A fresh and very readable translation of the world's greatest Sanskrit writer, Kalidasa ""Kalidasa(circa fourth century CE) is widely regarded as the greatest poet and dramatist in the Sanskrit language. Not much is known with certainty about his life and though many are aware of his timeless Sakuntalam and Meghadutam, very few have actually read him, even in translation. The aesthetics of poetry may have changed over 1500 years - we no longer compare women's faces to lotuses or their figures to vines - but it is difficult not to be moved by the sheer beauty and lyricism of Kalidasa's description of the exiled yak?a beseeching a cloud to carry his message across the mountains to his lover, or his evocative narration of the meeting of doomed lovers in the forest."" ""Mani Rao's supple, contemporary translation removes the distance between Kalidasa and the modern reader, she helps 'read' the poetry for us while remaining loyal to the text. "" ""Selections from all seven of the great poet's works (which are considered by Sanskrit scholars to be authentically his creations) are included in this volume- Meghad?tam, Kumarasambhavam and ?tusa?h?ram, he heroic exploits narrated in Raghuva?sam which gives us a remarkable picture of ancient India, as well as the celebrated dramas Abhijnãna Sakuntalam, Vikramorvasiyam and Malavikagnimitram. This is a translation that belongs to today, Kalidasa renewed""

Kalidasa is the major poet and dramatist of classical Sanskrit literature - a many-sided talent of extraordinary scope and exquisite language. His great poem, Meghadutam (The Cloud Messenger), tells of a divine being, punished for failing in his sacred duties with a years' separation from his beloved. A work of subtle emotional nuances, it is a haunting depiction of longing and separation. The play Sakuntala describes the troubled love between a Lady of Nature and King Duhsanta. This beautiful blend of romance and comedy, transports its audience into an enchanted world in which mortals mingle with gods. And Kalidasa's poem Rtusamharam (The Gathering of the Seasons) is an exuberant observation of the sheer variety of the natural world, as it teems with the energies of the great god Siva.

This one-volume thematic encyclopedia examines life in contemporary India, with topical sections focusing on geography, history, government and politics, economy, social classes and ethnicity, religion, food, etiquette, literature and drama, and more. Modern Indian, an addition to the Understanding Modern Nations series, is an in-depth and interdisciplinary encyclopedia. While many books on life in India exist today, this volume is unique as a concise, accessible overview of multiple aspects of Indian society and history. It will be a useful background or supplemental text for anyone interested in modern Indian life and culture. Individual chapters address all aspects of life in 21st-century India, from geography and history to economy and religion to etiquette and sports. Each chapter begins with an overview, followed by entries on, for example, major political parties or literary works. Each overview and entry is self-contained and accompanied by an up-to-date Further Reading list.

By sensing the fundamental ideas of earth and the earth-thought, this collection seeks to negotiate with and react to the underlying semasiological or psycho-geographical principle of geopoetics that cuts across varied and at times conflicting schools. From reading some geopoetical texts to understanding the idea of earth in Humboldt and Marx-Engels, topolitics in Tintin, reef-thinking, geopoet(h)ics and Asiabodh, the volume tries to perceive how we poetically exist with the earth. Isn’t literature, taking a cue from Hölderlin, a symptom of the way “man lives poetically on the earth”? How is our body and psyche integral parts of the earth-thought? How does literature deal with the concepts of space and place? How literature enables us to comprehend the underlying principle of geopoetics — the principle of finding art in earth? These are some of the critical questions which this volume seeks to explore. Literature exemplifies a geographical consciousness — an “intimate and subjective” experience of the earth. This book is an attempt to conceive this eclectic infusion of art and earth, so that we are able to ensure that the world of the art always remains in touch with the earth of the world. Let us, through this book, un-earth this deep-rooted spatiality and geographicality in literature. Let us imitate earth through art, as this is the only place where we can live.

"The Cloud of Longing is a translation and full-length study of the great Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa's famed Meghadūta (literally: "The Cloud Messenger") with a focus on its interfacing of nature, feeling, figurative language, and mythic memory. While the Meghadūta has been translated a number of times, the last "almost academic" translation was published in 1976 (Leonard Nathan, The Transport of Love: The Meghadūta of Kālidāsa). This volume, however, is more than an Indological translation. It is a study of the text in light of both classical Indian and contemporary Western literary theory, and it is aimed at lovers of poetry and poetics and students of world literature. It seeks to widen the arena of literary and poetic studies to include classic works of Asian traditions. It also looks at the poem's imaginative portrayals of "nature" and "environment" from perspectives that have rarely been considered"--

Living Mantra is an anthropology of mantra-experience among Hindu-tantric practitioners. In ancient Indian doctrine and legends, mantras perceived by rishis (seers) invoke deities and have transformative powers. Adopting a methodology that combines scholarship and practice, Mani Rao discovers a continuing tradition of visionaries (rishis/seers) and revelations in south India’s Andhra-Telangana. Both deeply researched and replete with fascinating narratives, the book reformulates the poetics of mantra-practice as it probes practical questions. Can one know if a vision is real or imagined? Is vision visual? Are deity-visions mediated by culture? If mantras are effective, what is the role of devotion? Are mantras language? Living Mantra interrogates not only theoretical questions, but also those a practitioner would ask: how does one choose a deity, for example, or what might bind one to a guru? Rao breaks fresh ground in redirecting attention to the moments that precede systematization and canon-formation, showing how authoritative sources are formed.

This critical volume addresses the question of Rabindranath Tagore's relevance for postmodern and postcolonial discourse in the twenty-first century. The volume includes contributions by leading contemporary scholars on Tagore and analyses Tagore's literature, music, theatre, aesthetics, politics and art against contemporary theoretical developments in postcolonial literature and social theory. The authors take up themes as varied as the implications of Tagore’s educational vision for contemporary India; new theoretical interpretations of gender, queer elements, feminism and subalternism in Tagore's literary and social expressions; his language use as a vehicle for a dialogue between positivism, Orientalism and other constructs in the ongoing process of globalization; the nature of the influence of Tagore's music and literature on national and cultural identity formation, particularly in Bengal and Bangladesh; and intersubjectivity and critical modernity in Tagore’s art. This volume opens up a space for Tagore’s critique and his creative innovations in present theoretical engagements.

Rabindranath Tagore is the second most popular literature laureate of all time (after John Steinbeck) according to the official website of the Nobel Prize. Writers ranked below him on the popularity chart include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda and Ernest Hemingway. Tagore won the prize in 1913, but a hundred years later readers continue to flock to his work because it possesses all the qualities essential to keep it fresh and relevant despite the passage of time-big ideas, complex themes, stylistic brilliance, a deep engagement with nature, beauty, family, love, and passion, and above all, a profound timelessness. Keeping the 21st century reader firmly in mind, this volume brings together some of Tagore's most celebrated works. In The Home and the World, perhaps his most popular novel, intricate issues of devotion-to the motherland and to the family-are explored through a story of two friends and a woman coming into her own. The Monk-King, with its devious priest and marauding armies, is also about the power of sacrifice and loyalty. In 'The Laboratory', Tagore's last short story, he creates a world that is materialistic and amoral with a light yet ruthless touch. In poems like 'Camilla' and 'An Ordinary Girl' he describes the sadness of unrequited love. His drama, Chandalika, is about the angst and helplessness of being in love with an unattainable ideal. Brilliantly translated by Arunava Sinha, this selection of Rabindranath Tagore's fiction, poetry, lyrics and drama is evidence of his position as one of the world's greatest writers and reinforces the enduring nature of his words, emotions and beliefs.

What India’s founders derived from Western political traditions as they struggled to free their country from colonial rule is widely understood. Less well-known is how India’s own rich knowledge traditions of two and a half thousand years influenced these men as they set about constructing a nation in the wake of the Raj. In Righteous Republic, Ananya Vajpeyi furnishes this missing account, a ground-breaking assessment of modern Indian political thought. Taking five of the most important founding figures—Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar—Vajpeyi looks at how each of them turned to classical texts in order to fashion an original sense of Indian selfhood. The diverse sources in which these leaders and thinkers immersed themselves included Buddhist literature, the Bhagavad Gita, Sanskrit poetry, the edicts of Emperor Ashoka, and the artistic and architectural achievements of the Mughal Empire. India’s founders went to these sources not to recuperate old philosophical frameworks but to invent new ones. In Righteous Republic, a portrait emerges of a group of innovative, synthetic, and cosmopolitan thinkers who succeeded in braiding together two Indian knowledge traditions, the one political and concerned with social questions, the other religious and oriented toward transcendence. Within their vast intellectual, aesthetic, and moral inheritance, the founders searched for different aspects of the self that would allow India to come into its own as a modern nation-state. The new republic they envisaged would embody both India’s struggle for sovereignty and its quest for the self.