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Spine-Tingling Tales From The Other Side Of Midnight. Indigo Is The Mood In This New Collection Of Stories About The Supernatural, The Peculiar And The Inexplicable From Satyajit Ray, One Of The Best-Loved Writers Of Our Times. There Are Tales Here Of Dark Horror, Fantasy And Adventure Along With Heart-Warmingly Funny Stories About Ordinary People In Extraordinary Situations. In Big Bill Tulsi Babu Picks Up A Newly-Hatched Chick From A Forest And Brings It Home Only To Find It Growing Bigger And Fiercer By The Day; In Khagam A Man Kills A Sadhu S Deadly Pet Snake And Invites A Curse Which Brings About Horrifying Changes In His Body; And In The Title Story, A Young Executive Resting In An Old...
Sharatchandra Chattopadhyay has been the most popular writer of novels and short stories in his native Bengaland in India at large. Despite this, he remains unrecognized in the English speaking world. Narasingha P. Sil fills this void by presenting a historical critical assessment of his upbringing and the experiences that influenced his masterful and magnificent work. The Life of Sharatchandra Chattopadhyay rescues the authentic man, a caste-conscious and patriarchal Brahmin of colonial Bengal, from the cuckoo land of gratuitous praise and panegyric showered on the Aparajeya Kathasilpi, the "invincible" wordsmith. The author exposes Sharatchandra's innate conservative worldview and his romantic platonic concept of human sexuality that inform all his love stories. In many respects Sharatchandra resembles his formidable European forbear, Jean Jacques Rousseau of Enlightenment France. The concluding chapter of Sil's biographical study introduces this pioneering comparison between the two men--a veritable tour de force.
The book also takes a hard look at his universally acknowledged reputation as a hypercosmological renouncer who championed the causes of the poor and the downtrodden and thus exemplified the doctrines of socialism at their finest. Sil is the first scholar to critically examine Vivekananda's attitude toward women in general and to probe into his experience with Margaret Noble (Sister Nivedita) in particular, and he is the first author to provide a detailed analysis of Vivekananda's popularity as a preacher and lecturer.
Food constitutes an integral aspect of the intellectual and cultural milieu of Bengal, and rituals, social customs and day-to-day routine are closely intertwined with the preparation of traditional dishes by the women of the household. The quintessential Bengali emphasis on food was brilliantly encapsulated by Chitrita Banerji in Life and Food in Bengal. In The Hour of the Goddess, she returns with an unbeatable combination of cultural insight, personal anecdote and mouthwatering recipes. Intimate yet objective, it examines the complex connection between gender and food preparation, and the intricate relationship between food, ritual and art in Bengal. Written in her inimitable style, the bo...
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The Mahabharata is at once an archive and a living text, a sourcebook complete by itself and an open text perennially under construction. Driving home this striking contemporary relevance of the famous Indian epic, Mahabharata Now focuses on the issues of narration, aesthetics and ethics, as also their interlinkages. The cross-disciplinary essays in the volume imaginatively re-interpret the ‘timeless’ classic in the light of the pre-modern Indian narrative styles, poetics, aesthetic codes, and moral puzzles; the Western theories on modern ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy of science; and the contemporary social, ethical and political concerns. The essays are all united in their effort to situate the Mahabharata in the context of here and now without violating the sanctity of the ‘written text’ as we have it today. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of Indian and comparative philosophy, Indian and comparative literature, cultural studies, and history.
Colonial times witnessed several new constructions- giving shape to new spaces and interactions. This included both public and private spaces. This work focuses on specific public spaces from the colonial times across the regions of Kolkata (West Bengal, India) and Colombo (Western Province, Sri Lanka). Various similarities lie between these two cities pertaining to the British colonial times of the respective countries as the socio-cultural fabric slowly witnessed many changes within. Numerous public constructions across both cities stand till date, as sentinels to weave a communication of several stories of yore. The work aims to help in spreading awareness and an understanding about the need for a balance between history and modernity- a continuity from the past that helps to find answers to many questions in the present.
Looks at the decade of 1940s in Bengal and provides a complete understanding of the pre-partition years.