The present anthology The Fiction of Amitav Ghosh: A Post-colonial Perspective attempts to bring together reading of Ghoshs selected and most exquisite novels from a refreshingly different viewpoint against the background of Post-colonialism. Amitav Ghosh is unarguably one of the most cosmopolitan of contemporary Indian English writers whose extra ordinary oeuvre of fiction has been a source of magical fascination and exerts a bewitching influence on the mind and heart of the lovers of lit...

Off the easternmost coast of India lies the immense archipelago of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans. Life here is precarious, ruled by the unforgiving tides and the constant threat of attack by Bengal tigers. Into this place of vengeful beauty come two seekers from different worlds, whose lives collide with tragic consequences.The settlers of the remote Sundarbans believe that anyone without a pure heart who ventures into the watery island labyrinth will never return. With the ...

Gandhi (1869-1948) was one of the few men in history to fight simultaneously on moral, religious, political, social, economic, and cultural fronts. During his time as a lawyer in South Africa he developed his strategy of non-violence: the idea of opposing unjust laws by non-violent protest, which he made the basis of his successful struggle against British rule in India. In this Very Short Introduction to Gandhi's life and thought, Bhikhu Parekh outlines both Gandhi's major philosophical i...

Prairie Town: Redefining Rural Life in the Age of Globalization describes the contemporary rural condition and efforts to sustain rural life in one small Minnesota community at the turn of the 21st century. Like many other agricultural based towns, Prairie Town struggled for survival within the context of the on-going farm crisis, NAFTA, neoliberal agricultural policies, and growing agribusiness that negatively impacted many farmers throughout the world. The effects of globalizati...

Looking back now, I am more than ever aware of the part that [Satyajit] Ray played in shaping the imaginary universe of my childhood and youth. I see this even in such details as my interest in science and science fiction; in ghost stories and the fantastical…When I saw Agantuk [The Stranger], in which the main character is an anthropologist, I began to wonder whether my interest in anthropology too, owed something,perhaps subconsciously, to Ray…, ruminates Amitav Ghosh in this book. Ghosh...

The cultural imagination of Hindu India is the subject of this book. Anyone interested in the prehistory of present-day tensions between Hindus and Muslims will find it exceptionally valuable. Charu Gupta shows how gendered notions about women's sexuality and Muslim debauchery were used to pull together a heterogeneous populace into a coherent Hindu community in colonial north India. She traces the deliberations of (largely male) publicists on how to make Hindu women 'pure', on how to distanc...

The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies innovatively combines the ways in which scholars from fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology, religious studies, literary studies, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics have integrated the study of Sikhism within a wide range of critical and postcolonial perspectives on the nature of religion, violence, gender, ethno-nationalism, and revisionist historiography. A number of essays within this collection also provide a mor...

This book brings together new approaches to the study of Sikh religion, culture and ethnicity being pursued in the diaspora by Sikh academics in western universities in Britain and North America. An important aspect of the volume is the diversity of topics that are engaged - including film and gender theory, theology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, semiotics and race theory - and brought to bear on the individual contributors' specialism within Sikh studies, thereby helping to explode previ...

Commentators call the United States an empire: occasionally a benign empire, sometimes an empire in denial, often a destructive empire. In American Umpire Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman asserts instead that America has performed the role of umpire since 1776, compelling adherence to rules that gradually earned broad approval, and violating them as well.

Renowned as the predominant farmers and landlords of Punjab, and long possessed of an autocthonous agricultural identity, Jat Sikhs today often live urban and diasporiclives. Rural Nostalgias and Transnational Dreams examines the formation and meaning of Jat Sikh identity in the contemporary Indian city.Nicola Mooney describes a number of Jat Sikh social practices and narratives through which contemporary notions of identity are developed. She contextualizes these elements...

Bringing South Asian and British imperial history together with recent scholarship on transnationalism and postcolonialism, Tony Ballantyne offers a bold reevaluation of constructions of Sikh identity from the late eighteenth century through the early twenty-first. Ballantyne considers Sikh communities and experiences in Punjab, the rest of South Asia, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world. He charts the shifting, complex, and frequently competing visions of Sikh identity that h...

India is changing at a rapid pace as it continues to move from its colonial past to its globalised future. This Companion offers a framework for understanding that change, and how modern cultural forms have emerged out of very different histories and traditions. The book provides accounts of literature, theatre, film, modern and popular art, music, television and food; it also explores in detail social divisions, customs, communications and daily life. In a series of engaging, erudite and ...