Women of India is an important volume, not only because as editor Bharati Ray has to gathered in one place essays by almost all the important gender studies scholars in India, but also because it seeks to put into one text all the imaginable aspects of the history of women in modern India.
2008
Razia Grover’s Mosques is a generalist’s introduction to the subject, but in the serious tradition of illustrated surveys of art and architecture. Written more for the lay reader than the specialist of Islamic architecture,
This book is beautifully produced with wonderful photographs not only of Alexander’s head and face, but also of the paraphernalia of art and jewellery and coins and maps and manuscripts that archaelogists love to work with. The debates themselves are very technical, but given the offices of the worldwide web in enhancing knowledge,
This is the third in a spate of books dealing with colonial archaeologists, following on the heels of those which concentrated on Alexander Cunningham and John Marshall.
You have to be a reviewer to read this book to the end, and a conscientious one at that! David Davidar has come up with one of the more tedious Indian English novels, one that does not reward the reader with new insights or the pleasure of enjoying accomplished use of language but perhaps affords only with a sense of virtue that one has actually read a book from beginning to end even though it has only very very occasional sparks—it is only sometimes that the language works, only sometimes that you think that the book may contain anything at all (only to be disappointed).
Sobti-Vaid Samvad ushers in a novel critical genre within the domain of Hindi literary-criticism. Here two literary stalwarts of Hindi literature, Krishna Sobti and Krishna Baldev Vaid, inspired by the intellectually stimulating surroundings of IIAS Shimla, enter into a significant dialogue on the intricacies of life and literature.
It is half a century since M.T. Vasudevan Nair—fondly called ‘M.T.’ by Malayalees—began his career as a novelist with his debut work Naalukettu. As OUP India now brings out its translation, Naalukettu: The House Around the Courtyard, it becomes a magnificent marker of M.T.’s literary jaitrayaatra (triumphal march) down the last five decades
I read Salma Ahmed’s book around the same time as I was reading the story of another Pakistani woman, Mukhtar Mai. The two stories, both about women battling against difficult odds, could not have been more different.
Street theatre in Delhi is synonymous with Safdar Hashmi. He was a gifted and committed artiste who spent his tragically short life in taking theatre to the workers and toilers, the poor and the dispossessed.
This is a difficult book to review. It is like reading an unfinished manuscript, a cluster of interesting but stray thoughts. Several of the pieces are no longer than a sentence or a paragraph.
2008
If poetry reconstructs space, re-configures time, and re-conditions language, M. Athar Tahir’s effort is yet another at doing all these with certain finesse and dexterity.
The blurb on the dust jacket of Ather Farouqui’s Redefining Urdu Politics in India makes a bold claim: ‘This volume breaks new ground on the issue of the Urdu language with the backdrop of language politics in the pre- and post-Partition eras.’
‘My years in the film industry were heady ones’. So said Ismat Chughtai. Having married Shahid Lateef from the film world in 1942, she gradually got inducted into the film domain herself and wrote scripts for several well-known Bombay films.
In Urdu poetry, the beloved has always been a bit of a mystery wrapped in an enigma. While the voice may be that of a lovelorn woman suffering from pangs of separation, a discontented concubine, or a young woman on the verge of marriage,
‘Manto Sahib’ to his intimate friends and simply ‘Manto’ to millions of his readers in India, Pakistan and elsewhere, Saadat Hasan Manto, the great maverick and an enigmatic literary giant, was undoubtedly different things to different people.
Crossing Over is the special issue of Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing and is devoted exclusively to Partition Literature from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. As the Introduction states, the work is addressed specifically to an American readership and more generally to English speaking readers.
‘Abortion’ is not only a biological but also a social phenomenon. Women’s experiences of abortion are often interpreted with cultural, ethical, moral or religious connotations. Though abortion became legal in India in 1971 and was later included in the Reproductive Child Health programme in the post-Cairo period, ‘abortion seeking’ continues to be a private act that set it apart from the health seeking practices for other reproductive or general health problems of women.