Manohar Publishers and Distributors

18 September, 2012

Tribal Crop-Livestock Systems in South-East India

Das Kornel

The book, Tribal Crop-Livestock Systems in South-East India, as the title implies describes the related practices followed in undivided Koraput district, in Orissa. There are 51 different communities who live here. They survive largely on marginal farming and animal husbandry.

The study covers communities living in different territories, hills and plains, some very primitive and some slightly advanced. The tribal groups studied are Bhattra, Kondh, Bondo, Dongria Kondh, Koya, Sabara, Bodo Poraja, Sano Poraja and Bhumia. A short enthnographic note and agriculture practices of each of these tribes has also been included. The magico-religious rites associated with agriculture, as well as the tribal cooperative agriculture labour, where still it exists, have been described.

The tribal crop-livestock farming system has been classified and described under sections, such as Backyard Farming System, Life Support Crop Farming System, Scarcity Period and Food Resources, Famine Saviour Plant System, Slash and Burn (Podu) Cultivation System and Mixed Species Animal Husbandry System. The successful intensive agriculture system
followed by Kondh under rain fed condition and the vegetable grower Mali under limited land and irrigation facilities have been described. The understanding of the existing system can be utilized to build sustainable food production system for those who are in a transitional stage of development.

The author has tried to present the book, as a practical manual through many interesting photographs and sketches and changes observed during the last three decades in agriculture and animal husbandry in the area has been documented carefully.

Das Kornel, presently Programme Coordinator to Indo-Swiss NRM Project in Orissa, had served for ten years as DANIDA Advisor for Integrated Livestock Development Project, working in tribal villages of Koraput district in Orissa.

ISBN 81-7304-668-9 2009 288p. Rs.725/ pounds 45

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17 September, 2012

Diplomatic Channels

By- Krishnan Srinivasan

Krishnan Srinivasan’s exceptionally frank memoir of his tenure as Foreign Secretary narrates his impressions of the personalities he encouraged, and of the topics in foreign policy that arose in the early 1990s and which would remain on India’s agenda for the subsequent two decades. The volume also offers an analysis of the origin, hey-day and decline of the practice of non-alignment, along with penetrating short takes on contemporary events from as far afield as in the United States of America in the West to Japan in the East; and for the general reader, reflections on caste, charity and competitiveness. The volume closes with a short story about the reminiscences of a colourful retired diplomat.

Krishnan Srinivasan is a diplomat and scholar, who served as Foreign Secretary and Commonwealth Deputy Secretary- General, and as a Fellow at Cambridge, Leiden and Uppsala. He is an Azad Fellow at the Institute of Asian Studies at Kolkata and an honorary professor at ASCI Hyderabad. This is his fifth book on world politics.

ISBN 978-81-7304-968-2 2012 264p. Rs.750/ pounds 45

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16 September, 2012

Trade and Traders in Early Indian Society

By- Ranabir Chakravarti

Situating trade and traders in the overall agrarian milieu of early India, this book highlights the diversities of merchants and market places, which are not viewed as an undifferentiated category. Chakravarti strongly argues against the perception of declining trade in India during the period AD 500-1000, and demonstrates the linkages of trade at the locality level during this period. The author questions the stereotyped account of early Indian commerce merely in terms of trade in luxuries and draws our attention to transactions in daily necessities. In-depth analysis of maritime commerce in the Bengal coast (c. 200 BC to AD 1300) is a major feature of the book.

The author also explores different, if not sometimes conflicting, attitudes of early Indian society to merchants, who were lauded as patrons to cultural activities and also branded as ‘open thieves’; yet the presence of non-indigenous merchants was always favoured. The settlements of foreign merchants especially in coastal tracts witnessed in different ages remarkable cultural synthesis and coexistence among diverse trading communities. Most significantly, the social and cultural accommodation of several non-indigenous minority groups is inseparably associated with the history of early Indian commerce. The author also examines the role of trading communities in the making of a plural and complex society like India.

Ranabir Chakravarti, Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi specializes in the social and economic history of early India, with a thrust particularly on the maritime trade of India in the Indian Ocean (c. AD 700-1500).

ISBN 81-7304-695-6 2007 300p. Rs.295/ pounds 19.99

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Tools and Ideas: The Beginnings of Local Industrialization in South Gujarat, 1970-2000

By- Hein Streefkerk

This book is a study of industrial development and labour relations in south Gujarat, western India. The empirical findings presented are based on long-term intensive anthropological fieldwork covering a period of 30 years, from 1970 to 2000.

The book provides an in-depth analysis of the different phases of industrialization in one of the most industrialized regions of India, covering both the period of planned development and that of the more recent phase of economic liberalization. It describes the transformation of a predominantly rural area into an industrial belt by giving a detailed account of the owners and workers in small scale factories. Economic success in this part of India has been accompanied by structural poverty among a large part of the population. Entrepreneurial spirit has gone together with a worsening of labour conditions, among them erosion of the rights of the labour force. In various respects, developments in south Gujarat, as described in this book, illustrates the contradictory model of development and deprivation in India.

Providing a long-term perspective on industrial development, this book will be essential reading for those engaged in the study of rural development, entrepreneurship, labour relations, and social change in India.

Until his retirement in 2004, Hein Streefkerk was Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

ISBN 81-7304-693-X 2006 188p. Rs.475/ pounds 35

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10 September, 2012

Time in India: Concepts and Practices

By- Angelika Malinar (ed.)

Thinking about notions of time in India still evokes images of circles and wheels symbolizing the fading away of collective and individual histories into the repetitious, cyclical movement of cosmic death and rebirth. However, time is perceived and reckoned in India in many different ways mirrored in a wide spectrum of philosophical and theological interpretations, methods of calculation, mythological narratives and ritual performances.

The richness of concepts and practices shows the concern for different dimensions of the experience of time in Indian cultures. The interplay between time as quality and quantity persists in many aspects of social life in India and has not been replaced by the advent of moden standardisations. Thus, ritual calendars and the concern for auspicious or inauspicious moments co-exist with other methods of time reckoning. Such as the digital clock or dynastic eras.

The essays collected in this volume highlight this multiplicity by studying both notions and practices of time in relation to the different contexts in which they are enacted. Scholars from different disciplines address these topics with regard to history, religion, methods of time-reckoning, festivals, life-cycle rituals kinship and modern historiograpy. The essays deal with both, pan-Indian notions and traditions located in Orissa. While there are some distinct features that relate to Orissa in particular, the regional and local traditions often draw on conceptural frameworks used in other parts of the subcontinent too.

Angelika Malinar is Lecturer in Hinduism at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research interest are Sanskrit Epics and Puranas. Hindu monasticism, Yoga and Samkhya.

ISBN 81-7304-713-8 2007 330p. Rs.825/ pounds 65

Art, Myths and Visual Culture of South Asia

By- Piotr Balcerowicz and Jerzy Malinowski (Eds.)

The study of South Asian Art requires not only expert knowledge of an art historian, but also sound philological proficiency and cultural competence of an Indologist. This calls for a close cooperation of specialists in both fields. The present volume of interdisciplinary character is just this: a solid exemplification of this vital principle.

The volume presents a collection of stimulating and inspiring papers linked by a common theme which incorporates various aspects of art, religion, myths, parables, symbols, literature and visual culture of the region of South Asia. The researchers’ interests go, in certain aspects, far beyond the geographical boundaries of South Asia and reach out to South-East Asia and even to Europe and Far East, revealing close cultural linkages and influences. The collection offers an entirely new material which explores a range of important motives and themes concerned with the art and visual culture of the region of South Asia, and partially with South-East Asia.

The authors examine a wide range of aspects of South Asian art, including sculpture, painting and decorative art, related to religious practice, temple consecration rituals, mythology and cult, eroticism, politics and power as well as the history and spread of artistic and mythological motives from South Asia to other parts of the world.

Piotr Balcerowicz, Professor of South Asian studies at the University of Warsaw, specializes in Indian philosophies, religions (including Jainism) and culture as well as in intercultural relations, conflict management and contemporary history of Asia (South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East).

Jerzy Malinowski is President of the Polish Institute of World Art Studies, Professor of history of art, head of the Departments of History of Modern and Oriental Art at the Nicolaus Copernicus University (Torun).

ISBN 978-81-7304-951-4 2011 320p. Rs.995/ pounds 70

09 September, 2012

The World of the Oraon: Their Symbols in Time and Space

By- Abhik Ghosh

In the early 1990s renowned anthropologist Sarat Chandra Roy published his ethnographies on Oraons, one of the numerous tribes in Chotanagpur region. Since then there has been no major work on this tribe, one of the largest in the areas.

The present work begins by using the symbol as a key ingredient in classifying and analyzing criteria used in the cognition of the Oraons. It goes into the detail of symbol formation to show how they are used in everyday contexts. Symbols include aspects of rituals, festivals and knowledge about other spheres of Oraon life. Since the raw material of anthropological studies comes ultimately from the individual, it is the latter who is the focus of this study.

The idea of time, space and boundaries help the Oraons to practice a large variety of medical practices for their curative and other health requirements. Further, the identity of the Oraons as one having a religion is also ambivalent, caused by inclusion-exclusion realities of various kinds operating on them. This makes them include converts to Christianity for certain reasons and also to resent and reject them for others. These ideas further enable them to politically create a pan-community identity as Jharkhandis, creating a demand for a space to be created called Jharkhand, having its own individual culture separate from other states around them. This imagined homeland became a reality recently with the creation of Jharkhand.

This work attempts a major stocktaking of the Oraons nearly a hundred year after Roy’s classic works appeared.

Abhik Ghosh is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Panjab University, Chandigarh. He holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Delhi. He has conducted fieldwork in the Chotanagpur region of Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh.

ISBN 81-7304-692-1 2006 364p. Rs.895/ pounds 55

MANOHAR PUBLISHERS & DISTRIBUTORS
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