How can we understand India today, fifty years after Independence and only months after its nuclear tests outraged the world? The novelist Arundhati Roy has written, specially for this collection, a fierce denunciation of the Indian nuclear program, which serves as an introduction to nine essays on India, all originally published in The New York Review of Books . In this volume, seven distinguished writers offer penetrating insights into the complexities of the subcontinent. Roderick MacFarquhar reflects on the legacy of Empire and Partition, Ian Buruma considers secularism and Indian democracy, Pankaj Mishra remembers life in Benares, and Christopher de Bellaigue writes on a violent Bombay. But the volatile intersections of history, politics, and culture on which they focus haunt Indian literature too, as shown in essays by Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen on Rabindranath Tagore, Hilary Mantel on Rohinton Mistry, and Anita Desai on Indian women's writing.

That Nissim Ezekiel is arguably the most influential, widely read, and appreciated modern Indian poet writing in English is well known. Less well known is that he is also a prose writer of considerable stature, although he has written very extensively with great sensitivity, style, and distinction on literature, art, television, books, and a range of other subjects for well over three decades. This gap in perception stems primarily from his prose writing being scattered in newspapers, journals and introductions to other books, giving readers and critics little opportunity to see them as an intellectually and stylistically distinctive body of work, of an original, inquiring, questing mind, consistent in the view that there are no easy answers to the questions of life and art; that each individual must seek his own anew every time on every issue. This book remedies this gap in perception by bringing together some of Ezekiel's best prose arranged in five sections entitled "On Poetry," "On Philosophy," "On Art and Culture," "On Life and Thought," and "On Books."

This book explores two millennia of south Indian Tamil civilization, with a special emphasis on the way Tamil speakers and literati understood the unique features of their language and the major cultural themes articulated in Tamil over this long time span. Tamil is one of the great world languages, with its 80 million speakers, its ancient, classical past, and the profound richness of its cultural traditions, which spread throughout South Asia and beyond to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia and, today, to a large Tamil Diaspora scattered around the globe. Presented in the format of a south Indian musical composition, the chapters take the reader through the whole of Tamil cultural history, from its beginnings at the end of the first millennium B.C. through the stunning poems of love and war known as "Sangam Poetry", the burst of intense religious movements in the mid-first-millennium A.D., the Chola period of imperial expansion, and into late-medieval and modern times, including present-day Tamil politics and the vast cultural production of Chennai, Madurai, and Tanjavur. The treasures of the Tamil language deserve a wide audience--thus the book is aimed at readers with no special knowledge of India no less than at speakers and connoisseurs of Tamil. Translated verses and spicy stories of poets, lovers, musicians, warriors and kings fill the pages of this book, which paints a wide-angle, panoramic canvas of one of the most creative civilizations in the history of South Asia as it evolved and transformed itself from the distant past up to our own generation.--