An Ambiguous Journey to the City

An Ambiguous Journey to the City
Author: Ashis Nandy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN:

This book examines the myth of the journey from the village to the city and shows how this myth and the changes it has undergone provide rich insight on India's ambivalent affair with the modern city. The first section looks at the vicissitudes of the metaphor of journey, especially the imagination of the hero as it intersects with the imagined city. The next two sections profile various heroes as they negotiate the transitions from the village to the city and back to the village. The final section focuses on the psychopathological journey from a poisoned village into a self-annihilating city, and the narrative draws parallels with the violence in 1946-8, the period which saw the birth of modern India and Pakistan.

A Very Popular Exile

A Very Popular Exile
Author: Ashis Nandy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 550
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN:

"This is a collection of three significant works of Ashis Nandy - The Tao of Cricket, An Ambiguous Journey to the City, and Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias. In The Tao of Cricket, Nandy shows how a game once identified with the British Empire - and a preserve of the British gentry - is now more South Asian than English. He examines the sneaking entry of the modern urban-industrial ethic and mass culture into a game that used to thrive on its ability to be a living critique of modern life. Through the story of Indian cricket, he attempts a systematic analysis of world-views, ideologies, cultural exchanges, and political choices. An Ambiguous Journey to the City - concerned with the apparently territorial journey between the village and the city - captures some of the core fantasies and anxieties of Indian civilization over the past century. Nandy argues that the decline of the village from the creative imagination of Indians in recent decades has altered the meaning of this journey drastically, and that the true potentialities of Indian cosmopolitanism cannot be realized without renegotiating the myth of the village. Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias is a collection of essays on the modern West and its cultural and psychological impact on the East. Nandy analyses, brilliantly and insightfully, aspects of East-West relationship - from Western visions, which have displaced all other ideals of a good society, to western histories that have displaced all other pasts of the East. Yet, the apparently defeated have, through the likes Gandhi and Senghor, tried to subvert the West's construction of the rest and to ensure cultural survival and on open-ended future. This volume is essential reading for social scientists, policymakers, activists and anyone interested in the way Indian politics and culture are now enmeshed with a global struggle to protect human dignity and democratic values. This is the third omnibus edition of Ashis Nandy's writings, the first two being Exiled at Home and Return from Exile"--Jacket.

Ambiguous Adventure

Ambiguous Adventure
Author: Hamidou Kane
Publisher: Heinemann
Total Pages: 194
Release: 1972
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780435901196

Sambo Diallo is unable to identify with the soulless material civilization he finds in France, where he is sent to learn the secrets of the white man's power.

Being English

Being English
Author: Sayan Chattopadhyay
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000507211

This book critically examines the cultural desire for anglicisation of the Indian middle class in the context of postcolonial India. It looks at the history of anglicised self-fashioning as one of the major responses of the Indian middle class to British colonialism. The book explores the rich variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings that document the attempts by the Indian middle class to innovatively interpret their personal histories, their putative racial histories, and the history of India to appropriate the English language and lay claim to an “English” identity. It discusses this unique quest for “Englishness” by reading the works of authors like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Cornelia Sorabji, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Dom Moraes, and Salman Rushdie. An important intervention, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies, Indian English literature, South Asian studies, cultural studies, and English literature in general.

A Culture of Ambiguity

A Culture of Ambiguity
Author: Thomas Bauer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231553323

In the Western imagination, Islamic cultures are dominated by dogmatic religious norms that permit no nuance. Those fighting such stereotypes have countered with a portrait of Islam’s medieval “Golden Age,” marked by rationality, tolerance, and even proto-secularism. How can we understand Islamic history, culture, and thought beyond this dichotomy? In this magisterial cultural and intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and establish absolute, uncontestable truths and another, competing tendency that looks for ways to live with ambiguity and accept complexity. Bauer ranges across cultural and linguistic ambiguities, considering premodern Islamic textual and cultural forms from law to Quranic exegesis to literary genres alongside attitudes toward religious minorities and foreigners. He emphasizes the relative absence of conflict between religious and secular discourses in classical Islamic culture, which stands in striking contrast to both present-day fundamentalism and much of European history. Bauer shows how Islam’s encounter with the modern West and its demand for certainty helped bring about both Islamicist and secular liberal ideologies that in their own ways rejected ambiguity—and therefore also their own cultural traditions. Awarded the prestigious Leibniz Prize, A Culture of Ambiguity not only reframes a vast range of Islamic history but also offers an interdisciplinary model for investigating the tolerance of ambiguity across cultures and eras.

Neo Delhi and the Politics of Postcolonial Urbanism

Neo Delhi and the Politics of Postcolonial Urbanism
Author: Rohan Kalyan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2017-04-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351846647

Kalyan presents a trans-disciplinary exploration of the manifold possibilities and challenges that confront a ‘globalizing’ megacity like New Delhi.

The Contemporary Novel and the City

The Contemporary Novel and the City
Author: S. Khanna
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2015-12-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137336250

This book examines the deeply divided terrain of the twentieth century city and its formative impact on narrative fiction. It focuses on two major 'world authors' at the two ends of the twentieth century who write, systematically, about the colonial and postcolonial cities they were born in: James Joyce and Dublin, and Salman Rushdie and Bombay.

I Speak of the City

I Speak of the City
Author: Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2015-02-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226792730

In this dazzling multidisciplinary tour of Mexico City, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo focuses on the period 1880 to 1940, the decisive decades that shaped the city into what it is today. Through a kaleidoscope of expository forms, I Speak of the City connects the realms of literature, architecture, music, popular language, art, and public health to investigate the city in a variety of contexts: as a living history textbook, as an expression of the state, as a modernist capital, as a laboratory, and as language. Tenorio’s formal imagination allows the reader to revel in the free-flowing richness of his narratives, opening startling new vistas onto the urban experience. From art to city planning, from epidemiology to poetry, this book challenges the conventional wisdom about both Mexico City and the turn-of-the-century world to which it belonged. And by engaging directly with the rise of modernism and the cultural experiences of such personalities as Hart Crane, Mina Loy, and Diego Rivera, I Speak of the City will find an enthusiastic audience across the disciplines.

In the Light of Medieval Spain

In the Light of Medieval Spain
Author: S. Doubleday
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2008-08-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230614086

This volume brings together a team of leading scholars in Spanish studies to interrogate the contemporary significance of the medieval past, offering a counterbalance to intellectual withdrawal from urgent public debates.

Pirate Modernity

Pirate Modernity
Author: Ravi Sundaram
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2009-07-30
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 113413052X

Focusing on the culture of piracy in the Indian capital, this book looks at what has happened to the city in the wake of the dissemination of the new media and the ways in which it has, and will, affect urban cultures in an age of globalization.