The Centrepiece Of The Analyst And The Mystic Is The Absorbing Story Of The Nineteenth-Century Bengali Mystic And Hindu Saint Sri Ramakrishna. Using Ramakrishna S Life As A Case Study, Sudhir Kakar Discusses In Depth Three Interacting Factors That He Feels May Be Essential In The Making Of An Ecstatic Mystic: Particular Life Historical Experiences, The Presence Of A Specific Artistic Or Creative Gift, And A Facilitating Cultural Environment.
Kakar Goes Beyond The Traditional Psychoanalytic Interpretation Of Ramakrishna S Mystical Visions And Practices. Going Beyond The Traditional Psychoanalytic Interpretation Of Ramakrishna S Mystical Visions And Practices, Kakar Clarifies Their Contribution To The Psychic Transformation Of A Mystic And Offers Fresh Insight Into The Relation Between Sexuality And Ecstatic Mysticism.
Through A Comparison Of The Healing Techniques Of The Mystical Guru And Those Of The Analyst, Kakar Highlights The Difference In Their Healing Objectives And Reveals The Positive Psychological Aspects Of The Religious Experience.
Archives: Books
Indian Identity
As A Commentator On The Worlds Of Love And Hate , India S Foremost Psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar Has Isolated The Ambivalence, Peculiarly Indian, To Matters As Various And Connected As Sex, Spirituality And Communal Passions.
In Intimate Relations, The First Of The Well-Known Books In This Edition, He Explores The Nature Of Sexuality In India, Its Politics And Its Language Of Emotions. The Analyst And The Mystic Points Out The Similarities Between Psychoanalysis And Religious Healing, And The Colours Of Violence Is His Erudite Enquiry Into The Mixed Emotions Of Rage And Desire That Inflame Communalism.
The Great Uprising
‘The punishment for Mutiny,’ said John Nicholson, Commander of the Movable Column, ‘is death’.
As India marks 150 years of the 1857 Uprising, this meticulously researched and vivid work recounts a time both tragic and compelling. Many-staged and many-charactered, this volume searches for the key issues, causes and effects, figures and developments that culminated in the massacres of Cawnpore, Satichaura and Bibighar, the ensuing counter-massacres, and the gory retribution dealt out by the British on their subjects.
Beginning with an account of the state of the British Raj in 1857, Pramod Nayar moves on the ‘A Gathering Storm’, the strife that led to the Uprising, ‘The Summer of Discontent’, recounting the Mutiny, ‘The Retreat of the Native’ which tells us how the British won back lost ground, and ‘The Raj Rises Again’, explaining the repercussions the Mutiny had on the administrative plans of the empire. He also delves into the real causes of the Uprising, more complex than what conventional history upholds. Detailed descriptions of the Mutiny’s main figures, including Henry Lawrence, John Nicholson, Lord Canning, Nana Sahib, the Rani of Jhansi, and the tragic king of Delhi, Bahadur Shah Zafar, are interspersed with quotes, facts and anecdotes that reanimate the past.
An overview and analysis of the Mutiny is flavoured with references to the literature of the time and includes an appendix on how the events of 1857 influenced European literary imagination.
Kanpur and Jhansi, violence and counter-violence, heroism and savagery – this every-person’s guide to 1857 captures the most tumultuous years of British India and re-enacts the drama of the first stirrings of nationalism.
Last Mughal
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize for History 2007 Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, a talented poet, and a skilled calligrapher, who, though deprived of real political power by the East India Company, succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance, and presided over one of the great cultural renaissances of Indian history. In 1857 it was Zafar’s blessing to a rebellion among the Company’s own Indian troops that transformed an army mutiny into the largest uprising the British Empire ever had to face. The Last Mughal is a portrait of the dazzling Delhi Zafar personified, and the story of the last days of the great Mughal capital and its final destruction in the catastrophe of 1857. Shaped from groundbreaking material, William Dalrymple’s powerful retelling of this fateful course of events is an extraordinary revisionist work with clear contemporary echoes. It is the first account to present the Indian perspective on the siege, and has at its heart the stories of the forgotten individuals tragically caught up in one of the bloodiest upheavals in history.
Bringing Back Grandfather
I’m stuck between poop and school, and I don’t know what to do. Dadu, this is all for you.’
Anu and his grandfather are happiest together, birdwatching in the forest near their home in Seattle, waiting for the barred owl to show up. One day Dadu suddenly dies in the woods, but his see-through spirit stays with Anu. He is desperate to get his grandfather back from the gods. With his best friend Unger, the daring Izzy Mumu next door and help from the Internet, Anu sets out to turn holy enough to perform great wonders. He visits a graveyard, shaves his head like a sadhu, lives on offerings of sandwiches and water, and rolls all the way to school-through rain and poop-like Ludkan Baba. In the end, the only hope he has left is Karnak, the awesome magician at the Mystery Museum on Divine Island . . .
What happens when Anu finally finds himself face-to-face with Karnak-and a truth that he cannot escape? Find out in this warm and funny story about how a boy deals with being foreign, being bald and being separated from someone he loves like crazy.
The Four-Week Countdown Diet
Dateline Islamabad
It was an assignment that was at once challenging and intimidating. I was going to be setting foot on –enemy” territory.’ Amit Baruah was one of only two Indian journalists allowed to be based in Islamabad during three tumultuous years of Pakistan’s history. The author recounts with some amusement his family’s experience of life in Islamabad society between April 1997 and June 2000″all of it conducted under the suspicious gaze of Pakistani intelligence agents who shadow Baruah, his wife and daughters everywhere, including into friends’ living rooms. He records his frustration at being disallowed from reporting freely on the ground many events that defined Indo-Pak relations, even as death or kidnapping forever stalks him. Three incidents haunt Baruah the most: not being cleared to attend the funeral, in 1998, of John Joseph, the bishop of Faisalabad who committed suicide in protest against Pakistan’s -blasphemy’ laws; being forbidden to view the wreckage of an Indian Air Force plane shot down during the Kargil conflict of 1999; and being prevented from entering Afghanistan from Pakistan to report on the Kandahar hijacking later that year. And yet, says Baruah, despite all the personal and professional difficulties he faced in Pakistan, his stint in Islamabad”and his exchanges with so many friends he cannot name”proved to be the most exciting and enriching in his career. While admitting the difficult nature of his job as a foreign correspondent in a hostile nation, Baruah recalls the joys of meeting generous, like-minded people in a country whose regimented stance on India”and its press”is less than friendly.
The Penguin U.G. Krishnamurti Reader
My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.’ Thus spoke U.G. Krishnamurti in his uniquely iconoclastic and subversive way, distancing himself from gurus, spiritual ‘advisers’, mystics, sages, ‘enlightened’ philosophers et al. UG’s only advice was that people should throw away their crutches and free themselves from the ‘stranglehold’ of cultural conditioning. Uppaluri Gopala Krishnamurti was born on 9 July 1918 in Masulipatnam, a coastal town in Andhra Pradesh. He died on 22 March 2007 at the age of eighty-nine in Vallecrosia, Italy, at the villa of a friend. The effect that he had, and will continue to have, on legions of his admirers is difficult to put into words. With his flowing silvery hair, deep-set eyes and elongated Buddha-like ears, he was an explosive yet cleansing presence and has been variously described as ‘a wild flower of the earth’, ‘a bird in constant flight’, an ‘anti-guru’ and a ‘cosmic Naxalite’. UG gave no lectures or discourses and had no organization or fixed address, but he travelled all over the world to meet people who flocked to listen to his ‘anti-teaching’. His language was always uncompromisingly simple and unadorned, his conversational style informal, intimate, blasphemous and invigorating. This reader, edited by long-time friend and admirer Mukunda Rao, is a compilation of UG’s freewheeling and radical utterances and ideas. UG unceasingly questioned and demolished the very foundations of human thought but, as Rao says, in the cathartic laughter or the silence after UG had spoken, there was a profound sense of freedom from illusory goals and ‘the tyranny of knowledge, beauty, goodness, truth and God’
The Battle For No. 19
Eight schoolgirls from the hills on a tour of Agra, drive into Delhi the day Indira Gandhi is assassinated. They run into a violent, crazed mob that pulls their jovial old driver Kartar Singh out and slays him brutally. In a blazing city lashed by violence, the girls flee to seek refuge. They find it in an elegant and apparently empty house but is it safe? Its gallery of forbidding masks and medieval weapons is alarming enough, but worse, it is a house marked by the vicious mob because it belongs to a rich Sikh family with two children. In an adventure gone dreadfully wrong, all that the girls can think of is going home, but the vengeful enemy is right at the door! Led by sixteen-year-old Puja, a masterful archer but with her own personal demons to fight, the girls have to tackle one threat after another, including a chicken thief in their midst. Mustering their wisdom, stealth, cunning and courage, they valiantly keep their conscienceless attackers at bay until they are finally plunged into a quandary where there is only hair’s breadth between killing and being killed. A gripping and powerful story, The Battle for No. 19 highlights the moral dilemmas of young people in today’s world where violence erupts round every corner, and the line between right and wrong runs dangerously thin.
Chicken Mama and Other Stories
Hop on to a super fragilistic story-tour that will take you far and wide to places you have never been and people you have never seen. Meet Chicken Mama, the spiky-haired medicine woman who can move Time backwards; Mokel-embe-embe, the world’s last dinosaur, about to be captured by British explorers; Spooky95768939123, the ghost in danger of becoming extinct; and Manto the Degree Master, equally expert at calligraphy and ‘chumpy’. Salute freedom fighter Shankarrao and his defiant chappal-throwing; and tag along with old Das Babu to Bombay’s Hanging Gardens, Arabia and the yucky-mucky footpath; and find out if Asha and Dhiren are ever able to fool the very clever Chachaji. There’s never a dull moment in this selection of unusual stories. From the laughable antics of Sammy the penguin to the secret of the snake-stone in the Himalayan meadows to Epsilon the biologist’s Amazonian hunt for the rare How-D’You-Do Bird-each story in this exciting collection introduces you to real characters you will never forget and imaginary ones you will want desperately to meet.