Calcutta Exile

Calcutta Exile PDF

Author: Bunny Suraiya

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2012-10-17

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9350293110

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'Bunny Suraiya, in a haunting, exquisite serenade, has written a history of heartbreak, tracing its subtleties through the metaphor of family, layer by layer, shadow by shadow' - M.J.Akbar Calcutta, 1959... a time when the city's social and cultural mosaic included Indians, the British and Anglo-Indians, who belonged to neither ommunity but claimed kinship with the English. The Ryans are a typical middle- class Anglo- Indian family. The head of the family, Robert, a senior executive with a managing agency, has dreams of going 'home' to England as soon as he can. His wife, the beautiful Grace, however, is unsure about leaving her comfortable life in india. Their two daughters, Shirley and Paddy, are meanwhile discovering new emotions and relationships which will make them cross invisible but inflexible boundaries. The Ryan household as included Ayah and her husband Apurru, a middle-aged Muslim couple who are making their own plans to go home - to an East Pakistan they have never seen. Also working in the same agency house as Robert is Ronen Mookerjee, the anglicized misfit son of a barrister who belongs to the Bengali landed gentry. Through the stories of these men and women, Calcutta Exile evokes a bygone era of one of the most vibrant and cosmopolitan cities in the world. It also raises questions about individual and collective identities, the foremost among which is: where is home?

Urdu/Hindi: An Artificial Divide

Urdu/Hindi: An Artificial Divide PDF

Author: Abdul Jamil Khan

Publisher: Algora Publishing

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 0875864384

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In a blow against the British Empire, Khan suggests that London artificially divided India's Hindu and Muslim populations by splitting their one language in two, then burying the evidence in obscure scholarly works outside the public view. All language is political -- and so is the boundary between one language and another. The author analyzes the origins of Urdu, one of the earliest known languages, and propounds the iconoclastic views that Hindi came from pre-Aryan Dravidian and Austric-Munda, not from Aryan's Sanskrit (which, like the Indo-European languages, Greek and Latin, etc., are rooted in the Middle East/Mesopotamia, not in Europe). Hindi's script came from the Aramaic system, similar to Greek, and in the 1800s, the British initiated the divisive game of splitting one language in two, Hindi (for the Hindus) and Urdu (for the Muslims). These facts, he says, have been buried and nearly lost in turgid academic works. Khan bolsters his hypothesis with copious technical linguistic examples. This may spark a revolution in linguistic history! Urdu/Hindi: An Artificial Divide integrates the out of Africa linguistic evolution theory with the fossil linguistics of Middle East, and discards the theory that Sanskrit descended from a hypothetical proto-IndoEuropean language and by degeneration created dialects, Urdu/Hindi and others. It shows that several tribes from the Middle East created the hybrid by cumulative evolution. The oldest groups, Austric and Dravidian, starting 8000 B.C. provided the grammar/syntax plus about 60% of vocabulary, S.K.T. added 10% after 1500 B.C. and Arabic/Persian 20-30% after A.D. 800. The book reveals Mesopotamia as the linguistic melting pot of Sumerian, Babylonian, Elamite, Hittite-Hurrian-Mitanni, etc., with a common script and vocabularies shared mutually and passed on to I.E., S.K.T., D.R., Arabic and then to Hindi/Urdu; in fact the author locates oldest evidence of S.K.T. in Syria. The book also exposes the myths of a revealed S.K.T. or Hebrew and the fiction of linguistic races, i.e. Aryan, Semitic, etc. The book supports the one world concept and reveals the potential of Urdu/Hindi to unite all genetic elements, races and regions of the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent. This is important reading not only for those interested to understand the divisive exploitation of languages in British-led India's partition, but for those interested in: - The science and history of origin of Urdu/Hindi (and other languages) - The false claims of linguistic races and creation - History of Languages and Scripts - Language, Mythology and Racism - Ancient History and Fossil Languages - British Rule and India's Partition.

The Scattered Court

The Scattered Court PDF

Author: Richard David Williams

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2023-04-24

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0226825450

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"How far did colonialism transform north Indian art music? In the period between the Mughal empire and the British Raj, did the political landscape bleed into aesthetics, music, dance, and poetry? The Scattered Court presents a new history of how Hindustani court music responded to the political transitions of the nineteenth century. Examining musical culture through a diverse and multilingual archive, primarily using sources in Urdu, Bengali, and Hindi that have not been translated or critically examined before, challenges our assumptions about the period. The book presents a longer history of interactions between northern India and Bengal, with a core focus on the two courts of Wajid Ali Shah (1822-1887), the last ruler of the kingdom of Awadh. Wajid Ali Shah was one of the most colorful and controversial characters of the nineteenth century and has had a polarizing legacy. According to political histories and popular memory, he was a failure of a king, who was forced to surrender his kingdom to the East India Company, on the eve of the Indian Uprising of 1857. On the other hand, in musical histories, he is remembered either as a decadent aesthete or a path-breaking genius. The Scattered Court excavates the place of music in his court in Lucknow and his court-in-exile at Matiyaburj, Calcutta (1856-1887). The book charts the movement of musicians and dancers between these courts, as well as the transregional circulation of intellectual traditions and musical genres, and demonstrates the importance of the exile period for the rise of Calcutta as a celebrated center of Hindustani classical music. Since Lucknow is associated with late Mughal or Nawabi society, and Calcutta with colonial modernity, examining the relationship between the two cities sheds light on forms of continuity and transition over the nineteenth century, as artists and their patrons navigated political ruptures and social transformations. The Scattered Court challenges the existing historiography of Hindustani music and Indian culture under colonialism, by arguing that our focus on Anglophone sources and modernizing impulses has directed us away from the aesthetic subtleties, historical continuities, and emotional dimensions of nineteenth-century music"--

Being English

Being English PDF

Author: Sayan Chattopadhyay

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2021-11-29

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1000507211

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This book critically examines the cultural desire for anglicisation of the Indian middle class in the context of postcolonial India. It looks at the history of anglicised self-fashioning as one of the major responses of the Indian middle class to British colonialism. The book explores the rich variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings that document the attempts by the Indian middle class to innovatively interpret their personal histories, their putative racial histories, and the history of India to appropriate the English language and lay claim to an “English” identity. It discusses this unique quest for “Englishness” by reading the works of authors like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Cornelia Sorabji, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Dom Moraes, and Salman Rushdie. An important intervention, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies, Indian English literature, South Asian studies, cultural studies, and English literature in general.

The Tears of the Rajas

The Tears of the Rajas PDF

Author: Ferdinand Mount

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-03-12

Total Pages: 809

ISBN-13: 1471129454

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The Tears of the Rajasis a sweeping history of the British in India, seen through the experiences of a single Scottish family. For a century the Lows of Clatto survived mutiny, siege, debt and disease, everywhere from the heat of Madras to the Afghan snows. They lived through the most appalling atrocities and retaliated with some of their own. Each of their lives, remarkable in itself, contributes to the story of the whole fragile and imperilled, often shockingly oppressive and devious but now and then heroic and poignant enterprise. On the surface, John and Augusta Low and their relations may seem imperturbable, but in their letters and diaries they often reveal their loneliness and desperation and their doubts about what they are doing in India. The Lows are the family of the author's grandmother, and a recurring theme of the book is his own discovery of them and of those parts of the history of the British in India which posterity has preferred to forget. The book brings to life not only the most dramatic incidents of their careers - the massacre at Vellore, the conquest of Java, the deposition of the boy-king of Oudh, the disasters in Afghanistan, the Reliefs of Lucknow and Chitral - but also their personal ordeals: the bankruptcies in Scotland and Calcutta, the plagues and fevers, the deaths of children and deaths in childbirth. And it brings to life too the unrepeatable strangeness of their lives: the camps and the palaces they lived in, the balls and the flirtations in the hill stations, and the hot slow rides through the dust. An epic saga of love, war, intrigue and treachery, The Tears of the Rajas is surely destined to become a classic of its kind.

Kamala Das and Her Poetry

Kamala Das and Her Poetry PDF

Author: A. N. Dwivedi

Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Dist

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 9788171568932

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This Book Traces The Origin And Growth Of Kamala Das As A Poet Through Successive Stages. Mrs. Das, Who Received No Formal Education, No Pompous University Degree, Stands On Her Own Merit And Is Placed On The Pinnacle Of Reputation And Distinction Among Indo-English Poets Of Today. Her Scintillating Verse Has That Irresistible Force And Tilting Rhythm In It Which Captures The Reader S Attention Immediately. The Reader Often Feels That He Is In The Presence Of A Writer Who Is Highly Gifted And Skilful, Largely Emotional And Subjective, And Who Is Ever Celebrating The Charms Of The Body And The Hungers Of The Sex, Without Getting Him Bored Even For A While. The Poetess Admirably Comes Through The Dictum Of William Wordsworth When He Pronounced That Poetry Is The Spontaneous Overflow Of Powerful Feelings. The Present Book Endeavours To Combine Biography And Criticism And Makes A Critical-Analytical Study Of Mrs. Das S Verse To Date. It Is Not So Much A Chronological Survey Of Her Literary Output As An Investigation Into The Aspects Of Her Poetry. There Are Already Books, Articles And Reviews On Kamala Das, But This One Is Unique In Evaluating Her Poetic Worth In The Light Of Her Work And In Ascertaining Her Position Amongst Contemporary Indo-English Poets. This May Well Claim To Be The First Of Its Kind In Making A Pointed Approach To Diverse Subjects Of Her Verse, To Her Being A Confessional Poet, To Her Conspicuous Tragic Vision Of Art, And In Critically Examining Some Of Her Significant Poems And In Undertaking An Appraisal Of Her Novel, Alphabet Of Lust (1976), And Of Her Prose Works. It Is, Thus, Designed For The Benefit Of The Teachers Of English Literature And The Taught Alike.

Trübner's American and Oriental Literary Record

Trübner's American and Oriental Literary Record PDF

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1865

Total Pages: 1022

ISBN-13:

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A monthly register of the most important works published in North and South America, in India, China, and the British colonies: with occasional notes on German, Dutch, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian books.

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