Ravi Dayal Publisher
25 books
Delhis landscape forms a dense pattern of the old and the new a maze of streets and dwellings where historic ruins rub shoulders with modern day complexes and where the expanding city encroaches relentlessly on village settlements that date back centuries. Delhis Historic Villages brilliantly captures this uneasy embrace of tradition and modernity. Eight villages have been singled out for the historical interest of medieval monuments in their midstfrom the ruins ...
Compilation of eleven lectures delivered at the India International Centre in 2006.
This is Keki Daruwalla’s ninth collection of verse. Known for his wide choice of subjects, he roams even further afiled in The Map-maker. In this volume he experiments with monologues and narrative verse. These dramatic pieces are often praised out of dark and unknown crevices of history. He bares the souls of his protagonists and in the same breath unfolds a story. A young student fleeing to Jaffa and Tel Aviv from Nazi pogroms explains how he took to Hebrew. ...
Over the past two decades or so, Amitav Ghosh has enthralled readers with novels and travelogues that have acquired the status of modern classics: The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, The Circle of Reason, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Glass Palace. Much less known is the fact that, simultaneously, over all these years, Amitav Ghosh has been writing non-fictional prose - reflective essays, activist pieces, political commentary, book reviews, autobiographical ...
The enormous city of U Belly bristled with street dogs, stray cows and mosquitoes, but its inhabitants were nevertheless a contented people. Governed by a City Council of five wise men, or elders (of whom, the eldest had been on his death-bed for thirty years), and cordoned off from the rest of the world, U Bellians had nothing to complain about, and everything they could dream of: food, work, houses, schools, hospitals, roads, parks, certitudes. Only the ...
This novel is set in India and Africa in a time not unlike the present, and tells the story of three irrepressible people trying to find order in an anarchic world. The story centres on Alu, an orphan enlisted by his foster father as a soldier in his crusade against the forces of myth and unreason. When a terrorist bomb blast ravages their village, Alu flees, pursued by a misguided police officer through Calcutta to Goa and on to a trawler that runs illegal ...
Here is a haunted and haunting volume that establishes Agha Shahid Ali as a seminal voice writing in English. Commenting on the American edition, first published in 1997, Edward Said observed: ‘The extraordinary formal precision and virtuosity of these poems, as well as their often searing imagery, derives from Agha Shahid Ali’s responses to Kashmir’s agony. But this is poetry whose appeal is universal, its voice unerringly eloquent: A marvellous ...
Sesh Prashna ('The Final Question') is one of Sharatchandra Chatterjee’s last major novels, and perhaps his most radically innovative. Breaking the bounds of Bengali romantic fiction, Sharatchandra challenges the norms of nationhood, society, and womanhood. The novel caused a sensation when it was first published in 1931, drawing censure from conservative critics but enthusiastic support from general readers, especially women. The heroine, Kamal, is exceptional ...
Outside the royal palace at Mandalay, a small Indian boy called Rajkumar is helping to run a dhaba. He hears the ominous boom of distant guns; he picks up rumours of a conquering British force; he watches panic furrow the faces of customers...and sooner than anyone can comprehend, the ancient capital of Burma is in chaos. The British conquest of Burma unfolds before Rajkumar's petrified eyes. The king, the queen, and their retinue are exiled to Ratnagiri in ...
In an Antique Land is subversive history in the guise of a traveller’s tale. Packed with anecdote and exuberant detail, it provides magical and intimate insights into Egypt from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm. It also offers vivid glimpses of the many small, indistinguishable and intertwining histories of India and Egypt, Muslims and Hindus and Jews. This is another of Amitav Ghosh’s books that, characteristically, ...
Beginning with a chapter on the role played by the Ramayana in India and the various forms it acquired in the land of its birth, the authors shift focus in the subsequent chapters of this book to Indonesia. The examine the creative manner in which Indian cultural elements were absorbed and moulded in Indonesia through a process which began nearly two thousand years ago, a process in which the Ramayana has had a vibrant presence for much of the time. Indeed, a ...
The twice-decorated Lieutenant-Colonel Quintin Reginald ‘Mulkally’ Oxley-Protheroe, an Anglo-Indian Commanding Officer of an elite guards battalion is on holiday in Kasauli, a cantonment town in the Simla hills, on the eve of international hostilities. Whilst searching for an epitaph in a derelict cemetry for his white forefather’s grave, he sees the need to revivify the Hindu side of his bloodline — which lacks the will to ‘wash down curry with bloody ...
"This is an account of the social-security programmes of SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association) and how they evolved in response to the needs and demands of SEWA members. Detailing the schemes for child care, health and nutrition, housing and insurance, this book draws on surveys and the voices of SEWA’s members toi bring alive how work and social security are intrinsically linked in the lives of the women in the informal sector. A short postscript, ...
Felice A. Beato features in most nineteenth century histories of photography as one of its pioneers, partly because of his adventurous subject-matter. He was at Crimea in 1856 and in India in January 1858 to record the last embers of the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857. In 1860 he proceeded to China where he recorded more British military exploits and, after spending some years in Japan, moved to Burma, where he died around 1908. By the ...
'After Gujarat', the first section of this volume, contains twenty-two poems that are a response to the events following 27 February 2002, in Godhra, Gujarat. Here, a train coach carrying kar sevaks returing from Ayodhya caught fire, leading to the death of fifty-eight passengers. The next day a massacre of Gujarat's Muslims began. 'Before Gujarat', the second section of sixteen poems, covers a quieter, more reflective world. But this too is not untouched by ...
Through a subtle interleaving of past and present, the overlapping narrative of Chinnery's Hotel traverses two continents and three historical periods. After spending nearly four uneasy decades in her ancestral England and accompanied by her dead sister's daughter Camilia, Grace returns to the cantonment township of Mhow where she had spent a much-cossetted childhood and youth in her parents' establishment called Chinnery's Hotel. The fictional Mhow, with its ...
Frederick Wilson (or 'Hulson Sahib' as he was called) was a nabob of the North Indian hills. A character of legend to this day in Garhwal-where he became the local raja and minted coins in his own name-Wilson was a British soldier-turned-entrepreneur who went native and whose phenomenal prosperity (by selling timber to the railways) made his India’s first timber magnate. But Wilson was much more then a successful businessman. He was, like his ...
A many-sided, multilayered scrutiny of not only a particular generation of novelists, but of young writers, experimenting with a generous and accommodating medium. In the wake of Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children, a curious literary phenomenon came to notice: a spate of novels in English by Indian writers, all educated at Delhi's St. Stephen's College. The novelists include Amitav Ghosh and I Allen Sealy. Others such as Upamanyu Chatterjee, Shashi Tharoor, Mukul ...
The first extended biography, spoken of by Corbett fans for many years, and remaining unavailable for too long, is now reissued with extensive revision in text and addition of some new material. Jim Corbett (1875-1955) was born in Nainital and spent most of his life in Kumaon. He is still remembered as a hero in the region, and his famed worldwide glows undimmed thanks to the books he wrote. This book evokes Corbett’s life and world with a ...
The narrative in this compact novel is sharply satirical, extremely funny and moves swiftly. Believing that his father has asked him to locate Sara, absent from home for two days, Max Saul sets off on his errand. Max doesn't usually bestir himself for others, or indeed himself; but Sarai is special and Max needs to find her..Soon, however, Max is diverted from his mission by sundry acquaintances and possible friends. The need to find Sarai is periodically ...
World famous author writes an astonishing novel with its extraordinary range of characters, religious cults, holograms, and wonderful portraits of 19th and 20 century India. The book follows the search for the history of the illusive and alluring Calcutta Chromosome. A wonderful reading.
The dogs of Justice relentlessly chase those enmeshed in attachment and consuming desire. Shahnaz leaves the legacy of this knowledge to her daughter, but first she learns it well herself, slowly and through much suffering. Shahnaz goes from a fashionable education in Geneva straight into the turmoil of pre-independence politics in Kashmir. One passion leads to another. Through her desperate and unquestioning love for Aslam Sheikh, she becomes involved in ...