K. A. Nizami. Translated from the original Urdu by Ather Farouqui
The Urdu Department of Delhi University has a photo gallery on its website. In a 1966 photograph of the Department, taken during the inaugural Nizam lecture, Princess Esin and Prince Muffakham Jah of Hyderabad are seated. Between the newly married.
Avik Chanda
The legacy and the myths surrounding him have far outlived Dara Shukoh, inspiring historians of varied hues to reconstruct the unusual persona of a prince who could have been an emperor. A visionary thinker, a talented poet, a prolific writer, a theologian.
Chanchal Kumar Ghosh/Bidisha Banerjee
Two very different books on the incomparable river Ganga: one, linking the river to a cultural continuity threading centuries into the past; the other, seeking personal inspiration and civic lessons from stories of hope and despair encountered along the river.
Ritesh Joshi. Foreword by Raman Sukumar
The elephant in India is an iconic animal writ large in our experience, culture and civilization. Several books have been written about it for centuries and they can fairly fill a book cabinet. The present offering is by the author, an environmental scientist.
Colin R. Alexander
2019
Although Winston Churchill has often been projected, especially in recent times, as one sinister character behind the Bengal Famine of 1943 that wiped out over three million people, what role the members of the hallowed Indian Civil Service (ICS) played in anticipating.
Pradip Bhattacharya
We are so obsessed with the legitimacy (or not) of many Ramayanas that we tend to forget that the Mahabharata also appears in almost every Indian language, that it, too, inhabits highly localized cultures; that outside the Sanskrit text, its characters often.
Perumal Murugan
2020
As a writer, Perumal Murugan has a politics of his own. Readers of Murugan know that following the protest against his 2010-Tamil novel, Mathorubhagan (One Part Woman) he wrote his obituary in 2015 saying, Perumal Murugan, the writer, is dead.
Neela Bhagwat and Jerry Pinto
Self-identity and self-expression have never been very smooth for women, described by one of the translators of this volume of poems under review as ‘adi-dalit, the original broken, oppressed and silenced’ caste. When social, economic and linguistic norms.
Srikant Verma
2018
One of the challenges of translating an Indian text into English is the constant tussle between the ‘Indianness’ of the original and the ostensible foreignness of the English language. But what if a Hindi novel is translated in such a way that the English.
Jerry Pinto
‘The trouble with having everything so beautifully thought out is that if one link in the think chain snaps, you are left holding the loose ends with not half an idea between the ten of you about what to do.’ – Shanta Gokhale.
Nihshanka Debroy
2020
This debut novel offers a playful twist on the possible origins of chess. The narrative flips back and forth between the boardrooms of the 21st century and the battlefields of the 5th century. The protagonists are Ms Vinita Joshi.
Priya Balasubramanian
Reading Priya Balasubramanian’s The Alchemy of Secrets during Covid-19 pandemic left a strong afterthought. While fierce debates rage on if the deadly disease is airborne and if community level transmission is observed at places, I wonder if those questions.
Viswanathan Anand with Susan Ninan
2019
Bonn, 2008. Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik face each other in the World Chess Championship, a much-anticipated clash between two modern titans of the game. The episode serves as a suspenseful introduction to the autobiography of the five-time World Championship winner, Viswanathan Anand.
