Monthly Archives: July 2017

Gogu Shyamala paints a world in rural Andhra Pradesh where human lives are not separate from nature. They inhabit a vast space, feet planted in the ‘moist mud’ and faces touching in the sky. That these human lives are also segregated by society as ‘untouchable’ means that certain pleasures, such as ‘the scent of new rice’, the taste of jowar sap, the power to invoke the goddess, are theirs to enjoy; joys perhaps unknown to the upper castes.

Indians writing poetry in English and not in their mother-tongue, Indo-Anglian poetry as it is fashionably known, has become quite a cult today. A cult particu­larly among the generation still suffering from the colo­nial hangover, the generation without any roots any­where…

This is a brilliant collection of stories,personally chosen by J. Devika, Associate Professor at CDS, Trivandrum, and Mini Krishnan, the well known editor particularly of translated works, at OUP. As a result, there is a quality of the unusual, the comic, the macabre and the holy, in an odd sense of equivalence.

Recently, in a talk given by Professor Nigel Leask at the University of Delhi on Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, he struck a comparison between Burns and Rabindranath Tagore. He mentioned how both appropriated Scottish ballads and folk music in their respective compositions and therefore, how both could be aptly titled ‘people’s poet’ or ‘poet of the soil’.

Referring to the craft of translation and its difficulties, J.M. Coetzee had commented in his rather well-known essay, ‘Roads to Translation’ that ‘Translation seems to me a craft in a way that cabinet-making is a craft. There is no substantial theory of cabinet-making, and no philosophy of cabinet-making except the ideal of being a good cabinet-maker, plus a handful of precepts relating to tools and to types of wood’ (Coetzee 151).

Once again in her latest novel, as in most of her earlier work, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala explores the situa­tion of foreigners in India and what India does to them. But unlike her earlier work (seven novels and three collections of short stories), here for the first time…

Mythology has always been a good source of raw material for fiction in literature. Recent activity on the Indian literary scene has reaffirmed this old proposition with a series of publications, including some bestsellers.

Although works of Indian language fiction in English translation are being published since the early nineties by the country’s major publishing houses, it is rare for these publishers to show the same enthusiasm for poetry in Indian languages.

Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 and died in 1970 at the ripe old age of ninety-seven. Mathematician, philosopher, pacifist during World War I, advocate of war on Russia soon after World War II, campaigner for nuclear disarmament towards the end of his life, and prolific writer on a variety…

We begin with the translator’s note on the change in title from Asprushyaru in Kannada to Vasudeva’s Family in English —itself an interesting conceptual and methodological exercise.

Nirad Chaudhuri has been quiet of late. A new book from him is, therefore, a welcome sight, for a remarkable control of the English language has given Chaudhuri a position in Indo-English literature similar to that of Mohammed Ali in international boxing. He is the greatest, especially at telling…

It is difficult to do full justice to the quality of the massive effort culminating in this diligent compilation of published material on the title of the book. The survey induces sadness at what appears to be a near total lack of (a) research into the more fundamental issues of public administration, (b) depth and penetration in such studies as have been made or come to notice…

Why is the short story called the short story when the long story is called not the long story but the novel? Why could it not be called simply the story? Following the illogical English usage,

Leftism, as commonly understood, is a blanket term covering everything from reformism to the more eccentric reaches of the New Left. What Gombin means by it, however, is those sections to the Left of the Communist parties which do not claim to be within the Marxist-Leninist tradition…

A book written about the British influence on the Indian garden is bound to elicit curiosity in the minds of botanical aficionados and students of imperial history:

In a few more years, perhaps as little as fifteen, an entire generation of persons to whom dak bungalows mean something will have gone on to the circuit house in heaven.

This is a slim and beautifully produced book of maps about India’s history, culture, religion and politics, wide ranging in its scope and very enlightening too. For reasons best known to Indian historians and their publishers,

With our destinies, We all have a pact, It is the memories, That can choose their act M iljul Mann is not a ‘slice of life’ novel, but a ‘slice of mind’ novel.

It is in the kitchen of the Chattopadhyay household that Khema, the daughter of a low caste Bagdi household retainer, Bamundi,

Savia Viegas, the author of two previous novels Tales from the Attic (2007, Saxtti) and Let Me Tell You about Quinta (2011, Penguin) has recently self published two graphic novels, Eddi & Diddi and Abha Nama.