According to Elizabeth Cook, ‘myths are about gods, legends are about heroes, and fairy tales are about woodcutters and princesses.’
Here is a collection of sixteen short stories including one by Ka Naa Subramanyam himself. Not all are short stories—at least one is an epic in a terse form: Ramapada Choudhury’s Festal.
The Magadha King Dhana Nanda had become unpopular because of his vile tongue, bad temper and greedy ways.
This collection of essays by Indian academics on American literature ranges in quality from the solitary brilliance of V.Y. Kantak’s essay on Faulkner’s Technique, through the competent and interesting (Neila Seshadri’s Leslie A. Fiedler: Critic as Mythographer, Isaac Sequeira’s Essay on Sylvia Plath), to the (alas!) majority that is mediocre, or, at best, stolid and painstaking.
From the raising of Mohenjodaro to the meeting of Chanakya and Thiruvalluvar, Pavithra Srinivasan’s Back to the BCs can be as engaging for a child as an adult.
Hiranyakashipu and his nemesis, Narasimha, an Avatar of Vishnu, are the central characters of eight short stories that are included in this book.
People often ask me whether there is something special about our times in terms of an apparent resurgence in the tellings of our ancient tales, myths and the epics.
Is this a fantasy novel? Or a dream come true from one’s childhood? You know, the one in which we wished school would have no exams and annoying things like report cards would simply disappear?
This book is a collection of essays published in a Sri Lankan newspaper The Island as a weekly column. Written by the erudite and politically conscious Rajiva Wijesinha, the book is a delightful survey of twentieth century English literature. While he threatens/promises to locate his readings in contemporary Sri Lankan politics, we find that either he has edited them out of the book or that such anchoring was provided only now and then in the original columns themselves.
From the author of the much acclaimed Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns comes another novel set in Afghanistan, moving with its actors to Europe and America.
The book under review is a commendable study of modern art in Pakistan and closely analyses the work of a few prominent artists as it deconstructs notions of modernism in their work. While the title of the work makes a reference to the art of ‘South Asia’, it would perhaps have been more appropriate to restrict its scope to ‘Pakistan’ as almost all the artists and the work discussed in the book have emerged out of Pakistan.
Laufer’s German version of the Citralaksana has no doubt been long known to the world of connoisseurs of Indian art. Coomaraswamy, Masson Oursel, Kramrisch and other great writers have indeed used this important document which was recovered from Tibetan.
This book is the revised and expanded edition of the 1981 edition of The Imperial Image by Milo Beach which focused on Freer Gallery collections produced for the Mughal Emperors ruling between 1560 and 1640.
I wanted to learn what it meant to know Islam in Pakistan and why this knowing was so easily brushed aside.
Commenting on the congruent genealogies of Oxford and the madrasas of South Asia (‘religious’ origins of both sets of institutions) and the eventual divergence (Oxford emerging as the fountainhead of ‘reason’ and madrasas positioning themselves as bastions of ‘orthodoxy’) between them, Masooda Bano argues that the main reason for the different development of these institutions was that they were operating in very different political environments.
The empirical work for Religion, Community and Education was conducted in two locations of rural Bihar namely Phulwari and Kasba blocks of Patna and Purnea districts, and highlights the historical trajectories and how it has shaped the educational development and disparities in educational attainment of the two communities.
Middle class, middle classes, bourgeoisie—these terms entered English and other European languages in a range of meanings and connotations with the rise of industrial capitalism in the late 18th century.
It was in the thirties that Dr. V. Raghavan had drawn attention to a form of theatre called Yaksagana. Much interest was aroused by his articles. In the early forties there was a lively discussion amongst scholars about the origin of this fascinating form and its connections with Kathakali.
Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a scholar, most unique in the Islamic world. He is considered one of the most significant thinkers of the pre-modern Muslim world.
This is an anthology put together by the London and Sussex based Filippo-Caroline Osella team of anthropologists both having a keen research interest in South Asia.