This superb collection of Nissim Ezekiel's seven individual volumes of verse, from A Time To Change (1952) to Latter-Day Psalms (1982), together with many uncollected or unpublished poems demonstrates why Nissim Ezekiel is widely considered to be India's greatest English-language poet. Commenting on politics and philosophy, the visual and performing arts, and life in modern Bombay, Ezekiel's poetry has been internationally praised for its clarity, lucidity, precision of image, and variety of form.

Mary Ellen Mark fell in love with the Indian circus in 1969, during her first trip to India. As she watched a huge hippopotamus walk around the ring with its mouth wide open, wearing a pink tutu, she was struck by the beauty and innocence of the show. She returned to India many times, and in 1989 and 1990 she devoted six months to photographing eighteen circuses, following them around the continent by train, plane, van, and auto-rickshaw. Secretive, highly competitive, and each a closed, self-sufficient society, the circuses embody what Mark calls "a poetry and a craziness that are still uncorrupted, and honest, and pure." Beautifully printed in tritone, this remarkable collection of photographs captures the texture of circus life outside of the ring - exhausting, humorous, poignant, and often bizarre - as well as the affection and devotion that the performers have for each other and their animals. Indian Circus is documentary photography at its finest. The photographs are not only compelling portraits of the performers, but also eloquent and poetic narratives about life in the Indian circus.

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.--

""Rocks. Goats. Dry shrubs. Buffaloes. Thorns. A fallen tamarind tree." Such were the sights that greeted David Shulman on his arrival in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in the spring of 2006. An expert on South Indian languages and cultures, Shulman knew the region well, but from the moment he arrived for this seven-month sojourn he actively soaked up such simple aspects of his surroundings, determined to attend to the rich texture of daily life - choosing to be at the same time scholar and tourist, wanderer and wonderer." "Lyrical, sensual, and introspective, Spring, Heat, Rains is Shulman's diary of that experience. Evocative reflections on daily events - from explorations of crumbling temples to battles with ineradicable bugs to joyous dinners with friends - are organically interwoven with considerations of the ancient poetry and myths that remain such an inextricable part of life in contemporary India. With Shulman as our guide, we meet singers and poets, washermen and betel-nut vendors, modern literati and ancient gods and goddesses. We marvel at the "golden electrocution" that is the taste of a mango fresh from the tree. And we plunge into the searing heat of an Indian summer, so oppressive and inescapable that when the monsoon arrives to banish the heat with sheets of rain, we understand why, year after year, it is celebrated as a miracle." "An unabashedly personal account from a scholar whose deep knowledge has never obscured his joy in discovery, Spring, Heat, Rains is a passionate act of sharing, an unforgettable gift for anyone who has ever dreamed of India."--Jacket.