Annie Zaidi

Prelude to a Riot

In this prize-winning exploration of the meaning of home, Annie Zaidi reflects on places, cultures and conflicts that shape identity.

A Memoir of Belonging and Dislocation

Bread, Cement, Cactus

Gulab

In this exploration of the meaning of home, Annie Zaidi reflects on the places in India from which she derives her sense of identity. She looks back on the now renamed city of her birth and the impossibility of belonging in the industrial township where she grew up. From her ancestral village, in a region notorious for its gangsters, to the mega-city where she now lives, Zaidi provides a nuanced perspective on forging a sense of belonging as a minority and a migrant in places where other communities consider you an outsider, and of the fragility of home left behind and changed beyond recognition. Zaidi is the 2019/ 2020 winner of the Nine Dots Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access.

Unbound is a collection of some of the most significant writing by Indian women over the past two thousand years. Divided into eleven sections, it encompasses writing on various aspects of life: spirituality, love, marriage, children, food, work, social and individual identity, battles, myths and fables, travel, and death. While many of the pieces are commentaries on the struggle that women undergo to overcome obstacles-social and political-all of them showcase the remarkable creative ability of their creators. The term 'women's writing' has often been used to limit and stereotype the work of women writers. But it also has a larger and more constructive meaning, and that is the sense in which it has been used to inform and describe the context of the book. As Annie Zaidi explains in her introduction: 'Women bring to their writing the truth of their bodies, and an enquiry into the different ways in which gender inequity shapes human experience.' Selected from hundreds of novels, memoirs, essays, short story collections and volumes of poetry that were either written in English or that have been translated into English, the pieces in this collection include the most distinctive and powerful voices from every era. There are verses from the Therigatha, written by Buddhist nuns (circa 300 BCE), and writing by poet-saints like Andal, Avvaiyar, Lal Ded, Mirabai; modern classics by writers like Ajeet Cour, Amrita Pritam, Arundhati Roy, Attia Hosian, Bama, Bulbul Sharma, Irawati Karve, Ismat Chughtai, Kamala Das, Krishna Sobti, Mahasweta Devi, Manju Kapur, Mannu Bhandari, Mrinal Pande, Nayantara Sahgal, Pinki Virani, Qurratulain Hyder, Rashid Jahan, Romila Thapar, Sarojini Naidu, Saudamini Devi, Shivani; and powerful new voices from our time like Arundhathi Subramaniam, Nilanjana Roy, Nivedita Menon. Profound, exhilarating, haunting, angry and meditative, Unbound is a collection that will shatter stereotypes about women's writing in India.

2,000 Years of Indian Women's Writing

Unbound

'Curious villagers stopped to stare at this shameless man and woman whose fingers were wound in each others' hair, and whose lips were stretched with impossible smiles, and faces were glowing like warm red wax in the late afternoon. But after a minute or two, they too walked away, because looking at the two any longer became unbearable.' A woman who won't let the shadow of death disrupt her love life, another who falls irrevocably in love with a dead police officer, a devoted wife who steps out twice a week for Narcotics Anonymous meetings, friends who should have been lovers, the woman who offers all her pent-up love to a railway announcer's voice ... Annie Zaidi's stories are at once warm and distant, violent and gentle - and, above all, untroubled by cynicism. This is a look at love, straight in the eye, to understand the alluring nature of the beast.

Love Story # 1 To 14

This is a look at love, straight in the eye, to understand the alluring nature of the beast. 'Curious villagers stopped to stare at this shameless man and woman whose fingers were wound in each other' hair, and whose lips were stretched with impossible smiles, and faces were glowing like warm red wax in the late afternoon. But after a minute or two, they too walked away, because looking at the two any longer became unbearable.' A woman who won't let the shadow of death disrupt her love life, another who falls irrevocably in love with a dead police officer, a devoted wife who steps out twice a week for Narcotics Anonymous meetings, friends who should have been lovers, the woman who offers all her pent-up love to a railway announcer's voice... Annie Zaidi's stories are at once warm and distant, violent and gentle - and, above all, untroubled by cynicism. this is a look at love, straight in the eye, to understand the alluring nature of the beast.

Annie Zaidi

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