anthropology-seagull books

In the Name of the Mother : four stories
Intro. and Tr. by Radha Chakravarty

His mother's gone, there's no one to cook hot rice when it's evening . . . No one to say, 'Son, sit near my lap and eat.'

'Ma, from Dusk to Dawn' is the story of a woman from a nomadic tribe, catapulted by her circumstances into the role of a spiritual mother whose so-called mystical powers depend upon her denial of maternal affection towards her own son during daylight hours. 'Sindhubala' describes the anguish of a childless woman forced to play the role of a semi-divine healer called upon to save other people's offspring. 'Jamunabati's Mother' offers a stringent critique of a consumerist society indifferent to those on the margins and 'Giribala' presents the plight of a village woman whose daughters are trafficked by their own father, to pay for the house he dreams of building.

The stories in this volume are linked by a common thread: the idea of the mother. They represent a range of responses to the concept of the maternal, exposing how the traditional deification of motherhood in India often conceals a collective exploitation and attempt to restrict women to their socially prescribed roles while denying them the right to articulate their individual needs and desires. At the same time, they also show the strategies evolved by women to survive and circumvent the repression inflicted on them by social norms. The maternal thus emerges as an ambivalent concept, with both restrictive and emancipatory potential.

'It is these hoodlums and desperadoes, the derelicts and drifters of the Bengali underworld as well as their political patrons and protectors in the police, whom Mahasweta brings to life with her caustic pen in the pages of these stories. As she pillories the respectable representatives of power in our political system who sustain this underworld, she offers us the extraordinary chance to watch a lifelike effigy of the bizarre structure of Indian democracy burning in the background'-Sumanta Banerjee

Unlike most of her works, which focus on tribals and the rural dispossessed, the four stories in this collection are located in the urban and suburban underworld, and form an unusual segment of Mahasweta Devi's oeuvre-'Fisherman' (about Jagat who recovers bodies of young boys from the village tank so that the police can pass them off as cases of drowning), 'Knife' (a tongue-in-cheek account of gang warfare in a suburban town of West Bengal, bordering Bangladesh), 'Body' (about a 'young woman', used by a politician and his cohorts until she makes her own protest against the exploitative Establishment) and 'Killer' (in which Sona alias Akhil, an unemployed middle-class youth, discovers himself after his first 'test' killing).

The indepth introductory essay by veteran cultural historian Sumanta Banerjee, who himself, from his crime reporting past, has a firsthand familiarity with the milieu being depicted, puts the stories in context and goes on to discuss the development of the new criminal underworld in Bengal today.

Price(HB) Rs 495  Ł 19.95
                           ISBN 81 7046 198 7
                            Not for sale in the U.S.A and Canada

A riveting family portrait of four generations of Jewish Indian women. An invaluable cultural document shaped from a personal exploration, through the lives of four generations of Baghdadi Jewish women, of a social and cultural history of Baghdadi Jews in Calcutta, India.

Food and cuisine are not just incidental to Bengal; they are essential to the Bengali's mental and cultural landscape. Like in agricultural communities the world over, food and ritual, food and social custom, food and culture, are deeply imbricated. Women's lives are closely bound with the production and preparation of food. This unusual book weaves a warm, evocative tapestry out of memories of food, ritual and women's lives in Bengal. In the skilful hands of the author, who writes of growing up from girlhood to womanhood in her native land, food and ritual become intimate experiences which definitively shape day-to-day life for the women of that culture. As memories of food preparation take shape, recalling associations of taste, smell and texture, a parallel thread of social commentary calls forth sharp observations; for example, how certain foods are 'forbidden' and what Bengali widows cannot eat. Eminently readable, this volume combines rigorous research into food and cultural history, social critique, and the immediacy and intimacy of memoir.