Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

On the whole, this anthology offers a good sampling of Nigah’s poetry insofar as it touches upon many significant aspects of her poetic vision. A good number of poems also dwell on the theme of aging and its attendant issues of neglect and loneliness. While the inevitability of the ageing process is acknowledged and its losses and gains accepted (‘Ab to Lagta hai Kuch Aise’), Nigah also calls out the hypocrisy of ‘cultured people’ who mouth the Islamic belief that Heaven exists beneath the feet of their mothers but in fact are indifferent to them (‘Ek Sacchi Ma ki Kahani’).

Certain geographical and location settings, such as the city of Calcutta, Jadavpur, a railway station amongst other surrounding areas, give life to the narrative, and the divisions within these spaces reveal how a person’s identity is shaped by the environment they inhabit. Translated by V Ramaswamy, the book flows effortlessly, with the language leaping off the pages, drawing readers into the underbelly of what it means to be displaced and without a firm foothold in an ever-changing world.

A book subtitled ‘Remarkable Short Fiction’ will surely include the great storytellers: Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand, Kuvempu, RK Narayan, Bhisham Sahni, Krishna Sobti, Mahasweta Devi, Vijaydan Detha, Ajeet Cour, Damodar Mauzo, Paul Zacharia and Bama, among others.

Chibo’s quiet landscape and calm rural environment enables an emotional honesty that is often crowded out in the clamour of urban spaces. This distance is critical for Kotoko, who moves away from the commotion of the big city to this curative space, unaware as yet that the pain she carries within her can gradually be healed. The kitchen, located on a secluded stretch of the seashore, is a gentle, comforting place where the dead appear quietly, without fanfare, in a fleeting blur of space and time, stepping back into life for a few moments to connect with a loved one over a ritual meal.

Firefly Games captures the various facets of Bengali culture, both in erstwhile Calcutta and of Bengalis in exile in the heart of India in the States of Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand. The intricacies of growing up, friendships and heartbreaks, corruption in government offices, relations between parents and their off-spring—Chakraborty touches on these themes and more.

The plot is woven around four main characters: Aurobindo, Manorama, Brajarani and Ajit. Aurobindo’s sister Saratsashi also plays an important part in the web of relationships among these characters, but is not directly affected by their fortunes, whereas the four main characters are affected by each other’s actions. Of course, the person whose character and power drives the plot dies when the narrative begins, but the shadow that he casts on the future course of action never disappears. He is Aurobindo’s father, who decrees that his legatee, Aurobindo, expel his wife Manorama and son, Ajit, and marry a second woman, Brajarani, the daughter of a rich man on account of his social prestige and a handsome dowry that she will bring. Manorama’s father belonged to a lower social class and could not afford any worthwhile dowry.

Interestingly, in the novel, some of the ‘abnormal’ characters say more logical things than the ‘intellectuals’, who are guided by an unbridled desire to consume things offered by the market. Though these individuals are psychic patients in the eyes of ‘mainstream’ society, they uncover the truth behind the normal and efficiently working market system. One character, for example, underlines the absence of dreams in his life, and questions those who laugh at him: ‘I don’t have any dream left, you know. I haven’t had a dream in months.

Indian towns and urbanism (by Helen Millar and AG Krishna Menon) is a synoptic view of colonial planning in the city of Calcutta (Partho Datta). Ranjeeta Dutta takes us back to the early modern Srirangam, via a text called the ‘Koil Olugu’ (‘The Koil Olugu and Srirangam in the Tamil Region’), more properly a temple history. Other accounts of pre-colonial cities and urbanisms include a discussion of Agra (Shailaja Kathuria), Jalandhar (Indu Banga) and a comparison of Calcutta and Delhi (Atiya Habeeb Kidwai).

Historical scholarship on Kutch is rather scanty. Although some aspects of the history of the region in the modern period have received the attention of scholars, there is hardly any work that deals with the colonial and postcolonial period as a whole. The colonial administrator LF Rushbrook Williams who held several important positions in the bureaucracy, and also wrote on historical subjects, penned a book on Kutch titled The Black Hills: Kutch in History and Legend which was published in 1958 shortly after the erstwhile State became part of Bombay Province in Independent India.

Piecing together evidence from their memoirs, newspapers, various journals and magazines, advertisements, burial records, building histories and street directories, the author has woven the tales of figures like Harry Hobbs, the piano tuner, raconteur and businessman; Robert Reid, the police detective; and Shirley Tremearne, ‘Law Officer—Media Moghul—Businessman in Kolkata’. The life-stories of Henry Thoby Prinsep reveal the issue of slavery and indentured labour in the city. Another figure, the American civil war hero,

In the book we get to encounter many forms of Māra and many Buddhism(s) in vast temporality and diverse spatial contexts. The author proposes three features of Māra in this long history—didactic, demonizing and shapeshifting. In any given context the figure has been instrumental in communicating didactic messages of Buddhism (in plural) and to corner or criticize the other thoughts contrary to the vision of the tradition by labelling them as Māra or evil.

For the Indian Government, he says, the challenges are to accommodate the unique identity of the Kashmiris (one might justifiably ask: don’t the people of every Indian State have their own unique identity?) and make them renounce anti-India sentiments of their own volition. A ‘serious dialogue’, ‘consultation’ would be a start.

The main theme of the book is how the broad features of Islamic tradition reconfigured by the historical particularities of modernity are martialized in specific practices of Dawat (p. 19). The book elaborates the importance that the Tablighi Jamaat attaches to the ritual practice of Dawat to create a cohesive Islamic society.

VOur two countries have the ability and responsibility to ensure that it broadens yet further and to nurture and enrich these seas to become of clearest transparence.’ In his speech, the Prime Minister also alluded to Swami Vivekananda, describing him as a Renaissance man ahead of his time, and to the enduring contributions of Justice Radhabinod Pal for his dissenting judgement in the Tokyo trial after the Second World War.

A second, and more ominous, outcome of colonization was its propensity to create and control the minds and histories of the colonized. The development of archaeology under state sponsorship in the 19th and 20th centuries and the monumentalizing of heritage played a significant role in this process by documenting and categorizing archaeological sites and monuments, creating thereby monolithic identities for Hindu and Buddhist monuments in India and Southeast Asia. However, a striking aspect of the recent archaeological data is the emphasis on local and regional diversity, whether in the context of Buddhism, the Hindu temple, or inscriptions.

One of the ten Asia lectures, for instance, deals with ‘Fundamentals of Islam and Islamic Fundamentalism’. In fifteen pages, the author has masterfully summarized the contentious issues, contextualizing them against the currents of history with an unerring commitment to details.

Some readers are likely to be familiar with all the events painstakingly chronicled by the author. However, in an era of alarmingly low news consumption, this book performs an admirable function of effectively reminding and explaining to all readers why and how Indian democracy has been on trial over the past decade or so.

Unfortunately, the book doesn’t explore how societies can reliably identify and appoint individuals who embody these judicial ideals. The appointment of judges is a crucial issue in many democracies—including India—and a more in-depth discussion on institutional mechanisms for judicial selection would have strengthened the work.

Through her field study and narratives in bhajan ashrams and temples in Nabadwip, the ‘city of widows’ (p. 29), Nilanjana Goswami explores the position of women amidst the exclusionary nature of religious practices as also the commingling of religion and politics, demonstrated through the presence of framed photos of local ministers and MLAs (Members of Legislative Assembly) in the bhajan ashrams.

However, one must point out that, a) the research focus on only ‘software professionals’ can be critiqued on the ground that it cannot be considered as representative of a much larger and a heterogeneous new middle class, as the author herself observes, which is not confined to urban metropolitan India, nestled in gated communities/SEZ or EPZ; b) the author needed to explain the shift in the cultural and political agenda of the new middle class in more detail.