SHAMELESS
SHAMELESS

Author: Taslima Nasreen

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9353578000

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'The textual tension between the real and the imaginary nourishes and complicates the narrative ... Shameless exposes the hypocrisies of Kolkata, the distrust and hatred that exists between the [Hindu and Muslim] communities.' -- Ashutosh Bhardwaj, award-winning writer and journalist 'Shameless is a far more marinated novel than its predecessor ... The emotional seesaw between the creator and her creations gives the plot a cerebral intensity ... Nasreen distils hard-hitting truth through her lived experiences, transforming her individual predicament to strike a universal chord through her deft storytelling.' -- Somak Ghoshal, Livemint 'My name is Suranjan. You don't recognize me? You wrote a novel about me. It was called Lajja.' One day in Calcutta, Taslima suddenly finds herself face to face with Suranjan, the principal character from her controversial novel Lajja. Persecuted in their native Bangladesh, Suranjan and his family have, like Taslima, moved to the city across the border.But is life for a Hindu family from an Islamic nation any better in a country where a majority of the population happens to be Hindu? Leading poor, unmoored lives, exploited and frustrated at every step of the way, and always carrying with them the memories of a scarred communal history, Suranjan and so many others like him seem to lead incomplete lives in their so-called 'safe haven'.Shameless, the explosive sequel to Lajja, is an uncompromising, heart-breaking look at ordinary people's lives in our troubled times.

Besharam
Besharam

Author: Priya-Alika Elias

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Published: 2021-04-20

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1641605103

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Besharam roughly translates to "shameless" in Hindi. This collection from Indian writer Priya-Alika Elias is a bold, sassy, and brilliantly written book on love, dating, body image, consent, and other issues that women today relate to and men should be thinking about. Elias reflects on, and challenges, the ideas of how women are told by society to be humble, obedient, and ashamed of their actions and desires. Her writing is fresh, feminist, and thought-provoking, disrupting taboos and exploring what it means to be a young women in today's world.

Barish
Barish

Author: Punitha Muniandy

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2011-08-26

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1462030963

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Everything about an Indian wedding is signi?cantthe mantras, the sacred ?re in the middle of the altar, the seven rounds around the ?re, and the colors of the brides sari. This day of an arranged marriage for the Sharma family is drenched in heavy rain, but far deeper problems lay within this particular Indian family, who has lived in Canada for the last thirty years. For Gangga Sharma, marrying Subash has been her dreamuntil her wedding day, when her dream turns into a nightmare. For Jamuna Sharma, the wedding is sacred; she vows if she gets married, itll be an Indian wedding. Shes not certain, though, that it will be with an Indian man. For Kaveri Sharma, the sacredness of her marriage meant nothing. For Menaka, her marriage destroyed the life shed always dreamed of living. When she discovers Ajays a?air, she believes shes failed at being a good wife. For Ajay, his daughters wedding opens a can of worms that could potentially destroy his life and his relationship with his daughters. The Sharma family must analyze what marriage means to each and reconcile their expectations with the old culture of India and the di?ering culture in Canada.

No Presents Please
No Presents Please

Author: Jayant Kaikini

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2020-07-28

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 194822691X

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For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Rohinton Mistry, as well as Lorrie Moore and George Saunders, here are stories on the pathos and comedy of small–town migrants struggling to build a life in the big city, with the dream world of Bollywood never far away. Jayant Kaikini’s gaze takes in the people in the corners of Mumbai—a bus driver who, denied vacation time, steals the bus to travel home; a slum dweller who catches cats and sells them for pharmaceutical testing; a father at his wit’s end who takes his mischievous son to a reform institution. In this metropolis, those who seek find epiphanies in dark movie theaters, the jostle of local trains, and even in roadside keychains and lost thermos flasks. Here, in the shade of an unfinished overpass, a factory–worker and her boyfriend browse wedding invitations bearing wealthy couples’ affectations—”no presents please”—and look once more at what they own. Translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana, these resonant stories, recently awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, take us to photo framers, flower markets, and Irani cafes, revealing a city trading in fantasies while its strivers, eating once a day and sleeping ten to a room, hold secret ambitions close.

The Lady of Two Nations
The Lady of Two Nations

Author: Raj Gopal Singh Verma

Publisher: Global Collective Publishers

Published: 2022-09-26

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1954021887

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A casual encounter between an Oxford University-educated scion of a Nawabi family and a comely young woman belonging to a Christian family of Kumaon transformed into a ‘happily ever after’ alliance. Their romantic entanglement had as its backdrop of the tug-of-war between Congress and Muslim League in undivided India. When Irene converted to Islam, her family ostracised her. Liaqat Ali Khan (1896-1951) went on to become the first Prime Minister of Pakistan and his wife Irene Pant (1905-90) attained fame as his wife and fondly came to be known as Gul-e-Ra’ana. In the 1930s, women were not easily allowed to get an education or work. The writer Raj Gopal Singh Verma narrates the fascinating story of this famous couple in the style of a fast-paced historical novel set against the complexities and upheavals of that time. After Liaqat’s assassination, the Begum brought up their two children alone and made a stellar contribution to Pakistan’s political, social, and cultural domains. She also served as the country’s finance minister and diplomat to several Western countries. On her return, she continued to work for empowerment of Muslim women of the country. She raised her voice against the dictatorial regime of Zia-ul-Haq. This book leaves no doubt that Irene Pant deserves to be counted as an iconic woman leader of South Asia, but we hardly know her.

From Quetta to Delhi: A Partition Story
From Quetta to Delhi: A Partition Story

Author: Reena Nanda

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-02-10

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 9386643448

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This story is a cameo set against the backdrop of Partition - a decision taken by political leaders in Britain and India that shattered the lives of ordinary people like the family in this narrative who at that time were living in Quetta, Baluchistan. Viewing victims of the Partition of Punjab in the light of post traumatic stress has been long overdue. The narrator's mother's method of coping with the traumatic present was to escape into the past by reliving her memories of Quetta and her beloved Pathans along with the mundane, insignificant little details of the women's daily lives. Her recall hinges on the drama of the trivial, on food,rituals, clothes, religious practices and neighbourhood bonding. It was a syncretic culture, of multilinguism - Urdu,Punjabi and Seraiki, Persian and Sanskrit, of multiple identities through the biradaris - caste,mohalla and religion. The author's grandmother kept the Guru Granth Sahib at home, her mother and sisters practiced Hindu rituals, while her husband was an agnostic. And everyone made pilgrimages to Sufi pirs.

Seeing Things
Seeing Things

Author: Kartik Nair

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-02-13

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0520392280

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"In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched prosthetic effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage in these movies. Such moments may very well be "failures" of various kinds, but in this book Kartik Nair reads them as clues to the conditions in which the films were once made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. Combining extensive archival research and original interviews with close readings of landmark films including Purana Mandir, Veerana, and Jaani Dushman, this book tracks the material coordinates of horror cinema's spectral images. In the process, Seeing Things discovers a spectral materiality-one that informs Bombay horror's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence and gives visceral force to our experience of the genre's globally familiar conventions"--

The Roles We Play
The Roles We Play

Author: Sabba Khan

Publisher: Myriad Editions

Published: 2021-07-15

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1912408945

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Two-thirds of today's British Pakistani diaspora trace their origins back to Mirpur in Azad Kashmir, a district that saw mass displacement and migration when it was submerged by the waters of a dam built after Partition. Sabba Khan's debut graphic memoir explores what identity, belonging and memory mean for her and her family against the backdrop of this history.

The Sound of Water
The Sound of Water

Author: Sanjay Bahadur

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1416585907

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Longlisted for the 2007 Man Asian Prize, a gripping debut novel about an Indian mining disaster as seen from the perspectives of the miners, their families, and the officials charged with rescuing them. Written by a former director of the Indian Ministry of Coal, and loosely based on the disastrous flood at the Bagdihi colliery in 2001, which trapped and killed dozens of miners, The Sound of Water is written with both an insider’s authority and rare literary style. Its suspenseful narrative is presented from three perspectives: The old miner struggling to save himself and his coworkers hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth; the company and government officials charged with managing the rescue efforts, but who are seemingly far more concerned with managing their careers; and, finally, the miners’ families, who stand to gain life-changing sums as a consequence of their losses. A searing fictional exposé of the appalling conditions that Indian miners endure and a moving story of the spiritual strength and conviction that enables one to survive against the odds, The Sound of Water dares to inaugurate “alternate realism,” a fresh genre very different from the soul-baring autobiographies and epic family sagas that have characterized so much of recent Indian fiction.

Truth Love and A Little Malice
Truth Love and A Little Malice

Author: Khushwant Singh

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2003-02-10

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 9351181359

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Born in 1915 in pre-Partition Punjab, Khushwant Singh, perhaps India’s most widely read and controversial writer has been witness to most of the major events in modern Indian history from Independence and Partition to the Emergency and Operation Blue Star and has known many of the figures who have shaped it. With clarity and candour, he writes of leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, the terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the talented and scandalous painter Amrita Shergil, and everyday people who became butchers during Partition. Writing of his own life, too, Khushwant Singh remains unflinchingly forthright. He records his professional triumphs and failures as a lawyer, journalist, writer and Member of Parliament; the comforts and disappointments in his marriage of over sixty years; his first, awkward sexual encounter; his phobia of ghosts and his fascination with death; the friends who betrayed him, and also those whom he failed.