Death In Banaras

Author : Jonathan P. Parry
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521466257
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Death in Banaras written by Jonathan P. Parry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-07-07 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of Hindu death rituals and the sacred specialists who perform them in the Indian city of Banaras.

Author : Priyanka Champaneri
Publisher : Restless Books
ISBN 13 : 1632062542
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The City of Good Death written by Priyanka Champaneri and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Priyanka Champaneri’s transcendent debut novel brings us inside India’s holy city of Banaras, where the manager of a death hostel shepherds the dying who seek the release of a good death, while his own past refuses to let him go. Banaras, Varanasi, Kashi: India’s holy city on the banks of the Ganges has many names but holds one ultimate promise for Hindus. It is the place where pilgrims come for a good death, to be released from the cycle of reincarnation by purifying fire. As the dutiful manager of a death hostel in Kashi, Pramesh welcomes the dying and assists families bound for the funeral pyres that burn constantly on the ghats. The soul is gone, the body is burnt, the time is past, he tells them. Detach. After ten years in the timeless city, Pramesh can nearly persuade himself that here, there is no past or future. He lives contentedly at the death hostel with his wife, Shobha, their young daughter, Rani, the hostel priests, his hapless but winning assistant, and the constant flow of families with their dying. But one day the past arrives in the lifeless form of a man pulled from the river—a man with an uncanny resemblance to Pramesh. Called “twins” in their childhood village, he and his cousin Sagar are inseparable until Pramesh leaves to see the outside world and Sagar stays to tend the land. After Pramesh marries Shobha, defying his family’s wishes, a rift opens up between the cousins that he has long since tried to forget. Do not look back. Detach. But for Shobha, Sagar’s reemergence casts a shadow over the life she’s built for her family. Soon, an unwelcome guest takes up residence in the death hostel, the dying mysteriously continue to live, and Pramesh is forced to confront his own ideas about death, rebirth, and redemption. Told in lush, vivid detail and with an unforgettable cast of characters, The City of Good Death is a remarkable debut novel of family and love, memory and ritual, and the ways in which we honor the living and the dead. PRAISE FOR THE CITY OF GOOD DEATH “In Champaneri’s ambitious, vivid debut, the dying come to the holy city of Kashi to die a good death that frees them from the burden of reincarnation…. In sharp prose, Champaneri explores the power of stories—those the characters tell themselves, those told about them, and those they believe. . . . This epic, magical story of death teems with life.” —Publishers Weekly “Brimming with characters whose lives overlap and whose stories interweave, Champaneri’s exquisite debut delves into the consequences of the past, and how stories that are told can become reality even when they contain barely a shred of truth. As Pramesh discovers, the bitterness of past wounds can bring hope for redemption and life.” —Bridget Thoreson, Booklist “Lush prose evokes the thick, close atmosphere of Kashi and the intricate religious practices upon which life and death depend. Rumor and superstition hold sway over even the most level-headed people, twisting what’s explainable into something extraordinary—with tragic consequences. . . . The City of Good Death is a breathtaking, unforgettable novel about how remembering the past is just as important as moving on.” —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews, Starred Review "Champaneri’s Kashi is teeming and vivid . . . the book frequently charms, and it's as full of humor, warmth, and mystery as Kashi’s own marketplace." —Kirkus Reviews “The City of Good Death is the debut novel of Priyanka Champaneri but it has the confidence of a master storyteller. Drawing on the rich literary traditions of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, Champaneri’s epic saga will satisfy armchair travelers thirsty for adventure, and sick of looking out their windows.” —Chicago Review of Books "In intricate detail and with remarkable skill, Champaneri writes a powerful tale about the pull of the past and our aching need to understand the mysteries and misunderstandings that thwart our relationships. An atmospheric and immersive debut with a rich cast of characters you won’t soon forget." —Marjan Kamali, author of The Stationery Shop

Author : Ravi Nandan Singh
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192864289
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dead in Banaras written by Ravi Nandan Singh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work is an anthropological analysis of death and the dead, which attempts a significant reworking of the idea of death that is prevalent in Hinduism.

Author : Diana L. Eck
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0307832953
Total Pages : 382 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Banaras written by Diana L. Eck and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-06-05 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sacred city of Banāras on the River Ganges is one of the oldest living cities in the world—as old as Jerusalem, Athens, and Peking. It is the place where Shiva, the Lord of All, is said to have made his permanent home since the dawn of creation. There are few cities in India as traditionally Hindu and as symbolic of the whole of Hindu culture as Banāras. In this eloquent, finely observed study, Diana Eck shows how the city over the centuries has become a lens through which the Hindu vision of the world is precisely focused. She reveals the spiritual and historical resonance of this holy place where great sages such as the Buddha and Shankara were taught, where ashrams, palaces, and universities were built, where God has been imagined and imagined in a thousand ways. She describes the rites of its temples, the busy life of its riverfront, and the exuberance of its festivals. She tells how people travel from all over India to Banāras for the privilege of dying a good death here, for they believe that on the banks of the River Ganges where “the atmosphere of devotion is improbable in its strength,” it is possible to be released from the earthly round forever. In her account of the sacred history, geography, and art of the city, its elaborate and thriving rituals, its myths and literature, and its importance to pilgrims and seekers, Diana Eck uses her wealth of scholarship to make the Hindu tradition come powerfully alive so that we come to understand the meaning of this sacred city to the millions of believers who have been coming here for over 2,500 years.

Author : K. Madavane
Publisher : Pan Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 1529015758
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book To Die in Benares written by K. Madavane and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In seven grim, macabre and sometimes darkly comic tales, Madavane traces France’s forgotten colonial presence, playfully reinterprets Hindu myths and recounts the many ways to die in postcolonial India. Recalling the pitiless world of Maupassant and animated by ghosts, gods and holy men, these haunting stories offer a fresh perspective on India’s past and present, its many ironies and idiosyncrasies. Mourir à Bénarès was first published in French in 2010 and received high acclaim for its depiction of India’s most fabled town and the many unusual characters who populate it. Now available in English for the first time, To Die in Benares brings to a wide audience a rare and irresistible literary voice.

Author : Ravi Nandan Singh
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192679341
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dead in Benares written by Ravi Nandan Singh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-19 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnographies fatefully rely on chance encounters and mysteriously so such encounters come true. "Dead in Banaras" is an instance of just such a fateful chance encounter. In its inception it set out to follow the 'dead' across multiple social locations of crematoria, hospital, morgue and the aghorashram in order to assemble a contemporary moment in the funerary iconicity of the well known North Indian city of Banaras. The crematoria in plural because the open-air manual pyres and close-door electric furnaces sit side by side within the symbolic inside of the city. Hospital and morgue became chosen destinations because in the local moral world the city is a medical metropolis anchored by a famed university hospital and storied through real life dramatic narratives of medical emergency, saving and untimely death. Aghorashram on the other hand as an urban Shaivite clinic and hermitage for sexual and reproductive cures works with funerary substances as pharmacopeia. Then, early on in fieldwork, these funerary journeys of the' dead' had a chance encounter with my father's death in the city. The same set of places henceforth spoke through a sensory logic of my father's death. Dead in Banaras is then both an ethnography of being in the dead centre of a city and an autobiographical funeral travelling (Shav Yatra) that narrates the city through a mourner's logic of using the pyre to illuminate the dead as a multiplicity.

Author : Aatish Taseer
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374715750
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Twice-Born written by Aatish Taseer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Twice-Born, Aatish Taseer embarks on a journey of self-discovery in an intoxicating, unsettling personal reckoning with modern India, where ancient customs collide with the contemporary politics of revivalism and revenge When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, the spiritual capital of Hinduism, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition. Known as the twice-born—first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation—the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death also known as Varanasi, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past. In a globalized world, to be modern is to renounce India—and yet the tide of nationalism is rising, heralded by cries of “Victory to Mother India!” and an outbreak of anti-Muslim violence. From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new.

Author : Geoff Dyer
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 030737808X
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi written by Geoff Dyer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-04-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book A Best Book of the Year: The Economist, The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Slate.com, and Time In Venice, at the Biennale, a jaded, bellini-swigging journalist named Jeff Atman meets a beautiful woman and they embark on a passionate affair. In Varanasi, an unnamed journalist (who may or may not be Jeff) joins thousands of pilgrims on the banks of the holy Ganges. He intends to stay for a few days but ends up remaining for months. Their journey—as only the irrepressibly entertaining Geoff Dyer could conjure—makes for an uproarious, fiendishly inventive novel of Italy and India, longing and lust, and the prospect of neurotic enlightenment.

Author : Christopher Justice
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 9780791432617
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dying the Good Death written by Christopher Justice and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the Hindu concepts of good and bad deaths, this rich ethnography follows pilgrims who choose to travel to the holy city of Kashi to die.

Author : Andrei Iliescu
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780464650720
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Life and Death in Varanasi written by Andrei Iliescu and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These photos were taken in Varanasi in an unexpected trip that lasted only 3 days. Varanasi is a place I always wanted to discover, but my arrival there in October 2008 was somewhat accidental, flying from Nepal. Fortunately I managed to find a place to sleep in one of the few Guest Houses located only 100 meters from the pyres of Manikarnika Ghat. Almost without sleep or food, I wandered on the banks of the Ganges along the 7-8 km where the 84 ghats are laid - in fact the place where everything happens, the spiritual center of this city. Maybe of all India.