Books of The Week -28th June, Saturday 2025

 Akhtari: The Life and Music of Begum Akhtar by Yatindra and Taneja Maneesha Mishra 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Akhtaribai Faizabadi, or Begum Akhtar as she was better known, was a legend even during her own lifetime, and one of the last of the great singers from the tawaif community. Akhtari documents her eventful life and her music through essays and reminiscences by some of her closest friends and associates, and by people who knew her work deeply -- including the likes of Bismillah Khan, Lata Mangeshkar, Shubha Mudgal, etc. The volume also includes long interviews with Begum Akhtar herself as well as some of her disciples.A bestseller in the original Hindi -- and now available in English -- this is a volume to treasure for all of Begum Akhtar's fans and lovers of music.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yatindra Mishra is a poet, editor, and scholar of music and cinema. He has written Girija (2001), Devpriya (2007) and Sur Ki Baradari (2009) about the life and work of thumri singer Girija Devi, dancer Sonal Mansingh, and shehnai maestro Ustad Bismillah Khan. He has also published a book on playback singer Lata Mangeshkar based on a series of interviews spanning over a period of seven years titled Lata: Sur-Gatha (2016).

Maneesha Taneja teaches Spanish at University of Delhi and translates between Spanish, English and Hindi. Her noteworthy translations include Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Nadine Gordimer's collection of short stories, and Pablo Neruda's Memoirs into Hindi. Her recent translation of Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island has received much critical acclaim.

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Books of the Week - Saturday, 28th January, 2023

A History of India Through 75 Objects
by - Sudeshna Guha

About the Book  

A Mughal knife made from a meteorite. A precious necklace split between two nations at partition. A butter advert that achieves iconic status.

Through a curatorial selection of objects from the prehistoric ages through twenty-first century India, Sudeshna Guha provides a panoramic view of the rich histories of the subcontinent. The incisive essays in this collection detail not just objects but the histories of their reception: examining how changing times and attitudes cast their presence on the ways in which the past is interpreted and recalled. In doing so, A History of India through 75 Objects inspires us to interrogate our own notions of a knowable past and fixed national history. Teeming with thought-provoking insights and surprising anecdotes, the essays instil a sense of wonder about the continuous processes by which histories are constructed.

About the Author

Sudeshna Guha is currently a professor in the department of History and Archaeology at Shiv Nadar University, India. She holds a Ph.D. in archaeology and has a long curatorial and teaching career at the University of Cambridge. She has built upon the scholarship of visual anthropology and ethnographies of material studies for analysing histories of archaeology and is at present developing research on histories of museums, collections and curatorial practices within South Asia. She has published widely, also on histories of heritage, and is the editor and contributor of The Marshall Albums: Photography and Archaeology (Mapin/Alkazi Collection of Photography, 2011), and author of Artefacts of History: Archaeology, Historiography and Indian Pasts (Sage 2015).

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Our mail order service ships books in India and Overseas

Email: sales@ebd.in, Phone: +91 135 2655192