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Book Review
FROM THE BLURB
Hands of Hope — Visible Voices from the SEWA Movement: Sanjay Kumar; Pub. by SEWA Bharat, India in partnership with One World Action, London.
This book is a photographic journey through the lives of SEWA members across India. SEWA is not just an organisation but also a movement. In fact, it is a confluence of three movements: the labour movement, the cooperative movement, and the women’s movement. It is also a movement of self-employed workers, their own, home-grown movement with women as the leaders. These women are often not represented by traditional trade unions, and their methods of organisation cannot be employed in a sector in which the work and employees are not recognised. The SEWA movement is guided by Gandhian thinking in organising the poor, where self-employed women members contribute to social change in the country. SEWA Bharat is part of the growth of this movement. Through photographs and interviews, this book captures how women rely on and experience life through their toiling hands. The author also seeks to bring out the hope that they carry throughout their lives for their next generation. These women share their personal moments of joy, grief and struggle, and narrate how comfortably they manage their various roles within the household and at work. This book is their story, a tribute to their struggles and triumphs.
James Tod’s Rajasthan — The Historian and His Collections: Edited by Giles Tillotson; Marg Publications on behalf of the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Army & Navy Building, 3rd Floor, 148, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Mumbai-400001.
Rs. 2500.
Lieutenant Colonel James Tod served as the East India Company’s political agent to the Western Rajputana states in the early 19th century, and while working there he undertook extensive research on Rajput history and polity. The publication of his exhaustive Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829/32) makes him one of the most important British historians of India. He was later the librarian of the Royal Asiatic Society in London, and he gave the Society four large collections of manuscripts, coins, paintings and topographical and architectural drawings. This book explores not only his collections but also his work as an author, and the reception of his ideas by other scholars and writers. The chapters are all written by experts on Tod or on Rajasthani art and history. Each one explores one aspect of his collections or their broader contexts in Tod’s life and times.
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