It is half a century since M.T. Vasudevan Nair—fondly called ‘M.T.’ by Malayalees—began his career as a novelist with his debut work Naalukettu. As OUP India now brings out its translation, Naalukettu: The House Around the Courtyard, it becomes a magnificent marker of M.T.’s literary jaitrayaatra (triumphal march) down the last five decades
I read Salma Ahmed’s book around the same time as I was reading the story of another Pakistani woman, Mukhtar Mai. The two stories, both about women battling against difficult odds, could not have been more different.
Street theatre in Delhi is synonymous with Safdar Hashmi. He was a gifted and committed artiste who spent his tragically short life in taking theatre to the workers and toilers, the poor and the dispossessed.
This is a difficult book to review. It is like reading an unfinished manuscript, a cluster of interesting but stray thoughts. Several of the pieces are no longer than a sentence or a paragraph.
2008
If poetry reconstructs space, re-configures time, and re-conditions language, M. Athar Tahir’s effort is yet another at doing all these with certain finesse and dexterity.
The blurb on the dust jacket of Ather Farouqui’s Redefining Urdu Politics in India makes a bold claim: ‘This volume breaks new ground on the issue of the Urdu language with the backdrop of language politics in the pre- and post-Partition eras.’
‘My years in the film industry were heady ones’. So said Ismat Chughtai. Having married Shahid Lateef from the film world in 1942, she gradually got inducted into the film domain herself and wrote scripts for several well-known Bombay films.
In Urdu poetry, the beloved has always been a bit of a mystery wrapped in an enigma. While the voice may be that of a lovelorn woman suffering from pangs of separation, a discontented concubine, or a young woman on the verge of marriage,
‘Manto Sahib’ to his intimate friends and simply ‘Manto’ to millions of his readers in India, Pakistan and elsewhere, Saadat Hasan Manto, the great maverick and an enigmatic literary giant, was undoubtedly different things to different people.
Crossing Over is the special issue of Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing and is devoted exclusively to Partition Literature from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. As the Introduction states, the work is addressed specifically to an American readership and more generally to English speaking readers.
‘Abortion’ is not only a biological but also a social phenomenon. Women’s experiences of abortion are often interpreted with cultural, ethical, moral or religious connotations. Though abortion became legal in India in 1971 and was later included in the Reproductive Child Health programme in the post-Cairo period, ‘abortion seeking’ continues to be a private act that set it apart from the health seeking practices for other reproductive or general health problems of women.
Sociologist Anuja Agrawal’s book is an attempt to understand the ‘familial economy’ of the Bedia community in the light of the role that women play as both ‘chaste wives’ and ‘prostitute sisters.’ The de-notified community of the Bedias, though ‘numerically insignificant’ are found in large parts of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.
This collection of seven essays with a thought-provoking introduction broadly recreates the contesting terrains of gender, sexuality and women’s rights to property in the 19th and early 20th century of the colonial period in India.
The book deals with the magnitude of aging in five south Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal—the order in which they appear in this book).
A ground-breaking attempt has been made to capture the dynamics of community-based natural resources management and related issues, particularly the non-governmental organization (NGO) driven developmental initiatives in this area.
Festivals like Gokulashtami, Ganeshotsav, Navratri and Mohurram are an integral part of Bombay’s social calendar. They have been and continue to be intricately connected with the city’s politics.
Elements of Spacemaking describes the grammar and vocabulary of ‘reading’ architecture and urban spaces. The language of spacemaking is not commonly understood in our society, not even among the intelligentsia. Its role in producing better living environments is therefore, not easy to appreciate.
Education of women is accepted today as a basic human right and a crucial input for national development. Apart from its intrinsic worth, women’s education has powerful instrumental value for bringing about economic growth and social change.
The relationship between China and Pakistan, as the editor of China-Pakistan Strategic Cooperation: Indian Perspectives quite aptly states at the very beginning of his Preface, remains one of the most serious challenges for Indian policy makers.
Maoist Spring Thunder is a detailed account and analysis of the momentous events, which made not only the West Bengal Administration but also the whole country sit up and think about the ruthless manner in which violent means were resorted to get the demands for land reforms and distribution of land among the have-nots in West Bengal.