Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

This book is a collection of 25 short stories written by their grandchildren about their Indian grandmothers who were born around 1900. The stories are written based on the memories that these grandchildren had about their grandmothers and what they had heard about them from other members of the family.

Rajinder Singh Bedi is a renowned writer, this story of his has won him the coveted Sahitya Akademi Award as well as been filmed. The translation is done by another eminent writer Khushwant Singh.

Hartley House, Calcutta is one of the earliest British novels of India and its depiction of expariate life during the early years of colonial presence in India is all the more remarkable for having been written by someone who had, possibly, never set foot in the country.

As a ‘text’ Meera has undergone continuous mutation with time; she has virtually been rendered into a discursive palimpsest. The exigencies of nationalism—the need of legitimacy, authenticity and a consequent search for native nationalistic roots—necessitated the appropriation of Meera as an icon of/for secular/spiritual India; she became an integral sub-text of passive, semi-spiritualized struggle against the colonialists.

Just when one had thought that the magic of the nation state was beginning to be superseded, in Indian academia, by the glamour and increasing relevance of empire in the new millennium—following not only from Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) or Nicholas Dirks’s Scandal of Empire (2004),

One may have heard most of it before, even seen most of it before, but this attempt to track the highlights of the non-fiction film in India is very valuable—both as a record of developments that have taken place as well as the future of the genre in the time of television.