Zubaan Books

Last updated

Zubaan Books
Zubaan logo.jpg
Parent company Kali for Women
StatusActive
Founded2003
Founder Urvashi Butalia
Country of originFlag of India.svg  India
Distribution Penguin Random House India (India trade)
Cambridge University Press (India academic)
University of Chicago Press (international print)
Diversion Books (international e-books) [1]
Nonfiction topicsconflict studies, health, human rights, gender justice, history, cultural studies, and feminist and queer theory
Fiction genres Many
Imprints Many
Official website www.zubaanbooks.com

Zubaan Books is India's second feminist publishing house, set up in the year 2004. [2] [3] [4] It is based in New Delhi and publishes fiction, nonfiction, academic & children's books for, by + about women in South Asia. [5] It was founded by Urvashi Butalia and is an imprint of Kali for Women. [6]

Contents

History

In 1984, Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon founded Kali for Women, India's first feminist publishing house. Its objectives were to publish quality work which meet international standards. Over the years it has become an important publishing house nationally and internationally. [4] As a successor to Kali for Women, Urvashi Butalia founded Zubaan in 2004.[ citation needed ] In 2011, Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon were jointly conferred the Padma Shri award, for their contribution to the nation by Government of India. [7]

In 2020, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Zubaan worked to create PDFs of their entire collection, opening their ebookstore in August 2020. [8] They organised meetings and discussions on Zoom, including sessions on the impact of COVID-19. [8] They also had virtual photo exhibitions, writing workshops, and more. [8]

Meaning of Zubaan

The word 'Zubaan' comes from Hindustani and means, literally, tongue, but it has many other meanings, such as voice, language, speech and dialect. [9]

Genres and imprints

Zubaan has a considerable list of academic books examining issues of gender. It has a growing list of autobiographies of women, the best known of which is A Life Less Ordinary by Baby Halder. As part of its initiative to publish broadbased popular books, Zubaan regularly publishes fiction by women writers. Genres range from literary fiction to science fiction to speculative fiction. Under the imprint of Young Zubaan, there is also a growing list of fiction for the age group 6 to 18 including books like Riddle of the Seventh Stone. [3]

Zubaan also publishes general books: fiction as well as non-fiction that focuses on themes such as conflict studies, health, human rights, gender justice, history, cultural studies, and feminist and queer theory. [5]

The publishing house has also made efforts to promote writings from women authors from the Northeast region of India, for example, the anthology, Centrepiece: New Writing and Art from Northeast India, which features 21 artists and writers within the Northeast region.

Authors

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miranda House</span> Constituent college for women at the University of Delhi in India

Miranda House is a constituent college for women at the University of Delhi in India. Established in 1948, it is one of the top ranked colleges of the country and ranked as number 1 for consecutively seven years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Urvashi Butalia</span> Indian feminist and historian

Urvashi Butalia is an Indian feminist writer, publisher and activist. She is known for her work in the women's movement of India, as well as for authoring books such as The Other Side of Silence: Voices from and the Partition of India and Speaking Peace: Women's Voices from Kashmir.

Manjula Padmanabhan is an Indian playwright, journalist, comic strip artist, and children's book author. Her works explore science, technology, gender, and international inequalities.

Baby Halder is an Indian author. Her best known work is her autobiography Aalo Aandhari (2002) which describes her harsh life growing up as a domestic worker, later translated into 21 languages, including 13 foreign languages.

Kali for Women was a start-up feminist publisher in India. Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon set up Kali for Women in 1984, arguably the first Indian publishing house dedicated to publishing on and for women. When they decided to take this step, Butalia had worked with Oxford University Press and Zed Books in Delhi, while Ritu Menon was a scholar. They started with very little capital but with an urgent sense that they had to make Indian women's voices heard, through academic publishing and activist works, translation and fiction. They were followed by other Indian presses concerned with gender and social issues, such as Bhatkal and Sen who publish the imprints Stree and Samya and Tulika Books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meena Kandasamy</span> Indian poet, fiction writer, translator and activist

Ilavenil Meena Kandasamy is an Indian poet, fiction writer, translator and activist from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Temsüla Ao</span> Indian writer (1945–2022)

Temsüla Ao was an Indian poet, fiction writer, and ethnographer. She was a professor of English at North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) from where she retired in 2010. She served as the director of the North East Zone Cultural Centre between 1992 and 1997 on deputation from NEHU. She was awarded the Padma Shri award for her contribution to literature and education. Her book Laburnum For My Head received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in the short story category. Her works have been translated into Assamese, Bengali, French, German, Hindi, and Kannada.

Anil Menon is an Indian writer of speculative fiction, as well as a computer scientist with a Ph.D. from Syracuse University, who has authored research papers and edited books on Evolutionary Algorithms. His research addressed the mathematical foundations of replicator systems, majorization, and reconstruction of probabilistic databases, in collaboration with professors Kishan Mehrotra, Chilukuri Mohan, and Sanjay Ranka. After working for several years as a computer scientist, he started to write fiction. His short stories and reviews have appeared in the anthology series Exotic Gothic, Strange Horizons, Interzone, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Chiaroscuro, Sybil's Garage, Apex Digest, and others.

Ritu Menon is an Indian feminist, writer and publisher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. Devika</span> Indian historian (born 1968)

Jayakumari Devika is a Malayali historian, feminist, social critic and academician from Kerala. She currently researches and teaches at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram as a Professor. She has authored several books and articles on gender relations in early Kerala society. She is bilingual and has translated both fiction and non-fiction books between Malayalam and English. She also writes on gender, politics, social reforms and development in Kerala on publications like Kafila, Economic and Political Weekly and The Wire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neha Dixit</span> Indian journalist and author

Neha Dixit is an Indian freelance journalist, covering politics, gender and social justice. She is a visiting faculty at Ashoka University and has been awarded with the Chameli Devi Jain Award (2016) as well as CPJ International Press Freedom Award (2019).

Tulika Books is a New Delhi–based independent publisher of scholarly and academic books in the humanities and social sciences, with a "broadly left perspective." The Chennai-based Tulika Publishers is a sister company of Tulika Books.

Aalo Aandhari is the autobiography of Baby Halder, a domestic worker who battled poverty, hardship, violence and after a lot of struggle finally managed to make a name for herself as a writer. The book traces Baby's difficult life since she was abandoned by her mother and left with a cruel, abusive father at a very young age. Married at twelve to an abusive man twice her age and a mother at fourteen, her life was marked by overwhelming challenges. Exhausted and desperate, she fled with her three children to Delhi, to work as a maid in some of the city's wealthiest homes. Expected to serve her employers' every demand, she faced a staggering workload that often left her no time to care for her own children.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Uma Chakravarti</span> Indian historian and filmmaker

Uma Chakravarti is an Indian historian and filmmaker. Beginning in the 1980s, Chakravarti wrote extensively on Indian history highlighting issues relating to gender, caste, and class, publishing seven books over the course of her career. Her body of work mostly focused on the history of Buddhism, and that of ancient and 19th century India.

Towards Equality was the title of the report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (1974–1975). This 1974 document is said to lay the foundation of women's movement in independent India, highlighting discriminatory sociocultural practices, political and economic processes. The findings of the report reopened the women's question for government, academia and women's organisation. Its authors included Vina Mazumdar and Lotika Sarkar, who later founded the Centre for Women’s Development Studies in Delhi.

Wajida Tabassum was an Indian writer of fiction, verses and songs in the Urdu language. She wrote 27 books. Some of her stories have been made into movies and Indian television serials. Her controversial 1975 story titled "Utran" was made into a popular soap opera on Indian television in 1988. "Utran" was reprinted in English translation as part of an anthology of 20 short stories titled Such Devoted Sisters in 1994, and from there was made into a movie in 1996 under the title Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, with a script by Mira Nair and Helena Kriel.

Priya Sarukkai Chabria is an Indian poet, translator and novelist writing in English, and a curator. She has written four poetry collections, two speculative fiction novels, translations from Classical Tamil, literary nonfiction, and a novel. She has edited two poetry anthologies. She is also founding editor of Poetry at Sangam, an Indian online literary journal of poetry.

The Kolkata Partition Museum is an initiative dedicated to documenting the Partition of India from the Bengal perspective. Dissimilar to the Punjabi context, the Bengal province had been divided twice: once in 1905, and then in 1947. The aftermath of the second partition, as recorded by many historians, unfolded distinctly in postcolonial Bengal vis-à-vis Punjab. Not only was the impact long-drawn and can be witnessed even 75 years after the Partition, its affect can also be seen in the neighbouring states of Bengal and the rest of the country owing to refugee resettlements spread out to as far away states such as Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh. The idea behind the Kolkata Partition Museum is to preserve and present the vanishing memories of partition, to emphasise both the "rupture and continuities between West Bengal and Bangladesh – in terms of language and literature, food, fabric, and the performing arts – and to encourage collaboration between them." The museum aims "to do so by involving public participation in its programs and gearing all its activities in a way that makes it more accessible and interesting to the public at large."

References

  1. "Distribution | Zubaan" . Retrieved 12 February 2018.
  2. Smruti Koppikar (16 August 2013). "Noted feminist to step down as director of Zubaa". Hindustan Times. Archived from the original on 16 August 2013. Retrieved 20 October 2014.
  3. 1 2 Ghoshal, Somak (20 January 2019). "Urvashi Butalia | I want to prove that feminist publishing can survive commercially". Live Mint.
  4. 1 2 "A Note from Zubaan Books". sacw.net. Retrieved 20 October 2014.
  5. 1 2 "World Book Day: Here Are Five Independent Publishers Making A Mark In India". Outlook India. Retrieved 25 October 2023.
  6. Bahuguna, Urvashi (22 July 2017). "What winning the Goethe Medal means for feminist publisher Urvashi Butalia". Scroll.in. Retrieved 26 October 2023.
  7. "Padma Awards Announced" (Press release). Ministry of Home Affairs. 25 January 2011. Retrieved 16 August 2013.
  8. 1 2 3 Zubaan, Urvashi Butalia and Team. "2021, The Year That Was: How Zubaan Books learnt to get back on its feet". thepunchmagazine.com/. Retrieved 25 October 2023.
  9. "ज़बान", Wiktionary, the free dictionary, 19 August 2023, retrieved 25 October 2023
  10. Datta, Sudipta (21 July 2023). "Interview with Anungla Zoe Longkumer on editing The Many That I Am an anthology on Nagaland". The Hindu. ISSN   0971-751X . Retrieved 26 September 2023.