'A Bend in the Ganges is one of the three best novels of 1964.' - E.M. Forster India, 1939. Gian, a Gandhian pacifist, commits a murder; Debi-dayal, an ardent revolutionary, is caught while setting fire to a British plane. Both men are sent to the Andamans penal colony. In the beehive life of the prison, they work in opposite camps-pro-British and anti-British. During World War II, when the Japanese take over the islands, all the convicts suddenly find themselves free. Gian and Debi manage to return to India only to get sucked into the violence of Partition. An epic saga of a nation in transition, A Bend in the Ganges, now available in a stunning new edition, depicts the cataclysmic events leading up to Partition and the conflict that arises between ideologies of violence and non-violence.
When freedom came to India so did violence. Three hundred thousand were slaughtered,a hundred thousand women were raped, abducted, mutilated, twelve million people were rendered homeless. The theme of this powerful novel is how that violence erupted in the lives of ordinary men and women and in the lives of three brilliantly depicted central characters - Gian, a follower of Gandhi, Debi-dayal, an ardent terrorist, and Debi-Dayal's sister, Sundari, a ruthless woman who holds nothing sacred and is half in love with her own brother.
In the "brilliant novel" (The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man — an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.
Dit boek is een literaire studie naar Zuid-Aziatische Engelstalige fictie vanaf midden jaren vijftig tot de late jaren tachtig over de afscheiding van Pakistan en Bangladesh van India, oftewel de Partitie. Het is een fascinerend verhaal over het ontstaan van een nieuw literair genre. Romanschrijvers van verschillende generaties geven hun kijk op dit beslissende moment in de Zuid-Aziatische geschiedenis. In het begin beschreven zij de catastrofe, later werd er meer getheoretiseerd. Aan de hand van zes romans, van onder andere Salman Rushdie, laat Roy zien welke factoren bepalend zijn geweest voor de grote thema's en verhaallijnen in deze romans.
India, 1938. The life of Abhayraj, the heir of Maharaj Hiroji, the ruler of the princely state of Begwad, is not unlike that of many young princes caught between two worlds-indeed, two eras. On the one hand are the traditions of the feudal, close-knit community ruled by his father that he is bound to follow, and on the other the pressures of independence as British dominion over begins to wane. Seeking a path of his own, Abhay joins the Indian army and fights in the Burma campaign during World War II. On his return, however, he is forced into a conventional marriage, and after his father's dramatic death becomes the Maharaja, to rule for just forty-nine days before he is compelled to merge his state with free India in 1948. Hailed as an unusual historical saga at the time of its release, The Princes was first published in New York in 1963 and was selected by the Literary Guild of America as a novel of the month that year. Available now in a beautiful new edition, it offers an enthralling, intimate glimpse into life in India's princely states through the story of a royal family caught in a struggle for survival, in a nation embracing democracy for the very first time.
India is killing the Ganges, and the Ganges in turn is killing India. Victor Mallet traces the holy river from source to mouth, and from ancient times to the present day, to find that the battle to rescue what is arguably the world's most important river is far from lost.
When Dhondu Pant Nana Saheb, the adopted son of exiled Maratha Peshwa Bajirao II, is denied rights as the Peshwa's heir by the British after his father's death, he makes an appeal to reclaim his title, only to be rebuffed again. Then, as a mutiny breaks out in Kanpur in 1857 and Nana Saheb emerges as its leader, he is labelled by the British as a villainous monster, a barbarous butcher and the criminal leader of the 'Sepoy Mutiny', which sweeps across India from 1856 to 1859. Yet, to a nation in turmoil, he becomes a hero who stands up to the colonial oppression and emerges as a forerunner to the leaders who bring freedom to the nation less than a century later. In The Devil's Wind, Nana Saheb's story-a significant, turbulent and intrigue-filled chapter in India's history-is skilfully brought to life by master storyteller Manohar Malgonkar in vivid, inventive detail.
The Men Who Killed Gandhi by Manohar Malgonkar takes readers back into the pages of Indian history during the time of the partition, featuring the murder plot and assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. The Men Who Killed Gandhi is a spellbinding non fictional recreation of the events which led to India’s partition, the eventual assassination of Gandhi, and the prosecution of those who were involved in Gandhi’s murder. This historical reenactment is set against the tumultuous backdrop of the British Raj. Malgonkar’s book is a result of painstaking research and from also having privileged access to many important documents and photographs related to the assassination. There is no doubt that Mahatma Gandhi played a leading role in obtaining independence from the British. But the problems that ensued afterwards, such as the structural rebuilding of the country and the Partition, led to many riots, massive migrations, and deep racial and cultural divides. Not everyone agreed with Gandhi and his ideals. As a result, a plot to assassinate Gandhi was devised by six individuals named, Narayan Apte, Gopal Godse, Madanlal Pahwa, Digambar Badge, and Nathuram Godse. This was eventually carried out in New Delhi, on the 30th of January, 1948. Eventually, these six individuals were tried and convicted. Four of them received life sentences while two of them received the death penalty. The first publication of The Men Who Killed Gandhi occurred in 1978, during the Emergency years. As a result, Malgonkar omitted many vital facts including Dr. Ambedkar’s role in minimizing Savarkar’s criminal conviction. This 11th edition of the text contains these omitted facts as well as rare documents, and photographs obtained from National Archives. After the four individuals who were convicted for Gandhi’s murder completed their life sentences, they were interviewed by Malgonkar. These individuals revealed many details to him which were never known before. The author also received access to the Kapur Commission from his friend Mr. Nayar, who was in the Indian Police Service. As a result, The Men Who Killed Gandhi is considered the most historically accurate account of Gandhi’s assassination plot.
A fifteen-year-old widow runs across a bridge to catch a train bound for Trichi. Sowmya is running away to make sense of the events that had seized her body and her mind, and had ripped apart her world. She is determined to flee her destiny of numbing isolation within her community, the Brahmins of the Thanjavur district in South India. Her plans pivot when she meets a devadasi--an aging dancer--in her compartment. When the woman Mallika opens her drawstring bag and buys Sowmya her dinner, Sowmya recognizes what she needs to overcome her own condition, that of a young woman in possession of a thin cotton sari, a head shorn clean, and little else. She asks Mallika how she too can achieve that kind of power--the power to open a bag and pull out money. Thus begins Sowmya's transformation in the city by the sea, Madras, which is in the grip of its own political and social changes while India is struggling to seize its independence from the imperial British raj. Here she learns the beauty of dance from Mallika, and the sweetness and agony of falling in love with a married man. The cinema brings unimagined opportunities and all the power and riches that she could desire, but it also consumes her relentlessly. When a letter arrives, Sowmya begins her quest to regain everything that had been lost when she once lived in that small village tucked into a little bend of the Kaveri River. Hear Champa Bilwakesh reading from Desire of the Moth here: http://voicethread.com/myvoice/#thread/5863247/30058528/31699244
The first in an epic trilogy, Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies is "a remarkably rich saga . . . which has plenty of action and adventure à la Dumas, but moments also of Tolstoyan penetration--and a drop or two of Dickensian sentiment" (The Observer [London]). At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Her destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean shortly before the outbreak of the Opium Wars in China. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners on board, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of Canton. With a panorama of characters whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, Sea of Poppies is "a storm-tossed adventure worthy of Sir Walter Scott" (Vogue).
