I bring from the East what is practically an unknown religion’. This is what Max Arthur Macauliffe wrote in his Preface to The Sikh Religion: Its Gurus, Sacred Writings and Authors, first published in 1909. While the Sikhs and their religion are no longer unknown as a result of worldwide dispersal of the Sikh community and the distinct markers of identity that they carry with them,
Dhadhi parampara, according to Nijhawan, is ‘a tradition or genre of bardic performance that constitutes one of the extant forms of oral epic performance in South Asia. The contents of dhadhi song and narrative are mostly heroic tales of legendary and historical figures’.
In the last twenty-five years, interest in the birdlife of the Indian subcontinent has grown manifold, and justifiably so considering the richness of India’s avifauna. With this interest, have come a string of books for both popular and more specialist consumption. Anand Prasad’s book should appeal to both—to anyone seriously interested in the birds of the region.
Time was when we thought Abol Tabol represented the beginning and the end of Indian nonsense. For those unsanctified by a bhadralok pedigree, this also meant that until Sukanta Chaudhuri’s wonderful English translation of Sukumar Ray came to be published in 1987, almost nothing nonsensical was remotely Indian and vice versa.
You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that.’ Raj Kamal Jha uses this most apposite quotation from Paul Auster’s Mr Vertigo to preface his second novel. I call it apposite because the entire book follows from that.
Sociology has not gone to Indian movies very often, and that needs to be corrected. Consider that in India today we breathe movies as a key element of the national atmosphere, second only to oxygen, ozone, bottled mineral water, satellite TV and the internet.