Fort Morgan Public Library

Photographs and text describe the history, art, culture, politics, customs, and religions of India.

Indians and Westerners are thrown together on the Ibis, a former slave ship, that is crossing the Indian Ocean to join in China's nineteenth-century Opium Wars. Cooped up on the voyage, an unlikely bond forms among the crew and travelers and ultimately ties the races and generations together.

The Ibis, loaded to its gunwales with a cargo of indentured servants, is in the grip of a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal; among the dozens flailing for survival are Neel-convicted of embezzlement; Paulette masquerading as a deck hand; and Deeti a widow fleeing with her lover Kalua. The storm also threatens the clipper ship Anahita, which is carrying the largest consignment of opium ever to leave India for Canton. And the Redruth, a nursery ship, carrying...

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption....

In India Calling, Giridharadas brings to life the people and the dilemmas of India today, through the prism of his m̌igr ̌family history and his childhood memories of India. He introduces us to entrepreneurs, radicals, industrialists, and religious seekers, but, most of all, to Indian families. He shows how parents and children, husbands and wives, cousins and siblings are reinventing relationships, bending the meaning of Indianness, and enduring...

"The story of two Indian women, one a victim of a brutal crime and the other an Americanized journalist returning to India to cover the story, and the courage they inspire in each other"-- Indian American journalist Smita has returned to India to cover a story, but reluctantly: long ago she and her family left the country with no intention of ever coming back. As she follows the case of Meena—a Hindu woman attacked by members of her own village...

While living in the red light district of Calcutta, documenting life in the brothels, New York-based photographer Zana Briski embarked on a project by which she gave cameras to the children of prostitutes and taught them photography, awakening within them hidden talent and creativity and giving them a means to transform their lives.

"The stunning true story of an untouchable family who become teachers, and one, a poet and revolutionary. Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary--and yet how typical--her...

"Third Eye Rising explores the neurodiversity of India through two of the country's most compelling aspects: family ties and spiritual faith. In a land where divisions of caste and class threaten survival, where the religious are corrupt and the corrupt religious, and where dogmas and superstitions impede economic and individual progress, Shroff shows how spiritual realizations impact daily lives and how they help withstand circumstances of corruption,...