A Backward Place


Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - 1965
    But it is also a Dickensian drama, charting the highs and lows of everyday life against the enchanting backdrop of a bustling Indian city.

Ashes for the Elephant God


Vijaya Schartz - 2000
    As she awakens to a newfound spirituality, unexpected visions of a former life during the Raj stir ancient yearnings for a long lost passion. Mukunda, the palace architect Fabienne loved a century and a half ago, lives again as an American engineer and works on the local dam project. As Fabienne falls in love again with India and the man of her destiny, the tapestry of her previous life unfolds. But, in the karmic land of the blue gods, a ruthless foe lies in wait. The Kali worshiper, who murdered the two lovers in a faraway past, has come back through the centuries to thwart their dream once more.

True Version Of The Philippine Revolution


Emilio Aguinaldo - 2006
    Account of the Philippine Revolution against Spain, and the Philippine-American War from the Filipino general and independence leader.

Bitten By Love


Vijaya S - 2020
    ONCE BITTEN BY LOVE, YOU WILL BE FOREVER SMITTEN BY ITS SWEET PAIN.”ANU is young, simple and carefree, gearing up for her first job at Oasis Ltd. She gets paired with ABHI, a mature and an unassuming boy, in her first assignment with the Indian IT giant. Little does she know that the pairing is not a mere coincidence, but a plan by destiny. Abhi does not have any inkling that the beautiful girl he was smitten by at a traffic signal, would end up as his pair programmer for whom he would eventually be ready to give up everything in life.What will happen when Anu’s protective family gets to know about their love?Will Abhi keep up the promise he makes to Anu’s family?How will Anu cope with this drastic change in Abhi’s priorities?Come, fall and rise in love as Bitten by Love takes you through an exhilarating and heart touching journey of friendships and love, driven by destiny, hope and determination.

Footprints of Partition: Narratives of Four Generations of Pakistanis and Indians


Anam Zakaria - 2015
    Millions displaced, thousands slaughtered, families divided and redefined, as home became alien land and the unknown became home. So much has been said about it but there is still no writer, storyteller or poet who has been able to explain the madness of Partition. Using the oral narratives of four generations of people - mainly Pakistanis but also some Indians - Anam Zakaria, a Pakistani researcher, attempts to understand how the perception of Partition and the 'other' has evolved over the years. Common sense dictates that the bitter memories of Partition would now be forgotten and new relationships would have been forged over the years, but that is not always the case. The memories of Partition have been repackaged through state narratives, and attitudes have only hardened over the years. Post-Partition events - wars, religious extremism, terrorism - have left new imprints on 1947. This book documents the journey of Partition itself - after Partition.

The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck


Rory Nugent - 1991
    In the tradition of the best travel narratives, he recounts his experiences in such places as Calcutta, Sikkim's Valley of Bliss, Darjeeling, and the Indian wilderness.

Ravana's Sister (Meenakshi) Kindle Edition


Anand Neelakantan - 2018
    But the world knew her as an evil, ugly and immoral seductress called Soorpanakha who had dared to fall in love with Lord Rama’s brother, Lakshmana. In this fascinating story, Ravana’s Sister (Meenakshi), best selling author of The Rise of Sivagami, Anand Neelakantan, tells the poignant tale of a woman whose ears, nose and breasts are chopped off by a man as punishment for seeking love from a superior being. Overturning what popular myths and legends may have endorsed about Meenakshi aka Soorpanakha, this story is about every woman who may have lost in love, but gained much more from life in general.

Jasoda


Kiran Nagarkar - 2017
    Jasoda is one of the last to leave this 'arse-end of the world' with her children and mother-in-law. Since her husband claims he has important work to do for the local prince, Jasoda must make the journey to the city by the sea on her own. Meanwhile, after years of anonymity, Paar seems poised to take off. Will Jasoda return home with her children? Or stay in the city that's become home for her children? It's taken for granted that epic journeys and epics were possible only during the time of the Mahabharata, the Odyssey, or the Iliad. Even more to the point, the heroes of the epics had to, perforce, be men. The eponymous Jasoda of the novel is about to prove how wrong the assumptions are. Kiran Nagarkar's trenchant narrative traces the journey of a woman of steely resolve and gumption, making her way through an India that is patriarchal, feudal, seldom in the news, and weighed down by dehumanizing poverty."Jasoda is as compelling and powerful as Nagarkar's other novels but uniquely itself in the gut-wrenching story it tells of the sordid uses of power, the suffering it causes, and the human spirit that rises above it." —Nayantara Sahgal "Nagarkar's storytelling genius takes us into the abyss of poverty and patriarchy—source of both inspiration and shame. Jasoda's brutal but transformative journey is the foil to counterfeit historical grandeur. With empathy turned to prose of pure steel, Nagarkar paints a modern Indian heroine." —Mitali Saran "A novel that stops your breath and doesn't let go until you get to the end. Jasoda: mother, murderer or saint? You'll want to put her down. But she won't let you." —Manjula Padmanabhan "No one can spin a yarn with such rollicking exuberance as Kiran Nagarkar, and no one exposes contemporary India's dark underbelly, in all its casual brutality, like him. Jasoda is a tour-de-force of razor-sharp observation and profound compassion, brilliantly realized." —Ritu Menon

Stealing Green Mangoes: Two Brothers, Two Fates, One Indian Childhood


Sunil Dutta - 2019
    Before that, he was a biologist at the University of California and a translator of classic Indian poetry. Before that, he was a destitute refugee, one of so many uprooted by the genocidal violence surrounding the Partition of India. Back then, he had a brother. Back then, they were children together, chasing whatever fun and solace they could find in impossible conditions. Sunil looked up to Raju. He admired his strength, his character.Raju took a different path. He was arrested, he fled the law, he became a fugitive. He became a terrorist. Then he became a father—and then a murderer.After being diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer later in life, Sunil urgently wanted to understand what choices had led he and his brother down such radically different paths. In Stealing Green Mangoes, Dutta takes us from his family home in Rajasthan to America, to France, to the streets of southeastern Los Angeles, homing in on the questions that tore him and Raju apart: Can you outgrow the madness that made you? Can you make peace with the ghosts of your past?  A memoir with sweeping, spiritual ambitions, Stealing Green Mangoes tells the story of a man who pushed back against the forces that captured his own brother and built a compassionate, meaningful life in a broken world.

Kathputli


Ushasi Sen Basu - 2016
    Two lives. Three generations. Four places. Chitrangda Chatterjee, 32, has been moving from one dead-end offshore job to another. Kathputli’s story begins after Chitrangda has quit her latest job and sets out in search of the perfect story for her Great Indian Novel. This takes her to a family reunion of her grandmother’s clan, where a story of the long-lost daughter of a once-powerful Zamindar family begins to take shape.  Unravelling the mystery of Mala’s disappearance a few years after the brutal murder of the boy she loved becomes an obsession for Chitrangda. One which draws Chitrangda out of her shell; and introduces her to the unaccustomed joys of getting to know new people and places.  What emerges, however, undermines the very foundation of Chitrangda’s understanding of her own family.  The novel goes back and forth between Chitrangda’s present-day search for all the missing pieces of Mala’s story and the story itself, set in 1940s Kolkata.

The Young and the Restless


Gurmehar Kaur - 2019
    

Hindutva or Hind Swaraj


U.R. Ananthamurthy - 2016
    Ananthamurthy is a timely reading of, and creative response to, the rise of Hindutva nationalism in India. Juxtaposing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh founder V.D. Savarkar's idea of Hindutva with M.K. Gandhi's concept of Hind Swaraj, the book examines two directions that were open to India at the time of Independence. Born out of a meditation of the idea of the nation state and nationalism, and what the new power structures and centres mean for the very idea of India, the essay uses shifting tones and styles to make a deep, elegant and heartfelt point about the human cost of radicalization.

A House for Happy Mothers


Amulya Malladi - 2016
    In a Southern Indian village, Asha doesn’t have much—raising two children in a tiny hut, she and her husband can barely keep a tin roof over their heads—but she wants a better education for her gifted son. Pressured by her family, Asha reluctantly checks into the Happy Mothers House: a baby farm where she can rent her only asset—her womb—to a childless couple overseas. To the dismay of friends and family, Priya places her faith in a woman she’s never met to make her dreams of motherhood come true.Together, the two women discover the best and the worst that India’s rising surrogacy industry has to offer, bridging continents and cultures to bring a new life into the world—and renewed hope to each other.

Chimera


Vivek Ahuja - 2012
    A violent uprising has been instigated all across Tibet as Beijing moves to establish control while the Dalai Lama’s health deteriorates further and questions on the future of the Tibetan leadership are raised. As Beijing pursues the rebels and their benefactors within India, both nations are plunged into a spiraling descent to war. Now each side must navigate their widely different paths to victory as vast armies on both sides wage all-out war in their bid to become the dominant power in Asia… Book Edition: II

INDIA ADVENTURE STORIES VOLUME ONE


Patrick Griffith - 2013
    This does not include scavenging. Although human beings can be attacked by many kinds of animals, man-eaters are those that have incorporated human flesh into their usual diet. Most reported cases of man-eaters have involved tigers, leopards, lions and crocodiles. However, they are by no means the only predators that will attack humans if given the chance; a wide variety of species have also been known to take humans as prey. ATTACKED BY A KING COBRA.ALADDIN'S CAVE.THE TERROR OF HUNSUR.THE TERROR OF HUNSUR II.AN ADVENTURE WITH A BOA.THE ONE EYED MAN EATER.A MAN EATING WOLF BOY.SEEALL, THE WOLF BOY.THE WHITE TIGER.THE FATE OF THE AHNAY PAYEE.THE BANDYPORE MAN EATER.THE KODERMA MAN EATER.TRAPPING A MAN EATER.THE MAN EATER OF BELKHERA.A NOTORIOUS MAN EATER.TUG OF-WAR WITH A LEOPARD.MISSED BY AN INCH.A FIGHTING TIGER.A NIGHT FRIGHT.CARRIED OFF BY A TIGER.