The Moonstone


Book Description

A fabulous yellow diamond disappears, the case looks simple, but in mid-Victorian England no one is what they seem, and nothing can be taken for granted.




Empire of Enchantment


Book Description

India's association with magicians goes back thousands of years. Conjurors and illusionists dazzled the courts of Hindu maharajas and Mughal emperors. As British dominion spread over the subcontinent, such wonder-workers became synonymous with India. Western magicians appropriated Indian attire, tricks and stage names; switching their turbans for top hats, Indian jugglers fought back and earned their grudging respect. This book tells the extraordinary story of how Indian magic descended from the realm of the gods to become part of daily ritual and popular entertainment across the globe. Recounting tales of levitating Brahmins, resurrections, prophesying monkeys and "the most famous trick never performed," Empire of Enchantment vividly charts Indian magic's epic journey from street to the stage. This heavily illustrated book tells the extraordinary, untold story of how Indian magic descended from the realm of the gods to become part of daily ritual and popular entertainment across the globe. Drawing on ancient religious texts, early travelers' accounts, colonial records, modern visual sources, and magicians' own testimony, Empire of Enchantment is a vibrant narrative of India's magical traditions, from Vedic times to the present day.







Letters from India


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Character


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Ethnographic Notes in Southern India


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THE STORY OF CAWNPORE


Book Description

This book can be downloaded as a PDF file from here.  Brutalities inherent in a feudal language social system This is another book that should necessarily be read by the citizens of the new nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. All false and fancy beliefs of a great and noble civilisation in their antiquity will evaporate into thin air. This book contains real incidences that took place during the so-called First War of Independence in India(?), the so-called Sepoy Mutiny. Sepoy Mutiny was just that. Just a mutiny in a small area of the Indian Peninsula and English-ruled India. It was not a national struggle against the English rule. The real reasons for this outbreak against a very noble class of rulers is never mentioned in the modern history books. The real reason was the sociological changes that the presence of the English race was creating in the peninsula. The very seeing of the physical attributes and dignified stances of the English individuals were making the lower class people here aware of the potential and possibilities of human dignity if allowed to improve without fetters. However, this kind of mental improvement in the lower classes can be quite ennerving to the higher feudal classes, who hold their serfs in the non-tangible, yet quite crushing claws of feudal language codes. These codes hold the lower classes in a level of dirt and indignity by a web of pejorative and ennobling words and usages. This makes the higher class conspire to make use of the very liberated classes to pull down their own benefactors. In fact, this is not the first time, the English side was made the butt of similar brutal massacres. In the TRAVANCORE STATE MANUAL written by a native official of the erstwhile Travancore kingdom located at the southern tip of the Indian peninsula another similar incident is mentioned. But the Pillamars and Madampimars (petty chiefs) resented this act of the Rani, and in November 1697 A.D., the factory of Anjengo was violently attacked on the plea that the English were pirates, but without success. Mr. Logan writes: — “It may however be doubted whether this, their ostensible reason, was the true one, for as will presently appear, the presence of the English in Travancore was gradually leading to a revolution in that State”




The Madras Presidency with Mysore, Coorg and the Associated States


Book Description

Part of the Provincial Geography of India series, this 1913 volume, concentrates on Madras, Mysore, Coorg, and other associated states.