An Indian Odyssey PDF Download

Author: Martin Buckley
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9780099458906
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 355

View

Book Description
The Ramayana - the Journey of Rama - is India's best-loved book, an inspiration to school-children, monks and moviemakers, yet it is virtually unknown in the Western world. The story of Rama, an exiled prince searching savage jungles for his kidnapped wife, it combines aspects ofHeart of DarknesswithThe Odysseybut it has become a flashpoint for Indian politics, and disputes surrounding its locations have claimed an estimated 13,000 lives since 1992. When Martin Buckley first encountered theRamayanatwenty-five-years ago, it became a guide to the complexities of Indian life and inAn Indian Odysseyhe fulfils a dream - to retrace the route of Rama from his birthplace in north India to the climax of his confrontation with Evil in Sri Lanka. The journey, by motorbike, microlight, bus and train, was sometimes perilous but the resulting book is a remarkable travel diary and a thought-provoking account of the story of India.

Author: Aaron Smith
Publisher: Roaring Forties Press
ISBN: 1938901134
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

View

Book Description
Journalist Aaron Smith never planned to go to India before he had a contract put on his life by a drug dealer, when suddenly India seemed like the perfect place to get lost. In the process, he ended up finding himself, as well as encountering a dead body or two, witnessing the tragic death of a friend, dodging terrorist attacks and a revolution, and befriending a colorful cast of characters. Pulling no punches, this Gonzo-styled, page-turning Indian adventure has pathos, self-deprecation, and a wicked sense of humor. It provides a raw, honest, and amusing appraisal of traveling through contemporary India.

Author: Martin Buckley
Publisher: Hutchinson Radius
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

View

Book Description
Myth, travelogue, and holy writ, theRamayana—the Journey of Rama—is India’s best-loved book, an inspiration to schoolchildren, monks, and movie-makers. It's one of the world’s great epic tales, yet is largely unread in the Western world. The story of a man searching savage jungles for his kidnapped wife, the Ramayana combinesHeart of Darknesswith theOdyssey. And bizarrely, this violent and erotic account of a war between light and dark is at the heart of the fiercest controversy in contemporary Indian politics—one that has claimed more than 10,000 lives. When Martin Buckley first encountered theRamayana 25 years ago, it became a guide to the complexities of Indian life. Here, he fulfills a dream—to retrace the route of Rama from his birthplace in north India to the climax of his confrontation with Evil in Sri Lanka. A cast of mystics and Marxists, idealists and cynics—Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist—lays out the rich fabric of contemporary India and Sri Lanka, illuminated by the remarkable story of their past—and the quest of a man to rescue the woman he loves.

Author: Prashant Kidambi
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198843135
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

View

Book Description
The extraordinary story of the first 'All India' national cricket tour of Great Britain and Ireland - and how the idea of India as a nation took shape on the cricket pitch.

Author: Michael Leroy Oberg
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812246764
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

View

Book Description
Born in 1788, Eleazer Williams was raised in the Catholic Iroquois settlement of Kahnawake along the St. Lawrence River. According to some sources, he was the descendent of a Puritan minister whose daughter was taken by French and Mohawk raiders; in other tales he was the Lost Dauphin, second son to Louis XVI of France. Williams achieved regional renown as a missionary to the Oneida Indians in central New York; he was also instrumental in their removal, allying with white federal officials and the Ogden Land Company to persuade Oneidas to relocate to Wisconsin. Williams accompanied them himself, making plans to minister to the transplanted Oneidas, but he left the community and his young family for long stretches of time. A fabulist and sometime confidence man, Eleazer Williams is notoriously difficult to comprehend: his own record is complicated with stories he created for different audiences. But for author Michael Leroy Oberg, he is an icon of the self-fashioning and protean identity practiced by native peoples who lived or worked close to the centers of Anglo-American power. Professional Indian follows Eleazer Williams on this odyssey across the early American republic and through the shifting spheres of the Iroquois in an era of dispossession. Oberg describes Williams as a "professional Indian," who cultivated many political interests and personas in order to survive during a time of shrinking options for native peoples. He was not alone: as Oberg shows, many Indians became missionaries and settlers and played a vital role in westward expansion. As a larger-than-life biography of Eleazer Williams, Professional Indian uncovers how Indians fought for place and agency in a world that was rapidly trying to erase them.

Author: Janice Harrell
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504089111
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

View

Book Description
Ari and Paul Montclair aren’t like other teenagers in this first novel of a spinetingling series about a family secret that’s about to be spilled. Sixteen-year-old twins Ari and Paul Montclair have grown up in New Orleans without a father. The only family they’ve ever known is their mother and a mysterious aunt in Washington DC. And when their mother is killed in a tragic car wreck, Aunt Gabrielle is the only person who can help them. Whisked away from their beloved home, Ari and Paul find themselves in a world of wealth and privilege. Aunt Gabrielle supposedly teaches night classes, but she lives in a beautiful townhouse, drives an expensive car, and sends the twins to a prestigious high school. Her days are spent taking “beauty sleeps.” But who are Ari and Paul to judge? Both see numbers in colors and have frightening visions. Their family just might be a little weird. Or they could be part of something much bigger—and bloodier—than they ever could have imagined . . . Don’t miss Bloodlust, the second book in the Vampire Twins series!

Author: Margaret C. Halliday
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781542831710
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
Prana Soup describes Margaret Halliday's three trips to India in candid, sometimes hilarious, detail. She embarks alone on her first trip at the age of fifty, undeterred by multiple sclerosis and osteoarthritis. She fell in love with the country and returned for two six-month trips, keeping a diary of her travels. These diaries have now evolved into Prana Soup. On her first two visits she travels from the Himalaya to the southernmost tip, meeting a fascinating mix of people and having memorable adventures. Her quest plunges her into a veritable 'life force' soup of tasty delights and enticing encounters. She escapes a rail riot, receives a tempting marriage proposal, has a close encounter with a python, is pulled up a hillside after an arduous trek in Sikkim, resides with royalty in Udaipur, has a strange liaison in Goa, is blessed by an elephant, travels to the biggest ship breaking yard in the world, does a Brahma Kumaris meditation course on the top of Mount Abu and stays in Auroville, the 'City of Dawn', to mention a few. She keeps encountering folk who are on a spiritual quest and realises that she too is a seeker. Her third trip focuses more on seeking rather than simply travelling. She traverses the second highest road in the world to Ladakh, 'Little Tibet', does a Buddhist retreat near Dharamsala, a month long yoga course in Rishikesh, stays at the headquarters of the Hare Krishna movement and undergoes ayurvedic treatment for arthritis in Mumbai where she also attends meetings with the 'divine banker', Ramesh Balsekar. In the book's epilogue she describes her future travels and spiritual experiences, explaining how they have enriched her life and enabled her to live with the pain of MS and osteoarthritis, hopefully inspiring others to live life to the full.

Author: Amy C. Schutt
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

View

Book Description
Seventeenth-century Indians from the Delaware and lower Hudson valleys organized their lives around small-scale groupings of kin and communities. Living through epidemics, warfare, economic change, and physical dispossession, survivors from these peoples came together in new locations, especially the eighteenth-century Susquehanna and Ohio River valleys. In the process, they did not abandon kin and community orientations, but they increasingly defined a role for themselves as Delaware Indians in early American society. Peoples of the River Valleys offers a fresh interpretation of the history of the Delaware, or Lenape, Indians in the context of events in the mid-Atlantic region and the Ohio Valley. It focuses on a broad and significant period: 1609-1783, including the years of Dutch, Swedish, and English colonization and the American Revolution. An epilogue takes the Delawares' story into the mid-nineteenth century. Amy C. Schutt examines important themes in Native American history—mediation and alliance formation—and shows their crucial role in the development of the Delawares as a people. She goes beyond familiar questions about Indian-European relations and examines how Indian-Indian associations were a major factor in the history of the Delawares. Drawing extensively upon primary sources, including treaty minutes, deeds, and Moravian mission records, Schutt reveals that Delawares approached alliances as a tool for survival at a time when Euro-Americans were encroaching on Native lands. As relations with colonists were frequently troubled, Delawares often turned instead to form alliances with other Delawares and non-Delaware Indians with whom they shared territories and resources. In vivid detail, Peoples of the River Valleys shows the link between the Delawares' approaches to land and the relationships they constructed on the land.

Author: Gaiutra Bahadur
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022604338X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 313

View

Book Description
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize: “[Bahadur] combines her journalistic eye for detail and story-telling gifts with probing questions . . . a haunting portrait.” —The Independent In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie” —the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Gaiutra Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives. Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages—traumatic “middle passages” —only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and, especially, sexual exploitation. As Bahadur explains, however, it is precisely their sexuality that makes coolie women stand out as figures in history. Greatly outnumbered by men, they were able to use sex with their overseers to gain various advantages, an act that often incited fatal retaliations from coolie men and sometimes larger uprisings of laborers against their overlords. Complex and unpredictable, sex was nevertheless a powerful tool. Examining this and many other facets of these remarkable women’s lives, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora—from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next—that is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.

Author: Chitrita Banerji
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596917121
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 292

View

Book Description
Though it's primarily Punjabi food that's become known as Indian food in the United States, India is as much an immigrant nation as America, and it has the vast range of cuisines to prove it. In Eating India, award-winning food writer and Bengali food expert Chitrita Banerji takes readers on a marvelous odyssey through a national cuisine formed by generations of arrivals, assimilations, and conquests. With each wave of newcomers-ancient Aryan tribes, Persians, Middle Eastern Jews, Mongols, Arabs, Europeans-have come new innovations in cooking, and new ways to apply India's rich native spices, poppy seeds, saffron, and mustard to the vegetables, milks, grains, legumes, and fishes that are staples of the Indian kitchen. In this book, Calcutta native and longtime U.S. resident Banerji describes, in lush and mouthwatering prose, her travels through a land blessed with marvelous culinary variety and particularity.