Ruskin Bond is an inveterate diarist, but over the years the nature of what he wants to record has changed, for ‘In the autumn of my life, I grow reflective’. Although Landour itself is a magical world—where every month has its own flower, every walker his own style, and the countryside is filled with a beauty all its own—in his mind Bond ranges further afield. In Landour Days, he ponders on the experience of being a writer, on writers he has known and those that he loves reading, and on critics, handwriting and typewriters. Filled with warmth and gentle humour, Landour Days captures the timeless rhythm of life in the mountains, and the serene wisdom of one of India’s best-loved writers.
The result of two decades of research, this volume on Mussoorie and Landour by Ruskin Bond and Ganesh Saili documents the daily life of this old English summer hill-town.
"This is the Garhwal Himalayas and the people who live on these mountain slopes in the mist-filled valleys of Garhwal, have long since learned humility, patience and a quiet resignation. Deep in the crouching mist lie their villages, while climbing the mountain slopes are forests of rhododendron, spruce and deodar, soughing in the wind from the ice-bound passes.' A lifetime in the hills and a bountiful collection of stories throughout it--for over six decades Ruskin Bond has been charming readers with his stories from India's hinterland. He has brought to the forefront of everybody's imagination the mountains, valleys and rivers of Garhwal, as well as the magic of small, tucked-away places. Landour Bazaar is a collection of his best-loved stories about Garhwal over the years. Featuring some of his classics along with heart-warming anecdotes and essays woven around life in the hills, this book showcases Bond's writing genius like never before.Get ready for an enchanting read that is sure to bring the mountains to you." --cover page [4].
Ruskin Bond's first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written several novels (including Vagrants in the Valley, A Flight of Pigeons and Delhi Is Not Far), essays, poems and children's books, many of which have been published by Penguin India. He has also written over 500 short stories and articles that have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993 and the Padma Shri in 1999.
A case study in the social history of frontier town building set in the swamps of South Carolina On the banks of the lower Savannah River, the military objectives of South Carolina officials, the ambitions of Swiss entrepreneur Jean Pierre Purry, and the dreams of Protestants from Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, and England converged in a planned settlement named Purrysburg. This examination of the first South Carolina township in Governor Robert Johnson's strategic plan to populate and defend the colonial backcountry offers the clearest picture to date of the settlement of the colony's Southern frontier by ethnically diverse and contractually obligated immigrants. Arlin C. Migliazzo contends that the story of Purrysburg Township, founded in 1732 and set in the forbidding environment bounded by the Savannah River and the Coosawhatchie swamps, challenges the notion that white colonists shed their ethnic distinctions to become a monolithic culture. He views Purrysburg as a laboratory in which to observe ethnic phenomena in the colonial and antebellum South. Separated by linguistic, religious, and cultural barriers, the émigrés adapted familiar social processes from their homelands to create a workable sense of community and identity. His work is one of only a handful of examples of what has been deemed the "new social history" methodology as applied to a South Carolina subject. Initially devastated by privation and a high mortality rate, Purrysburg residents also suffered the vicissitudes of an indifferent provincial elite, the encroachment of lowcountry rice planters, Prevost's invasion in 1779, and ultimate destruction of the settlement by Sherman's army. Migliazzo details the community's changing military and economic fortunes, the gradual displacement of its residents to neighboring communities, the role of African Americans in the region, the complex religious life of township settlers, and the quirky contributions of Purry's climatological speculations to the fateful siting of this first township.
This book represents a new vista, looking past the days when there were two distinct groups-those who were studied and those who studied them. This history of the Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla people had its beginnings in October 2000, when elders sat side by side with native students and native and non-native scholars to compare notes on tribal history and culture. Through this collaborative process, tribal members of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation have taken on their own historical retellings, drawing on the scholarship of non-Indians as a useful tool and external resource. Primary to this history are native voices telling their own story. Beginning with ancient teachings and traditions, moving to the period of first contact with Euro-Americans, the Treaty council, war, and the reservation period, and then to today's modern tribal governance and the era of self-determination, the tribal perspective takes center stage. Throughout, readers will see continuity in the culture and in ways of life that have been present from the earliest times, all on the same landscape. Wiyaxayxt (Columbia River Sahaptin) and Wiyaakaa'awn (Nez Perce) can be interpreted to mean "as the days go by," "day by day," or "daily living." They represent the meaning of the English term "history" in two of the common languages still spoken on the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
Fourteen engaging stories from one of India's master story-tellers Semi-autobiographical in nature, these stories span the period from the author's childhood to the present. We are introduced, in a series of beautifully imagined and crafted cameos, to the author's family, friends, and various other people who left a lasting impression on him. In other stories we revisit Bond's beloved Garhwal hills and the small towns and villages that he has returned to time and again in his fiction. Together with his well-known novella, A Flight of Pigeons (which was made into the film Junoon), which also appears in this collection, these stories once again bring Ruskin Bond's India vividly to life.
Rain in the Mountains brings together some of Ruskin Bond’s most beautiful works from his years spent in the foothills of the Himalayas in the town of Mussoorie. Through vivid images and lucid writing, Bond evokes the everyday sights and sounds, and captures the essence of mountain life. The musings on his natural habitat, in both prose and poetry, offer a view of that simple and affable world. Some of his writings featured in the book are ‘Once Upon a Mountain Time’, ‘Sounds I Like to Hear’, ‘How Far Is the River’ and ‘After the Monsoon’. Rain in the Mountains will transport the reader into the quiet world of the mountains, lit with an eternal charm.
Ruskin Bond emerges again, with a delightful set of sketches set in and on the way to his beloved Mussoorie. With an endearing affection and nostalgia for his home of over forty years, Mr Bond describes his journeys to and from Mussoorie over the years, and then delves into the daily scandals surrounding his life and friends in the (not so) sleepy hill town. The pieces in this collection are characterised by an incorrigible sense of humour and an eye for ordinary-and most often unnoticed-details that are so essential to the geographic, social and cultural fabric of a place. Accompanied by beautiful illustrations, Roads to Mussoorie is a memorable evocation of a writer's surroundings and the role they have played in his work and life.
