The Razmnama or The Book of War is the Persian translation of one of the great Hindu epics of India, the Mahabharata. The Mughal emperor Akbar took a personal interest in the translation project and a lavishly illustrated copy was prepared for his personal use. Out of the three copies made, the three-volume Razmnama in the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata is the only copy that is complete with 81 miniatures that bear the name of the scribe and the date of completion, 1605. The paintings combine the finest elements of the Mughal court style with the narrative style of storytelling.
In this book, the author brings to the reader the Goddess Parvati, the Female Principle, consort of the God Shiva, lover, mother, provider, embodiment of beauty. In showing her in each of her manifestations, he tries to create the ambience that would normally exist around her to show her in her true glory. The images in stone come mostly from the classical period in north India. The dominant theme in the stone sculptures is the amorousness of Shiva and Parvati, and images of the generic term Uma-Maheshvara, half female-half male. Chola bronze images are also included, as are images painted on glass, later miniature paintings and folk paintings.
Dr. Balkrishna Doshi (1927–2023) was foremost among the modern Indian architects. An urban planner and educator for over 70 years, Doshi has to his credit outstanding projects ranging from dozens of townships and several educational campuses. Apart from his international fame as an architect, Doshi was equally known as an educator and institution builder. He received several international and national awards and honors, and in 2018 Doshi was selected as the Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate, internationally known as architecture’s highest honor.
This autobiography captures Doshi’s career from his childhood to his studies in Bombay and London, his work at Atelier Le Corbusier in Paris and collaboration with Louis I Kahn for IIM Ahmedabad. It recounts his meetings with the most remarkable persons in his own and allied fields, and his equally remarkable patrons, and the story of his own family.
Put together, for the first time, from the lifelong diaries and notes maintained by him, Paths Uncharted is a personal recounting of this remarkable journey unfolding over more than 80 years and across all the continents.
The Auroville Architects Monograph Series documents the pioneering work of the architects whose vision shaped Auroville, a unique international township in southeastern India. This monograph, the second in the series, is a comprehensive record of the work of Piero and Gloria Cicionesi, whose architectural legacy translates Auroville’s philosophy of community living into built form. Piero (b 1935) and Gloria (b 1933) Cicionesi hail from the magical town of Florence in Italy. They arrived in Auroville a week after its inauguration on 28 February 1968 and have since made it their karma-kshetra. This unique International Township based on the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother is a source of inspiration to many architects around the world. This publication brings together essays, drawings and photographs to demonstrate the elegant legacy of Piero and Gloria Cicionesi, for whom architecture is not only a search for beauty but also has a deeper social aspiration. This book has been enhanced with 7 augmented reality videos, each linked to a photograph marked with the symbol. These videos include interactions with Piero and Gloria as well as documentation of their journey and work in Auroville. The videos are available through the BooksPlus mobile app. To play the videos, please follow the instructions given on the copyright page.
The first to describe in detail a community of potters working for the Jagannatha Temple in Puri, eastern India, Temple Potters of Puri explores the role of the temple servant and how it affects the potters’ understanding of their work and of themselves. As a pilgrimage center of national importance, supported by the patronage of successive regional dynasties and by fervent popular belief, the Jagannatha Temple requires earthenware in great quantities for the creation and distribution of the sacred food that is an integral feature of daily ritual and pilgrimage. Several hundred potters participate as temple servants in maintaining the temple’s ritual cycle by performing their divinely assigned task. This study observes the potters’ technical prowess, sustained by devotion, but also examines the tensions within their relationships to more powerful temple servants and authorities. The role of the potter as temple servant is at once glorious, as demonstrated by texts and personal interpretations of the potters’ divinely-appointed service, and pathetic, as shown in the brutality of caste-based hierarchy and cash-based exchange penetrating the modern temple’s daily operations. The accompanying DVD shows the potters at work and records their skills and products as well as the annual festival that celebrates their role as temple servants.
The remarkably accomplished Alexander Greenlaw, probably the first photographer to reach Vijayanagara in South India in 1855, is known principally through his monumental paper negatives of this great imperial Hindu city. Greenlaw, an army officer, explored the vast site, capturing the temples, shrines, palaces and pleasure pavilions with his camera, as well as recording the dramatic landscape that surrounds the ruins of this once majestic capital. While Greenlaw’s response to the architecture within its spectacular natural setting is the principal focus of this book, the work of subsequent photographers at the site is also explored. Included are images by William Pigou, Edmond David Lyon, Nicholas & Co. and others. They show the role of photography in documenting and preserving the site through a comparative approach that seeks to present a comprehensive overview of commercial, archaeological and other documentary activity at Vijayanagara in the 19th century.
The Walking Tour City Guide series provides an engaging bridge between conventional tourist books, which contain less information on architecture, and academic books, which are often too specialized for a leisurely audience. A Walking Tour: Ahmedabad – the first to focus on an Indian city – provides hand-drawn illustrations that escort the reader from building to building, providing information on history, architectural styles, uses and purpose, and the architects themselves. Focusing on the blend of medieval and modern architecture in Ahmedabad, the authors explore the magnificent old city and the historic ‘Pol’ houses. They also shed light on the buildings built by modern masters, such as Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. From havelis and temples to mosques, markets, and buildings that were only made possible because of the work of Mahatma Gandhi, the authors provide a lively illustrated tour through this city which has seen Mughal, Maratha and British influences in its culture, food and architecture.
On 22nd February 2015, Syed Haider Raza turns 93. Widely acknowledged as a master of modern Indian art, for nearly six decades his work, vision and life have attracted critical attention from various points of view. Raza returned to India, his home country, after spending 60 years in France and now lives in Delhi and continues to paint.
Raza has created nearly 50 new paintings in past six months. Raza’s art has been analysed, explored and evaluated in many books and continues to evoke new responses, also because he is still painting significantly and passionately. Collectors of his paintings exist worldwide.
This fresh collection of essays offers new insights into the artistic career and life of a truly dynamic visionary of our times.
The DVD accompanying this volume is an invaluable recording of Raza creating his collection Aarambh. Thus, this fresh perspective on his art is enriched by the knowledge of how that art came to be.
Aamir – Actor, Activist, Achiever. An acclaimed actor who became the thinking man’s superstar. An ardent activist who highlighted complex social issues and spread awareness. An accomplished achiever who reinvented the entire concept of a movie star. Aamir Khan – actor, producer, director – has so many colors in his life that it is almost impossible to compile them in a single book. The author and photographer, Pradeep Chandra, attempts the insurmountable task of tracing the trajectory of Aamir’s career that has seen him evolve and become one of the greatest contributors to the art of cinema in India and a hugely influential public figure. This book is the author’s tribute to the superstar and the man behind it.
Dance as Yoga addresses the background, technique and embodiment of the odissi dance form. It describes odissi’s mechanism for creating, dispersing, and expressing energy, as well as some early experiments in choreography that extended its accepted parameters with reference to Choreological Studies. It is meant for both performers and audiences to better appreciate the reasons for the restraints inherent in such dance forms and, by doing so, have an informed appreciation of innovation that builds on traditional strengths.
Intizar Husain is the finest writer of Urdu prose and the most brilliant story-teller of the post-partition generation. The two novellas, Day and Dastan (Din Aur Dastan), his favorite texts, show his versatility and fictional inventiveness. Day, a realistic story, is a meditation on the cruellest of events to have scarred our times – migrations. When people are forced to move to new homes or new geographies, they only recall a mix of uncanny facts, streets lost in sad nostalgias, fantasies of lovers, parables of simple things, or an unending romance about a possible life and a world. While physical geographies are redrawn, moral landscapes become so bewildering as to leave one emotionally paralyzed. As in Intizar Husain’s other work, India’s partition haunts the tale like an inexplicable shadow.
In contrast, Dastan is a traditional tale of wonder. Its language is lyrical and exaggerated; its narrative, obsessed with action, weaves dreams and adventure, heroism and mercy, beauty and love, magic and grace. It is located in another time of turmoil and uncertainty when mysterious forces cause havoc in nature, and societies rise up suddenly to avenge old wrongs. The 1857 war of independence is prophesied by a mysterious faqir; rivers suddenly break their banks; an old haveli is left desolate; a princess weeps beside a fountain; a parrot shows a soldier the road to take; and hope of political change is fatally lost. Intizar Husain is neither a social critic nor a preacher; he is a story-teller – a supreme one.
Embodied Vision delves into a series of representations Fatehpur Sikri has been subjected to and concludes that there is an inexorable tension at its core embodied in the constantly shifting axes, complex rhythms, raising or lowering of the ground planes, juxtapositions of mythical symbols and the conflicting pulls of traditions and human will. The space of Fatehpur Sikri is revealed to us through perception more than through geometry. Professor Mehta’s unconventional interpretation of the architecture of Fatehpur Sikri emanates from his exploration of the history of architectural representation and leads him to conclude that the tools of designing, representation and analysis, which we normally use today, did not exist in sixteenth-century India when Fatehpur Sikri was built. These drawings, which assume our “mind’s eye” hovering above the city and taking in the whole of reality at once, have failed to represent the existential lived experience of inhabitation of architecture.
This field guide is the result of the author’s intense study of the flora of the southern western ghats as well as those of Palni hills for several years. The book lists more than 200 species of trees, herbs, and shrubs, that can be found in the region. The author names the genus, the species, the short name of the botanist who classified the plant, and the family name of the plant, in all the cases. She also takes great pains to provide the common English names as well as the local names of the species in various regional languages of India. Not only is the distribution of the species in various parts of the world explained, but the author also gives a physical description of the species, including its leaves, flowers, and fruits. Medicinal as well as general uses of any part or parts of the plant is also explained in most cases. The author, however, warns the reader that use of any species for medicinal purposes must be preceded by doctoral advice.
Contents: Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Trees; Shrubs; Herbs; Line Drawings; Glossary; Bibliography; Indices – Trees, Shrubs, Herbs; Index.
The Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the most important protected areas in the Himalayas, one of the World’s great biological realms. The book is intended both as a history and an ecological overview of the Park and as a plea for continuing conservation of the rich legacy of Himalayan plants and animals. In addition to descriptions of the ecology, the book includes local history and culture and a review of current development in the region. The inscription of the Park into the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2014 confirmed the Outstanding Universal Values of the area, which contains the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of Western Himalayan biological diversity. The pictures, taken by the authors and their collaborators, vividly illustrate the grandeur and diversity of the area. The book has universal appeal: to naturalists, scholars, resource managers, trekkers, arm-chair travelers. Success and failure along the road to creating today’s Park are discussed frankly to inform future management efforts and there are numerous examples of conservation in action that will motivate a new generation of naturalists and ecologists to continue the fight to protect the ecology of the greatest mountains on earth.
India has an astonishingly rich variety of painting traditions. While miniature painting schools became virtually extinct with the decline of aristocratic patronage, a number of local vernacular idioms still survive and continue to develop, adjusting to social and political changes. The present collection of papers is the volume of the proceedings of the conference Indian Painting: The Lesser-Known Traditions, held in Houston in 2008. The aim of the conference was to highlight these lesser-known artistic expressions grouped, until the recent past, under the heading of ‘folk art’. These artistic expressions are now beginning to be recognized as of pivotal importance for an understanding of the social setting in which they have evolved. The essays concentrate on the following geographical areas: Assam, Bengal, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. The timespan covered by the works discussed by the contributors ranges from the late seventeenth century to the present day.
Indira Gandhi is perhaps one of the few Indian leaders whose recognition factor has not diminished with time. Her leadership sparked furious debates and controversy, spawning satire both in film and in print. Her legacy, both in terms of politics and progeny continue to impact the future of this country. In Indira Gandhi: The Final Chapter, Suraj ‘Eskay’ Sriram, through his cartoons and illustrations, presents a snapshot of the Indian political and social scene at the time. Presented with tongue-in-cheek humor, wit and cynicism, ‘Eskay’ has an uncanny knack of getting to the heart of the matter with just a few swift strokes of his pen. What better way to reacquaint ourselves with the good, the bad, the ugly – and the humorous! – events that took place during the ‘final chapter’ of Indira’s reign? Contents: Foreword Preface Introduction Indira, Family, Friends & Foes The Indian Scene Personality Parade End of the Final Chapter Epilogue Acknowledgements The Last Page
Afghanistan has perhaps always preferred to live with uncertainties. The eminent Bengali writer Syed Mujtaba Ali had to quit the country overnight while on a visit in 1927, threatened by political upheavals. Amitabha Ray spent some time in Kabul between 2007 and 2008, as a representative of the Government of India on a United Nations mission. Living a risky existence in an unsettled country he was nevertheless awestruck by its unique landscape, ancient heritage and the natural warmth of its people. Kabulnama is his tribute to those years, sharing personal moments of anxiety, lending a glimpse into the life of the common Afghan. It is a rare journey along the highs and lows of the land and the times. There is camaraderie amidst chaos in this story of a battle-worn nation in a rugged land, lending a ringside view of its natural beauty, history, culture, travel, food and people.
The monsoon is the season of pouring rain and intense emotions: love and longing, hope and fear, pleasure and pain, devotion and joyous excess. Through a series of evocative essays exploring rain-drenched worlds of poetry, songs, paintings, architecture, films, gardens, festivals, music, and medicine, this lavishly illustrated collection examines the history of monsoon feelings in South Asia from the twelfth century to the present. Each essay is written by a specialist in the field of South Asian arts and culture, and investigates emotions as reflections and agents of social, cultural, and political change across borders of language and religion and between different arts and cultural practices. This history of emotions in the rain is as rich, surprising, beautiful and devastating as the thundering monsoon clouds, and will delight general and scholarly audiences alike.
In this book, which is the result of painstaking research spread over many years, Professor B.N. Goswamy has brought together Nainsukh’s entire known or ascribable oeuvre: close to a hundred paintings, painted sketches and drawings which contain the first flush of his thoughts. Nainsukh of Guler is perhaps the first ever book to appear on a traditional painter of the past in India. It is a ground-breaking work: illuminating in its scholarship and written in a flowing, almost poetic style. Justly, it has received worldwide notice.
Three things come together in the series of paintings depicted in this book: a great text, a delectable old romance, and the work of one of the most talented families of painters.
The text is the 12th century Naishadhacharita of Sriharsha, one of the last great kavyas of Sanskrit literature; the story, told with the utmost delicacy, centres around the intense love that grew – mutual sights heard of, but yet unseen – between King Nala and Princess Damayanti. The painter family that produced this exquisitely painted series came from the small principality of Guler in the “Pahari” hills: today’s Himachal Pradesh. The intent of the painter/s was to cover the story in close to 110 paintings, but only 47 paintings could be completed all of them now in the collection of the Amar Mahal Museum and Library at Jammu, and here published the remaining having survived only in the form of highly finished drawings.
Rabindranath Tagore, a name very close to many people’s hearts, evokes a feeling of pride, awe and inspiration and continues to arouse curiosity about this multi-faceted personality. This book chronicles the Poet’s contributions in the context of the period to which he belonged, bringing into light those incidents, anecdotes and issues which have often been overlooked but, nonetheless, are significant as they enable us to understand Tagore better. His role as a son, brother, husband, father; his accomplishments as a poet, philosopher, writer, painter, choreographer, actor; his relations with his family, friends, contemporary writers and poets, as well as predecessors; his correspondences with the political leaders of his time within the nation as well as abroad; and, above all, his interpretations about life, revealing his quest for love, faith and devotion and his deep-rooted anguish. Tagore’s unfulfilled dreams and expectations as projected in the broad sweep of this lucid narration reveal two facets of the Poet – a man of extraordinary abilities yet a man having ordinary expectations, who could thereby understand the joys and sorrows of the common man keeping aside his own gains and losses.
Ragachitra: Deccani Ragamala Paintings presents exquisite miniature art from Bijapur, rendered in the Deccan style (19th century). A set of 44 unpublished ragamala paintings in possession of the National Museum, Delhi since 1989 has been displayed, retaining its original brilliance. The paintings stand apart in their vibrant visual appeal, depth and range of content and in the perfect symphony created between art and music. A lucid narrative documents the history of Indian classical music, the range of traditions of the raga theory and their miniature visual forms created in medieval India. It is a delightful and overwhelming aesthetic and intellectual experience for the reader.
The book presents traditional, easy-to-cook Rajasthani meals and related food recipes, for young homemakers, future chefs and all food connoisseurs. It transfers homegrown knowledge to the young generation and caters to multicultural readership. Each recipe has been combined with supplementary food items to present the concept of a tasty, wholesome and nutritious meal. They focus on a fast-changing society where “snacking” is replacing full sit-down meals and “finger food” and “quick bites” fulfill the purpose of a light dinner. The dishes add plenty of nutritive value to the diet and cater to the eating habits and fast lifestyle of the multi-tasking generation.
The select recipes are grouped in five categories cereals, pulses, vegetables, non-vegetarian dishes and special dishes for festivals.
Contents: Welcome to Rajasthan and the Local Cuisine (Padharo Mahre Desh); Flavours of Cereals (Zaika Anaj Ka); Wheat; Sadi bati; Churma; Dupper; Missi roti; Gulgule; Lapsi; Daal dhokli; Wheat ghughari; Wheat flour roti; Puri; Plain paratha; Bharwa / aloo paratha; Sabzi paratha; Meetha paratha; Halwa; Doodh dalia; Maize; Maize roti; Makki ka dhokla; Raab; Maize papadi / khichiya; Bhutta pakodi; Bhutta sabzi; Bhutta pulav; Jajaria; Bhutta barfi; Bajra; Bajra kheech; Bajra gudmudia; Bajra khichada; Power of Pulses (Damdaar Daalen;) Mixed daal; Mangodi / badi; Mangodi ki sabzi; Kadhi pakodi; Pakodi sabzi; Besan gatte; Sabut moth; Besan chakki; Vegetables in a Variety (Sabziyan Swaad-bhari); Ratalu sabzi; Bharwa besan mirch; Mirchi bada; Kachha kela chhilka sabzi; Dried vegetables curry; Pach kuta / ker sangri; Meethi dana methi sabzi; Dana methi papad; Lahsan chutney; Papad sabzi; Kachhi haldi ki sabzi; Mirchi ke tapore; Meat, Poultry, Eggs (Maansahaari Zaika); Laal maans; Keema matar; Chicken curry; Egg curry; Fish curry; Fish fry (snack/ starter).
Shah Rukh Khan is many things: a villain, an anti-hero, a romantic hero, a heart-throb, and a superstar. Khan burst onto the big screen in 1992 as a character-actor who gave even the most reprehensible villains depth. The accolades he won allowed him to take on a plethora of more adventurous roles, proving his versatility and skill to the world of Indian cinema, but also establishing him as a celebrity icon. This book, containing essays from some of Khan’s closest coworkers, offers an intimate and honest picture of SRK the actor and Shah Rukh the man.
SRK – 25 Years of a Life looks at Shah Rukh through the eyes of the directors who transformed him into each of his unforgettable roles. It shows the creation of a living legend, tracing Khan from his early days to his current position at the pinnacle of the Bollywood casting lists. As well as offering an insight into Khan’s life that will entrance any dedicated fan, this book is designed to please the eye; its many illustrations are inspired by Bollywood’s hand-painted film posters, reminiscent of the iconic portraits that first revealed SRK’s characters. SRK writes that he hasn’t had time for introspection, and does not dwell on the details of his successes and failures. However, this book puts everything that needs to be known about SRK within the reader’s grasp. With its stark and unembellished accounts of SRK’s personal and professional life, it provides a unique window of insight into this legandary man.