India
Europe’s India Douban
author: Sanjay Subrahmanyam publishing house: Harvard University Press 2017 - 3
When Portuguese explorers first rounded the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in the subcontinent in the late fifteenth century, Europeans had little direct knowledge of India. The maritime passage opened new opportunities for exchange of goods as well as ideas. Traders were joined by ambassadors, missionaries, soldiers, and scholars from Portugal, England, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany, all hoping to learn about India for reasons as varied as their particular nationalities and professions. In the following centuries they produced a body of knowledge about India that significantly shaped European thought.
Europe’s India tracks Europeans’ changing ideas of India over the entire early modern period. Sanjay Subrahmanyam brings his expertise and erudition to bear in exploring the connection between European representations of India and the fascination with collecting Indian texts and objects that took root in the sixteenth century. European notions of India’s history, geography, politics, and religion were strongly shaped by the manuscripts, paintings, and artifacts—both precious and prosaic—that found their way into Western hands.
Subrahmanyam rejects the opposition between “true” knowledge of India and the self-serving fantasies of European Orientalists. Instead, he shows how knowledge must always be understood in relation to the concrete circumstances of its production. Europe’s India is as much about how the East came to be understood by the West as it is about how India shaped Europe’s ideas concerning art, language, religion, and commerce.
Apur Sansar (1959) Douban IMDb WikiData TMDB
অপুর সংসার
8.2 (80 ratings) director: 萨蒂亚吉特·雷伊 actor: 松米特拉·查特吉 / 莎米拉·泰戈尔
other title: 아푸 제3부: 아푸의 세계 / অপুর সংসার
Apu is a jobless ex-student dreaming vaguely of a future as a writer. An old college friend talks him into a visit up-country to a village wedding. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 1996.
印度古典美学 Douban
author: 邱紫华 publishing house: 华中师大 2006 - 4
《印度古典美学》系教育部“九五”规划社会科学研究基金项目“印度美学研究”的最终成果,是国内第一部运用跨学科、多视角的研究方法全面论述印度古典美学与艺术的学术著作。本书立足于印度广阔的文化背景来展开印度美学特点的论述,揭示了印度哲学思想、宗教、文学与美学和艺术理论的内在联系,阐明了印度思想对印度民族审美观念和艺术创造的影响。本书注重史论结合,既突显了印度美学思想发展的基本轨迹,分析了印度美学思想在不同历史日寸期的特征及变化的状况,又具体展示了戏剧、建筑、雕刻、绘画、音乐、舞蹈等印度艺术的美学魅力。
Shantaram Douban Goodreads
Shantaram
author: Gregory David Roberts publishing house: Scribe 2004 - 1
"It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured."
So begins this epic, mesmerizing first novel set in the underworld of contemporary Bombay. Shantaram is narrated by Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear.
Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter Bombay's hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.
As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city's poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals. The keys to unlock the mysteries and intrigues that bind Lin are held by two people. The first is Khader Khan: mafia godfather, criminal-philosopher-saint, and mentor to Lin in the underworld of the Golden City. The second is Karla: elusive, dangerous, and beautiful, whose passions are driven by secrets that torment her and yet give her a terrible power.
Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas – this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart. Based on the life of the author, it is by any measure the debut of an extraordinary voice in literature.