Among the many qualities of Piyush Daiyas book of conversation with artistAkhilesh, the most inspiring is his ability to efface his minutest traces from the text. The entire dialogue comes across as a selfrevelation by the artist, as if he conversed with himself in the darkness of a summer night, or standing against his canvas, and Piyush merely overheard him.
What Bharat wrote about theatre has always been discussed as a theory of poetics by critics like Abhinav Gupta, Dhananjay, Bhatt Nayak, Bhatt Lolak and others. This tradition has travelled right up to our contemporaries like Dr. Nagendra. Did this tradition benefit either poetry or drama, the present author, Devendra Raj Ankur, asks.
Mannu Bhandari is a wellknown author whose autobiography presents the masculine aspect of womens conscience. This can play an important role in understanding the contradictions of feminist discourse. This discourse is created as an outcome of the crisis of the woman writer, her ambitions, her contradictions…
The book was first published by Oxford University Press five years ago with a critical introduction. However this remarkable Indian drama is finding a broader reader/audience base and has recently been published by the University of Hawaii Press with an additional, deeply penetrating essay …
At present, Hindi short fiction, an important genre emerging in the postIndependence period, is at a crossroads. After confrontingNai Kahani(New Short Story) andAkahani (AntiShort Story) movements, this fiction moved towards commitment in the nineteen seventies; here it dwelt persistently on themes of exploitation…
Meera Kant has the distinction of being one of the most prolific young Hindi playwrights today. Her plays, including Nepathya Raag, Kaali Barf and Ihamrig, have engaged with an interestingly wide range of subjects in both contemporary and thought provoking manner. Her plays are distinguished by her skilful use of dramaturgy…
2011
Astudenotes Lot Lakar(Past Tense) Pratham Purush(Third person, not the first person in Sanskrit) singularthat is To be, become. It denotes the sense of possibility also. A possibility which includes an apprehension there along with a sense of uncertainty. Astuis also the name of the heroine of the novel, therefore the term is a feminine-noun…
2011
his novel makes a wideranging comment on a complex sociocultural world and virtually troubled political loyalties of a generation of intellectuals, who proudly describe themselves as progressive intellectual activists in pre1990 India. Focusing on the intellectual life of contemporary Delhi, the novel quite stridently interrogates…
The volume under review is a kind of arapid reader in Indian history that the towering Hindi poet of the 1940s and 1950s, Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (hereafter, Muktibodh) wrote in 1962. An odd volume in itself, and in the authors own words, probably the only text he ever wrote that had nothing original in itafter all…
Likhe Mein Dukkha (Pathos in Print) is a new collection of poems by a popular poet, Liladhar Mandloi Mandloi. He has simultaneously published three collections of poetry. This collection contains ninetyeight small poems. It is distinctly different from other collections in the sense that it includes a particular kind of poetry. ..
Kabir is now widely acclaimed as one of our most eminent poets from any Indian language, but this wasn’t always so. Until about half a century ago, he was regarded in Hindi as perhaps the last of the quartet of the four great bhakti poets and ranked after Tulsi Das, Sur Das and Mira Bai. In a marked reversal, Kabir’s…
While telling a story the awakening of love and desire is an illusion, a chimera. The desire is the desire only for the story, the love only love for the story. (From Bhikshuni aur Nai).In Teji Grover’s recent collection of stories, seven stories have been strung together in a sequence. In English translation, roughly the titles would be ‘The Nun and the Barber’, ‘My Poets’, ‘Grey Flowers etc’., ‘Sindbad’, ‘Just a Story’, ‘Suparna’, and ‘Su’…
2011
A lot is being said about Premchands tradition in Hindi, but only a very few fiction writers have an understanding of what it really means. While someone is burning Premchands books, someone else is holding on to his tail to cross the Vaitarani, the mythical river that divides the earth and the nether regions…
2011
This is a novel by a journalist which is certainly an advantage. The journalist is always present inside the novelist and knows well that his opting for story telling is driven by his urge to catch and tell facts that are beyond the reach of journalism. This understanding gives Davanal a distinct tinge and flavour…
2011
The more we conjectured and enquired the more facts and things deserving mention we gathered. But in regard to them it became more and more difficult to distinguish between truths and falsehood. Were they lies that looked like the truth Or were they truths that resembled lies Or were they both truth and lies…
These days I find the prettiest things growing in my garden are weeds. They are the ones I pluck and put in my singlerose vase. They stay fresh for days on end; true (to nature), hardy and beauteous. Shivam, satyam, sundaram: the righteous, the truthful and the beautiful the quintessence of literary aesthetics…
Jaatidansh Ki Kahanian edited by Subhash Chandra Kushwaha is a thoughtprovoking and unique collection of essays and stories in Hindi by dalit writers. What distinguishes this anthology from other anthologies of dalit stories in Hindi such as the one edited by Ramanika Gupta is an entire discursive section dealing theoretically with issues which are also raised through the medium of the stories…
Written in Hindi, and under translation into Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi,Malayalam, English and German, Sheoraj Singh Bechains autobiography, is a paradigmatic lifestory of a member of one of Indias numerous dalit castes. Bechains book is an extended narrative of his struggle against social disabilities imposed on him by birth…
Devendra Choubeys book Adhunik Sahitya Mein Dalit Vimarsh (Dalit Discourse In Modern Literature) is a collection of essays written by him on various aspects of Hindi dalit literature, published in journals over a period of 15 years. It is a timely intervention in dalit studies which merits a sustained, serious, critical evaluation and theorization on its literary production…
The book under review on linguistic politics in India born out of a happy marriage of anthropology and history is a very well planned and carefully organized textual commentary giving an account of use and misuse of the labels language and mother tongue for political purposes. The book is divided into six chapters on each…