TWICE BORN : Life and Death on the Ganges

By Aatish Taseer. New Delhi Fourth Estate India 2018 , When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition. Known as the twice-born – first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation – the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past. From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new. The Twice-born is a deeply individual, acutely perceptive, urgently relevant book: it revolves around questions of culture and politics that are going to define our future as a nation. But beyond the inherent interest of the stories it tells, it is a wonderfully written book, characterised by the music of Aatish Taseer’s prose, which will haunt the reader long after the final page has been turned. 9789353023881

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D D KOSAMBI : One Life, Many Worlds

By Ram Ramaswamy. New Delhi Fourth Estate India 2026 , From 1929 to 1966, D.D. Kosambis scholarship in the fields of mathematics, historiography, numismatics and statistics caused ripples across the world. From his pioneering translations of Bhartrihari to his revolutionary reinterpretations of Indian history in landmark books, the intellectual heft and range of Kosambis mind was truly astounding. Sixty years after his passing, however, he is quoted more often than he is read and praised more often than he is analysed—his legacy expunged from administrative records and fading from public memory. Ram Ramaswamys definitive biography of Kosambi seeks to correct this lapse. Drawing from letters and journal entries, family accounts and unprecedented archival material, he presents before us a man of multitudes—fearless and independent on the one hand, plagued by a restless curiosity on the other. D.D. Kosambi: One Life, Many Worlds not only mines the incandescent, if troubled, mind of a genius, whose pursuits were informed by a family and a nation of towering personalities, but also revives an era of fascinating political, scientific and historiographical transformation in the subcontinent.... 9789369891566

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TWICE BORN : Life and Death on the Ganges

D D KOSAMBI : One Life, Many Worlds