Longing for an Elsewhere is about the colonial ancestry of India's contemporary embrace of economic development. Unlike existing scholarship that traces the emergence of the developmental state to the mid-twentieth century process of decolonization, the book argues that these origins are anchored in the preoccupation of colonized Indian elites with emulating the industrial modernity of Europe and the United States and seeking civilizational recognition for attaining progress. Beyo...

‘A product of immaculate scholarship, refined rumination and humane sensibility — drawing upon little known or forgotten bits of history, mythology, literature, and personal encounters with exceptional individuals, this excellent book urges us to reflect on our predicament as a people.’ GEETANJALI SHREE‘Another India is a metaphor for rich cultural diversity. It is a tapestry that lucidly marks the criss-crossing of intellectual currents which run through ...

A fascinating portrait of the life and ideas of the great Indian writer and public intellectual, U.R. Ananthamurthy. Between 2012 and 2013, Ananthamurthy shared his personal experiences in a series of lively conversations with academic and writer Chandan Gowda, and reflected on issues that would preoccupy him until the end. Besides the vivid accounts of his childhood, friendships, the evolution of his intellectual life, and public involvements, his passionate ideas on tradition, on India's...

Ajji, can I have some water? … Just a few drops will do, Ajji. With the searing sky above and the blistering earth below, like cactus the people of this parched terrain are determined to stay alive. Emaciated children scurry along, dejected farmers pawn their ploughs, weary women sleep on empty stomachs…. Would those perishing now have died anyway? Or is hunger calling them away prematurely? Filled with social concern, Satisha, the district commissioner, wants to help the afflicted. But he...

This book gathers peer-reviewed contributions presented at the 3rd RILEM Spring Convention and Conference, held at Guimarães and hosted by the University of Minho, Portugal, on March 9-14, 2020. The theme of the Conference was “Ambitioning a Sustainable Future for Built Environment: comprehensive strategies for unprecedented challenges”, which was aimed at discussing current challenges and impacts of the built environment on sustainability. The present volume is dedicated to the topic “Shi...

A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2017A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2017A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2017" Ants Among Elephants is an arresting, affecting and ultimately enlightening memoir. It is quite possibly the most striking work of non-fiction set in India since Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and heralds the arrival of a formidable new write...

**From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes a masterpiece of astonishing insight and candor about a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.“Extraordinarily forceful.... Naipaul is an elegantly precise and exacting writer.” –Newsweek**In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency,” V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years earlier. Out of that journey he produ...

India is a land of contrasts. It is the world's most populous democracy, but it still upholds the caste system. It is a burgeoning economic superpower, but one of the poorest nations on earth. It is the home of the world's biggest movie industry after Hollywood, as well as to the world's oldest religions. It is an ancient civilization celebrating fifty years as a modern nation. Now, as never before, the world wants to know what contemporary India is all about.As she has proved in t...

A ground-breaking collection of stories, poems and articles about Nepal covering the length and breadth of this enchanting nation and its people.'If you want a book in English that tells you about Nepalese thinking, and gives a taste of the country's contemporary literature, you could hardly do better than House of Snow' Daily Telegraph'One of the finest books I have read this year' Nudge Books'A well-curated sliver...

“[A] sharply observed study . . . richly detailed portraits.”—EconomistSomini Sengupta emigrated from Calcutta to California as a young child in 1975. Returning thirty years later as the bureau chief for The New York Times, she found a vastly different country: one defined as much by aspiration and possibility—at least by the illusion of possibility—as it is by the structures of sex and caste. The End of Karma is an exploration of this ne...

Raja Rammohun Roy has come to be called the 'Maker of Modern India. Without giving up what was good and noble in the past, he laid the foundations for a great future. He put an end to the horrible custom of burning the living wife with the dead husband. He was a great scholar and an independent thinker. He advocated the study of English, Science, Western Medicine and Technology. He spent his money on a college to promote these studies.

A monumental biography of the subcontinent from the award-winning author of The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul.Second only to China in the magnitude of its economic miracle and second to none in its potential to shape the new century, India is fast undergoing one of the most momentous transformations the world has ever seen. In this dazzlingly panoramic book, Patrick French chronicles that epic change, telling human stories ...