Harperperennial imprint: 267 books

When the East India Company sells one of its village bungalows to a Bengali aristocrat, the erstwhile manager, Hamilton sahib, finds himself homeless in his adopted country. A mother leaves her house and her notions of chastity in order to feed her children. A Muslim woman fights for her right to...

Most discussions on the sepoy mutiny of 1857 have centred on the roles played in it by the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, Begum Hazrat Mahal and other sundry members of mostly urban nobility. What remained missing was a comprehensive ground-zero account of how people in the...

Aurangzeb must rebel against his father, and compete with his brothers, especially Darashikoh who is Emperor Shah Jahan's favoured son, to become the shahenshah of India and sit on the Peacock Throne. In politics, after all, trust and betrayal are two edges of the same sword. Meanwhile, in his zenankhana,...

A controversial novel based on the life of India's most celebrated painter, Raja Ravi Varma He was accused of making the gods look like humans and insulting them by portraying them in the nude. He countered that he saw divinity in both gods and humans, and that nudity was the purest form he knew....

In 2003, a group of men and women, setting themselves up as guardians of Tamil culture, objected publicly to the language of a new generation of women poets - particularly in the work of Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani - charging the women with obscenity and immodesty. More...

Audacious experimentalist and self-declared anti-writer, Subimal Misra is the master of contemporary alternative Bengali literature and anti-establishment writing. This collection brings together twenty-five stories that record the dark history of violence and degeneration in the Bengal of the seventies...

It is sometime in the first decade of the 20th century. The British Imperialists have been in India for over 150 years. However, life in the small village of Shahpur in undivided Punjab has remained largely unchanged. The menfolk look to the wealthy and worldly-wise Shahji and his benevolent younger...

Suryakant's life begins to unravel as he is forced to quit his government job. To get temporary financial relief, he decides to work for a Ramjoar Pandey and trace his lineage. The journey takes Suryakant back to Sultanpur, his hometown and his estranged family. The past slips in and out, as in a...

B.T. Road (B.T. Roader Dharey, 1953) emerged out of Samaresh Basu's own experiences of urban slum life concentrated around the jute mills of Bengal and the trade union movement that grew around them. The residents of a nameless slum next to the Barrackpore Trunk Road are brought to life with his sensitive...

There were a hundred games the children played with the sky. Each question that arose in a child's mind was a game. 'Where is the moon?' they asked if they woke up in the middle of the night. There's a pygmy mountain at the edge of the village. Near the top of the mountain is a mysterious hole. If...

'Next time in Jerusalem' - uttered during every Passover, these words kindle, within the small Jewish community of Kerala, a homesickness for their promised homeland. They must prepare to break all ties with the place they have known and loved for centuries, all in response to the Zionist call. Salamon,...

Abdul Khaleq teaches at a rural college nearing collapse in newly independent Bangladesh. When a writer friend asks him to chronicle his childhood, Abdul retreats to an enchanting world in the suburbs of Calcutta. He remembers the girl who spoke to fish and birds, the girl he first loved. He also...

Valmiki's Ramayana is the story of Rama's exile and return to Ayodhya, a triumphant king who will always do right by his subjects. In Volga's retelling, it is Sita who, after being abandoned by Purushottam Rama, embarks on an arduous journey to self-realization. Along the way, she meets extraordinary...

The Partition of 1947 has influenced the works of an entire generation of writers, and continues to do so. Gulzar witnessed the horrors of Partition first-hand and it is a theme that he has gone back to again and again in his writings. Footprints on Zero Line brings together a collection of his finest...