Contents: Introduction, Environmental Degradation and Rural Poverty, Environmental Degradation in Study Districts, Impact of Environment Degradation on Rural Poverty, Summary and Conclusions.

The volume presents V.O.C. as a great and dauntless political leader, a pioneer in Trade Unionism in South India, a versatile scholar and a good critic of Tamil language and literature and Saiva Siddhanta philosophy.

Valliappan Olaganthan Chidambaram Pillai, (1872-1936) popularly known by his initials, V.O.C. (spelt Vaa. Oo.Ce in Tamil), also known as Kappalottiya Tamilan "The Tamil Helmsman", was a Tamil political leader. He was a disciple of Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

‘Kalki’ R. Krishnamurthy, one of the pioneering giants of the Tamil press in the tumultuous times of the nationalist movement, was a versatile and prolific writer, inscribing the urgencies of his time in his fiction. This collection brings together the best of Kalki’s short stories, which contain some of his most colourful and enduring characters and themes of Tamil popular fiction of the nineteen thirties and forties. There is in these stories the heady urgency of the freedom struggle, the piquant humour of the parodied Tamil gothic and devastating social satire. In her sensitive translations, Gowri Ramnarayan has succeeded in capturing the nuances of the gently mordant wit that made Kalki’s stories the highlight of the magazines they were originally published in, creating for themselves a dedicated following that flourishes undiminished to this day. Coinciding with the centenary of Kalki’s birth, this volume is a well-deserved tribute to a writer whose breadth of vision and genius imagined and served a new India.

Suitable for both the academician as well as the layman, this book draws from sources as varied as fiction, essays, reviews, and more.

Are you aware that there is a Great Wall of India built by Rana Kumbha at the Fort of Kumbalgarh?Or that Rash Behari Bose was the first to introduce Indian curry into Japan?Or of the Naval Ratings Mutiny that rocked the British empire?India is a nation where history literally lies under your feet, where every rock, nook and corner, has a story to tale.History Under Your Feet aims to look at the history behind some places and persons in India.

Bipin Chandra Pal, Jagdis Chandra BoseKasturba Gandhi, Vithalbhai PatelRafi Ahmad Kidwai, Vinoba BhaveShyama Prasad Mukherjee, Homi Bhabha

For all of India’s myths, stories and moral epics, Indian history remains a curiously unpeopled place. In Incarnations, Sunil Khilnani fills that space, recapturing the human dimension of how the world’s largest democracy came to be. His trenchant portraits of emperors, warriors, philosophers, film stars and corporate titans—some famous, some unjustly forgotten—bring feeling, wry humour and uncommon insight to dilemmas that extend from ancient times to our own.

The Tamil Brahmans were a traditional, mainly rural, high-caste elite who have been transformed into a modern, urban, middle-class community since the late nineteenth century. Many Tamil Brahmans today are in professional and managerial occupations, such as engineering and information technology; most of them live in Chennai and other Tamilnadu towns, but others have migrated to the rest of India and overseas. This book, which is mainly based on the authors ethnographic research, describes and analyses this transformation. It is also a study of how and why the Tamil Brahmans privileged status within a hierarchical society has been perpetuated in the face of both a strong anti-Brahman movement in Tamilnadu, and a series of wider social, cultural, economic, political, and ideological changes that might have been expected to undermine their position completely. The major topics discussed include Brahman rural society, urban migration and urban ways of life, education and employment, the position of women, and religion and culture. The Tamil Brahmans class position, including the internal division into the upper- and lower-middle classes, and the process of class reproduction, are examined closely to analyze the congruence between Tamil Brahmanhood and middle classness, which as comparison with other Brahman and non-Brahman groups shows is highly unusual in contemporary India."