No matter how old you are, if you are from India, you can probably recall the first time you heard the story of Rama. The memory could be your grandmother’s voice in a room lit only by a lamp, or a book such as Rajagopalachari’s rendition or the pictures in the Amar Chitra Katha or the televised version. Every Indian household has children who have grown up on the telling of the Ramayana.
At the end of the book, Iyengar singles out one person from among the publishing staff for special thanks for having encouraged him to switch from ‘myth-fiction’ to historical fiction. All those who read this novel and are familiar with Iyengar’s earlier work will want to do that after reading this book. Without going into details, this switch has made the book easier to read, less laboured than his earlier work.
Anjum Hasan is exceptional. The imagery in her stories comes at you so fast that you gasp as you try to absorb it all—and every image is familiar—but in her stories they become poetry: ‘The phrase that comes to mind is–bursting into life. But spring is a gradual unfolding: day-by-day colour seeps back into the land, expressed in crocuses of lilac and gold. The oaks will fatten with leaves by slow degrees. Will they burst into life? Will the buds on the apple trees?’
2018
Somewhere hidden in the labyrinth of memory you can hear the lonely whistle of a train crossing the dark expanse of the Indian subcontinent. It is often reminiscent of the cry of those djinns that you have been warned will suddenly appear on your doorstep. They chitter and grind their teeth with rage as the train rocks uneasily along a steel bridge over a swollen river.
This is a very unusual book. But then, a novel written by a poet needs to be so. At one level, it is undoubtedly ‘Letters to Mama’… as the title says. The voice is that of Seema Thakur Singh, a journalist and an idealist speaking through a series of letters to her much loved but long-lost mother about the travails of living through the Emergency and the dismay of her bureaucrat husband.
2018
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) remains the enfant terrible of English literature if not an outright villain, for he is routinely castigated for his blatant championing of British imperialism. He remains phenomenally popular as a writer, his sheer political incorrectness notwithstanding. His poem ‘If –’, which is stoical rather than jingoistic, regularly comes out tops in opinion polls conducted in Britain to decide the most popular poem in the language.