Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

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.

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.