Changing Visions, Lasting Images

Changing Visions, Lasting Images PDF Author: Pratapaditya Pal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description

Changing Visions, Lasting Images

Changing Visions, Lasting Images PDF Author: Pratapaditya Pal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description


Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal

Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal PDF Author: Rachel Fell McDermott
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231129181
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Annually during the months of autumn, Bengal hosts three interlinked festivals to honor its most important goddesses: Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri. While each of these deities possesses a distinct iconography, myth, and character, they are all martial. Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri often demand blood sacrifice as part of their worship and offer material and spiritual benefits to their votaries. Richly represented in straw, clay, paint, and decoration, they are similarly displayed in elaborately festooned temples, thronged by thousands of admirers. The first book to recount the history of these festivals and their revelry, rivalry, and nostalgic power, this volume marks an unprecedented achievement in the mapping of a major public event. Rachel Fell McDermott describes the festivals' origins and growth under British rule. She identifies their iconographic conventions and carnivalesque qualities and their relationship to the fierce, Tantric sides of ritual practice. McDermott confronts controversies over the tradition of blood sacrifice and the status-seekers who compete for symbolic capital. Expanding her narrative, she takes readers beyond Bengal's borders to trace the transformation of the goddesses and their festivals across the world. McDermott's work underscores the role of holidays in cultural memory, specifically the Bengali evocation of an ideal, culturally rich past. Under the thrall of the goddess, the social, political, economic, and religious identity of Bengalis takes shape.

The Book of Joy

The Book of Joy PDF Author: Dalai Lama
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399185062
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
An instant New York Times bestseller. Over 1 million copies sold! Two spiritual giants. Five days. One timeless question. Nobel Peace Prize Laureates His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have survived more than fifty years of exile and the soul-crushing violence of oppression. Despite their hardships—or, as they would say, because of them—they are two of the most joyful people on the planet. In April 2015, Archbishop Tutu traveled to the Dalai Lama's home in Dharamsala, India, to celebrate His Holiness's eightieth birthday and to create what they hoped would be a gift for others. They looked back on their long lives to answer a single burning question: How do we find joy in the face of life's inevitable suffering? They traded intimate stories, teased each other continually, and shared their spiritual practices. By the end of a week filled with laughter and punctuated with tears, these two global heroes had stared into the abyss and despair of our time and revealed how to live a life brimming with joy. This book offers us a rare opportunity to experience their astonishing and unprecedented week together, from the first embrace to the final good-bye. We get to listen as they explore the Nature of True Joy and confront each of the Obstacles of Joy—from fear, stress, and anger to grief, illness, and death. They then offer us the Eight Pillars of Joy, which provide the foundation for lasting happiness. Throughout, they include stories, wisdom, and science. Finally, they share their daily Joy Practices that anchor their own emotional and spiritual lives. The Archbishop has never claimed sainthood, and the Dalai Lama considers himself a simple monk. In this unique collaboration, they offer us the reflection of real lives filled with pain and turmoil in the midst of which they have been able to discover a level of peace, of courage, and of joy to which we can all aspire in our own lives.

On the Politics of Ugliness

On the Politics of Ugliness PDF Author: Sara Rodrigues
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319767836
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—it has long functioned as a social category that demarcates access to social, cultural, and political spaces and capital. The editors of and authors in this collection harness intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches in order to examine ugliness as a political category that is deployed to uphold established notions of worth and entitlement. On the Politics of Ugliness identifies and challenges the harmful effects that labels and feelings of ugliness have on individuals and the socio-political order. It explores ugliness in relation to the intersectional processes of racialization, colonization and settler colonialism, gender-making, ableism, heteronormativity, and fatphobia. On the Politics of Ugliness asks that we fight against visual injustice and imagine new ways of seeing.

Calcutta in Colonial Transition

Calcutta in Colonial Transition PDF Author: Ranjit Sen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429576110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This book brings home the story of how three clustered villages grew into a primate city, in which a garrison town, a port city and the capital of an empire merged into one entity—Calcutta. This and its companion volume Birth of a Colonial City examine the geopolitical factors that were significant in securing Calcutta's position in the light of growing influence of the East India Company and subsequently the British Empire. A definitive history of Calcutta in its nascent years, this book discusses the challenges of city-planning, the de-industrialization at the hands of British imperialists, the catastrophic fall of the Union Bank, the advent of British capital, and the rise of the Bengali business enterprise in the colonial era. It also underlines how Calcutta facilitated the development of a political consciousness and the pivotal political and cultural role it played when the movement for independence took hold in the country. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, British Studies, city and area studies.

Sentiment and Self

Sentiment and Self PDF Author: Peter Robb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199088608
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Richard Blechynden was a surveyor, architect, and builder in early colonial Bengal. This volume and its companion (Sex and Sensibility) use 80 volumes of his diaries and other archival material along with anecdotes, extracts, and stories to recreate histories of everyday life. While Sex and Sensibility deals with larger issues of sexuality, concubines, and dynamics of households in colonial Bengal, this volume deals with life in Calcutta and the re-creation of a British identity. It explores issues like interactions between Europeans and Indians; race and tolerance; laws and legal system; and establishment of colonial city and government giving a bird’s eye-view of colonial Calcutta and its dynamic society. This book will interest scholars and students of modern Indian history, gender studies, cultural studies, and British Imperialism, as well as those interested in biographies.

Uttam Kumar

Uttam Kumar PDF Author: Sayandeb Chowdhury
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9390358019
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
'There is none like Uttam and there will be no one to ever replace him. He was and he is unparalleled in Bengali, even Indian cinema.'-Satyajit Ray, Oscar-winning Indian film-maker Actor and screen icon Uttam Kumar (1926–1980) is a talismanic figure in Bengali public life. Breaking away from established codes of onscreen performance, he came to anchor an entire industry and led the efforts to reimagine popular cinema in mid-20th-century Bengal. But there is pitifully less knowledge about Uttam Kumar in the learned circles-be it about his range of style and performance; the attractions and problems of his cinema; his roles as a producer and patriarch of the industry; or his persona, stardom and legacy. The first definitive cultural and critical biography of this larger-than-life figure engages meaningfully with his life and cinema, revealing the man, hero and actor from various, often competing, vantages. The conceptual aim is to locate a star figure within a larger historical and cultural context, and to enquire into how a towering image was mobilised for an ever-greater, wholesome, popular and even, at times, radical and progressive entertainment. A complimentary métier of this work is to explore why and how this star persona would go on to reconstitute the bhadrolok Bengali visual and cultural world in the post-Partition period. But above all, this is the story of a clerk who became an actor, an actor who became a star, a star who became an icon and an icon who became a legend.

Public Faces, Private Lives

Public Faces, Private Lives PDF Author: Mattison Mines
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520914599
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Individuality is often viewed as an exclusively Western value. In non-Western societies, collective identities seem to eclipse those of individuals. These generalities, however, have overlooked the importance of personal uniqueness, volition, and achievement in these cultures. As an anthropologist in Tamil Nadu, South India, Mattison Mines found private and public expressions of self in all sectors of society. Based on his twenty-five years of field research, Public Faces, Private Voices weaves together personal life stories, historical description, and theoretical analysis to define individuality in South Asia and to distinguish it from its Western counterpart. This engaging and controversial book will be of great interest to scholars and students working in anthropology, psychology, sociology, South Asian history, urban studies, and political science.

Calcutta Mosaic

Calcutta Mosaic PDF Author: Nilanjana Gupta
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 8190583557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
'Calcutta Mosiac' explores the history of the diverse immigrant communities of this great city.

Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams

Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams PDF Author: Rachel Fell McDermott
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195134354
Category : Devotional poetry, Bengali
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
This text chronicles the rise and subsequent fortunes of goddess worship (Saktism) in the region of Bengal from the middle of the 18th century to the present. McDermott places the advent of the Sakta lyric in its historical context.