In 1895 Mark Twain conducted a year-long around-the-world lecture tour that formed the basis for Following the Equator. A modern-day journalist recounts Twain's passage through India and offers his own intriguing observations of the same sites a century later.

Back in the mid-1980s when I was teaching in Warren College at the University of California, San Diego, we were required to use Mark Twain's famous book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in our classes. However, we were cautioned beforehand that certain words that were in common usage in the 19th century (such as the "N" word) were no longer acceptable either in speech or print today. But instead of editing out those offensive words, it was believed that keeping the older text in tact allowed us an historical and psychological glimpse into the mindset of the people living at that time, even if they contained only a partial glimpse of a certain class. I mention this because in re-reading Mark Twain's book, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (from which we have specifically excerpted his reminiscences of India), it becomes almost immediately apparent how dated the language is and how some phrases may be regarded as totally inappropriate to today's modern ear. But we have made no attempt here to alter Twain's words in any way, believing that it is important not to alter such since the document provides the interested reader with a fascinating social telescope into a time far gone. Having myself been to India nine times (and most recently in the Fall of 2014), much has changed in this wondrous country over the years even if many parts remain the same-so much so, in fact, that one imagines that Twain himself would acknowledge the semblance. The following book focuses only on Mark Twain's time in India during the first few months of 1896. He doesn't always looking kindly on the country that intrigued him so much and some Hindu scholars have questioned his objectivity. As Hinduism Today pointed out, "Twain's tales of his encounter with India and Hinduism are typical of the curmudgeonly essayist--witty, sagacious, exaggerated and cynical."Yet, Twain is such an exceptionally gifted writer (with a keen eye for the non obvious and a subtle if at times acerbic sense of humor) that he makes India come alive in a way that few writers can match. He is also skilled at revealing the ordinary in the midst of all the gala and pageantry. Reading Twain one gets a deeper feeling for all the multi-layered contradictions of human life. In any case, I think the reader is in for a treat, even if he or she may not agree with all of Twain's descriptions and insights.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

Widely considered a jewel of contemporary travel literature, Equator is Thurston Clarke’s magnificent, witty account of his solo journey along the earth’s torrid midsection—a grueling twenty-five-thousand-mile odyssey that spanned three years and as many continents. His was a perilous trek across an almost surreal landscape—where a first-class hotel appeared smack in the middle of a leper colony and a one-time Pacific island paradise stood as a hideous, bomb-blasted testament to nuclear folly. Along the way Clarke encountered the world’s heaviest rat, the earth’s highest volcano, and the king of a Micronesian island, wearing flip-flops and a novelty T-shirt. Throughout, Clarke’s unflagging sense of humor and wonder make Equator a classic of its kind.

In the early modern world, the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal empires sprawled across a vast swath of the earth, stretching from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. The diverse and overlapping literate communities that flourished in these three empires left a lasting legacy on the political, religious, and cultural landscape of the Near East and India. This volume is a comprehensive sourcebook of newly translated texts that shed light on the intertwined histories and cultures of these communities, presenting a wide range of source material spanning literature, philosophy, religion, politics, mysticism, and visual art in thematically organized chapters. Scholarly essays by leading researchers provide historical context for closer analyses of a lesser-known era and a framework for further research and debate. The volume aims to provide a new model for the study and teaching of the region’s early modern history that stands in contrast to the prevailing trend of examining this interconnected past in isolation.

In 2001, India had 4 million cell phone subscribers. Ten years later, that number had exploded to more than 750 million. Over just a decade, the mobile phone was transformed from a rare and unwieldy instrument to a palm-sized, affordable staple, taken for granted by poor fishermen in Kerala and affluent entrepreneurs in Mumbai alike. The Great Indian Phone Book investigates the social revolution ignited by what may be the most significant communications device in history, one which has disrupted more people and relationships than the printing press, wristwatch, automobile, or railways, though it has qualities of all four. In this fast-paced study, Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey explore the whole ecosystem of the cheap mobile phone. Blending journalistic immediacy with years of field-research experience in India, they portray the capitalists and bureaucrats who control the cellular infrastructure and wrestle over bandwidth rights, the marketers and technicians who bring mobile phones to the masses, and the often poor, village-bound users who adapt these addictive and sometimes troublesome devices to their daily lives. Examining the challenges cell phones pose to a hierarchy-bound country, the authors argue that in India, where caste and gender restrictions have defined power for generations, the disruptive potential of mobile phones is even greater than elsewhere. The Great Indian Phone Book is a rigorously researched, multidimensional tale of what can happen when a powerful and readily available technology is placed in the hands of a large, still predominantly poor population.