Sumati Ramaswamy has written a brilliant book. It has a breathtaking sweep and a pace that is most unusual for a scholarly work. The book is about Lemuria – a lost place from a lost time. Human preoccupations with lost continents look back as well as forward.
“But life itself is poetry; it is the most living poetry, and with us there are no clear limits between life and poetry.” So says To Huu, the poet of modern Vietnam, in one of the interviews with which this slender volume of selections from his poetry are interspersed—interviews in which he speaks about his life,
Written by Stuart Gillespie and Lawrence J. Haddad of the International Food Policy Research Institute and published in the year 2003, this book attempts to deal with a major problem of “the double burden of malnutrition in Asia’. The publishers have made a genuine attempt to make it accessibile by pricing it at Rs. 235.00, a level almost unknown for academic publications these days.
The universe in a basekt: that’s what one would love to call this beautifully done up anthology of interviews, snippets, snapshots, chit-chat, profiles, psychic flow charts of seven Indo-English writers of eminence: Shashi Deshpande, Shama Futehally, Gita Hariharan, Anuradha Marwah Roy, Mina Singh, Lakshmi Kannan and Anna Sujatha Mathai.
Looking In, Looking Out, Shanta Acharya’s third poetry collection, houses fifty-two poems, representing work over a decade. Most of these poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, internationally. The title defines the theme of the collection — the poet and her environment.
2006
These two volumes of poetry need to be noticed for more than one reason. This is perhaps the first time that the Sahitya Akademi has published English writings. This is truly welcome in poetry, where even established poets struggle to find publishers.
Isabel Dalhousie is the literary descendant of Emma Woodhouse in Jane Austen’s eponymous novel. Like Miss Woodhouse, Miss Dalhousie is a lady of comfortable means, solidly upper middle class and with an interest in people which the uncharitable would say borders on the “meddlesome”. But there the comparison ends.
2006
Being fungible is a key trait of today’s highfliers, in the arena of job profile at least. Don’t we love to rant about sportsmen, particularly cricketers, delving into the realm of Bollywood when they appear in commercials and even TV serials and films? But what about Bollywood actors delving into the realm of sports,
2006
Anita Nair’s new novel is a book on relationships, told in many voices, going back and forth in time, across continents. It is a book which deals with infatuations and obsessions across the gulfs of religion, marriage, legitimacy and conventions.
Now here’s a bold book that attempts to bring together in its leaves three literary giants whose writings belong to three entirely different genres. No mean task this, considering also that the gentlemen were not contemporaries, despite being very nearly so. Charles Dickens is widely regarded as first and foremost a storyteller, and that was how the contemporary public viewed him.
Iam tempted to describe Nangatalai ka Gaon by Vishwanath Tripathi as one of the most challenging literary works that I have ever read. It is also intriguing and complex, primarily because the writer uses a highly sophisticated genre to express his life and times. He describes the work as Smriti-Akhyan, which could translate as ‘remembered narrative’ or more enigmatically, and more interestingly too, as ‘a legend of memory.’ This literary work, which defies categorization and definition,
2006
Perhaps the most pertinent question one can ask about a memoir is whether the author has made the person or period s/he wishes to evoke relevant to readers. In Two Lives the persons concerned are Vikram Seth’s maternal granduncle Shanti and his German-Jewish wife Henny who met in Berlin when Shanti boarded as a student at her home,
While fiction, autobiography and poetry by Indian women have received considerable critical attention in recent years, women’s drama has remained a relatively neglected area. Staging Resistance seeks to redress this lacuna, foregrounding the contribution of women playwrights to the development of a subversive “womanist dramaturgy” in India.
2006
Madhavi, the daughter of Yayati has intrigued writers over the decades. There have been novels, plays, short stories in many Indian languages focussing on her fate. The tale of Yayati’s gifting away of his daughter to Galav who asks her to bed three kings and his Guru so that he may fulfil his vow to offer appropriate Guru dakshina has,
This slim volume is a significant expression of concern for the future of minority languages and the attendant cultural casualties in the age of electronic communication. The author, who is one of the foremost authorities on the English language today, also watches the direction and profile of English as a global language,
Travel literature has all along remained a relatively neglected sub-genre, at least, in the realm of literary studies. Perhaps, it would have continued to be so, had it not been for the aggressive, militant postures of the postcolonial theorists.
The Autobiography of An Indian Indentured Labourer by Munshi Rahman Khan is a volume that is the English translation of the autobiography of a first generation indentured worker who migrated from Uttar Pradesh in India to Dutch Surinam in Latin America. He left India in 1898 at the age of twenty-four and died in Surinam in 1972,
This is the first of four large volumes, chronologically arranged, that detail major aspects of the life and times of Allan Octavian Hume; he is better known to students of Indian history as the founder and general secretary of the Indian National Congress between 1885 and 1894.
2006
As students of early Indian history know only too well, the Aryan question just refuses to go away. It remains the subject of conversation in middle-class homes, and, in the last decade or so, has been the theme of stormy academic (and not-so-academic) debates. It is in this context that this volume in the Oxford University Press Debates series is most welcome.
This book is aimed at the very heart of belief in the modern world: the ineluctable faith in economic growth. The idea of progress tied to inexhaustible desire and the unrelenting quest for want driven development have, in concert, become elements central to the globalizing economy. In the media generated imagination, a rising stock market, increasing exports,