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This book presents a solid introduction to nonviolence as a mode of thinking and a mode of life, but also as a strategy of self-defence and social and political transformation. "Nonviolence" is a frequently misunderstood, frequently abused term. It can be used in very narrow or broad constructs and can be based on a wide variety of philosophies and practices. The book will examine several of the main currents of nonviolent thought and practice, as approaches that concentrate around the concepts of "struggle" and "resistance". By focusing on these two concepts, the book will examine the theories and principles of nonviolence as well as the religious and philosophical underpinnings of their commitments.The book dwells on the theoretical discussion of the concept and history of nonviolence as a revolutionary concept for a change in mentalities and realities of our societies. It brings to the forefront the philosophy of nonviolence as it developed from Socrates to Thoreau, Jesus to Dalai Lama. The book covers Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr. the advocates and practitioners of non-violence in the 20th Century.

The volume is a collection of essays interrogating the connections of digital governance and digital politics in South Asia. It challenges the dominant idea of digital governance as a purely technological, technocratic and 'apolitical' phenomenon. Based on a largely transdisciplinary approach, the contributions in the volume are both theoretically informed and empirically grounded as they cover select South Asian states. Against this backdrop, the volume highlights the growing intervention and outcome of new 'invasive' technologies in shaping the social and political processes. The contributors interrogate the critical intersections of governance and politics, with intense focus on strategies, policies, infrastructure, services, skills and capacity building, performance and measurement, and political communication. In offering a bottom-up view of the digital reality of South Asia along with its potentials, challenges and dilemmas, the volume seeks to provoke further deliberations and debates on this important theme.

Humanizing Humanity is distinctively framed advocacy of the ways in which the concept of humanity has been defended by various ideologues of India like Tagore, Gandhi, and Ambedkar. By grounding itself in the epistemology of intellectual history, the book delineates how these three major thinkers visualised the ways in which society can be better humanized. Such a process of humanization for these thinkers forms the bedrock of the trajectory in which humanity may be preserved, amidst intense authoritarianism and the violent quest for power by a small minority in the society. The book is an attempt at exploring the strands of inter-textuality that exist when Tagore, Gandhi and Ambedkar's thinking is situated in the ontic and epistemic context of a few humans' tendency to destroy humanity and the efforts of another section to create conditions for its preservation. Bidyut Chakrabarty does this by comparing the ways in which the Federalist Papers of the United States of America and the Indian Constitution manifest as quintessential texts that uphold the principles of liberty, equality, justice, and the protection of the weaker sections of society from structured strands of domination and exploitation.

The book examines the emergence of a new female subjectivity in 19th century Bengal through the life narratives of four women writers and gives a comprehensive account of each.This book provides the interrelationships between textuality, a historical context of cultural and epistemological shifts as the Bengali intelligentsia of the time advocated greater rights for women, class, which determined choice for the women agents, new educational policies which led to the founding of Bethune School in 1849, and the work of British women educationists like Annette Ackroyd and Mary Carpenter for women's education.The book provides a comprehensive insight into the socio-political and cultural history of Bengal of the late 19th century. The book postulates an interesting analysis of autobiography as a Romantic genre, examining its intersections with gender and its relevance to the cultural and literary landscape. It draws attention to the gendered difference and obvious power misbalance between men's autobiographies, designated 'atmacharit' and women's autobiographies, devalued as "only" reminiscences, and categorized as 'smritikatha', narratives based on memory and therefore lacking critical value.

Why are abnormal figures at the heart of literary canon and what do they tell us about the society that writes and circulates these stories? This book studies the constitution of disability and discusses concepts of corporeal difference that are socio-historically rooted in the Indian cultural milieu.The volume aims at looking at the central issue of the various aspects of disability representation, the impact of these representations on the materially embodied experience of disablement, the political imperatives shaping the narratives of corporeal difference, and the influences of highly particularised local cultural context on the constitution of epistemic and discursive notions of corporeality.The volume follows 3 routes of inquiry: How do we find 'disability' in texts or, what are 'disability texts'? How do we read concepts historically using literary and cultural texts and what would a similar study of the Indian context reveal? How do we study culturally distinct ways of narrating bodyminds? These questions will be answered through a discussion of representation histories of the abnormal informed by histories of disease conditions and its representations, with the aim of developing ways of thinking and talking about concepts of corporeal difference that are socio-culturally and socio-historically located away from the western context and to explore the intersections between gender, caste, religion, sexuality, class and disability.

The Hitman is the riveting account of a batsman, who has always chosen to play on his own terms, from two of India''s best-known cricket writers, Vijay Lokapally and G. Krishnan.

This book changes the way we think of caste ideologies, histories and academic representations. It traces how the magico-religious beliefs on pollution as a state of danger inhering potency of violence were transformed into notions of dirt. The varying formulations and cultural beliefs founded on distinctive conceptions of pollution led to caste violence. It analyses the cultural and religious mechanisms of normalization of violence through the concepts of Matsyanayana and Vadho-avadhah that are central to discussions on danda and dharma and justification of violence. The modern discourse of othering through caste categories is legitimised through the Brahminic and Vedic interpretations. This historical dimension presents an alternative form and autonomous space for understanding ritual violence. The historical transition is examined through modern cult figures such as Savarkar, Gandhi and Ambedkar.

Ravi Dutt Bajpai examines some of the pivotal episodes in the modern history of China and India to argue that their behaviours reflect the self-identity of a civilization-state. The book starts from the progression of China and India into putatively modern polities during the colonial period, as the two indigenous societies imagined their national identities and nationalist aspirations primarily by contrasting their civilizational attributes with the Western colonial occupiers. As newly independent nation-states, both believed that their international status flowed from their civilizational glories. Therefore, despite their material and institutional fragility, China and India decided to pursue complete autonomy to manage their domestic and foreign affairs. Indian Prime Minister Nehru's policy of non-alignment, envisioning an alternate world order beyond the great power competition, was inspired by Indian civilizational ethos. The book also examines the Sino-Indian war of 1962 from a civilization-state perspective and argues that Tibet represented a conflict of civilizational influence.Chapters also explore some of the more recent developments, such as the Indian nuclear test of 1998, China's ambitious Belt and Road (BRI) infrastructure project aimed at reviving the ancient Silk Road, and India's campaign to regain its civilizational status of Vishwa Guru, as the continued manifestations of the two civilization-states endeavouring to regain their past glories in the contemporary world.

This volume contributes to understanding Bangladesh's growth story, as it celebrates 50 years of independence. The fastest growing South Asian state is being recognised as an important partner and model case study with increasing global relevance by world powers. Sreeradha Datta reviews many of its critical bilateral relationships, as well as its expanding influence in the region and world beyond, enabling an understanding of how Bangladesh's growth trajectory complements and informs its foreign policy aims. The volume has a mixture of thematic and bilateral chapters, and includes the active Bangladeshi diaspora population and its influence on the country's unfolding narrative. Datta features the viewpoints of key Bangladeshi policy makers; expert takes on how the world is engaging with Bangladesh; and covers the growing salience of Bangladesh's foreign policy, reflecting its new acquired economic status.

This volume is a critical reader, focusing on the continuities and discontinuities, confirmations and confrontations, crossovers and collisions, appropriations, adaptations and assimilations in the cultural transitions between British and Bangla vernacular modernist fiction within the context of the imperial modernity of the first half of the 20th century.The volume, consisting of critical essays aspires to illuminate, from multiple but intersecting perspectives, those thematic and structural areas where these two kinds of literary modernism, each aesthetically diverse, historically segmented by onslaughts of wars and other outbreaks of suffering and violence, and ideologically convoluted, but conditioned in many ways by common socio-historical catastrophes and promises, interact with each other to constitute an 'aesthetics of motion and dissonance'.Essays cut across literary criticism to employ interdisciplinary approaches, as they blur the boundaries between histories, biographies and fictional narratives, between individual ethics in and outside the fictional world, between imagined and living communities, between real and generic politics, between the home and the world, and between the corporeal and the cultural. These essays interrogate the mastery in literary techniques, narrative motives and dualities, 'major' and 'minor' genres, (de)formations of canons in respect of the 'worldliness' formed by the textual incorporation of the intricate imperial relationships between the United Kingdom and Bangla.

The book positions Sanskrit poetics in a postcolonial context to understand its contemporary relevance and proposes a productive future direction for this system of knowledge.The fundamental argument against Sanskrit poetics in modern literary circles is that it is a system of knowledge that does not have any contemporary relevance, since the idea of literature conceptualised by Sanskrit poetics is incompatible with the modern notion of literature. The general argument is that Sanskrit poetics has only the archaic value of a museum piece.This book which resists such an extremist approach to Sanskrit poetics aims to provide a new direction for Sanskrit poetics to generate new knowledge about this epistemology. The new approach that the author proposes is explicated through three major theoretical positions in Sanskrit poetics, namely dhvani, aucitya and vakrokti.

This book elaborates the politico-ideological viewpoints of Aurobindo, as displayed when he reigned as one of the major nationalist leaders defining Indian nationalism. Bidyut Chakrabarty examines Aurobindo's politico-ideological ideas during the period (1893-1910) when he was an active participant in the 'New Nationalist' or 'Democratic Nationalist' campaign, which started with the bifurcation of the Indian National Congress between the Moderates and Extremists (also known as the Revolutionary Nationalists) in its 1907 annual session, held at Surat.Chapters cover Aurobindo's distinctive ideas of nationalism, which he evolved in collaboration with his colleagues, especially Lal-Bal-Pal (Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Bipin Chandra Pal), and how he redefined the practice of nationalism. The book also demonstrates that unlike his predecessors, the Moderates, Aurobindo set out many strategies - including boycott and passive resistance - to execute the distinctive plan he designed to attain his politico-ideological goal. Other topics include the relatively less discussed aspect of Aurobindo's socio-political ideas, namely his unique model of education as an antidote to many of the crippling socio-cultural prejudices, and the importance of Bhagavad Gita in shaping Aurobindo's politico-ideological priorities.

This book explores narratives of nationalism in the Hindi novel (1940s-80s), engaging with mainstream, populist, political conceptualisation of a postcolonial nation and local, cultural, often marginalised fictional parallels and alternatives to it.Analysing processes of nation-formation and nationalism(s) via experiments with the novel form and versions of realism in Hindi, conversations between the political and the cultural, rural/borders and the urban/central spaces, individual subjectivity and social structures, and the challenges Hindi novels' internal linguistic diversity poses to formalised Hindi's hegemony, Imagining a Postcolonial Nation: Hindi Novels and Forms of India (1940s-80s) traces Hindi fiction's history of postcolonial India. The multiplicity of realisms indicates significant responses to postcolonial nationalism, idealistic, critical, regional, satirical and psychological.Looking at indigenous narrative methods employed by authors to critically evolve Western ideas of the nation and novel, the book explores the simultaneous convergences and divergences between literary and political understandings of ideological, religious and linguistic nationalisms. Surveying the broad sentiments of idealism, enchantment and disenchantment with freedom and postcoloniality, it studies the possibilities of fiction embodying national history without an outright commitment to mainstream nationalism or nationalist literary canon formation.It also briefly tries to understand the repercussions of nationalism as a masculinist project and its gendered nature affecting a section of writing, novels by women authors, to present counter-narratives to both national and literary canons. Choosing a fairly broad historical timeframe, the book reveals the radical potential of narratives that have over the years been critically categorised as canonical. It reopens discussions around nationalism within novels that have been often canonised as apparently uncritically nationalist.

Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi constitute the key pillars of Indian nationalist thought. In this book Bidyut Chakrabarty demonstrates how Tagore and Gandhi drew on each other as they articulated their unique mode of thinking, which led to an innovative discourse. Tagore and Gandhi agreed on many ideas but also had serious differences on quite a few, for instance, on whether to support the British during the Boer War.Confluence of Thought brings out the compatibility as well as the differences in their thoughts by asserting that both of them, despite their differences in approach, are essentially informed and shaped by Western and indigenous discourses as well as by colonial rule.The chapters in the volume dwell on their views on nationalism, civilisation, religion, rural construction and religion. These ideas and arguments moulded the freedom struggle and shaped the future of a free India.

The book explores the encounter of the self with situations of crisis from diverse disciplinary and cultural perspectives from antiquity to contemporary times. A crisis is at once a historically situated phenomenon and a recurring idea of endangerment or a breakdown in creaturely living. By making our choices stark and difficult, crisis opens up the possibility for genuinely fresh and unexpected beginnings. At the most fundamental level, crisis is the disintegration of relationality among creatures. In fact, crisis is a battle of attrition with and within selfhood. It has the potential to turn into a norm in everyday interaction. It then stops being an exception and becomes the very condition of our living.Through the rubrics of the assured and the restive, the volume addresses how selfhood encounters and negotiates concentric circles of crisis in life and literature. Does the idea of crisis allow us to formulate the idea of self in a particular way? How do certain sources and resources within the self - stoic or heroic, political andcreative - come into being during crisis? While some essays delve into questions of repose and sensuality by highlighting specific cases and trajectories from the subcontinent, others deal with questions of mythology, politics and art in a wider sense. One essay directly addresses the core literary question of the uncanny and its relation to selfhood. While specific concerns illuminate each essay, the volume speaks with a collective, global sense of crisis that faces humanity now and tentatively offers some prospects to deal with it.

Human interventions with living entities have had to be in a constant state of negotiating space necessary for co-habitation with animals, birds, trees, plants, grasslands, forests, hills, water bodies in the creation of villages and other settlements. The book argues that negotiating this space meant sharing, which impacted economic strategies, religious experiences, cultural interactions and oral performances that humans have strategized and preserved. This intersectional theme, through individual case studies, ultimately provides us the civilizational ethos of the Indian sub-continent on how human non-human relations informed it. The book provides a window on how this relationship was represented in a variety of material and literary texts, visual representations, archival records, folklore and oral testimonies. It brings to the fore these narratives over the longue durée to explicate the complex and delicate relationships in region specific ecological settings and thus give readers a perspective that crosses disciplinary and conceptual boundaries.

Leisure is a corollary to pleasure. While modern sociologists locate and relate leisure with the notion of work, time and entertainment emerging as a prominent status marker with modernity; this historical exploration, traces how leisure and recreation were often imagined and celebrated during premodern times, spanning from the ancient to the precolonial period.The book takes into account the differential access to leisure and pleasure based on class and gender where masculinity is projected through manly sports and femininity though beauty and indulgence in projection of recreation, entertainment and luxury. The counter-discourse representing labour for those who cater for this leisure is invisibilized as is their transactional nature.The volume dwells on the attitudes, prescribed and proscribed, and brings to the fore the differences across religious ideologies Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jaina and Muslim in various periods. Further it looks at leisure in the various classes and cultural spaces like the elite, women, the king in the bedchamber, and the court with dancing girls, public such as orchards, garden and performance spaces.

This is a cultural history of the British Empire in India presented through ten key non-literary texts. Each of these texts embodies a particular attitude, ideology and/or development in imperial thinking, administrative process or cultural practices, and it is this attitude, ideology and development that the book unpacks through a reading of the texts, along with excerpts from the original documents.­The aim is to flag and signpost momentous events and ideas through imperial texts such as J.Z. Holwell's 1756 account of the Black Hole of Calcutta, T.B. Macaulay's 1835 'Minute' on Indian education and Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner's 1888 advice book on colonial domesticity, ­The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook.­Through this book, it is hoped, the reader will get a flavour and glimpse of the complex and complicated structure that was the Raj. ­The book will appeal not only to the academic audience and literary scholars keen on the rhetoric of empire but also to the general, informed readers.

Celebrated as the national poet of Bangladesh and fondly commemorated in India as the 'Rebel Poet', Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) is widely known for his poetry and music, although his political philosophy and anti-colonial revolutionary sentiments are best expressed in his journalistic writings.Nazrul's journalistic career spans across three key newspapers: Nabajug, Dhumketu and Langol. Editorials in Nabajug addressed a diverse range of subjects, including untouchability, racial discrimination, power structure and the importance of communal harmony. Dhumketu, perhaps the most signifi­cant amongst Nazrul's revolutionary contributions, became a testimonial to the reclamation of India's complete freedom, which eventually proved perilous for Nazrul. Langol, the mouthpiece of the Labour Swaraj Party, was the ­first Bengali paper speci­fically for and by the working class. It provided voice to the labourers and peasants, speaking self-reflexively about the nation's agro-economy.Kazi Nazrul Islam's Journalism brings together for the fi­rst time in English Nazrul's editorials published in the colonial Indian subcontinent and showcases Nazrul's far-reaching views on subjects close to his heart. By critically examining these essays, Arka Deb establishes Nazrul's relevance in the current times.

Kannagi and Silappatikaram are important parts of the cultural landscape of Tamil Nadu-the story has been told in many genres of literature and continues to be told. Every narrative, however, carries the imprint of the times it was released in. Kannagi through the Ages: From the Epic to the Dravidian Movement aims to understand the ways in which representations of Kannagi in the epic Silappatikaram differ in every new narrative. Looking at the portrayals of Kannagi in plays, commentaries and folk narratives, the book examines how representations of gender and culture have evolved over time. Focusing on the interrelationships between a text and a society as well as between society and the way it moulds the category of 'woman' at different times through symbols and icon, the author analyses the social, cultural and political processes that contributed to the emergence of Kannagi as an icon of Tamil culture and epitome of Tamil womanhood.

Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations explores the gaming culture of one of the most culturally diverse and populous regions of the world-the Indian subcontinent. Building on the author's earlier work on videogame culture in India, this book addresses issues of how discussions of equality and diversity sit within videogame studies, particularly in connection with the subcontinent, thereby presenting pioneering research on the videogame cultures of the region.Drawing on a series of player and developer interviews and surveys conducted over the last five years, including some recent ones, this book provides a sense of how games have become a part of the culture of the region despite its huge diversity and plurality and opens up avenues for further study through vignettes and snapshots of the diverse gaming culture. It addresses the rapid rise of videogames as an entertainment medium in South Asia and, as such, also tries to better understand the recent controversies connected to gaming in the region In the process, it aims to make a larger connection between the development of videogames and player culture, in the subcontinent and globally, thus opening up channels for collaboration between the industry and academic research, local and global.

India and the subcontinent stimulated the curiosity of the British who came to India as traders. Each aspect of life in India - its people, customs, geography, climate, fauna and flora - was documented by British travelers, traders, administrators, soldiers to make sense to the European mind. As they 'discovered' India and occupied it, they also attempted to 'civilise' the natives. The present volumes focus on select aspects of the imperial archives: the accounts of "discovery" and exploration - fauna and flora, geography, climate - the people of the subcontinent, English domesticity and social life in the subcontinent, the wars and skirmishes - including the "Mutiny" of 1857-58 - and the "civilisational mission".Volume 2 Indian People and Society includes English studies of Indian languages, people and communities, and the social order.The landscape provided, understandably, endless prospects of the survey and the map. But the British were also keen on documenting the people. In the studies generated for 400 years, the British documented castes, religions, education, economies, professions, cultural practices, states of health and sickness, and other domains. With projects like the Census and the People of India, the land's inhabitants were classified and, eventually, also typecast and contributed to the colonial discourse about the native/colonised.

India and the subcontinent stimulated the curiosity of the British who came to India as traders. Each aspect of life in India - its people, customs, geography, climate, fauna and flora - was documented by British travelers, traders, administrators, soldiers to make sense to the European mind. As they 'discovered' India and occupied it, they also attempted to 'civilise' the natives. The present volumes focus on select aspects of the imperial archives: the accounts of "discovery" and exploration - fauna and flora, geography, climate - the people of the subcontinent, English domesticity and social life in the subcontinent, the wars and skirmishes - including the "Mutiny" of 1857-58 - and the "civilisational mission".Volume 4 Rebellions and Wars is a collection of accounts of a very different British life in India: as prisoners, under siege and in conditions of war. The British ascendancy in India did not proceed smoothly, and colonisation was always a militarised zone of interest, action and process.

India and the subcontinent stimulated the curiosity of the British who came to India as traders. Each aspect of life in India - its people, customs, geography, climate, fauna and flora - was documented by British travelers, traders, administrators, soldiers to make sense to the European mind. As they 'discovered' India and occupied it, they also attempted to 'civilise' the natives. The present volumes focus on select aspects of the imperial archives: the accounts of "discovery" and exploration - fauna and flora, geography, climate - the people of the subcontinent, English domesticity and social life in the subcontinent, the wars and skirmishes - including the "Mutiny" of 1857-58 - and the "civilisational mission".Volume 3 Domesticity, the Social Scene and Leisure shifts the focus to the English home and social life. Domesticity, often a fraught exercise for the 'memsahib', carried on with the assistance of a retinue of Indian servants, meant tackling corruption, inefficiency and the all-pervasive social hierarchy of the colonised. Advice books were produced to aid the memsahib for this purpose. The Steel-Gardiner guide to housekeeping, which was a bestseller in its day and is excerpted here, was indispensable in the length and breadth of its coverage, from the care of children to the right wages for the servants. Diver's text, likewise, also demonstrates how running the home was difficult and has a resonance with the (male) dominion of running the Empire. These texts exhorted the English woman to practice thrift, control and managerial skills, to be aware of the natives' penchant for dirt and indolence and the caste-community dynamics that inform the servant-class.

Uneasy Translations: Self, Experience and Indian Literature interweaves the personal journey of an academic into reflections around self, language and translation with an eye on the intangibly available category of experience. It dwells on quieter modes of being political, of making knowledge democratic and of seeing gendered language in the everyday. In an unusual combination of real-life incidents and textual examples, it provides a palimpsest of what it is to be in a classroom; in the domestic sphere, straddling the 'manyness' of language and, of course, in a constant mode of translation that remains incomplete and unconcluded. Through both a poignant voice and rigorous questions, Kothari asks what it is to live and teach in India as a woman, a multilingual researcher and as both a subject and a rebel of the discipline of English. ­She draws from multiple bhasha texts with an uncompromising eye on their autonomy and intellectual tradition. ­The essays range from questions of knowledge, affect, caste, shame and humiliation to other cultural memories. Translation avoids the arrogance of the original; it has the freedom to say it and not be held accountable, which can make it both risky and exciting. More importantly, it also speaks after (anuvaad) rather than only for or instead, and this ethic informs the way Kothari writes this book, breaking new ground with gentle provocations.

After a brief interlude following the Cold War, nuclear weapons have regained their prominent place in world affairs. Yet our current nuclear age will not be a replay of the Cold War. New technologies, changing political contexts and the death of old arms-control agreements mean that today's nuclear strategists have to navigate unchartered waters filled with fresh perils. Unfortunately, the consequences of failure in the nuclear world can be catastrophic. The immediate imperative today is to lower the possibility of nuclear weapons use during a crisis or conflict involving nuclear powers. While deliberate or pre-emptive nuclear use is less likely, the rising danger of our time is that nuclear weapons will be employed due to some combination of miscommunication, misjudgment, misperception and sheer accident.The Sheathed Sword: From Nuclear Brink to No First Use is a collection of essays by leading scholars and practitioners on the role of nuclear weapons in global security. The contributors examine how individual states view nuclear weapons, the devastating effects of nuclear war on the world's climate and the issues around nuclear no first use. They also debate the feasibility and desirability of a global no-first-use (GNFU) agreement.

Word, Work and the World begins with the assumption that people are interested in the world around them. The book is written with the intent of drawing in lay and specialised readers into the interdisciplinary world of Sociology/Social Anthropology. The methods of both, since the 1960s, has been seen as combined for the reasons that the dichotomy of tribal/ peasant in relation to urban conglomerations is thought to be immensely interesting to the reading public. Migration for work is so significant, whether within the country or outside, that the dilemmas and concerns of the diaspora are always interesting data. Put simply, the book tries to bring forward the living practices of communities which are interlocked in time and space, where work and their cultures become intermeshed in different ways. Of course cyberspace becomes the common denominator in understanding that people are interested in one another, families and friends become interactive over spans of time which allow a certain intimacy of acknowledgement. Economic practices are also embedded in the hinterland of communication. As the world becomes increasingly vulnerable to climate change, organic farming, the search for water, the protection of lands and people from floods, are all real indexes of how urgent the task of recording people's life worlds has become. Narrative production, and its interpretation draws us into the complexities of the ethnographic present, which as a type of documentation provides resource materials to historians. Since the world is now so encompassable, the book explores how human being remember the past, while creating new niches for the survival of their families and communities. Hybridization of cultures also involves familiarity with world literature, because people enjoy the expanse of imagination into which they are released by reading time honoured texts, whether of the ancient past, or of contemporary time. The time of legend, of fable, of coercive patterns of existence arising out of natural or political calamities, makes them ever more respectful of traditions and the hope for survival. Out of war and loss arise both science and poetry, not necessarily opposed to one another.This book tries to bring to the reader the pleasures of many cultures in conversation with one another, where dissonances may be accommodated.