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100th Anniversary of the Working Women’s Day (1917)

Two days before International Women’s Day in 1917, the Petersburg Interdistrict Committee, largely populated by Bolsheviks, sent out a call for the widest participation in the March 8th march. The temperature seemed high. Soldiers on the front wilted in poor morale as the Great War turned out to be anything but for them. Peasants and workers suffered economic chaos, as the Tsarist bureaucracy seemed incapable of solving the basic problems of hunger and insecurity. There was little expectatio[...]

The Reviews Are Coming In!

Teesta Setalvad’s memoir – Foot Soldier of the Constitution – is already in its second printing. We anticipate that we’re going to have to tax our printer with a great many orders for this book. There is a good reason why people are interested in Teesta’s story. The ruling party has so fundamentally vilified her at the same time as she has been an essential voice for the stifled justice in Gujarat. Finally, Teesta is able to tell her story in her own words without having to answer one [...]

Letter to the LeftWord Books community

Dear friends, We have opened our year with a publication that has been long anticipated – Teesta Setalvad’s Foot Soldier of the Constitution: A Memoir.   The book has already been widely reviewed all favorably and is on the road to appear in Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and a host of other languages. Teesta’s book tells an intimate story of a young woman from an important legal family who goes on the quest of journalism only to be dragged into the world of the la[...]

Vijay Prashad on Teesta Setalvad's Memoirs

Here's the transcript of the interview: On Teesta Setalvad's Memoirs: For the past two years I have been editing Teesta Setalvad's memoirs. The reason, we at Leftword, were very excited about this book is that during the summer of 2013 and into 2014, there was a demonization of Teesta in the media, mainly by BJP politicians. One heard about a person called Teesta that those of us who worked with her couldn't recognize. We thought that it’s important for her to tell her real story so t[...]

AG Noorani and Hindutva

We, at LeftWord Books, have been proud to publish the thoroughly-researched and laser-sharp writings of AG Noorani. Born in 1930, Noorani is a renowned advocate in the Bombay High Court and in the Supreme Court of India. It is that lawyer’s eye that Noorani brings to his historical and political studies, careful to map out the dynamics of human events but also to judge them based on a moral standard that oscillates between the barometer of common sense and the liberal constitutional tradition.[...]