As a monk, tired of seeking the divine elsewhere, looks within and finds his way back, Sengupta follows a trail of breadcrumbs strewn in his path to move back to his cloister. If we see through the black humour in these poems, we will know the poet is weary in his critical gaze and all he needs is rest. But resting is possible only in the midst of nature, or specifically, in the tenderness of Bengal’s mud and grass.
Sen does a wonderful job at simultaneously being a feminist and a humanist. Her poems offer as much of an immersive experience into what it means to be a woman as they tap into the sorrows and longings common to all. My Body is Not a Vessel both provokes and consoles, and takes us out of ourselves while doing it.
2021
Sabitha Satchi’s debut poetry collection Hereafter surpasses all expectations from a first book. Hereafter is the work of a seasoned pen, with well-chiseled poems, backed with profundity of thought. The artwork in the book including the cover image is by the Kerala film maker and artist KM Madhusudhanan. Selections from Madhusudhanan’s ‘Oedipus Series’ separate the different sections in this poetry collection.
If you’re also caught up in the tug-of-war between the history of Mughals in India and of that of the Rajput kings stirred by current politics, Rajendran’s poetry of the French colonial past in Pondicherry will come as a great relief! The poetry collection which starts with over 30 poems stretched across a decade in Pondicherry, offers an insight into the lives of natives and colonials, couched in multilingual verses with heaps of historical references.
2022
Rarely does one come across a book that stirs up one’s curiosity and inspires one to explore the author’s entire corpus. An Arc in Time (2022) is Saleem Peeradina’s most recent and compelling gift to the literary world. Blessed with a multi-faceted personality, Peeradina dons many hats: writer, journalist, editor, painter, ethnographer, critic, and professor.
2022
Hawk and Hyena is a short memoir of Charles Sobhraj, the infamous serial killer, written by Farrukh Dhondy. Farrukh Dhondy is not an unfamiliar name in the literary, journalistic, television and film industries and he is known for his writings across several genres including biographies, children’s literature, novels, screenplays and more.
2023
Dark Rainbow, a debut novel by a young author, Naina Gupta, an Indian native who currently lives in Dubai, is a fantasy grounded in reality, loaded with humour and sarcasm. It delves into the psyche of the protagonist Ernaline Volkov, 16, as she wanders around the locales of New York city trying to unearth secrets about her mother, Dalia Volkov.
Here’s a question for you to mull over—why can’t elephants be red? Why not, indeed! Everything is possible in the multi-coloured fantasy world of a child.
In the wake of the Arab uprising in 2011, the West Asian region faces immense uncertainty due to the lack of a democratic structure, authoritarian rules, sectarian divisions, economic crisis, tribal and military polarization, and foreign state interventions. Being a rentier state, the region of West Asia experienced an immense geopolitical shift contesting the definition of regional power, especially between Saudi, Iran, Turkey, and others.
The discovery of tea in Assam and the growth of tea plantation as commercial commodity have added a new dimension in the socio-economic landscape of Assam. The establishment of the tea industry in Assam, in which the British had monopoly, reflected the imperial mastery over colonial land and its inhabitants. The new industrial setup by the British transformed not only the economy but altered the whole demography of Assam as shown by the biggest human migration in Indian history in search of labour for tea plantations.
V Murali is a veteran who has spent his entire career in manufacturing, dabbling across various roles, and mastering a critical few, which have shaped him into a leader with a proven track record of a string of successes in business. Here, in the book Hop on Hop off, which comes across as his professional journal, he shares the recipe of those successes, from which scores of manufacturing professionals can draw vital lessons on making a turnaround when necessary.
The irreversible entrapment of religion with terms like violence, brutality, offence, anger, fear, and censure instead with say, inquiry, beauty, prayer or tolerance is a paramount sign of our decayed condition. But resigned acquiescence is also not a mark of the academic enterprise. The very act of thinking and writing challenges admission.
Why is it that every Helen is an enigma? Homer’s, Marlowe’s, Bollywood’s? Does the letter H—drawn like a one-step ladder connecting nothing with nothing, or a bar in a passage between two walls—have something occult to do with it? Neither Menelaus nor Faustus could read his Helen. Both were doomed.
Aloka Parasher Sen’s latest collection brings together seven essays dealing with gender and religion, almost all of which were previously published, and have been revised for inclusion in this volume. Taken collectively, the volume is a three-pronged history of the intersections of gender and religion in local contexts. Parasher Sen’s stated intent is to trace how women subscribed to and broke out of the prescriptive norms that were laid out for them and to generally explore how religious ideas shaped gender relations in early India, while trying to bring in the particularities of local history in all this (p. xviii).
In the vicinity of walled-Delhi, or old Shahjahanabad, stands a school with a long, fraught and yet cherished history. The magnificence of the Anglo-Arabic School is amplified by the Indo-Persian architectural style of the mosque and buildings, and the astoundingly serene and sprawling campus within which it is housed.
In January 2023 the world of Indology lost Alf Hiltebeitel, prolific Mahabharata scholar who hewed new pathways through that thorny thicket to reveal fresh vistas of understanding. Freud’s India explored personal experiences following his father’s death and his own divorce that recalled Freud’s life and Freud’s connection with India through Dr. Girindrasekhar Bose (‘an extraordinary professor who had founded a local psychoanalytic group in Calcutta’—Freud, 1922). Bose sent Freud an icon of Vishnu seated on Ananta which he kept on his desk. This features as the cover.
Creating fiction, poetry and drama based on the Mahabharata, the Ramayana or the Puranas is a well-established tradition in Sanskrit and the Bhashas. Indian English novelists and poets have turned to reinterpretations of Hindu mythology in a big way only in the twenty-first century: the twentieth century had just a few writers, like KR Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo and TP Kailasam who attempted this. Christopher C Doyle has gone a step further; having studied the Mahabharata for fifteen years, he makes good use of incidents in the epic to build up his series of thrillers.
If feminism was a colour, we would all be colour blind. It is, by nature, a fiddly matter; one that people trip over, trying to understand. It is both an aesthetic and a burden for the modern world we live in; a jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece if you like. The metaphors are endless, like its many (mis)interpretations. Enter Yashika Singla. Colour corrected glasses in hand, theories tucked under her arm, ready to clear the fog around feminism—the word, its meaning, and its practice.
The Indian Parliament completed 71 years during April-May 2023. The study of the institution, which began soon after the publication of Parliament in India by WH Morris-Jones in 1957, a classic till today, is still a work in progress, as is Indian democracy. There have been authored studies and edited volumes on the Indian parliament with rich material.
The term ‘Saffron Terror’ was coined almost two decades ago in 2002 and gained popularity in 2007-2008. At times, terms like Hindu terrorism or Hindutva terror are also used instead, allegedly to describe acts of violence motivated by Hindu extremist nationalism. In all probability, the term comes from the symbolic use of the saffron colour by most of the temples in India and many Hindu nationalist organizations.