Popular Punjabi culture has given the world the lively Bhangra folk dance with its rhythmic and infectious music hitting International Chart busters. The Punjabi way is to live life to the full and enjoy every minute of it - reflected in their zest for good food.

There is perhaps no political figure in modern history who did more to secure and protect the Indian nation than Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. But, ironically, seventy years after Patel brought together piece by piece the map of India by fusing the princely states with British India to create a new democratic, independent nation, little is understood or appreciated about Patel's enormous contribution to the making of India. Caricatured in political debate, all the nuances of Patel's difficult life and the daring choices he made are often lost, or worse, used as mere polemic. If Mahatma Gandhi was the spiritual core of India's freedom struggle and Jawaharlal Nehru its romantic idealism, it was Sardar Patel who brought in the vital pragmatism which held together the national movement and the first ideas of independent India. A naturally stoic man, Patel, unlike Gandhi or Nehru, wrote no personal history. He famously argued that its was better to create history than write it. This is why even his deepest misgivings and quarrels have been easily buried. But every warning that Patel left for India - from the dangers of allowing groups to create private militias to his thoughtful criticism on India's approach to Kashmir, Pakistan and China - are all dangerously relevant today. It is impossible to read about Patel, who died in 1950, and not feel that had he lived on, India might have been a different country. It is also impossible to ignore Patel and understand not only what the idea of India is but also what it could have been, and might be in the future. The Man Who Saved India is a sweeping, magisterial retelling of Sardar Patel's story. With fiercely detailed and pugnacious anecdotes, multiple award-winning, best-selling writer Hindol Sengupta brings alive Patel's determined life of struggle and his furious commitment to keep India safe. This book brings alive all the arguments, quarrels and clashes between some of the most determined people in Indian history and their battle to carve out an independent nation. Through ravages of a failing body broken by decades of abuse in and outside prison, Patel stands out in this book as the man who, even on his death bed, worked to save India. Hindol Sengupta's The Man Who Saved India is destined to define Patel's legacy for future generations.

Beyond Bollywood is the first comprehensive look at the emergence, development, and significance of contemporary South Asian diasporic cinema. From a feminist and queer perspective, Jigna Desai explores the hybrid cinema of the "Brown Atlantic" through a close look at films in English from and about South Asian diasporas in the United States, Canada, and Britain, including such popular films as My Beautiful Laundrette, Fire, MonsoonWedding, and Bend it Like Beckham.

A commitment to modernity is the underlying theme of this volume. Through essays that are interpretive and theoretical, the author seeks to situate the modern in contemporary cultural practice. She sets up an ideological vantage point to view modernism along its multiple tracks in India and the third world.The essays divide into three sections. The first two sections, Artists and ArtWork and Film/Narratives, raise questions of authorship, genre, and contemporary features of national culture that materialize into an aesthetic in the Indian context. The last section, Frames of Reference, formalizes the polemical options developed across the book. The essays here propose resistance to the depoliticization of narratives, and affirm an open-ended engagement with the avant-garde. They explore the possibility of art practice finding its own signifying space that is still a space for radical transformation.Geeta Kapur is an independent art critic and curator living in New Delhi. Her extensive publications on modern Indian art include the book Contemporary Indian Artists (Delhi, 1978), exhibition catalogues and monographs on artists. She is currently writing a monograph on Tyeb Mehta. Her essays on cultural criticism have been widely presented in forums of art history and cultural studies. Her curatorial work includes the show Bombay/Mumbai 1992 2001 in the multi-part exhibition titled Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis , at Tate Modern, London, in 2001. Geeta Kapur is a founder-editor of the Journal of Arts & Ideas and advisory editor to Third Text. She has held research fellowships at Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and Clare Hall, Cambridge University. For the past three decades, [Geeta Kapur s] has been the singular dominant presence in the field to a point that her writings alone seem to have constituted the whole field of modern Indian art theory and criticism. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Biblio (Delhi), May June 2001. Geeta Kapur is a magisterial presence in the sphere of modern Indian art. [The] insistence on the primacy of bearing witness to creative practice has been the leitmotif of Kapur s work. . . . Kapur s contribution . . . is best understood by reflection on the radical change that her activity has brought about in Indian art criticism. Ranjit Hoskote, Art India (Mumbai), Vol. VI, 1, 2001. When Was Modernism is a book of essays: imaginative, interpretive, argumentative, polemical, political and, in the combined sense of all these, historical. . . . [It] provides an instance of passionate engagement that, at its best moments, verges on the poetic. Chaitanya Sambrani, ART AsiaPacific (Australia), Issue 30, 2001.

This book draws out stories of South Asian adivasi (indigenous/ tribal) built environments and everyday lives that have remained largely hidden from history.