Saundarya Lahari: Wave of Beauty
Mani Rao
HarperCollins India, Rs 359
Saundarya Lahari is a popular Sanskrit hymn celebrating the power and beauty of sakti, the primordial goddess. In one hundred verses, it underlines the centrality of the feminine principle in Indian thought.
Attributed to adi sankaracarya, Saundarya Lahari is a valuable source for understanding tantric ideas. Every verse is associated with yantras and encoded mantras for tantric rituals, and specific verses in the hymn are considered potent for acquiring good health, lovers, and even poetic skills.
Mani Rao’s Saundarya Lahari is an inspired, lyrical translation that renders the esoteric immediate and the distant near.
Arundhathi Subramaniam, author of When God Is a Traveller, said, “‘Mani Rao’s translations have a hard-won simplicity and ripeness. This joyful rendition of an iconic text will offer its share of literary delight, as well as a key to a deeper alchemy. These translations, with their ease and lightness of touch, will resonate with lovers of poetry as well as travellers on the path of the Divine Feminine.”
The Progressive Maharaja
Rahul Sagar
HarperCollins Publisher, Rs 2994
Hints on the Art and Science of Government was the first treatise on statecraft produced in modern India. It consists of lectures that Raja Sir T. Madhava Rao delivered in 1881 to Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III, the young Maharaja of Baroda. Universally considered the foremost Indian statesman of the nineteenth century, Madhava Rao had served as dewan (or prime minister) in the native states of Travancore, Indore and Baroda. Under his command, Travancore and Baroda came to be seen as ‘model states’, whose progress demonstrated that Indians were capable of governing well.
Rao’s lectures summarise the fundamental principles underlying his unprecedented success. He explains how and why a Maharaja ought to marry the classical Indian ideal of raj dharma, which enjoins rulers to govern dutifully, with the modern English ideal of limited sovereignty. This makes Hints an exceptionally important text: it shows how, outside the confines of British India, Indians consciously and creatively sought to revise and adapt ideals in the interests of progress.
This edition contains newly rediscovered, original lecture manuscripts and an authoritative introduction.
COVIDiaries of SIGAR
Sagar Chandola
Xlibris Publishing, Rs 1433
In the last few months of 2020, lives across the globe have been disrupted in an unprecedented fashion since the outbreak of the Coronavirus. Lives and livelihood have been lost in an extraordinary turn of events, never seen before in the history of peacetime for humanity. Since the lockdown was first announced in India on 24th March 2020, the author has been maintaining this COVID blog diary. Inspiring all and sundry, especially an estimated quarter of the world population operating under lockdown, that this is not the end of the world, and there will be another new world AC (After Corona), COVIDiaries seeks to be a friendly digestive pill end of the day for the global readers. The book is further a treasure hunt for those seeking lifestyle and dietary twirl for holistic and mental wellbeing. Besides on a personal front, being technically single, looking to explore Euphemism in a mild manner to probably attract some intrigued like-minded potential partners. An exotic mating call of sorts.
The second part of the book explores the intriguing version of the game of Darts, which goes by the name of 301, a barroom’s delight. Via a slight twist in the 2 nd part of COVIDiariesof SIGAR, the author seeks to explore how to achieve holistic Authentic Intelligence rather than the trend towards Artificial Intelligence based solutions.
India, Bharat and Pakistan
J. Sai Deepak
Bloomsbury Publishing, Rs 574
India, Bharat and Pakistan, the second book of the Bharat Trilogy, takes the discussion forward from its bestselling predecessor, India That Is Bharat. It explores the combined influence of European and Middle Eastern colonialities on Bharat as the successor state to the Indic civilisation, and on the origins of the Indian Constitution. To this end, the book traces the thought continuum of Middle Eastern coloniality from the rise of Islamic Revivalism in the 1740s following the decline of the Mughal Empire, which presaged the idea of Pakistan, until the end of the Khilafat Movement in 1924, which cemented the road to Pakistan. The book also describes the collaboration of convenience that was forged between the proponents of Middle Eastern coloniality and the British colonial establishment to the detriment of the Indic civilisation.
One of the objectives of this book is to help the reader draw parallels between the challenges faced by the Indic civilisation in the tumultuous period from 1740 to 1924, and the present day. Its larger goal remains the same as that of the first, which is to enthuse Bharatiyas to undertake a critical decolonial study of Bharat’s history.
