Whenever I think of Indian literature, a story retold by A.K.Ramanujan comes to mind: Hanuman reaches the nether-world in search of Rama’s ring that had disappeared through a hole.
2014
A heart-wrenching account of a child who gets trapped in a flesh trade circle and her relentless struggle to get out of it, Prem Nagar is much more than a work of fiction.
These lines from the opening poem, titled ‘Episcope’, instantly give the reader a sense of richness of words and images that the volume under review abounds in. Poem after poem, Ranjani Neriya weaves an intricate tapestry of myriad images, metaphors and vivid visual verse pictures in a tirelessly flowing stream of sonorous sounds and fecund expressions.
Shyam Selvadurai, who has edited Many Roads Through Paradise, an anthology of Sri Lankan writers is a writer of acclaim, and has published several books, many of which have won prestigious awards.
My narrative will not be your’s. I will live my life. You have to live with your demons.
Daughter by Court Order
In a country like India, it is still the norm in many parts of the country to cut women off from all aspects of family decision making processes, or even from decisions involving their own lives—marriage, family planning etc.
Bidyut Chakrabarty sees the mass uprisings of 2011 in West Asia as reconfirmation of the relevance of nonviolence. Barely three years after the exhilarating successes of the Arab Spring, however, nonviolence is far from the minds of the numerous factions engaged in seemingly interminable conflict for control of those troubled lands.
In that 1971 classic essay, ‘After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States’, Clifford Geertz alluded to the ‘darkened mood’ that had descended upon the new states. The great cultural anthropologist talked of a creeping ‘disenchantment with party politics, parliamen-tarianism, bureaucracy, and the new class of soldiers…
In 1963 Maulana Bhashani met Mao in Peking and Mao spoke to him about Pakistan, USA, USSR, and China. China’s relationship with Pakistan was extremely fragile at the time, Mao said to Bhashani…
Sukanya Agashe’s attempt to definitively locate Lanka and to establish a physical geography for the Sanskrit Ramayana covers an astonishing amount of ground, literally and metaphorically. Her documentary research is meticulous and wide ranging, her physical journeys and empirical investigations equally so.
The two authors of this book have over the years developed a type of book-making for themselves. The idea is to pick up some subject of recent history which is full of incident and drama, visit the site, read up as much as you can…
Biography, according to Lytton Strachey, is ‘the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing’. It is also a difficult art particularly when the story told is that of Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who strode the world like ‘a gentle colossus’ until very recently…