You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The rebellious life of a novelist, screenwriter and revolutionary activist Born in Poona, India, Farrukh Dhondy came to England in 1964 and immersed himself in radical politics and the counterculture. He kicked off a career in journalism interviewing Pink Floyd and Allen Ginsberg and covering the first meeting between the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Dhondy was soon drawn into political activism. He joined the Indian Workers Association and the British Black Panther Movement. Within the radical activist collective Race Today, he worked alongside Darcus Howe and C. L. R. James. An award-winning writer, he co-wrote the ground-breaking sit-com Tandoori Nights. In 1984 he became Channel 4�...
Marked by lyrical beauty and spiritual insight, a deep understanding of human suffering that coexists with rapturous abandon, the poems of Jalaluddin Rumi continue to be relevant almost eight centuries after they were composed, with contemporary audiences finding new meanings in them. Rumi's poems bring together the divine and the human, the mystical and the corporeal to create a vivid kaleidoscope of poetic images. While many recent 'translations' have sought to give Rumi's poetry a certain hippy sensibility, robbing it of its true essence, Farrukh Dhondy attempts to bring out the beauty and sensibility of the verses whilst imitating the metre of the original. Dhondy's translations provide a modern idiom to the poems, carefully keeping intact their religious context.
Rediscover the voice and vision of Rumi in this new translation of selected poems by the beloved Muslim spiritual master and Sufi...
A long-overdue critical appreciation of the West Indian historian and political activist who played a towering role in the cause of Pan-Africanism in the twentieth century. Born in Trinidad in 1901, Cyril Lionel Robert James was a precocious polymath all his life. By the time he was a teenager and already a certified teacher, he had embarked on a lifelong advocacy for the Trinidadian oppressed. He embraced Marxism while living in England during the 1930s, during which time he published, among other works, The Case for West Indian Self Government and his masterpiece, The Black Jacobins. James lived in the United States from 1939 until he was expelled during the McCarthy terror for his politic...
Rumi: The Book of Love is a collection of astonishing poems for lovers from the mystic Rumi, by the translator who made him sing anew, Coleman Barks. Poetry and Rumi fans will want to own this gorgeously packaged compilation of love poems by the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic. Rumi is best known and most cherished as the poet of love in all its forms, and renowned poet and Rumi interpretor Coleman Barks has gathered the best of these poems in delightful and wise renderings that will open your heart and soul to the lover inside and out.
Bombay duck, hobson-jobson, big cheese, minaret - words are cultural signifiers, slices of history made up of letters. In Words, Farrukh Dhondy reveals a certain landscape of India through a joyful exploration of Indianisms and Indo-British usages, including slang, choice curse words and colonial coinage. He cites Anglo-Indian dictionaries and Cockney kids, Parsi grandmothers and bartenders, foul-mouthed neighbours, history books and tour guides. Dhondy's musings on etymological evolution bring to light the social, moral and often less-than-moral beliefs and behaviours these sayings stem from.Just goes to show - whether it's an earnest chat or gossip, we are saying more than we realize.
'A beautiful collection, full of affection and an extremely funny book.' - Salman Rushdie In this collection of nine linked stories, young Farrukh recounts his years growing up in a Parsi neighbourhood in Poona during the fifties. Sarbatwalla Chowk is the centre of the world of those he remembers: Eddie the Inventor and his Big Boy; the massive Samson, who lives on the street and refuses to get a job; the blind man and his guide, Black Dog, supposed to have special powers; Terry Soakum, the Australian crybaby who has his eye on Farrukh's swimming trunks; Confession D'Souza, the scholarship boy who loses favour with the Jesuits over a 'dirty book' and later becomes a courageous journalist; Chamak, a permanent pimple on his big nose, who wants to win the college elections and the heart of 'Jhansi-ki-Rani'. There's Farrukh himself, distressed over a pair of broken spectacles, or a knife-fight at school. Warm, funny, sometimes sad but always delightful, Poona Company seems as fresh as when it was first published in 1980, and presents a picture of small-town India observed with a sharp eye and a fond heart - a combination still rare in Indian fiction.