HT Picks; New Reads
This week’s reading list includes a book that traces the evolution of Indian civilization, a volume featuring watercolours, drawings, etchings, sketches, and lithographs by senior Indian modernists from the Gaur Collection, and an Ayurvedic cookbook
The story of a complex country
A complete one-volume history of India illustrated throughout by maps and photographs in full colour, this book covers all the major landmarks of Indian history from prehistoric times up to the twenty-first century. It starts with the country’s geological origins a few billion years in the past and the migration of Homo sapiens from Africa into the region several millennia ago. It traces the evolution of Indian civilization through a multitude of epochs, personalities, and turning points, including the Harappan Culture, Vedic Society, the age of Mahavira and the Buddha, Ashoka and the Mauryas, the Gupta period, the Delhi Sultanate, major kingdoms in the east, west, and south, the Mughal empire, European incursions into the subcontinent, the British Raj, the freedom struggle led by Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Bose, Tagore, and others, Independence and Partition, and key developments in the life of the modern republic. Deepening the overarching narrative are essays on archaeology, caste, religion, art, architecture, philosophy, language, culture, the economy, and various aspects of the nation’s plural, diverse society Written by award-winning historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee along with cultural historian Shobita Punja and photographer-archivist Toby Sinclair, A New History of India brings the story of one of the oldest, most complex countries on earth to vivid life.*
Modern Indian works from the Gaur collection
India is a nation of conflicting realities where the old and the new, the traditional and modern regularly coexist. Visual narratives are vital resources in telling stories and facilitating communication. Here, the artists are concerned not solely with telling their own tales but also with exploring what it means to live in a nation steeped in tradition.Within the context of modern and contemporary India, works on paper offered artists a way of cultivating transnational modernist expression while continuing to explore the potential of a medium that had deeper roots in older artistic traditions native to the subcontinent. This volume features over 100 watercolours, drawings, etchings, sketches, and lithographs by senior Indian modernists, born primarily before the 1950s and who came of age in the decades directly following Independence in 1947. These artists span the transition from colonial to postcolonial India, embracing both realism and abstraction, exploring complex metaphors, and making political statements that directly engage India’s past, present, and future.With contributions by Tamara Sears, Rebecca M. Brown, Jeffrey Wechsler, Darielle Mason, Paula Sengupta, Michael Mackenzie, Emma Osle, Kishore Singh and Swathi Gorle, this book accompanies the exhibition at Grinnell College Museum of Art drawn from the collection of Umesh and Sunanda Gaur and curated by Tamara Sears.*
Recipes for balance and rejuvenation
In Ayurveda, one does not count calories, instead we commit to a philosophy and a way of life. Ayurveda proposes that eating be a mindful, meditative experience. By making a shift to a way of slow eating, using freshly sourced, seasonal ingredients, this cookbook shifts the focus of eating to detoxification and rejuvenation for all body types. Written by Gita Ramesh who has channelled her years of expertise as an Ayurvedic practitioner into preparing and curating them, the recipes in The Ayurvedic Wellness Cookbook are vegetarian, nutritious and with therapeutic values. At the centre of these healthy recipes is the idea that food has medicinal properties with the power to heal. The beauty is in the simplicity of these recipes with the perquisite that they are delicious too. When consumed daily for a week, the recipes in this book will make you feel light, energised and promote an overall sense of wellbeing.*
*All copy from book flap.
