-An intimate look at a period of modern Indian history that has shaped the music of the subcontinent today -Features detailed sections on several important Indian and American jazz musicians, including Chic Chocolate, 'the Louis Armstrong of India'; and Teddy Weatherford In 1935, a violinist from Minnesota named Leon Abbey brought the first 'all negro' jazz band to Bombay, leaving behind a legacy that would last three decades. In a decade, swing found its way onto the streets of India. It influenced Hindi film music: the very soundtrack of Indian life. The optimism of jazz became an important element in the tunes that echoed the hopes of newly independent India. This book tells a story of India, especially of the city of Bombay, through the lives of a menagerie of geniuses, strivers, and eccentrics, both Indian and American, who helped jazz find a home in the sweaty subcontinent. They include the burly African-American pianist Teddy Weatherford; the Goan trumpet player Frank Fernand, whose epiphanic encounter with Mahatma Gandhi drove him to try to give jazz an Indian voice; Chic Chocolate, who was known as' the Louis Armstrong of India'; Anthony Gonsalves, who lent his name to one of the most popular Bollywood tunes ever; and many more. Taj Mahal Foxtrot, at its heart, is a history of Bombay in swing time.
This book tells a story of India - and especially of the city of Bombay - through the lives of a menagerie of geniuses, strivers, and eccentrics, both Indian and American, who helped jazz find a home in the sweaty subcontinent.
When King Charles Ii Of England Married Princess Catherine De Braganza Of Portugal In 1661, He Received As Part Of His Dowry The Isles Of Bom Bahia, The Good Bay. Reclaimed From The Sea, These Would Become The Modern City Of Bombay. A Marriage Of Affluence And Abject Poverty, Where A Grey Concrete Jungle Is The Backdrop To A Heady Potpourri Of Ethnic, Linguistic And Religious Subcultures, Bombay, Renamed Mumbai After The Goddess Mumbadevi, Defies Definition. Bombay, Meri Jaan, Comprising Poems And Prose Pieces By Some Of The Biggest Names In Literature, In Addition To Cartoons, Photographs, A Song And A Bombay Duck Recipe, Tries To Capture The Spirit Of This Great Metropolis. Salman Rushdie, Pico Iyer, Dilip Chitre, Saadat Hasan Manto, V.S. Naipaul, Khushwant Singh And Busybee, Among Others, Write About Aspects Of The City: The High-Rise Apartments And The Slums; Camaraderie And Isolation In The Crowded Chawls; Bhelpuri On The Beach And Cricket In The Gully; The Women'S Compartment Of A Local Train; Encounter Cops Who Battle The Underworld; The Jazz Culture Of The Sixties; The Monsoon Floods; The Shiv Sena; The Cinema Halls; The Sea. Vibrant, Engaging And Provocative, This Is An Anthology As Rich And Varied As The City It Celebrates.
Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for History A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A Saveur “Essential Food Books That Define New York City” Selection In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women. As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.
The long-anticipated sequel to Tanuja Desai Hidier's groundbreaking BORN CONFUSED! Dimple Lala thought that growing up would give her all the answers, but instead she has more questions than ever. Her boyfriend is distant, her classmates are predictable, and a blue mood has settled around the edges of everything she does.It's time for a change, and a change is just what Dimple is going to get - of scenery, of cultures, of mind. She thinks she's heading to Bombay for a family wedding - but really she is plunging into the unexpected, the unmapped, and the uncontrollable. The land of her parents and ancestors has a lot to reveal to her - for every choice we make can crescendo into a journey, every ending can turn into a beginning, and each person we meet can show us something new about ourselves. Tanuja Desai Hidier's BORN CONFUSED gave voice to a new multicultural generation. Now, Bombay Blues explores everything this generation faces today, with a heady mix of uncertainty and determination, despair and inspiration, haunting loss and revelatory love.
Bombay was the city everyone came to in the early decades of the nineteenth century: among them, the Goans and the Mangaloreans. Looking for safe harbour, livelihood, and a new place to call home. Communities congregated around churches and markets, sharing lord and land with the native East Indians. The young among them were nudged on to the path of marriage, procreation and godliness, though noble intentions were often ambushed by errant love and plain and simple lust. As in the story of Annette and Benji (and Joe) or Michael and Merlyn (and Ellena). Lovers and haters, friends and family, married men and determined singles, churchgoers and abstainers, Bombay Balchão is a tangled tale of ordinary lives - of a woman who loses her husband to a dockyard explosion and turns to bootlegging, a teen romance that drowns like a paper boat, a social misfit rescued by his addiction to crosswords, a wife who tries to exorcise the spirit of her dead mother-in-law from her husband, a rebellious young woman who spurns true love for the abandonment of dance. Ordinary, except when seen through their own eyes.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle • Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The Seattle Times • The Economist • Kansas City Star • BookPage On February 14, 1989, Valentine’s Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been “sentenced to death” by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being “against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran.” So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov—Joseph Anton. How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for more than nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; and of how he regained his freedom. It is a book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling, provocative, moving, and of vital importance. Because what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day. Praise for Joseph Anton “A harrowing, deeply felt and revealing document: an autobiographical mirror of the big, philosophical preoccupations that have animated Mr. Rushdie’s work throughout his career.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “A splendid book, the finest . . . memoir to cross my desk in many a year.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “Thoughtful and astute . . . an important book.”—USA Today “Compelling, affecting . . . demonstrates Mr. Rushdie’s ability as a stylist and storytelle. . . . [He] reacted with great bravery and even heroism.”—The Wall Street Journal “Gripping, moving and entertaining . . . nothing like it has ever been written.”—The Independent (UK) “A thriller, an epic, a political essay, a love story, an ode to liberty.”—Le Point (France) “Action-packed . . . in a literary class by itself . . . Like Isherwood, Rushdie’s eye is a camera lens —firmly placed in one perspective and never out of focus.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Unflinchingly honest . . . an engrossing, exciting, revealing and often shocking book.”—de Volkskrant (The Netherlands) “One of the best memoirs you may ever read.”—DNA (India) “Extraordinary . . . Joseph Anton beautifully modulates between . . . moments of accidental hilarity, and the higher purpose Rushdie saw in opposing—at all costs—any curtailment on a writer’s freedom.”—The Boston Globe
In Intoxicating Shanghai, Paul Bevan explores the work of a number of Chinese modernist figures in the fields of literature and the visual arts, with an emphasis on the literary group the New-sensationists and its equivalents in the Shanghai art world, examining the work of these figures as it appeared in pictorial magazines. It undertakes a detailed examination into the significance of the pictorial magazine as a medium for the dissemination of literature and art during the 1930s. The research locates the work of these artists and writers within the context of wider literary and art production in Shanghai, focusing on art, literature, cinema, music, and dance hall culture, with a specific emphasis on 1934 – ‘The Year of the Magazine’.
Teasing, provocative, and very funny, Mohammed Hanif’s debut novel takes one of the subcontinent’s enduring mysteries and out if it spins a tale as rich and colourful as a beggar’s dream. Why did a Hercules C130, the world’s sturdiest plane, carrying Pakistan’s military dictator General Zia ul Haq, go down on 17 August, 1988? Was it because of: 1. Mechanical failure 2. Human error 3. The CIA’s impatience 4. A blind woman’s curse 5. Generals not happy with their pension plans 6. The mango season Or could it be your narrator, Ali Shigri? Here are the facts: • A military dictator reads the Quran every morning as if it was his daily horoscope. • Under Officer Ali Shigri carries a deadly message on the tip of his sword. • His friend Obaid answers all life’s questions with a splash of eau de cologne and a quote from Rilke. • A crow has crossed the Pakistani border illegally. As young Shigri moves from a mosque hall to his military barracks before ending up in a Mughal dungeon, there are questions that haunt him: What does it mean to betray someone and still love them? How many names does Allah really have? Who killed his father, Colonel Shigri? Who will kill his killers? And where the hell has Obaid disappeared to?
This is the first book to tackle the diverse styles and multiple histories of popular musics in India. It brings together fourteen of the world's leading scholars on Indian popular music to contribute chapters on a range of topics from the classic songs of Bollywood to contemporary remixes, summarized by a reflective afterword by popular music scholar Timothy Taylor. The chapters in this volume address the impact of media and technology on contemporary music, the variety of industrial developments and contexts for Indian popular music, and historical trends in popular music development both before and after the Indian Independence in 1947. The book identifies new ways of engaging popular music in India beyond the Bollywood musical canon, and offers several case studies of local and regional styles of music. The contributors address the subcontinent's historical relationships with colonialism, the transnational market economies, local governmental factors, international conventions, and a host of other circumstances to shed light on the development of popular music throughout India. To illustrate each chapter author's points, and to make available music not easily accessible in North America, the book features an Oxford web music companion website of audio and video tracks.
