Hindi litterateur Harivansh Rai Bachchan was born in Allahabad in 1907, and acquired immense popularity in the 1930s through Madhushala, a long poem inspired by the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Some three decades later, by now well established as a major figure on the Hindi literary scene, Bachchan wrote the first of four volumes of his autobiography, which was to earn widespread praise from critics and readers alike. In the Afternoon of Time is a creative ...
The Caurasi Pada (Eighty-four Hymns,) is a sixteenth-century anthology of devotional Braj Bhasa verses ascribed to Hita Harivamsa, a devotee of Radha. With the delicacy of their language and the intensity of their sentiments, these poems recreate the bucolic world of Jayadeva; and their devotional content gives them an unrivalled place in the history of Vaisnava devotional literature. The text, which comprises the theological basis of the Radhavallabha ...
As India became free on 15 August 1947, and Jawaharlal Nehru became the first prime minister of the country, the larger 'Gandhi family', comprising the political and non-political associated of the Mahatma, needed to think through their future equations. Was a dividing line to be drawn between those who had entered public office and those who continued to do' constructive work'? The Mahatma had planned a discussion on this and, in his meticulous ...