For our overseas readers: our English-language titles are available to order from our UK partner, Contextual Alternate. Do look at their e-store here:
contextualternate.com/#jup
We are delighted to announce that the iconic Mayday Bookstore in Delhi is stocking all our English-language titles. They are the first bookstore in Delhi who will be displaying our entire English-language catalogue.
Image courtesy LBB.
🧵Who is Francesca Orsini?
Many people here have expressed ignorance about her work. Lets change that.
Her google scholar profile mentions that she has 2500 academic citations.
That’s over two thousand published journal articles or academic books referencing her work.1/n
I have no views on this scholar Francesca Orsini. Had never heard of her. But those of us from a rooted background, who speak Hindi at home, read Hindi books as well, can only roll our eyes at this rather bizarre claim that 'few have shaped our understanding' of Hindi literary culture like a British SOAS Prof! 🙄
Unnamed GOI officials, on condition of “strict anonymity”, are suggesting Prof Francesca Orsini was blacklisted because she did ‘research’ which visiting India in a tourist visa.
Think about this for a second.
Orsini is a professor of Hindi, her most celebrated work is on the Hindi public sphere. So what these officials are suggesting is that if she comes to India on a tourist visa, she cannot speak to people in Hindi, cannot meet friends who are Hindi scholars, cannot watch a Hindi play or attend a mushaira or Kavi sammelan as all this would be considered “research”! Indian babudom is anti-intellectual at the best of times but in the hands of the ignorant politicians ruling over us these days the system has crossed all limits of rationality and basic common sense.
Few have shaped our understanding of Hindi and North Indian literary cultures like Francesca Orsini. To know she’s been denied entry into the country she’s written about with such love and rigour feels deeply wrong.
Francesca Orsini's scholarship has greatly enriched Hindi literary studies and history of the book in India. She is a renowned scholar published worldwide in English and in Hindi. She has just been denied entry into India, with no reason given.
Our warmest congratulations to Mridula Ghosh on being awarded the Order of Merit, 3rd class by President Zelenskyy on Ukraine’s Independence Day. Ghosh's Bengali translation of the poems of Taras Shevchenko, Ukaine's greatest poet, has been recently published by JUP.
Taras Shevchenko’s poetry was published in Bengali
For the first time in South Asia, a Bengali-language collection of Taras Shevchenko’s poetry has been published in India to mark his 211th anniversary.
Foreword by:
Historian Serhii Plokhii
Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko
Translator: Mridula Ghosh
Publisher: Jadavpur University Press
The book is illustrated with Shevchenko’s own paintings. Translator Mridula Ghosh expressed gratitude to the archives and digital resources of the Taras Shevchenko National Museum, stating, "Without access to them, my translation would not have been possible."
#TarasShevchenko#BengaliLiterature#UkraineIndia#ShevchenkoInBengali#UkrainianPoetry
📷: Facebook//Mridula Ghosh
Out now:
Envisioning the Indian City: Spaces of Encounter in Goa, Calcutta, Pondicherry, and Calcutta.
Edited by Supriya Chaudhuri, Nandini Das, Iain Jackson, and Iain H. Magedera
Hardback, pp. 452. Colour. INR 1500