based on a detailed household ...
Drawing on a range of visual archives and personal collections, the book casts Rabindranath Tagore as the ‘Dancing Poet’ – in whom the contours of a pan-Indian diversity seek to merge, albeit...
Whither Rural India? Political Economy of Agrarian Transformation in Contemporary India
A poetic evocation of the act of reading, a provocation for non-readers, a sparkling soliloquy for avid readers, and a philosophical reflection on what we call literature, Why Read? ...
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd writes with passionate anger, laced with sarcasm, on the caste system and Indian society. He looks at the socioeconomic and cultural differences between the Dalit-Bahujans an...
This volume consists of five essays on the National Movement that arose to overthrow British rule in India. Three of these essays are devoted to the two men, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, wh...
"It is that rare book, wise and modest, which informs, instructs, inspires – but with the lightest of touch. Realistic enough to know that for the vast majority of women in India the struggle is ...
Indian Society and the Secular
Romila Thapar‘s new book of essays, Indian Society and the Secular, arrives at a time when India is facing its greatest challenges since Independence in 1947. With ultra right in power and fo...
In this impressive new work, Benjamin Zachariah questions the tendency to regard nationalism as a necessary, inevitable and natural basis upon which to organise the world. In doing so, he embarks o...
This slim volume is an attempt to rouse the interest of students and non-specialists in the early civilization of the Indus valley and adjoining regions of Pakistan and India. The challenges of arc...
Days and Nights of Love and War
Days and Nights of Love and War is the personal testimony of one of Latin America's foremost contemporary political writers. In this fascinating journal and eloquent history, Eduardo Galea...
This book is an erudite and elegiac exploration of Hindu nationalism in India today. It offers a revealing account of Hindu militant mobilizations as an authoritarian movement manifest throughout c...
On 1 January 1989, Janam was attacked in performance in a working class locality on the outskirts of Delhi. Safdar Hashmi, Janam's brilliant leader, was killed in this attack. This book contains an...
These essays focus on the various forms of collective violence that have occurred in India during the past six decades, which include riots, pogroms, and genocide. It is argued that these various f...
This volume makes a discerning attempt to bring into focus myriad dimensions of the idea of secularism and the foremost impediments in the way of its attainment. Most scholars who contributed to th...
The "crisis" of liberal democracies in today's world demands from us re-investigation of the notion of the "political". Since the dominant concept of the "political" that is associated with the lib...
Terry Eagleton’s witty and polemical Reason, Faith, and Revolution is bound to cause a stir among scientists, theologians, people of faith and people of no faith, as well as general readers eager...
This valuable collection of essays by KN Panikkar chronicles contemporary South Asia as it has unfolded in the last three decades. His being a historian of modern India has lent to his analysis of ...
