Download or read book Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares written by Wendy Doniger and published by . This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores the horse in Indian mythology and history. Despite the fact that horses were imported to India and associated with foreigners and conquerors, Indian villagers created wonderful stories and brilliant visual images of horses. The author relates how Turkish horses, tribal horses, Dalit horses, Hindu stallions, and Arab mares all mix in streams of story that raise issues about the assimilation of foreign cultures in India"--

Download or read book Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares written by Wendy Doniger and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Horses are not indigenous to India. They had to be imported, making them expensive and elite animals. How then did Indian villagers—who could not afford horses and often had never even seen a horse—create such wonderful horse stories and brilliant visual images of horses? In Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares, Wendy Doniger, called "the greatest living mythologist," examines the horse’s significance throughout Indian history from the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, followed by the people who became the Mughals (who imported Arabian horses) and the British (who imported thoroughbreds and Walers). Along the way, we encounter the tensions between Hindu stallion and Arab mare traditions, the imposition of European standards on Indian breeds, the reasons why men ride mares to weddings, the motivations for murdering Dalits who ride horses, and the enduring myth of foreign horses who emerge from the ocean to fertilize native mares.

Download or read book Dancing with the Nation written by Ruth Vanita and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indian cinema is the only body of world cinema that depicts courtesans as important characters. In early films courtesan characters transmitted Indian classical dance, music and aesthetics to large audiences. They represent the nation's past, tracing their heritage to the fourth-century Kamasutra and to nineteenth-century courtly cultures, but they are also the first group of modern women in Hindi films. They are working professionals living on their own or in matrilineal families. Like male protagonists, they travel widely and develop networks of friends and chosen kin. They have relations with men outside marriage and become single mothers. Courtesan films are heroine-oriented and almost every major female actor has played this role. Challenging received wisdom, Vanita demonstrates that a larger number of courtesans in Bombay cinema are Hindu and indeterminate than are Muslim, and that films depict their culture as hybrid Hindu-Muslim, not Islamicate. Courtesans speak in the ambiguous voice of the modern nation, inviting spectators to seize pleasure here and now but also to search for the meaning of life. Vanita's groundbreaking study of courtesans and courtesan imagery in 235 films brings fresh evidence to show that the courtesan figure shapes the modern Indian erotic, political and religious imagination.

Download or read book Celtic Cosmology and the Otherworld written by Sharon Paice MacLeod and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-05-21 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early medieval manuscripts of Ireland and Britain contain tantalizing clues about the cosmology, religion and mythology of native Celtic cultures, despite censorship and revision by Christian redactors. Focusing on the latest research and translations, the author provides fresh insight into the beliefs and practices of the Iron Age inhabitants of Ireland, Britain and Gaul. Chapters cover creation and cosmogony, the deities of the Gaels, feminine power in narrative sources, druidic belief, priestesses and magical rites.

Download or read book The Anatomy of Myth written by Michael W. Herren and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anatomy of Myth is a comprehensive study of the methods of interpreting authoritative myths from the Presocratic philosophers to the Neoplatonists and their adoption by the Church Fathers.

Download or read book Infinite Variety written by Madhavi Menon and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Elegant, lucid and funny, this book will appeal to as many readers as there are desires.'--Shohini Ghosh 'The history of desire in India, ' writes Madhavi Menon in this splendid book, 'reveals not purity but impurity as a way of life. Not one answer, but many. Not a single history, but multiple tales cutting across laws and boundaries.' In Bhakti poetry, Radha and Krishna disregard marital fidelity, age, time and gender for erotic love. In Sufi dargahs, pirs (spiritual guides) who were married to women are buried alongside their male disciples, as lovers are. Vatsyayana, author of the world's most famous manual of sex, insists that he did not compose it 'for the sake of passion', and remained celibate through the writing of it. Long hair is widely seen as a symbol of sexuality; and yet, shaved off in a temple, it is a sacred offering. Even as the country has a draconian law to punish homosexuality, heterosexual men share the same bed without comment. Hijras are increasingly marginalized; yet gender has historically been understood as fluid rather than fixed. Menon navigates centuries, geographies, personal and public histories, schools of philosophy, literary and cinematic works, as she examines the many--and often surprising--faces of desire in the Indian subcontinent. Her study ranges from the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho to the shrine of the celibate god Ayyappan; from army barracks to public parks; from Empress Nur Jahan's paan to home-made kohl; from cross-dressing mystics to androgynous gods. It shows us the connections between grammar and sex, between hair and war, between abstinence and pleasure, between love and death. Gloriously subversive, full of extraordinary analyses and insights, this is a book you will read to be enlightened and entertained for years.

Download or read book The Ring of Truth and Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry written by Wendy Doniger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Ring of Truth, Wendy Doniger expertly unfolds the cultural and historical significance of rings and other kinds of circular jewelry through timeless stories taken from mythology, religious traditions, and literature. Each chapter, like a separate charm on a charm bracelet, considers a different constellation of stories, linked by a common cluster of meanings: the mutual imitation of real and fake, legal and illegal, marital and extra-marital jewelry; the circular form of rings and bracelets, miming the circle of eternity, which persists in the face of human ephemera

Download or read book Understanding Sectarianism written by Fanar Haddad and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sectarianism" is one of the most over-discussed yet under-analyzed concepts in debates about the Middle East. Despite the deluge of commentary, there is no agreement on what "sectarianism" is. Is it a social issue, one of dogmatic incompatibility, a historic one or one purely related to modern power politics? Is it something innately felt or politically imposed? Is it a product of modernity or its antithesis? Is it a function of the nation-state or its negation? This book seeks to move the study of modern sectarian dynamics beyond these analytically paralyzing dichotomies by shifting the focus away from the meaningless '-ism' towards the root: sectarian identity. How are Sunni and Shi'a identities imagined, experienced and negotiated and how do they relate to and interact with other identities? Looking at the modern history of the Arab world, Haddad seeks to understand sectarian identity not as a monochrome frame of identification but as a multi-layered concept that operates on several dimensions: religious, subnational, national and transnational. Far from a uniquely Middle Eastern, Arab, or Islamic phenomenon, a better understanding of sectarian identity reveals that the many facets of sectarian relations that are misleadingly labelled "sectarianism" are echoed in intergroup relations worldwide.

Download or read book Prison Days written by Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and published by . This book was released on 2018-02-10 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The author of this absorbing book was, where India is concerned, truly present at the Creation...I urge her book on everyone who lived in those great years and on all those who want to know more about them.' --John Kenneth Galbraith When Mahatma Gandhi gave the call for the nation to join in the freedom struggle, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit threw herself wholeheartedly into the Movement, along with her father, Motilal Nehru, brother Jawaharlal, and husband, Ranjit Sitaram Pandit. Prison Days is an account of her third and final term in Naini Central Jail in Allahabad. She was arrested on 12 August 1942. World War II was on, the country was under military rule and arrest and imprisonment took place without trial. Several lorries filled with armed policemen arrived that night at Anand Bhawan to arrest one lone, unarmed woman. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit was soon joined in jail by her 25-year-old niece, Indira Gandhi. In this diary, Pandit recounts her experiences in jail and the hardships she endured along with others who had joined the fight for freedom: rations mixed with dirt and stones, a lack of water and sanitary facilities, surviving on an allowance of 9 annas a day, and only the hard ground to sleep on. Though it is more the personal, day-to-day details of her life that fill Pandit's jail diary, it is the politics of the day--the overarching desire to throw off the shackles of British rule and Mahatma Gandhi's unique approach of non-violence and non-cooperation to achieve this, that define the book. It is this that gives Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and her fellow prisoners the courage to carry on the fight with unbroken spirits--and at the stroke of the midnight hour on 15 August 1947, victory was theirs. India was reborn as an independent nation.

Download or read book Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris written by Christopher Snedden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seemingly intractable Kashmir dispute and the fate of Kashmiris throughout South Asia and beyond are the twin themes in Snedden's meticulously researched book.

Download or read book Big Cat Tales written by and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Beast and Man in India written by John Lockwood Kipling and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Seven Demon Stories from Medieval Japan written by Noriko T. Reider and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Japanese culture, oni are ubiquitous supernatural creatures who play important roles in literature, lore, and folk belief. Characteristically ambiguous, they have been great and small, mischievous and dangerous, and ugly and beautiful over their long history. Here, author Noriko Reider presents seven oni stories from medieval Japan in full and translated for an English-speaking audience. Reider, concordant with many scholars of Japanese cultural studies, argues that to study oni is to study humanity. These tales are from an era in which many new oni stories appeared for the purpose of both entertainment and moral/religious edification and for which oni were particularly important, as they were perceived to be living entities. They reflect not only the worldview of medieval Japan but also themes that inform twenty-first-century Japanese pop and vernacular culture, including literature, manga, film, and anime. With each translation, Reider includes an introductory essay exploring the historical and cultural importance of the characters and oni manifestations within this period. Offering new insights into and interpretations of not only the stories therein but also the entire genre of Japanese ghost stories, Seven Demon Stories is a valuable companion to Reider’s 2010 volume Japanese Demon Lore. It will be of significant value to folklore scholars as well as students of Japanese culture.

Download or read book Manto Saheb written by and published by . This book was released on 2018-08-10 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Saadat Hasan Manto has a good claim to be considered the greatest South Asian writer of the 20th century... [He] incarnated the exuberance, the madness, the alcoholic delirium of his time...'--Suketu Mehta, The New York Times This remarkable anthology brings together stories about Saadat Hasan Manto, essayist, scriptwriter, and a master of the short story, by his friends, family and rivals--among others, Ismat Chughtai, Upendranath Ashk, Balwant Gargi, Krishan Chander, his daughter Nuzhat and nephew Hamid Jalal. These are accounts of grand friendships and quarrels, protracted drinking bouts, cutthroat rivalries in the world of Urdu letters, and intense engagement with issues of that turbulent age. Together, they form an unprecedented portrait of the literary and film worlds of the time, and of the great cities of Bombay, Delhi and Lahore. They also offer a glimpse of the making of a legend even as they reveal Manto as a complex man of many contradictions. A devoted husband and father, he was as comfortable at home as he was at prostitutes' quarters, seeking new material. Generous to a fault, he freely gave away his earnings and often put his family in financial jeopardy. Fiercely competitive and an outspoken critic of others' writing, he brooked no criticism of his own, at times choosing to sever ties rather than have his words tampered with. And, for much of his adult life, right until the end, Manto was an alcoholic who fiercely defended his choice to remain one. Honest, frank and personal, at times sentimental, and critical--even gossipy--at others, the pieces in Manto-Saheb constitute an unparalleled, multi-faceted biography of a genius

Download or read book In the Meadow of Fantasies written by Hadi Mohammadi and published by Elsewhere Editions. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by the winner of IBBY's Best Book Award, Mohammad Hadi Mohammadi, In the Meadow of Fantasies is one girl's luminous escapade into a land of seven mysterious horses. A young girl with a physical disability gazes up at a mobile of spinning horses from her little pink bed in her room filled with leafy plants. As she watches them prance about, the tufted snout of a real live horse peeks through her bedroom door. Soon enough, our bright protagonist is off and cantering on an adventure with seven majestic horses. The first six are easily understood: their colors, dreams, families, and origins are described and accompanied with exquisite drawings. The seventh horse, however, is an enigmatic creature with no clear hue or history, a lack that is soon filled in by the loving offerings of the other ponies. A story about dreaming and about caring for others, In the Meadow of Fantasies will remind young readers of their own reveries and conjure new fantasies of friendly creatures in far off lands.

Download or read book Thalaba the Destroyer written by Robert Southey and published by . This book was released on 1801 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Fatal Accidents of Birth written by Harsh Mander and published by . This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects seventeen stories of women and men who, simply because they were born poor, or a particular gender, or into a certain caste or religion, fell prey to the many atrocities and indignities endemic to contemporary India. Some resisted, survived, and soldier on. Some did not. Lachmi Kaur lost almost all the male members of her family in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. She then overcame despair to singlehandedly bring up her children and grandchildren with fierce love and pride. With great courage of conviction, Krishan Gopal, a Dalit man from Nimoda in Rajasthan, decided to build his own shrine to Hanuman after being forbidden from the village temple by his upper-caste neighbours. What followed was persecution, violence and exile from the village which lasted all his life. At twenty-eight, Dandapani defied his family--which could not accept him for what he was--left home, and underwent a sex-change operation. Now known as Dhanam, she lives with her extended family of eunuchs in a Chennai shanty. And, in a chilling first-person account, Raheem tells of his village in Muzaffarnagar which, after cynical political manipulation, went from amity to a communal conflagration in just a week. Fatal Accidents of Birth is a powerful, challenging book. It tells us of the many ways in which we inflict violence upon each other--most of all by choosing to not see. And as it does so, this necessary book ensures that these stories will find their rightful place in our consciousness.