Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Sikeena Karmali’s ‘Chahar Bagh: The Mulberry Courtesan’ is the longest in this collection of twenty-two stories. Like Tabish Khair’s
‘Night of 16th January, 1955,’ Uzma Aslam Khan’s ‘From Trespassing’ and Mohsin Hamid’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist,’ it is an extract out of a novel, although this one was awaiting publication when this book appeared in print. Its length would justify the present compilation being called Chahar Bagh and Other Stories.

Tlism-i-Hoshruba, an epic fantasy, a part in the long series of Hamza dastans, was in many ways a watershed in the popular Urdu litera
ture of its time and continues to generate academic and popular interest till date. In that it compares with Greek myths or Homer’s epics.

Editing a substantial collection of short stories is a daunting task; it becomes especially so when the editor also doubles up as the trans-lator—that too of not one or two stories in the collection but all 22 of them.

This book grew out of a seminar organized in March 2008 by the India Theatre Forum, which had the idea of bringing together a
large group of theatre persons, academics, activists, thinkers and critics, and permitting them over three days to talk about issues relevant to India’s theatre today.

Lakshmi Subramanyam’s book, Modern Indian Drama:Issues and In-terventions is a welcome endeavour given the lack of substantial theoretical work on postcolonial Indian drama.

Is an editor of an anthology of essays anything more than a compiler? Is she (or he) merely expected to read widely on the subject, string to-gether whatever essays are available (and ideally unpublished), slap on an Introduction in which the contents of the essays are summarized, and dispatch it to the publisher? When I was working in the publishing world, an editor was virtually expected to stamp her personality on the anthology, infusing it with—if I may use the word—a vision.

The book is a story or should we say history written with a differ-ence. The focus is on challenging the legends that have surrounded
the Mughal emperors and therefore their reappraisal.

Many of the struggles in postcolonial India have been over the right to use natural resources. Today, after more than sixty years of independence, issues of control over land, forests and water resources remain extremely contentious.

In recent years there has been much concern at the reckless, unregu-lated and destructive exploitation of groundwater in many parts of
India and a general agreement on the urgent need for regulation, though there have been differences on the form and modalities of regulation.

Literature on the relationship between gender and violence has largely focused on theorizing specific acts of violence (rape, dowry, female infanticide, domestic violence among others) or on documenting the experiences of violence against women across the world.

China and India are among the few exceptions in the world which continue to show stark deprivations that are specific to women or
girl children while the per capita GDP growth has been moving ahead at a phenomenal pace.