Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Mendonca’s memoir unfolds the joys of having an eminent poet as one’s father, and at the same time, the unhappiness of growing up in a broken family. She remarks that he was overjoyed at her birth and called her his ‘best poem’. He named her ‘Kavita’, which means ‘poem’ in Hindi. According to Mendonca, he was a loving father to his three children, two daughters and a son—Kavita, Kalpana and Elkana.

Like Ted Hughes, Daruwalla draws our attention to the natural habitat, an earth that is home for birds and animals, plants and rocks. ‘Winter Migration’ has images of ‘dall sheep’, ‘rust-coloured rocks’, ‘dwarf birch’, ‘antlers’; ‘wolves’, ‘bear’, and ‘the Arctic tern’, ‘the marmot’ and ‘the squirrel’ wake up and move, or decide not to leave. The story of the ‘Alaskan Bear named Sky’ in the poem ‘Mother Bear’ brings alive the instinct of motherhood and responsibilities associated with it. The mother protects and nurtures her young cubs with much love and caution.

The poetry collection by Vinay Sharma moves deeper into an inner terrain. The idea of change is not driven by external factors alone, but by the dissolving of the inner boundaries. The slipping of selves happens so fluidly in this moving, shape-shifting book that I now hold in my hands. It becomes difficult, almost impossible to pin these poems down, for time and space seem to have no fixed hold over the words that inhabit these pages.

While my novel will survive this onslaught (glorious endorsements, remember?), what shocks me is the type of critical analysis the piece is emblematic of–it felt like a personal attack rather than a rational debunking of the novel’s premise, its characters, etc.

Though short, her observations are penetrating and, at the same time, insightful. A case in point is an entry from 3 January 1947, in which she describes her visit (along with Gandhi and others) to a Harijan locality, named Namasudra. She describes this visit thus: ‘In the forenoon we went to visit the Harijan locality—they are called Namasudra—here. The inhumanity perpetrated on them makes one quiver’ (emphasis mine).

The memoir is spread in five sections, namely ‘Fire’, ‘Threads’, ‘Flowers’, ‘Air’ and ‘Water’, which are indicative of violence’s contamination of the most basic elements of the everyday. The section titled ‘Fire’ tells us about her association with fire in the train burning, and the burning of the Gulbarg society, which saw the killing of Ahsan Jafri and Bilkis Bano’s gang rape. The chapter discusses violence that is personalized through its effect on the hearing body and writing body, in this case, the narrator, and her attempts to formalize an affective intimate public sphere to form an affective community. She writes, ‘When I hear the story of the night Bano spent in the forest, I will think often about Bano’s body

Despite securing prestigious opportunities to study abroad, Heredia was confronted with personal sacrifice, as he was unable to attend his father’s funeral while in Chicago. He pays tribute to the influential Jesuits who shaped his journey, including Fr. Joseph Neuner, Fr.
George Soares, Fr. Jose Ugarte and Fr.

The memoir is set out in eight parts and begins with life on the family’s remote island home on Katakhali. A lack of infrastructure—safe drinking water, electricity, sanitation, roads, schools, housing, etc.—compounded by natural calamities made life hard for the people living here. Moreover, accessing basic amenities such as education beyond primary school or even medical assistance required crossing the turbulent Agunmukha which regularly claimed lives.

The Loharu family as ‘the Habsburgs of north India’, whose network of alliances enabled them to be successful in their quest for social, cultural and political advancement is described in chapter five. This first part of the chapter provides details of the matrimonial alliances forged between the Loharu family and other Muslim princes in different corners of India.

An even more disappointing presence, though sparse, is of the female characters. While they are hardly a part of the narrative, whenever they do appear, they seem to be objects of desire or cunning plotters hungry for power through their male counterparts.
‘The nautanki-wali’s breasts showed dark and bulbous beneath the thin pink silk of the baju. Rohidas, who could not tear his eyes away, recognized them at last for large purple brinjals,

Further, in the overarching context of the structural relations of modes of production, Baruah introduces three distinct cultural forms/windows—memoirs, ballads and world views—and their articulations by the respective figures of the hunter, the peasant and the rebel to draw attention to, as mentioned earlier, the combined nature of the underlying structure of colonialism in Assam.

As far as the Indian Paralympics is concerned, the story of country’s glorious sons and daughters resembles the socio-economic milieu of the country. The book provides a vivid description of the social background of the athletes, their rationale for choosing para sports, the physical and the emotional struggles they underwent during the course of their career. More than physical strength, it was the willpower of the para-athletes which makes their story enthralling.

Justice and fairness are ideals that are core to the life and generational memory of the Tamil people. Powerful historical incidents of rulers who have strongly dispensed justice, or even those who have failed to do so, are ingrained in the minds of Tamil people. There is King Manuneedhi Konda Cholan (250 BCE), who punishes his son upon realizing that his chariot wheel had killed a calf.

Nathaniel Edward Kindersley (1763-1831), employed by the East Indian Company’s civil service at Madras, promoted to be the collector of South Arcot later, made a small but significant contribution to Tamil studies by translating certain sections of Thirukkural, presenting it as secular literature, and the story of Nalan with explanatory notes;

In their Foreword, Thamizhacchi Thangapandian states there is no fullness in the writings by men because they don’t have subtlety in showing the pain, agony and mental stress of women while Jayanthi Shankar calls for a similar record in all languages to show how feminism has evolved as a philosophy.

Another important aspect weaved into the novel is of the skewed gender relations between the mother and father. Gender stereotypes are highlighted as the narrator’s father talks sharply with the mother, makes fun of her family and has a sense of entitlement when it comes to her brother. Amma too would scream at him and is suspicious of his generous attitude especially with respect to women—‘He never told her anything about the rice mill, to whom he had given a loan, from whom he had borrowed—nothing…Just as he never told her what he was doing, he did not ask her what she was doing.’

The poor, itinerant lives of the bards are a literal metaphor for the intimacy and alienation that characterizes human lives, of especially those who are dependent on others for their own survival. For Kolumban’s family, the conflict between sharing a life of poverty with loved ones and leading a lonely life of relative comfort in a foreign land is partially resolved by their passing intimacies with other communities they encounter on their journey.

The title story, ‘The Phantom’s Howl’ is in a different sub-genre of ghostly tales. In the trope of a lost traveller being given night shelter in a haunted mansion, certain hair-raising details may be expected but here the violence is blood curdling and almost kills the protagonist. The savage ghouls, denied rightful revenge, continue their search for victims and some living beings succumb to their macabre attack.

Sandipan’s roots reach into the avant-garde, cultural-literary Hungryalist Movement of Bengal initiated in the early decades of the 1960s. This was a distinct impetus to uproot conventional ways of looking at themes, especially those of love and desire. The opening story, ‘With Ruby in Diamond Harbour’, engages with Arun’s extra-marital affair summarized by himself for his wife, Ranu, whose face turns ‘pale as a seashell’, her expression frozen. Yet the one-night stint happens thereafter and ‘Ruby keeps talking.

The most common thread in this collection is of the highly suspicious nature of men regarding their wives or girlfriends, of whom they are never sure, sometimes rightfully, many times because of their lack of confidence in their own attractiveness. ‘Yet Again’, ‘Chance’ and ‘God’s Good Man’ are three such illustrative stories. Destroying domestic harmony, fragile male ego plays havoc in couples’ relationships. ‘You have poison in your gaze,’ (p. 17) aptly summarizes Leena, the wife in ‘Yet Again’.