A Short Resource List for India Rising
India is a land of staggering complexity and diversity, so it is not easy to come up with a short list of accessible resources for those who have lots of curiosity, but only limited time to devote to the topic. If you are looking for a brief introduction to the grand sweep of Indian history, try India: An Illustrated History by Prem Kishore and Anuradha Kishore Ganpati (2003, 200 pp, paperback).
Our keynote speaker, Shashi Tharoor, has recently published a collection of essays about the tensions between tradition and modernity in today’s India: The Elephant, The Tiger, And the Cell Phone: Reflections on India, the Emerging 21st-Century Power (2008, 498pp, paperback). Another interesting collection of essays dealing with India’s cultural diversity is Gita Mehta’s Snakes and Ladders (1998, 320pp, paperback; also available in audio book format from Amazon or Audible.com).
During the program, Vikram Chandra will be reading from his massive award-winning novel, Sacred Games; he has also published a book of short stories and novellas called Love and Longing in Bombay (1998, 272pp, paperback), which might provide a more accessible introduction to his work. For fans of Indian cinema, Netflix offers 8-10 movies by Satyajit Ray, and a separate genre category devoted to the "Best of Bollywood."
If you buy any of these items through the link provided, Humanities West will receive a small dividend at no extra cost to you. If anyone has any additional suggestions to recommend, please enter them as a comment to this posting.
posted by Chuck Sieloff @ 1:37 PM
2 Comments:
Here's another topic to ponder: as a native U.S. career woman, I now work in international companies in the U.S. In my present group, working with many Indians, while I truly enjoy their culture and conversation, yet I face a shocking amount of gender and age prejudice from the males, which over the previous decades I have already worked hard to overcome in our original population. The U.S. males in the group have now begun to pick up their old habits of thought. Must we start all over again working for equality in the U.S.? And. must we add to our efforts class equality?
The previous comment certainly raises a serious issue. In his book mentioned in this post, Shashi Tharoor (our keynote speaker) writes that "South Asia has emerged as the poorest, the most illiterate, the most malnourished, and the least gender-sensitive region in the world..." (p. 137, emphasis mine)
He goes on to say that he is often asked "What is the single most important thing that can be done to improve the world?...(O)f late I have cast my caution to the winds and ventured an answer to this most impossible of questions. If I had to pick the one thing we must do above all else, I now offer a two-word mantra: 'Educate girls.'" (p. 141)
I hope we will hear some discussion of this issue at the program in February.
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