The Boatman An Indian Love Story

The six years John Burbidge spent in India as a community development worker changed him in many ways, but one stands out from all the rest. It led him to confront a deeply personal secret—his attraction to his own sex. After taking the plunge with masseurs on a Bombay beach, he found himself on a rollercoaster ride of sexual adventuring. A complicating factor in his journey of self-discovery was the tightly knit community in which he lived and worked, with its highly regimented schedule and minimal privacy that forced him to live a double life. Written with passion, integrity and humour, The Boatman is packed with incident, anecdote, adventure and above all, real and memorable people. Burbidge takes hold of India as few have done before, deftly interweaving the search for selfhood with an intimate exploration of Indian life and society. His story shows us how, when we dare to immerse ourselves in a culture radically different from our own, we may discover parts of ourselves we never knew existed.

A compilation of love stories and poems from the classical literature and folklore of India Set in regions of great natural beauty where Kamadeva, the god of love, picks his victims with consummate ease, these stories and lyrics celebrate the myriad aspects of love. In addition to relatively well-known works like Kalidasa's Meghadutam and Prince Ilango Adigal's Shilappadikaram, the collection features lesser-known writers of ancient India like Damodaragupta (eighth century AD), whose 'Loves of Haralata and Dundarasena' is about a high-born man's doomed affair with a courtesan; Janna (twelfth century), whose Tale of the Glory-Bearer is extracted here for the story of a queen who betrays her handsome husband for a mahout, reputed to be the ugliest man in the kingdom; and the Sanskrit poets Amaru and Mayaru (seventh century), whose lyrics display an astonishing perspective on the tenderness, the fierce passion and the playful savagery of physical love. Also featured are charming stories of Hindu gods and goddesses in love, and nineteenth-century retellings of folk tales from different regions of the country like Kashmir, Punjab, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Both passionate and sensuous in its content, this book is sure to appeal to the romantic in all of us.

This book offers a comprehensive view of the 100 most significant films ever produced in Bollywood. Each entry includes cast and crew information, language, date of release, a short description of the film’s plot, and most significantly, the importance of the film in the Indian canon.

The Great Indian Love Story is set in a world where appearances mean everything and nothing is as it seems. There's no time for love in a world that revolves around the latest Ferraris, the hottest nightclubs, diamonds, single malts, cocaine and ecstasy.

This volume of the HISTORY OF INDIAN THEATRE presents most enhanting and colourful panorama of folk and traditional theatre flourishing in India since time immemorial. Utilising various sources the author meticulously and systematically builds up the theatre history, which spans over several centuries. It is for the first time an elaborate account of dramatic rituals associated with the Bhuta or the Cult of Spirits is given here. This will enable the students of theatre understand and relationship of ritual and dramatic performance in its correct perspective. Various ritualistic theatre forms such as Teyyam are described and discussed. The book also tells us how the teachnique of ballad singing was dramatized and finally evolved into full-fledged drama in the course of time. The history of narrative forms is traced from the Vedic times to the present. With the emergence of Bhakti cult the spics were dramatized. This gave rise to the Leela Theatre which dedicated itself to portraying the divine acts of incarnations such as Krishna and Rama. Various forms of Leela Theatre are described in the book. Audiences turn to theatre for entertainment. A class of folk theatre arose in India whose main function was secular entertainment. Swang, Tamasha, Nautanki, Khyal entertained the people with dance, music and song, as well as with humour and pathos, love and war. Their enchanting story is narrated here.

Islam in India, as elsewhere, continues to be seen as a remainder in its refusal to "conform" to national and international secular-modern norms. Such a general perception has also had a tremendous impact on the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, who as individuals and communities have been shaped and transformed over centuries of socio-political and historical processes, by eroding their world-view and steadily erasing their life-worlds. This book traces the spectral presence of Islam across narratives to note that difference and diversity, demographic as well as cultural, can be espoused rather than excised or exorcized. Focusing on Malabar - home to the Mappila Muslim community in Kerala, South India - and drawing mostly on Malayalam sources, the author investigates the question of Islam from various angles by constituting an archive comprising popular, administrative, academic, and literary discourses. The author contends that an uncritical insistence on unity has led to a formation in which "minor" subjects embody an excess of identity, in contrast to the Hindu-citizen whose identity seemingly coincides with the national. This has led to Muslims being the source of a deep-seated anxiety for secular nationalism and the targets of a resurgent Hindutva in that they expose the fault-lines of a geographically and socio-culturally unified nation. An interdisciplinary study of Islam in India from the South Indian context, this book will be of interest to scholars of modern Indian history, political science, literary and cultural studies, and Islamic studies.

The rich and varied body of writing in the Indian languages has grown immeasurably in the last hundred years. This collection of short stories brings together some perennial favourites from this vast treasure trove, written by acknowledged masters of the art and sensitively translated. The twenty-three stories included deal with themes central to modern India: caste, gender politics and emerging changes in the traditional family structure. These are striking vignettes from all parts of the country, evocative of different lifestyles yet reflective of common issues and problems with which we can all identify.