Download or read book Akhtari written by and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Akhtaribai Faizabadi, or Begum Akhtar as she was better known, was a legend even during her own lifetime, and one of the last of the great singers from the tawaif community. Akhtari documents her eventful life and her music through essays and reminiscences by some of her closest friends and associates, and by people who knew her work deeply -- including the likes of Bismillah Khan, Lata Mangeshkar, Shubha Mudgal, etc. The volume also includes long interviews with Begum Akhtar herself as well as some of her disciples. A bestseller in the original Hindi -- and now available in English -- this is a volume to treasure for all of Begum Akhtar's fans and lovers of music.
Download or read book Lord Meher Part 4 written by Bhau Kalchuri and published by Meher Nazar Publications. This book was released on 2024-10-22 with total page 1275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The biography of the Avatar of the Age Meher Baba updated as of 22 October 2024
Download or read book Begum Akhtar Love s Own Voice written by S. Kalidas and published by . This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Akhtaribai Faizabadi, or Begum Akhtar as she was later called, was a much loved classical diva of 20th century India. The last of the great female singers from the courtesan (tawaif) community, Begum Akhtar effortlessly transcended that label to marry Barrister Ishtiaq Ahmed Abbassi of Lucknow. Witty, vibrant, and engaging with the world at various levels, here was a remarkable woman who took life head-on, and by many accounts, perhaps a bit recklessly. As a tawaif, she was trained to charm the system and subvert narrow patriarchal practices by means of highly sophisticated seduction. At another level, she was a hapless victim, constantly tormented by the twists and turns of her own destiny. She braved on regardless, driven by a deep inner quest to pursue love in its purest form, as an end in itself; be it in music or in life. Begum Akhtar: Love’s Own Voice documents her troubled and tempestuous life through the narratives of some of her closest friends and associates.
Download or read book Mehera Meher A Divine Romance written by David Fenster and published by Meher Nazar Publications. This book was released on 2021-01-21 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mehera-Meher is the story of an intimate, Divine Romance between the Beloved and his closest disciple. The three-volume hardbound set draws deeply from Mehera's firsthand narrative gathered from over 200 hours of tape recordings made by the author, David Fenster, from the years 1974 to 1982. To this he painstakingly researched and added other historical material from Mehera and those close to her to create an epic, 1700–page biography of Avatar Meher Baba's foremost woman disciple. This is the latest, revised edition, and contains numerous corrections and additions to previous editions.
Download or read book Asian American Writers written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents critical perspectives on the works of Asian-American writers, including Gish Jen, Cheng-rae Lee, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Download or read book Beginning at the End written by Robert Stilling and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the struggle for decolonization, Frantz Fanon argued that artists who mimicked European aestheticism were “beginning at the end,” skipping the inventive phase of youth for a decadence thought more typical of Europe’s declining empires. Robert Stilling takes up Fanon’s assertion to argue that decadence became a key idea in postcolonial thought, describing both the failures of revolutionary nationalism and the assertion of new cosmopolitan ideas about poetry and art. In Stilling’s account, anglophone postcolonial artists have reshaped modernist forms associated with the idea of art for art’s sake and often condemned as decadent. By reading decadent works by J. K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde alongside Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, Derek Mahon, Yinka Shonibare, Wole Soyinka, and Bernardine Evaristo, Stilling shows how postcolonial artists reimagined the politics of aestheticism in the service of anticolonial critique. He also shows how fin de siècle figures such as Wilde questioned the imperial ideologies of their own era. Like their European counterparts, postcolonial artists have had to negotiate between the imaginative demands of art and the pressure to conform to a revolutionary politics seemingly inseparable from realism. Beginning at the End argues that both groups—European decadents and postcolonial artists—maintained commitments to artifice while fostering oppositional politics. It asks that we recognize what aestheticism has contributed to politically engaged postcolonial literature. At the same time, Stilling breaks down the boundaries around decadent literature, taking it outside of Europe and emphasizing the global reach of its imaginative transgressions.
Download or read book Incendiary Circumstances written by Amitav Ghosh and published by HMH. This book was released on 2007-04-23 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journalist who “illuminates the human drama behind the headlines” writes about today’s dramatic events, from terrorist attacks to tsunamis (Publishers Weekly). “An uncannily honest writer,” Amitav Ghosh has published firsthand accounts of pivotal world events in publications including the New York Times, Granta, and the New Yorker (The New York Times Book Review). This volume brings together the finest of these pieces, chronicling the turmoil of our times. Incendiary Circumstances begins with Ghosh’s arrival in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands just days after the devastation of the 2005 tsunami. We then travel back to September 11, 2001, as Ghosh retrieves his young daughter from school, sick with the knowledge that she must witness the kind of firestorm that has been in the background of his life since childhood. In his travels, Ghosh has stood on an icy mountaintop on the contested border between India and Pakistan; interviewed Pol Pot’s sister-in-law in Cambodia; shared the elation of Egyptians when Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize; and stood with his threatened Sikh neighbors through the riots following Indira Gandhi’s assassination. In these pieces, he offers an up-close look at an era defined by the ravages of politics and nature. “Ghosh is the perfect chronicler of an increasingly globalized world . . . Reading [him] is a mind-expanding experience. Once you’ve finished this book, you’re very likely to press it into your friends’ hands and beg them to read it as well.” —Sunday Oregonian
Download or read book The Courtesan s Arts written by Martha Feldman and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2006-03-23 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Courtesans, hetaeras, tawaif-s, ji-s--these women have exchanged artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons throughout history and around the world. In Ming dynasty China and early modern Italy, exchange was made through poetry, speech, and music; in pre-colonial India through magic, music, chemistry, and other arts. Yet like the art of courtesanry itself, those arts have often thrived outside present-day canons and modes of transmission, and have mostly vanished without trace.The Courtesan's Arts delves into this hidden legacy, while touching on its equivocal relationship to geisha. At once interdisciplinary, empirical, and theoretical, the book is the first to ask how arts have figured in the survival or demise of courtesan cultures by juxtaposing research from different fields. Among cases studied by writers on classics, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and various histories of art, music, literature, and political culture are Ming dynasty China, twentieth-century Korea, Edo and modern Japan, ancient Greece, early modern Italy, and India, past and present. Refusing a universal model, the authors nevertheless share a perception that courtesans hover in the crevices of space, time, and practice--between gifts and money, courts and cities, subtlety and flamboyance, feminine allure and masculine power, as wifely surrogates but keepers of culture. What most binds them to their arts in our post-industrialized world of global services and commodities, they find, is courtesans' fragility, as their cultures, once vital to civilizations founded in leisure and pleasure, are now largely forgotten, transforming courtesans into national icons or historical curiosities, or reducing them to prostitution.
Download or read book Lest We Forget How Three Sisters Braved the Partition written by Indira Varma and published by Westland. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘INDIRA VARMA’S POIGNANT, EVOCATIVE AND MOVING AUTOBIOGRAPHY IS UNPUTDOWNABLE, BECAUSE IT DESCRIBES, SPANNING SEVERAL GENERATIONS, THE EVOLUTION OF THREE SISTERS, BEFORE AND AFTER THE TRAUMA OF PARTITION, AND HOW THEY REBUILD THEIR LIVES, TO ULTIMATELY TRIUMPH.’ — PAVAN K. VARMA ‘India is being divided,’ Didi tried to explain. ‘Like a cookie? Whoever gets the smaller half will be upset,’ I nodded wisely. Indira Varma was six years old when she first heard of the impending partition of India. Soon, it would sweep her and her family up in its wake. They would leave behind in Peshawar a fabulous house and vast lands, their horses and cars, in fact, an entire way of life. A family that had gifted the Peshawar Clock Tower to Queen Victoria would go on to live a life of poverty as homeless refugees in India. Like the millions it affected, for Indira Varma too, the Partition was a scar that would remain, even as the wound healed with the passing of time. In Lest We Forget, Varma lets her memory stretch as far back as it will—to its beginning set against the Partition. She recounts her family’s years as refugees, her life shuttling between cities and towns until she finally settled in Delhi, and her journey to building a successful business in travel. Against all odds, Varma weaves for herself a life rich with poetry, family and friendships. This is the story of one life upturned by the Partition, but it is also an ode to the power of love and that thing called hope. It is, ultimately, both a record of, and a guide to, a life well lived.
Download or read book The Riot Grrrl Collection written by Lisa Darms and published by The Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2015-01-19 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archival material from the 1990s underground movement “preserves a vital history of feminism” (Ann Cvetkovich, author of Depression: A Public Feeling). For the past two decades, young women (and men) have found their way to feminism through Riot Grrrl. Against the backdrop of the culture wars and before the rise of the Internet or desktop publishing, the zine and music culture of the Riot Grrrl movement empowered young women across the country to speak out against sexism and oppression, creating a powerful new force of liberation and unity within and outside of the women’s movement. While feminist bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile fought for their place in a male-dominated punk scene, their members and fans developed an extensive DIY network of activism and support. The Riot Grrrl Collection reproduces a sampling of the original zines, posters, and printed matter for the first time since their initial distribution in the 1980s and ’90s, and includes an original essay by Johanna Fateman and an introduction by Lisa Darms.
Download or read book Mad Heart Be Brave written by Mohammed Kazim Ali and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-04-17 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born and raised in Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) came to the United States in the mid-1970s to pursue graduate study in literature; by the mid-1980s, he had begun to establish himself as one of the most important American poets of the late 20th century. Mad Heart Be Brave: On the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali is the first comprehensive examination of all stages of his career, from his earliest work published in India but never reissued in the U.S., through his seven poetry volumes from American publishers, ultimately collected as The Veiled Suite. The essays, written by a range of poets and scholars, many of whom knew and studied with Ali, consider his early free verse poetry; his transition into writing more formalist poetry; his correspondence with poets Anthony Hecht and James Merrill; his literary engagement with the political realities of contemporary Kashmir; his teaching and mentorship of young poets; and Ali’s championing of the ghazal, a traditional Eastern poetic form, in English. Some essays have a predominantly scholarly focus, while others are more personal in their tone and content. All exhibit a deep appreciation for Ali’s life and work. Contributors to this volume include Sejal Shah, Rita Banerjee, Amanda Golden, Ravi Shankar, Abin Chakraborty, Amy Newman, Christopher Merrill, Jason Schneiderman, Stephen Burt, Raza Ali Hassan, Syed Humayoun, Feroz Rather, Dur e Aziz Amna, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Mahwash Shoaib, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Grace Schulman, and Ada Limón. Mad Heart Be Brave closes with a long biographical sketch and elegy by Agha Shahid Ali’s friend Amitav Ghosh and a comprehensive bibliography assembled by scholar Patricia O’Neill with Reid Larson.
Download or read book The Habit of Love written by Namita Gokhale and published by Penguin Books India. This book was released on 2012 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Key Features A collection of elegantly told stories about women by a well-known writer. About the Book: The Habit of Love Collection of stories offering a profound insight into the female mind!. The Habit of Love is a collection of stories about the inner lives of women. Some of these women inhabit the ancient past, some the present day but they share the whimsical humour with which they speak of themselves. Journalist Madhu Sinha strikes up a friendship with a young man the same age as her indifferent children; a messenger swan relates the story of the doomed lovers Nala and Damayanti; Vatsala Vidyarthi suspects her one night stand of stealing her money.
Download or read book Raga n Josh written by Sheila Dhar and published by Orient Blackswan. This book was released on 2005 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sheila Dhar`S Autobiographical Stories, Essays And Memoirs Are Classics Of Modern Indian Prose Many Out Of Print For Some Time. The Present Book Provides, For The First Time Within The Covers Of A Single Volume, Her Collected Shorter Writings, Including All Her Memorable Stories And Essays.
Download or read book The Imam and the Indian written by Amitav Ghosh and published by Orient Blackswan. This book was released on 2002 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, For The First Time Is As Complete A Collection As Can Be Made Of The Prose Which Reveals That Relatively Unknown Amitav Ghosh: The Novelist As Thinker, The Man Of Ideas As A Writer Of Luminous, Illuminating Non-Fiction.
Download or read book Yesterday s Melodies Today s Memories written by Manek Premchand and published by Notion Press. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yesterday’s Melodies Todays Memories is a rare collection of profiles of all important music-makers of the Hindi Film Industry between 1931 and 1970. It not only gives a biographical background of each music artiste, but it goes further to interview many of the surviving giants and completes the task by listing some of the best songs with which that person is associated. Here are singers that include the whole gamut from KL Saigal to Asha Bhosle, lyricists that include Sahir and Gulzar, music composers from Naushad to RD Burman, artistes that were part-time singers and full time actors like Ashok Kumar, melody queens like Noor Jahan and Lata Mangeshkar, gentlemen lyricists like Prem Dhawan and gentlemen singers like Manna Dey, mischief-makers like Kishore Kumar and rebels without pause like OP Nayyar and Majrooh Sultanpuri. In fact, this book is a house in which all these great talents live happily, each in a separate room, given space for self-expression. The serious research that has gone into this book is evident as you move from one chapter to another, opening layers after layers presented non-seriously. Over 100 music makers are presented this way and many more in a huge single chapter.
Download or read book Portrait of India written by Ved Mehta and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Returning to 1960s' India after decades beyond its borders, Ved Mehta explores his native country with two sets of eyes: those of the man educated in the West, and those of the child raised under the Raj. Travelling from the Himalayas in the east to Kerala in the west, Ved Mehta's observations and insights into India and some of its most interesting figures - including Indira Gandhi, Jaya Prakash Narayan and Satyajit Ray - create one of the twentieth century's most thought-provoking travel memoirs.
Download or read book The Veiled Suite The Collected Poems written by Agha Shahid Ali and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-02-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with the impassioned, never-before-published title poem, here is the poet. Agha Shahid Ali died in 2001, mourned by myriad lovers of poetry and devoted students. This volume, his shining legacy, moves from playful early poems to themes of mourning and loss, culminating in the ghazals of Call Me Ishmael Tonight. The title poem appears in print for the first time. from “The Veiled Suite” I wait for him to look straight into my eyesThis is our only chance for magnificence.If he, carefully, upon this hour of ice,will let us almost completely crystallize,tell me, who but I could chill his dreaming night.Where he turns, what will not appear but my eyes?Wherever he looks, the sky is only eyes.Whatever news he has, it is of the sea.
