Download or read book Nautch Girls of the Raj written by Pran Nevile and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life and times of the nautch girl evoked by Nevile are an eye-opener The Times of India To see her is to fall in love, and to drink a cup of wine from the flask of her lustrous eyes is to be transported to the cosiest corner of Heaven. To be with her even for a moment is to taste immortality. The much-celebrated nautch girl, extravagantly adored for both her beauty and her virtuosity, belonged to a unique class of courtesans who played a significant role in the social and cultural life of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The nautch girl, it may be said, was no ordinary woman of pleasure she had refined manners, a ready wit and poetry in her blood. She embodied a splendid synthesis of different cultures and dance forms the classical and the popular and catered to the sophisticated tastes of the elite who had the time, resources and inclination to enjoy her accomplishments. Over the centuries female dancers have appeared in various incarnations, frequently as temple dancers dedicated to the gods, for dance is believed to have divine approval. However, historians, sociologists, novelists and chroniclers have not always done justice to the nautch girl, depicting her as either a vamp or as a showgirl bought by the wealthy for festive occasions. This book highlights the emergence of the quintessential nautch girl in the Mughal era when she reached the zenith of her talent and charisma. Her mystique continued to reign supreme during the Raj and her popularity and status among the English sahibs and the Indian aristocracy flourished during this period.
Download or read book Nautch Girls of India written by Pran Nevile and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents An Authentic View Of Dance Entertainment Specially During The Raj. It Is Sumptuously Illustrated With Productions Of The Finest Paintings And Drawings From Collections All Over The World.
Download or read book Licentious Worlds written by Julie Peakman and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Licentious Worlds is a history of sexual attitudes and behavior through five hundred years of empire-building around the world. In a graphic and sometimes unsettling account, Julie Peakman examines colonization and the imperial experience of women (as well as marginalized men), showing how women were not only involved in the building of empires, but how they were also almost invariably exploited. Women acted as negotiators, brothel keepers, traders, and peace keepers—but they were also forced into marriages and raped. The book describes women in Turkish harems, Mughal zenanas, and Japanese geisha houses, as well as in royal palaces and private households and onboard ships. Their stories are drawn from many sources—from captains’ logs, missionary reports, and cannibals’ memoirs to travelers’ letters, traders’ accounts, and reports on prostitutes. From debauched clerics and hog-buggering Pilgrims to sexually-confused cannibals and sodomizing samurai, Licentious Worlds takes history into its darkest corners.
Download or read book Lahore written by Pran Nevile and published by Penguin Books India. This book was released on 2006 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lahore, First Published In 1993, Is Pran Nevile S Tribute To The Land Of His Birth. Grounded In Memory And Redolent With Nostalgia, Nevile S Reminiscences Transport The Reader Into The Heart Of Lahore As It Was In The 1930S And 40S A City Bustling With Activity Where People Coexisted Harmoniously, Unfettered By Considerations Of Religion, Region Or Caste. From The Riotous Seasonal Festivities Of Kite-Flying To Clandestine Love-Affairs Upon Rooftops, From Matinee Shows At The Cinema To Twilight Hours Spent Amongst The Bejewelled Dancing Girls Of Hira Mandi, Lahore Emerges As A City Of Mesmerizing Contradictions And Chaotic Splendour. The Author Underscores The Contrast Between Pre- And Post-Partition Lahore, And The Sense Of Pain, Loss And Longing For One S Homeland Experienced By The Displaced Millions In India And Pakistan Is Palpable. Evocative And Informative, Lahore Is At Once Social Commentary, Historical Documentation And Memoir.
Download or read book Dancing Women written by Usha Iyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms cinema and dance historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the "women's question" via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the "choreomusicking body" and "dance musicalization," aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic "techno-spectacles," Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.
Download or read book Tawaifnama written by Saba Dewan and published by . This book was released on 2023-11-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Dancing Girls of Lahore written by Louise Brown and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unforgettable and compassionate look at the lives of the residents of Lahore’s pleasure district The Dancing Girls of Lahore inhabit the Diamond District in the shadow of a great mosque. The 21st century goes on outside the walls, this ancient quarter, but scarcely registers within. Though their trade can be described with accuracy as prostitution, the dancing girls have an illustrious history: beloved by sultans, their sophisticated art encompassed the best of Mughal culture. The modern day Bollywood aesthetic, with its love of gaudy spectacle, music, and dance, is their distant legacy. But the life of the pampered courtesan is not the one now being lived by Maha and her three girls. What they do is forbidden by Islam, though tolerated; but they are, unclean, and Maha’s daughters, like her, are born into the business and will not leave it. Sociologist Louise Brown spent four years in the most intimate study of the family life of one Lahori courtesan. Beautifully understated, it turns a novelist’s eye on a true story that beggars the imagination. Maha, at fourteen a classically trained dancer of exquisite grace, had her virginity sold to the Sultan of Dubai; when her own daughter Nena comes of age and Maha cannot bring in the money she once did, she faces a terrible decision as the agents of the Sultan come calling once more.
Download or read book Sahibs India written by Pran Nevile and published by Penguin Books India. This book was released on 2010 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culled from Raj literature, Sahib's India reveals little-known aspects of their lives and their dealings with their Indian subjects. Drawing from contemporary journals, plays and poems,
Download or read book A Very Pukka Murder written by Arjun Gaind and published by Maharaja Mysteries. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Major William Russell, the English Resident of the princely state of Rajpore, is found dead the morning after the 1909 New Year's Ball. The fabulously wealth Maharaja of Rajpore, a lover of luxury cars and beautiful women, cannot resist a mystery and, over the objections of the local Magistrate and the Superintendent of Police, attempts to solve the crime. As the British authorities dispatch their own investigator from Simla, His Highness deals with the growing hostility of the English Establishment, learning that Major Russell was not as pukka, as proper, as he liked to pretend.
Download or read book Oriental Memoirs written by James Forbes and published by Gyan Publishing House. This book was released on 1988 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary exposition of the early 19th century India, with interesting account of social, cultural and religious life. These illustrated chronicles are valuable for conservation and restoration of some of the important historical buildings and monuments
Download or read book The Raj on the Move written by Rajika Bhandari and published by Roli Books Private Limited. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Established in the 1840s by the peripatetic British, dak bungalows forever changed the way officers of the Empire and their families travelled across the subcontinent and got to know the real India. With most of the British Raj perpetually on the move, whether on tour or during the summer migration to the hills, dak bungalow travel inspired a brotherhood of sorts for generations of British and Indian officers, who could recount tales of horrid dak bungalow food, a crazed khansama, and the time their only companion at the bungalow was a tiger on the loose. Today, too, PWD-run circuit houses and dak bungalows continue to occupy an important place in the lives and imagination of India's civil servants. In The Raj on the Move: Story of the Dak Bungalow, Rajika Bhandari weaves together history, architecture, and travel to take us on a fascinating journey of India's British-era dak bungalows and circuit houses, following, quite literally, in the footsteps of travellers who stayed in these bungalows over the past two centuries. Her search takes her from the early-19th century memoirs and travelogues of British memsahibs, to travelling from the original colonial outpost of Madras in the south to the deep interiors of Madhya Pradesh, the heart of British India. Evoking the stories of Rudyard Kipling and Ruskin Bond, and filled with fascinating tidbits and amusing anecdotes, the book unearths local folklore about these remote and mysterious buildings, from the crotchety khansamas and their delectable chicken dishes to the resident ghosts that still walk the halls at night.
Download or read book Royals and Rebels written by Priya Atwal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late-eighteenth-century India, the glory of the Mughal emperors was fading, and ambitious newcomers seized power, changing the political map forever. Enter the legendary Maharajah Ranjit Singh, whose Sikh Empire stretched throughout northwestern India into Afghanistan and Tibet. Priya Atwal shines fresh light on this long-lost kingdom, looking beyond its founding father to restore the queens and princes to the story of this empire's spectacular rise and fall. She brings to life a self-made ruling family, inventively fusing Sikh, Mughal and European ideas of power, but eventually succumbing to gendered family politics, as the Sikh Empire fell to its great rival in the new India: the British. Royals and Rebels is a fascinating tale of family, royalty and the fluidity of power, set in a dramatic global era when new stars rose and upstart empires clashed.
Download or read book Louise Lightfoot in Search of India written by Louise Lightfoot and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, Indian dance in Australia is represented by professional dance artists, companies, schools, and amateur community groups. They have, over the years, performed both traditional classical works as well as Bollywood pieces, and participated in various dance and cultural festivals organised throughout Australia. Louise Lightfoot, an Australian architect turned ballet teacher, is credited with successfully promoting a range of Indian classical dance forms. Lightfoot as a dedicated impresario for Ananda Shivaram, Rajkumar Priyagopal Singh, and Ibetombi Devi, urged Australian audiences not to see Indian dance as just an ancient, mysterious, and spiritual art form, but try to truly understand the value of this complex art of Indian dance and culture in order to strengthen cultural bonds. This book brings together Lightfoot’s thirty-three essays, reflecting her broader worldview as a dancer, choreographer, and impresario. Louise’s essays segue into each other and echo her various encounters with India and its diverse cultural conditions, beliefs and philosophies.
Download or read book Wicked Women Of The Raj European Women Who Broke Society Rules And Married Life written by Coralie Younger and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2004 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unputdownablc factual account of the zenana world of the rajas and sultans of India, concentrating on the firangi bahus and begums of this veiled world of myths and folklores. The book gives us the stories of twenty different European women who broke society's rules to marry the 'heathen' Indian princes. Who were these women? Were they gold-diggers, or hopeless romantics hoping to enact their own Cinderella fairy-tale? Did they live happily ever after? Set against the backdrop of India's independence struggle, the book has a delicious and potent mix of flavours - the end of the British Raj and the downfall of the pompous and extravagant Indian aristocracy.
Download or read book She Merchants Buccaneers and Gentlewomen written by Katie Hickman and published by Virago Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Love Stories from the Raj written by Pran Nevile and published by Penguin Books India. This book was released on 1995 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British came to India in search of wealth and power. But it was a man's world and women, especially English women, were few. An English bride for long remained an expensive proposition, costing a small fortune to bring to Calcutta, and was quite out of the reach of young career-minded officers and civil servants. Driven by loneliness, lust or just plain longing, many looked foe companionship among Indian women, or where the more rakish among them were concerned, the bored wives of fellow officers. But man, reduced to cringing submission by his native housekeeper-mistress fled across the country to board ship for home, pursued all the way in a palanquin by the furious maid.
Download or read book Passionate Players written by Pran Nevile and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
