American Anthropologist reviews our Celebrating Transgression book.

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Celebrating Transgression.

Amitava Kumar writes again

A new book - a novel! - by my good friend Amitava Kumar. Get it. Don't delay. See here for reviews and so forth.

Home Products
February 2007

A film director asks Binod, who is a journalist in Bombay, to produce a portrait of a murdered girl, a poet killed by a politician by whom she is pregnant. The director wants a script about small towns, desire, compromise and intrigue. Probably he wants masala. Subtle and articulate, his sensibility shaped by the classic films of a high-minded and austere boyhood, Binod undertakes to draught a Bollywood story. Unlike Binod is his cousin Rabinder, in Hajipur jail and full of plans. Arrested for turning his cybercafe into a porn parlour, Rabinder is a doer, with dreams of entering films.

Home Products is the story of Binod and Rabinder, brought up as brothers, one a man of hope, the other of appetite, whose ambitions unexpectedly intertwine. As it unfolds, a complex world comes to throbbing life, moving from Motihari where Binod was born, and George Orwell before him; to the Bombay of film, imitation and enterprise; via Delhi, its calm shattered by an assassination and riots.

In the broad sweep of this stunning first novel, acclaimed non-fiction writer Amitava Kumar charts a tale of sexual anxiety and anarchic impulses in a society steeped in crime. Detailing the search among its members for order and artistic brilliance, written with extraordinary inventiveness, Home Products brings aglow the struggle against small-town beginnings. It reminds us gently, and incisively, of our anxieties as middle-class individuals in a middle-class nation.

See his weblog here

Sacred Media Cow

From Somnath over on on "Sacred Media Cow" [SACREDMEDIACOW is an independent postgraduate collective on Indian media research and production at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London]:

Oh Calcutta

Published by Somnath Batabyal February 26th, 2007 in Som's Blog.

Folks, been away from active blogging for a while. Apologies. The PhD writing and thinking alongwith other activities been taking its toll. Hopefully back now.

My thesis concerns itself with two urban news centres, Calcutta (I still cant bear to do away with the colonial imageries) and Mumbai. Been reading a bit about both the cities lately and a book by John Hutnyk called The Rumour of Calcutta is a quite fascinating account of the city and deconstructs the myths around this “city of extremes” created through the views and notions of representations, from foreign travellers on missions of mercy staying at a cheap tourist lodge to travel guides, books and films.

I have also been logging how the media in recent times has been portraying the city. By all accounts, Calcutta has finally come of age. It is the city on the mend. The government is being applauded, the Chief Minister felicitated. Right wing Conservative Shekhar Gupta in Indian Express speaks and applauds the Indian Left and its erudition, the Politburo and its concerns. Sagarika Ghose cant stop gushing in her interview with Buddha Babu. Protests by “nay sayers” are brushed aside as the crumbling city wakes up to a new dawn. These are not my metaphors. So what’s going on.

It is very much like the errant child who has come home. Give it it’s just rewards, bring it into the fold, hand out the sops and make sure it feels welcome. The media house, the corporate entities cant stop falling over each other to felicitate Buddhadev Bhattacharya’s “coming to sense” wisdom and merging Calcutta with the other metros; long live the Left, so long as it can be managed.

Powell's Books - Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies by John Hutnyk

Powell's Books - Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies by John Hutnyk: "
Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies
by John Hutnyk
ISBN:0745322662 (More details...)
Available at:Quimby Warehouse
Synopses & Reviews
Book News Annotation:
To Hutnyk (anthropology and cultural studies, Goldsmiths College, UK), figures like James Clifford, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, and other theorists of 'cultural studies' have had a substantial impact recently with eclectic, but 'substantially misconstrued' versions of Marx. He offers a critique of these theorists, presents a relatively positive re-evaluation of Georges Batailles, and attempts to point the way towards a substantially expanded cultural studies that is able to take on such topics as geo-politics, theory, war, and capitalism. Distributed in the US by the U. of Michigan Press.
Annotation �2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)"

City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty

by Ananya Roy

Uni of Minnesota Press.

Roy she was paralysed by "Rumour", but went on to write her book anyway. Some pics too, and discussion of New Communism. "Roy shows how urban developmentalism, in its populist guise, reproduces the relations of masculinist patronage, and, in its entrepreneurial guise, seeks to reclaim a bourgeois Calcutta, gentlemanly in its nostalgias".
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