New books

9789380607313
Disciplined Natives: Race, Freedom and Confinement in Colonial India 
Satadru Sen
This volume examines three interrelated aspects of the history of British India: race, the disciplining institution, and attempts by the colonized to imagine states of freedom. They deal with sites as diverse as the prison, the family, the classroom, the playing field and children’s literature.
The included essays confront the ideological, social and political ramifications of the fact that even as metropolitan prisons and schools shifted their attention from the body of the inmate to the confined ‘soul’, colonial disciplinary institutions ensured that race was firmly attached to the body and its habits.
The author
Satadru Sen is Associate Professor of South Asian history at the City University of New York.


9789380607474
Desi Dreams: Indian Immigrant Women Build Lives Across Two Worlds
Ashidhara Das
Desi Dreams focuses on the construction of self and identity by Indian immigrant professional and semi-professional women who live and work in the US. Some of the major issues that this ethnographic study discusses are: What are the selves and identities of professional Indian women? How is the continuity of selves and identities accomplished
when these women find themselves constantly shuttling between the starkly different expectations of American society and workplace on one hand, and the Indian immigrant home and community on the other?
The focus in this anthropological fieldwork is on Indian immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area. They have often been defined as a model minority. Indian immigrant women who have achieved entry into the current technology based economy in the Silicon Valley value the capital-accumulation, status-transformation, socio-economic autonomy, and renegotiation of familial gender relations that are made possible by their employment. However, this quintessential American success story conceals the psychic costs of uneasy Americanization, long drawn out gender battles, and incessant cross-cultural journeys of selves and identities. The outcome is a diasporic identity through the recomposition of Indian culture in the diaspora and strengthening of transnational ties to India.
The author
Ashidhara Das earned her Ph.D. in Cultural  Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego, and has published articles in prestigious journals, such as the Journal of the Anthropological Survey of India.


9789380607382
Indian Diaspora in the Caribbean: History, Culture and Identity
Rattan Lal Hangloo
This collection of essays seeks to explore some aspects of the history of Indian emigration to the Caribbean, which is one of the most significant events in the history of Indian indentured migration that took place to different parts of the world during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Indians faced many hardships in the Caribbean during the initial stage of their migration. However, over the years, despite several adversities, Indians have become one of the most successful immigrant ethnic groups in the Caribbean. Indian Diaspora in the Caribbean: History, Culture and Identity studies key facets of this retention of the Indian ethos. While doing so, it also analyses notions of religiocultural transformation, identity reconstruction, political participation and transformations, as well as resistance to enslavement and other oppressions. The contributors to this volume, who are recognized scholars and academics in the field of Caribbean studies, also have the advantage of first-hand knowledge and the experience of being a part of the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean.
The Editor
Rattan Lal Hangloo is presently Head, Chair of Indian Studies at Tbilisi State University, Georgia, and Professor of History at Hyderabad Central University. Earlier he served Hyderabad Central University as Head, Department of History and also Chief Proctor.
Contributors
Radica Mahase l Sherry-Ann Singh l Brinsley Samaroo l Bridget Brereton l Benjie Mahabir l Nasser Mustapha l Ann Marie Bissessar l Shaheeda Hussain