Monthly Archives: July 2017

The collected essays of historian Sarvepalli Gopal (1923-2002) has finally arrived, meticulously edited with a fine introduction by Srinath Raghavan. Raghavan and the general editors of the series, Ramachandra Guha and Sunil Khilnani make a strong case for a Gopal revival.

One of the most enduring myths of the founding of the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) is that of the rescue and subsequent marriage of the Englishman Job Charnock to an Indian woman. Marriages between Europeans and Indians were not quite uncommon in the early colonial period, most famously chronicled by William Dalrymple in his White Mughals.

Arrest and detention are considered as routine and necessary procedures in any criminal justice system. In fact, it relies heavily on it.

The fact that foreign scholars find it difficult to decode the Indian experience of living with, negotiating and managing the multiple challenges of citizenship and rights in arguably the world’s most diverse ethnic and religious environment without, in the main, sacrificing the tenets of procedural democracy, comes as no surprise.

The edited volume under review makes a stimulating attempt to explore a seemingly elusive and intrinsically unsettling territory called modern Indian culture.

It is the usual impression that oriental know­ledge essentially consists of speculation concerning the ultimate nature of things beyond what is avail­able by pure observation.

Watership Down is an incredible book. It is the story of an epic journey of a small band of wild rabbits. Fiver, the prophet, predicts imminent destruction and, under the leadership of his brother Hazel, the rabbits leave the familiar security of their warren and brave the unknown countryside in search of a new home…

Like the proverbial Prometheus, Sikkim, having happily unbound itself from a despotic past, now adds to the diversity-a distinct hallmark of our culture. Yet, reading these tales from Sikkim, one often has a feeling of familiarity. It stems from common experi­ences of the past…

Roy Morris Jr.’s book chronicles Oscar Wilde’s eleven-month long tour of the United States and Canada in 1882. It is during this tour, we are told, that Oscar Wilde became Oscar Wilde.

Even as not everything written by Indian writers in English may be of equal merit, one would have to acknowledge that the Indian novel in English has come of age.

When God receives a request from Fátima to help prevent a war between Fidel Castro and JFK, he asks his son, Jesus, to return to Earth and diffuse the conflict. On his island, Fidel Castro faces protests on the streets and realizes that he is about to be overthrown.

Very captivating and entertaining, Teller of Tales goes down the memory lane of two friends in the civil service, the reserved secretive Arunava and the staid Tapan—a very close friendship at one level and full of doubts on the other. Adding to the mystery and charm of it all is a thread of romance. A beautifully crafted novel, it keeps the reader in suspense till the very end.

Indian Music, like Hinduism, is comparable to an ocean. Its origins are lost in the mists of antiquity, and over the centuries, it has evolved, modifying itself to suit the times, assimilating new ideas from alien con­cepts, and yet managing to retain its own unique personality.

Here is another general commentary on Indian culture, this time by a well-known Indian writer. It is difficult to assess which level of reader the book is really meant for as it is written in a very broad sweep.

There are times, usually of media hype, when I don’t read a new novel that I would otherwise have read. Then there are novels I don’t read immediately because I am told by friends that I am certain to like them.

Growing up, I used to treat going to my nani’s house for a sleepover as a great event. I would very seriously pack my night clothes, my tooth brush and my towel, and then toddle off down the road to her house.

Good intentions in anthology-making are never good enough unless they are backed by a clear sense of direction, a balanced overview of the ground under survey, and—if it is an anthology of translations—an uncompromising stand on the quality of translations coupled with a precise awareness of the ‘other lan­guage’ audience and its standards.

V.I. Braginsky could as well have been describing Parveen Talha and her book of short stories, when he wrote in a review of Anna Suvorova’s Nostalgia po Laknau1 that ‘it is characteristic of her scholarly style to find a specific leitmotif to thread through each of her works and define the essence of discussion.

Shakespeare is easily the most written about dramatist, so much so that one feels he might have taken fright, had he lived, to see his plays interpreted on so many levels—some of them well beyond his ken. And this has been the case mainly with his tragedies…

Each age has poets and poems circumscribed by environmental pressures and the politics of the emotions of the age. It is not just the manner in which feelings are expressed but these feelings—the very impact of a situation, seems to be different in every age. But a poet or poets…