Search results for ""Roli Books Pvt Ltd""

Born in the cradle of upper-middle-class privilege in a Mumbai Parsi household and educated at one of India’s finest schools, Kobad Ghandy’s life and career could have scaled heights in the bustling world of corporate finance. Only it did not. Instead, he chose to become an activist working for the oppressed of the country. Shocked by the racism he witnessed in the UK as a student and learning of the horrors of colonial rule in India, he determined to serve those struck the harshest by the cruel inequalities of his country. Fractured Freedom takes you through the journey of an honest man and his partner, Anuradha’s, to a difficult destiny. Here is the story of two people who dedicated their lives in the service of the marginalised, and who believed that true revolution required direct action for a more human and just society. Part memoir, part prison diary, Ghandy bares it all looking back at their lives, love, loss and politics, so intrinsically tied together. Having languished in Indian prisons for over a decade, he tells of his long incarceration, of his fellow prisoners, and of the Kafkaesque experiences with the Indian legal system. This is the candid and unfiltered account of how an unjust system breaks the brave and bold-hearted. A story of life in extremes – the height of privilege and the depth of despair, a story of our times, of a path many would shy away from.

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Banaras is a city on the banks of the river Ganges. It is the holiest of the seven sacred cities in Hinduism and Jainism, and played an important role in the development of Buddhism. It is regarded as one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. It is portrayed beautifully through Majumdar's captivating perspective on different walks around the city. Banaras witnesses thousands of devout Hindus who journey to the banks of the Ganga to wash their sins away. The ghats and the riot of colours only add to the character of this city. Banaras now known as Varanasi is also a major tourist attraction and welcomes thousands from around the world.

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Sabita Radhakrishna, author of the best-selling and award-winning Annapurni: Heritage Cuisine from Tamil Nadu (2015), now turns her expertise towards Kerala, the green jewel of South India. Step into God’s own country with Paachakam, a beautifully-illustrated cookbook that offers authentic insights into Kerala’s most popular recipes by drawing attention to the communities that cherish them – Syrian Christians, Namboodris, Cochin Jews, Nairs, and Maplas, to name but a few. In exploring their diverse foods and customs, interviewing community elders, and researching preferred spices and flavours, Radakrishna uncovers special commonalities between them that serve to define Kerala cuisine as a whole. With easy-to-follow recipes, Paachakam invites you to enjoy the many tastes of Kerala from the comfort of your own kitchen. The next time you’re in the mood for a rich Thalassery Biryani, or a refreshing glass of Pacha Maanga, you know where to look!

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Insurgency and the Artist explores not merely how Indian printmakers and artists responded to the freedom struggle but also how the art they fashioned invoked their own conception of the nation, their sense of the past, and the contours of the movement for India’s emancipation from the yoke of colonial oppression. Recent scholarly work has been almost entirely riveted on nationalist prints, and much of it has focused on the idea of Bharat Mata, but this book seeks to furnish a more rounded account of the artwork — including etchings, paintings, woodblocks prints, and cartoons — contemporary to the freedom struggle and also highlights the work of neglected artists such as Babuji Shilpi, S.L. Parasher, Zainul Abedin, and M.V. Dhurandhar, among others. The author considers how the Indian past was rendered as one of martial resistance to ‘foreign’ rule, the manner in which artists worked with mythic material, and, of course, the treatment of the larger-than-life figures of Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Subhas Bose, and other patriots in nationalist art. This gloriously illustrated work simultaneously offers a narrative history of the freedom struggle and the rich interplay of text and images is designed to offer insights that neither conventional histories nor images can offer in isolation. Insurgency and the Artist is also an inquiry into how ideas travel across borders, the porousness of culture, and the relationship of art to politics.

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The book dives into the history of sedition and censorship in colonial India. Closely examining 100 texts that the British Empire banned, censored or deemed seditious, the work brings to life these lost gems from India’s freedom, cultural, and social movements. It includes writing by figures famous and obscure, of events immortalised and forgotten, by Indians and non-Indians, by people jailed and free, by politicians and missionaries, by travellers and novelists, and in several Indian as well as European languages. Each excerpt illuminates not just its author’s thought processes, but the times in which it was composed and circulated.

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Pure & Healthy is a unique book, packed with tasty vegetarian recipes suitable for everyone, including practical weekly menu suggestions for those with medical conditions such as diabetes, gluten allergies, and thyroid issues as well as how food groups and servings can be determined and distributed. With its blend of traditional dishes and innovative renditions, it elevates healthy food into refined cuisine. The focus is on using wholesome and fresh ingredients to make dishes like Ragi Dosa (Finger Millet Pancake), Papita-Nariyal Sherbet (Papaya-Coco Shake), and Bharwa Parwal (Stuffed Pointed Gourd). The recipes have been created in collaboration with well-known nutritionist Radhika Karle to ensure that nutritional values are balanced and appropriate. This book retains all features of bestselling author Vidhu Mittal's previous works - simple recipes, step-by-step photographs, and special tips.

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Bringing you vegetarian wholesomeness and stories from India, Thali is an immersive tour into India’s culinary landscape. As one of the largest consumers of a vegetarian diet in the world today, many Indian communities in the plains and the peninsula have depended on the huge variety of healthy local produce rich in vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains, and cereal due to suitable climatic conditions over generations. There’s a diversity of food available for every occasion, season, festival, age, region and even the day of the week – you name it. Exquisitely designed, with 70 easy-to-make quintessentially Indian recipes, Thali will make your mouth water and jaw drop with histories of India’s places and people telling you who they are and why they eat what they eat. Doctor, nutrition expert, wellbeing advocate and columnist, Nandita Iyer is the author of three bestselling books. She has been writing on nutrition, health and food for over 15 years. Since 2006, her popular blog, Saffron Trail, has been a major resource for healthy food and vegetarian recipes.

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Pavan K. Varma’s illustrated bestseller, Kama Sutra: The Art of Making Love to a Woman is a modern adaptation of Vatsyayana’s classic, Kama Sutra. Varma’s take on the classic treatise is a celebration of love and lovemaking to a woman. The two-thousand year old text, rewritten for a contemporary audience is a confirmation that being sensitive to a woman’s needs is at the heart of the experience. ‘A good lover has to be sensitive to a woman’s needs.’ Pavan K. Varma’s new-age adaptation of Vatsyayana’s cult classic Kama Sutra makes precisely this point. Keeping in mind the celebrated sage’s instruction that men and women are equal partners in the act of consummation, Varma takes us on a witty journey through what has sometimes been seen as a ‘heavy’ manual on sex, and at others as a volume of titillating visuals. This adaptation is a serious tribute to the genius and vision of Vatsyayana, highlighting the ‘modernity’ of what he wrote two thousand years ago – that the fulfilment of women is at the heart of the experience of sex, and that the lines between sex and sensuality, and between social mores and individual desire are indeed fine and must be understood deeply.

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This book is an ode to the mythological heritage of Bharatanatyam. The visual narrative captures the rich heritage of this temple dance and its original exponents, the Devadasis or ‘handmaidens of the deity’. Its repertoire of movements and moods bring alive the fascinating stories of Hindu gods and goddesses and their kaleidoscopic lives. In the following pages, the authors have traced the myths and legends that are cherished in our performing arts, to delight the culture-curious reader. And what is interesting is that in these stories, the reader will discover the inter-connectedness of ancient mythologies around the world. Perhaps such discoveries go a long way in validating the role that art plays in connecting civilisations. The book is designed to engage the reader without pedagogy or scholastic strictures, but with a lightness of touch, that entertains while it informs. Because the vision here is to weave information, anecdotes and trivia, together in the spirit of a popular cultural ranconteur. Replete with rare photographs curated from the Sohinimoksha World Dance and Communications archives, complemented by a lucid narrative that wraps facts in the language of romance and adventure, this book promises to be a collector’s item for those who value the legacy of India’s most celebrated dance form. For glimpses of some live performances by Sohini Roychowdhury, and her Sohinimoksha World Dance troupe, celebrating the music, dance, mythology of India and the World, go on-line to ‘Dancing With The God.... with Sohinimoksha World Dance’ at https://youtu.be/naR7p6SKiko

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Musicscapes: The Multiple Emotions of Indian Music is a visual diary, comprised of 30 years of photo documentation. It explores Indian music through the lens of the passionate photographer Shobha Deepak Singh. Shobha is a chronicler, dedicated to representing the musical zeitgeist of modern India in pictographic form. Retelling history through evocative black-and-white portraits, she displays the many moods, iconic moments and the 'rasa' of Indian music. From the maestros of vocal music, Balasaheb Poonchwale, Kumar Gandharva, Bhimsen Joshi, Kishori Amonkar and Shubha Mudgal; to legendary instrumental musicians, Bismillah Khan, Ravi Shankar, Amjad Ali Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, Vilayat Khan, Hari Prasad Chaurasia, Shiv Kumar Sharma, Ronu Mazumdar and Zakir Hussain; Shobha captures some of the boldest and brightest talents that have emerged from India's diverse music community. Her unique visual language portrays these artists with a rawness and verve no other photographer's camera could match.

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Knockings At My Heart is the first ever collection of Rabindranath Tagore's unpublished short poems - the autograph poems he started writing for the first time during his visit to China and Japan between 1916 and 1929. A Nobel laureate, Tagore was often requested by his admirers to write short poems while signing autographs. Influenced by the precision, depth, power and intensity of Japanese haiku poetry, Tagore's short poems are a tour de force, demonstrating his lyrical simplicity.

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At the pinnacle of French power in India, Pondicherry sparked the imagination of those back home. Pondicherry was the French window on Indian culture, proudly seen as the Gallic Gateway of India. For over three centuries this gateway witnessed the busy trade of spices, beautiful textiles, woven cloth and later peanuts in return for a steady flow of gold, silver, weapons, merchants, priests, soldiers and adventurers. Later, as the English tightened their noose around Pondicherry, the beleaguered French were caught up in their own fateful and impossible attempt to combine colonial and republican principles. History was played out street by street in old Pondicherry and the wealth of these experiences have left an indelible mark on the unique cosmopolitan city that is Pondicherry today. The purpose of this book is to present a brief, illustrated history of these places that once were French.

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Richly designed with beautiful images and illustrations, this edition, published in collaboration with INTACH Kashmir Chapter, is a celebration of architectural ornamentation in shrines and mosques of one of the most beautiful regions of India. The book is also a study to understand the Islamic architecture in the era of continuity and change.

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It began with a new camera, a retirement present from the author’s wife. The Kameng area in Arunachal Pradesh, familiar to the author’s family for over six decades, and the Monpa people provided the perfect subjects to indulge his interest in photography. Over time, the idea of a book firmed up, and the photographs coalesced into what was envisioned as a sensitive, not necessarily comprehensive, look at the Monpa way of life and their land, Monyul. The intent was not to be ethnographic or academic, but to portray the rapidly changing world of the Monpas. A meditative travelogue in images that transforms into a thoughtful exploration, the book captures the lives of the people and the region. The author’s personal stories, interspersed throughout the book, tell of the Monpas’ hospitality and warmth, providing insight into the everyday lives of a spiritual community.

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Jangarh Singh Shyam was born in the early 1960s to an impoverished Gond family in rural central India. Discovered and nurtured by the renowned artist J. Swaminathan at Bharat Bhavan, the multi-arts centre in Bhopal, Jangarh rose to global prominence after participating in a seminal art exhibition in Paris. After a brief career spanning only 20 years - and by then recognised as one of India's greatest tribal artists - Jangarh committed suicide in 2001 at the age of 39. His work, informed by the Gond deities of his childhood, defied established categories and inspired a contemporary school of indigenous painting, which continues to attract admirers in India and abroad. Exploring his aesthetics, themes, and art historical relevance, this book also looks at the relationship between the artist and his early patrons, the collectors Niloufar and Mitchell S. Crites. Dr. Aurogeeta Das closely examines the huge body of work Jangarh left behind in The Crites Collection, enriching her study with references to works in other private and institutional collections. As such, she also captures early practices of collecting contemporary folk and tribal art in India. Contents: Preface by Mitchell S. Crites Patangarh to Paris, New Delhi to Niigata; Images I Samvega, Aesthetic Shock: Jangarh's Artistic Evolution; Images II The Enchanted Forest: Jangarh's Thematic Range; Images III Cataloague Raisonné: Paintings and Drawings from the Crites Collection.

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