Manohar Publishers and Distributors

30 September, 2012

Divorce and Remarriage among Muslims in India

By- Imtiaz Ahmad (ed)

Divorce is usually studied in terms of two distinct perspectives. One focuses on the procedure laid down for giving the seal of final authority to a divorce. The other explores the processes that are set in motion once the stability of a marriage is threatened. The latter perspective does not see divorce in isolation but treats it in the wider context of social structure.

When divorce in Muslim communities is discussed, the tendency quite often is to place theology and law at the centre. This book recognizes that divorce in Muslim communities entails substantial theological and legal dimensions, but takes as its point of departure the view that it is only by placing divorce in the social and cultural context that meaningful conclusions can be arrived at. It examines, in the light of empirical evidence, the incidence of divorce and separation, the social and other causes due to which divorce and separation takes place, and the position of divorced women in society as well as their prospects of remarriage. In the process substantial methodological and theoretical questions relevant to the study of divorce as a social phenomenon are raised.

The book has an immediate practical aim as well. Muslim law of divorce, particularly the provision of triple divorce, which vests a unilateral right in the husband to pronounce a summary divorce upon his wife, has been the subject of considerable controversy. Essentially, the papers brought together in this book are sociological analyses of divorce and remarriage among Muslims in India and the data thrown up as part of these analyses should clear some points in the controversy.

Imtiaz Ahmad is former Professor of Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

ISBN 81-7304-493-7 2003 436p. Rs.850/Pounds 60

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Delhi Dialogue III: Beyond the First Twenty Years of India-ASEAN Engagement

By- S.T. Devare and Vibhanshu Shekhar (eds.)

This volume offers a comprehensive account of India-ASEAN Relations with a roadmap for the future, involving both practitioners as well as the larger academic community. Moreover, it provides a fresh insight into the intent and strategies of the Indian government in developing relations with its Southeast Asian neighbourhoods. This volume is a reservoir of information on the evolution and growth of India’s Look East policy and a sincere effort to reach out to the wider national and international relationship of India-ASEAN comprehensive engagement.

Sudhir T. Devare is the Director General, Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi, one of the oldest think-tanks in India. He served for 37 years in the Indian Foreign Service and was India’s Ambassador to South Korea, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia and Indonesia. He has authored and edited books on India and Southeast Asia, and written on various aspects of Indian diplomacy and regional affairs in the Asia-Pacific.

Vibhanshu Shekhar is Research Fellow, Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi. In addition to contribution to national and international academic journals.

ISBN 978-81-7304-962-0 2012 174p. Rs.1500/Pounds 45

28 September, 2012

Current Studies on Indus Valley Civilization (Vol. IX)

By- Toshiki Osada and Hitoshi Endo (eds.)

This book contains papers concerning several animals, i.e. crocodile, ass and unicorn written by the Finnish eminent scholar on Indus script, Professor Asko Parpola and his colleague in Helsinki University, Professor Juha Janhunen who has specialized on the Mongolic, Tugusic and Turkic languages widely spoken in Eurasia. These animals’ motifs are found not only in the Indus seals but also in the several mythological literatures from Eurasia, including India.

Another contributor is Professor Ajithprasad of Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, Gujarat. His paper deals with issues related to the early Chalcolithic regional tradition of north Gujarat in western India.

Toshiki Osada is a Professor at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), Kyoto and the leader of Indus Project. He has conducted extensive field research on the language and culture of Munda since 1984. He edited the book titled Indus Civilization: Text and Context Vol. 1 (2006) and Vol. 2 (2009), and edited with Dr. Uesugi the RIHN-Manohar Indus Project series titled Current Studies on the Indus Civilization.

Hitoshi Endo is a researcher scholar at the RIHN. He has carried extensive fieldworks at several archaeological sites in Egypt, Mesopotamia and around the Indus.

ISBN 978-81-7304-948-4 2012 278p. Rs.1150/Pounds 70

Buddhists in India Today: Descriptions, Pictures and Documents

By- Detlef Kantowsky

Detlef Kantowsky’s Buddhisten in Indien heute (1999) brought to a German audience new material, including many photographs and documents, on six facets of Buddhists’ life in India today. This English translation by Hans-Georg Tuerstig will bring Kantowsky’s innovative study to an even wider audience. He has examined the literature on the New Buddhists, converts in the wake of Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism in 1956, and also studied the All India Bhikkhu Sangha, the organization of monks chiefly from that conversion. The efforts of the Sangha as documented in their conferences are the new material in the literature on the Ambedkar movement.

The Maha Bodhi Society chapter also contains an unusual document, a letter from the founder, Anagarika Dharmapala, and the chapter on Bodh Gaya introduces three maps from very different perspectives. The central meaning of Nagpur to the Ambedkar movement is brought out and the Indian wing of the British Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, the TBMSG, is analysed. The Life of S.N. Goenka, who brought Vipassana meditation back to India, and his establishment, Dhammagiri, brings the book to the close.

Dr Kantowsky examines these facets of Buddhists today in a very personal way, including his opinions as well as the useful photographs and documents he has discovered in his journey among Buddhists. He has allowed Eleanor Zelliot to add her comments, sometimes contradictory, in a chapter at the end of the volume to which he replies in a Postscript. The result is a stimulating account of a living religion.

Dr D. Kantowsky, born in Berlin in 1936, retired as Professor of Sociology from the University of Konstanz (Germany) in 1999. He pursued postgraduate studies at Banaras Hindu University from 1964 to 1967 and spent more than a year in a village of Varanasi district. He has maintained close research contacts with the region ever since, and is founder-editor (1990) of a series of publications on ‘Buddhist Modernism’ especially in the West.

Professor emerita of History of Carleton College, Eleanor Zelliot has been visiting India for half a century. Since 1963 she has done research on and written about the Ambedkar movement and all its facets. She has also written on Maharashtrian intellectual history and the medieval bhakti movement.

ISBN 81-7304-511-9 2003 238p. Rs.500/Pounds 40

Beyond The Rhetoric: Vol. II: The Economics of India’s Look East Policy

By- Frédéric Grare and Amitabh Mattoo (eds)

Published in Association with

Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi

This volume is part of a research programme on ‘India’s Foreign Policy at the Turn of the Millennium: Forging New Partnerships in South-East Asia’. As the strategic and security issues have been addressed in the earlier volume, the present volume deals exclusively with economic issues. It comprises eight contributions, and is the result of a second workshop organized in New Delhi in April 2001.

In this connection the authors examine the potential for increased economic relations between India and ASEAN, as well as the manner in which the structural problems of the Indian economy could undermine these relations. The various essays also seek to draw some lessons for India from the Asian financial crisis.

With an market around 500 million people and a combined gross domestic product of US $800 billion, ASEAN, one of the most dynamic groups of nations in the world economy, was also perceived as a zone of economic opportunity for India. Starting from a very low level, trade and investments between the two partners developed rapidly. However, they remain even today far below their full potential. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 is only a partial explanation for the unrealized and untapped potential. Although improving at remarkable pace, India’s attractiveness remains limited while its economy is still not export driven. These are some of the pivotal issues addressed in this present volume.

Frédéric Grare is presently Cultural Counsellor, Embassy of France in Pakistan. Earlier he was Director of the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi, and worked for the Programme for Strategic and International Security Studies in Geneva.

Amitabh Mattoo is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Jammu. He was Professor of International Relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Director of the Core Group for the Study of National Security at JNU. Dr Mattoo is also a member of the National Security Advisory Board appointed by the Prime Minister of India. He has been a visiting Professor at Stanford University and the University of Notre Dame. Dr Matoo has published extensively, including seven books and more than forty articles in leading international journals.

ISBN 81-7304-490-2 2003 240p. Rs.180/Pounds 40

27 September, 2012

At the Confluence of Two Rivers: Muslims and Hindus in South India

By- Jackie Assayag

Relations between Hindus and Muslims are a matter of vital concern in contemporary India. Analysis of the relations between Islam and Hinduism, frequently reduced to stereotypes, is not always accompanied by a thorough consideration of the complexity of the mutual relations of attraction and repulsion which ‘the people of the Book’ and various Hindu castes have maintained for more than a thousand years.

Having evoked the historical and social circumstances of the implantation of Islam in South Asia, the author presents the situation of Muslims in Karnataka, where the dynamics of the cultural forms of pair alterity/identity has seldom been studied. In the framework of an anthropological investigation conducted in the region over a period of several years, the complexity of interactions between Hindus and Muslims fully emerges. Their relations are explored in the village and in the urban milleu, among saints cum-healers or during ceremonies of fakirs, across hybrid cults or within the individual community, in daily life as well as on the occasion of festivals. Finally, the socio-historical study of the rise to prominence of the inter-communitarian conflict in a town of average size reveals how the demarcation of new boundaries, which are nevertheless secular, today heightens a communitarian exclusivism which extends to the core of collective memories. Thus, local knowledge casts light on the destiny of the subcontinent, at the same time as it offers possibilities of comparison.

Jackie Assayag is Director of Research at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) and affiliated to EHESS, Paris. He has worked extensively on anthropology, sociology and politics in modern India.

ISBN 81-7304-512-7 2003 314p. Rs.650/Pounds 50

Asia Annual 2010: Nationhood and Identity Movements in Asia: Colonial and Post-colonial Times

By- Swarupa Gupta (ed)

This volume tells a new story of Asian nationalisms, moving beyond stereotypical representations of Asia as the exoticized/subjugated ‘other’ of Orientalism. It focuses on the interface between Asian forms of nationhood and identity-movements. Dispensing with Western prisms of looking at colonial/Asian nationalisms, it rethinks the relation between the West and the rest, by returning agency to Asians. Using a multidisciplinary methodology, this volume tracks constellations of unity predating the colonial modern, and sees how these operate within spirals of continuity through change. It traces and compares hitherto unexplored nationalist experiences in West, Central, South, South East and East Asia, gathered under the rubric of an internally-differentiated model of Asian nationalism. This moves beyond sectional micro-studies, connecting intra-regional, inter-regional and transnational/international identities in Asia. Seeing how pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial identities meld in specific contexts, this volume contains original thematic essays which fall into categories of: (1) Nationhood, Place and History; (2) Nationalism and State-Building; (3) Cultural Nationalism and Linguistic Identity; (4) Nationalisms in Eurasia; (5) Transnational Identities; and (6) Gender and Identity-Movements. What emerges is no single, uniform model of Asian nationalism, but different (from Western/European) forms of nationhood. Multiple pathways lead to discoveries of non-Western Asian experiences of nationhood through insiders’ narratives (intra-Asian voices). These make it possible to dream of a new Asia which avoids the snare of post-colonial inevitabilities of fragmentation, fundamentalisms and core-periphery problems. Arguing that the continuation of the colonial into the post-colonial can have positive possibilities, shaping new policies, spatialities, intercultural dialogue/cooperation, and economic/material connections, this volume shows how Asia emerges as a key-player in the history and contemporaneity of nationalism.

Swarupa Gupta, Ph D. (SOAS, London, 2004) is a Fellow at Maulana Azad Inst. Of Asian Studies (Ministry of Culture, Government of India) and Guest Faculty Member, Department of History, Presidency University, Calcutta

ISBN 978-81-7304-960-6 2012 366p. Rs.1150/Pounds 65