The Smile of Murugan

The Smile of Murugan
Author: Michael Wood
Publisher:
Total Pages: 253
Release: 1995
Genre: India, South
ISBN: 9780719564055

Some time in the future you will come back here to Chindambaram and you will make a pilgrimage, said the astrologer to Michael Wood as they sat in a small airless house in Tamil Nadu. It is the most important thing you will do. Four years later Michael found himself on a pilgrim bus heading southwards on a journey of more than a thousand miles through the temples and holy shrines of Southern India. The bone-shaking bus, its aisle crammed with passengers on folding chairs and its video showing glimpses of old films through a blaring snowstorm of white static, would transport him into another world and time where the rituals at the spiritual heart of India are still observed as they were a thousand years ago, existing side by side with all the trappings of the modern world. As his many admirers know, Michael Wood is the perfect travelling companion, eyes and ears wide open, knowledgeable yet eager to learn. His touching and humorous account of this inner and outer journey captures both the life-enhancing spirit of Hinduism and the essence of India itself.

The Essential South Indian Cookbook

The Essential South Indian Cookbook
Author: Srividhya Gopalakrishnan
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1641527102

Discover the diverse (and delicious) cuisines of South India. Indian food is as complex, broad, and varied as the country itself—and it's time to bring that expanse of flavors to your kitchen. Drawing on the rich traditions of South India, The Essential South Indian Cookbook will take your taste buds somewhere they've probably never been before. The Essential South Indian Cookbook lets you explore the rarely-tasted regional cuisines of India's southern states. Travel to Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Telangana, and Andhra as you sample delicious foods and learn how each of these areas contributed to the rich traditions of Indian dining. The Essential South Indian Cookbook includes: 75 South Indian recipes—Discover a mouthwatering variety of unique and flavorful dishes that include idli (savory rice cake), dosa (rice crepes), sambar (vegetable stew), chutneys, and more. Taste the south—You'll enjoy an Indian cookbook that examines the varied histories of South India's states—and their contributions to the legacy of Indian food. True Indian kitchen—Learn how to keep your flavors authentic in this Indian cookbook, filled with advice for selecting essential spices and must-have cookware. Earn a new stamp on your culinary passport with the help of The Essential South Indian Cookbook.

Leaving India

Leaving India
Author: Minal Hajratwala
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 469
Release: 2009-03-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0547345410

The PEN Award–winning chronicle of the Indian diaspora told through the stories of the author’s own family. In this “rich, entertaining and illuminating story,” Minal Hajratwala mixes history, memoir, and reportage to explore the collisions of choice and history that led her family to emigrate from India (San Francisco Chronicle). “Meticulously researched and evocatively written” (The Washington Post), Leaving India looks for answers to the eternal questions that faced not only Hajratwala’s own Indian family but all immigrants, everywhere: Where did we come from? Why did we leave? What did we give up and gain in the process? Beginning with her great-grandfather Motiram’s original flight from British-occupied India to Fiji, where he rose from tailor to department store mogul, Hajratwala follows her ancestors across the twentieth-century to explain how they came to be spread across five continents and nine countries. As she delves into the relationship between personal choice and the great historical forces—British colonialism, apartheid, Gandhi’s salt march, and American immigration policy—that helped shape her family’s experiences, Hajratwala brings to light for the very first time the story of the Indian diaspora. A luminous narrative from “a fine daughter of the continent, bringing insight, intelligence and compassion to the lives and sojourns of her far-flung kin,” Leaving India offers a deeply intimate look at what it means to call more than one part of the world home (Alice Walker).

Travels Through South Indian Kitchens

Travels Through South Indian Kitchens
Author: Nao Saito
Publisher: Tara Books
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2018-04
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9789383145591

ln this richly perceptive travelogue, Japanese designer Nao Saito explores the kitchens of South India, bringing together architecture, cookery, and conversation.

India's Unending Journey

India's Unending Journey
Author: Mark Tully
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2012-02-29
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1446491498

Sir Mark Tully is one of the world's leading writers and broadcasters on India, and the presenter of the much loved radio programme 'Something Understood'. In this fascinating and timely work, he reveals the profound impact India has had on his life and beliefs, and what we can all learn from this rapidly changing nation. Through interviews and anecdotes, he embarks on a journey that takes in the many faces of India, from the untouchables of Uttar Pradesh to the skyscrapers of Gurgaon, from the religious riots of Ayodhya to the calm of a university campus. He explores how successfully India reconciles opposites, marries the sensual with the sacred, finds harmony in discord, and treats certainty with suspicion.

Journey Through India

Journey Through India
Author: Mark Probert
Publisher: Journey through
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre:
ISBN: 9781916305649

Ever wondered what it's like to backpack across India? Two sixty-somethings go for one more adventure and just about survive a five-week journey involving world famous sights, crazy incidents and lots of cows. The journey begins in Mumbai and using trains, planes, camels, tuk-tuks and bicycle rickshaw, it finally ends 8,000 kms later in Kolkata.

Religious Journeys in India

Religious Journeys in India
Author: Andrea Marion Pinkney
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2018-08-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 143846603X

Explores how religious travel in India is transforming religious identities and self-constructions. In an increasingly global world where convenient modes of travel have opened the door to international and intraregional tourism and brought together people from different religious and ethnic communities, religious journeying in India has become the site of evolving and often paradoxical forms of self-construction. Through ethnographic reflections, the contributors to this volume explore religious and nonreligious motivations for religious travel in India and show how pilgrimages, missionary travel, the exportation of cultural art forms, and leisure travel among coreligionists are transforming not only religious but also regional, national, transnational, and personal identities. The volume engages with central themes in South Asian studies such as gender, exile, and spirituality; a variety of religions, including Sikhism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity; and understudied regions and emerging places of pilgrimage such as Manipur and Maharashtra. “It’s rare to find such diverse accounts of religious travel collected in a single volume, where scholars’ engagements with individual places of pilgrimage in India and with the journeys surrounding them are truly in conversation with one another. For readers, it makes for a deeply enlightening journey. It also raises an interesting question: Is the reality of India powerful enough that it absorbs divergent expressions of religious tourism, making of them a common fabric? Here, so unusually, readers have the materials to decide.” — John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement

Spring, Heat, Rains

Spring, Heat, Rains
Author: David Shulman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2009-08-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0226755789

“Rocks. Goats. Dry shrubs. Buffaloes. Thorns. A fallen tamarind tree.” Such were the sights that greeted David Shulman on his arrival in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in the spring of 2006. An expert on South Indian languages and cultures, Shulman knew the region well, but from the moment he arrived for this seven-month sojourn he actively soaked up such simple aspects of his surroundings, determined to attend to the rich texture of daily life—choosing to be at the same time scholar and tourist, wanderer and wonderer. Lyrical, sensual, and introspective, Spring, Heat, Rains is Shulman’s diary of that experience. Evocative reflections on daily events—from explorations of crumbling temples to battles with ineradicable bugs to joyous dinners with friends—are organically interwoven with considerations of the ancient poetry and myths that remain such an inextricable part of life in contemporary India. With Shulman as our guide, we meet singers and poets, washermen and betel-nut vendors, modern literati and ancient gods and goddesses. We marvel at the “golden electrocution” that is the taste of a mango fresh from the tree. And we plunge into the searing heat of an Indian summer, so oppressive and inescapable that when the monsoon arrives to banish the heat with sheets of rain, we understand why, year after year, it is celebrated as a miracle. An unabashedly personal account from a scholar whose deep knowledge has never obscured his joy in discovery, Spring, Heat, Rains is a passionate act of sharing, an unforgettable gift for anyone who has ever dreamed of India.