[Sarai Newsletter] April 2008

[The Sarai Programme]

*Newsletter-April 2008

[[CONTENTS]]

12th B.N.Ganguly Memorial Lecture at CSDS
Rethinking Collectivities: Institutional Innovations in Group Farming,
Community Forestry and Strategic Alliances
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Talk @ Sarai
"Koi Acchi Kitab":Transnational Markets and the Indian Publisher
By Rashmi Sadana** *
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Film @ Sarai
Myself Sandeep
A film by Uddhav Ghosh, Curated by Azam Q.
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Dear Readers,
April like March has a light schedule, but interesting enough for you to 
make your way to Sarai. We have the yearly B.N.Ganguly Memorial Lecture 
at CSDS on the human capabilities of bringing about environmental 
sustainability; a talk at Sarai which showcases the competitive 
relationship between transnational (English) and local (Hindi) 
publishers to attain legitimacy at the national level; and a film 
screening where humor is used to show the protagonist's trials and 
tribulations to reach the upper echelons of society.
Hope you will make yourself available for the events and access the 
particulars announced.

Best,
Mitoo Das
Programme Coordinator
Sarai, CSDS
Email me at: mitoo at sarai.net
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*12th B.N. Ganguly Memorial Lecture at CSDS
Rethinking Collectivities: Institutional Innovations in Group Farming,
Community Forestry and Strategic Alliances
Speaker: Professor Bina Agarwal
Chair: Professor Niraja Goyal Jayal
Date: 11th April 2008, Friday
Time: 5:30 pm
Venue: Seminar Room, CSDS*

*B.N. Ganguli Memorial Lectures *are instituted in memory of the 
distinguished economist-intellectual Professor B.N. Ganguli, former 
Chair CSDS Board of Governors. Earlier speakers in the series include 
Professors Charles Taylor, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Raimundo Panikkar, 
Bhikhu Parekh, Ernest Gellner, Ali Mazrui, Roberto Unger, Michael 
Walzer, John Keane, Amit Bhaduri and Giorgio Agamben.

*Bina Agarwal* is Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic 
Growth, Delhi University. She has written on a range of subjects: land, 
livelihoods and property rights; environment and development; the 
political economy of gender; poverty and inequality; law; and 
agriculture and technological change. Among her books are /Cold Hearths, 
Barren Slopes: The Woodfuel Crisis in the Third World/ and /A Field of 
One's Own: Gender andLand Rights in South Asia/. Her writings have been 
used extensively in framing policy by governments, NGOs and 
international agencies. She has participated in the formulation of 
several of India's Five Year Plans. She was conferred the Padma Shri in 
2008.

*Niraja Gopal Jayal* is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and 
Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Senior Fellow at the Nehru 
Memorial Museum and Library. She is the author of /Democracy and the 
State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India/ and 
/Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public 
Institutions.
/
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*Talk @ Sarai
"Koi Acchi Kitab": Transnational Markets and the Indian Publisher
Speaker: Rashmi Sadana
Date: 17th April 2008, Thursday
Time: 4:00 pm
Venue: Seminar Room, CSDS*

This paper begins with a provocation about the framing of Indian 
literature in the transnational marketplace, and then turns to a 
discussion of Ravi Dayal and the Hindi publishers of Ansari Road. I 
frame my interviews with literary publishers as an intellectual history 
of the present in order to ask : How did Hindi and English language 
publishers position themselves in the decades immediately after 
Independence? And, what might that tell us about the ways in which the 
two languages having been vying for national legitimacy ever since? The 
paper will juxtapose these transnational (London-New York) and local 
(Delhi) narratives of how to make "good books" in order to spark a 
larger discussion about how literature is produced, texts are 
interpreted and audiences cultivated.

*Rashmi Sadana* received her Ph.D. from the University of California, 
Berkeley in 2003 and, from 2003 till 2007, was a postdoctoral fellow and 
lecturer in Anthropology at Columbia University. She is now based in 
Delhi, completing a book manuscript about the intersection of language 
politics and Indian literary production and is co-editing /The Cambridge 
Companion to Modern Indian Culture/.

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*Film @ Sarai
/Myself Sandeep/
A film by Uddhav Ghosh
Length: 60 mins
Language: Hindi, English
Cast: Akhil Banga, Kartike Kapoor, Sakshi Gulati
Curated by: Azam Q
Date: 25th April 2008, Friday
Time: 4:30 pm
Venue: Seminar Room, CSDS*

The film is a light comedy focusing on the aspirations and values of the 
"middle class of contemporary Indian society" and the extent to which 
people are willing to go to, to achieve the same. The protagonist of the 
film is Sandeep Singh, hailing from the heartlands of Punjab, carrying 
with him the middle class value system. A Media manager in an 
advertising agency, he battles his life in the cut throat competition 
world which Delhi has to offer. He lives a nightmare in search of the 
"Great Indian Dream". He wants the big car, the house, the trophy 
wife...and yet has no means of achieving them. So he builds a web of 
lies around his life, to convince people that he's almost made it! That 
is...till he meets Tanya Batra, the woman of his dreams. She is elegant, 
beautiful and sophisticated...the only hitch is she's the boss' 
daughter. Sandeep realizes that he can make his dreams come true by 
marrying Tanya. But the class difference is such a deterrent that he 
almost gives up. And then he meets Prince, the black sheep of his 
family, chucked out by his father, down on his luck. But he has what 
Sandeep desires...Class. And therein starts the transformation, from 
Sandeep Singh to Sandy, from moaning over the girl of his dreams, to 
roaming hand in hand with her. Fate conspires to change Sandeep's life. 
But fate has a twisted sense of humor...

*Uddhav Ghosh* has a master's degree in Journalism and works in the 
advertising sector. Besides writing and making short films, he does 
quite a bit of travelling too.

*Azam Q* has done his graduation in Mass media from Jamia Millia 
Islamia. His passions are theatre and film making. He has been hugely 
involved in theatre and writing for the last 5 years. He now works as a 
theatre instructor for the blind at the National Association for the 
Blind, Haus Khas.

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