Rabindranath Tagore’s powerful novel, set on a Bengali noble’s estate in 1908, is both a love story and a novel of political awakening. The central character, Bimala, is torn between the duties owed to her husband, Nikhil, and the demands made on her by the radical leader Sandip. Her attempts to resolve the irreconcilable pressures […]
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Étiquette : India
The god of small things
With sensuous prose, a dreamlike style infused with breathtakingly beautiful images and keen insight into human nature, Roy’s debut novel charts fresh territory in the genre of magical, prismatic literature. Set in Kerala, India, during the late 1960s when Communism rattled the age-old caste system, the story begins with the funeral of young Sophie Mol, […]
The story of my experiments with truth
The Story of My Experiments with Truth is the autobiography of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, covering his life from early childhood through to 1920. It was initiated at the insistence of Swami Anand and other close co-workers of Gandhi, for him to explain the background of his public campaigns. »It is not my purpose to attempt a […]
A concise history of modern India
In a second edition of their successful Concise History of Modern India, Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf explore India’s modern history afresh and update the events of the last decade. These include the takeover of Congress from the seemingly entrenched Hindu nationalist party in 2004, India’s huge advances in technology and the country’s new role […]
An area of darkness
A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to […]
The Glass Palace
Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace […]