Here are 100 books that Motifs in Indian Mythology fans have personally recommended if you like
Motifs in Indian Mythology.
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I am a professional historian who came to the Indian world years ago through studies of epic, mythology, and gender. When I read the Mahabharata, I was surprised that its internal coherence was not apparent. I connected with authors such as Alf Hiltebeite, who saw things in the same way. By then, I found evidence that its author used different materials, including Greco-Roman. And that his work was set at the time—around the turn of the era—when Afro-Eurasia was united in a very intense network of relations, exchanging merchandise, ideas, and many other things (including viruses). I have been trying to find out things about this brilliant author since.
I liked this book very much because it is a brave book. It is becoming more and more difficult to accept that ancient Indian culture was influenced by outside influences, as is the case with all parts of the world.
But at the time, it was already a debated issue. This book advocated an open perspective on the Indian past and present. I was very pleased to see the author's lack of prejudice and wide knowledge. I enjoyed it very much.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am a professional historian who came to the Indian world years ago through studies of epic, mythology, and gender. When I read the Mahabharata, I was surprised that its internal coherence was not apparent. I connected with authors such as Alf Hiltebeite, who saw things in the same way. By then, I found evidence that its author used different materials, including Greco-Roman. And that his work was set at the time—around the turn of the era—when Afro-Eurasia was united in a very intense network of relations, exchanging merchandise, ideas, and many other things (including viruses). I have been trying to find out things about this brilliant author since.
At first glance, it seems like a rather unexciting book, to be honest. But it is enough to look at the table of contents to see that the author argues that one of the basic and oldest manuals of Indian architecture had borrowed whole sections from the best manual we have on Roman (that is, Greco-Roman) architecture: the book of Vitruvius.
I was shocked the first time I read it. This is another of the great enigmas of the subject: how is it that this text is hidden and the consequences of such massive borrowing are not brought out?
I am a professional historian who came to the Indian world years ago through studies of epic, mythology, and gender. When I read the Mahabharata, I was surprised that its internal coherence was not apparent. I connected with authors such as Alf Hiltebeite, who saw things in the same way. By then, I found evidence that its author used different materials, including Greco-Roman. And that his work was set at the time—around the turn of the era—when Afro-Eurasia was united in a very intense network of relations, exchanging merchandise, ideas, and many other things (including viruses). I have been trying to find out things about this brilliant author since.
Of the five recommended books, this is the most current. No wonder there are so many years in between. Maintaining that there are external influences in India is very dangerous academically. I like that Morales-Harley, a young scholar who knows Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, dared to do it.
I like his book because it is well written, well argued, and always leaves open alternative interpretation possibilities.
This volume presents a sophisticated and intricate examination of the parallels between Sanskrit and Greco-Roman literature. By means of a philological and literary analysis, Morales-Harley hypothesizes that Greco-Roman literature was known, understood, and recreated in India. Moreover, it is argued that the techniques for adapting epic into theater could have been Greco-Roman influences in India, and that some of the elements adapted within the literary motifs (specifically the motifs of the embassy, the ambush, and the ogre) could have been Greco-Roman borrowings by Sanskrit authors.This book draws on a wide variety of sources, including Iliad, Phoenix, Rhesus and Cyclops (Greco-Roman)…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I am a professional historian who came to the Indian world years ago through studies of epic, mythology, and gender. When I read the Mahabharata, I was surprised that its internal coherence was not apparent. I connected with authors such as Alf Hiltebeite, who saw things in the same way. By then, I found evidence that its author used different materials, including Greco-Roman. And that his work was set at the time—around the turn of the era—when Afro-Eurasia was united in a very intense network of relations, exchanging merchandise, ideas, and many other things (including viruses). I have been trying to find out things about this brilliant author since.
I wanted to end my list with another book by an Indian author. This is a text similar to Acharya's, a text that impressed me when I found it and that almost no one cites.
This is an author who argues not only that there are external influences in ancient India but that it is a constant in Indian history and that there is no reason to be ashamed of it. Why should there be? It is a basic text in the good sense of the word, a brave book that deserves to be reread.
Anand Neelakantan is an Indian author, columnist, screenwriter, television personality, and motivational speaker. He has authored eight fiction books in English and one in Malayalam. His debut work Asura, The Tale of the Vanquished is based on the Indian epics of Ramayana. His next book series was Ajaya-Roll of the Dice, Ajaya – Rise of Kali based on the two books on the epic Mahabharata told from Kaurava perspective. Anand's books voice the suppressed party or the defeated party. In his fifth book Vanara, the legend of Baali, Sugreeva, and Tara also follow the same pattern of expressing the defeated side.
This historical fiction is on the life of a quasi-mythical figure, the bhakti era saint, Meera. Narrated by Bhoj Raj, the husband of Meera Bhai, it is the poignant tale of India itself at the cusp of a historical event. The political and social questions Nagarkar raises in the book are relevant in every era and culture. The story of Meera, the princess who fell in love with Lord Krishna and her hapless husband who is forced to compete with God for his wife’s love. The beauty of Nagarkar’s English is bewitching. The loneliness of Rajkumar, the protagonist, throbs through every line. How difficult it would have been to be married to a saint, who is revered even after five hundred years of her death and whose compositions are still sung in temples, weddings, and homes? In my opinion, this is perhaps the best Indian English novel written so far,…
Cuckold is set in the historic 16th century, in the rajput kingdom of mewar the region is ruled by rana sangha, who has been trying to establish peace with the sultans of malwa, delhi, and gujarat his eldest son is maharaj kumar bhoj raj, who is the crown prince of mewar this fictional character is based on the real life rajpur prince, thakur bhojrajmaharaj kumar is the narrator of cuckold, and he is married to meera bai, the princess of mewar meera claims that she cannot cohabitat with the prince because she is already married to the hindu god, lord…
Anand Neelakantan is an Indian author, columnist, screenwriter, television personality, and motivational speaker. He has authored eight fiction books in English and one in Malayalam. His debut work Asura, The Tale of the Vanquished is based on the Indian epics of Ramayana. His next book series was Ajaya-Roll of the Dice, Ajaya – Rise of Kali based on the two books on the epic Mahabharata told from Kaurava perspective. Anand's books voice the suppressed party or the defeated party. In his fifth book Vanara, the legend of Baali, Sugreeva, and Tara also follow the same pattern of expressing the defeated side.
This Kannada classic written by S L Byrappa humanises each character of Mahabharata and turns the ancient epic into a modern novel. The book won the Kendra Sahitya Academy Award and is one of the greatest Indian books written in any Indian language. There is no magic, gods, or superhumans in this novel and this makes it poignant, deep, and moving. This is Mahabharata as raw as it can get and reads like historical fiction. If Bhima is lyrical, Parva is powerful fiction. It grabs you from the first page and shakes up many of our beliefs.
The novel narrates the story of the Hindu epic Mahabharata mostly using monologue as a literary technique. Several principal characters found in the original Mahabharata reminisce almost their entire lives. Both the setting and the context for the reminiscence is the onset of the Kurukshetra War. Parva is acknowledged to be S.L.Bhyrappa's greatest work.Non-Kannadigas who have read it in it's Hindi and Marathi translations consider it one of the masterpieces of modern Indian literature.It is a transformation of an ancient legend into a modern novel.In this process,it has gained rational credibility and a human perspective.The main incident,the Bharata war,symbolic of…
A fake date, romance, and a conniving co-worker you'd love to shut down. Fun summer reading!
Liza loves helping people and creating designer shoes that feel as good as they look. Financially overextended and recovering from a divorce, her last-ditch opportunity to pitch her firm for investment falls flat. Then…
Suspense thrillers were staple “reading food” in my college and young adult days, and my love for them continues. I always craved thrillers that are based on WWII, the Cold War, and secret scientific advances and that offered fresh historical perspectives and dared to challenge popular narratives while delighting the readers with dexterously woven fictional tales. And then, most importantly, it is the feeling the author has conducted genuine, painstaking research bringing out captivating, reasoned nuggets of history that I find most satisfying.
Can a memoir be a thriller? I say this one is. It is truly an amazing and inspiring account of an immigrant’s tenacious, fearless journey to success, from humble beginnings in a small town in India to earning a PhD in the US and becoming a multimillionaire entrepreneur.
While not exactly a historical thriller, The Blue Suitcase took me on a roller coaster ride full of fascinating cultural insights and nuances and the serendipities that shaped Thanedar’s journey.
I'm a writer and journalist with an eye on South and Southeast Asia. I first visited Kolkata, or Calcutta as the city was known back then, in 1995 and fell in love with its spirit, culture, architecture, politics, and decrepitude. I have been back regularly reporting on the city’s cultural life for media like CNN and Nikkei Asia. In 2019, I was selected as artist-in-residence for the Indo-European Art Residency by the Goethe Institute and spent 10 weeks writing a crime fiction set in the Bengali capital. Kolkata is, hands down, my favorite city in the world – despite its poverty, systemic injustice, and political cruelty, there is an energy in the place that is hard to beat.
Another nonfiction similar in scope and outlook to Kushanava Choudhury’s The Epic City, this title dispenses with the personal narrative and offers a highly structured rundown of the main attractions/points of history/social and cultural issues, etc of the Bengali capital. Not quite a guidebook, Calcutta offers short texts on particular aspects of life in the city, then and now. Well written, the book suffers from the same issue as all other recent books on Kolkata – the British get away with way too much and the post-independence period is seen through the eyes of Calcutta’s privileged elite. That said, this title does well at dissecting cultural currents, and the section on artistic Kolkata is especially rewarding. A great, practical introduction for the first-time visitor.
Else Roesdahl has a life-long passion for Vikings. She is emerita professor of Medieval Archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark, and has travelled all over the Viking world and taken part in many excavations. She has also organized major international Viking Exhibitions and published academic as well as popular books, for which she has been awarded several prizes.
In this small and colourful volume the reader is introduced to a wide range of Viking ‘life’ through poetry – from highly formal and (one may say) cruel poems composed in honour of Viking chieftains and kings on honour, battle, blood, and death, to others on age discrepancies, very attractive men or eternal reputation.
"They are most famous for being violent invaders of foreign shores but a new book by a University of Nottingham Viking expert shows they were also poetry lovers with a wicked sense of humour! ‘Viking Poetry of Love and War’ by Professor Judith Jesch, of the University’s Centre for the Study of the Viking Age, is the first collection in English with extracts from the full range of Viking poetry published in the UK. The colourful volume published today by the British Museum, is an accessible introduction to the broad poetry ranges of the Vikings, from the highly formal to…
“Rowdy” Randy Cox, a woman staring down the barrel of retirement, is a curmudgeonly blue-collar butch lesbian who has been single for twenty years and is trying to date again.
At the end of a long, exhausting shift, Randy finds her supervisor, Bryant, pinned and near death at the warehouse…
As a child of a worker in the boot and shoe industry of the English Midlands, I have written for more than half a century about poverty in its many guises – from the want and misery of early industrialism in Britain to the modernised poverty of a form of affluence which mimics prosperity without providing either satisfaction or sufficiency. Writing about the landscapes of poverty in the 1980s, I went to India and Bangladesh, and saw there in patterns of urbanization familiar echoes of what we in Britain had experienced. It seems to me that poor people are always poor in the same way, although this may be hidden behind differences in culture, tradition, ethnicity, and faith.
This story of an orphan, brought up by an uncle and aunt and sent out to work as a house servant, moved me so much because, although written in the early years of the Independence struggle, nevertheless prefigures the fate of countless young Indians, little more than children who, beaten and mistreated, run away to the closest city and later, to the unforgiving metropolis of Mumbai or Delhi. His life of innocence destroyed and youth blighted, ends at the age of sixteen when he dies of TB. It is harrowing but uplifting.
Coolie portrays the picaresque adventures of Munoo, a young boy forced to leave his hill village to fend for himself and discover the world. His journey takes him far from home to towns and cities, to Bomboy and Simla, sweating as servant, factory-worker and rickshaw driver. It is a fight for survival that illuminates, with raw immediacy, the grim fate of the masses in pre-Partition India. Together with Untouchable, Coolie places Mulk Raj Anand among the twentieth century's finest Indian novelists writing in English.
