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Along with Mohan Rakesh, Vijay Tendulkar and Girish Karnad, Badal Sircar was a preeminent playwright who shaped our modern theatre. Ebong Indrajeet (Evam Indrajeet, ‘And Indrajeet’, 1963) and Pagla Ghoda (‘Mad Horse’, 1967) are undisputed classics of the modern Indian stage, translated into several languages and performed across the country. They blazed a trail, and opened new vistas. Badal Sircar was a playwright of great power and technical sophistication.

The nature and purport of this book is clearly explained by its title. It is a dictionary in English of technical terms, legal, political and administrative, used in the Sanskrit language.Such works on Sanskrit already exist for grammar and priestly rituals. The most recent are Abhyankar and Shukla’s A Dictionary of Grammar, 1986, and Sen’s A Dictionary of Vedic Rituals, 1978. The need for one on law, statecraft and political science prompted the present compilation, it being felt that technical terms on these subjects were not available sufficiently in standard Sanskrit-English dictionaries.

Suleiman Charitra is a truly amazing little book. A short work in Sanskrit from the 16th century, it’s title should be enough of a clue to even the casual reader about its hybrid nature. It is a perfectly synthetic work that, on the surface, tells a story from the Semitic tradition in the form of a classical Sanskrit narrative—the Charitra, i.e., the acts of a great man who might be a king, a hero, or even a god. But below the surface, there are currents and eddies, perhaps even whirlpools, that sweep us off our feet and away into an unexpected story land

In Chinglam, most of what I plan comes true and that has seldom happened to me in any other place. The days were stolen before they had begun; I think I never saw a day. When I was a child I remember days that stretched into infinity with the certainty of other infinite days; certain, unhurried and brimmingly full.For the reader, the beauty of life in a solitary mountainous retreat in the North East is evoked in this very image of time hanging so heavy; the author’s day-to-day journal describes small and unrelated acts of quotidian life, human exchanges, and communion with nature, children and animals minutely one after the other as she reminisces about her life as a recluse for a year.

This study is a broad history of Muslims and Jews in France from World War I to the present times. With half a million Jews and 4 to 6 million Muslims, France is home to the largest Jewish and Muslim populations in Western Europe. It tries to look at how the lives of Jews and Muslims had been entwined on both sides of the French Mediterranean. Historically what we call Jewish-Muslim relations in France were neither inescapably ethno-religious nor necessarily oppositional, rather they interacted on a wide range of terms.