The stories in this book have their roots in the Indian culture but express universal emotions that are experienced across the boundaries of regions, caste, and creed. Varied emotions of love, heartbreak, aloofness, anxiety, fear, and longing are expressed in this book.There is one story in which movie star Dilip Kumar breaks the heart of a young girl. There is another where a man pushes off another from a moving train. Raavi Paar also tells the story of a Muslim man whose wish is to be cremated after death and not be buried. There is also a story about a married woman who realises that the only reason for her husband to marry her was to use her as cheap labour.The title of this book is an incident from the author’s own life. During the India-Pakistan partition, the author was mistakenly claimed as their own child by another family. Raavi Paar consists of stories which will touch the reader’s hearts due to the simplicity and intricacy of emotions portrayed by the author.Serious, moving, funny and ironic by turns, these stories are replete with the perceptions of a man who has viewed the world with equanimity and compassion.

    Centuries ago, it was proclaimed of the Mahabharata: "What is not in it, is nowhere." But even now, we can use the same words about it. He who knows it not, knows not the heights and depths of the soul; he misses the trials and tragedy and the beauty and grandeur of life. The Mahabharata is not a mere epic; it is a romance telling the tale of heroic men and women, and of some who were divine. It is a whole literature in itself, containing a code of life, a philosophy of social and ethical relations, and speculative thought on human problems that is hard to rival.

    Muhammad Bin Qasim conquered Sindh introducing Islam to South Asia and giving Sindh the title of Bab-ul-Islam (The Gateway of Islam). He ended unjust treatment of the so-called 'untouchable caste' and incorporated the ruling class in his administration to establish law and order in the region.

    It is one of the most appreciated works of Dinkar other than "Kurukshetra".Karna was first born son of Kunti whom she had abandoned at birth as he was an illegitimate son. Karna grew up in a lowly family, yet became one of the best warriors of his time. In the Great Mahabharata war, Karna was obliged to fight from the side of Duryodhana as Duryodhana recognizing his merits had made him a king and adopted him as a close friend. Karna fighting from Kaurava's side was a great worry of Pandavas as he was reputed to be unconquerable in war. The way Dinkar has presented the story of Karna with all hues of human emotions trapped in moral dilemmas, is simply marvelous. The rhythm and meter is lilting. Choice of words and purity of language is exhilarating. The work has a timeless relevance and is a must read.

    Shikwa (1909) and Jawab-i-Shikwa (1913) extol the legacy of Islam and its civilising role in history, bemoan the fate of Muslims everywhere, and squarely confront the dilemmas of Islam in modern times. Shikwa is thus, in the form of a complaint to Allah for having let down the Muslims and Jawab-i-Shikwa is Allah's reply to the poet's complaint.

    In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.

    An analysis of Victorian women writers, this pathbreaking book of feminist literary criticism is now reissued with a substantial new introduction by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that reveals the origins of their revolutionary realization in the 1970s that "the personal was the political, the sexual was the textual."Contents:The Queen's looking glass: female creativity, male images of women, and the metaphor of literary paternity --Infection in the sentence: the women writer and the anxiety of authorship --The parables of the cave --Shut up in prose: gender and genre in Austen's Juvenilia --Jane Austen's cover story (and its secret agents) --Milton's bogey: patriarchal poetry and women readers --Horror's twin: Mary Shelley's monstrous Eve --Looking oppositely: Emily Brontë's bible of hell --A secret, inward wound: The professor's pupil --A dialogue of self and soul: plain Jane's progress --The genesis of hunger, according to Shirley --The buried life of Lucy Snowe --Made keen by loss: George Eliot's veiled vision --George Eliot as the angel of destruction --The aesthetics of renunciation --A woman, white: Emily Dickinson's yarn of pearl.

    However, Burke's analysis of the relationship between emotion, beauty, and art form is now recognized as not only an important and influential work of aesthetic theory, but also one of the first major works in European literature on the Sublime, a subject that has fascinated thinkers from Kant and Coleridge to the philosophers and critics of today.

    Containing 74 essays written over the last ten years, this book covers a range of subjects including the literature of the perceived masters and of Rushdie's contemporaries, the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture, film, politicians, the Labour Party, religious fundamentalism in America, racial prejudice and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression.

    -- Alan Dundes. Propp's work is seminal...[and], now that it is available in a new edition, should be even more valuable to folklorists who are directing their attention to the form of the folktale, especially to those structural characteristics which are common to many entries coming from even different cultures. -- Choice

    Seven years later Pakistan was created amidst a communal holocaust of unprecedented proportions. Concentrating on the All-India Muslim League and its leader, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, The Sole Spokesman assesses the role of religious communalism and provincialism in shaping the movement for Pakistan.

    I shall release you -SAKUNTALA When?KING When?When, like a bee, I kiss the bud of your unbruised lipAnd flood my thirsting mouth with nectar.Kalidasa's play about the love of King Dusyanta and Sakuntala, a hermitage girl, their separation by a curse, and eventual reunion, is the supreme work of Sanskrit drama by its greatest poet and playwright (c.4th century CE). Overwhelmingly erotic in tone, in peformance The Recognition of Sakuntala aimed to produce an experience of aesthetic rapture in the audience, akin to certain types of mystical experience.The pioneering English translation of Sakuntala in 1789 caused a sensation among European composers and writers (including Goethe), and it continues to be performed around the world. This vibrant new verse translation includes the famous version of the story from the Mahabharata, a poetic and dramatic text in its own right and a likely source for Kalidasa. The introduction discusses the play in the aesthetic and cultural context of ancient India.

    Writing with an incomparable knowledge of his subject but without a hint of pedantry, Van Doren elucidates both the astonishing boldness and myriad subtleties of Shakespeare's protean art. His Shakespeare is a book to be treasured by both new and longtime students of the Bard.

    The story of Husain and Zammarrud fallen in the grip of the Assassins take us back to the last days of Hasan Bin Sabah's merciless followers, at the end of which the sect's stronghold, the famous fort of Alamoot, was destroyed by the even more merciless Mongol hordes. Sharar writes famously in the style of a Walter Scott novel, the novel itself being a new literary form in his day. But there are shades of an earlier indigenous genre - the Dastaan - in his work. Yet although he tells a gripping tale, part Scott and part Dastaan, he is not unaware of character. Husain may be credulous, and smitten silly by his love for Zammarrud, but he can still ask Shaikh Vujoodi intelligent questions which the Shaikh can only parry by the display of great wrath and superhuman knowledge. Husain's credulity in accepting his answers immediately has a lot to do with his fear that he would not be allowed to visit his beloved in 'Paradise.' There is a definite modern streak in Sharar's work. His treatment of Zamarrud is different from the usual portrayal of female characters in his day. Zamarrud has a mind of her own. She is observant and intelligent and capable of rebuffing her lover when he sounds credulous and foolish. No old fashioned perceptions of female 'duty' or the superior status of men holds her back from realizing that she is more clear-headed than Husain. She is moreover not mild of manner or adulatory of her man, as the prototypes of female perfection tend to be in Urdu literature of the day. Yet non of this detracts from her femininity, as she runs around 'like a delicate, fleet-footed doe' but fully determined to have her way. Much has been written about the Assassins in English and other languages. Sharar's novel has its own charm, and given a chance it should become a very popular book. Translated into Tajik, Sharar's works have quite a lot of readers in Tajikistan, where they are also the subject of a Ph.D. dissertation by Vladimir Lanikin.

    Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky, and, most of all, Kafka.