About the Book With the ninth book of hers, Uma Vasudev gives her passion for the arts a characteristically individual flavour. Here, she got twelve of India's leading classical dancers encompassing five classical dance forms, Bharat Natyam, Kathak, Odissi, Manipuri and Kuchipudi, to portray a format never attempted before. Here, you have the essence of Kashmir as revealed in gesture, movement, poetry and words by dancers poised along photographs of this beautiful land's meandering rivers and towering.

While the essays delineate the cultural essence of Kashmir, the dancers are etched in evocative sublime form. Each one of them also articulates in words here, as creatively as they do in their dance, about the new challenges that they had to face in terms of adapting to a different imagery and content.

Each one of them describes also how they combined their individual reaction with the inspiration provided by the author as director.

Designed exquisitely the result is a book so unusual, it can take your breath away.

About the Author Uma Vasudev is the biographer of Indira Gandisi, India's late Prime Minister. Her two books, Indira Gandhi Restation in Restraint (1974) and Tire Faces of Indira Gandhi (1978) cover the tumultuous years of Indira Gandhi's growth to power and the later controversial period of the nineteen seventies and the Emergency. Her third book, Indira Gandhi: Courage Under Fire (2004) takes the late Prime Minister's life up to her assasination in 1984.

Uma Vasudev's first novel, Song of Amaya came out in 1978 and set a trend in analytical structural form and its portrayal of Delhi's high society. Her second novel, Shreya of Sonagarh ranges over the nuances of a crumbling feudal order and bureaucratic ascendance in India of the nineteen sixties. It was based on her own observations over years in Madhya Pradesh as the wife of an IAS officer, the late 1.K. Malhotra. She also published and edited her own magazine Surge (later changed to Sarge Internatonal). She was editor of India Quarterly, the journal of the Indian Council of World Affairs. Subsequently, briefly, editor, India Today. She also edited Ius before Non-Alignment. Past & Present for the Indian Council of World Affairs in 1983.

Uma Vasudev's biography of India's pre-eminent flautist, Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, Romance of the Bamboe Reed (2005) was lauded by eminent music critic Mohan Nadkarni as "a masterpiece... and simply unputdownable". Her seventh book, Fairs and Festivals of India (2007) Combines religion, mythology and customs in a cultural celebration of India.

As a free lance columnist Uma Vasudev has continued to cover topics ranging from politics to the arts, both in the literary field and for radio and television. Her particular interest has been Indian classical music in which she herself took vocal training at Delhi's Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, Her portraits of India's great ustads and garus in classical music were the earliest to be published in The Illustrated Weekly of India in the late fifities in the form of personal interviews which are now of archival value. She has coordinated a series on Indian classical musicians for the BBC entitled Eastern Sounds. Combining with this also was a concurrent passion for sports, which made a champion in Indian tennis.

**Contents and Sample Pages**