Shantaram is narrated by Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear.Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter Bombay's hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city's poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals. The keys to unlock the mysteries and intrigues that bind Lin are held by two people. The first is Khader Khan: mafia godfather, criminal-philosopher-saint, and mentor to Lin in the underworld of the Golden City. The second is Karla: elusive, dangerous, and beautiful, whose passions are driven by secrets that torment her and yet give her a terrible power.Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas—this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart. Based on the life of the author, it is by any measure the debut of an extraordinary voice in literature.

    Saadat Hasan Manto's stories are vivid, dangerous and troubling and they slice into the everyday world to reveal its sombre, dark heart. These stories were written from the mid 30s on, many under the shadow of Partition. No Indian writer since has quite managed to capture the underbelly of Indian life with as much sympathy and colour. In a new translation that for the first time captures the richness of Manto's prose and its combination of high emotion and taut narrative, this is a classic collection from the master of the Indian short story.

    K. Nayudu and Sachin Tendulkar naturally figure in this captivating history of cricket in India, but so too—in arresting and unexpected ways—do Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The Indian careers of those great English cricketers Lord Harris and D. R. Jardine provide a window into the operations of Empire, while the extraordinary life of India's first great slow bowler, Palwankar Baloo, introduces the still-unfinished struggle against caste discrimination. Later chapters explore the competition between Hindu and Muslim cricketers in colonial India and the extraordinary passions now provoked when India plays Pakistan. An important, pioneering work, this is also a beautifully-written meditation on the ramifications of sport in society at large, and on how sport can influence both social and political history.

    Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America.In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail — the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase — that opens whole worlds of emotion.The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.

    Sheltered by a potter the boy grew up with the prophecy of a wandering sage ringing in his ears that he would one day become king. The Sanskrit classic, Kathasaritasagar and Vikrama Charita, from which most of this story is taken, traces the path that makes Shalivahana so powerful that an entire era, the Shalivahana Shaka, was named after him.

    With candour and wit, she tells of her taking up law studies because this could be combined with caring for her husband and son, Intertwining family life with professional, the author describes the years after her father's premature death. It is an intricate, amusing and charming rendering of her life.

    But above all, she aims to remind us that we hold the essence of power and the foundation of genuine democracy—the power of the people to counter their self-appointed leaders’ tyranny.First delivered as fiery speeches to sold-out crowds, together these essays are a call to arms against “the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.” Focusing on the disastrous US occupation of Iraq, Roy urges us to recognize—and apply—the scope of our power, exhorting US dockworkers to refuse to load materials war-bound, reservists to reject their call-ups, activists to organize boycotts of Halliburton, and citizens of other nations to collectively resist being deputized as janitor-soldiers to clear away the detritus of the US invasion.Roy’s Guide to Empire also offers us sharp theoretical tools for understanding the New American Empire—a dangerous paradigm, Roy argues here, that is entirely distinct from the imperialism of the British or even the New World Order of George Bush, the elder. She examines how resistance movements build power, using examples of nonviolent organizing in South Africa, India, and the United States. Deftly drawing the thread through ostensibly disconnected issues and arenas, Roy pays particular attention to the parallels between globalization in India, the devastation in Iraq, and the deplorable conditions many African Americans, in particular, must still confront.With Roy as our “guide,” we may not be able to relax from the Sisyphean task of stopping the U.S. juggernaut, but at least we are assured that the struggle for global justice is fortified by Roy’s hard-edged brilliance.

    While war is an extension of the politics of a nation, it ultimately falls to the lot of the soldier to face combat on the ground. Schooled in the culture of 'Service before Self', soldiers of the Indian Army take their challenges head-on, turning adversity into opportunity, overcoming impossible situations with a smile. While some of their deeds of valour are rewarded, many more need to be remembered. What makes these men the way they are? This book helps us understand better the Indian soldier and his degree of commitment to the Indian Army, and to the nation that he serves.

    To recover the sense of moral well being and responsibility, the author suggests, is the core of the democratic challenge before India.

    Based on the real-life experiences of street children in Chennai, it tells the story of Velu, a runaway village child. He ends up as a ragpicker in a big city and must face the harsh realities of life on the streets. The story is accompanied by facts and arguments that connect complex issues—ranging from child labor and child rights, to lifestyles, waste and recycling.“A true gem in the Indian publishing landscape . . .”—The White Ravens Catalogue of the World’s Best Children’s Books

    Yet, until the late eighteenth century when Sir William "Oriental" Jones broke the Brahmins' prohibition on learning the sacred language of Sanskrit, the Buddha's teachings were treasures unappreciated in the West. Uncovering clues about Buddhism's origins from inscriptions on pillars and rocks, Jones pioneered an enthusiastic band whose search for the Indian subcontinent's secret religion is chronicled in this book of high adventure and monumental historical detection. Acclaimed narrative historian Charles Allen brings to life extraordinary eighteenth- and nineteenth-century characters and travels to lost holy places across the Eastern world as he tells the story of how Westerners found the Buddha. Allen has recorded the Western birth of a religion whose influence in America has increased tenfold in the just the past forty years.

    Resolving this mystery is of significance not only to philosophers and physicists but is also a very practical concern. Our perception of time shapes our values and way of life; it also mediates the interaction between science and religion both of which rest fundamentally on assumptions about the nature of time.C K Raju begins with a critical exposition of various time-beliefs, ranging from the earliest times through Augustine, Newton and Einstein to Stephen Hawking and current notions of chaos and time travel. He traces the role of organised religion in subverting time beliefs for its political ends. The book points out how this resulted in a facile dichotomy between 'linear' and 'cyclic' time, thereby inaugurating a confusion which, according to the author, has handicapped Western thought ever since, eventually influencing the content of science itself. Thus, this book daringly asserts that physical theory, traditionally regarded as amoral and objective, has depended on cultural beliefs about time.The author points out that time beliefs are again being manipulated today as the credibility of science is being exploited to promote a picture of time and, hence, a pattern of human behaviour which is convenient to the agenda of globalisation of culture. The linkages between modern theology and this 'brave new physics' are traced against the wider context of the so-called 'clash of civilisations', and the attempts to remake the world order.The conclusions point to the need to de-theologise time. The author challenges Einstein's understanding of relativity theory and suggests that a 'tilt in the arrow of time', or a small tendency towards cyclicity, will help repair the prevalent confusion about time. A 'tilt' also enables a physics that permits both memory and creativity, so that purpose and spontaneous growth of order are returned to human life. The book ends with a vision of Man as Creator, surprising God.Extensive research in physics, the history of science, comparative religions, and sociology lend weight to the important and challenging conclusions reached by the author. Written as a rejoinder to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, this book goes much further and, unlike any previous book, it gives a critical exposition of various world religions-Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Jainism-while exploring their intricate links, through time beliefs, to current physics on the one hand, and to global political and economic trends, on the other. This book will appeal to scholars and laypersons equally. It will fascinate anyone who reads it and will teach its readers to question the unquestionable.

    

    But he was not destined to remain in his lowly position for long. With a combination of clear-sighted thinking, frugality and sheer hard work, he managed to put together a plan and the finances necessary to acquire his first hotel: Clarkes, That was only the beginning...Decades later The Oberoi Group has thirty hotels, girdles the globe, and is acknowledged as a standard setter.

    Large sea eagles prowl its blue skies, saltwater crocodiles patrol meandering creeks, and lush forests unfold behind lonely beaches. These magnificent forests, however, are not as empty as they appear to be. They are the home of a proud and ancient people known as the Jarawa. Wieldingarrows and spears, the Jarawa fiercely protect their forests, attacking those whodare enter. Vikram and Aditya, accompanied by Chitra – a girl whose spirit is as free and wild as the islands themselves – embark on a voyage along this fabulous coast. On a moonlit night the teenagers venture up a forbidden creek where disaster strikes. Revealing startling truths of a Stone Age people, the ‘Andaman Adventure’ is a story of survival and courage, set in a primeval land where nature, in her unrestrained glory, still rules.

    According to Prabhat Kumar Mukhopdhyay, it was the first lecture by Tagore delivered in English in India. It deals with the question of what should be the ideal of education in India. Tagore presents his opinion about the prevalent system of education and the need for change.

    For centuries Indian children have grown up hearing Ganesh's story--how his mother, Parvati (an incarnation of the great mother goddess), created a small boy from sandalwood soap and commanded that he guard the palace against all intruders while she took her bath. How her husband, Shiva (the fearsome god of destruction), didn't take kindly to being barred from his own home. How Shiva beheaded the boy during the cosmic war that followed, but then, when he realized that the balance of the entire universe was at stake, brought the boy back to life by grafting an elephant's head onto his body and made him the people's intercessor against the powers of destruction. Ganesh's timeless story teaches children about the steadfast power of dedication to duty, the awe-inspiring power of a mother's love for her child, and the gentle power of compassion, which holds the world together. Accompanied by rich, color illustrations prepared according to the traditional Hindu canon, How Ganesh Got His Elephant Head will transport children to a magical world filled with ancient wisdom.

    During the 1950s and 1960s, India launched an extremely ambitious and highly regarded program of state-led development. But it soon became clear that the Indian state lacked the institutional capacity to carry out rapid industrialization. Drawing on newly available archival sources, Vivek Chibber mounts a forceful challenge to conventional arguments by showing that the insufficient state capacity stemmed mainly from Indian industrialists' massive campaign, in the years after Independence, against a strong developmental state.Chibber contrasts India's experience with the success of a similar program of state-building in South Korea, where political elites managed to harness domestic capitalists to their agenda. He then develops a theory of the structural conditions that can account for the different reactions of Indian and Korean capitalists as rational responses to the distinct development models adopted in each country.Provocative and marked by clarity of prose, this book is also the first historical study of India's post-colonial industrial strategy. Emphasizing the central role of capital in the state-building process, and restoring class analysis to the core of the political economy of development, Locked in Place is an innovative work of theoretical power that will interest development specialists, political scientists, and historians of the subcontinent.

    But the years Aurobindo spent in yogic retirement were preceded by nearly four decades of rich public and intellectual work. Biographers usually focus solely on Aurobindo's life as a politician or sage, but he was also a scholar, a revolutionary, a poet, a philosopher, a social and cultural theorist, and the inspiration for an experiment in communal living.Peter Heehs, one of the founders of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives, is the first to relate all the aspects of Aurobindo's life in its entirety. Consulting rare primary sources, Heehs describes the leader's role in the freedom movement and in the framing of modern Indian spirituality. He examines the thinker's literary, cultural, and sociological writings and the Sanskrit, Bengali, English, and French literature that influenced them, and he finds the foundations of Aurobindo's yoga practice in his diaries and unpublished letters. Heehs's biography is a sensitive, honest portrait of a life that also provides surprising insights into twentieth-century Indian history.

    The History and Culture of the Indian People: Volume 11: Struggle for Freedom Hardcover

    How did religion and politics become so enmeshed in defining the protest of Kashmir's Muslims against Hindu rule? This book reaches beyond standard accounts that look to the 1947 partition of India for an explanation. Examining the 100-year period before that landmark event, during which Kashmir was ruled by Hindu Dogra kings under the aegis of the British, Mridu Rai highlights the collusion that shaped a decisively Hindu sovereignty over a subject Muslim populace. Focusing on authority, sovereignty, legitimacy, and community rights, she explains how Kashmir's modern Muslim identity emerged.Rai shows how the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was formed as the East India Company marched into India beginning in the late eighteenth century. After the 1857 rebellion, outright annexation was abandoned as the British Crown took over and princes were incorporated into the imperial framework as junior partners. But, Rai argues, scholarship on other regions of India has led to misconceptions about colonialism, not least that a "hollowing of the crown" occurred throughout as Brahman came to dominate over King. In Kashmir the Dogra kings maintained firm control. They rode roughshod over the interests of the vast majority of their Kashmiri Muslim subjects, planting the seeds of a political movement that remains in thrall to a religiosity thrust upon it for the past 150 years.

    Well-known for her work combining feminist theory and postcolonial studies, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan shows how the state is central to understanding women’s identities and how, reciprocally, women and “women’s issues” affect the state’s role and function. She argues that in India law and citizenship define for women not only the scope of political rights but also cultural identity and everyday life. Sunder Rajan delineates the postcolonial state in implicit contrast with the “enlightened,” postfeminist neoliberal state in the West. Her analysis wrestles with complex social realities, taking into account the influence of age, ethnicity, religion, and class on individual and group identities as well as the shifting, heterogeneous nature of the state itself.The Scandal of the State develops through a series of compelling case studies, each of which centers around an incident exposing the contradictory position of the Indian state vis-à-vis its female citizens and, ultimately, the inadequacy of its commitment to women’s rights. Sunder Rajan focuses on the custody battle over a Muslim child bride, the compulsory sterilization of mentally retarded women in state institutional care, female infanticide in Tamilnadu, prostitution as labor rather than crime, and the surrender of the female outlaw Phoolan Devi. She also looks at the ways the Uniform Civil Code presented many women with a stark choice between allegiance to their religion and community or the secular assertion of individual rights. Rich with theoretical acumen and activist passion, The Scandal of the State is a powerful critique of the mutual dependence of women and the state on one another in the specific context of a postcolonial modernity.

    From the cities, small towns and villages of India -- a country of almost unparalleled diversity where every major religion of the world has found a home -- Dinesh Khanna brings us images of faith as it endures in everyday life. Priests light up the night on the ghats of Varanasi in honor of Shiva; Sufis sing ecstatic love songs to Allah at the tomb of Nizamuddin Auliya; young boys in Ladakh prepare for the austere life of a Buddhist Lama; and devotees offer wax models of what they desire to Mary at her church in Mumbai. Meanwhile, on the highways and lanes of India, taxi and truck drivers carry on their dashboards little shrines to their gods; Jain nuns walk barefoot for miles on an eternal pilgrimage; and people stop along busy roads to offer prayers at modest temples and tombs.Living Faith is an intimate, revealing record of a deeply spiritual way of life. It acknowledges the strength of private worship and shared faith, which ultimately transcends the more visible but short-lived realities of discord.

    One British outpost after another goes up in flames along the Ganges. The common man, driven to desperate measures by poverty and generations of inherited debt, is trapped between native kingdoms where convicted felons are trampled to death by elephants and British protectorates where they are blown to bits by cannons. Helpless flotsam caught in the backlash are the victims: the soldier Daulat Ram who carries his British Captain's five-year-old daughter to safety; Kamal, his brother, who struggles to support his extended family and protect them from the terror that stalks the village, while Lila, heir to the impoverished kingdom of Paramgar, forced into a politically expedient marriage with a stranger in spite of her hopeless entanglement with a British officer, is hounded from one end of the country to the other in a bid to escape her almost certain annihilation.

    Gopal, is a comprehensive and first rate selection. It has been compiled mainly from his speeches and writings. The compilation indicates the evolution of his mind and personality and gives some idea of his enormous range of interests.

    Asian American Studies. Born in Rajasthan, India, Rita leaves her native country to live with her diplomat father in exotic places abroad. Her innocent, happy, and sheltered childhood is characterized by a deeply reflective nature. That childhood comes to an end with her marriage in Ghana to a fellow Indian she meets in the diplomatic circles of Accra. Shock and horror follow, for the union is violently abusive. The couple move to England, then to Canada, where the outcome is breakup, then the tragedy of a murder-suicide. Rita Nayar has a university degree in psychology and a teaching certificate from the University of Sheffield, England. A senior corporate professional in Toronto, she is also an artist and a poet.

    In this book, Rustom attempts to map Kothari's vast experience, drawing on extended and freewheeling conversations with him. Interconnected reflections on land, water, agriculture, irrigation, livestock, sati and shrines are linked to forms of puppetry and the folk songs of the Langas and Manganiyars to create an epic narrative that celebrates folk culture and life

    In India, works of art-sculptures, monuments, paintings-were first viewed under colonial rule as archaeological antiquities, later as architectural relics, and by the mid-20th century as works of art within an elaborate art-historical classification. Tied to these views were narratives in which the works figured, respectively, as sources from which to recover India's history, markers of a lost, antique civilization, and symbols of a nation's unique aesthetic, reflecting the progression from colonialism to nationalism. The nationalist canon continues to dominate the image of Indian art in India and abroad, and yet its uncritical acceptance of the discipline's western orthodoxies remains unquestioned, the original motives and means of creation unexplored. The book examines the role of art and art history from both an insider and outsider point of view, always revealing how the demands of nationalism have shaped the concept and meaning of art in India. The author shows how western custodianship of Indian "antiquities" structured a historical interpretation of art; how indigenous Bengali scholarship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries attempted to bring Indian art into the nationalist sphere; how the importance of art as a representation of national culture crystallized in the period after Independence; and how cultural and religious clashes in modern India have resulted in conflicting "histories" and interpretations of Indian art. In particular, the author uses the depiction of Hindu goddesses to elicit conflicting scenarios of condemnation and celebration, both of which have at their core the threat and lure of the female form, which has been constructed and narrativized in art history. Monuments, Objects, Histories is a critical survey of the practices of archaeology, art history, and museums in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. The essays gathered here look at the processes of the production of lost pasts in modern India: pasts that come to be imagined around a growing corpus of monuments, archaeological relics, and art objects. They map the scholarly and institutional authority that emerged around such structures and artifacts, making of them not only the chosen objects of art and archaeology but also the prime signifiers of the nation's civilization and antiquity.The close imbrication of the "colonial" and the "national" in the making of India's archaeological and art historical pasts and their combined legacy for the postcolonial present form one of the key themes of the book. Monuments, Objects, Histories offers both an insider's and an outsider's perspective on the growth of these scholarly fields and their institutional apparatus, analyzing the ways they have constituted and recast their objects of study. The book moves from a period that saw the consolidation of western expertise and custodianship of India's "antiquities," to the projection over the twentieth century of varying regional, nativist, and national claims around the country's architectural and artistic inheritance, into a current period that has pitched these objects and fields within a highly contentious politics of nationhood.Monuments, Objects, Histories traces the framing of an official national canon of Indian art through these different periods, showing how the workings of disciplines and institutions have been tied to the pervasive authority of the nation. At the same time, it addresses the radical reconfiguration in recent times of the meaning and scope of the "national," leading to the kinds of exclusions and chauvinisms that lie at the root of the current endangerment of these disciplines and the monuments and art objects they encompass.

    Every day more than 14 million people go to the cinema across India to watch films produced by this massive and powerful industry. In India, movies are not just a form of entertainment but practically a religion. Streets in major Indian cities are lined with colourful posters of Indian movies and their stars. Movie stars are treated like demi-gods, no match even for American standards of celebrity obsession. More than any other cultural or political institution of the twentieth century, the cinema has captured the hearts and minds of India's growing population of almost one billion, even against the stark backdrop of the vast country's struggle with poverty and hunger and often tense Muslim-Hindu relations. The experience of actually going to the movies in India is as much a part of the Bollywood phenomenon as are the stars themselves and Bollywood Dreams documents this important aspect of understanding the important role Bollywood plays in contemporary Indian culture. "Going to the cinema" Torgovnik says, "is about going to see the actors larger-than-life. It is about living the glamorous life for a few hours and leaving your daily hardships behind." Once inside the movie theatres, the audience can expect at least three hours of entertainment, including several song and dance numbers, love scenes, action sequences and most surely a happy ending. Each film includes the necessary ingredients for success: action, violence, music, dance, romance and morals. The themes of the movies are often social issues such as communalism, ethnicity, religion and caste, and the movie theatres themselves are often full of lively interaction between viewer and star. Cheers and boos pervade the atmosphere: the audience becomes a part of the film and, likewise, the film becomes a part of them. Bollywood Dreams begins with a vignette of the touring caravans that bring Bollywood on the big screen to India's villages in portable tents. We then follow the Indian film from its creation on the movie set, to the larger-than-life stars, directors and character actors, to the editing chamber, to the city streets where ubiquitous promotional posters abound and, finally, to the multitude of movie theatres that abound in India.

    The book offes an in-depth analysis of children′s experiences and preception of their own learning at a Government Primary School in India.... [It] will be of particular interest to anyone involved in Primary Education in both developing countires and the UK. I feel that any work that brings a different perspective and helps to challenge our traditional assumptions on educational issues is to strongly welcomed′ - Educational Review `The book is overwhelming based upon field experience.... Sarangapani does a splendid job, and her work is certainly enriched with the help of diagrams, tables, maps and photographs′ - Progress in Development Studies Mention `government run primary schools in India`to anyone and the immediate response: `monotony, uninterested teachers, dysfunctionality, rote memorization and little learning`. The author of this unusual book argues that it is important to move beyond these obvious if basically true images, not only to re-examine our common perceptions of these schools but in order to devise more appropriate intervention strategies. Using the tools of an anthropologist, Padma Sarangapani explores the process and meaning of rural schooling as constituted by the teachers and children themselves. It is based on a detailed ethnographic study of a village school and draws upon philosophy, epistemology, cognitive psychology, popular folklorist texts and the sociology of education for its interpretive frameworks.

    Exploring India's renewed foreign policy from the 1980s through the nuclear tests of the 1990s to its current strategy, Mohan looks at two crucial issues that account for this revolutionary change: the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and a new wave of economic globalization. This book provides an incisive look at how India has reworked its relations with major powers--notably its new rapports with the United States and post-Soviet Russia--to become a major contributor in international affairs.

    In his work, philosophy becomes an ongoing synthesis of knowledge and sensation. This new translation of The Bhagavad Gita, with its easy and beautiful reading, is a major philosophical attempt to read a most important text of a culture in it's own context.

    It examines the form of peasant protest and the reasons for their failure and infrequency. The author also examines the development of tantrism and the mentality that feudalism created.

    Stories of previous emanations (jātakas) of the Gautama Buddha.

    The Cinematic ImagiNation provides readers with valuable insight into the relationships between nation-building, gender, sexuality, the family, and popular cinema, using post-Independence India as a case study." --Gina Marchetti, author of Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction India produces more films than any other country in the world, and these works are avidly consumed by non-Western cultures in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and by the Indian communities in Australia, Britain, the Caribbean Islands, and North America. Jyotika Virdi focuses on how this dominant medium configures the "nation" in post-Independence Hindi cinema. She scrutinizes approximately thirty films that have appeared since 1950 and demonstrates how concepts of the nation form the center of this cinema's moral universe. As a kind of storytelling, Indian cinema provides a fascinating account of social history and cultural politics, with the family deployed as a symbol of the nation. Virdi demonstrates how the portrayal of the nation as a mythical community in Hindi films collapses under the weight of its own contradictions--irreconcilable differences that encompass gender, sexuality, family, class, and religious communities. Through these film narratives, the author traces transactions among the various constituencies that struggle, accommodate, coexist uneasily, or reconstitute each other over time, and, in the process, reveal the topography of postcolonial culture.

    Civilizing Natures unravels unexpected relationships between science, technology, and administrative systems in colonial India from the 1850s to the 1930s, deepening our perspective on continuing conflicts over race, resources, and empire.Botanists, anthropologists, and foresters had their most important sources of data—nature and natives—located at colonial sites. In the hilly, forested regions of Madras Presidency, tribal populations were studied by ethnographers, managed by revenue officials, recruited by plantation contractors, and modernized by missionaries. Racial constructions of nature and modernity helped criminalize and domesticate unruly natives. This is a story about the construction of nature in southern India that is deeply local and irreducibly global.Through detailed case studies, Kavita Philip shows how race and nature are fundamental to understanding colonial modernities. Through its insightful combination of methodologies from both the humanities and the social sciences, Civilizing Natures complicates our understandings of the relationships between science and religion, pre-modern and civilized, environment and society.

    Dalit-bahujan feminists go beyond arguing that Indian feminism is incomplete and exclusive and suggest that we rethink the genealogy of Indian feminism in order to engage meaningfully with dalit women's "difference" from the ideal subjects of feminist politics.

    This work points out that it is a paradoxical film which affirms old-fashioned values of pre-marital chastity and family authority, affirming the idea that Westernization need not affect an essential Indian identity.

    Edward Moor published The Hindu Pantheon in 1810, and this new volume draws upon his exposition of India's religious iconography to offer a spectacular array of images of Hindu deities.Dramatic engravings and line drawings include scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata as well as temple images of Krishna, Vishnu, Siva, and other major gods and goddesses. Many are derived from bronze figurines; others are reproduced from manuscript illustrations. All appear with captions for ease of identification.

    Chachaji's tales of great Hindu gods and demons and of his adventures in the Indian Army leave Neel openmouthed. But it is the tale of his great-uncle's favorite teacup that teaches Neel the most, for Chachaji's cup holds far more than sweet, spicy masala chai. When the precious cup and Chachaji's health both prove to be more fragile than they look, Neel knows what he must do.Uma Krishnaswami weaves a gentle tale of family love and the power of memory, which Soumya Sitaraman brings to vivid life in her richly hued paintings. Chachaji's Cup will captivate and comfort readers of all ages, long after the last sip.

    And these are no ordinary babies—Doctor baby, Scientist baby, Apollo rocket baby—all make their appearance. Babies are revered for their qualities of absolute innocence, guilelessness, and of course, when it boils down to it—their cuteness.This is the first ever collection of these wonderful images. They have a unique graphic style and are colorful, highly unusual, and very funny.Sirish Rao is a novelist, writer, and editor based in Southern India. He is a partner in the publishing company Tara Publishing and is involved in a multitude of varying projects.

    Their collaboration enabled the British to govern India with relatively limited manpower from the late 1790s to 1947. The book is intended for students of colonial history and visitors to the princely states.

    Where does the contemporary Indian woman stand today? In what manner does she reflect the influences, insidious and overt, of cultural and historical conditioning? Is there such a thing as a 'typical' Indian woman? If so, what are her centers of conflict and harmony? What is the present-day reality in terms of progress, the break-up of the joint family, the role of the woman as a wage-earner? Does she find herself leading a life of contradictions? The issues dealt with in this illuminating book are those that connect female awareness and its struggle against patriarchy with specific Indian situations and problems. Indian religious texts and shastras are used to reinforce the argument that gender in many ways has become a curious equalizer with respect to Indian women even though the conventional caste-structure continues to dominate social operations.