Daughters Of India

Isabel, born into the British Raj, and Asha, a young Hindu girl, both consider India their home. Through mischance and accident their stories intersect and circumstances will bring them from the bustling city of Delhi to the shores of the Andaman Islands, from glittering colonial parties to the squalor and desperation of a notorious prison; and into the lives of men on opposing sides of the fight for self-government.As the shadow of the Second World War falls across India, Isabel, caught up in growing political violence, has to make impossible choices - fighting for her love for India, for the man she yearns for, and for her childhood Indian friend, in the face of loyalty to her own country.

This book takes us along on a search for the feminine face of God. We travel with Linda Johnsen for a fascinating investigation of the great women saints of India who manifest the divine in their lives. Together with her we comb the scriptures, meet the holy ones, and are led, step by step, to sit in awe at the feet of six remarkable, contemporary women.

In her role as devoted wife, the Hindu goddess Parvati is the divine embodiment of viraha, the agony of separation from one's beloved, a form of love that is also intense suffering. These contradictory emotions reflect the overlapping dissolutions of love, family, and mental health explored by Sarah Pinto in this visceral ethnography. Daughters of Parvati centers on the lives of women in different settings of psychiatric care in northern India, particularly the contrasting environments of a private mental health clinic and a wing of a government hospital. Through an anthropological consideration of modern medicine in a nonwestern setting, Pinto challenges the dominant framework for addressing crises such as long-term involuntary commitment, poor treatment in homes, scarcity of licensed practitioners, heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and the ways psychiatry may reproduce constraining social conditions. Inflected by the author's own experience of separation and single motherhood during her fieldwork, Daughters of Parvati urges us to think about the ways women bear the consequences of the vulnerabilities of love and family in their minds, bodies, and social worlds.

The Book ‘Scientific Daughters of India’ is a beautifully sketched life journey of 21 women scientists of India and their contribution to the field of Science. These scientists belong to fields of cell biology, neuroscience, mathematics, statistics, botany, space sciences, geology, genetic engineering and many more. Mrs. Neeta Mohite, the author of the book, teaches Physics at Dr. D.Y.Patil ACS College, Pune. She has always inspired her students by the life stories of various scientists and has now compiled a book serving this very purpose. The book was originally written in Marathi and has been translated to English by Dr. Harkirat Kaur who believes that such books should get wide readership, across India and the world to let everyone know of such phenomenal women scientists, who create ripples in their respective fields but sadly remain unknown to the population in general. The book is also beneficial to students appearing for competitive examinations. It strives to achieve the goal of motivating innumerable girls and boys to delve into the unfathomable mysteries of the universe and solve them.

In India, girls are aborted on a massive scale merely because they are girls. Underlying this widespread problem is the puzzling fact that daughters have become vulnerable in a time of general improvement of welfare, female status and deep economic and social changes. The findings centre on a contradiction between the continued importance of the cultural factors which for so long have established that a son is necessary, and socio-economic changes that are challenging the importance of these very same factors. This contradiction entails an uncertainty over sons fulfilling expectations which has, rather than tilt the balance in favour of daughters, instead increased the relative importance of sons and intensified negative consequences for daughters. The original findings are based on set theoretic systematic comparisons of eight villages in Himachal Pradesh that facilitate a reconceptualization and an alternative analysis that takes contextual differences into account. It builds on extensive fieldwork and collection of both qualitative and quantitative data.

In the nineteenth century, at the height of colonialism, the British ruled India under a government known as the Raj. British men and women left their homes and traveled to this mysterious, beautiful country–where they attempted to replicate their own society. In this fascinating portrait, Margaret MacMillan examines the hidden lives of the women who supported their husbands’ conquests–and in turn supported the Raj, often behind the scenes and out of the history books. Enduring heartbreaking separations from their families, these women had no choice but to adapt to their strange new home, where they were treated with incredible deference by the natives but found little that was familiar. The women of the Raj learned to cope with the harsh Indian climate and ward off endemic diseases; they were forced to make their own entertainment–through games, balls, and theatrics–and quickly learned to abide by the deeply ingrained Anglo-Indian love of hierarchy. Weaving interviews, letters, and memoirs with a stunning selection of illustrations, MacMillan presents a vivid cultural and social history of the daughters, sisters, mothers, and wives of the men at the center of a daring imperialist experiment–and reveals India in all its richness and vitality. “A marvellous book . . . [Women of the Raj] successfully [re-creates] a vanished world that continues to hold a fascination long after the sun has set on the British empire.” –The Globe and Mail “MacMillan has that essential quality of the historian, a narrative gift.” –The Daily Telegraph “MacMillan is a superb writer who can bring history to life.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer “Well researched and thoroughly enjoyable.” –Evening Standard