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Ayya's Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India, Book Release event

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Thursday, March 27th 2014

7:30 pm

Red Emma's

Join us for the Baltimore release of Ayya's Accounts, a new book by Anand Pandian, a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins. Ayya's Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India explores the life of Pandian's 95-year-old grandfather Ayya, a retired fruit merchant living in the south Indian city of Madurai. Born in colonial India into a despised caste of former tree climbers, Ayya came of age in a small town in lowland Burma, which he fled at the outbreak of World War II, making a treacherous 1,700-mile journey by foot, boat, bullock cart, and rail back to southern India. Becoming a successful fruit merchant, Ayya educated and eventually settled many of his descendants in the United States. Weaving back and forth between Ayya's stories and his grandson's reflections, the book provides a rare window into the complexities of life and aspiration in modern India.

“Anand Pandian's spellbinding memoir of his grandfather is at once a labor of love and a reckoning with life,“ writes Michael D. Jackson, author of The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Wellbeing. “Despite differences of location, language, and vocation, grandson and grandfather share such deep affinities that Pandian confesses to feeling indebted to Ayya for his own life. Not only do 'all of us come to life in a sea of stories,' but it proves possible to read a nation's history between the lines of this biography. At the same time, Pandian's sensitive and luminous narrative demonstrates the power of a literary sensibility to broaden our ethnographic horizons and broach new philosophical questions in anthropology.“

Anand Pandian is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (2009), and has co-edited Subramaniyapuram: The Tamil Film in English Translation (2014) and Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference (2003). Ayya's Accounts also includes an incisive afterword by renowned anthropologist Veena Das, the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

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