Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The Bengali intellectual displays this immense appetite for knowledge, and it does not matter where it came from. Whether it is Badal Sircar or Kunal Basu or Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, they are not afraid of looking far and wide to grasp, and even grab, ways of seeing and ways of writing. But this is overlaid on a deep Bengaliness. And that saves them in many instances from being blown off their feet.

The genesis of the book lies in Subramaniam’s stint as a teacher at CalArts, during which he felt the need for a ‘handy guide of music theory’ potentially useful to ‘a practical musician and a composer’ (p. 1). This led to the authors collaborating on a work initially titled Euphony, of which the book being reviewed here is an extensively revised edition. The authors’ backgrounds attest to their formidable grasp over three distinct forms of music, namely the Hindustani, Carnatic, and Western classical systems.

But a complex formal puzzle is announced in the Author’s Note: ‘The chapters in this book are marked with a number and an alphabet. The alphabet marks its own absence in the chapter whereas the number is a more conventional ordering. And in embarking on this book, you are invited to follow either the numbers or alphabets and you will stilll be reading the same book…’

Suman Nath, Riziya, and Tahirul, are all sensitive, intelligent, and thinking individuals who are victims of the social structures that they question but fail to surpass. Religion is not a matter of spiritual sublimation, as Riziya and Suman would like to believe, or a matter of juridical authority, as Tahirul would like to believe. It is twisted and deployed for politically motivated ends by the residents of Sadnahati.

After this delusory incident for the first time nobody notices the change in Pauloma’s behaviour and however much she tries to confess to her husband that there was another world in the vessels, no one really cares about her irrational beliefs. Soon she is drawn to the storeroom once again and now she is transported to Cairo in Egypt where she lives as Princess Rabiya Abdi. Set during the period of the cultural revolution in Egypt during the 1950s, Rabiya is exposed to another world when her husband brings in an outsider, a bohemian painter from London, to draw her portrait.

Rohini, Malini, Malathi and Paatti are as shackled by their own upbringing and values instilled in them since childhood as they are buffeted by the winds of change and an awareness of what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal set up. There is no doubt that the ‘times they are a-changin’ as Bob Dylan sang. Yet there is a sluggishness with which it does exact a heavy price on women, leading to mental imbalance, loss and despair.

‘Rajmao: The Queen Mother’ traces the journey of Komola whose motherhood confers on her the identity of being Purobi’s mother, and it is in the attempt to fulfil her duties as a mother that she attains the grandiose name of Rajmao but only after paying a terrible price for it. ‘By the Clock’ introduces us to Ghori-Koka-Aita and the tyranny of the grandfather’s clock which becomes a metonym for the authoritarian presence of her husband.

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.