The first book published in the United States on Parsi food written by a Parsi, this beautiful volume includes 165 recipes and makes one of India's most remarkable regional cuisines accessible to Westerners. In an intimate narrative rich with personal experience, the author leads readers into a world of new ideas, tastes, ingredients, and techniques.
Anjali Nerlekar's Bombay Modern is a close reading of Arun Kolatkar's canonical poetic works that relocates the genre of poetry to the center of both Indian literary modernist studies and postcolonial Indian studies. Nerlekar shows how a bilingual, materialist reading of Kolatkar's texts uncovers a uniquely resistant sense of the "local" that defies the monolinguistic cultural pressures of the post-1960 years and straddles the boundaries of English and Marathi writing. Bombay Modern uncovers an alternative and provincial modernism through poetry, a genre that is marginal to postcolonial studies, and through bilingual scholarship across English and Marathi texts, a methodology that is currently peripheral at best to both modernist studies and postcolonial literary criticism in India. Eschewing any attempt to define an overarching or universal modernism, Bombay Modern delimits its sphere of study to "Bombay" and to the "post-1960" (the sathottari period) in an attempt to examine at close range the specific way in which this poetry redeployed the regional, the national, and the international to create a very tangible yet transient local.
Discover a world of spice and color in this celebration of Indian cuisine made for the American kitchen. Indian cooks are masters of flavor. Enjoyed and revered worldwide, the best Indian food offers comfort, wonder, and beauty. In Mumbai Modern, Amisha Dodhia Gurbani delivers a marriage of traditional Gujarati cuisine, Mumbai street food, and modern innovation inspired by the bountiful fresh ingredients on offer in her adopted home of California. Mumbai Modern offers more than 100 vegetarian recipes, complete with Gurbani’s stunning photographs, including breakfasts (Pear and Chai Masala Cinnamon Rolls); appetizers and salads (Dahi Papdi Chaat); mains (Ultimate Mumbai-California Veggie Burger); bread (Wild Mushroom and Green Garlic Kulcha), rice, and snacks (Cornflakes Chevdo); sauces, dips, and jams (Blood Orange and Rosemary Marmalade); desserts (Masala Chai Tiramisu with Rose Mascarpone, Whipped Cream, and Pistachio Sprinkle); and drinks (Nectarine, Star Anise, and Ginger Shrub). Alongside family stories, history, culture and more, this vibrant cookbook is a triumph of Indian-American culinary brilliance.
This book provides a pioneering study of the historical interaction between the city and the natural environment from the colonial to the contemporary era in South Asia. The book provides a multidisciplinary analysis examining the environmental history of the city and bringing together contributions from environmental experts and practitioners as well as academics. Focusing on case studies stretching from the Maldives and Sri Lanka to the Indian subcontinent, the chapters trace linkages between the contemporary and earlier patterns of urban expansion and their environmental effects and consider lessons that can be drawn with respect to preventing future environmental degradation and mitigating the effects of climate change. An important contribution to the field, this book studies the contemporary environmental issues arising from rapid South Asian urbanization. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of South Asian studies, world history, and environmental history.
India is a lively and diverse country that in recent years has developed into one of the largest industrialized nations in the world. This process is also reflected in its architecture. Recent developments betray a new consciousness and the search for an Indian identity. International influences are merging with traditional styles to create a unique new architectural language, which also bears the stamp of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, who worked there. In its introduction, the book depicts the rise of modern architecture in India since independence in 1947. The main section describes the important tendencies of contemporary Indian architecture in thematic chapters, each with built examples. In addition to the new younger generation of Indian architects, it also considers the first post-independence generation, including Balkrishna Doshi and Charles Correa.
Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary is a unique way of looking at Mumbai's terrain and the history of its making. It presents an alternative visualisation of MumbaI's landscape with extraordinary' artistic and design expertise. Innovative technique in architectural drawing, rare photo-works, maps and models add to the thought-provoking and exciting insights. Proposes twelve design initiations that work to resolve the problem of flood. Uses approximately 72 historical maps and illustrations and 90 new drawings and photographic works done by the authors themselves. Comes across as a major initiative that will bring awareness of contemporary concerns of cities, using design to create public awareness and involvement. Holds global relevance in the context of sea level rise and climate change. This is a distinctive book in response to the Mumbai flood of 2005. It aspires to address and transform the increasingly shrill language of fear, anxiety and dread that marks our reception of the rains in Mumbai today. The book imagines the sea and the monsoon not as enemies and agents of flood, but as inevitable partners in the shaping of the land and thereby offers a new vocabulary for living with the monsoon and the sea.
A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insider’s view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs, following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse, opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood, and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks. As each individual story unfolds, Mehta also recounts his own efforts to make a home in Bombay after more than twenty years abroad. Candid, impassioned, funny, and heartrending, Maximum City is a revelation of an ancient and ever-changing world.
Winner of the Silver Nautilus Award for Journalism & Investigative Reporting "A book that truly is impossible to put down.”—Washington Post "This remarkable debut is so deeply reported, elegantly written, and profoundly transporting that it reads like a novel you can’t put down. It’s both a nuanced and intimate evocation of Indian culture, and a provocative and exciting meditation on marriage itself."—Katie Roiphe, author of The Violet Hour In the vein of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, an intimate, deeply reported and revelatory examination of love, marriage, and the state of modern India—as witnessed through the lives of three very different couples in today’s Mumbai. In twenty-first-century India, tradition is colliding with Western culture, a clash that touches the lives of everyday Indians from the wealthiest to the poorest. While ethnicity, class, and religion are influencing the nation’s development, so too are pop culture and technology—an uneasy fusion whose impact is most evident in the institution of marriage. The Heart Is a Shifting Sea introduces three couples whose relationships illuminate these sweeping cultural shifts in dramatic ways: Veer and Maya, a forward-thinking professional couple whose union is tested by Maya’s desire for independence; Shahzad and Sabeena, whose desperation for a child becomes entwined with the changing face of Islam; and Ashok and Parvati, whose arranged marriage, made possible by an online matchmaker, blossoms into true love. Though these three middle-class couples are at different stages in their lives and come from diverse religious backgrounds, their stories build on one another to present a layered, nuanced, and fascinating mosaic of the universal challenges, possibilities, and promise of matrimony in its present state. Elizabeth Flock has observed the evolving state of India from inside Mumbai, its largest metropolis. She spent close to a decade getting to know these couples—listening to their stories and living in their homes, where she was privy to countless moments of marital joy, inevitable frustration, dramatic upheaval, and whispered confessions and secrets. The result is a phenomenal feat of reportage that is both an enthralling portrait of a nation in the midst of transition and an unforgettable look at the universal mysteries of love and marriage that connect us all.
Between the well-documented development of colonial Bombay and sprawling contemporary Mumbai, a profound shift in the city's fabric occurred: the emergence of the first suburbs and their distinctive pattern of apartment living. In House, but No Garden Nikhil Rao considers this phenomenon and its significance for South Asian urban life. It is the first book to explore an organization of the middle-class neighborhood that became ubiquitous in the mid-twentieth-century city and that has spread throughout the subcontinent. Rao examines how the challenge of converting lands from agrarian to urban use created new relations between the state, landholders, and other residents of the city. At the level of dwellings, apartment living in self-contained flats represented a novel form of urban life, one that expressed a compromise between the caste and class identities of suburban residents who are upper caste but belong to the lower-middle or middle class. Living in such a built environment, under the often conflicting imperatives of maintaining the exclusivity of caste and subcaste while assembling residential groupings large enough to be economically viable, led suburban residents to combine caste with class, type of work, and residence to forge new metacaste practices of community identity. As it links the colonial and postcolonial city--both visually and analytically--Rao's work traces the appearance of new spatial and cultural configurations in the middle decades of the twentieth century in Bombay. In doing so, it expands our understanding of how built environments and urban identities are constitutive of one another.
