On the works of Shiv Kumar, 1937-1973, Panjabi poet.

This volume forms a part of the Critical Discourses in South Asia series which deals with schools, movements and discursive practices in major South Asian languages. It offers crucial insights into the making of the Punjabi language and literature, and its critical tradition across a century. The book brings together English translation of major writings of influential figures dealing with literary criticism and theory, aesthetic and performative traditions and re-interpretations of primary concepts and categories in Punjabi. It presents 30 key texts in literary and cultural studies from Punjab from the beginning of development of Punjabi language to its present form, with most of them translated for the first time into English. These seminal essays cover interconnections with socio-historical events in the medieval, colonial and post-independence period in Punjab. They discuss themes such as spiritual and aesthetic visions, poetic and literary forms, modernism, progressivism, feminism, Dalit literature, power structures and social struggles, ideological values, cultural renovations, and humanism. Comprehensive and authoritative, this volume offers an overview of the history of critical thought in Punjabi literature in South Asia. It will be essential for scholars and researchers of Punjabi language and literature, literary criticism, literary theory, comparative literature, Indian literature, cultural studies, art and aesthetics, performance studies, history, sociology, regional studies and South Asian studies. It will also interest the Punjabi-speaking diaspora and those working on the intellectual history of Punjab and conservation of languages and culture.

The book explores the encounter of the self with situations of crisis from diverse disciplinary and cultural perspectives from antiquity to contemporary times. A crisis is at once a historically situated phenomenon and a recurring idea of endangerment or a breakdown in creaturely living. By making our choices stark and difficult, crisis opens up the possibility for genuinely fresh and unexpected beginnings. At the most fundamental level, crisis is the disintegration of relationality among creatures. In fact, crisis is a battle of attrition with and within selfhood. It has the potential to turn into a norm in everyday interaction. It then stops being an exception and becomes the very condition of our living. Through the rubrics of the assured and the restive, the volume addresses how selfhood encounters and negotiates concentric circles of crisis in life and literature. Does the idea of crisis allow us to formulate the idea of self in a particular way? How do certain sources and resources within the self – stoic or heroic, political and creative – come into being during crisis? While some essays delve into questions of repose and sensuality by highlighting specific cases and trajectories from the subcontinent, others deal with questions of mythology, politics and art in a wider sense. One essay directly addresses the core literary question of the uncanny and its relation to selfhood. While specific concerns illuminate each essay, the volume speaks with a collective, global sense of crisis that faces humanity now and tentatively offers some prospects to deal with it.

On the completion of fiftieth year of Sahitya Akademi.

Our society’s literate population who are into research and teaching are dependent on libraries for accessing information and information sources. Thus the significance and need of library and information services are widely realized and recognized. Library users always appreciate if the relevant and accurate information is quickly and timely made available to them. Students, research scholars and faculty members are mostly dependent upon the library for information resources and services to fulfill their information needs and to keep themselves up to date. Libraries are acquiring relevant material to meet the requirements of the changing demands of the users. The procurement of information resources by the library and its proper organization helps in information dissemination expeditiously and ensures its optimum use by the users. Users' interests are of prime importance in the library sector. It has a direct bearing on information-seeking behaviour which differs from individual to individual and from discipline to discipline. This book will be of great interest to research scholars, faculty members, students of Punjabi Literature. It will help the librarians to organize their collection accordingly. This book is based on the study conducted by the research in perspective of six universities i.e. University of Delhi (Delhi), University of Jammu (Jammu), Kurukshetra University (Kurukshetra), Panjab University (Chandigarh), Punjabi University (Patiala), Guru Nanak Dev University (Amritsar).

When dapper Aslam, an aspiring writer, who is recovering from a broken relationship, accidently meets Jessica, an activist and an actor in the adult entertainment industry from Los Angeles, they fall hopelessly in love with each other. The novel is about these two unlikely characters and their journeys in the backdrop of the rise of right-wing political forces in India. It takes you to the Indian hinterlands to bring to light George Orwell's deep connection with Motihari, a small town in the northern part of Bihar from where Gandhi Ji experimented with Satyagraha for the first time.

This book maps the journey of the Indian poetic imagination—in Hindi, Panjabi and Indian English—from its original quasi-spiritual longings to its activist interventions in the public domain. As Indian poetry of the post-1990s gravitates towards a non-Orientalised postcolonial nationalism, it seeks to rewrite and disseminate the shifting coordinates of nationalist imagination in terms of the dissent of the subaltern discontents of the nation. The book is interdisciplinary: it studies Indian poetry from the new emerging imperatives of postcolonialism, new historiography (subaltern, dalit and diasporas), nationalism, and cultural studies. Covering the two major north Indian languages—Hindi and Punjabi—along with poetry in Indian English, the book is a close textual study of about 150 poetry collections in these languages. It is path-breaking in its study of secular poetry written in the so-called vernaculars, with critical attention to its participation in the political as well as cultural processes of nation-making. This cutting-edge book should be of interest to scholars of Indian writings in English, Hindi and Panjabi, gender studies, dalit and diaspora studies, postcolonial poetry and to students reading South Asian literature and culture.

When ‘Once upon a time successful’ Bollywood script writer Avinash Shastri shifts to a modest one room apartment in a middle class Mumbai suburb, he gets more than he bargained for in the form of a young innocent wife Sanam Kaur Bedi. He is the heir of a conglomerate and she is a penniless orphan at the mercy of her relatives. Their love blooms when they are forced to stay together in a contract marriage for a few months. They push the harsh reality of life to the back-burner and fall for each other in the city of dreams, Mumbai.

“There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.” ~ George Sand Love has no boundaries, no meaning, no logic and no limit. It is boundless, endless, unconditional, and free. It has the power to change people for the good, to live life for real. And that is maybe because love doesn’t have to be perfect, it just must be true. With this idea of love, we have a compendium of 25 minds from across India, who have expressed themselves on love in their own ways and perceptions. This book presents to you love in its most original form: with both its ups and downs. But more importantly, it gives you all the different shades of love put together.