Zubaan: 90 books

Four musicians, whose lives intersect in the small mofussil town on the banks of the Brahmaputra. Against the backdrop of a magnificent musical heritage and the haunting and timeless ragas that sweep through the pages, Mitra Phukan presents the ambitious sitarist Kaushik Kashyap, already a ‘name’,...

Across the South Asian region, water determines livelihoods and in some cases even survival. However, water also creates exclusions. Access to water, and its social organisation, are intimately tied up with power relations. This book provides an overview of gender, equity and water issues relevant to...

Mahila Samakhya is as much a story of a government programme for women’s education and empowerment as it is of the celebration of the struggles of poor women for gender just rights. Spread across eight states and more than 150 districts in India, the Mahila Samakhya programme grew out of a unique partnership...

Water management is not an engineering matter alone, it involves ecological, socio- political, administrative and legal concerns. Gender is a key factor but has been neglected both conventionally and in recent water reform policies and structures. Yet, a cross-section of South Asian women have challenged...

Toilets, trees and gender? Can there be a connection? Is there a gender angle to a business story? Is gender in politics only about how many women get elected to parliament? Is osteoporosis a women's disease? Why do more women die in natural disasters? These are not the questions journalists usually...

Mainstream feminist discourse has failed to fully engage with commercial sex work. In a series of groundbreaking, previously unpublished essays, The Business of Sex corrects this lacuna. Moving beyond the traditional feminist focus on slavery and trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and other health issues, the contributors...

This exciting new anthology show-cases 21 of the best short stories by South Asian women under the age of 40. Ranging from the lyrical to the humourous to the darkly disturbing, this collection highlights the desires, concerns and obsessions of young women from the subcontinent. A new generation of writers...

A postman turns up with an unexpected letter one rainy afternoon in Cherrapunji, a letter that will turn fourteen-year-old Saphira’s world upside down. Dalinia’s life seems perfect, with a successful husband, beautiful children and a well-appointed home. But the arrival of a handsome competitor on...

Amrita Nandy is a scholar whose work focuses on issues of gender, rights and culture. Her academic work has been published both in India and abroad, including in journals such a as the Economic and Polictical Weekly and Women's Studies International Forum. Amrita contributes to a range of dailies...

It was on a sabbatical in England in the late seventies that Suniti Namjoshi discovered feminism—or rather, she discovered that other feminists existed, and many among them shared her thoughts and doubts, her questions and visions. Since then, she has been writing—fables, poetry, prose autobiography,...

This book links caste and gender to the social production of motherhood. The author argues that in contradiction to the assumption that motherhood is a primarily female-centred and positive domain, subaltern agency produces it as malign, dangerous, malevolent and marginal. Highlighting the manner...

Based on a large number of interviews with women politicians of many generations and women who have entered the three-tier Panchayati Raj institutions since the mid-1990s in Kerala, this book tries to initiate fresh debate on the impact of the large-scale induction of women into the institutions of local...

What is contemporary women’s writing in Hindi all about? How far does it reach beyond the commonly perceived limits of feminine experience or feminist ideology? From legendary writer Mannu Bhandari’s The Cremation Ground which satirises notions of eternal love, to Alpana Mishra’s superbly crafted...

Author-artist Manjula Padmanabhan returns with ten stories: five new, five old, some dark, some funny, all edgy. A vampire visits New Delhi, a space traveller returns to her ancestral home, a character from an ancient epic is transported into the future... To each story Padmanabhan brings an unexpected...