Beginning from the year 2000, a year that marked the 50th anniversary of the setting up of diplomatic relations between India and China, the recent rise of China and India has witnessed a proliferation of literature on these two large and fastest growing economies of Asia.
As a senior European academician who has devoted a whole life to studying South Asian history and politics, Professor Dietmar Rothermund is best equipped to chronicle the rise of India as an ‘Asian Giant’. He has been visiting India for nearly five decades, and is a familiar face to Indian policy-makers and leaders.
This book is a collection of 25 short stories written by their grandchildren about their Indian grandmothers who were born around 1900. The stories are written based on the memories that these grandchildren had about their grandmothers and what they had heard about them from other members of the family.
Rajinder Singh Bedi is a renowned writer, this story of his has won him the coveted Sahitya Akademi Award as well as been filmed. The translation is done by another eminent writer Khushwant Singh.
Hartley House, Calcutta is one of the earliest British novels of India and its depiction of expariate life during the early years of colonial presence in India is all the more remarkable for having been written by someone who had, possibly, never set foot in the country.
As a ‘text’ Meera has undergone continuous mutation with time; she has virtually been rendered into a discursive palimpsest. The exigencies of nationalism—the need of legitimacy, authenticity and a consequent search for native nationalistic roots—necessitated the appropriation of Meera as an icon of/for secular/spiritual India; she became an integral sub-text of passive, semi-spiritualized struggle against the colonialists.