Trees have a subtle language to which animals have been responding over millennia. A communication system that the plants use to compete and even wage ruthless wars. This book is an attempt to decode this warm, but chillingly efficient system.
When going to bed, do you wish on the moon, or the stars in the sky? When the blue moon hears the children of the world singing "Twinkle, twinkle little star..." the bluer he becomes. Why is blue moon so sad? How can you, the little stars in the night sky and children everywhere help blue moon to beam brightly? Featuring pages of activities for children to name the moon, connect the dots, and help the star to find its way to earth.
This book examines the performance of Bauls, ‘folk’ performers from Bengal, in the context of a rapidly globalizing Indian economy and against the backdrop of extreme nationalistic discourses. Recognizing their scope beyond the musical and cultural realm, Sukanya Chakrabarti engages in discussing the subversive and transformational potency of Bauls and their performances. In-Between Worlds argues that the Bauls through their musical, spiritual, and cultural performances offer ‘joy’ and ‘spirituality,’ thus making space for what Dr. Ambedkar in his famous 1942 speech had identified as ‘reclamation of human personality’. Chakrabarti destabilizes the category of ‘folk’ as a fixed classification or an origin point, and fractures homogeneous historical representations of the Baul as a ‘folk’ performer and a wandering mendicant exposing the complex heterogeneity that characterizes this group. Establishing ‘folk-ness’ as a performance category, and ‘folk festivals’ as sites of performing ‘folk-ness,’ contributing to a heritage industry that thrives on imagined and recreated nostalgia, Chakrabarti examines different sites that produce varied performative identities of Bauls, probing the limits of such categories while simultaneously advocating for polyvocality and multifocality. While this project has grounded itself firmly in performance studies, it has borrowed extensively from fields of postcolonial studies and subaltern histories, literature, ethnography and ethnomusicology, and cosmopolitan studies.
In this remarkable account of imperial citizenship, Sukanya Banerjee investigates the ways that Indians formulated notions of citizenship in the British Empire from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Tracing the affective, thematic, and imaginative tropes that underwrote Indian claims to formal equality prior to decolonization, she emphasizes the extralegal life of citizenship: the modes of self-representation it generates even before it is codified and the political claims it triggers because it is deferred. Banerjee theorizes modes of citizenship decoupled from the rights-conferring nation-state; in so doing, she provides a new frame for understanding the colonial subject, who is usually excluded from critical discussions of citizenship. Interpreting autobiography, fiction, election speeches, economic analyses, parliamentary documents, and government correspondence, Banerjee foregrounds the narrative logic sustaining the unprecedented claims to citizenship advanced by racialized colonial subjects. She focuses on the writings of figures such as Dadabhai Naoroji, known as the first Asian to be elected to the British Parliament; Surendranath Banerjea, among the earliest Indians admitted into the Indian Civil Service; Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman to study law in Oxford and the first woman lawyer in India; and Mohandas K. Gandhi, who lived in South Africa for nearly twenty-one years prior to his involvement in Indian nationalist politics. In her analysis of the unexpected registers through which they carved out a language of formal equality, Banerjee draws extensively from discussions in both late-colonial India and Victorian Britain on political economy, indentured labor, female professionalism, and bureaucratic modernity. Signaling the centrality of these discussions to the formulations of citizenship, Becoming Imperial Citizens discloses a vibrant transnational space of political action and subjecthood, and it sheds new light on the complex mutations of the category of citizenship.
Sister Nivedita arrived in India in January 1898, in response to the call of her Guru, Swami Vivekananda. After initiating her, Swamiji gave her the name Nivedita, “the dedicated”. Later he brought out the significance of that name in the following lines he penned for her as his blessings: The mother’s heart, the hero’s will, The sweetness of the southern breeze, The sacred charm and strength that dwell On Aryan altars, flaming, free; All these be yours and many more No ancient soul could dream before— Be thou to India’s future son The mistress, servant, friend in one! Since then, Nivedita embraced her adopted country as her very own. She selflessly gave her all to her beloved country and waged a relentless fight for India and the causes dear to India. Of the numerous instances of Nivedita’s Indian struggles in the fields of thought and activity such as religion, education, art, and politics, a few that show 'The Extraordinary Fighter' that Nivedita was are analysed by the authors in this book published by Advaita Ashrama, a publication house of Ramakrishna Math, Belur Math.
Trees have a subtle language to which animals have been responding over millennia. A communication system that the plants use to compete and even wage ruthless wars. This book is an attempt to decode this warm, but chillingly efficient system.
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