Saffron Republic

This volume examines the phenomenon of contemporary Hindu nationalism or 'new Hindutva' that is presently the dominant ideological and political-electoral formation in India. There is a rich body of work on Hindu nationalism, but its main focus is on an earlier moment of insurgent movement politics in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, new Hindutva is a governmental formation that converges with wider global currents and enjoys mainstream acceptance. To understand these new political forms and their implications for democratic futures, a fresh set of reflections is in order. This book approaches contemporary Hindutva as an example of a democratic authoritarianism or an authoritarian populism, a politics that simultaneously advances and violates ideas and practices of popular and constitutional democracy.

Approaches contemporary Hindutva as an example of a democratic authoritarianism or an authoritarian populism.

This book tells an ethnographic story of a secret literary culture that has recently emerged from its cocoon. Until 2012, Myanmar (also known as Burma) was ruled for fifty years by one of the most paranoid and repressive censorship regimes in history. The military junta enforced strict reading and writing restrictions in line with their ideology, feared writers' potential to trigger change, and did their best to keep Western books and influences out of the country. As part of an unexpected move toward democracy, the government has recently lifted the worst restrictions on reading and writing, giving rise to a new era in the country's literature and literary culture. While living in Myanmar in 2013, Ellen Wiles sought out the best of its contemporary writers and writing to begin uncovering the country's remarkable literary life and history. This book contains the experiences and recent output of nine Myanmar writers spanning three generations, featuring interviews and English-language translations of their work, along with political, legal, and artistic explorations. It includes men and women, fiction and poetry, reflecting the ripples of political and cultural change as they have moved across different groups and genres. A rare portrait of a people and place in transition, Wiles's work contributes both to the study of literature and culture in Myanmar and to the general study of art under censorship.

Explore the dramatic history of the world’s most expensive spice in Saffron: A Global History. Literally worth their weight in gold, sunset-red saffron threads are prized internationally. Saffron can be found in cave art in Mesopotamia, in the frescoes of ancient Santorini, in the dyed wrappings of Egyptian mummies, in the saffron-hued robes of Buddhist monks, and in unmistakable dishes around the world. It has been the catalyst for trade wars as well as smuggling schemes and used in medicine and cosmetics. Complete with delicious recipes and surprising anecdotes, this book traces the many paths taken by saffron, revealing the allure of a spice sought globally by merchants, chefs, artists, scientists, clerics, traders, warriors, and black-market smugglers.

In The Unfinished Quest, leading international relations and South Asia scholar T.V. Paul charts India's cumbersome path toward higher regional and global status, covering both the successes and failures it has experienced since the modern nation's founding in 1947. Paul focuses on the key motivations driving Indian leaders to enhance India's global status and power, but also on the many constraints that have hindered its progress. Paul's analysis of India's quest for status also sheds important light on the current geostrategic situation and serves as a new framework for understanding the China-India rivalry, as well as India's relative position in the broader Indo-Pacific theater.

This lyrical memoir evinces the author's passion for constructing an American life with the spiritual fervor and deeply aesthetic rituals that were part of her childhood in Iran. Asayesh, who immigrated to North Carolina as a girl, writes too of her struggle to arrive at an acceptable sexuality in the face of parental panic, and tells of her frustration, during later trips to post-Shah Iran, with "the sisters," the Ayatollah's ubiquitous enforcers of female modesty.

Defying the dire predictions that attended its birth as an independent nation-state in 1947, the Indian republic is more than seventy-five years old. And yet, it is a place where criticisms of actually existing democracy are intense and strident. In recent years, the trope of victimized people suffering at the hands of a predatory elite and political dysfunction has reaped rewards. The populist language of redemptive outsiders pledging to combat a corrupt system has been harnessed in successful electoral campaigns, like the majoritarian regime of Narendra Modi. Tracking the shift from postcolonial nation-building to democracy-rebuilding, Srirupa Roy shows how the political outsider came to be a valorized figure of late-twentieth century Indian democracy, tasked with the urgent mission of curing a broken democratic system—what Roy terms "curative democracy." Drawing attention to an ambivalent political field that folds together authoritarian and democratic forms and ideas, Roy argues that the long 1970s were a crucial turning point in Indian politics, when democracy was suspended by the declaration of a national emergency and then subsequently restored. By tracing the crooked line that connects the ideals of curative democracy and the political outsider to the populist antipolitics and strongman authoritarian rule in present times, this book revisits democracy from India, and asks what the Indian experience tells us about the trajectory of global democratic politics.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian history and popular culture. It examines partition's impact on cultural production, based on hard to access archives and collections situated in India, Pakistan, United Kingdom and the United States.

It highlights shifts over two centuries as the geopolitical context has transitioned from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana.