Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Among the many qualities of Piyush Daiyas book of conversation with artistAkhilesh, the most inspiring is his ability to efface his minutest traces from the text. The entire dialogue comes across as a selfrevelation by the artist, as if he conversed with himself in the darkness of a summer night, or standing against his canvas, and Piyush merely overheard him.

What Bharat wrote about theatre has always been discussed as a theory of poetics by critics like Abhinav Gupta, Dhananjay, Bhatt Nayak, Bhatt Lolak and others. This tradition has travelled right up to our contemporaries like Dr. Nagendra. Did this tradition benefit either poetry or drama, the present author, Devendra Raj Ankur, asks.

Mannu Bhandari is a wellknown author whose autobiography presents the masculine aspect of womens conscience. This can play an important role in understanding the contradictions of feminist discourse.

The book was first published by Oxford University Press five years ago with a critical introduction. However this remarkable Indian drama is finding a broader reader/audience base and has recently been published by the University of Hawaii Press with an additional,

At present, Hindi short fiction, an important genre emerging in the postIndependence period, is at a crossroads. After confrontingNai Kahani(New Short Story) andAkahani (AntiShort Story) movements, this fiction moved towards commitment in the nineteen seventies; here it dwelt persistently on themes of exploitation, injustice and oppression.

Meera Kant has the distinction of being one of the most prolific young Hindi playwrights today. Her plays, including Nepathya Raag, Kaali Barf and Ihamrig, have engaged with an interestingly wide range of subjects in both contemporary and thought provoking manner.

Astudenotes Lot Lakar(Past Tense) Pratham Purush(Third person, not the first person in Sanskrit) singularthat is To be, become. It denotes the sense of possibility also.

This novel makes a wideranging comment on a complex sociocultural world and virtually troubled political loyalties of a generation of intellectuals, who proudly describe themselves as progressive intellectual activists in pre1990 India.

The volume under review is a kind of arapid reader in Indian history that the towering Hindi poet of the 1940s and 1950s, Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (hereafter, Muktibodh) wrote in 1962.

Likhe Mein Dukkha (Pathos in Print) is a new collection of poems by a popular poet, Liladhar Mandloi Mandloi. He has simultaneously published three collections of poetry. This collection contains ninetyeight small poems.

Kabir is now widely acclaimed as one of our most eminent poets from any Indian language, but this wasn’t always so. Until about half a century ago, he was regarded in Hindi as perhaps the last of the quartet of the four great bhakti poets and ranked after Tulsi Das, Sur Das and Mira Bai.