Classic tales of crime detection featuring Byomkesh Bakshi, the master inquisitor. Written long before Satyajit Ray’s Feluda series, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi mysteries heralded a new era in Bengali popular fiction . Set in the old-world Kolkata, three stories featuring the astute investigator and his chronicler friend Ajit are still as gripping and delightful as when they first appeared.
Byomkesh’s world, peopled with wonderfully delineated characters and framed by a brilliantly captured pre-Independence urban milieu, is fascinating because of its cotemporary flavour, In the first story, Byomkesh works undercover to expose an organized crime ring trafficking in drugs. In the ‘Gramophone Pin Mystery’, he must put his razor-sharp intellect to good used to unearth the pattern behind a series of bizarre roadside murders. In ‘Clalamity Strikes’, the ace detective is called upon to investigate the strange and sudden death of a girl in a neighbour’s kitchen, In the next story, he has to lock horns with an old enemy who has vowed to kill him with an innocuous but deadly weapon. And, in ‘ Picture Imperfect’, Byomkesh unravels a complex mystery involving a stolen group photograph, an amorous couple, and an apparently unnecessary murder.
A lucid and brilliantly-argued book on India’s recent economic reforms Nearly fifty years after independence, India remains a very poor country. It ranks near the bottom in terms of per capita income, and is similarly placed in the Human Develoent Index which measures social well-being. Economic growth in India has been less than half that of China or even other countries in Asia. And governments, at the Centre as well as in the states, are close to insolvency. The reason for our spectacular underachievement lies in the continuation of policies which had a certain validity as a response to the colonial experience, but which have long outlived their usefulness. The global economic scene has changed dramatically since they were formulated, and we must respond to the new realities. Bimal Jalan, the well known economist and present Governor of the RBI, in this lucid and well-argued book, makes a case for governments doing what they alone can best do, and less of what they cannot do effectively.
A ribald, good-natured story of love in Delhi.
Jaishree Mishra’s second novel is an unexpected romp through the universal dilemmas of love and marriage. It is a compelling tale of icompatible relationships and their astonishing success rated. The Sachdevs, Memoms and Singhs are urban Indians, normal folk with everyday converns, instantly recognizable, in fact, just a little bit like youji and me. But when a foppish Delhiwalla falls for a loverly, smart keralite and his brother finds remance abroad, passion and comedy take control of their destinaies. Why are any of these couples married to each other? Why are the unmarried wanting to marry each other? And why are some of them friends? For wouldn’t you have throught that friends, at the very least, had to be vaguely compatible, even if husbands and wives weren’t?
This hilarious tale of imcompatiblities explores why we do the things we do or, indeed, why we let them happen to us.
Meet Chris Stark—six-feet-four, weighing a healthy 300 pounds—a former player of American football who, as he himself is the first to accept, ‘think pretty good but don’t talk that great on account of playing too much football’. Following the pportunities created by Liberalisation, his family’s c orporation h as e ntered in to a business
collaboration with an Indian company, and this has brought the sportive young man to Delhi. While in India he becomes enmeshed i n i ndustrial d isputes, p olitical
machinations, weird intelligence webs and an unfortunate love
affair, besides various other oddities.
The solution to the entire Gordian knot of problems lies in making
the Minister smile. What happens?
The rich and varied body of writing in the Indian languages has grown immenasurably in the last hundred yeards. This collection of short stories brings together some pernnial favourites from this vast treasure trve, written by acknowledged masters of the art and sensitively translated. The twenty-three stories included here deal with themes central to modern India:caste, gender politics and emerging changes in the traditonal family structure, These are striking vignettes from all parts of te country, evocative of different lifestyles, yet reflective of common problems and issues with which we can all idnetify.
Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award An award-winning novel that uses both vast panoramic views and lovingly reconstructed detail to provide an unforgettable picture of nineteenth-century Bengal. The Bengal Renaissance and the 1857 uprising form the backdrop to Those Days, a saga of human frailties and strength. The story revolves around the immensely wealthy Singha and Mukherjee families, and the intimacy that grows between them. Ganganarayan Singha’s love for Bindubasini, the widowed daughter of the Mukherjees, flounders on the rocks of orthodoxy even as his zamindar father, Ramkamal, finds happiness in the arms of the courtesan, Kamala Sundari. Bimbabati, Ramkamal’s wife, is left to cope with her loneliness. A central theme of the novel is the manner in which the feudal aristocracy, sunk in ritual and pleasure, slowly awakens to its social obligations. Historical personae interact with fictional protagonists to enrich the narrative. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, the reformer; Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the poet; the father and son duo of Dwarkanath and Debendranath Tagore; Harish Mukherjee, the journalist; Keshab Chandra Sen, the Brahmo Samaj radical; David Hare and John Bethune, the English educationists—these and a host of others walk the streets of Calcutta again, to bring alive a momentous time.
‘Kalki’ R. Krishnamurthy, one of the pioneering giants of the Tamil press in the tumultuous times of the nationalist movement, was a versatile and prolific writer, inscribing the urgencies of his time in his fiction. This collection brings together the best of Kalki’s short stories, which contain some of his most colourful and enduring characters and themes of Tamil popular fiction of the nineteen thirties and forties. There is in these stories the heady urgency of the freedom struggle, the piquant humour of the parodied Tamil gothic and devastating social satire. In her sensitive translations, Gowri Ramnarayan has succeeded in capturing the nuances of the gently mordant wit that made Kalki’s stories the highlight of the magazines they were originally published in, creating for themselves a dedicated following that flourishes undiminished to this day.
Coinciding with the centenary of Kalki’s birth, this volume is a well-deserved tribute to a writer whose breadth of vision and genius imagined and served a new India.
A brilliant biography of one of India’s greatest poets
Mirza Mohammad Asadullah Khan Ghalib began writing poetry in Persian at the age of nine and the pre-eminent poet of the time, Mir, predicted a great future for the precocious genius when he was shown his verse. But success and material rewards did not come to Ghalib easily, for the times were against him, and he did not suffer fools gladly even if they occupied positions of importance.
Ghalib was at the height of his powers when events took a turn for the worse. First came the decline of the Mughal court, then the rise of the British Empire and, finally, the Revolt of 1857. Though Ghalib lived through the upheavals and purges of the Revolt, in which many of his contemporaries and friends died and his beloved Delhi was irrevocably changed, he was a broken man and longed for death. When he died, on 15 February 1869, he left behind some of the most vivid accounts of the events of the period ever written. In this illuminating biography Pavan K. Varma evocatively captures the spirit of the man and the essence of the times he lived in.
The vast ocean of stories that influenced storytelling the world over ‘The Kathasaritasagara’ is said to have been compiled by a Kashmiri Saivite Brahmin called Somadeva in AD 1070, although the date has not been conclusively established. Legend has it that Somadeva composed the Kathasaritasagara for Queen Suryavati, wife of King Anantadeva who ruled Kashmir in the eleventh century. The stories in this book are retold from ten of the eighteen books of the original Kathasaritasagara. The most remarkable feature of the Kathasaritasagara is that unlike other texts of the time, it offers no moral conclusions, no principles to live by and is throughout a celebration of earthly life. The tale of Naravahanadatta, the prince of the vidyadharas, the sky-dwellers with magical powers, comprises the main narrative and is used as an outer frame to introduce the stories in the text. Promiscuous married women and clever courtesans, imbecile Brahmins, incompetent kings and wise ministers, wicked mendicants and holy ascetics, cursed men and men who are granted boons, evil non-human creatures and friendly magical beings, all jostle for attention in Arshia Sattar’s masterful translation of this timeless collection of tales.
A sweeping saga of ancient india
Return of the Aryans tells the epic story of the Aryans – a gripping tale of kings and poets, seers and gods, battles and romance and the rise and fall of civilizations. In a remarkable feat of the imagination, Bhagwan S. Gidwani takes us back to the dawn of mankind (8000 BC) to recreate the world of the Aryans. He tells us why the Aryans left India, their native land, for foreign shores and shows us their triumphal return to their homeland…
Vast and absorbing, the novel tells the stories of characters like the gentle god, Sindhu Putra, spreading his message of love; the physician sage Dhanawantar and his wife Dhanawantari; peaceloving Kashi after whom the holy city of Varanasi is named; and Nila who gave her name to the river Nile…
Richly textured and with a cast of thousands, the epic adventure of the Aryans come gloriously alive in the hands of the bestselling author of The Sword of Tipu Sultan.
