Murty classical library of India

Nandi Timmana’s Theft of a Tree recounts how Krishna stole the wish-granting pārijāta tree from the garden of Indra, king of the gods, to appease his wife Satyabhama. This is the first English translation of the poem, which prefigures the modern Telugu novel with its unprecedented narrative unity.

No judgment of taste is innocent. In a word, we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. France’s leading sociologist focuses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and preferences. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a French person’s choice of clothing, furniture, leisure activities, dinner menus for guests, and many other matters of taste. What emerges from his analysis is that social snobbery is everywhere in the bourgeois world. The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctions—that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu finds a world of social meaning in the decision to order bouillabaisse, in our contemporary cult of thinness, in the “California sports” such as jogging and cross-country skiing. The social world, he argues, functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgment. The topic of Bourdieu’s book is a fascinating one: the strategies of social pretension are always curiously engaging. But the book is more than fascinating. It is a major contribution to current debates on the theory of culture and a challenge to the major theoretical schools in contemporary sociology.

Ten Indian Classics showcases translations from a vast array of India’s literary traditions, Hindi, Kannada, Pali, Panjabi, Persian, Sanskrit, Telugu, and Urdu, with a foreword by the award-winning poet and translator Ranjit Hoskote. It is an invitation to explore classic literature that continues to shape modern South Asian culture and aesthetics.

The Sea of Separation, a new free verse translation of Tulsidas’s beloved Rāmcaritmānas, presents renowned episodes from the Ramayana epic, including Ram’s battles with demons, the kidnapping of his wife Sita, and the god Hanuman’s heroic journey to Lanka to find her.

Mir Taqi Mir (1723–1810), widely regarded as the most accomplished Urdu poet, composed his ghazals in a distinctive Indian style arising from the Persian tradition. Here, the lover and beloved live in a world of extremes: the outsider is the hero and death is preferred to the beloved’s indifference. Ghazals offers a collection of Mir’s finest work.

The 700 poems of Hindi poet Biharilal’s Satsai weave amorous narratives of the god Krishna and the goddess Radha with hero and heroine motifs, bridging divine and worldly love. This new translation presents 400 couplets from the seventeenth-century classic. He Spoke of Love brims with rivalries, secret trysts, and the sorrows of separated lovers.

Bullhe Shah’s work is among the glories of Panjabi literature, and the iconic eighteenth-century poet is widely regarded as a master of mystical Sufi poetry. This striking new translation is the most authoritative and engaging introduction to an enduring South Asian classic.

The Therīgāthā, part of the Pali canon of Buddhist scripture, is one of the oldest surviving works by women, composed more than two millennia ago by some of the first Buddhist women—therīs—honored for their religious achievements. With a spare and elegant style, this powerful translation introduces us to a classic of world literature.

Surdas—and his remarkable lyrics refashioning the widely known narrative of the Hindu deity Krishna and his lover Radha—has been regarded as the epitome of artistry in Hindi verse from the end of the sixteenth century to the present day. This award-winning translation of Sur’s Ocean reconstructs the early tradition of Surdas’s poems.