The book seeks to analyse the faultlines and subversion in the ancient history of India in the praxis of social domination and systematic marginalization and obliteration of traditional political elites or traditional Kshatriya that social elites (Priestly class or caste) of ancient India achieved, just to maintain their socio-political domination and hegemony. This rather myopic act led to the balkanization of socio-political scape of mediaeval Indiaresulting into subjugation, plunder and foreign invasions and rule for one thousand years. Through the case study of Krishna and Mahabharata period, the book tries to illuminate the so called Dark Age of the Indian history. Despite the numerous archaeological proves found in the form of Painted Grey Ware (PGW) associated with Mahabharata period and Black Red Ware (BRW) with different shades, associated with Krishna and Yadavas which tally with details of different scriptures and epic, nothing seems to be happening in this regard. This very fact seems to underline the continued saga of subversion and domination that seemed to have been ingrained in the post-Krishna-and-Mahabharata period. Once the deification and mystification of great historical personality and period such as Krishna and Mahabharata was started just to negate the socio-political revolutions ushered into, it seems to have continued and institutionalized.

Farce elicits an immediate, elemental response from all age levels, cutting across national and intellectual boundaries. It dates back to people’s first attempts to scoff in public at whatever their neighbors cherished in private: social prestige, eccentricities, virtues that are vices, friendships, and enmities. Albert Bermel, teacher, writer, and translator of farce, takes readers on an instructive and hilarious voyage from the classical Greek stage through English Restoration and French farce, to the young Hollywood of Mack Sennett, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, the other silent farceurs of the Jazz Age, and on to W. C. Fields, Mae West, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Monty Python—including other greats along the way like Hope and Crosby, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers.

Surveying the artistic and cultural scene in the era of Trump In a world where truth is cast in doubt and shame has gone missing, what are artists and critics on the left to do? How to demystify a political order that laughs away its own contradictions? How to mock leaders who thrive on the absurd? And why, in any event, offer more outrage to a media economy that feeds on the same? Such questions are grist to the mill of Hal Foster, who, in What Comes after Farce?, delves into recent developments in art, criticism, and fiction under the current regime of war, surveillance, extreme inequality, and media disruption. Concerned first with the cultural politics of emergency since 9/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, conspiracy, and kitsch, he moves on to consider the neoliberal makeover of aesthetic forms and art institutions during the same period. A final section surveys signal transformations in art, film, and writing. Among the phenomena explored are machine vision (images produced by machines for other machines without a human interface), operational images (images that do not represent the world so much as intervene in it), and the algorithmic scripting of information that pervades our everyday lives. If all this sounds dire, it is. In many respects we look out on a world that has moved, not only politically but also technologically, beyond our control. Yet Foster also sees possibility in the current debacle: the possibility to pressure the cracks in this order, to turn emergency into change.