A stunningly lyrical work, The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata reinterprets Vyasa’s epic from Arjuna’s point of view. As Arjuna relives the battle of Kurukshetra, he senses a profound change coming upon himself. He begins to understand the true meaning of surrender and sacrifice.
The book comprises three parts, narrated principally by Arjuna. Part I takes us through the childhood and youth of the Pandavas and Kauravas, the game of dice, the Pandavas’ exile, and ends with the armies arrayed for battle at Kurukshetra. Part II recounts the battle itself, and the teachings of the Bhagvad Gita. Part III presents a moving and brilliantly original take on the Mahabharata, as Lidchi-Grassi gives a voice to the forgotten victims of every war—the ordinary citizens who must pick themselves up, and resume the business of life. An old order has been swept away, but can the new age—the Kali Yuga—help lessen human strife and misery? Vastly ambitious in scope and epic in scale, The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata is an astonishing read.
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Leela—alluring, taciturn, haunted—is moving back to Delhi from New York. She knows her return will unsettle many lives. Twenty-five years ago her sister was seduced by Vyasa, a young university lecturer. Now Vyasa, an eminent Sanskrit scholar, is preparing for the unlikely marriage of his son, Ash, to the child of a Hindu nationalist. Compounding Leela’s disruptive presence, Vyasa’s hedonistic daughter Bharati arrives from London, reluctantly leaving her cosmopolitan university life to see Ash married. He, meanwhile, has fallen in love with his brother-in-law to be.
Gleefully presiding over the drama is Ganesh—divine, elephant-headed scribe of India’s great epic, the Mahabharata. The family patriarchs may think they have arranged the wedding for their own selfish ends, but according to Ganesh it is he who is directing events—in a bid to save Leela, his beloved heroine, from his devious enemy Vyasa.
Turning to fiction after an award-winning travel book, Alice Albinia has written a brilliantly playful and genre-defying first novel. Ambitious and entertaining, Leela’s Book weaves a tale of contemporary Delhi that crosses religious and social boundaries, reaching back into the origins of the Mahabharata itself.
Oozing with men, money, and Maseratis, Dubai is the ultimate playground for the woman who knows her Louboutins from her Louis Vuittons.
But for some, there’s a lot more at stake than a Hermes Birkin. Leila has been in search of a wealthy husband for over a decade. Nadia moves to Dubai to support her husband’s career, only to have her sacrifices thrown in her face. Sugar escapes the UK in an attempt to escape her past. Lady Luxe, the rebellious Emirati heiress, scoffs at everything her culture holds sacred. Until the day her double life starts unravelling at the seams.
Set against a backdrop of luxury hotels and manmade islands, Desperate in Dubai tells the tale of four desperate women as they struggle to find truth, love, and themselves.
aman is a fast rising marketing executive at a global drinks company; Shagun is his extraordinarily beautiful wife. With his glittering future, her vivid beauty, and their two adorable children-eight year old Arjun who looks just like her and two year old Roohi who looks just like him-the pair appear to have everything.
Then Shagun meets Raman’s dynamic new boss Ashok and everything changes. Once lovers and companions, husband and wife become enemies locked in an ugly legal battle over their two children. Caught in their midst is the childless Ishita who is in love with the idea of motherhood.
Custody is the riveting story of how family-love can disintegrate into an obsession to possess children, body and soul, as well as a chilling critique of the Indian judicial system. Told with nuance, sympathy, and clear-sightedness, it confirms Manju Kapur’s reputation as the great chronicler of the modern Indian family.
Basharat Peer was a teenager when the separatist movement exploded in Kashmir in 1989. Over the following years countless young men, seduced by the romance of the militant, fuelled by feelings of injustice, crossed over the Line of Control to train in Pakistani army camps. Peer was sent off to boarding school in Aligarh to keep out of trouble. He finished college and became a journalist in Delhi. But Kashmir-angrier, more violent, more hopeless-was never far away.
In 2003, the young journalist left his job and returned to his homeland to search out the stories and the people which had haunted him. In Curfewed Night he draws a harrowing portrait of Kashmir and its people. Here are stories of a young man’s initiation into a Pakistani training camp; a mother who watches her son forced to hold an exploding bomb; a poet who finds religion when his entire family is killed. Of politicians living in refurbished torture chambers and former militants dreaming of discotheques; of idyllic villages rigged with landmines, temples which have become army bunkers, and ancient sufi shrines decapitated in bomb blasts. And here is finally the old story of the return home-and the discovery that there may not be any redemption in it.
Lyrical, spare, gutwrenching and intimate, Curfewed Night is a stunning book and an unforgettable portrait of Kashmir in war.
By the late 1930s, Subhas Chandra Bose had become disillusioned with Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian National Congress and the nationalist struggle. With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, he resolved that India could only achieve freedom through a violent uprising.
Two years later, in 1941, Bose went on to make a daring escape, via Afghanistan and Russia, to Berlin in search of an anti-British alliance. The Nazis seized Bose’s offer and the possibilities of an anti-British revolt in India, even envisaging German troops marching into the country as ‘liberators’. Meanwhile, thousands of British Indian troops captured in North Africa enlisted in the Wehrmacht hoping to join the Nazi march into India as they swore oaths to Hitler and Bose ‘in the fight for the freedom of India’. Yet for all their accord, the Bose-Nazi relationship remained complicated, full of ambivalences on both sides.
This book for the first time, tells the story of Bose’s war years in Germany and examines his relationship with the Nazis. This period remains a deeply controversial moment in Indian history and has thus far been suffused with hagiography. Using rare German and Indian war records, Romain Hayes has written a nuanced, thoughtful, and vital account of these years, shedding light on an aspect of Bose that has till now remained in shadow.
Do you want to adopt a baby but don’t know where to start? Worried about the cost and the time it will take? Nandini too went through the same doubts, fear, and confusion before her daughter Kiki came into her life nearly three years ago and turned her life upside down. And out of her experiences was born Babies from the Heart, a comprehensive resource for couples who want to adopt a child in India. Written in her unique personal style, it takes you through:
• Each step in the adoption process, from choosing an agency to bringing a child home
• Getting the family on board
• Medical, emotional, and legal issues
• The process of telling the baby she’s adopted
• Discipline issues with teenager adoptive kids
Warm, reliable, and honest and with practical advice and tips from a cross-section of adoptive parents, Babies from the Heart tells you all you need to know to adopt a child.
Mohammed Ashraf has studied biology in college, and after college has learnt how to repair television sets, cut suit lengths, and slice chicken. He has lived in Mumbai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Surat, and Patna, but this evening he is stoned on a street in Sadar Bazaar, in North Delhi. The morning shall bring hangovers, whiskey breakfasts, and possibly answers to the lingering questions that haunt Ashraf. How did he get here? Why is he the way he is? And is there a way back home?
In this compelling account of the life of an itinerant labourer, Aman Sethi brings Ashraf vividly alive and illuminates the lives of countless others like him. Wry, humourous, and insightful, A Free Man is an unforgettable portrait of an invisible man in his invisible city.
An erotic classic and the most recognized work of an celebrated nineteenth-century poet and courtesan
‘Last night, I dreamt of Hari
With that melodious-voiced woman.
He seemed impatient with me,
And now even
The song of the nightingale seems shrill.’
An erotic narrative poem that explores desire and jealousy, love experienced and love lost, Radhika Santawanam is the most recognized work of nineteenth-century poet and courtesan Muddupalani.
Celebrated as a literary masterpiece in Muddupalani’s lifetime, Radhika Santawanam was banned by the British in 1910 when it was published again, a century and a half later, with critics panning its graphic descriptions of lovemaking. And, after another hundred years, this epic is now available in its entirety for the first time in English translation
