Myth, travelogue, and holy writ, theRamayana—the Journey of Rama—is India’s best-loved book, an inspiration to schoolchildren, monks, and movie-makers. It's one of the world’s great epic tales, yet is largely unread in the Western world. The story of a man searching savage jungles for his kidnapped wife, the Ramayana combinesHeart of Darknesswith theOdyssey. And bizarrely, this violent and erotic account of a war between light and dark is at the heart of the fiercest controversy in contemporary Indian politics—one that has claimed more than 10,000 lives. When Martin Buckley first encountered theRamayana 25 years ago, it became a guide to the complexities of Indian life. Here, he fulfills a dream—to retrace the route of Rama from his birthplace in north India to the climax of his confrontation with Evil in Sri Lanka. A cast of mystics and Marxists, idealists and cynics—Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist—lays out the rich fabric of contemporary India and Sri Lanka, illuminated by the remarkable story of their past—and the quest of a man to rescue the woman he loves.

Anpao is young and Handsome and Brave -- a man any maiden would be proud to call her husband. Any maiden but Ko-Ko-Mik-e-is, that is, who calims she belongs to the Sun alone. And so Anpao sets off for the house of the Sun to ask permission to marry the woman he loves. But Anpao's journey is not an easy one. Before he can reach the Sun, Anapao must travel back in time to the dawn of the world. He must relive his own creation, venture through The World Beneath the World, and battle the many magical mystical creatures of Native American legends. For only by doing so can Anpao discover who he really is, and rove to the Sun why he alone is worthy of the fair Ko-komik-e-is

Journalist Aaron Smith never planned to go to India before he had a contract put on his life by a drug dealer, when suddenly India seemed like the perfect place to get lost. In the process, he ended up finding himself, as well as encountering a dead body or two, witnessing the tragic death of a friend, dodging terrorist attacks and a revolution, and befriending a colorful cast of characters. Pulling no punches, this Gonzo-styled, page-turning Indian adventure has pathos, self-deprecation, and a wicked sense of humor. It provides a raw, honest, and amusing appraisal of traveling through contemporary India.

The extraordinary story of the first 'All India' national cricket tour of Great Britain and Ireland - and how the idea of India as a nation took shape on the cricket pitch.

Born in 1788, Eleazer Williams was raised in the Catholic Iroquois settlement of Kahnawake along the St. Lawrence River. According to some sources, he was the descendent of a Puritan minister whose daughter was taken by French and Mohawk raiders; in other tales he was the Lost Dauphin, second son to Louis XVI of France. Williams achieved regional renown as a missionary to the Oneida Indians in central New York; he was also instrumental in their removal, allying with white federal officials and the Ogden Land Company to persuade Oneidas to relocate to Wisconsin. Williams accompanied them himself, making plans to minister to the transplanted Oneidas, but he left the community and his young family for long stretches of time. A fabulist and sometime confidence man, Eleazer Williams is notoriously difficult to comprehend: his own record is complicated with stories he created for different audiences. But for author Michael Leroy Oberg, he is an icon of the self-fashioning and protean identity practiced by native peoples who lived or worked close to the centers of Anglo-American power. Professional Indian follows Eleazer Williams on this odyssey across the early American republic and through the shifting spheres of the Iroquois in an era of dispossession. Oberg describes Williams as a "professional Indian," who cultivated many political interests and personas in order to survive during a time of shrinking options for native peoples. He was not alone: as Oberg shows, many Indians became missionaries and settlers and played a vital role in westward expansion. As a larger-than-life biography of Eleazer Williams, Professional Indian uncovers how Indians fought for place and agency in a world that was rapidly trying to erase them.

Prana Soup describes Margaret Halliday's three trips to India in candid, sometimes hilarious, detail. She embarks alone on her first trip at the age of fifty, undeterred by multiple sclerosis and osteoarthritis. She fell in love with the country and returned for two six-month trips, keeping a diary of her travels. These diaries have now evolved into Prana Soup. On her first two visits she travels from the Himalaya to the southernmost tip, meeting a fascinating mix of people and having memorable adventures. Her quest plunges her into a veritable 'life force' soup of tasty delights and enticing encounters. She escapes a rail riot, receives a tempting marriage proposal, has a close encounter with a python, is pulled up a hillside after an arduous trek in Sikkim, resides with royalty in Udaipur, has a strange liaison in Goa, is blessed by an elephant, travels to the biggest ship breaking yard in the world, does a Brahma Kumaris meditation course on the top of Mount Abu and stays in Auroville, the 'City of Dawn', to mention a few. She keeps encountering folk who are on a spiritual quest and realises that she too is a seeker. Her third trip focuses more on seeking rather than simply travelling. She traverses the second highest road in the world to Ladakh, 'Little Tibet', does a Buddhist retreat near Dharamsala, a month long yoga course in Rishikesh, stays at the headquarters of the Hare Krishna movement and undergoes ayurvedic treatment for arthritis in Mumbai where she also attends meetings with the 'divine banker', Ramesh Balsekar. In the book's epilogue she describes her future travels and spiritual experiences, explaining how they have enriched her life and enabled her to live with the pain of MS and osteoarthritis, hopefully inspiring others to live life to the full.

Ari and Paul Montclair aren’t like other teenagers in this first novel of a spinetingling series about a family secret that’s about to be spilled. Sixteen-year-old twins Ari and Paul Montclair have grown up in New Orleans without a father. The only family they’ve ever known is their mother and a mysterious aunt in Washington DC. And when their mother is killed in a tragic car wreck, Aunt Gabrielle is the only person who can help them. Whisked away from their beloved home, Ari and Paul find themselves in a world of wealth and privilege. Aunt Gabrielle supposedly teaches night classes, but she lives in a beautiful townhouse, drives an expensive car, and sends the twins to a prestigious high school. Her days are spent taking “beauty sleeps.” But who are Ari and Paul to judge? Both see numbers in colors and have frightening visions. Their family just might be a little weird. Or they could be part of something much bigger—and bloodier—than they ever could have imagined . . . Don’t miss Bloodlust, the second book in the Vampire Twins series!

Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize: “[Bahadur] combines her journalistic eye for detail and story-telling gifts with probing questions . . . a haunting portrait.” —The Independent In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie” —the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Gaiutra Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives. Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages—traumatic “middle passages” —only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and, especially, sexual exploitation. As Bahadur explains, however, it is precisely their sexuality that makes coolie women stand out as figures in history. Greatly outnumbered by men, they were able to use sex with their overseers to gain various advantages, an act that often incited fatal retaliations from coolie men and sometimes larger uprisings of laborers against their overlords. Complex and unpredictable, sex was nevertheless a powerful tool. Examining this and many other facets of these remarkable women’s lives, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora—from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next—that is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.

Though it's primarily Punjabi food that's become known as Indian food in the United States, India is as much an immigrant nation as America, and it has the vast range of cuisines to prove it. In Eating India, award-winning food writer and Bengali food expert Chitrita Banerji takes readers on a marvelous odyssey through a national cuisine formed by generations of arrivals, assimilations, and conquests. With each wave of newcomers-ancient Aryan tribes, Persians, Middle Eastern Jews, Mongols, Arabs, Europeans-have come new innovations in cooking, and new ways to apply India's rich native spices, poppy seeds, saffron, and mustard to the vegetables, milks, grains, legumes, and fishes that are staples of the Indian kitchen. In this book, Calcutta native and longtime U.S. resident Banerji describes, in lush and mouthwatering prose, her travels through a land blessed with marvelous culinary variety and particularity.