Recognized as the first original memoir in Hindi, Apni Khabar spans half a century of its authors engagement with the contemporary socio- polity from the vantage point of the problematic of his ‘writings.’
The epigraph by Nathaniel Hawthorne sets the tone of this new short story collection by Jhumpa Lahiri; for human nature to flourish, it must have other birthplaces and strike roots in ‘Unaccustomed Earth’. Lahiri’s collection of short stories falls into two parts.
There’s a certain kind of writer who should be allowed to grow old only if he promises to do it disgracefully. Many of Hanif Kureishi’s fans would argue that he belongs to this group,
2008
M. Mukundan is one of those fiction-writers in India, who, writing in his mother-tongue Malayalam set out to liberate contemporary fiction from the tyranny of the social, the outward, the eventful and to connect it with the existential, the inward, the less audible rhythms of living.
2008
Ameen Merchant’s debut novel gently tugs at the reader’s heartstrings, stirring one’s compassion for the two sisters torn apart by varying compulsions that engulf their life in a middle class agraharam (Brahmins’ colony) in a provincial town in Tamil Nadu.
This volume comprises essays that Meenakshi Mukherjee, one of the most respected literary critics of our time, wrote for special occasions, some of them lectures delivered at different places.
Prest Futures presents a thought-provoking ethnography of village life in Rawain (western Garhwal), a region that originated, and was affected and influenced by the Chipko movement.
It is unusual for a book which is itself a ‘Review’ to be reviewed by a person with an evident bias in the subject. It is better therefore that the bias is brought up front before readers draw their own conclusions. The reviewer was connected with the formulation of the first notification in 1994 under the Environment Protection Act.
The author of this book is a highly respected figure, who, as the blurb tells us, has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in academia and in the field of international development. Given the vast knowledge and wide-ranging experience that have gone into the making of the book,
Let me start this review with a confession: I loved this book. The challenge of writing this review is to write without gushing.
Sri Lanka in the Modern Age sets out to be a different kind of Sri Lankan history; one in which a broad brush-strokes, largely top-down, linear narrative is transformed into an amazing account of human experiences of change—from shoes and sarongs to ways of learning to turf-battles in the corridors of power.
Secularism and communalism have long been a staple of Indian politics, certainly after Independence, and have been fiercely debated in recent times with the rise of a variety of fundamentalisms and accusations of “minority appeasement”.
It is perhaps due to its ubiquity and our effortless access to popular visual culture in every day life that the ‘critical distance’ necessary to facilitate analysis of the field remains deficient. Popular culture in India characteristically presents itself in infinite,
2008
The popular print-pictures of late 19th and 20th century India have become the subject of a booming publishing industry.
Relief and pleasure should greet the work of Rochelle Pinto in the area of Goan studies. Finally we have serious academic research being published and reviewed by mainstream publishers and periodicals.
Master of Life Skills, a first novel by Vijay Nair, an organization consultant, could not have been better timed. The present day urban landscape is replete with stories of battered lives seeking solutions through ‘process work’, ‘personal growth programmes’ etc.,
In his book Redefining Urdu Politics in India (OUP, 2007), Ather Farouqui raised some very pertinent questions regarding the past, present and future of Urdu language in India.
Technology has taken over both the methods of warfare and its representations, and the human body, the victim of war’s cruelty, has been effaced from our perceptions of armed combats in recent times.
2008
Love and Samsara is a historical novel set in the sixteenth century. It explores the consequences of the discovery by Vasco da Gama of the sea route from Europe to India.The importance of this discovery has been a subject of revision since the fifties; the quinquennial celebrations of his landing in Calicut were deemed politically incorrect and had to be abandoned.
2008
Ever since he arrived on the literary scene in the second half of the nineteenth century, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee has never been out of the news, for the right or wrong reasons.
When Marx wrote Das Kapital, he theorized about the social relationships involved in the act of production of commodities under capitalism. But what happens when the commodities being produced are strictly speaking not of a material nature—for instance, what happens when stories are produced? Walter Benjamin addressed this question in one of his most brilliant essays, ‘Author as Producer’.