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Catagory: Classics

Vishnu Purana

LORD VISHNU AND THE CREATION

The Vishnu Purana is part of a series of eighteen sacred Hindu texts known collectively as the Puranas. It occupies a prominent position among the ancient Vaishnava Puranas which recount tales of creation and the many incarnations of Lord Vishnu. It describes the four classes of society, the four stages of life, and key astronomical concepts related to Hinduism.
Brimming with insight and told with clarity, this translation of the Vishnu Purana by Bibek Debroy presents readers with an opportunity to truly understand the classical Indian mythic texts. Debroy has previously translated the Bhagavata Purana, the Markandeya Purana, and the Brahma Purana.

Battles of Our Own

An Indian ‘industrial novel’ from the winner of the 1990 Odisha Sahitya Akademi Award

Jagadish Mohanty’s Battles of Our Own is a rare work of modern Odia and Indian fiction. It seeks to delineate a world that is off the grid. Its action unfolds in the remote and non-descript Tarbahar Colliery-a fictional name for the over hundred-year-old open-cast Himgiri Rampur coal mine in the hinterland of western Odisha. A work of gritty realism in its portrayal of a dark and dangerous underworld where coal is extracted, the novel poignantly reveals the primeval struggle between man and brute nature.
Offering a complete experience of the ‘industrial novel’-face offs between trade unions and management, trade union rivalry, and clandestine deals between enemy camps-this work brings alive Mohanty’s literary genius, which takes us to a world beyond the simplistic binary division between the worker and the master. The novel unravels a complex, fractious, and nuanced picture of the human condition.
This sensitive and evocative rendering by Himansu S. Mohapatra and Paul St-Pierre captures the thrill, beauty, horror and tragedy of this fictional tour de force.

Dada Comrade

‘This fine translation has once again returned Yashpal’s story to that fraught arena where every warrior appears exhausted today’-Ravish Kumar

‘A daring and unusual novel’-Vasudha Dalmia

‘A remarkable contribution to literary translation in English’-Apoorvanand

Harish, a young revolutionary in pre-Independence Lahore, upsets his party by questioning its credo of underground armed resistance. Escaping the party’s wrath, he becomes a labour activist, but is soon framed by the British government. Meanwhile, Shailbala, his comrade and lover, must take a decision about her pregnancy. As she courageously defies social norms and stands up to her influential father, can she find an ally within the revolutionary party-with Dada–Harish’s erstwhile mentor and antagonist–as its autocratic leader?

Yashpal’s first and semi-autobiographical novel, Dada Comrade is considered the pioneering political novel of Hindi literature. It raises questions about freedom and equality, as well as about sexuality and marriage-subjects as urgent today as in those times. In this first-ever English translation, Simona Sawhney brilliantly captures the force and intensity of the original, which had heralded the arrival of a literary genius.

Brahma Purana Volume 2

Translated by Bibek Debroy

A GLORIOUS RENDITION OF ONE OF THE OLDEST PURANAS BY A MASTER TRANSLATOR

The Brahma Purana is the first of a series of eighteen texts known collectively as the Puranas. These are counted amongst the foundational texts of Hinduism. The holy trinity of Brahma as the creator, Vishnu as the preserver and Shiva as the destroyer constitutes the central deities of this series and features in its narratives. Sometimes referred to as Adi Purana, Brahma Purana oscillates between being a work of geography with a focus on the holy sites of the River Godavari, and being an encyclopaedic work of cosmology, genealogy and mythology.
Reading almost like a travel guide, it celebrates temples and sites related to Vishnu, Shiva and Devi as it focuses on places like modern-day Odisha and Rajasthan. Brimming with insight and told with clarity, this luminous text is a celebration of a complex mythological universe populated with gods and mortals, providing readers with an opportunity to truly understand Indian philosophy.

Brahma Purana Volume 1

Translated by Bibek Debroy

A GLORIOUS RENDITION OF ONE OF THE OLDEST PURANAS BY A MASTER TRANSLATOR

The Brahma Purana is the first of a series of eighteen texts known collectively as the Puranas. These are counted amongst the foundational texts of Hinduism. The holy trinity of Brahma as the creator, Vishnu as the preserver and Shiva as the destroyer constitutes the central deities of this series and features in its narratives. Sometimes referred to as Adi Purana, Brahma Purana oscillates between being a work of geography with a focus on the holy sites of the River Godavari, and being an encyclopaedic work of cosmology, genealogy and mythology.
Reading almost like a travel guide, it celebrates temples and sites related to Vishnu, Shiva and Devi as it focuses on places like modern-day Odisha and Rajasthan. Brimming with insight and told with clarity, this luminous text is a celebration of a complex mythological universe populated with gods and mortals, providing readers with an opportunity to truly understand Indian philosophy.

Ecstasy and Other Stories

STORIES THAT TOUCH YOUR HEART BY ONE OF THE BEST MODERN TAMIL WRITERS

Special Birth Centenary Edition

Thi. Janakiraman (ThiJa) was one of the best Tamil prose writers of the twentieth century. The stories in this specially curated collection offer a view of the modernizing Tamil countryside as well as the changing landscape of human relationships. A man builds his reputation based on lies to meet the expectations of his father, a woman desiring tenderness from her abusive husband finds release in an unexpected way, a music teacher is mocked for taking on a lower-caste student, and a drowning cat becomes the centre of attention during funerary rituals. In these and other tales, Janakiraman reaches inside the depths of the human heart and lays bare its contradictory pulls.

Through their brilliant translation, Professor David Shulman and the late S. Ramakrishnan reveal the ‘perfect pitch’ of Janakiraman’s precise, exquisite Tamil. They deftly capture his fluid, sensitive style in idiomatic English, seamlessly rendering the subtle inflections of the original. Prof. Shulman’s insightful and affecting introduction places Janakiraman within the long continuum of Tamil literature. There is also a short, beautiful memoir on him, written by his daughter Uma.

The Incomparable Festival (A masterpiece of Indo-Islamic literary culture)

An indispensable translation of Jan Sahib’s poetic ethnography of nineteenth-century performers-Pasha M. Khan, chair in Urdu Language and Culture, McGill University

This is a truly extraordinary work, an important contribution to the cultural history of the subcontinent-Muneeza Shamsie, writer and literary critic

The translation is experimental, challenging traditional expectations in its approach to rhyme and meter-Carla Petievich, South Asia Institute, The University of Texas at Austin

The Incomparable Festival (Musaddas Tahniyat-e-Jashn-e-Benazir) by Mir Yar Ali (whose pen name was Jan Sahib) is a little known but sumptuous masterpiece of Indo-Islamic literary culture, presented here for the first time in English translation. The long poem, written in rhyming sestet stanzas, is about the royal festival popularly called jashn-e-benazir(the incomparable festival), inaugurated in 1866 by the Nawab Kalb-e-Ali Khan (r. 1865-87) with the aim of promoting art, culture and trade in his kingdom at Rampur in northern India. The task of commemorating the sights and wonders of the festival was given to the hugely popular writer of rekhti verse, the tart and playful sub-genre of the ghazal, reflecting popular women’s speech, of which Jan Sahib is one of the last practitioners.

Structured as an ode to the nawab, the poem is a world-album depicting various classes on the cusp of social upheaval. They include the elite, distinguished artists and commoners, brought together at the festivities, blurring the distinction between poetry, history and biography, and between poetic convention and social description. The book is a veritable archive of the legendary khayal singers, percussionists, and instrumentalists, courtesans, boy-dancers, poets, storytellers (dastango) and reciters of elegies (marsiyago). But, above all, the poem gives voice to the ‘lowest’ denizens of the marketplace by bringing to light their culinary tastes, artisanal products, religious rituals and beliefs, and savoury idioms, thereby focusing on identities of caste and gender in early modern society.

This Penguin Classics edition will be of interest not just to the Urdu and Hindi literary historian, but to specialists and readers interested in the histories of music, dance, and the performative arts, as well as scholars of gender and sexuality in South Asia. Lovers of Urdu poetry will find in it a forgotten masterpiece.

Vikramorvashiyam

The earthly King Pururavas rescues the celestial nymph Urvashi from a demon, and thus begins a majestic love story that brings heaven and earth together. Both are struck with Kama’s arrow in their very first meeting, but each shies away from saying anything because the distance between them seems insurmountable. Even when they do confess their love, magical transformations and heavenly curses keep the lovers apart. Will Pururavas succeed in his quest for Urvashi?

A magnificent drama based on an episode from the Rig Veda, Vikramorvashiyam is filled with dramatic turns of event, music and dance. The scenes, characters and dialogues are at once lively and theatrical as well as sensitive and speculative. Believed to be the second of Kalidasa’s three plays, Vikramorvashiyam is an undisputed classic from ancient Indian literature. A.N.D. Haksar’s brilliant new translation gives contemporary readers an opportunity to savour this delightful tale.

The Coming Age

C. Subramania Bharati (1882-1921) has an unrivalled reputation in twentieth-century Tamil literature and has come to be known as the Tamil ‘Mahakavi’, meaning ‘Supreme Poet’. His work as a poet and prose-writer ignited a Renaissance in modern Tamil writing. However, he also wrote and published regularly in English.
The Coming Age brings together Bharati’s important English writings in an authoritative and reliable edition presented by his great-granddaughter. The pieces in this volume reveal a well informed and cosmopolitan writer, engaging with the world around him, passionately sharing his opinions.
Exploring Indian history and culture, offering a shattering contemporary view of the colonial experience, commenting on political events, advocating for women’s rights and caste equality, and sharing his deep knowledge of the Tamil language and literary tradition, these pieces present Bharati in a new light for a new generation.

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