HT PICKS: New reads for the lockdown - Hindustan Times
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HT PICKS: New reads for the lockdown

Hindustan Times | ByHT Team
Apr 07, 2020 07:45 PM IST

Beat that ennui with these interesting new releases: A book on six tribes of India, a controversial Bengali writer’s memoir of her early life, and a look at the relationship between India and Pakistan in the half decade immediately after independence

WHITE AS MILK AND RICE BY NIDHI DUGAR KUNDALIA

Bangladesh, India’s tribes, and the post-Partition relationship with Pakistan all feature on this week’s HT Picks.(HT Team)
Bangladesh, India’s tribes, and the post-Partition relationship with Pakistan all feature on this week’s HT Picks.(HT Team)

256pp, ₹399; Penguin
256pp, ₹399; Penguin

The Maria girls from Bastar practise sex as an institution before marriage, but with rules - one may not sleep with a partner more than three times; the Hallaki women from the Konkan coast sing throughout the day - in forests, fields, the market and at protests; the Kanjars have plundered, looted and killed generation after generation, and will show you how to roast a lizard when hungry. The original inhabitants of India, these Adivasis still live in forests and hills, with religious beliefs, traditions and rituals so far removed from the rest of the country that they represent an anthropological wealth of our heritage.
This book weaves together prose, oral narratives and Adivasi history to tell the stories of six remarkable tribes of India - reckoning with radical changes over the last century - as they were pulled apart and thrown together in ways none of them fathomed.*

Discover the thrill of cricket like never before, exclusively on HT. Explore now!

MY GIRLHOOD BY TASLIMA NASREEN

336pp, ₹599
336pp, ₹599

Set in the backdrop of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, this book recollects Taslima Nasrin’s early years. From her birth on a holy day to the dawn of womanhood at 14 to her earliest memories that alternate between scenes of violence, memories of her pious mother, the rise of religious fundamentalism, the trauma of molestation and the beginning of a journey that redefined her world, My Girlhood is a tour de force.*

ANIMOSITY AT BAY BY PALLAVI RAGHAVAN

260pp, ₹699; HarperCollins
260pp, ₹699; HarperCollins

In this groundbreaking book, Raghavan uses previously untapped archival sources to weave together new stories about the experiences of post-Partition state-making in South Asia. Through meticulous research, it challenges the existing wisdom about the preponderance of animosity and the rhetoric of war.
The book shows how amity and a spirit of cordiality governed relations between the states of India and Pakistan in the first five years after Partition. Arguing that a hitherto overlooked set of considerations have to be integrated more closely into the analysis of bilateral dialogue, this book analyses the developments leading to the No War correspondence between Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan, the signing of a ‘Minorities’ Pact between the two prime ministers, and the early stages of the Indus Waters negotiations, as well as exploring the calculations of Indian and Pakistani delegates at a series of interdominion conferences held in the years after Partition.
This book will be of interest to specialists in histories of diplomatic practice as well as a general audience in search of narratives of peace in the South Asia region.*

*All copy from book flap.

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