1 STRAY birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away. And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh. 2 O TROUPE of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words. 3 THE world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover. It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal. 4 IT is the tears of the earth that keep her smiles in bloom. 5 THE mighty desert is burning for the love of a blade of grass who shakes her head and laughs...
Women's Travel Writings in India 1777-1854 (Chawton House Library: Women's Travel Writings)
The 'memsahibs' of the British Raj in India are well-known figures today, frequently depicted in fiction, TV and film. In recent years, they have also become the focus of extensive scholarship. Less familiar to both academics and the general public, however, are the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors to the memsahibs of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Yet British women also visited and resided in India in this earlier period, witnessing first-hand the tumultuous, expansionist d...
Juniper of Literature (Ragavapriyan Literary Works 2, #2)
by Ragavapriyan Thejeswi
Risalo (Murty Classical Library of India - HUP) (Murty Classical Library of India)
by Shah Abdul Latif
Shah Abdul Latif's Risalo is acknowledged across Pakistan and the wider diaspora as the greatest classic of Sindhi literature. In this collection of short Sufi verses, originally composed for musical performance, the poet creates a vast imaginative world of interlocking references to traditional Islamic themes of mystical and divine love and the scenery, society, and legends of the Sindh region.Latif (1689-1752), a contemporary of the Panjabi poet Bullhe Shah, belonged to the class of Sufi saint...
He was born a boy, but never felt like one. What was he then? He felt attracted to boys. What did this make him? He loved to dance. But why did others make fun of him? Battling such emotional turmoil from a very young age, Laxminarayan Tripathi, born in a high-caste Brahman household, felt confused, trapped, and lonely. Slowly, he began wearing women's clothes. Over time, he became bold and assertive about his real sexual identity. Finally, he found his true self-she was Laxmi, a hijra. From num...
India - Facts, Vedas, Mountains, Rivers, Rituals and Mythology
by MR Sunny Kodwani
Half mythical, heroic and sagacious, the emperor Vikramaditya is widely regarded as India's greatest monarch. This collection of stories tells of the ruler's fabled encounter with a vetala, a genie who inhabits the body of a corpse. The emperor begs the spirit for his help against a mighty necromancer and is told in return twenty-four tales, each of which presents a situation he might face as a king and culminates in a riddle that he must solve. With each answer, Vikramaditya displays his deep w...
All the great utterances of man have to be judged not by the letter but by the spirit-- the spirit which unfolds itself with the growth of life in history. We get to know the real meaning of Christianity by observing its living aspect at the present moment-- however different that may be, even in important respects, from the Christianity of earlier periods. For western scholars the great religious scriptures of India seem to possess merely a retrospective archaeological interest; but to us they...
As stories of Indian dance's renaissance span almost a full century, there has emerged a globally dispersed community of Indian dancers, scholars and audiences who are deeply committed to keeping these traditions alive and experimenting with traditional dance languages to grapple with contemporary themes and issues. Scripting Dance in Contemporary India is an edited volume that contributes to this field of Indian dance studies. The book engages with multiple dance forms of India and their repres...
