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Author: Jonathan P. Parry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521466257
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
A study of Hindu death rituals and the sacred specialists who perform them in the Indian city of Banaras.
Author: Jonathan P. Parry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521466257
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
A study of Hindu death rituals and the sacred specialists who perform them in the Indian city of Banaras.
Author: Priyanka Champaneri
Publisher: Restless Books
ISBN: 1632062542
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 561
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Book Description
Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Priyanka Champaneri’s transcendent debut novel brings us inside India’s holy city of Banaras, where the manager of a death hostel shepherds the dying who seek the release of a good death, while his own past refuses to let him go. Banaras, Varanasi, Kashi: India’s holy city on the banks of the Ganges has many names but holds one ultimate promise for Hindus. It is the place where pilgrims come for a good death, to be released from the cycle of reincarnation by purifying fire. As the dutiful manager of a death hostel in Kashi, Pramesh welcomes the dying and assists families bound for the funeral pyres that burn constantly on the ghats. The soul is gone, the body is burnt, the time is past, he tells them. Detach. After ten years in the timeless city, Pramesh can nearly persuade himself that here, there is no past or future. He lives contentedly at the death hostel with his wife, Shobha, their young daughter, Rani, the hostel priests, his hapless but winning assistant, and the constant flow of families with their dying. But one day the past arrives in the lifeless form of a man pulled from the river—a man with an uncanny resemblance to Pramesh. Called “twins” in their childhood village, he and his cousin Sagar are inseparable until Pramesh leaves to see the outside world and Sagar stays to tend the land. After Pramesh marries Shobha, defying his family’s wishes, a rift opens up between the cousins that he has long since tried to forget. Do not look back. Detach. But for Shobha, Sagar’s reemergence casts a shadow over the life she’s built for her family. Soon, an unwelcome guest takes up residence in the death hostel, the dying mysteriously continue to live, and Pramesh is forced to confront his own ideas about death, rebirth, and redemption. Told in lush, vivid detail and with an unforgettable cast of characters, The City of Good Death is a remarkable debut novel of family and love, memory and ritual, and the ways in which we honor the living and the dead. PRAISE FOR THE CITY OF GOOD DEATH “In Champaneri’s ambitious, vivid debut, the dying come to the holy city of Kashi to die a good death that frees them from the burden of reincarnation…. In sharp prose, Champaneri explores the power of stories—those the characters tell themselves, those told about them, and those they believe. . . . This epic, magical story of death teems with life.” —Publishers Weekly “Brimming with characters whose lives overlap and whose stories interweave, Champaneri’s exquisite debut delves into the consequences of the past, and how stories that are told can become reality even when they contain barely a shred of truth. As Pramesh discovers, the bitterness of past wounds can bring hope for redemption and life.” —Bridget Thoreson, Booklist “Lush prose evokes the thick, close atmosphere of Kashi and the intricate religious practices upon which life and death depend. Rumor and superstition hold sway over even the most level-headed people, twisting what’s explainable into something extraordinary—with tragic consequences. . . . The City of Good Death is a breathtaking, unforgettable novel about how remembering the past is just as important as moving on.” —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews, Starred Review "Champaneri’s Kashi is teeming and vivid . . . the book frequently charms, and it's as full of humor, warmth, and mystery as Kashi’s own marketplace." —Kirkus Reviews “The City of Good Death is the debut novel of Priyanka Champaneri but it has the confidence of a master storyteller. Drawing on the rich literary traditions of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, Champaneri’s epic saga will satisfy armchair travelers thirsty for adventure, and sick of looking out their windows.” —Chicago Review of Books "In intricate detail and with remarkable skill, Champaneri writes a powerful tale about the pull of the past and our aching need to understand the mysteries and misunderstandings that thwart our relationships. An atmospheric and immersive debut with a rich cast of characters you won’t soon forget." —Marjan Kamali, author of The Stationery Shop
Author: Diana L. Eck
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307832953
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 382
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Book Description
The sacred city of Banāras on the River Ganges is one of the oldest living cities in the world—as old as Jerusalem, Athens, and Peking. It is the place where Shiva, the Lord of All, is said to have made his permanent home since the dawn of creation. There are few cities in India as traditionally Hindu and as symbolic of the whole of Hindu culture as Banāras. In this eloquent, finely observed study, Diana Eck shows how the city over the centuries has become a lens through which the Hindu vision of the world is precisely focused. She reveals the spiritual and historical resonance of this holy place where great sages such as the Buddha and Shankara were taught, where ashrams, palaces, and universities were built, where God has been imagined and imagined in a thousand ways. She describes the rites of its temples, the busy life of its riverfront, and the exuberance of its festivals. She tells how people travel from all over India to Banāras for the privilege of dying a good death here, for they believe that on the banks of the River Ganges where “the atmosphere of devotion is improbable in its strength,” it is possible to be released from the earthly round forever. In her account of the sacred history, geography, and art of the city, its elaborate and thriving rituals, its myths and literature, and its importance to pilgrims and seekers, Diana Eck uses her wealth of scholarship to make the Hindu tradition come powerfully alive so that we come to understand the meaning of this sacred city to the millions of believers who have been coming here for over 2,500 years.
Author: K. Madavane
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1529015758
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 126
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Book Description
In seven grim, macabre and sometimes darkly comic tales, Madavane traces France’s forgotten colonial presence, playfully reinterprets Hindu myths and recounts the many ways to die in postcolonial India. Recalling the pitiless world of Maupassant and animated by ghosts, gods and holy men, these haunting stories offer a fresh perspective on India’s past and present, its many ironies and idiosyncrasies. Mourir à Bénarès was first published in French in 2010 and received high acclaim for its depiction of India’s most fabled town and the many unusual characters who populate it. Now available in English for the first time, To Die in Benares brings to a wide audience a rare and irresistible literary voice.
Author: Andrei Iliescu
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780464650720
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
These photos were taken in Varanasi in an unexpected trip that lasted only 3 days. Varanasi is a place I always wanted to discover, but my arrival there in October 2008 was somewhat accidental, flying from Nepal. Fortunately I managed to find a place to sleep in one of the few Guest Houses located only 100 meters from the pyres of Manikarnika Ghat. Almost without sleep or food, I wandered on the banks of the Ganges along the 7-8 km where the 84 ghats are laid - in fact the place where everything happens, the spiritual center of this city. Maybe of all India.
Author: Aatish Taseer
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9353023890
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition.Known as the twice-born - first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation - the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past. From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new.The Twice-born is a deeply individual, acutely perceptive, urgently relevant book: it revolves around questions of culture and politics that are going to define our future as a nation. But beyond the inherent interest of the stories it tells, it is a wonderfully written book, characterised by the music of Aatish Taseer's prose, which will haunt the reader long after the final page has been turned.
Author: Diana L. Eck
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807073040
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
A clarion call for interfaith dialogue in the U.S., this “splendid exposition of non-Christian approaches to God . . . encourages an increased religious literacy that . . . will contribute richness and diversity to our national identity” (Publishers Weekly) In this tenth-anniversary edition of Encountering God, religious scholar Diana Eck shows why dialogue with people of other faiths remains crucial in today’s interdependent world—globally, nationally, and even locally. As the director of the Pluralism Project—which seeks to map the new religious diversity of the United States, from Hinduism and Buddhism to Islam—she reveals how her own encounters with other religions have shaped and enlarged her Christian faith toward a bold new Christian pluralism.
Author: Irfan Nabi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789389136777
Category : Handicraft
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
- An experience of a lifetime -- of traveling through the ghats and lanes of Banaras, the sacred city, where millions of believers pause to encounter the divine -- captured in the pages of a book - Through Nabi's visuals of the waterfront, of the Ganges, the eye meets a world that is frantic of the mundane and magnum opus, a scene of both calm and chaos amalgamated - A unique journey from the pages of history to the contemporary times, this is a narrative composed with meticulous research and beautiful illustrations - Narrated in a story-telling manner, this book will appeal to the common reader and the scholar alike Banaras is an enigma with a carefully crafted antiquity that runs deep into its veins. It is an anagram hard to decipher. In more tangible terms, going beyond the metaphorical, Banaras is about all its elements and many sights and sounds. It is about the visible thousands, the Banarasis (the dwellers), the pilgrims, the tourists, the patrons, the kings, the emperors, and the nameless. Banaras is the perceived 'sacred' by the believer, reflected in its past created and recreated, finally standing ground in the contemporary or the lived-in, in particular. A visit to Banaras leaves you with vivid memories or recall of a particular moment which resides in one's senses long after the journey. This book is about the author's sensing of Banaras, a quest to comprehend all of the above and a catalyst to experience more.
Author: Ron Barrett
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520252187
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
"Aghor Medicine moves seamlessly between an ethnography of religion and medical anthropology. The stories of suffering and renunciation, of collective experience that turn Indian hierarchy and discrimination upside down are quite marvelous. The writing is clear and direct and the interpretations balanced and scrupulously documented. Barrett has written one of the best accounts on local traditions "modernizing" in ways that combine indigenous significance with globally crucial changes that react against health and social inequalities."—Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University "Ronald Barrett's fine account of aghor medicine reveals essential characteristics of India's popular culture, and, since an ashram in California has an important role in the story, of American popular culture as well."—Charles Leslie, author of Death Row Letters (forthcoming)
Author: Bishwanath Ghosh
Publisher: Tranquebar
ISBN: 9789389152005
Category : Vārānasi (Uttar Pradesh, India)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
