#Publishing services India

[e-learningsoftware]

Computer-based Training (CBT) Uses, Meaning and Advantages

If you're a student, healthcare provider, technology expert, or a brave soldier, CBT can serve as your hidden tool for learning and improving your skills. It's like having an incredible learning toolkit that makes even the most challenging subjects simple and enjoyable to understand!

[bloseroseone]

How to Become a Book Editor

Ever wonder who crafts the novels we read into well-crafted works of art? That’s what editors of books do! They are essential to the publishing industry because they make sure that every book is readable, interesting, and free of errors. A career as a book editor can be ideal for you if you have an eye for detail and are passionate about reading. Now let’s explore the procedures you must follow in order to work as a book editor.

Understand the Role of a Book Editor

A book editor is responsible for reviewing and improving manuscripts. They work closely with authors to enhance the structure, content, and language of a book.

Their goal is to make the text more readable and engaging for the target audience. This involves correcting grammatical errors, ensuring consistency, and sometimes even restructuring parts of the manuscript.

Different Types of Book Editors

Developmental Editors

Developmental editors focus on the big picture of a manuscript, helping authors shape their stories and structure. They work on plot development, character arcs, pacing, and overall coherence.

Unlike other types of editors, developmental editors often engage with authors early in the writing process. Their goal is to ensure the book’s content is engaging and logically organized, making it a crucial step for any aspiring book editor aiming to master the craft.

Copy Editors

In the book editing process, copy editors are quite important. They make sure that the style and tone are consistent while concentrating on fixing spelling, grammatical, and punctuation mistakes.

Their meticulous attention to detail results in a polished and polished copy that is easier to read and understand. Copy editors improve the book’s overall quality and reader appeal by attending to these details. Learning the craft of copy editing is frequently the first step towards becoming a competent book editor.

Proofreaders

Proofreaders are a crucial type of book editor. Their primary role is to review the final draft of a manuscript for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and formatting errors.

Unlike other editors, proofreaders focus on the surface-level details to ensure the book is polished and error-free before publication. This meticulous attention to detail helps maintain the book’s professional quality and readability, making proofreaders an essential part of the book editing process....Continue reading

[beyondwordzlocalization]

How Do DTP Localization Services Prove To Be Beneficial For Modern Businesses?

Multilingual DTP services are slowly but surely becoming a mainstream localization service that small, medium and even multinational corporations are increasingly using to promote their interests as well as offerings.

This post in the following sections will try and enunciate all that one needs to know about DTP localization services.

Here goes.

So what exactly are the benefits of DTP localization services?

DTP localization services entail a bunch of real-world advantages. For instance, since DTP localization services are based on modern computerized tools, linguists proficient in DTP localization now have the artistic (and linguistic) freedom to bring their vision to fruition easily.

Then there is the fact that compared to DTP localization practices followed back in the day, modern-day DTP localization entails short turnaround times.

The third benefit of modern-day DTP localization service is that since the internet and many digital marketing tools are available to linguists specializing in DTP localization, the whole process of translation, adaptations and localization becomes pretty easy thanks to the easy availability of online elements and content add-ons.

Which problems can be addressed with multilingual DTP?

Multilingual desktop publishing services can be used to address issues like the ones mentioned below.

Often one might find that the font type they are planning to use doesn’t come with certain ‘special’ characters that will be used to properly translate the source content to the target language. In such cases, multilingual DTP can be used to mitigate the issue at the nick of time!

Translation is a pretty complex process. One of the most common issues in translating content from one language to the other is the expansion or contraction of translated content. Whichever may be the case, and whatever the target language is, professional multilingual DTP experts have the expertise to address this issue proficiently.

Which sectors of the corporate world rely on multilingual DTP?

Localization services in India or any part of the world can be used in almost all sectors of an economy. However, the sectors where multilingual DTP finds extensive application are as follows.

In the healthcare sector, multilingual DTP plays a pivotal role in ensuring designs of products, their documents and packaging for medications are not only localized but also creatively adapted in a manner that keeps the image of the brand intact all the while ensuring the product in question and the brand that has made the product gels with the linguistic and cultural preferences of the location where the product is being offered.

The consumer electronics sector is yet another giant consumer of multilingual DTP services. You see, in the consumer electronics sector, content was, is and always will be king. Even if a brand has made the best consumer electronic product, if the same is not being promoted using engaging digital (and offline) content then the brand and the product itself will simply vanish from the minds of the people that are being targeted. This is where multilingual DTP services come into the picture where engaging content is being constantly pumped into the physical and digital spaces simultaneously in a bid to generate hype for a brand and its products.

The manufacturers of heavy machinery use multilingual DTP in a bid to ensure that their products reach their global customers with detailed localized documents for installation and maintenance of the pieces of equipment.

Get high quality multilingual DTP services at BeyondWordz

BeyondWordz believes in the fact that linguistic services offered by humans are of higher quality compared to their AI-based counterparts. Although this is slowly becoming the age of AI, it is best to leave certain areas to human ingenuity and creativity. And one of those areas is multilingual localization services. If you have been searching for that ideal language service provider that has highly trained, experienced and certified linguists under its payroll who can render high quality multilingual DTP localization services then contact BeyondWordz. Furthermore, BeyondWordz has an impressive business record that spans more than a decade. On top of that, the agency has a pan-India presence, an impressive clientele, competitive tariffs and scalable service packages. To learn more, please contact the agency today.

[orientalsolutions]

Visit the Oriental Solutions blog page to explore a dynamic company dedicated to providing end-to-end solutions for information processing and document management needs

[ladylaviniya]

AVATAR: THE NEW MISSION MASTERLIST

Story Summary: After failing his mission to hunt down Jake Sully, Miles Quaritch is given a new mission. Let’s just say you’re not the most co-operative na’vi native and Quaritch loves to put you in your place.

Story Warnings: 18+ Dead Dove Do Not Eat, Non-Con, Dubious Consent, Manipulation, Age Gap, Colonisation, Bondage, Alien Sex, Pregnancy, Breeding Kink.

Pairing: Recom!Miles Quaritch X Na'vi Reader

Author Notes:

★This story has been published in the past on Tumblr on my old account @milknhonies-old-account since I have created a newer account I am reposting this story here.

★I would like to express the knowledge that I do not approve or perform of any of the actions the characters of this fanficition demonstrate.

★This story might be alarming and severely upsetting for people who have had experiences with rape, colonisation, abuse, traumatic births and mental manipulation.

★If you do not wish to see this content please block #ATNM (scroll and you'll find it is the first tag.)

★This story is not fit for every viewers eyes and it will be glorifying acts of trauma and characters that shouldn't be in reality.

★CHAPTER LIST★

★ Chapter 1 - Word Count: 3k

★ Chapter 2 - Word Count: 4k

★ Chapter 3 - Word Count: tba

★ Chapter 4 - Word Count: tba

★ Chapter 5 - Word Count: tba

★ Chapter 6 - Word Count: tba

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★ Chapter 10 - Word Count: tba

★HELPLINES★

If you are a victim of sexual abuse, assault or domestic violence or know someone who is please reach out to these links that share helpline services, phone numbers or emails. Consent and respect is important in every relationship whether between friends, family or even strangers. .

Australian Helpline Services

UK Helpline Services

American Helpline Services

India Helpline Services.

[marxism-transgenderism]

Reading academic histories of settler colonialism is often infuriating because so many scholars at best only pay lip service to the anti colonial movements that do most of the heavy lifting in theorizing settler colonialism.

Most simply cite Patrick Wolfe's 1999 book Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology as the origin of the term. Others take it back even further, noting Marx and Engels use of the term "the colonies proper" to distinguish settler colonies from colonies like India. Lorenzo Veracini, the current leading scholar on settler colonialism, cites the first instance of the term in Donald Denoon's 1983 book Settler Capitalism.

Yet the same year that Denoon published his book, the activist J. Sakai was writing a book that would come to be called Settlers for his comrades in the Black Liberation Army, which opens with: "The key to understanding Amerika is to see that it was a chain of European settler colonies that expanded into a settler empire."

Rather than citing Denoon or any other scholar, Sakai attributes his understanding of settler colonialism principally to his Palestinian comrades who shared their understanding of Israeli settler colonialism with him. Indeed, we can even see in documents by groups like the PFLP like the Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, Israel is regularly referred to as a "colonial-settler state."

There are plenty of other examples of revolutionary groups doing to legwork of theorizing settler colonialism long before any academic wrote a thesis on it. Yet within academia there is this chronic refusal to acknowledge non-academic work. Indeed it's no surprise most of these academics are settlers themselves or are white Europeans.

Thus, it becomes clear that's its not merely enough to learn about settler colonialism. No amount of book reading or thesis writing will end genocide, and indeed many of those authors and scholars can go there whole careers without ever working with or acknowledging those on the ground struggling against settler colonial states. As always, decolonization is not a metaphor. It is not simply a scholarly journal or academic handbook. It is a determination to completely upend the current order based on displacement and genocide, and academia will never be the vanguard of such a struggle.

[20kmemesunderthesea]

Captain Nemo, Freedom Fighter

There's a lot of historical and cultural significance in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea which is not widely known by modern audiences. Here some some facts I find very interesting:

-> In Verne’s original character notes, he was going to be a POLISH noble whose family was killed by Russians.

Verne’s publisher argued with him about that for a long time because of his large Russian fanbase. Verne reluctantly gave in, but eventually changed Nemo’s backstory to that of an Indian Prince whose family was killed by the British.

With that in mind, that makes the Soviet miniseries more interesting: A Polish revolutionary is actually mentioned by Captain Nemo in the second episode. Vladislav Dvorzhetsky, the actor portraying Nemo, was actually half-Polish himself!

-> Captain Nemo was written as a foil to Confederate Navy Captain Raphael Semmes.

Captain Raphael Semmes had portraits of General Robert E. Lee and the Confederate President Jefferson Davis on the cabin wall of the CSS Alabama, while Captain Nemo has portraits of Abraham Lincoln and the radical abolitionist John Brown in the cabin walls of the Nautilus.

Semmes was a supporter of slavery while Captain Nemo was an abolitionist.

Raphael Semmes stated that India should never be free from British rule,  while Captain Nemo was an Indian who fought to be free from British rule.

A list of more comparisons between Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" and Raphael Semmes' "Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States" can be found on Wikipedia.

Thus, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne was trying to point fingers at the cruelty of the British towards India, the Russians towards the Polish, AND Americans towards people of color.

There are many fascinating rabbit trails to explore in regards to Jules Verne's literary masterpiece. Here are some sources:

[migalloyuji]

Things I wanted to see in Sense8

1. Riley overcoming her trauma and experience motherhood with Will

2. Kala Rajan and Wolfgang living their best lives in India

3. Will getting his job and life back

4. Lito’s debut in Hollywood

5. Why was he making heart eyes at Hernando? (Blake)

6. More of Dani, Lito and Hernando overall

7. Nomi and Amanita living in Paris

8. What happened to Nomi and the organization that gave her the key to disappear? Did they never bother her again?

9. Coppheaus being an honest politician

10. Sun cleaning her name, sending her brother to jail

11. Sun and Mun training together

12. Sun reunion with her friends from jail

13. What really happened to Raul? Was he lobotomized? If he was, why was he able to move around and destroy Angelica’s investigation?

14. Lito giving clausure to Raul’s father and the rest of Raul’s family

15. More about Angelica

16. The Lacuna and Bhoddie

17. Whisper’s claustro, who were they? My personal theory is that whispers started to experiment on them

18. Someone from the Claustro giving both to a new claustro

19. Raul’s story being published, exposing the BPO and everybody involved

So please please please Netflix go bankrupt so another streaming service can buy the rights of this amazing story and the Wachowski sisters can give us more season, ten at least

[audible-smiles]

So, I think I may have accidentally found the worst book ever written by a human being.

I don't know if you guys have ever heard of Savitri Devi; she was a Hitler stan who moved from Greece to India, got really excited about "Aryan" racial mythology, changed her name, and tried to fuse Nazism with Hinduism. A lot of her ideology is patently absurd (e.g. Hitler is an avatar of Vishnu), but none of it is funny because she spent her entire life actively trying to build a coalition of the most violently racist people you can imagine. Hindutva paramilitary groups, American neo-Nazis, early ecofascists; you name them, she probably went to their meetings and wrote propaganda for them.

So, knowing this, it makes one feel particularly deranged to learn that she also wrote fiction about- and from the POV of- her many cats.

The book in question is called Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess, or The True Story of a "most objectionable Nazi" and half-a-dozen Cats.

Published in 1965, this text features a protagonist named "Heliodora", who Devi admits in the introduction is just her lightly fictionalized self-insert. In the beginning Heliodora heroically rescues a stray kitten and its mother, but then the narrative grinds to a halt to explain the weird racial theories that brought her to India, before it picks right back up with the cat fancying. Here is an excerpt that may convey a little of how jarring these transitions can be:

"An unexpected thought crossed Heliodora’s mind, like a flash of lightning: “Had I gone to Europe in 1939, or even in 1940, 1 should not have had this lovely creature, nor, in fact, any of these cats to which I have given a home. They probably all would have been dead, by now — would have died of misery, in some gutter, without love, poor beautiful felines!” And a strange question followed that thought: “Was it for them that I was fated to remain here?” She knew the thought was a nonsensical one and the question too. For of what account was the life and happiness of any creatures, nay, of any human beings, including her own, compared with the Service of the Aryan Reich and of the Cause of truth?

It is all. Fucking. Like This. There are grim descriptions of feline suffering contrasted with long, ecstatic descriptions of her cats learning to trust the only nice human in the world (her). There are passages on the virtue of vegetarianism and the evils of (especially Kosher) slaughterhouses. She thinks it's a great idea to do medical experiments on criminals rather than animals! She thinks kids who throw rocks at cats should have their hands cut off! She starts chapters with direct quotes from Mein Kampf! When her favorite cat runs away she writes the (fully imaginary) story of his adventures on the streets, including him having cat sex. Here is the cat sex:

"The coquettish she-cat jumped up and ran away, only to stop again some twenty yards further and again to roll in the grass, calling for love, — and again to ran away as soon as the lover was about to take her. At last, however, — after many an unsuccessful leap and further and further galloping in the moonshine, Long- whiskers overcame her faked resistance and possessed her. He forgot himself, and she — his black silky panther — forgot herself. Their individualities ceased for a while to exist, and in him, the eternal He-Cat, Creator and Lord of everything, and in her, the co-eternal, sphinx-like, dark Feline Mother, Lady of all Life, once more mingled their opposite polarities and took consciousness of their double Godhead, as they had been doing for millions and millions of years. And once more the divine spark — the Creative Lightning — flashed through their furry bodies, and the daily miracle took place: there was life in the female’s womb."

Sooooo......anyway...........the lost cat finds its way back to her, but has caught feline distemper and dies in her arms, but then he is REINCARNATED IN ENGLAND, as a kitten in a decent (white) home where his family loves him. Heliodora is coincidentally going back to Europe at this time (she lists her religion as "national socialist" on the travel paperwork), which means we get pages and pages of her obsessing over every 'misstep' in the war, and Germany's tragic loss, but more importantly, she meets a random cat and he is (unknown to her), the reincarnation of her beloved Long-whiskers, the Cat Who Fucked. She sees that he's well-fed and happy and is like "I finally understand why Hitler was so nice to the British; they treat cats well so I guess they're Aryan too". I am not making any of this up:

“They have poured streams of fire over Germany; betrayed their own race; identified themselves with its worst enemies ...”

“Prrr, prrr, prrr,” purred back the cat; “that is because they had been (as they are still being) misled, deceived. But one day they shall wake up from their delusion, tum against their bad shepherds, and help the people of their own blood to build up a new Europe — the very Europe of your dreams, in which we creatures will all be happy — for they are good people at heart; good people like Aryans generally are, taken as a whole. Prrr, prrr, prrr . . . The proof of it is that they have taken such good care of me! Prrrrrrrrr . . .”

This version of her cat grows old and dies. Meanwhile, Heliodora is arrested and imprisoned for distributing Nazi propaganda. When she gets out, she meets the reincarnation of a different cat she had left behind in India. (All of her cats want to find her again after death because they love her so very much.) In between her banal, mundane descriptions of caring for this new cat, she describes her various arrests, interrogations, and brief periods of imprisonment. And then she moves, gives that cat away and gets another fucking cat. It is at this point where I completely lose track of which cat is meant to be the reincarnation of which other cat; this woman goes through cats like potato chips. She says she doesn't even love them as individuals, but as one piece of "the intangible Essence of Catdom", so I guess it doesn't fucking matter whether I know their names or not.

This woman's primary thesis is "human suffering doesn't matter, only animal suffering matters" and she beats it into the ground. Her secondary thesis is that national socialism is the one true religion and will save the world. Not only is this a deeply self-obsessed, morally incoherent, grotesque piece of writing, it is also boring as hell. It's half stories about how people who are mean to animals all deserve to get murdered, and half a travelogue where the protagonist goes on screeds about race-mixing every time she visits a new city. While you're reading it you feel as if time has stopped, and you will be stuck reading this terrible book for the rest of your life. All she knows how to do is repeat her two ideas over and over again. Honestly, it reads like heavy-handed satire of a very specific type of white woman. Heliodora wears golden swastika earrings.

I'm exhausted. Never read this book.

[justforbooks]

Richard Woodman

Writer who drew on his own experience at sea in a series of novels and historical works about the British merchant navy

“The end was anticlimax. We slipped home unnoticed. Britain turned no hair at our arrival, as just as she has turned no hair at our extinction.” When Richard Woodman published Voyage East in 1988, he knew that the mercantile world depicted within it, which he had joined aged 16, was gone.

The first-person novel – which never reads like fiction – describes the voyage of a cargo liner carrying goods and passengers from Liverpool to Singapore, Hong Kong, Kobe and Shanghai in the mid-1960s. There is a moment, off the coast of Borneo, when the captain sees a vessel with half a dozen grey aluminium boxes on her foredeck: “What the devil are they?” he asks the pilot. “‘They’re containers, Captain,’ the Pilot replied, and no one on the bridge heard the sentence of death pronounced upon us.”

Woodman, who has died aged 80, became the memorialist of the merchant fleets. Between 2008 and 2016 he wrote the history of the British merchant navy in five volumes, followed by A Low Set of Blackguards, a two-volume history (2016-17) of the East India Company.

His outstanding contribution came through his three second world war convoy histories: Arctic Convoys (1994), Malta Convoys (2000) and The Real Cruel Sea (2005). These are works of passion, based on experience and scrupulous research.

The loss of life among merchant seamen was proportionately greater than in any of the armed services and the recognition they received far less. From the beginning of the war a seafarer’s pay was stopped the minute his ship was sunk. “Time spent fighting for his life on a float or lifeboat was an unpaid excursion,” wrote Woodman.

While Winston Churchill acknowledged the crucial importance of the Battle of the Atlantic to national survival, it was not until 2012 that those who had served in the Arctic convoys, and had taken the highest casualties of all, were retrospectively honoured.

Born in north London, Richard was the elder son of Rosalie (nee Cann) and Douglas Woodman, a civil service administrator. Though he was far from the sea, his imagination was captured by the works of Arthur Ransome, Daniel Defoe, RM Ballantyne and Alan Villiers, and his enthusiasm nurtured by Sea Scout membership.

He was the youngest member of the Sea Scout crew that sailed the ex-German yawl Nordwind in the 1960 Tall Ships race and, despite failing all but two of his O-levels, he was accepted as an indentured apprentice with the Alfred Holt (Blue Funnel) line in 1960.

His first long trip to Australia came as a midshipman on the SS Glenarty, returning via the US: “I had been round the world before I would have been allowed inside a British pub.” Life on board ship took place in an uncompromising, all-male environment: the almost compulsory swearing, drinking and sexist banter encouraged the development of “a carapace behind which we hid our private selves”.

Woodman responded eagerly to the hands-on education in seamanship and navigation, developed his writing and sketching through the log-keeping and read his way through the excellent ships’ libraries provided by the Marine Society. He completed his four-year apprenticeship and gained his second mate’s certificate. He was, however, in love and hated saying goodbye to his girlfriend, Christine Hite, an art student, for many months at a time.

He left Blue Funnel in the mid-1960s and went to work for the Ocean Weather Service, where he discovered how vicious the North Atlantic winter weather systems could be – and how pitilessly an ex-second world war corvette would roll. Fortunately it was not long before a temporary position became available with Trinity House, the corporation charged with the maintenance of navigation marks around England, Wales and the Channel Islands.

The position became permanent; he and Christine married in 1969 and settled in Harwich, Essex, near the Trinity House east coast depot, and he served the corporation for most of the rest of his life.

The work at sea was varied, challenging, sometimes dangerous. Precise navigation, seamanship and attention to detail were essential qualities, but Woodman also found time to write. His first novel, The Eye of the Fleet, was published in 1981. This introduced a series of 14 adventures featuring the young Nathaniel Drinkwater, a hero somewhat in the Horatio Hornblower mode but bearing the unmistakable stamp of a writer who was also a sailor.

Despite his professional career being in motorised vessels, Woodman loved traditional gaff-rigged yachts, particularly his own Kestrel and then Andromeda, in which he and Christine explored the east coast rivers and beyond. The action of his nautical novels often turns on neat, seamanlike manoeuvres as well as including varied and closely observed seascapes.

His productivity was astonishing. He often wrote two or three novels a year and soon added non-fiction to his output. When he became captain of Trinity House Vessel Patricia, he achieved this by having two desks, one from which he could conduct official business, the other hidden behind a door, with a page from the work in progress always ready in the typewriter.

Meanwhile, in his job he was extremely focused, conscientious and painstaking. Although some remember him as being of the “old school”, Jill Kernick, the first woman in almost 500 years to work at sea for Trinity House, credits him with helping her break through traditional barriers in the early 80s.

In 1997 Woodman retired to write full time, but was soon elected a Younger Brother of Trinity House, and then an Elder Brother, the first time a former employee was accorded this honour. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2003 but there was no let-up in his work rate. His last completed novel, A River in Borneo (2022), harks back to 60s Indonesia but sets its final scene in a Colchester hospice.

He is survived by Christine and their children, Abigail and Edward, and grandson, Arlo.

🔔 Richard Martin Woodman, master mariner and author, born 10 March 1944; died 2 October 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[e-learningsoftware]

Overwhelming Episode for the Company, and a Reason to Celebrate.

Regarding the IETM requirement we explained to them complete information about IETM, its History, Technologies, Architecture, development process, deployment and distribution methodology.

[emjee]

Extremely random question but I love to ask librarians this: what have u read recently that’s stuck out? Do u have any book recs for 2023?

And I, a librarian, love being asked this!! Here are my favorite books from this year:

Little Thieves by Margaret Owen - actually picked this one up because of an excellent rec post here on tumblr. It’s loosely based on The Goose Girl fairy tale so I pitch it as “it’s a beautiful day in fantasy Germany and you are a horrible goose girl.” The sequel also came out this year and is every bit as good.

When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb - This one was actually my pick for Best Book of My Year at work. It’s incredible. An angel and a demon who are study partners leave their shtetl to go find a local girl who immigrated to America and hasn’t been heard from since. It’s gorgeous.

Ask a Historian by Greg Jenner - I love Greg Jenner and his podcast You’re Dead to Me and I listened to the audiobook of this one, which was wonderful.

If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio - the very very rare internet darling that I felt lived up to the hype. Insufferable theatre students at conservatory do a murder. Lots of Shakespeare.

The Chalice of the Gods by Rick Riordan - Not only did he write a new Percy book, but it had the audacity to be good???

A Lady’s Guide to Scandal by Sophie Irwin - One of the best romance novels I read this year. I haven’t swooned that hard over a heterosexual pairing in a traditionally published book since I don’t know how long.

A Rome of One’s Own by Emma Southon - a history of Rome in 21 women. I love Emma Southon—she’s funny and rigorous and so insightful. And she makes me care about the Romans, who I generally hate.

The Secret Service of Tea and Treason by India Holton - I love the entire Dangerous Damsels series and this one was no exception. The balance of humor and deep emotion is my favorite thing about these books.

These are just the highlights of a long list—I also read a lot of children’s lit for work, lots more nonfiction, and things like scriptural commentary and saints’ biographies. Thank you for this question!

[fatehbaz]

Scientific knowledge and technology played a significant role in the expansion of colonial rule in India and the consequent incorporation of the Indian sub-continent into the [commercialized, imperial] world-system [...]. The colonization of nature, territory and people in British India led to a mutually constitutive interplay [...].

By the time the East India Company managed to establish a foothold in Bengal in 1757, [...] [a]fter the acquisition of the formal rights to collect revenues in the states of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, the issue of obtaining accurate information about the extent of the produce, the population and other social statistics assumed significance. The detailed scientific surveys [...] were possible due to the large number of amateur scientists employed by the Company. Over time, these surveys played a major role in the transformation of a trading company into a colonial state [...] and the incorporation of India into the modern world-system. [...]

---

Considered the founder of British geography, James Rennell arrived in India in 1760 barely three years after the decisive battle of Plassey. Rennell’s cartographic skills caught the attention of the governor of Bengal presidency, who was ‘anxious to inaugurate some system for correcting and revising the geography of Bengal’ [...]. Rennell’s mapping out in great detail the area under the Company was indispensable for the rationalization of the extraction of surplus, administrative strategies and techniques of control. [...] In 1777 he left for England, and two years later he published the Bengal Atlas that led to his election to the Royal Society. [...] With reference to the ‘science wars’, [...] Rennell’s work was also incorporated in the key text[s] of the time, C. Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) [...] [and] the work of [...] Humboldt and Carl Ritter. Rennell’s surveys contributed to the organized [...] surveys [across wider regions of India] that followed after the defeat of Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1799. [...] [Mysore's] sustained resistance to British power had a major impact on the general consciousness in Britain. [...]

Thomas de Quincey extolled the virtues of the ‘British bulldog’ against [...] the tyrannical ‘Bengal tiger’ [...]. The scientific knowledge that emerged as a consequence of the surveys of Mysore contributed [...] to the consolidation of administrative power [...]. The key figures associated with the surveys [included] Colin Mackenzie [...]. Mackenzie’s ethnographic notes contributed to imperial perceptions of the [...] [people of South Asia] and the grid of anthropological knowledge through which administrative power was deployed. [...]

---

Nature, culture and colonial power were inextricably implicated in the production of scientific knowledge and of colonial society. [...] The establishment the Public Works Department in 1854 provided fresh impetus for the deployment of science and technology in grappling with problems precipitated by colonial rule. Declining revenues for the Company focused attention on gigantic irrigation and other public works projects. [...]

The irrigation projects were expanded to include the railways (1849), the telegraph (1852), and the postal system (1850). Together, they represented the largest state-sponsored enterprise undertaken anywhere at that time. Lord Dalhousie, under whose tenure these projects were inaugurated, declared the railways, the telegraph and the postal system as the ‘three great engines of social improvement’.

His predecessor William Bentinck had already termed the railways ‘the great engine of moral improvement’ in a country ‘cursed from one end to the other by the vice, the ignorance, [...] the barbarous and cruel customs that have been the growth of ages under every description of Asian misrule’ [...]. Later observers were to wax ever more eloquent on the role of the railways in the modernization of India. For W. A. Rogers of the Indian Civil Service, railways ‘are opening the eyes of the people … they teach them that speed attained is time, and therefore money, saved or made’ (Adas1989: 226). The importance of a network of railways, connecting the cotton plantations of the Deccan region to the ports became significant especially during the 'cotton famine' of 1846 [...].

---

Almost immediately after Dalhousie left India, secure in the belief that the double engines of moral improvement and legitimacy were at work, the rebellion of 1857 put an end to such expectations. The rebellion was partly triggered in response to the wide-ranging transformations [...] triggered off by the introduction of [these] new [colonial infrastructures] [...].

In the end, the rebellion was violently suppressed by the very technologies that had precipitated it in the first place. [...]

---

All text above by: Zaheer Baber. "Colonizing nature: scientific knowledge, colonial power and the incorporation of India into the modern world-system". British Journal of Sociology 52(1), pages 37-58. April 2001. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[orientalsolutions]

https://www.orientalsolutions.com/e-publishing-the-movement-from-print-to-digital-publication/

[dailyanarchistposts]

Histories of colonisation ought to be remembered, including the horrors and atrocities, but also the endurance and empowerment found in trenchant resistance and the fight for sovereignty, writes Radhika Reddy.

India and Aotearoa are both grappling with decolonisation. In this ongoing struggle to wrest free from the legacies of colonialism, each society can learn from the other.

A recent piece published by The Spinoff uncovered some of these lessons, but in my view gave a rather disempowering view of both Māori and Indian experiences. It emphasised tragedy, brutality and suffering, but overlooked trenchant resistance efforts seeking sovereignty, where we might find the most useful stories to exchange.

Common ground

The previous article began with common ground, but only focused on Māori and Hindu ecological values, so let’s broaden the picture with some Indian traditions beyond Hinduism, and decolonising Māori values.

Papatūānuku and Kaitiakitanga: Khalifa, Amana (from Islam)

An “ethos of living in harmony in nature” is found in Islam, India’s second-largest religion. The Quranic approach is based on Khalifa and Amana (trusteeship of nature) in which humans have guardianship over nature, to appreciate and care for it, pass it unspoiled to future generations, and manage sustainably.

Manaakitanga: Seva (from Sikhism)

A spirit of hospitality pointedly appears in the centuries-old Sikh tradition of Guru Ka Langar (communal meal), an act of Seva (selfless service). Langar serves food freely and equally to all-comers, regardless of religion, caste, wealth, gender or age, overcoming divisions exploited by colonialism.

Tino rangatiratanga: Swaraj (from secularism)

Māori notions of self-government and Gandhi’s credo of Swaraj (self-rule) share an essence of seeking self-determination, with social structures and values separate from colonial interference.

Besides principles, there are common experiences and episodes of resistance shared in history:

Parihaka

The events of Parihaka came long before India’s independence movement gained momentum, but the spirit of non-violent resistance echoes across centuries, possibly having influenced Gandhi.

Redcoats

British regiments frequently rotated through India and New Zealand. Waves of veterans, after plundering India or suppressing its rebellions, came to fight the New Zealand Wars, or left to police India. British statues as well as town, street and suburb names across Aotearoa are familiar to students of Indian history — Empress Victoria, Governor-General Auckland, Colonel then Commander-in-Chief Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington), and places like Bombay or Khyber Pass. These are connected histories.

Lessons India has to offer for Māori

Among decolonisation projects, India’s imperfect story of independence still has interesting lessons.

Non-violent resistance works

Māori have led non-violent resistance in Aotearoa for generations, from Parihaka to Ihumātao, and may find the example of India’s liberation a hopeful landmark victory in global history.

The practice of Indian non-violent resistance continues to this day, as protests rage against likely unconstitutional policies such as the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens, with assemblies, marches, sit-ins, and art, despite state violence.

Coexistence

Although India ejected British occupation and suffers internal divisions, there is still a firm thread running through the ages demonstrating coexistence between different cultures.

Look to chapters in history like the peaceful inclusion of Muslims in South India since the seventh century, the religious tolerance of Akbar in the 16th century, the joint Hindu-Muslim Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the secular Indian constitution. They contrast with divisive ideologies like Hindutva founder V.D Savarkar’s two-nation theory that promoted a dominant Hindu nation. The daily lives of many Indians today embody inter-cultural acceptance, the norm across much of the country, most of the time.

Whereas Aotearoa may not return its settler society for a full refund, multicultural coexistence is possible.

Overcoming divide-and-rule

Whether it was the East India Companies or the British Raj, a small minority of power brokers ran the show — infamously, 35 staff in an East India Company office. They relied on divide-and-rule, recruiting vast numbers of Indian foot soldiers (Sepoys) to do the hard work. But a highly-leveraged organisational arrangement is weak to united resistance (like Kotahitanga). Today it appears in gig economies or the criminal justice industry, which pit marginalised people against each other.

Self-government is not always good government

Today’s India shows how things can get wobbly even 70 years after independence, as a homegrown blood-and-soil movement undermines equality and reproduces colonial hierarchies atop a diverse society.

Take the word “decolonisation”. It probably looks straightforward, but it is a co-opted term in India. In the name of decolonisation, the Hindutva movement promotes discriminatory reforms, such as ending affirmative action for lower-caste people, and passing the exclusionary Citizenship Amendment Act.

There are regions under Indian rule seeking greater autonomy or Azaadi (freedom) today – resisting occupation by a central Indian state, as Assam endures detention centres, and Kashmir a militarised siege.

It takes eternal vigilance to protect hard-won sovereignty from sabotage.

What India can learn from Māori

Colonialism is now

It is tempting to think colonialism must belong only to museums and history books. But settler-colonial societies still persist. In Aotearoa, settlers may have settled but the nation remains unsettled. As Treaty negotiations, claims and protests unfold, Indians can reflect on how the colonial legacy is fed by continuous re-colonisation – a risk India is prone to, not from Britain, but from, say, supremacists within.

Indians in Aotearoa can also respond by allying with Māori in decolonisation efforts.

Overcoming casteism and anti-indigeneity

While there is no comparing two complex societies, there are still parallels between the institutional discrimination that Māori have endured, and the discrimination against Dalit, Other Backward Class, Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and Adivasi (indigenous) people. As Indians in Aotearoa can find solidarity with Māori in undoing colonial oppression, so too can India find equality for its systematically disadvantaged classes.

Protecting taonga like language

While India is blessed with a diversity of cultures, a tendency to homogenise society with one language and identity sometimes rears its head. Whether under well-meaning secularism, or Hindutva rule, language imposition threatens diversity. South Indian languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada are spoken by large minorities but are often in tension with a Hindi regime pushed by central governments. The experience of Te Reo Māori shows the value in preserving languages, and the perils of erasure.

Common struggles

Supremacism

Whether it is white supremacy or Hindu supremacy (sharing traits like Islamophobia), countering dangerous ideologies is vital to fulfill the egalitarian promise of the constitutions of both Aotearoa and India.

Climate change

A global challenge like climate change demands a variety of solutions, but most importantly by centering indigenous people in decision-making — something Aotearoa has yet to fully embrace. For all the “harmony with nature” embedded in dominant Indian cultures such as Hinduism, the ruling BJP government has much to answer for when it comes to emissions, environmental degradation and deregulation.

Feminism, LGBT and disability equality

Achieving equality for women, non-binary, LGBT and disabled people in India and Aotearoa is an ongoing struggle. Threats like sexual abuse, domestic violence, inadequate healthcare, colourism, repressive gender roles, limited autonomy, inaccessiblity, and economic inequality, are common concerns.

Patriarchal British norms echo in Indian laws, as with Section 377 that criminalised homosexuality until recently. Despite decriminalisation in 2018, there is not yet recognition of same-sex or gender-diverse marriage, protection against discrimination, or adequate healthcare. Trans Indians are targeted by the new Transgender Persons Act which sanctions second-class treatment — for instance, it provides for lower sentences in cases of violent crimes against trans women. The new Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens especially threaten women, non-binary, LGBT and disabled people.

In Aotearoa, amendments to laws like the Birth, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Bill, letting trans people more easily update birth certificates, still face transphobic opposition. Abortion decriminalisation remains under consideration. Māori may be worst affected by settler-colonial sexism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism.

These are signs that our societies have a long way to go, to enact systemic reforms, and to lift the veil of everyday shame and silence surrounding marginalised lives in our cultures.

Remembering

Histories of colonisation ought to be remembered, including the horrors and atrocities, but also the endurance and empowerment found in resistance. The previous Spinoff article proposed a museum dedicated to New Zealand colonisation, and praised changes to the curriculum teaching New Zealand history in all schools.

Both of these are laudable goals, but must be conducted with care to avoid the kind of revisionism seen in India under Hindutva rule. Any museum of New Zealand colonisation should seek to share with all New Zealanders the narratives Māori have learned and developed, to centre Māori self-determination and agency, and to emphasise coexistence under a Treaty framework that respects Tino Rangatiratanga.

[canmom]

booksbooksbooks{1} - clones, parrots, and high stakes poetry

one of the things I wanna do in the wake of worldcon is read more sff books and write about them. in that spirit, going to try and catch up on writing about some books, starting with...

Clone, Priya Sarukkai Chabria

This is a book that is maybe decently well known in India, but I'm not sure it's caught a lot of attention in the West. Which is a shame, because it's an absolute banger of a book.

It's tricky to know where to begin with Clone. You could approach it as a dystopian science fiction story, in which a clone in a hypocritical and cruel society stops taking her memory-suppressing drugs and starts channeling the past life of a controversial poet. Or, you could view that as a frame story and the real substance as something more like a short story anthology: a long slice through history from unlikely angles, coloured in shades of cruelty and religion. Of course, it's both those things.

Clone has been cooking for a while, it seems; an older version was published way back in 2009 as Generation Fourteen. I'm not sure the differences between that version and the version I read.

The story follows Clone 14/54/G, mostly just referred to by the title Clone by characters. She belongs to a society calling itself the Global Community, rigidly stratified and populated by various engineered posthumans: the abundant Clones, the dumb and violent Superior Zombies, the poetic Firehearts and so on. Almost all of them are essentially disposable slaves to the ultra-privileged Originals, from whom each generation of Clones is derived.

As such, the book is full of interesting contortions of language used to dress up this cruel, repressive society in a positive light. Capital letters ('The Drug', 'The Celebrations') and euphemisms abound. Clones aren't killed, they are 'withdrawn' after their 'actuality' runs out - there is another different word for each other category of being. Their lives are heavily regimented, both work and what passes for free time. It's always ready to proffer an explanation for a certain practice: here's why it's a good thing the flamethrowers use regular napalm. Make sure to thank the person punishing you.

Of all the various species of posthuman we encounter, besides the clone, the ones the story most seems to enjoy writing are the Fireharts - all named after elements of poetry like 'Quatrain' and 'Stanza', they are mercurial, energetic bug creatures who exist to obey a poetic function (and of course they're hooked on drugs and as controlled as every other element of the society). The rest of the society seems to view them with an attitude of mild exasperation, but as strange as the Firehearts are to our protagonist, they are some of the only genuine connections she's able to form across the book. But they are very much captive creatures: whatever liberal ideology they espouse, they are no more separate from this dystopia than the clones.

So, the inciting incident: 14/54/G, our eponymous Clone, ends up 'mutating', starting with dreams of past times - glimpses of the stories that will be told in full later in the book. Many of these stories are from the perspective of animals: a dog thought to have divination powers in the service of a prehistoric warlord at the foot of the Himalayas; a devoutly religious fish with a condescending attitude swimming in the Ganges flood waters; a lesbian parrot deeply infatuated with its owner one of the wives of a monarch Khan-Sahib (a title used in British India, though I am not sure of the time period of this story). Others are humans in mostly dire situations: a soldier awaiting execution, a low-ranking acolyte of a hidden Buddhist monastery complex; a mother of a boy killed in battle for the sake of Emperor Ashoka.

These stories - eventually dubbed 'the Visitations' - vary impressively in tone and style. What is the unifying theme? The blurb declares 'compassion and memory in the midst of all that is grotesque', and that's not a terrible start, but I think it leaves out a lot. Many of the characters in the stories are defined by devotion, often to people who do not reciprocate it, or view them as toys at best. The parrot's story is equally the story of 'My Love', life in the court, the affair she has - and also of casual, indifferent cruelty, such as when the parrot's tongue is peeled to make her sing prettier on Khan-Sahib's suggestion. (I assume this is an actual historical practice...)

Sarukkai Chabria has a fantastic command of narrative voice, which works extremely well when she's sketching the contours of living through all these different partial perspectives. I am reminded, strongly, of the different stories in Rachel Pollack's novel Unquenchable Fire, and what Pollack had to say about suffering and ecstasy. The story of Dhammapada, the 'flying monk', is a great example of how the stories immerse you in the worldviews of each character: full of earnest passion, we can read a bit between the lines to learn a bit about the harshness of the monastery and the power structures within it, but at the same time it's difficult not to be pulled in to share that same fascination with life. The arrogant fish, who believes it has solely seen through the illusion and understood the world and casts disdain on its fellow fish, is another fantastically entertaining character.

As good as these stories are, the dystopian setting is also a pretty fascinating creation. It's a society defined by weird calcified hypocrisies. Anyone is free to access information, but doing so may call suspicion down on you, which could be lethal. 'Free-Time' is ritualised and timed down to the minute. It assigns her a cyborg dog to monitor her, but the dog is so affected by the ambient violence of the gladitorial games that it tears itself to pieces; the Clone is helpless to stop this but still punished, a recurring pattern. It's a well observed depiction of the caprice of such a system of power.

The final arc of Clone sees 14/54/G imprisoned in luxurious but harshly controlled circumstances as various factions within the Global Community try to pry out the final poem of her original, the subversive poet 'Aa-aa'. She's caught up in a somewhat convoluted power game: 'Leader', an Original who turns out to be related to Aa-aa, wishes to take this opportunity to stage a rebellion; all, however, hinges on the Clone sufficiently recreating the life of Aa-aa to be able to conjure up her final words.

As with all affairs of the "Global Community", their approach is haphazard, almost cargo-cult attitude towards the way humans work. As soon as they give up on one approach, like putting her in Aa-aa's quarters and trying to get her to roleplay as the Original, they switch to another, like drugging her. At one point our protagonist is taken on a trip to see the horrible conditions at a factory that had a severe effect on Aa-aa, but there's a Guide Clone and a Superior Zombie along for the ride to make sure she reacts in the proper way. The tension builds and builds, as our protagonist desperately struggles to think of something to say to demonstrate her usefulness, or support the rebellion, and somehow survive.

The ending when it comes is quite abrupt, and I feel like this is the only part (aside from biological quibbles) where I felt like I didn't quite get it anymore. Spoilers, then:

Unable to divine what Aa-aa was going to say, the Clone ends up making an appeal to common humanity in front of all of the Originals at The Celebrations. It felt like an odd moment to me, because the entire book up to that point seemed to be demolishing the idea that anyone has ever given a shit about common humanity. To be fair, the words don't seem to have much effect on anyone else either: the Clone manages to escape with her life in the chaos of the palace drama within a few pages, but there is little sign that her words will have much effect beyond the immediate disruption.

So what's it all about? We have this unsparing cross-section through all types of human cruelty; we've seen all sorts of people contemplating the nature of existence through religion and interpersonal devotion; in the present we've seen a privileged intellectual become aware of the horrors of her society and minutely observed the hypocritical ways she reacts, which have become calcified into a ritual designed to extract one final missing piece of information from a disposable being. For all the strange turns her life takes, the Clone almost never has any power; she's tossed around on the wake of events that preceded her. But the forces acting on her are in their own way painfully ignorant and stupid.

We can read parallels to all sorts of societies. Given the very specifically Indian references in this book, we could think of British India, or equally the modern fascism of Modi's government - but I think it would be too reductive to read it as being about just one specific political regime when it takes this especially broad view.

I feel like part of the reason the Clone's statement feels like it falls short is that there is no way to sum up everything we've seen. It's too broad and too full of contradictions. Individual stories have overt themes: the arrogance of the intellectual fish, the freedom of political power to be capricious in the mother's address to Emperor Ashoka, and so on and so on - and many of these ideas have reflection in the present-day story. But any attempt to just turn them all into one pithy statement feels doomed to be pat.

Perhaps it is because I finished the game around the same time, but I am kind of reminded of the stories of NieR Reincarnation, which takes a similar anthology approach to the follies and tragedies of human history. In that case, the preservation of the archive taken as a whole is the subject of the story; here the stories all belong to one person's body of work, and we are witnessing a mad effort to try to find where they all point, with the futility of this project all concentrated on our Clone.

I kind of wonder what ending could have worked better than 'I am human, I claim my birthright' as the Clone's final statement - after spending the whole story dismantling the construct of the human, inviting us to inhabit animals and clones and so on, it feels off to reaffirm 'we are all human' as the basis of a path out. And, to be fair it's not quite her final statement - she goes away carrying memories of those who died, contemplating the 'cocoons' of memories, carrying a child (biological), and contemplating perhaps one day continuing to write down the Visitations. The final words of the story return to the death-witnessing dog Trichaisma, as Trichaisma's owner, the warlord Vrikama, finally dies. It ends in a dog's prayer. That's pretty cool!

I don't know that I have a final definitive reading of all that happens in Clone. That's exactly what makes it compelling! It's a book that doesn't pull its punches and is content to face ambiguity. That's good shit.

So, I was well impressed with Clone. I definitely feel like I'd love to see more recognition of this book in Western SFF fandom (I don't wanna say English-language, because it seems like a lot of the newspapers that covered it are in English). I feel like I'm only scratching the surface here, and I lack the cultural background to appreciate some of the historical or religious allusions, which I'd love to see elaborated on!

I definitely wanna read more Indian SFF! Next on the docket on that front is Kaiyeki by Vaishnavi Patel. Hopefully it will take me fewer months to get around to writing about this one ^^'