Desert Indian Woman

Basket weaver, storyteller, and tribal elder, Frances Manuel is a living preserver of Tohono O'odham culture. Speaking to anthropologist Deborah Neff, who has known her for over twenty years, she tells of O'odham culture and society and of the fortunes and misfortunes of Native Americans in the southwestern borderlands over the past century.

This Volume Investigates The Tremendous Contemporary Spurt In The Literary Creativity Of 'Women Writers' In Indian English Fiction. Demonstrating That Fictional Creation Is No 'Male Territory' And Women Are No 'Trespassers' In It, The Contributors To This Study, Both Discerning Critics And Major Fictionists, Scrutinize And Evaluate The Diverse, Inter-Related Aspects Of Women'S Fiction. The Volume Meticulously Brings Together The Voices Of These Persistent And Determined Sheherzades, Too Significant To Miss Or Ignore, In A Wide-Ranging Selection Of Perceptive Essays, Written In Jargon-Free And Refreshing Prose.

Basket weaver, storyteller, and tribal elder, Frances Manuel is a living preserver of Tohono O'odham culture. Speaking to anthropologist Deborah Neff, who has known her for over twenty years, she tells of O'odham culture and society and of the fortunes and misfortunes of Native Americans in the southwestern borderlands over the past century.

In the harsh Thar desert of Rajasthan State in Northwest India, the famed photographer Hans Silvester found his paradise. Not far from the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi, who assumed the ways of the poor out of solidarity, the women of the desert live a hard life, without electricity, without running water, without doctors. With only the simplest means, they keep their homes scrupulously clean and decorate them with wonderful designs. With the barest of resources, they clothe themselves so richly that their costumes have been copied by fashionable women in the West. The women sing while working in the fields or picking over grains, and while spinning thread in their tiny courtyards. Their songs, dating back centuries, invoke ancient gods and goddesses. The intensity of this simple life captured by Hans Sylvester's lens is matched by Catherine Clement's poetic and provocative text, a musing meditation on this region of India and its inhabitants - especially its women, the Eves of the desert

From the bestselling author of Tracks: A travel writer’s memoir of her year with the nomadic Rabari tribe on the border between Pakistan and India. India’s Thar Desert has been the home of the Rabari herders for thousands of years. In 1990, Australian Robyn Davidson, “as natural a travel writer as she is an adventurer,” spent a year with the Rabari, whose livelihood is increasingly endangered by India’s rapid development (The New Yorker). Enduring the daily hardships of life in the desert while immersed in the austere beauty of the arid landscape, Davidson subsisted on a diet of goat milk, roti, and parasite-infested water. She collided with India’s rigid caste system and cultural idiosyncrasies, confronted extreme sleep deprivation, and fought feelings of alienation amid the nation’s isolated rural peoples—finding both intense suffering and a renewed sense of beauty and belonging among the Rabari family. Rich with detail and honest in its depictions of cultural differences, Desert Places is an unforgettable story of fortitude in the face of struggle and an ode to the rapidly disappearing way of life of the herders of northwestern India. “Davidson will both disturb and exhilarate readers with the acuity of her observations, the sting of her wit, and the candor of her emotions” (Booklist).

The wife of an Indian trader tells of her life in the Four Corners country where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado touch.