Cartel Regulation/ Culinary Culture in Colonial India

Cartel Regulation: India in an International Perspective by Lovely Dasgupta from Cambridge University Press (India).

The recent decision of the Competition Commission of India imposing Rupees 60 billion penalties on the Cement cartels exemplifies the extent to which cartelization affects the Indian consumers. The book looks into the law, policy and practice that inform the anti-cartel provisions within the Indian Competition Act 2002.

In the process, it tries to establish that even though the anti-cartel provisions of the Indian Competition Act are ambiguous on their support or opposition to cartels, the primary purpose of the Act is protection of the interest of consumers. Therefore, the Competition Commission of India and the Central Government are expected to come up with such regulations and notifications that help in clarifying the scope of the anti-cartel provisions in the interest of consumers.

The book also compares the Indian regulator’s approach vis-à-vis the approach taken by the fair trade regulators in more advanced jurisdictions like the EU, US and UK. Importantly, it introduces readers to a developing country perspective by bringing forth the impact of cartels on bargaining power of both end consumer as well as intermediaries. It also provides workable solutions to enhance the efficacy of anti-cartel provisions.

In our Governance section, Rs. 995, in hardback, viii+375 pages, ISBN : 9789382993759

Culinary Culture in Colonial India: A Cosmopolitan Platter and the Middle-Class by Utsa Ray from  Cambridge University Press (India).

This book utilizes the idea of cuisine to understand the construction of the colonial middle-class in Bengal. Colonial transformation contextualized the cultural articulation of a new set of values, prejudices and tastes for the colonial middle-class. This middle-class ensured that cuisine was not commoditized and remained domestic and embedded in the material culture of Bengal. One of the chief arguments of this book is that the middle-class in colonial Bengal indigenized new culinary experiences that came with colonialism.

This process of indigenization was an aesthetic choice imbricated in the upper caste and patriarchal agenda of middle-class social reform. While enabling the middle-class to soak in new culinary pleasures, the process of indigenization also made possible certain social practices, including the imagination of the act of cooking as a classic feminine act and the domestic kitchen as a sacred space. In these acts of imagination, there were important elements of continuity from the pre-colonial times, especially evidenced in the reinstitution of caste-based norms of gastronomy.

The process of indigenizing new gastronomic practices was at the same time anti-colonial yet capitalist, cosmopolitan yet gendered and caste based. Thus, the idea of a refined taste that was so integrally associated with the formation of the middle class in colonial Bengal became a marker of standards of good and bad, acceptance of some things, rejection of some others and in Pierre Bourdieu’s apt phrase ‘disgust for other tastes.

In our History section, Rs. 695, in hardback, 284 pages, ISBN :9781107042810

Talking of Justice

Talking of Justice: Peoples Rights in Modern India by Leila Seth from Aleph Book Company.

In Talking of Justice, eminent jurist Leila Seth discusses several critical issues that she has engaged with in a legal career spanning over fifty years - violence against women, the nurture of the girl child, the need for a uniform civil code, women's rights, prisoners' rights, gender sensitization of the judiciary, and judicial administration, among others.

From the landmark Justice Verma Committee (2012-2013), on which she suggested amendments to the law as well as speedier trials and more effective punishment for all those accused of sexual assault and violence against women, to her experience as a member of the 15th Law Commission of India (1997-2000), to her appointment as the one member commission to enquire into the custodial death of Rajan Pillai (1995-1997), Leila Seth shares her insights on some of the most substantive and contentious matters facing the nation today

Keenly observed and elegantly argued, Talking of Justice goes deep into the laws of the land that need to be reviewed and revised, and offers suggestions for protecting the rights of the people, especially those who are marginalized and vulnerable.

Interesting Facts
Essays on key points of law and human rights on critic al issues of women's rights, children's rights, judicial administration, gender sensitization of the judiciary and more.
Written by eminent jurist whose career spans fifty years - as lawyer, judge and chief justice.
An easy-to-understand guide for every citizen of India who wants to know his or her rights.

In our Sociology section, Rs. 500, in hardback, 228 pages, ISBN : 9789382277965

The Night it Rained Guns

The Night it Rained Guns: Unravelling The Purulia Arms Group Conspiracy by Chandan Nandy from Rupa & Co.

On the night of 1718 December 1995, an aging Russian Antonov26 plane dropped three weaponsladen wooden pallets over Purulia, a backward, nondescript district in West Bengal. Four days later, the same plane was forcelanded at Mumbai's Santa Cruz airport, from where the mastermind of the operation, Kim Davy aka Niels Christian Nielsen, managed a daring escape. Who were the endusers of the weapons? Why were they airdropped over that particular region? Were they, as claimed later, meant for the shady cult, the Ananda Marga? Was it an effort to topple the CPI (M)ruled state government of West Bengal?

Or was it a conspiracy of international proportions, spanning continents and masterminded by a global superpower? As a reporter for The Telegraph and later, the Hindustan Times, Chandan Nandy broke several stories on this bizarre covert operation. Nineteen years after the sensational arms drop, in this book, he exposes the grave lapses committed by India's security agencies and pieces together the story of how the operation was planned and executed.

He brings to light as yet undisclosed evidence about the end users, whose identity still remains a mystery. Based on scores of interviews with R&AW, IB and CBI insiders and relying on classified documents, The Night it Rained Guns is a riveting exploration of India's greatest security breaches.


In our Fiction section, Rs. 295, in paperback, 298 pages, ISBN : 9788129134738

A Descriptive Study of Bengali Words

A Descriptive Study of Bengali Words by Niladri Sekhar Dash from Cambridge University Press (India).

The book is about the study of modern Bengali words based on the data obtained from a corpus of written texts. The corpus contains more than five million words of written text samples collected from hundred subject domains published within 1981 to 2000. The author analyses Bengali words from empirical point of view to understand their form and function in the language.

It also deals with the form and function of Bengali words in a systematic manner from the perspective of structure and use of words to understand how Bengali words are formed and used. The book provides, for the first time, some important findings about the general patterns of use of Bengali morpheme. It sheds new light on the form and function of morphemes in construction of words in the language.

Bengali single word units (both inflected and non-inflected) are analyzed from the perspective of their structure or surface forms. The book also provides a solid empirical support for developing tools and systems for morphological analysis, morphological generation, lexical decomposition and lexical composition for the language for machine learning and language teaching.

In our Linguistics section, Rs. 895, in hardback, 374 pages, ISBN :9781107064249

India 2050

India 2050: A Roadmap to Sustainable Prosperity by Ramgopal Agarwala from Sage India.

Can India achieve a high-income status by 2050 when it celebrates the centenary of its Republic? Will the nation eliminate absolute poverty and improve its human development record?

This book emphasizes the centrality of a trade-oriented services sector led by communication, business services, health, education, research, and innovations for achieving these growth targets. It also argues that inclusiveness, financial prudence, and low-carbon lifestyles are preconditions to long-term growth.

India can achieve such prosperity neither through the socialistic policies of 195080 nor through the neo-liberalistic policies since 1980. It needs to, instead, follow a middle-path approach closer to the systems adopted by Germany and the Nordic countries. It is within this framework that India will devise its independent development paradigm rooted in its own traditions and realities.

In our Development Studies section, Rs. 995, in hardback, 388 pages, ISBN : 9789351500438

Behind the Door

Behind the Door: The Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp Story by Mandy Wiener And Barry Bateman from Macmillan India.

Oscar Pistorius was the golden boy of South African sport and an inspiration to millions around the world - until the tragic shooting that left his model girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp dead and Pistorius on trial for murder. Behind The Door will be written by South African journalists Mandy Wiener and Barry Bateman. Published once the trial is concluded, it will explore the characters involved, relate the courtroom interactions and unpack the forensic and circumstantial evidence.

But more than that, this book seeks to go beyond the facts of the case in search of the wider context behind this shocking tragedy: the back-story of the police investigation, the nature of the South African criminal justice system, the culture of violence in South Africa and the need of society to create flawed heroes who are destined to fail.

In our Biography section, Rs. 599, in paperback, 300 pages, ISBN : 9781447267867

One Hundred Years of Servitude

One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Assam by Rana P. Behal from Tulika Books.

This book presents a hundred-year history of tea plantations in the Assam (Brahmaputra) Valley during British colonial rule in India. It explores a world where more than two million migrant labourers worked under conditions of indentured servitude in these tea plantations, producing tea for an increasingly profitable global market. The book is divided into six chapters. The first chapter traces the genesis and early development of the tea industry, from 1840 to the early 1860s. It examines the links between the colonial state and private British capital in fostering plantations in Assam. It also discusses the nature of the ‘tea mania’ and its consequences, which led to the emergence of the indenture labour system in Assam’s tea gardens.

In the second chapter, the focus is on the process of labour mobilization and the nature of labour relations in the tea plantations. It deals with the operational aspects of labour recruitment for the plantations, which involved the transportation and employment of migrant labourers, from the 1860s right up to1926 – when the indenture system was formally dismantled. The third chapter examines the power structure that ruled over the organization of production and labour relations within the plantations. This power structure operated at two levels: around the Indian Tea Association, the apex body of the tea industry, and the coercive authority exercised by planters.

The fifth chapter offers a critical analysis of the quantities of production, market prices, volume of exports and profitability, acreage expansion, labour employment and wage payments in the Assam Valley tea plantations from the 1870s to 1947. The final chapter tells the story of everyday labour life in the tea gardens, and of the resistance to the oppressive regime by ‘coolie’ labourers who had been coerced into generational servitude. It analyses the forms of their protests, and raises the question whether the transformation of these migrant agrarian communities working in conditions of unfree labour was proletarian in nature.
In our History section, Rs. 900, in hardback, xiv+390 pages, ISBN: 9789382381433