This book chronicles the story of love which is considered an Indian creation. The first love story of the world was found in the Rig Veda and the first comprehensive work on love was written in India with Kamasutra becoming one of its offshoots. Love techniques were perfected over centuries and sculpted on the walls of temples of Khajuraho and Konarak. Since ancient times, rishis in India have believed that it was love which came first and then followed the world. The origin and evolution of love in India is traced by the author in an elaborate manner, providing invaluable insights which make this book a rare treasury in itself. The book draws from concrete sources including cave paintings, ancient archaeological findings and a mass of literature belonging to the Vedic and Buddhist eras to give a complete portrayal of love. Through love lyrics, humorous plays and erotic descriptions, Love in Ancient India takes you through a timeless saga of royalty and grandeur, beauty and infidelity, all of which are interspersed with the concept of the world’s most bewitching expression - love.

An elegant translation of the Sattasaī (or Seven Hundred), India's earliest collection of lyric poetry, Poems on Life and Love in Ancient India deals with love in its many aspects. Mostly narrated by women, the poems reveal the world of local Indian village life sometime between the third and fifth centuries. The Sattasaī offers a more realistic counterpart to that notorious theoretical treatise on love the Kāmasūtra, which presents a cosmopolitan and calculating milieu. Translators Peter Khoroche and Herman Tieken introduce the main features of the work in its own language and time. For modern readers, these short, self-contained poems are a treat: the sentiments they depict remain affecting and contemporary while providing a window into a world long past.

India is not just a geography or history. It is not only a nation, a country, a mere piece of land. It is something more: it is a metaphor, poetry, something invisible but very tangible. It is vibrating with certain energy fields that no other country can claim. For almost ten thousand years, thousands of people have reached to the ultimate explosion of consciousness. Their vibration is still alive, their impact is in the very air; you just need a certain perceptivity, a certain capacity to receive the invisible that surrounds this strange land. It is strange because it has renounced everything for a single search, the search for the truth. In these pages, we are treated to a spellbinding vision of what Osho calls "the real India," the India that has given birth to enlightened mystics and master musicians, to the inspired poetry of the Upanishads and the breathtaking architecture of the Taj Mahal. We travel through the landscape of India's golden past with Alexander the Great and meet the strange people he met along the way. We are given a front-row seat in the proceedings of the legendary court of the Moghul Emperor Akbar, and an insider's view of the assemblies of Gautama the Buddha and his disciples. In the process, we discover just what it is about India that has made it a magnet for seekers for centuries, and the importance of India's unique contribution to our human search for truth.

This is the story of Madhavanala and Kamakandala. Madhav, a handsome and accomplished young man, is asked to leave his city of Pushpavati: his looks and singing so distract women that they neglect their work, and cityfolk create an uproar about it. Exiled, Madhav reaches the court of King Kama Sena, the ruler of Kamavati, where he meets the bewitching courtesan Kama. The two fall in love but royal ire ensures that the lovers part. A heartbroken Madhav takes shelter in a temple at Ujjain, the city of King Vikramaditya. What can the great ruler do to assuage Madhav’s pain? Can he reunite the lovers? This lively and colourful tale has startling metaphors, a candid narration of love and an ending that matches its evocative language. In circulation since the twelfth century AD, Madhav and Kama has been translated from the original Sanskrit text for readers in English for the first time.

"This admirably produced and well-translated volume of stories from the Sanskrit takes the Western reader into one of the Golden Ages of India. . . . The world in which the tales are set is one which placed a premium upon slickness and guile as aids to success. . . . Merchants, aristocrats, Brahmins, thieves and courtesans mingle with vampires, demi-gods and the hierarchy of heaven in a series of lively or passionate adventures. The sources of the individual stories are clearly indicated; the whole treatment is scholarly without being arid."—The Times Literary Supplement "Fourteen tales from India, newly translated with a terse and vibrant effectiveness. These tales will appeal to any reader who enjoys action, suspense, characterization, and suspension of disbelief in the supernatural."—The Personalist

Same-Sex Love in India presents a stunning array of writings on same-sex love from over 2000 years of Indian literature. Translated from more than a dozen languages and drawn from Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and modern fictional traditions, these writings testify to the presence of same-sex love in various forms since ancient times, without overt persecution. This collection defies both stereotypes of Indian culture and Foucault's definition of homosexuality as a nineteenth-century invention, uncovering instead complex discourses of Indian homosexuality, rich metaphorical traditions to represent it, and the use of names and terms as early as medieval times to distinguish same-sex from cross-sex love. An eminent group of scholars have translated these writings for the first time or have re-translated well-known texts to correctly make evident previously underplayed homoerotic content. Selections range from religious books, legal and erotic treatises, story cycles, medieval histories and biographies, modern novels, short stories, letters, memoirs, plays and poems. From the Rigveda to Vikram Seth, this anthology will become a staple in courses on gender and queer studies, Asian studies, and world literature.

'There are many missing pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that is ancient India, but those we have yield a rich tapestry.' The oldest surviving love graffiti on a cave wall immortalizing an intimate bond in the third century BCE; charred seeds and chewed animal bones that provide evidence of a peoples' food obsessions; architectural minutiae that point to the alarming regression of a civilization's potty habits; intriguing sculptures that reveal myriad facets of the human-animal relationship... In Time Pieces, award-winning historian Nayanjot Lahiri whimsically sifts through intricate clues left behind by the early inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent - in plaques and inscriptions, fragments of jewellery, bones and tools, poetry, art and pottery - to reveal to us our ancient land in all its variety, splendour, complexity and contradictions. Sparkling with wit and reflective of a scholar's keen and curious energy, this delightful volume seamlessly connects the past to the present and a civilization to the world beyond.