BLOG
09. 01. 2020
Raising Hell at Jhandapur
By LeftWordMuch has changed in the past thirty years: the marginally better roads, there’s even a metro station not too far away; overdriven speakers in autos playing 90s music
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
Join acclaimed novelist Amitava Kumar and theater scholar Shayoni Mitra in conversation with Sudhanva Deshpande about his new book *Halla Bol: The Death and Life of Safdar Hashmi* on Friday Jan. 10 ...
read moreWe invite you to visit us at the New Delhi World Book Fair Saturday, 4th January to Sunday, 12th January 2020, Pragati Maidan, at the IPD Alternatives stall:
...
read more
इस दशक में गाय के नाम पर भीड़ की कातिलाना हिंसा के जितने वारदात हुए, उनका 98 फ़ीस...
यह मौत की कहानी नहीं है। यह ज़िंदगी की कहानी है। एक सादालौह इंसान की दमकती, हस...
सुलगता कश्मीर, सिकुड़ता लोकतंत्र
हाल ही में भारतीय संसद ने देश के संघीय ढाँचे और लोकतांत्रिक चरित्र की जड़ों ...
राज्य और उसके क़ानून की निगाह में सभी नागरिकों की समानता का आदर्श स्थापित कर...
The Liberation Struggle in El Salvador
"This book, written with so much love, so much realism, so much honesty and so much literary beauty by my friend and comrade in the struggle, Dr Eduardo Espinoza, our beloved Felipe Dubón, is a li...
मई 2019 में नरेंद्र मोदी के नेतृत्व में हिंदुत्ववादी दक्षिणपंथी भारतीय जनता ...
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 ...
India is battling for its very soul.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is the most powerful organisation in India today; complete with a private army of its own, unquestionably obeying ...
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...
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – a workers' and peasants' state – lasted a mere seventy years. It has been gone for a quarter of a century. Existing socialist states face many o...
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...
तीस्ता सेतलवाड़ कौन हैं?
हिंदुत्ववादी ताकतों के लिए वो देश के विकास में ए...
The Freedom Theatre is one of the most remarkable institutions in occupied Palestine, and indeed the world. Nestled in Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, the theatre has faced attacks, threats, i...
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...
Brinda Bose, Subhabrata Bhattacharyya
A flamboyantly eclectic anthology that explodes several current myths about lines that divide – the heterosexual from the homosexual, the normative from the ‘alternative’, the phobic from the...
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’...
"The ancient values of the Neolithic and Paleolithic traditions still struggle to survive in a world of cold metallic civilization. Human symbiosis with nature has no place in the progress of suc...
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...
B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi are two figures who have had the most enduring impact on India. Their well-documented divergence and combativeness are met with either facile attempts at synthesis or ...
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 ...
