Books published by Aleph Book Company

In Abolishing the Death Penalty: Why India Should Say No to Capital Punishment, Gopalkrishna Gandhi asks fundamental questions about the ultimate legal punishment awarded to those accused of major crimes. Is taking another life a just punishment or an act as inhuman as the crime that triggered it? Does having capital punishment in the law books deter crime? His conclusions are unequivocal: Cruel in its operation, ineffectual as deterrence, unequal in its application in an uneven society, liable

The clouds are moving ecstatically from Kashi to Mathura and the sky will remain covered with dense clouds as long as there is Krishna in Braj.These lines were composed by Mohsin Kakorvi, a Muslim poet, to celebrate not Lord Krishna's birthday but that of the Prophet Muhammad. Awadh, the author's birthplace, was steeped in this sort of syncretism in which Islam and Hinduism complemented and celebrated each other and Urdu culture merged with Awadhi and Brajbhasha. Sadly, this glorious culture ha

Extraordinary Indians is a collection of profiles of fifty eminent Indians (and one Pakistani) from a variety of backgrounds and professions. Published on the seventieth anniversary of India's independence, it is intended to provide the reader with a glimpse of the kind of people who have made this country great.Over the course of a long and prolific career, Khushwant Singh met and wrote about hundreds of people. The people in this book are those he admired deeply for their integrity, talent, g

You will not forget Raghu Rai's people. It does not matter if they are famous or unknown, the master photographer's images of them are so arresting that they stamp themselves immediately on the viewer's gaze. What he is able to do is catch the essential truth of his subjects in a way that renders them unforgettable. He says, 'When I take a person's portrait, I am trying to capture the aura of that person, the person's spirit in the picture. I am trying to get the truth of that person to emerge i

For thousands of years, the Indian subcontinent has proved a fertile ground for the world's most captivating erotic love poetry, and the genius of its devotional writing harnesses great energy and mystical insight. It is in fact often hard to tell whether the poets are offering poems of spiritual longing using the garments of love poetry or writing erotic pieces in the guise of devotion. Perhaps, in a land where erotic sculptures routinely ornament its many temples and gods are known for their explosive sexuality, this question has little meaning to these remarkable writers. In their devotional traditions, eroticism and mysticism seem inseparable.This collection spans 2,500 years and includes work originally sung or recited by well-known bards: Kabir, Mirabai, Lal Ded, Vidyapati and Tagore. There are also poems from the Upanishads, ancient Sanskrit poetry and Punjabi folk lyrics. The poets have largely emerged from the ranks of the dispossessed: leather workers, refuse collectors, maidservants, women and orphans. Their vision is of a democratic society in which all voices count. Often they faced persecution for speaking candidly, or daring to speak of spiritual matters at all. The notes include profiles of these legendary lives. Several of these poets simply vanished, absorbed into a deity, or disappeared in a flash of purple lightning. A few produced miracles-most of them are surrounded by clouds of mystery. Andrew Schelling has drawn on the work of twenty-four translators, including A. K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Deben Bhattacharya, Dilip Chitre, Gieve Patel, Ezra Pound and Robert Bly to build the finest anthology of India's erotic and spiritual poetry ever assembled for the general reader.

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Corruption in India today is pervasive, omnipresent, and diverse, covering every branch of the Indian state and key sectors of the economy. Far from declining and fading away, as predicted, with deregulation and liberalization, it has increased exponentially in the twenty-first century at all levels-central, state, and local. It can be seen today as a normal, not a pathological, condition within the political economy. In several states, corruption involving politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen,