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Sharing food, eating salt, breaking bread, raising a toast, picnics in the wild, formal dinners—all have certain ideological, political and social significances. Some foods are taboo, whereas others endow the eater with purity. The means of preparing or processing food in different cultures each symbolise something. The Writer’s Feast is a collection of essays that discuss the various symbolic representations associated with food.The essays in this ...
Gopal Chandran thinks he hcan trust his employers. After all, they need him: he is a valuable scientist in a semi-secret defence lab, one of the few to be entrusted with the high-level research into the composition of Signal Red, a type of glass found only in a remote village in Rajasthan. All’s well for Gopal and his wife Vidua on their sleepy campus till an old friend, anuprabha, visits them and starts asking awkward questions. After that she will stir up ...
The history of Oxford University Press in India is the history of Indian scholarly publishing. This book tells the story of OUP, or ‘the Press’, as it has always been called by its members, during the years from 1880 to 1947-an era that coincided with the modernization drive of the Press at Oxford and its rapid international expansion. The Indian Branch, established in1912, was the result of the great transformation OUP underwent in the 1860s-from a primarily ...
Titu Mir, a peasant leader, led a revolt against the British in Bengal in 1830–31, in the course of which he was killed. He has remained a hero in the popular imagination. This was a period of transition in agricultural Bengal. The evil effects of the Permanent Settlement were beginning to be felt by the rural people. Traditional zamindars were being replaced by absentee landlords. Indigo plantations were eating up fertile agicultural land. Titu, a hotheaded, ...
Five hundred years ago, four people set out on individual journeys of discovery: In the quest for enlightenment and bags of gold, one travels to the end of the known world, another meddles with the fates of kings, a third loses all he had, and a fourth finds the City of Love. Set in the half century after Vasco da Gama’s historic landfall in India, this is the story of four intertwined lives: Fernando Almenara, a Castilian trader fleeing persecution in his ...