Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The folded earth produces mountains; in their folds in turn nestle hill-stations,in one of which Maya, the grieving, widowed protagonist of Roy’s novel winds up. In Ranikhet, to be precise. Ranikhet as much as Maya star in this novel. Sitting first in an airport lounge, and then in the bowels of an aeroplane, I consumed…

The first printing press in Asia was set up in Goa in 1550 by missionaries,and the pattern that follows is similar to that in other parts of India: manuals of devotion for converts, dictionaries, grammars.

The title of the ‘novel’ The Man with Enormous Wings arouses a child-like curiosity and expectations of a story that may be built with a rather innocent imagination. But what we experience within the folds of this short novel is an epic tale that presents an anticlimax to what we may have expected. Vignette after vignette, the story of Gardabad…

The White Tiger—robustly reviled by many in India—was also hailed by some in the western media as a novel that adumbrated a response to globalization in its representations of inequity, class, amorality, and greed.1 Last Man in Tower, focused on Vishram Society—a bastion of middle class stolidity in Mumbai…

Wit and irreverence are Farrukh Dhondy’s hallmark, and there is plenty of both in this set of rapid-fire short stories. The seventh commandment deters no one it seems. Man, woman, gigolos, e-mail wallahs and such others find endless opportunities to defy the old dictum ‘Thou shalt not commit…’and happily survive through ‘illicit’ relations…

At the close of River of Smoke, the second novel in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, the ex-zamindar Neel Rattan speaks of a painting he acquired on his last visit to Canton. The painting shows Fanqui-town, the site of the Thirteen Hongs or factories set up by foreign traders on the Pearl River in Canton, in flames…

Any time partition is mentioned, the mind immediately goes to 1947 and all the carnage that is usually associated with the birth of Pakistan. What many forget is that 1947 marked just one of two partitions Pakistan had to suffer.

A part from the title and a semblance of the mood, Aamer Hussein’s The Cloud Messenger shares very little else with Kalidasa’s lyric poem of 111 stanzas, Meghadutam. For instance, Hussein’s narrator-hero, Mehran, is no exiled lover. Hussein’s kunstlerroman borrows the lilting romantic tenor of the poetic conceit used by Kalidasa in his sandesa kavya…

With insurgent and resistant narratives thronging the repertoire of contemporary South Asian fiction, what stands undisputed are the truth-claims of Eric Hobsbawm’s theory regarding the paradox of South Asian nationalisms: new and old. Provocatively flaunting the gauntlet, the historian stakes his claim by stating that (almost) all insurgencies…

A wander through the fiction section of Delhi’s bookstores reveals rows and rows of colourful dust-jackets and attractive offerings by Indian and Pakistani authors. The volume is staggering, but though there is no shortage of choice, not all of it is good. Sadly, Invitation too promises more than it can deliver…

For the past couple of years, we have been told, often and loudly, that Pakistani fiction has come of age. It is unclear exactly what this means, but apparently a dedicated issue of Granta is an essential marker. In some recent essays, the Indian writers Amit Chaudhuri and Palash Mehrotra among others have argued that plaudits…

The bountiful nature of the publishing business in India in recent years has brought tens of new voices writing in Indian English to the bookstores and bedside tables. Not all of this mishmash of themes and writing styles makes for great reading, and almost always the blame lies in for pretentious, uninspiring writing…

A slim 47-page booklet forms the kernel of this book; the rest is mere padding in the form of introduction, appendices and notes. However, the 47 pages of Iqbal contain much that is illuminating and useful—not merely about one of the greatest poets of the Urdu language but also about his age and many of his peers…

There are documents that survive the strife of history. Who would have known that a missive written by Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru of the Sikhs, to Aurangzeb, the last great Mughal emperor, right after his defeat at the hands of the Mughal army, would survive ironically as Zafarnama, an epistle of victory?…

That the US invasion of Iraq informs, indeed haunts, policy-making in the US was illustrated in some speeches and justifications related to the UN-sanctioned but US and NATO-led no-fly-zone over Libya. What seemed to vex policy-makers and military strategists was whether UN Resolution 1973 allowed for ‘regime change’…

To be able to distill your love for words and art into the work that you do for a living, and that work of a nature that fulfills a niche in society, is to be fortunate. Debjani Chatterjee, well known and much awarded poet from Sheffield, England, was once a community relations officer.

Sample this: A headline in a leading Hindi News channel, ‘Tabaahi ki Taaza Tasveerein’ (Hindi?) Another headline in a leading Urdu daily, ‘Cut-Off Ke Doosre Din Honours Courses Ki Demand’ (Urdu?) And yet the Hindi-Urdu divide has played a crucial role in the history of the subcontinent. Any serious attempt to understand identity formation in India…

Raghu Rai is one of India’s most celebrated photographers and his 29th book of photographs on Mumbai is yet another visual treat. Aimed at capturing the essence of Mumbai, it is almost a study of contrasts and very evocatively captures slices of what Mumbai as the city really is.It starts off with an introduction of Vir Sanghvi on the origin and evolution of Mumbai. It is fairly well written, except that it starts off sounding like a history lesson and ends like an anti-Shiv sena rant, but that is besides the point…

The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life edited by Neera Adarkar gazes at the city of Mumbai through the prism of this specific structure—the chawl. The result is an interesting and rather different view of a city that has gathered global notoriety through some recent popular books about it…

This is an intense book but then rarely does a book that indulges in architectural theory make itself so lucid and strong-footed. Setting the stage for declaring the emergence of Post-Rational Architecture, Jaimini Mehta eloquently traces the vocation’s transition over its recent two hundred and fifty year-old history…