Download or read book Hira Mandi written by Claudine Le Tourneur d'Ison and published by Roli Books Private Limited. This book was released on 2012-10-18 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Very few French writers have ventured to write on the social, religious, political and cultural issues of Pakistani society, but Claudine is an exception. She is one of those writers who not only made frequent visits to Pakistan but also watched some very sensitive prevailing issues from a close angle. Her fine sensibilities and eye for detail is a hallmark of her writing skills which also makes her an accomplished writer. In Hira Mandi her strong pen has beautifully succeeded in capturing the true identity of the society. Hira Mandi is a remarkable piece where Claudine has rolled out a tale that would make the readers spellbound. Hira Mandi sounds a forbidden subject for many who are familiar with the name as it is an area located in the walled city of Lahore which in its hey days was notoriously known as pleasure seekers' paradise but Claudine's expressions, portrayal of feelings and glaring social dichotomies are unparallel. Jaffer Bilgrami Television Journalist, Islamabad (Pakistan)

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 Empress The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan written by Ruby Lal and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Finalist for the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History Four centuries ago, a Muslim woman ruled an empire. When it came to hunting, she was a master shot. As a dress designer, few could compare. An ingenious architect, she innovated the use of marble in her parents’ mausoleum on the banks of the Yamuna River that inspired her stepson’s Taj Mahal. And she was both celebrated and reviled for her political acumen and diplomatic skill, which rivaled those of her female counterparts in Europe and beyond. In 1611, thirty-four-year-old Nur Jahan, daughter of a Persian noble and widow of a subversive official, became the twentieth and most cherished wife of the Emperor Jahangir. While other wives were secluded behind walls, Nur ruled the vast Mughal Empire alongside her husband, and governed in his stead as his health failed and his attentions wandered from matters of state. An astute politician and devoted partner, Nur led troops into battle to free Jahangir when he was imprisoned by one of his own officers. She signed and issued imperial orders, and coins of the realm bore her name. Acclaimed historian Ruby Lal uncovers the rich life and world of Nur Jahan, rescuing this dazzling figure from patriarchal and Orientalist clichés of romance and intrigue, and giving new insight into the lives of women and girls in the Mughal Empire, even where scholars claim there are no sources. Nur’s confident assertion of authority and talent is revelatory. In Empress, she finally receives her due in a deeply researched and evocative biography that awakens us to a fascinating history.

Download or read book Finding the Raga written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography An autobiographical exploration of the role and meaning of music in our world by one of India's greatest living authors, himself a vocalist and performer. Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, critic, and essayist, is also a musician, trained in the Indian classical vocal tradition but equally fluent as a guitarist and singer in the American folk music style, who has recorded his experimental compositions extensively and performed around the world. A turning point in his life took place when, as a lonely teenager living in a high-rise in Bombay, far from his family’s native Calcutta, he began, contrary to all his prior inclinations, to study Indian classical music. Finding the Raga chronicles that transformation and how it has continued to affect and transform not only how Chaudhuri listens to and makes music but how he listens to and thinks about the world at large. Offering a highly personal introduction to Indian music, the book is also a meditation on the differences between Indian and Western music and art-making as well as the ways they converge in a modernism that Chaudhuri reframes not as a twentieth-century Western art movement but as a fundamental mode of aesthetic response, at once immemorial and extraterritorial. Finding the Raga combines memoir, practical and cultural criticism, and philosophical reflection with the same individuality and flair that Chaudhuri demonstrates throughout a uniquely wide-ranging, challenging, and enthralling body of work.

Download or read book The Wild Heart of India written by T.R. Shankar Raman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-06 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wild—untamed, hostile, remote. Yet, wild can be gentle, welcoming, and inspiring, too. This is the wild that preoccupies biologist Shankar Raman as he writes about trees and bamboos, hornbills and elephants, leopards and myriad other species. Species found not just out there in far wildernesses—from the Thar desert to the Kalakad rainforests, from Narcondam Island to Namdapha—but amid us, in gardens and cities, in farms, along roadsides. And he writes about the forces that gouge land and disfigure landscapes, rip trees and shred forests, pollute rivers and contaminate the air, slaughter animals along roads and rail tracks—impelling a motivation to care, and to conserve nature. Through this collection of essays, Shankar Raman attempts to blur, if not dispel, the sharp separation between humans and nature, to lead you to discover that the wild heart of India beats in your chest, too.

Download or read book A Cloud Called Bhura written by Bijal Vachharajani and published by Blackstone Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From award-winning author Bijal Vachharajani, A Cloud Called Bhura is a delightful middle-grade novel that tackles climate change through an inspiring lens of friendship, trust, and community. Amni wakes up one morning to find the sky taken over by a huge brown cloud. Even as she and her friends start to discover more, their city of Mumbai starts reeling from the changes the cloud brings to the weather. Bhura Cloudus (as the media calls it) causes scalding rain to fall, makes birds flee the city, and suffocates every living thing. As chaos continues to build and the climate changes brought by Bhura become disastrous, there are several questions on everyone’s mind: What will the powerful politician, Mota Bhai, do now? Can the scientist twins Vidisha and Bidisha find a solution? What about superstar Pavan Kumar and the amazing cloud-sucking machine? Will Bhura ever be driven away—or is it already too late? Thought-provoking, funny, and inspiring, A Cloud Called Bhura is about changing global climate and the havoc it can cause—as well as the forces of friendship, trust, and community that give hope and help counter this deadly threat to humanity.

Download or read book Wendy Carlos written by Amanda Sewell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her debut album Switched-On Bach, composer and electronic musician Wendy Carlos (b. 1939) brought the sound of the Moog synthesizer to a generation of listeners, helping to effect arguably one of the most substantial changes in popular music's sound since musicians began using amplifiers. Her story is not only one of a person who blazed new trails in electronic music for decades but is also the story of a person who intersected in many ways with American popular culture, medicine, and social trends during the second half of the 20th century and well into the 21st. There is much to tell about her life and about the ways in which her life reflects many dimensions of American culture. Carlos's identity as a transgender woman has shaped many aspects of her life, her career, how she relates to the public, and how the public has received her and her music. Cultural factors surrounding the treatment of transgender people affected many of the decisions that Carlos has made over the decades. Additionally, cultural reception and perception of transgender people has colored how journalists, scholars, and fans have written about Carlos and her music for decades.

Download or read book Gender in Modern India written by Lata Singh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-29 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender in Modern India brings together pioneering research on a range of themes including social reforms, caste, and contestations; Adivasis, patriarchy, and colonialism; capitalism, political economy, and labour; masculinity and sexuality; health, medical care, and institution building; culture and identity; and migration and its new dynamics. Commissioned in remembrance of the prolific social historian Biswamoy Pati, this volume examines the gender question through a multilayered and multi-dimensional frame in which interdisciplinarity and intersectionality play an important role. Using case studies on gender from diverse geographies?east, west, north, south, and northeast; community locations?Hindu, Muslim, and Christian; and marginalized socio-economic or ethnic habitations such as those of Dalits and Adivasis, the contributors highlight the complexities and diversities of women's negotiations of patriarchies in varied social, ethnic, and community contexts. Collectively, the chapters in this volume focus on three related and overlapping settings?colonial, colonial and postcolonial continuum, and postcolonial. They delineate the multiple lives of gender by focusing on its intersections with other markers of difference including race, class, caste, sexuality, culture, ethnicity, region, and occupation, thereby questioning stereotypes, challenging dated notions and interpretations of gender, and demonstrating the ubiquity of patriarchy.

Download or read book Bibliographical Index to the Historians of Muhammedan India written by Sir Henry Miers Elliot and published by . This book was released on 1850 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book My Name is Gauhar Jaan written by Vikram Sampath and published by Rupa. This book was released on 2012 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biography of Gauhar Jan, 1870-1930, Indian musician

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 Skyfall written by Saba Karim Khan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Heera Mandi, Lahore's famous red-light district, Rania is a tour guide by day and a classical singer by night. Despite the worst of humanity every day – her madrassa-running father selling her mother's body and beating her sister – Rania remains the 'troublemaker', unable to give up on her dreams. When an Indian filmmaker encourages her to enrol in a music contest that can take her to New York, her dreams take flight. But even as she wins the hearts of her listeners, a family secret threatens to bring her life in Heera Mandi back in sharp relief, upending the new life she has built for herself. From the oppressive walls of religious hypocrisy to the orange jumpsuits of American prisons, Skyfall is a tender, piercing debut that teaches us the strength of human endeavour and our desire for love in a time of hate.

Download or read book Love Without a Story written by Arundhathi Subramaniam and published by Bloodaxe Books. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here are poems that celebrate an expanding kinship: of passion and friendship, mythic quest and modern-day longing, in a world animated by dialogue and dissent, delirium and silence. Circling themes of intimacy and time, they return to the urgency of conversation: that fragile bridge across the frozen attitudes that divide our world. But at the heart of the collection is a deeper preoccupation, with those blurry places where humans might walk with gods, where the body might touch the beyond, where the enchanted might intersect effortlessly with the everyday. Where one stumbles upon what the poet simply calls 'love without a story'. Arundhathi Subramaniam's previous book from Bloodaxe, When God Is a Traveller, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Love Without a Story is her fourth collection of poetry. Her earlier work is available in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems.

Download or read book India Retold written by Rajesh James and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India Retold: Dialogues with Independent Documentary Filmmakers in India is an attempt to situate and historicize the engagement of independent documentary filmmakers with the postcolonial India and its discourses with a focus on their independent documentary practices. Structured as an interview collection, the book examines how these documentary filmmakers, though not a homogeneous category, practice their independence through their ideology, their filmmaking praxis, their engagement with the everyday and their formal experiments. As a sparsely studied filmmakers, the book through meticulously tracing a wide ranging historical transitions (often marked by communal conflicts and the forces of globalization) not only details the ways in which independent filmmakers in India address the questions of postcolonial nation and its modernist projects but also explores their idiosyncratic views of these filmmakers which are characterized by a definitive departure from the logic of commercial films or state-sponsored documentary films. More important in many ways, these documentary filmmakers expose incongruences in national institutions and programs, embrace the voice of the underrepresented, and thus, imagine an alternative vision of the nation. During the last three years of the execution of the project, thirty Indian documentary filmmakers are interviewed in this book. Given the dearth of quality interviews and little theoretical engagement with documentary as a genre, this book would not only fill in the gap in scholarship but also would serve as an authentic guide for interested readers and for documentary filmmakers alike.

Download or read book Is lesbian Identity Obsolete written by Ella Ben Hagai and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-29 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cross-disciplinary book engages with the provocation, "Is lesbian identity obsolete?". In this volume, researchers offer diverse perspectives on the question of lesbian identity past, present, and future. This eclectic, multidisciplinary compilation composed of chapters and shorter commentaries helps readers understand the roots of conflict and current tensions between the queer and the trans movements and the lesbian community. Using a historical lens, authors examine the 1970s lesbian communities' practices of racial and trans inclusion and exclusion. Several contributions from across the social sciences utilize qualitative and quantitative methods to illuminate the shifting meaning of lesbian identity today. These contributions help explain why some cis and trans women and nonbinary folx come to either be attached to or disavow lesbian identification. An additional set of chapters engage in theoretical analysis to explore the fraught relationship between queer theory and lesbian thought and the importance of lesbian theory in the formation of transgender scholarship. This collection's eclectic engagement with the question of lesbian identity's obsoleteness helps draw an ethical blueprint for a more sustainable, inclusive, and coalitional future for lesbian communities and identities. This book will be of great value to students, researchers and scholars in the fields of Sociology, Psychology and Anthropology including Gay and Lesbian studies as well as the intersectionality of gender and sexuality. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

Download or read book Banaras written by Vertul Singh and published by Penguin Random House India Private Limited. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Banaras has been home to sages, artists, poets, musicians and seekers from all parts of India. The ancient canon of texts passed down orally by the sages was written and transcribed in the lanes and by-lanes of this city. Over the centuries, the art of grafting and subsuming the religious and cultural ethos became the hallmark of Banaras. In this book, Vertul Singh presents a kaleidoscopic view of Banaras that charts a narrative spanning from the present-day city and its origins as Kashi to the fin de siècle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which witnessed the city’s inclusionary development as a cultural and pilgrimage centre, an opulent trading hub and a basilica of political power. Weaving facts, interesting anecdotes and untold stories to make a rich tapestry, this book is an insider’s account and an unparalleled portrait of the city.

Download or read book Ways of Voice written by Matthew Rahaim and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ways of Voice explores techniques of voice production in North India, from Bollywood to raga music to ghazal to devotional hymns and Sufi song. The voices in play here are not merely given, but achieved. Singers consciously train themselves to cultivate characteristic vocal gaits, sonorities, and poetic attunements; they adopt postures of the vocal apparatus; they build habits of listening, temporality, and social relations. The action in Ways of Voice revolves around several dozen North Indian popular, devotional, classical, and folk singers engaged in projects of vocal striving. Like most singers, they are strategically working on changing, refining, and making their own voices. The book thus highlights the ways in which singers not only "have" voice, but actively acquire, cultivate and contest particular vocal dispositions for particular kinds of listeners. In framing a "Hindustani vocal ecumene" that encompasses a diverse range of classical, popular, and spiritual-devotional musical styles and practices, it offers an expansive look at ways of voice that extend far beyond commonsense boundaries of genre and place. A rich archive of audio and video examples are provided on the online companion site, which can be found at https://www.weslpress.org/readers-companions/.