Submitted by Mrs Faith Payne on Mon, 16/10/2023 - 09:46
Dr Ankur Barua, Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies, has just published his first novel, The Harvest of Time.
Professor Douglas Hedley writes:
"Our colleague Ankur is a philosopher, a scholar of Hinduism and comparative religion, and an erudite man of letters. All three aspects of his oeuvre coalesce beautifully in his debut novel, The Harvest of Time. The protagonist is an idealistic student at the renowned Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge who journeys to the Indian subcontinent in search of meaning. It is a captivating novel of love and violence, contemplation and action, while also a narrative about the complexity of Hinduism in the modern age, and the author presents - didactically, but subtly - a series of instructive and haunting vignettes of life in London, Cambridge, Delhi and Kathmandu. In the midst of lustrous images of Trinity College Cambridge and Connaught Circle in Delhi, and sparkling evocations of Ram Mohun Roy and Tagore, Marxists, Moghuls, Missionaries, and jaded officers of the Raj, Ankur furnishes a fine tale of adventure, and an illuminating story about that arresting polyphony of voices and perspectives that is the contemporary Indian cultural landscape".
