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Meet Some Hindu Deities and Get To Know Them Better

Posted on by Penguin India

In the Hindu universe, gods and goddesses play freely among human beings to help them, nudge them towards the right action and mete out justice. They may appear to us as avatars in human form or manifest themselves as forces of nature. The many myths of Hinduism become colourful and entertaining when Shiva, Vishnu and Devi take different forms to enact their rivalries, destroy demons and teach devotees with superpowers a lesson in humility.
From The Book of Avatars and Divinities, we quote some of the different characteristics of some of these Hindu deities.


“Ganesha is one of the most widely worshipped deities in India, regarded by millions with love and adoration. Simple everyday routines, a new business, a journey, even an examination—all are preceded by a prayer to Ganesha, beseeching his benediction. Ganesha, more than any other deity, satisfies human aspirations for worldly success and fulfilment. Ganesha is also a most accommodating deity, easy to please.”


“Shiva is the god of life and death, of destruction and rebirth. The whole life process is imminent in him, but he transcends it and inhabits a mental, emotional and spiritual space which is difficult to understand through intellectual processes alone. To embrace Shiva, to comprehend his power, involves an intuitive leap into our deepest inner selves.”


“In popular Hinduism, Vishnu is the Preserver, the protector of the good and the guardian of Dharma, the law of righteousness and the moral order…The most important aspect of Vishnu is his ability to incarnate himself on earth whenever Dharma is in danger, to save good from evil.”


“There are probably more forms of Devi than any other deity, for temples are dedicated to the goddess in every Indian village. She is energy and power, the ultimate destroyer of evil. She may be Shakti, Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati, or she may be a local village goddess with an unknown name, but all-powerful and commanding.”


“Hanuman is both an all-powerful god and the greatest devotee and there is no contradiction in this….Hanuman epitomizes piety, duty, discipline, strength, chastity, modesty, altruism, scholarship and simplicity.”

This book introduces us to the divinities and avatars of Hinduism, a great variety spread out all over the country but uniting to become a single mystical power for the triumph of good over evil.

Glorious Resistance: The similarity between African American and Dalit movements from The Radical in Ambedkar

Posted on by Penguin India

This remarkable volume, edited and introduced by Anand Teltumbde and Suraj Yengde, seeks to unpack the radical in B.R. Ambedkar’s legacy by examining his life work from hitherto unexplored perspectives. Although revered by millions today primarily as a Dalit icon, Ambedkar was a serious scholar of India’s history, society and foreign policy.
The Radical in Ambedkar is an extraordinary collection of immense breadth and scholarship that challenges the popular understanding of Ambedkar, an essential reading for all those who wish to imagine a new future.
Read on to find out the similarity between African American and Dalit oppression and the co-operation in their resistance.

Jotiba Phule’s recognition (as early as 1873) of the similarities in oppression between the African Americans and the Sudras

“The similarity between the caste system in India and racism in the US had been noted by none other than Jotiba Phule, whom Ambedkar had acknowledged as one of his three gurus. In 1873, Phule had dedicated his book Gulamgiri (Slavery) to American abolitionists ‘in an earnest desire that my countrymen may take their example as their guide in the emancipation of their Sudra Brethren from the trammels of Brahmin thralldom’”

 ~

The correspondence between black intellectual and civil rights activist W.E.B Dubois and Ambedkar regarding the importance of a comparative study of African Americans and the Dalits in India

His correspondence with Du Bois in July 1946 consisted of an “enquiry about the National Negro Congress’s petition to the UN, which attempted to secure minority rights through the UN Council. Ambedkar explained that he had been a ‘student of the Negro problem’ and that ‘[t]here is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary’. In a letter dated 31 July 1946, Du Bois responded by telling Ambedkar he was familiar with his name and that he had ‘every sympathy with the Untouchables of India’.”

  ~

 W.E.B. Du Bois and Ambedkar had similar ideas empowering their respective communities.

“On many counts, Du Bois’s approach comes close to Ambedkar’s. His Talented Tenth is what Ambedkar expected of select people reaching important positions in the government with higher education and becoming a protective umbrella for the interests of the Dalit masses. Right from the Mahad Conference, he spoke of this expectation and focused most of his struggle on this issue. It also informs his emphasis on higher education. Like Du Bois, he believed in Dalits struggling for civil rights.”

  ~

The role of skin colour as one of the most consistently applied traits in casteism and racism.

“The issue of colourism as a variant of racism manifested via skin colour remains controversial in conjunction with caste and race. Indian scholars contend that caste is a matter of birth. Internationally, others at the World Conference against Racism held in South Africa in 2001 contended that many discussions of racism should exclude caste. However, in both instances of race and caste, identity and/or inferiority cannot be established absent visual speculation. The most consistently applied trait in observations of race and caste is arguably that of skin colour.”

  ~

The circumscriptions placed upon access to public drinking water as a form of oppression on both the Indian Untouchables and African Americans.

“Access to water is an effective metaphor for characterizing the struggle of the Indian Untouchable and African American to escape oppression for freedom, justice and equality in the new millennium. Access to public drinking locations has been limited by the various forms of race discrimination in America and caste discrimination in India that the oppressed populations in both countries have suffered for generations.”

  ~

The similarity between Jim Crow ‘laws’ and the customs in India that functioned like the caste system.

“Denial of access to public and clean drinking water for African Americans became institutionalized by the quasi legislation historically referred to in America as the Jim Crow laws. The Jim Crow laws were not laws per se but de facto customs contingent upon race that operated similar to the Indian caste system. It reduced African-American citizens in good standing to the status of second-class citizens. This lasted officially from 1877 to 1964, although in fact its strains are unofficially felt even today.”

  ~

The rise of the Black Panthers and the Dalit Panthers in reaction to the systemic oppression that continued even after corrective laws were instituted.

“While laws were passed, Dalits as Untouchables in India and African Americans in the US continued to face oppression in their daily lives, as suggested by the modern-day events . . . This motivated some to seek a new direction in arming themselves in order to access their right to the dignity and respect denied to them by their oppressors. In America, African Americans organized the Black Panthers for a new direction. In India, there emerged the Dalit Panthers. Both fought for similar objectives, motivated by their goal to end blatant oppression.”

  ~

The persistence of oppression when upper-caste Indians and Euro-Americans refuse to recognize how they benefit from an oppressive system.

“As it pertains to colourism in the new millennium, caste abusers and racists may say they are against colourism when what they really mean is individual colourism. They refuse to recognize that upper-caste Indians and Euro-Americans benefit as a group from institutional and systemic colourism against all dark-skinned peoples of the world. Thus, all upper-caste Indians in India and Euro-Americans in the US are nepotistic beneficiaries of an oppressive system that bestows upon them inherited ‘rights’ and privileges absent skill, talent and hard work.”

 ~

The Dalit capitalism idea of Chandra Bhan Prasad that challenges centuries of economic exploitation.

“Another example of the awareness among Dalits of the struggle of African Americans is in the movement for ‘Dalit capitalism’. Some social activists in India, including Gail Omvedt, argue that liberalization and globalization can empower Dalits as they undermine the Brahminical control over the economy. Chandra Bhan Prasad, however, is widely credited with launching the idea of ‘Dalit capitalism’…Though not central to the religious notion of pollution, economic exploitation has been built into the caste system. One must understand that the historical position of Dalits in the Indian caste system forbade them from engaging in entrepreneurial activities. Thus, Prasad challenges this traditional notion. He has asserted that in order for Dalits to successfully overcome the dominance of the caste Hindu they need to create a middle class based on education/white-collar jobs/professions. He openly admits that Black capitalism in the US was his inspiration for Dalit capitalism.”

 ~

The support and co-operation between the Black Lives Matter movement and Dalit activists.

“Recently, Dalit activists have also reached out to the Black Lives Matter movement for both support and for strategies and policies they should pursue. This includes Dalit women activists who are organizing and protesting against sexual violence inflicted on them in India, which is often ignored by authorities.”

An extraordinary collection of immense breadth and scholarship that challenges the popular understanding of Ambedkar, The Radical in Ambedkar is essential reading for all those who wish to imagine a new future.

Fatima Bhutto on Her New Book, The Runaways!

Posted on by Penguin India

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul. She is the author of a book of poetry, two works of non-fiction, including her bestselling memoir Songs of Blood and Sword, and the highly acclaimed novel The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon, which was longlisted in 2014 for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Read on to know more about her new book The Runaways, as we catch up with her on a conversation:

How did you decide the characteristics of the main three people in the book? Are they someone you know?
Sunny and Monty are the two characters that I knew right out of the gate. I had the idea of these two young men, alone, on a march who can barely stand each other. But then you start to wonder just why someone might loathe the idea of another person and you start to consider each man afresh. The characters always surprised me, I had ideas what I wanted from them but I didn’t always get my way. They’re not anyone I know in real life, but parts of them are composites of me and other parts are figments of completely made up universe.
Where did the idea for this book come from?
I wanted to write about what it means to be at war with the world around you – with your family, your community, your country, your history, everything. How much pain do you have to be in, how wounded do you have to feel, to begin a battle that large?
What were some of the challenges in writing The Runaways?
People are afraid of the topic. Fear or discomfort means that the idea that we have to understand radicalism and the consequences of political alienation rather than solely condemning it is an unusual one. What does it mean to speak of freedom but to be afraid of contrary political ideas? That has been the biggest challenge – everyone wants to talk about freedom, no one wants to test it.
What was your favourite part about writing this particular book?
Spending time with these people and going deeper and deeper into their lives. Writing is a lonely occupation, you spend hours and hours by yourself at a desk in silence but writing Sunny and Anita Rose I never felt lonely. I wrote The Runaways over four years and they were not easy years for me, my time writing this book helped me through a difficult time and it has my heart.
What is your book writing process?
I need a lot of space and time to work. I’m not someone who can work in coffee shops or public places. I need to be on my own, in quiet. I think books begin with a disturbance, something you can’t get out of your mind that haunts you and follows you until you surrender. The whole process of writing fiction is so otherworldly and mysterious, I don’t think one can describe it with any justice.
Do you have a message for aspiring authors/writers?
Read widely and deeply. Be generous to others. Accept that you don’t know anything, only then can you learn.
What is your work schedule like when you’re writing?
I keep saying writing is solitary work but the truth is, I’m a bit of a loner. I like to be by myself and to have unlimited space to think and read and wonder. When I’m working, I inhabit another place and resent any and all disruptions so I can’t say I’m a great joy to be around.
What is one important quality one must have in order to become an author?
Patience. You need to devote yourself fully to your work and that devotion may mean years of labour that no one will ever know about. If you don’t have the fire inside to see you through, you’ll rush, you’ll make mistakes and you won’t end up with anything deliberate or true.
What was the research process involved in writing The Runaways?
I watched a lot of videos on LiveLeak, which is a sort of alternate Youtube. They have all the stuff Youtube has like pandas sneezing and prank videos but they also have tabs on the war in Syria and Iraq. I read a lot of blogs and Tumblrs and Reddit threads – they hadn’t been taken down back when I started working on The Runaways – written by young people who had joined jihadist groups. I followed the news of the wars in Iraq and Syria very closely too but after a while, the research ran continually in the background and I began to work off imagination.
What is the one thing that authoring books has taught you?
That the work of learning and investigating what you think you know is never done.

The Runaways is an explosive new novel that asks difficult questions about modern identity in a world on fire.

Something Strange and Sinister – an excerpt from ‘The Spell of the Flying Foxes’

Posted on by Penguin India

It is a commonly held belief in India that flying foxes augur prosperity. They were certainly abundant in the Champaran region of north Bihar. Here in 1845, an Englishman, Alfred Augustus Tripe, fascinated by the prospect of farming indigo, known as Blue Gold, was drawn to its isolated wilderness.
In The Spell of the Flying Foxes author Sylvia Dyer, recaptures what now seems a fairy-tale world of picturesque beauty, peopled by unique and unforgettable characters.

————————————————————
Here is an excerpt from the chapter Something Strange and Sinister.
The floods that year were devastating. But now it was all over. With the coming of September the water receded. The transplanted paddy seedlings stood vivid green and upright, and the sugar cane was six feet high, with still another three months to go. All should have been well with our world.

But it was not.
The pi-dogs of Musahari Tola were seized by a sudden jitteriness, insisting on being let into the huts to sleep with the Musahars at night. They were kicked out with rough reprimands: ‘Worthless pariahs, are you watchdogs or lapdogs?’
Early next morning, one of the watchdogs had quit and was never seen again. Slowly more watchdogs began to disappear, and always one at a time. It was a mystery in a land where mysteries were quickly cleared up.
 Other villages too were in for mysterious disappearances, villages where only the upper-caste Hindus lived. Most of them owned at least one acre of this fertile land and were comfortably off. Their wives lived in purdah, seldom stepping out to work or socialize, but spending their lives as honoured housewives in their own thatched prisons, for each home had a little private courtyard with high thatched walls. Inside they ground the grain, milked the buffalo, cooked the meals and lived out their lives in cloistered contentment. In the dark hours just before dawn, proud sons of the village mounted on their buffaloes made a slow but certain beeline for our mango groves, or the adjacent fi elds, to graze furtively on the current crops, returning at sunrise, the riders full of song and the buffaloes full of milk for their owners.
But one morning, a buffalo failed to return.
 ‘I tell you, brother, it has been sent to the pound!’
‘The pound? But then, where is the boy? Has the earth swallowed him up?’
 That evening we went to visit Harry. He had built a narrow bamboo bridge across the Mahari so he could visit us or take a short cut through Puchkurwa to the railway station. It served its purpose well enough till a bad fl ood, like the one we had just experienced, swept it clean away.
So we sat on our bank, and he on his, with sixty feet of water in between. It was a little more than knee-deep in most places, scarcely a setback for our usual social exchanges. His servants waded across with chairs for us, and we sat shouting at each other, above the ripple of restless, running water.
Ghogra appeared on Harry’s side, in a snow-white uniform, dhoti hitched up, and a tray of fried snacks carried high above his head as he waded into the water. He had almost reached our bank when, all of a sudden, he lost his footing. His turban flew like a snowball. The eyes in the bulldog face popped, and the mouth opened. And he was gone.
 A moment later he reappeared coated with grey silt, and still clutching the tray. But the fried snacks had gone to the fishes, along with the dishes. Even from our bank, we could see the irritation on Harry’s face. They were from his best set. ‘He is the king of idiots, this Ghogra, and such a show-off!’
Nobody laughed out loud.
The setting sun sent out a blaze of fiery orange from the western horizon as Ghogra was making his slimy way back to Harry’s bank, grumbling about the upkeep of bridges, when—
‘Shh!’ Dad raised a hand for silence. ‘Crikey! Did you hear that?’
 ‘Hear what?’
‘A call . . . I could swear I heard a strange call in the distance, bloody strange.’
Some of the servants had heard it too. ‘Baap re baap! It’s a bhooth—an evil spirit!’
Nostalgic, funny and sad, The Spell of the Flying Foxes is a true story of a plantation in North Bihar on India’s border with Nepal

 

The Great Gatsby: A Rich Man in India – an excerpt from the 'The Beautiful and the Damned'

Posted on by Penguin India

The Beautiful and the Damned examines India’s many contradictions through various individual and extraordinary perspectives. Like no other writer, Siddhartha Deb humanizes the post-globalization experience in the book–its advantages, failures, and absurdities. India is a country where you take a nap and someone has stolen your job, where you buy a BMW but still have to idle for cows crossing your path.
Available for the first time with the controversial and previously unpublished first chapter, The Beautiful and the Damned is as important and incisive today as it was when it was first published. Here is an excerpt from that first chapter of the book, titled The Great Gatsby: A Rich Man in India.

A phenomenally wealthy Indian who excites hostility and suspicion is an unusual creature, a fish that has managed to muddy the waters it swims in. The glow of admiration lighting up the rich and the successful disperses before it reaches him, hinting that things have gone wrong somewhere. It suggests that beneath the sleek coating of luxury, deep under the sheen of power, there is a failure barely sensed by the man who owns that failure along with his expensive accoutrements. This was Arindam Chaudhuri’s situation when I first met him in 2007. He had achieved great wealth and prominence, partly by projecting an image of himself as wealthy and prominent. Yet somewhere along the way he had also created the opposite effect, which – in spite of his best efforts – had given him a reputation as a fraud, scamster and Johnny-come-lately. We’ll come to the question of frauds and scams later, but it is indisputable that Arindam had arrived very quickly. It had taken him just about a decade to build his business empire, but because his rise was so swift and his empire so blurry, it was possible to be quite ignorant of his existence unless one were particularly sensitive to the tremors created by new wealth in India. Indeed, throughout the years of Arindam’s meteoric rise, I had been happily oblivious of him, although once I had heard of him, I began to see him everywhere: in the magazines his media division published, flashing their bright colours and inane headlines at me from little news-stands made out of bricks and plastic sheets; in buildings fronted by dark glass where I imagined earnest young men imbibing the ideas of leadership disseminated by Arindam; and on the tiny screen in front of me on a flight from Delhi to Chicago when the film I had chosen for viewing turned out to have been produced by him. A Bombay gangster film, shot on a low budget, with a cast of unknown, modestly paid actors and actresses: was it an accident that the film was called Mithya? Theword means ‘lies’.
Still, I suppose we choose our own entanglements, and when I look back at the time in Delhi that led up to my acquaintance with Arindam, I realize that my meeting with him was inevitable. It was my task that summer to find a rich man as a subject, about the making and spending of money in India. In Delhi, there existed in plain sight
some evidence of what such making and spending of money amounted to. I could see it in the new road sweeping from the airport through south Delhi, turning and twisting around office complexes, billboards and a granite-and-glass shopping mall on the foothills of the Delhi Ridge that, when completed, would be the largest mall
in Asia. Around this landscape and its promise of Delhi as another Dubai or Singapore, I could see the many not-rich people and aspiring-to-be rich people, masses of them, on foot and on two-wheelers, packed into decrepit buses or squeezed into darting yellow-and-black auto-rickshaws, people quite inconsequential in relation to the world rising around and above them. The beggar children who performed somersaults at traffic lights, the boys displaying
menacing moustaches inked on to their faces, made it easy to tell who the rich were amid this swirling mass. The child acrobats focused their efforts at the Toyota Innova minivans and Mahindra Scorpio SUVs waiting at the crossing, their stunted bodies straining to reach up to the high windows. I felt that such scenes contained all that could be said about the rich in India, and the people I took out to expensive lunches offered me little more than glosses on the above.

A personal, narrative work of journalism and cultural analysis in the same vein as Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family and V. S. Naipaul’s India series, The Beautiful and the Damned is an important and incisive new work.

4 Quotes from Sohaila Abdulali’s Book on Rape That Will Get You Thinking

Posted on by Penguin India

Rape is one of the most abhorrent crimes. It is a violation as much of the body as the psyche of the victim. And whatever spin one gives to it – the girl should have been more careful, women should dress ‘properly’, she was asking for it by being flirtatious, she is known to be promiscuous, women should not venture out alone beyond a certain time at night – there is no condoning it. But these are the very reasons one hears being bandied about. In her book What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, Sohaila Abdulali points out why these excuses make matters worse, urging us, as a society, to start afresh the conversation about and around rape.
Here is a sneak peek into a few stories that will astound, infuriate and ignite you to take a step forward.
 
Title: Your Love Is Killing Me
‘Girls and boys get completely different messages about sex. We assume that sex feels good for boys, but girls learn early that losing their virginity is supposed to hurt. We create the idea that sex is uncomfortable for girls, and we raise girls who don’t think they deserve pleasure, and boys who at best don’t care about their partner’s pleasure, and at worst are actively abusive.’
 
Title: Good Girls Don’t
‘Who gets raped? Who do we think gets raped? Are girls who can shit and vomit on command immune? What about sex workers? Even if we acknowledge that anyone can be raped, who deserves to be raped? When are we willing to call it rape? At what point do you lose sympathy of your peers? When you’ve drunk too much, when you’ve had sex with x number of men in the past, when you’re just not a nice person? … Maybe acknowledging that all sorts of women get raped by all sorts of men messes too much with the comfortable narrative that says only good girls get raped. Oh, but it also says good girls don’t get raped. Both these things can’t be true, and sex workers aren’t good girls, so how can they be raped, and if they’re raped, they’re human and hurt, and we can’t have that. So let’s just shut our eyes and maybe the whole confusing thing will go away.’
 
Title: What Did You Expect?
‘Much of the confusion comes from the sexist attitudes and cultural norms. But I think there is another aspect to the ease with which we blame ourselves for terrible events. It has to do with that familiar word: control. And if that’s the case, then it’s not necessarily completely pathological to blame yourself a bit. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism.’
 
Title: Oh, Please
‘There’s a subversive little thread that often weaves itself into any discussion of women actually speaking out and taking space to claim their histories of sexual violence. It’s an insidious thread that has choked us for far too long. I call it the Lose-Lose Rape Conundrum. It unwinds like this. If you talk about it, you’re a helpless victim angling for sympathy. If you are not a helpless victim, then it wasn’t such a big deal, so why are you talking about it? If you’re surviving and living your life, why are you ruining some poor man’s life? Either it’s a big deal, so you’re ruined, or it’s not a big deal and you should be quiet.’

In What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, Sohaila Abdulali asks pertinent questions: Is rape always a life-defining event? Does rape always symbolize something? Is rape worse than death? Is rape related to desire? Who gets raped? Is rape inevitable? Is one rape worse than the other? Who rapes? What is consent? How do you recover a sense of safety and joy? How do you raise sons? Who gets to judge?
 

Things To Leave Behind- an Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Things to Leave Behind brings alive the romance of the mixed legacy of British-Indian past. A rich, panoramic historical novel that shows you Kumaon and the Raj as you have never seen them, the book is full of the fascinating backstory of Naineetal and its unwilling entry into Indian history, throwing a shining light on the elemental confusion of caste, creed and culture, illuminated with painstaking detail.Things to Leave Behind is a fascinating historical epic and Namita Gokhale’s most ambitious novel yet.
Here is a brief excerpt from the book:

In 1856,  just before the fateful year of the Indian Mutiny,  a curious phenomenon was observed in the fledgling hill station of Naineetal. Six native women, draped in black and scarlet pichauras, circled the lake for three days, singing mournful songs which no one could understand. As they used the lower road, reserved for dogs and Indians, the British sahib-log chose to ignore their antics.
The Pahari community was, however, thrown into a panic. Thehill people knew, as the British did not, that it was the inauspicious month of the Shraddhas, when the spirits of the dead and gone hover over the lake in the late autumn evenings. Scarlet and black were colours sacred to the death cults and to the goddess Kali. These women could only be dakinis, evil female spirits with some dark, accursed purpose. But they said nothing, not even to each other. They hid their apprehensions behind stern looks and a tight-lipped silence, for, sometimes, to recognize an evil is to give it more force. Then there were the snails.
In the season after the first monsoon showers, snails had begun appearing in multitudes by the lake shore. Now they lay thick on the rocks, layers and layers of them, squirming and undulating. It was not a pretty sight, and Mr Lushington tried his best to investigate the cause of this unusual occurrence. He pored through the first two volumes of the Himalayan Gazetteer, so painstakingly compiled through the admirable efforts of Mr Atkinson. He searched the sections on the forests andwild tribes, and consulted the 1835 treatise on ‘Kemaon Geology & Natural Science’ by McClellant as well as Hooker’s Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist. Finally‚ he arrived at the conclusion that a particularly prolonged summer had destroyed the frog spawn, and that the mollusc population had consequently proliferated.
The hill folk of course knew better. ‘It’s the voice of the lake goddess,’ they whispered amongst themselves. ‘The lake goddess Naina Devi has sent her servants to announce her displeasure!’ When a young Englishwoman drowned near the rocks by the Ayarpatta shore, a new certainty entered these pronouncements. The whispers were louder and more insistent. ‘The lake goddess demands propitiation,’ the local Paharis told each other. ‘She is avenging the intrusion of the white man on her sacred waters.’

Set in the years 1840 to 1912, Things to Leave Behind chronicles the mixed legacy of the British Indian past and the emergence of a fragile modernity.

Meet the Author of Vanara, Anand Neelakantan

Posted on by Penguin India

Vanara by Anand Neelakantan is a classic tale of love, lust and betrayal. Baali and Sugreeva are orphaned brothers of the Vana Nara tribe who created a peaceful country for their people after having suffered the consequences of the continuous war between the Deva tribes in the north and the Asura tribes in the south.  But tragedy strikes as the beautiful Tara, the daughter of a tribal physician becomes the love interest of both the brothers.
A tale about love and the the struggles that come with it, Anand Neelkantan weaves a story about love with the tale of the greatest warrior in the Ramayana-Baali.
Here we give you a few facts about the author:

Shakespearean in its tragic depth and epic in its sweep, Vanara gives voice to the greatest warrior in the Ramayana-Baali.

In Times of Siege – an Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Staff meetings, lesson modules, a half-hearted little affair with a colleague-this is the bland but comfortable life of Shiv Murthy, a history teacher in an open university. But disruption and change are on their way-an outspoken young woman with a broken knee comes into his life and turns it upside-down. Read In Times of Siege to know how Shiv is forced to confront the demands of his times and choose a direction for the future with love, lust and a perverted nationalism at his heels.
Here is an excerpt from Gita Hariharan’s, In Times of Siege.

The wave peaked, the story goes, when a marriage was arranged between the children of two veerashaiva couples.The bride-to-be was brahmin. The bridegroom-to-be was the son of a cobbler. This marriage is more the stuff of legend and folklore than stern history. But so apt a symbol was it of the crisis Kalyana was heading towards that every subsequent popular account took it for granted. The marriage is the ineluctable climax of the story in popular memory. (There is, however, ample historical evidence that Kalyanawas rocked by violence in King Bijjala’s last days.)The story is that the marriage was the catalyst; it generated a shock that charged all of Kalyana City.
The traditionalists were already enraged by Basava’s challenge to their monopoly of god and power and the afterlife. Now, terrorized by their fear that ‘even a pig and a goat and a dog’ could become a devotee of Siva in an equal society, they condemned this marriage as the first body blow against all things known, familiar, normal. Against, in short, a society based on caste. Egalitarian ideas are bad enough, but a cobbler and a brahmin in the same bed? As well bomb Kalyana (and its vigorous trade, its prosperous temples and palace) out of existence!  King Bijjala was pressured into joining the condemnation of the marriage. He sentenced the fathers of the bride and bridegroom (and the young untouchable bridegroom) to a special death. Tied to horses, they were dragged through the streets of Kalyana; then what was left of them was beheaded.
But Basava’s followers did not call themselves warriors of Siva for nothing. They, particularly the young and the militant, particularly those who had shed the stigma of their lower-caste status to become followers of Basava, retaliated. Basava’s call for non-violence was not heard. His charisma was no longer enough to keep the moderates and the extremists among his followers together. The city burned; now in the untouchable potters’ colonies, now in the coffer-heavy temples. Basava left the city for Kudalasangama, the meeting point of rivers that had been his inspiration in his youth. The king was assassinated, allegedly by two of Basava’s young followers.
Not long after King Bijjala’s death, Basava too died under mysterious circumstances. The popular legend is that the river, the waters of the meeting rivers, took him into their allembracing arms. Though veerashaivism would live on, its great moment of pushing for social change was over. What began as a critique of the status quo would be absorbed, bit by bit, into the sponge-like body of tradition and convention. But Basava and his companions left a legacy. A vision consisting of vigorous, modern thought; poetry of tremendous beauty and depth, images that couple the radical and the mystical. Most of all, Basava’s passionate questions would remain relevant more than eight hundred years later.
 

 
“What makes a fanatic? A fundamentalist? What makes communities that have lived together for years suddenly discover a hatred for each other? The book  In Times of Siege answers these pertinent questions.

The Playlist that Inspired Fatima Bhutto's 'The Runaways'

Posted on by Penguin India

In Fatima Bhutto’s new book, The Runaways, three disparate lives cross paths in the middle of a desert, a place where life and death walk hand-in-hand, and where their closely guarded secrets will force them to make a terrible choice.
Here is a playlist piece on the songs that she listened to while writing the book, with notes on what they mean to her.
Ya Rayah – Rachid Taha

I have always loved Ya Rayah. To me, it is the most beautiful song about exile. It’s a song that’s followed me a lot in life and I felt it relate to all the characters in The Runaways.
Nour Baladi (solo drums) – Amir Sofi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNuFcegJImU
This is the sort of music that Aloush plays in the darkened Apollo basement, it’s what draws Sunny in that first night he’s walking by and becomes the music that passes between them night after night in the club.
Layla- Eric Clapton

This is Monty’s anthem for his beloved and anyone who listens to the lyrics will know that the beloved doesn’t exactly return the devotion of the singer. But Monty is too blinded to even notice the warning in the song Layla always asks him to sing to her.
Anjane – Strings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58yEDh_s_b0
Strings is one of Layla’s favourite bands and this is the song she sings in the car with Monty when he takes her on their night time drives around Karachi.
Mogambo – Riz MC 

This song came out after I was done writing The Runaways, but the lyrics are so incredible, like a jolt to the body. “They put their boots in our ground, I put my roots in their ground” really spoke to Sunny’s experience. But, “why you bring a tweet to a gunfight” is pure Oz to me.
Eid al Ashaq – Kadim al Seher

This is Abu Khalid’s wife’s favourite singer and Sunny hears a ghostly refrain of one of his songs in the desert.
Billie Jean remix – Punjabi MC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oipnXZOAYTY
Billie Jean is the best song of our century. I won’t hear any debate about that. I imagine Oz, in his pre-Syria days, would have had this remix blaring out of his beat up Skoda.
Ams Intahena – Fairuz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DKXyKUB06Q
Aloush isn’t a main character but his story and Sunny’s merge powerfully. He’s someone that has a profound impact on Sunny and I don’t want to give very much away but this is a song that belongs to them.
Hypnotise – Biggie Smalls

Monty would have listened to Biggie Smalls and been a devoted East Coast loyalist in the West Coast/East Coast divide. (Sunny meanwhile is West Coast till he dies, this difference between them tells any 90s hip hop fan a lot). Monty would have imagined himself possessing some of the rapper’s swagger and style – this to me was a song he would listened to with his friends at house parties and in the lounge at school.
Dam Mast Qalandar – Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

The Sufi poetry and the emotional resonance this song has in Sindhi, syncretic culture, always made me think of Anita Rose as a young girl in the days when she climbed the steps to Osama’s home, seeking refuge with her dear comrade.

The Runaways is an explosive new novel that asks difficult questions about modern identity in a world on fire.

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