Showing all 8 books
This book is about memories, beliefs, values and sometimes just stray thoughts selected from more than one thousand pieces of scattered writings by a most remarkable man. HY Sharada Prasad has lived through interesting times, turbulent times, times of great hope and of despair. He has been witness to some momentous events of recent Indian history. The book captures some of these moments in elegantly crafted and sometimes delightfully anecdotal prose. The author ...
There is no other work as influential as this study of the idea of India`s Unity imbedded in the classical Hindu texts and scriptures. As opposed to the colonial notion that British rule had United Indai, this book argues that there was an inherent unity in Indain civilization as it took shape in ancient India.
The Play of the Gods, first published in 1980, a seminal study of Indian sacred festivals, appears here in a new, expanded and illustrated edition. The two related festivals considered here Durgapuja, in honor of the Goddess Durga, and Gajan, in honor of the Lord Siva-are the most popular and most complex of Bengali rituals, involving elaborate preparation and wide and ever-increasing participation. The detailed description and interpretation of the rituals ...
Bimal Krishna Matilal (1935-91) was Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University from 1977 to 1991. Matilal was an academic of exceptional scholarship and originality and in his untimely death the world lost an outstanding thinker and philosopher. The distinctive feature of this work is that the author was consciously motivated by contemporary historical experience: the frequent conflict between communities which have coalesced around ...
Infirm Glory places Shakespeare in the context of Renaissance thought and literature, especially with respect to man’s faculties and his place in the universe. The author starts with an account of Renaissance skepticism, the line of thought that questions man’s ability to attain to certain knowledge. This intellectual doubt soon extends to moral questioning, and passes beyond formal philosophy to broader literary and speculative treatments.Infirm ...
This book is a travelogue with a difference. From the middle of 1970s to as recently as January 2006, the author has been travelling to remote tribal areas of Central India and recording his experiences, impressions and interactions with the people in these places. These experiences are juxtaposed with the writings of Verrier Elwin who lived and travelled in these areas and wrote a corpus of classic anthropological works. Das Gupta discovered Elwin's writing by ...
There is an Agra beyond the coffee table book and the tourist brochure waiting to be discovered. This anthology of Thomas Smith's writing attempts to set the reader off on that journey of discovery. Smith was a scholar, a historian and a journalist who wrote about the people and places of Agra after painstaking research and enquiry and with rare humour and sensitivity. For over five decades, between 1930 and 1995, he collected material including the stories and ...