SHAHRNUSH PARSIPUR, born in Iran in 1946, began her career as a fiction writer and a producer at Iranian National Television and Radio. Shortly after the publication of Women Without Men in 1989, Parsipur was arrested and jailed for her frank and defiant portrayal of women’s sexuality. While still banned in Iran the novel became a bestseller there, and has been translated into many languages around the world. Parsipur is also the author of Touba and the Meaning of Night, and now lives in exile in North California.
The idea to work on a topic of Socio - economic importance pertaining to Kerala was suggested to me by Monsieur Louis Dumont , professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and then executive d
Bernard D'Mello is a senior journalist with the Economic & Political Weekly and a civil rights activist with the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.
Archana Prasad is Professor at the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is the author of Against Ecological Romanticism: Verrier Elwin and the
