An intricately researched and elegantly written epic history peopled with larger-than-life characters, it is the work of a major scholar at the peak of his abilities...

    Sultana’s Dream, first published in 1905 in a Madras English newspaper, is a witty feminist utopia—a tale of reverse purdah that posits a world in which men are confined indoors and women have taken over the public sphere, ending a war nonviolently and restoring health and beauty to the world."The Secluded Ones" is a selection of short sketches, first published in Bengali newspapers, illuminating the cruel and comic realities of life in purdah.Suggested for course use in:HistoryIndian LiteratureSouth Asian StudiesUtopian FictionWomen’s StudiesRokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880 - 1932) was a Bengali Muslim writer and feminist activist who founded the first Muslim girls’ school in Calcutta in 1911.

    It is a story based on the life of famous Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his wife Anna.

    Their struggle for an independent Nagaland and their continuing search for identity provides the backdrop for the stories that make up this unusual collection. Describing how ordinary people cope with violence, how they negotiate power and force, how they seek and find safe spaces and enjoyment in the midst of terror, the author details a way of life under threat from the forces of modernization and war. No one the young, the old, the ordinary housewife, the willing partner, the militant who takes to the gun, and the young woman who sings even as she is being raped is untouched by the violence. Theirs are the stories that form the subtext of the struggles that lie at the internal faultlines of the Indian nation-state. These are stories that speak movingly of home, country, nation, nationality, identity, and direct the reader to the urgency of the issues that lie at their heart.

    As he becomes more and more involved with the lives and troubles of the common people in his district, he finds himself sucked deeper and deeper into the dark heart of the desert. And there, with the help of the mysterious musician, the Sarangiya, he has an encounter with beauty in its purest, most absolute form. An encounter that precipitates a dangerous descent. The pages from the journal he keeps are combined with the narratives of those around him—a Tehsildar, a Circuit House guard, a camel-herder, a pair of tribal girls, a Medical Officer, a Police Superintendent and the Collector's orderly—to create a compelling account of his slide away from reality. Half-real and half-fable, and redolent with the songs and myths of Rajasthan, Anukrti Upadhyay's Daura announces the arrival of a powerful new literary talent.

    The usually venerated characters of this ancient Indian epic are here subjected to a rational enquiry that places them in context, unravels their hopes and fears, and imbues them with wholly human motives, thereby making their stories relevant and astonishing to contemporary readers. Irawati Karve, thus, presents a delightful collection of essays, scientific in spirit, yet appreciative of the literary tradition of the Mahabharata. She challenges the familiar and formulates refreshingly new interpretations, all the while refusing to judge harshly or venerate blindly.

    Hanumarathnam, a village healer with some renown as an astrologer, has approached her parents with a marriage proposal. In keeping with custom, he provides his prospective in-laws with his horoscope. The problem is that his includes a prediction, albeit a weak one, that he will die in his tenth year of marriage. Despite the ominous horoscope, Sivakami’s parents hesitate only briefly, won over by the young man and his family’s reputation as good, upstanding Brahmins. Once married, Sivikami and Hanumarathnam grow to love one another and the bride, now in her teens, settles into a happy life. But the predictions of Hanumarathnam’s horoscope are never far from her new husband’s mind. When their first child is born, as a strategy for accurately determining his child’s astrological charts, Hanumarathnam insists the midwife toss a lemon from the window of the birthing room the moment his child appears. All is well with their first child, a daughter, Thangam, whose birth has a positive influence on her father’s astrological future. But this influence is fleeting: when a son, Vairum, is born, his horoscope confirms that his father will die within three years.Resigned to his fate, Hanumarathnam sets himself to the unpleasant task of readying his household for his imminent death. Knowing the hardships and social restrictions Sivakami will face as a Brahmin widow, he hires and trains a servant boy called Muchami to help Sivakami manage the household and properties until Vairum is of age.When Sivakami is eighteen, Hanumarathnam dies as predicted. Relentless in her adherence to the traditions that define her Brahmin caste, she shaves her head and dons the white sari of the widow. With some reluctance, she moves to her family home to raise her children under the protection of her brothers, but then realizes that they are not acting in the best interests of her children. With her daughter already married to an unreliable husband of her brothers’ choosing, and Vairum’s future also at risk, Sivakami leaves her brothers and returns to her marital home to raise her family.With the freedom to make decisions for her son’s future, Sivakami defies tradition and chooses to give him a secular education. While her choice ensures that Vairum fulfills his promise, it also sets Sivakami on a collision course with him. Vairum, fatherless in childhood, childless as an adult, rejects the caste identity that is his mother’s mainstay, twisting their fates in fascinating and unbearable ways.

    A prostitute, her lover and a policeman play for high stakes in BombDay. Injectionwala exposes chilling medical malpractices and a lovelorn vigilantes twisted game plan. In Coma Man, a man awakens from coma after twenty years, and sets out in search of his wife and himself. Gritty love stories, manipulative cops and hard-boiled slumlords form the backdrop of this unputdownable thriller. Its MUMBAISTAN all the way. Mumbai, a city of dreams for many. But for others, a nightmare. Behind the façade of lustre and glamour churns a seething underbelly of squalor, corruption and crime. Mumbaistan’s three explosive crime novellas unravel the subterranean secrets of maximum city—from the teeming maw of Dharavi and the wanton streets of Kamathipura to the swank high-rises of Bandra. A prostitute, her lover and a policeman play for high stakes in Bomb-Day. Injectionwala exposes chilling medical malpractices and a lovelorn vigilante’s twisted game plan. In Coma Man, a man awakens from coma after twenty years, and sets out in search of his wife— and himself. Macabre love stories, conniving cops and hard-boiled slumlords form the backdrop of a schizophrenic city that is brooding...dying. Welcome to Mumbaistan; a gritty, compelling take on the megalopolis that lives on the edge.

    Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir's politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love.With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay masterfully examines Indian politics, class prejudice, and sexuality through the lens of an outsider, offering a profound meditation on grief, guilt, and the limits of compassion.

    But when their firstborn son dies in a terrible accident, tragedy transforms their marriage into a bleak landscape. As the pair starts fresh in a heartbroken old villa by the sea, they are joined by Nandini, a dazzling and devious artist with a trace of leopard blood in her veins. While Nandini flamboyantly takes on Bombay’s art scene, the couple attempts to mend their marriage, eventually discovering that real love, mercurial and many-hued, is given and received in silence. Sensuous and electric, achingly moving and wickedly funny, The Last Song of Dusk is a tale of fate that will haunt your heart like an old and beloved song.“A cornucopia of life at full tilt and high color . . . Shanghvi–who’s been compared to Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, and Vikram Seth–combines ribald humor with prose poetry.”–Sunday Oregonian“Few first novelists achieve such perfection, such control, in their performance.”–India Today“A gorgeous novel . . . written with a youthful twinkling eye.”–Los Angeles Times Book Review“Lush, witty . . . sassy prose . . . moves like a carnival ride.”–San Francisco Chronicle

    Often used to get around the provisions of constitutions and legal codes.A late-night phone call from his ex-girlfriend Anasuya forces writer Arjun Kumar to leave his wife and home in Delhi and travel to the mofussil town of Noma on the UP-Bihar border. The reason — Anasuya's husband, Rafique Neel, a college professor and theatre director, has mysteriously disappeared.Soon after he arrives, Arjun realizes that things are not as they seem: the police are refusing to register a missing-persons case, Rafique's student Janaki has also disappeared, and the locals are determined to turn it into a case of 'love jihad'. And when Arjun begins to dig deeper, what he finds endangers him and everyone around him.Inspired by true events from today's India, Legal Fiction is a brilliant existential thriller and a chilling parable of our times.

    Three dancers in Kochi mastermind their sex lives over email. A young wife in Mumbai becomes obsessed with a dead woman’s online relics. Strange (and familiar) troll wars drag at a writer’s peace of mind. Her daughter’s cellphone conversations deeply worry a cook in Delhi. A young mother finds a job monitoring disturbing content for a social media company.The stories in this dazzling debut collection tap into the rich vein of love, violence and intimacy that technology, particularly the Internet, has brought to the lives of Indians over the last two decades. Two decades that transformed India’s digital landscape, where would-be lovers went from cooing into cordless phones to swiping right on cellphones.Whimsical in its telling and brutal in its probing of the human mind, these stories breathe unexpected life into the dark and joyful corners of a country learning to relish and resist globalisation.

    Exhumed from dust, Manto’s unpublished novel surfaces in Lucknow. Is it real or is it a fake? In this dastan, Manto and Ghalib converse, entwining their lives in shared dreams. The result is an intellectual journey that takes us into the people and events that shape us as a culture. As one writer describes it, ‘I discovered Rabisankar Bal like a torch in the darkness of the history of this subcontinent. This is the real story of two centuries of our own country.’ Rabisankar Bal’s audacious novel, told by reflections in a mirror and forged in the fires of hell, is both an oral tale and a shield against oblivion. An echo of distant screams. Inscribed by the devil’s quill, Dozakhnama is an outstanding performance of subterranean memory.

    Contained here in this volume are the following short stories: The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes; The Phantom 'Rickshaw; Gemini; A Wayside Comedy; At Twenty-Two; The Education of Otis Yeere; The Hill of Illusion; Dray Wara Yow Dee; The Judgment of Dungara; With the Main Guard; In Flood Time; Only a Subaltern; Baa Baa, Black Sheep; At the Pit's Mouth; Black Jack; On the City Wall; and The Man Who Would be King.

    NINE NUANCED STORIES THAT EXPLORE THE THEMES OF DESIRE, INTIMACY AND LOVE...A contractor at a dam site develops so obsessive a desire for a tribal woman that he brings home and holds captive another man's wife; a kathak dancer trapped in a marriage of convenience redefines notions of fidelity; an accidental step into an occupied bathroom changes a Delhi servant boy's life forever; a young married couple beleaguered by infertility desperately tries to reignite the romance and passion of their honeymoon on a houseboat in Kashmir...Set across India, each of the stories in this collection unerringly locates the defiant undercurrent of individual expression in people shackled by societal norms.