Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

If one goes by the deluge of WhatsApp videos, Tulsishyam in Gujarat beholds a mysterious power. Things seem to roll uphill, defying gravity and our common sense. Vehicles, with the engine switched off and placed in neutral, on their own roll uphill. From mystifying ‘anti-gravity’ to magnetic or gravitational anomalies…

Acollection of short stories by Gaurishankar Govardhanram Joshi, popularly known by his pseudonym ‘Dhumketu’, one of the most significant and prolific writers in the history of Gujarati literature, translated into English is certainly a cause for celebration.  It is important because without such an initiative…

Greg Salyer (2017), in his lecture ‘Myth and Hinduism’, attempts to create an archeology of myth by defining it at three levels. Firstly, he understands ‘myth’ (in the lowercase) as a false story. In popular culture, especially in social media, we perhaps use it the most. The often-used phrase ‘myth-busting’ covers some aspects of this definition…

Aravind Malagatti is a prolific Kannada writer with more than seventy books to his credit, covering a wide range of genres. His Government Brahmana, the first Dalit autobiography in Kannada (1994) and brought out in English under the same title (2007), received wide acclaim for its sensitive and nuanced account of Dalit life…

In recent years, several translations of Bhyrappa’s novels have appeared in English making these available to non-vernacular readership.  This spate of translations rectifies to a degree Bhyrappa’s relative lack of visibility outside the Kannada speaking world, so different from the more expansive trajectory of international repute traced by UR Ananthamurthy’s fictional works…

Karisal (black soil) literature is a facet of Tamil literature which encompasses soil-related dialectical literatures of several regions within Tamil Nadu. The southernmost part of the State made up of Nellai, Thoothukudi, Virudunagar, Theni, Madurai and Ramanathapuram districts reflect in their literature—an offspring of the Karisa, the rawness that is typical of the rural lives…

Gloria Steinem once said, ‘We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.’ In a way, Neela Padmanabhan’s Generations is a response to this aspect of crossing and building new knowledges. The story bridges tradition and modernity as it chronicles…

T Janakiraman’s novel The Crimson Hibiscus is, at one level, the story of an ordinary man prematurely burdened by duties and responsibilities. Equally though, it is the story of an entire era and of that complex eco-system called the joint family. This sensitively translated, beautifully produced novel..

The Tamil Brahmin community has for me been an enigma, mainly because of their rites and rituals that begin or close any event of everyday life. The rich symbolism in lifestyle patterns, the pragmatically intelligent womenfolk, the shrewd menfolk and the sharp children have always piqued…

‘Did he live? Did he die? Was it a search? Or a hunt? When she set him free, did she also succeed in setting herself free?’ In this eclectic collection of thirteen short stories, Ambai’s characters pose existential questions that are intriguing, even disturbing, because they defy mundane answers…

When Prema gets married, little does she know that she will have to toil endlessly and live like a tongue-tied prisoner, listening to the same litany of complaints from her husband every day. Pummelled for three years and ten days, she eventually walks out of her abusive marriage, securing ‘freedom with costs’…

Pain knows no language, but languages do know pain. As first Malayalam and then English lend their scripts to narrate the violence and intensity of a Santhali woman’s pain; out of these narrations are born the images of those whose wounds make languages crumble and words shrink in impoverishment…

It is generally agreed that translation is an act of moving a text from one language to another. Those who have reflected critically on the processes of translation, like John Dryden (1631–1700), concur with this basic definition. Complicating this, possibly in the late eighteenth century England…

Words are like human beings. Behind every living word there are many dead words.’Theeyoor Chronicles  deals primarily with the resilience of human beings in different situations to a certain extent and those who seek refuge in death when they are unable to do so…

Kadambari: The Flower Girl  by Sethu is a work that surprised me on two primary counts. The first is that it is a self-translation, perhaps Sethu’s first attempt. It was originally published in Malayalam as Aaramathe Penkutty (2006). Self-translations are rarely attempted in Malayalam…

The last couple of years have seen a quantum leap in terms of the sheer number and range of books being translated from Indian regional languages into English. While there has been a healthy market for bhasha translations of English works, the process

Letters to Jorina is a collection of eleven letters written by Alok Das, a University Professor from Odisha, to his woman friend Jorina McCarthy, a Guyanese settled in England. The book records Alok’s observations and reflections on home and abroad…

This is one of those books that puts a reviewer in a dilemma. It is so promi­sing in its design and intent that one is tempted to characterize it as a near clas­sic, but in its execution it leaves one dissatisfied. Of course, to say this is not to criticize the book, but merely to sug­gest the level that the book could have attained…

Writers are not known to have taken to Pills, not yet. In any case, since males dominate the world of writing, prolife­ration of books cannot be stopped by any known oral contraceptives. Prolife­ration of books is certainly better than proliferation of weapons and conflicts. All books are not as stale as airlines food…

To give the essays in this collection a unifying theme, the editor raises what is perhaps the most interesting question about…