The Life of Harishchandra, a 13th cen-tury Kannada classic by poet Raghavanka, is the latest volume
brought out by The Murthy Classic Library of India which is bringing out extremely well edited and professionally worked out English translations of classic Indian texts for not just a global audience, but to Indian readers as well.
At a first glance, the title may sound old fashioned, vintage lit-crit in the genre of Life & Times or Men of Letters series. But the book opens with the freshness of a new found love that encourages a rediscovery of the self. Ranga Rao’s doctoral dissertation was on Narayan, in the sixties.
Art historian, novelist, painter and film-maker, Manju Kak, has brought us a potpourri of sights, smells and experiences. Manju grew up in the hills as a school girl in Nainital, and with her marriage, returned to Uttrakhand, this time to Ranikhet.
India is geographically contiguous to two other nuclear weapon powers, and both
these countries, China and Pakistan have adversarial relations with India. On the contrary, China and Pakistan are known to share an all-weather friendship and have a convergent strategic aim to curtail India’s rise.
There is no dearth of biographical accounts of Indira Gandhi (1917–84), and there lies the challenge before the author Sagarika Ghose, a journalist and novelist, as to what new could she offer. One of the identifiable novelties of this portrait is a creative style of beginning and/or ending the chapters with a letter from the author to the departed soul.
Both Audrey Truschke and her book Aurangzeb have garnered much attention. A number of interviews of the author, reviews of the book, and other promotional material are circulating widely on the internet.
Kevin McGrath’s analysis of Yudhishthira’s complex personality is refreshingly free from hagiography; at the same time, the text balances lucid scholarship with a compassionate, nuanced view of its subject.
McGrath points out that neither of the warring sides of the royal Hastinapura clan (Pandavas and Kauravas), wins in the end—rather, it is Krishna’s Yadava lineage that achieves lasting success.
The Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA), New Delhi, is mak-ing a remarkable tribution to Kautilya studies. The IDSA Library runs a ‘Kautilya Desk’, storing a growing body of new material, in a spirit of dedication. A contributor to this volume, Col. Pradeep Gautam (Retd.), supported by the current and former IDSA Directors and others, supervises this project.
Among the many qualities of Piyush Daiyas book of conversation with artistAkhilesh, the most inspiring is his ability to efface his minutest traces from the text. The entire dialogue comes across as a selfrevelation by the artist, as if he conversed with himself in the darkness of a summer night, or standing against his canvas, and Piyush merely overheard him.
What Bharat wrote about theatre has always been discussed as a theory of poetics by critics like Abhinav Gupta, Dhananjay, Bhatt Nayak, Bhatt Lolak and others. This tradition has travelled right up to our contemporaries like Dr. Nagendra. Did this tradition benefit either poetry or drama, the present author, Devendra Raj Ankur, asks.
Mannu Bhandari is a wellknown author whose autobiography presents the masculine aspect of womens conscience. This can play an important role in understanding the contradictions of feminist discourse.
The book was first published by Oxford University Press five years ago with a critical introduction. However this remarkable Indian drama is finding a broader reader/audience base and has recently been published by the University of Hawaii Press with an additional,