An Empire Speaks: Kavya Narratives of India’s Cultural History, presenting poems by Dr. Rupinder S. Brar, is designed with selected illustrative artworks relating to the themes of the poems. The title An Empire Speaks references an expression that Ralph Waldo Emerson used when he wrote of the Bhagavad Gita, “In the great books of India, an empire spoke to us.”

This book recounts, in English yet in the “kavya” poetic format, tales of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist and other South Asian traditions. The readers coming across historic figures or place names can surely enjoy the poetic presentation of these lively stories even without deep background. The editor’s introduction provides an initial overview of the narrative, by prefacing the poems with some brief summaries of each poem’s subject-matter and historic context, in the hope that readers will better see the consistency of narrative as spoken by this historic “Empire” through the words of the poet-author.