Download or read book Days and Nights in Calcutta written by Clark Blaise and published by Saint Paul, Minn. : Hungry Mind Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1973, Clark Blaise and his Bengali wife, Bharati Mukherjee, decided to spend a year with her family in Calcutta. Clark came as a Westerner; Bharati, as an adult woman examining her life as it might have become had she followed the traditional course expected of her. They recount a modern passage to India with insight, humor and compassion.
Download or read book Calcutta Nights written by Hemendra Kumar Roy and published by Niyogi Books. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Calcutta nights (Raater Kolkata) is the real-life story and memoir of the enigmatic ‘Meghnad Gupta’, pen name of famed Bengali fiction writer Hemendra Kumar Roy. Translated into English by Rajat Chaudhuri almost a century after the first publication of Raater Kolkata in 1923, Roy reveals to contemporary readers The darkest secrets of an earlier Calcutta. The first two decades of the last century, the backdrop for this book, were politically turbulent times. Those days, Calcutta, the erstwhile capital of British India, was teeming with people from different parts of the country besides Europeans and other foreigners. It was a city of sin, pleasure and suffering. Indians who arrived and settled here mingled with locals, some of them picking up dress, manners and the wanton lifestyles of the Bengali ‘Babu’, while others kept their identities intact. All this created a unique cosmopolitan setting, coloured with shades of debauchery, darkness and crime that this first-hand account brilliantly recounts. Written in an age very different from ours, certain views of the author could be jarring for the present times. However, these need to be tempered by the understanding of the sociopolitical contexts and the distance of a century separating us from Meghnad Gupta’s Calcutta. Calcutta nights is the hootum pyanchar naksha (published in 1862 and penned by kaliprasanna Sinha) of the early twentieth century, a book that will help anyone understand the contrasts and colours of a unique Indian metropolis.
Download or read book The Epic City written by Kushanava Choudhury and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2018 Ondaatje Prize Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year A masterful and entirely fresh portrait of great hopes and dashed dreams in a mythical city from a major new literary voice. Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to the world which his immigrant parents had abandoned, to a city built between a river and a swamp, where the moisture-drenched air swarms with mosquitos after sundown. Once the capital of the British Raj, and then India's industrial and cultural hub, by 2001 Calcutta was clearly past its prime. Why, his relatives beseeched him, had he returned? Surely, he could have moved to Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, where a new Golden Age of consumption was being born. Yet fifteen million people still lived in Calcutta. Working for the Statesman, its leading English newspaper, Kushanava Choudhury found the streets of his childhood unchanged by time. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish-sellers squatted on bazaar floors; politics still meant barricades and bus burnings, while Communist ministers travelled in motorcades. Sifting through the chaos for the stories that never make the papers, Kushanava Choudhury paints a soulful, compelling portrait of the everyday lives that make Calcutta. Written with humanity, wit and insight, The Epic City is an unforgettable depiction of an era, and a city which is a world unto itself.
Download or read book Calcutta written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir, reportage, and history in this intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta. Chaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novels—a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a “self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.” He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the city’s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, and toward the politics of the present, finding a city “still not recovered from history” yet possessed of a singular modernity. Chaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.
Download or read book Holder of the World written by Bharati Mukherjee and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-06-22 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An amazing literary feat and a masterpiece of storytelling. Once again, Bharati Mukherjee prove she is one of our foremost writers, with the literary muscles to weave both the future and the past into a tale that is singularly intelligent and provocative.”—Amy Tan This is the remarkable story of Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, “a person undreamed of in Puritan society.” Inquisitive, vital and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal, India, with her husband, and English trader. There, she sets her own course, “translating" herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja. It is also the story of Beigh Masters, born in New England in the mid-twentieth century, an “asset hunter” who stumbles on the scattered record of her distant relative's life while tracking a legendary diamond. As Beigh pieces together details of Hannah's journeys, she finds herself drawn into the most intimate and spellbinding fabric of that remote life, confirming her belief that with “sufficient passion and intelligence, we can decontrsuct the barriers of time and geography....”
Download or read book Calcutta Diary written by Ashok Mitra and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1977 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1977. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Desirable Daughters written by Bharati Mukherjee and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amy Tan says of Bharati Mukherjee's previous novel The Holder of the World, 'An amazing literary feat and a masterpiece of storytelling'. Desirable Daughters maintains the strong literary muscle and the tenderness of narrative that we now expect from this prizewinning author.
Download or read book Jasmine written by Bharati Mukherjee and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the assassination of her husband, seventeen-year-old Jasmine leaves India to live with a middle-aged banker in a small Iowa town, only to retain some of the traditions and memories of the past.
Download or read book Wife written by Bharati Mukherjee and published by Fawcett. This book was released on 1992 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dimple Dasgupta had set her heart on marrying a neurosurgeon, but her father was looking for engineers in the matrimonial adds. So begins the wry story of an obedient daughter of middle-class Indian parents who is about to embark on an adventure of a lifetime. Driven first to shock and then to despair, Dimple lives in a waking dream. And when her fantasies take a violent turn, she wonders where wishes end and reality begins. Dimple Dasgupta asserts her identity and independence in the alien and threatening ordeal of life in New York City.
Download or read book Representing Calcutta written by Swati Chattopadhyay and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the politics of representation and the cultural changes that occurred in the city, this post colonial study addresses the questions of modernity and space that haunt our perception of Calcutta.
Download or read book The Tiger s Daughter written by Bharati Mukherjee and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Calcutta and schooled in Poughkeepsie, Madison, Manhattan, beautiful, luminous Tara leaves her American husband behind as she journeys back to India. But the Calcutta she finds on her return -- seething with strikes, riots, and unrest -- is vastly different from the place she remembers. In this taut, ironic tale of colliding cultures, Tara seeks to reconcile the old world -- that of her father, the redoubtable Bengal Tiger -- and the brash new one that is being so violently ushered in. In this, her first novel, Mukherjee claimed as her subject the shock, uneasiness, and haphazard transformation that are part of the immigrant experience -- a theme she has masterfully woven into her subsequent novels, Wife and Jasmine, and into The Middleman and Other Stories, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Download or read book Days and Nights of Love and War written by Eduardo Galeano and published by Pluto Press. This book was released on 2001-01-20 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '[A] masterpiece of reportorial thoroughness, painstaking research, and serious reflection.' Edward Said
Download or read book Understanding Bharati Mukherjee written by Ruth Maxey and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2019-09-06 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Bharati Mukherjee was the first major South Asian American writer and the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Kolkata, India, she immigrated to the United States in 1961 and went on to publish eight novels, two short story collections, two long works of nonfiction, and numerous essays, book reviews, and newspaper articles. She was professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, until her death in 2017. In Understanding Bharati Mukherjee, Ruth Maxey discusses Mukherjee's influence on younger South Asian American women writers, such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Divakaruni. Mukherjee's powerful writing also enjoyed popular appeal, with some novels achieving best-seller status and international acclaim; her 1989 novel Jasmine was translated into multiple languages. One of the earliest writers to feature South Asian Americans in literary form, Mukherjee reflected upon the influence of non-European immigrants to the United States, following passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the quota system. Her vision of a globalized, interconnected world has been regarded as prophetic, and when Mukherjee died, diverse North American writers—Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Beattie, Amy Tan, and Richard Ford—came forward to praise her work and its importance. Understanding Bharati Mukherjee is the first book to examine this pioneering author's complete oeuvre and to identify its legacy. Maxey offers new insights into widely discussed texts and recuperates overlooked works, such as Mukherjee's first and last published short stories, her neglected nonfiction, and her many essays. Critically situating both well-known and under-discussed texts, this study analyzes the aesthetic and ideological complexity of Mukherjee's writing, considering her sophisticated, erudite, multilayered use of intertextuality, especially her debt to cinema. Maxey argues that understanding the range of formal and stylistic strategies in play is crucial to grasping Mukherjee's work.
Download or read book One Thousand and One Nights written by Hanan Al-Shaykh and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Arab world's greatest folk stories re-imagined by the acclaimed Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh, published to coincide with the world tour of a magnificent musical and theatrical production directed by Tim Supple
Download or read book The Fiction of South Asians in North America and the Caribbean written by Mitali P. Wong and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2010-06-28 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study establishes connections between the themes and methodologies of writers within the South Asian diaspora in the New World, and serves both serious analysts as well as beginning readers of South Asian fiction. It is an impartial study that analyzes the stylistic excellence of South Asian fiction and the clearly emergent motifs of the writers, recognizing the value of the interplay of cultural differences and the need for resolution of those differences. The book begins with a discussion of the works of Indo-Caribbean novelists Samuel Selvon and V.S. Naipaul, author of A House for Mr. Biswas and The Enigma of Arrival, thereby establishing parallels between the immigration patterns of the South Asian diaspora who first emigrated to the Caribbean long before significant numbers of South Asians came to the United States. Next, the fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Heat and Dust), the non-fictional narratives of Ved Mehta (Face to Face), and the satire and social criticism of Bharati Mukherjee (Wife) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Sister of My Heart) are discussed. New literary voices such as those of Bapsi Sidhwa (An American Brat), Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, whose characters, plots and themes deal with universal human experiences, Akhil Sharma, Manil Suri and Samrat Upadhyay are studied for the new directions and new methods they offer. A sub-genre of young adult fiction is discovered in the novels of Dhan Gopal Mukerji, such as in his Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon, and more recently in the works of Mitali Perkins and Indi Rana. Recent expatriate novelists from South Asia such as Anita Desai, Amitav Chosh, Vikram Chandra and the American editions of Vikram Seth's novels are appraised together with contemporary Indo-Canadian novelists and Indo-Caribbean novelists resident in Canada.
Download or read book Bengal Nights written by Mircea Eliade and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-04 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A semi-autobiographical romance between a French engineer and the daughter of a Hindu family with which he stayed in India. A case of East meets West with all the joys and woes that such encounters bring. For her version of the story see her novel, It Does Not Die.
Download or read book Darkness written by Bharati Mukherjee and published by David R. Godine Publisher. This book was released on 2023 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Twelve stories of immigrants who struggle against the ancestral past of India to remake their lives-and themselves-in North America. These are stories of fluid and broken identities, discarded languages and deities, the attempt to create bonds with a new community against the ever-present fear of failure and betrayal. 'The narrative of immigration,' Ms. Mukherjee once said, 'is the epic narrative of this millennium.' Her stories and novels brilliantly add to that ongoing saga. In the story, 'The Lady from Lucknow,' a woman is pushed to the limit while wanting nothing more than to fit in. In 'Hindus,' characters discover that breaking away from a culture has deep and unexpected costs. In 'Father,' the clash of cultures leads a man to an act of terrible violence. 'How could he tell these bright, mocking women,' Ms. Mukherjee writes, 'that in the darkness, he sensed invisible presences: gods and snakes frolicked in the master bedroom, little white sparks of cosmic static crackled up the legs of his pajamas. Something was out there in the dark, something that could invent accidents and coincidences to remind mortals that even in Detroit they were no more than mortal.' There is light in these stories as well. The collection's closing story, 'Courtly Vision,' brings to life the world within a Mughal miniature painting and describes a light charged with excitement to discover the immense intimacy of darkness. Readers will also discover that excitement, and the many gradations of darkness and light, throughout these pages from the mind of a master storyteller"
