RAMBLING WITH RUKKA: A MOVING MEMOIR

Category Biographies & Memoirs
Format Paperback
Imprint Rupa
Price 395

ISBN: 978-93-5702-522-5
Pages: 320 pages
Date: 5th June 2024

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Rambling with Rukka, a co-authored book of memoirs written by a mother and daughter, traverses roughly eight decades in the life of Rukmini Srinivas, from her childhood in pre-Independence India in the 1930s to the present day.

Rukka’s father, an accountant with the Southern Command, moved around India and the family experienced first-hand the diversity and variety in India’s regions and cultures. The book meanders from Poona and stories about Rukka’s childhood, her mother’s cooking and kitchen garden, to Rukka’s life in Delhi with her husband—the renowned social anthropologist M.N. Srinivas, her experiences of juggling family and career, and the family’s fateful migration to Bangalore in the 1970s before it became known as a tech city. Engaging anecdotes, richly descriptive and by turns poignant, surprising, hilarious, always honest and human, bring people and places alive and take the reader on a delightful journey.

AUTHOR OF THE BOOK

Rukmini Srinivas is a geographer by training, a television chef and an author. An educator at heart, Rukka taught geography, first at university and then in Bangalore schools. She was a field researcher for the first Bangalore City Survey. Her interests are in teaching, cooking, gardening, music and telling stories. Her first book Tiffin: Memories and Recipes of Indian Vegetarian Food was a finalist in the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards and became a bestseller in India. It appeals to readers interested not only in vegetarian home cooking but also in history and biography.

Lakshmi Srinivas is a sociologist and anthropologist. Her interests are in film and media, in stories and storytelling, urban life and the natural world. Lakshmi’s first monograph, House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience, based on fieldwork in Bangalore, is the first in-depth ethnography of cinema-going in India. Lakshmi teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She has written numerous articles on cinema, film consumption and the lived culture of cinema in India.