One of India's most incredible and enviable cultural aspects is that every Indian is bilingual, if not multilingual. Delving into the fascinating early history of South Asia, this original book reveals how migration, both external and internal, has shaped all Indians from ancient times. Through a first-of-its-kind and incisive study of languages, such as the story of early Sanskrit, the rise of Urdu, language formation in the North-east, it presents the astounding argument that all Indians...

From Calcutta to Trinidad they went, the girmitiyas, crossing two oceans to reach their new homes on the other side of the world. jahajin illuminates for us the extraordinary experience of that jouney, the train ride from faizabad to calcutta, the passage down the hooghly. the three-month voyage around the stormy cape and up the Atlantic to Trinnidad, where the weary migrants settled into life as indentured labourers on the sugar estates. The novel opens with the narrator, a young linguist...

The communal pogrom that indelibly altered the course of Gujarat. Set in the tense post-riots years, The Youngest Suspect is the story of Adil and, yes, of Gujarat. Adil and seventeen other young men are arrested in Ahmedabad, and charged with terrorism. There are written confessions on record. Enter Deepa, linguist and subtle thrill-seeker. She is enlisted by Adil's lawyer, the fiery Ramya, to discredit those confessions. Peggy Mohan brings to bear her rigorous research...

**A BEAUTIFUL TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING MASTERPIECE WITH A NEW PREFACE FROM THE AUTHOR“Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.” —The New Yorker**In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, an embittered judge wants only to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorst...

**National Book Award FinalistWinner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction AwardWinner of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation AwardWinner of the Anisfield-Wolf AwardWinner of the Bard Fiction PrizeOne of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the YearOne of Granta’s Best Young American NovelistsA Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the YearPEN Cente...

Where do our journeys take us?What do we leave behind?What do we carry with us?How do we find our way?You are invited to consider a more graceful way of traveling through life. With arresting clarity, Journeys of Simplicity offers vignettes of forty travelers and the few, ordinary things they carried with them—from place to place, from day to day, from birth to death.Edward Abbey Nellie Bly Raymond CarverDoro...

India is among the most difficult-and most rewarding-of places to travel. Some have said India stands for "I’ll Never Do It Again." Many more are drawn back time after time because India is the best show on earth, the best bazaar of human experiences that can be visited in a lifetime. India dissolves ideas about what it means to be alive, and its people give new meaning to compassion, perseverance, ingenuity, and friendship. India-monsoon and marigold, dung and dust, colors and corpses, sm...

‘Garry Weare is enigmatic, funny and he has an enormous conscience. He brings into the story of his Himalayan traverse a succession of vignettes about people’s lives that he meets along the way, relevant history, natural history observations and a delightful sprinkling of his inimitable sense of humour. The warmth of his relationships with his old Kashmiri friends and various people from the trekking fraternity adds a wonderful dimension to this journeyman's tale’. Peter Hillary

A 2012 New York Times Book Review Editor's ChoiceAn intimate portrait of an invisible man—a powerful story of one man’s life that contains multitudes.Like Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun and Alexander Masters’s Stuart, this is a tour de force of narrative reportage.Mohammed Ashraf studied biology, became a butcher, a tailor, and an electrician’s apprentice; now he is a homeless day laborer in the heart of old Delhi. How did he end up this way? In an...

This is the true story of a spiritual journey combined with a very real adventure across the Great Himalayas. A journey on foot that began in Dharamsala, Northern India, home of His Holiness Fourteenth Dalai Lama, as well as that of the author. The journey took the form of a 21 day trek across the Kashmir Valley and into the remote area of Zanskar, traversing nine passes all above 4000 metres and ending in the city of Leh, Ladakh. I undertook this journey accompanied by my wife, two guides...

Agustín and Paloma, our tireless promoters of applied and practical spiritual ecology and their recently formed group "Don Uriel" join various groups of seasoned walkers in the sacred city of Teotihuacán to perform an important ritual-walk during the Autumn equinox. The solid group of walkers, candidates to become spiritual warriors would try to establish the necessary tuning with the pyramid of the Sun, which thanks to the recent work of a group of Tibetan spiritual warriors sent by his h...

Rehan Tabassum has grown up in a world of privilege in Delhi. His mother and her new husband embody the dazzling emergent India everyone is talking about. His real father, however, is a virtual stranger to him: a Pakistani Muslim who lives across the border and owns a vast telecommunications empire called Qasimic Call.As Rehan contemplates his future, he finds himself becoming unmoored. Leaving the familiarity of home for Pakistan in an attempt to get closer to his father, he is dra...