It is difficult to review this book, as the smooth writing tempts you to pause and ruminate on techniques used, which inspires you to attempt a few pieces. Nikita Parik’s poems are lessons in creative writing. Both My City is a Murder of Crows, and her debut collection Diacritics of Desire, are important reads for emerging poets working on their craft. Invariably, Parik will teach them concise writing.
Dazzlingly unpredictable, Ra Sh’s recent collection of poems, Buddha and Biryani, constructs a world of perception that is playfully irreverent but trenchantly real. The poet, known for his seductively tantalizing referentiality of erotica in The Architecture of Flesh (2015) and The Bullet Train (2019), strikes the raw chords of the readers again.
The cover of this slim volume of poems is of a flower blossoming and the uneven lines drawn on every petal sets the tone for the ideas that are enclosed within its spaces. On first glance, one is not prepared for what follows inside the book. The stereotypical set of ideas pertaining to flowers and colour schemes that one has been conditioned to, and the way one casually looks at the surface, does not prepare us for the powerful assemblage of poems that will shake you to your core.
Archana Shah’s Crafting a Future—Stories of Indian Textiles and Sustainable Practices is organized in three sections—the story of cotton, the story of silk, the story of wool—along with a foreword by Laila Tyabji, an introduction, an afterword, appendices I and II, acknowledgements, photo credits, bibliography, and an index.
At the outset I must confess that I have never been a Bollywood aficionado and that I have not ever seen a film where Kabir Bedi had acted. Yet, I find his life, vignettes of which he has sensitively narrated in his memoir, unusually interesting, sometime even profound. In fact, after completing the book that mixes adroitly the profane with the sacred, I feel tempted to know more about him.
If the advance praise of the book is written by Amitabh Bachchan, Shabana Azmi and Professor Ira Bhasker one can assume the book is going to be good, given that it has been appreciated by actors in the popular area as well as in the critical arena, plus by an academician. And, so it turns out to be. There is something for everyone who is interested in Hindustani Cinema to take away from this book.
Remember Kasiee Paheli Zindagani from the movie Parineeta? Sanjay Dutt drives the ladies of the house out to a Night Club in Calcutta. Glasses clink, horns and keys come alive as Rekha ascends onstage—and in a red sari she puts a spell on you. Another reference would be Arun Bhai and Meenakshi Mehra from A Suitable Boy and sultry Calcutta evenings providing for a heady mix of jazz and yearning.
The book showcases several traditional games of India—their origin, structure, rules and style of play. In addition, it has extrapolated how these games depict the larger moral values of human life. In this endeavour, the author has sub-divided the book into appropriate sub-themes which enable the reader to grasp its core tenets.
Sharks have maintained an enduring allure in culture. Powerful, magnificent and terrifying—they capture the imagination of audiences, artists, and researchers alike. Yet, this fascination combined with our fear of the unknown has an ongoing impact. A large number of shark species are threatened with extinction.Raj Sekhar Aich is a marine anthropologist and social scientist who studied shark cage-diving by living in New Zealand where the great white shark is classified as ‘vulnerable’.
A curated collection of outstanding books in English and in Hindi, for children and young adults, by the Parag Initiative of Tata Trusts. This list, published annually, comprises noteworthy books of the year with brief information about each title. It has been created with careful screening and multiple reviews by experts in the children’s literature sector. The list aims to promote access to a comprehensive curated list of good quality children’s literature that librarians, teachers, parents and children can refer to and read.
Reviewers typically position themselves as being more or less superior to the work under review. Thus, the work being reviewed is discovered to be—discreetly or otherwise—deficient, in the light of the work that the reviewers themselves would write if only they could tear themselves away from important work—like reviewing. (Though it might be more accurate to say that they might have written if they could…) I’m afraid Rita Kothari’s Uneasy Translations: Self, Experience and Indian Literature offers no such comfort.
In 1936, the young and upcoming Hindi writer and poet, Sachidanand Hirananda Vatsyayan, ‘Agyeya’, wrote to Banarasi Das Chaturvedi, his mentor and friend at the time, ‘It is too early yet to tell secrets especially to you’ (p. 130). A few years later, in 1944, to another friend he wrote, ‘a person like me has a very small life outside but a big inner life’ (p. 267). Throughout his lifetime, and even after, those close to Agyeya variously described him as ‘reserved’, ‘quiet’, and ‘restrained’.
This book is part of the series ‘Writers in Context’ edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Chandana Dutta. The time for such a series has long come and I am glad that we finally have the first books in the series in our hands. To take up Indian language writers and put together an authoritative volume on their writings in English translation with excerpts from their works and their own essays and letters, interviews with them, biographical sketches and memoirs, bibliographical details, and critical readings of their works over the years answers to the needs of scholars of Indian literature all over the world.
Although Dalit literature has had a long and variegated presence in Bengal, especially through the oral traditions of Bauls, Fakirs, Sufis and other popular sects, it remains a relatively neglected area in Dalit studies and has only recently found greater visibility via translation. Under My Dark Skin Flows a Red River, seeks to fill this gap with an anthology that combines historical and theoretical frameworks with samples of creative writing across diverse genres.
The Mendicant Prince spans multiple genres: historical fiction, real-life mystery and a legal drama that inspired a long-drawn-out pamphlet war in pre-Partition Bengal. Aruna Chakravarti breathes life into the Bhawal Sanyasi case that has fascinated generations in Bengal and Dhaka, in yet another novel that demonstrates her mastery over the genre of fiction about colonial Bengal.
Somdatta Mandal’s The Last Days of Rabindranath Tagore in Memoirs is a uniquely conceived book that provides a comprehensive look into the final months of biswakabi Rabindranath Tagore’s life when the hallowed man was ‘oscillating between fitness and illness’ (p. 164), until he passed away after a fatal surgery performed against his wishes. The book consists of translated selections from several memoirs and biographies originally written in Bengali by the poet’s associates and other well-known writers and researchers.
What Debali Mookerjea-Leonard achieves distinctly in this book is to effectively showcase her own reasoned angst and that of the others, regarding the lesser visibility of diverse aspects of Partition literature on the Bengal side in comparison with the abundant and a rich variety of perspectives on Partition fiction from the western side of the subcontinent. In her detailed analysis of the critical writings of such critics as Srikumar Bandopadhyay, she convincingly draws the attention of the reader to the non-acknowledgement of different Partition themes presented by several Bengali authors.
What struck me most in the Evening with a Sufi: Selected Poems by Afsar Mohammad translated by him with Shamala Gallagher are vivid, sometimes startling images such as of ‘a body like a wound peeks from your torn shirt’ or of wounds that ‘open their huge doors’ in a poem like ‘Name Calling’. Or consider the lines in ‘A Piece of Bread’ written in memory of Bismillah Khan
Although the hyperbolic title of this just minted anthology indicates a performance in the realm of extravaganza, the forty stories included within its covers do offer a dazzling spread of assured and exciting writing. In itself the anthology contains a wealth of riches; the editorial decision to print only the best writing of authors belonging to the millennial generation and Generation Z catapults this book into a budding promise: a dynamic product rather than a finished volume, which functions like a tantalizing anticipation of that which is yet to come.
When one thinks of Deepti Naval, one immediately wants to frame her into a film sequence with Farooq Sheikh, both of whom have been remarkably great actors in Indian cinema. And so, when I eagerly picked up her autobiography, A Country Called Childhood, I was half-expecting at least a chapter or two on her life as a Bollywood actress who was at the fore of ‘parallel cinema’ which has left an indelible mark in the history of Indian films.