Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

A mother-daughter relationship has always been a complex one to decode given its subjectivity. But Vrinda Nabar’s Family Fables & Hidden Heresies: A Memoir of Mothers and More manages to strike that right balance between myopic proximity and clinical objectivity.

I must admit, I received my copy of this book on the same day as the Guwahati molestation case, and I was riling with anger towards men as sexual predators and women as victims of abuse at the hands of men who can’t control their sexual urges and also society. The act of sex that day at least wore a pall of oppression.

The book opens up a gamut of emotions that rules human psychology. The inner pages carry cartoons of how people are attracted to each other through various mental mappings.

When I was asked to review Bishwa-nath Ghosh’s Tamarind City: Where Modern India Began, I figured my eligibility had to do with the novel I had written set in the Madras (as it was back then) of the 1970s.

Bunny Suraiya’s debut novel Calcutta Exile is an impressive and bitter-sweet epilogue to the Anglo-Indian community during its heyday in what was once the ‘second city of the British Empire’.

The usual practice is to turn a book or a story into a movie. What if you could turn a movie inside your head into a novel? Reading through Kiran Nagarkar’s novel, The Extras, that is exactly the feeling you get.

In Marathi theatre Mahesh Elkunchwar spearheaded a modernism through his plays. They challenged the unequal power relationships between the genders. Opening the win-dows to let out the stagnant air of discrimination was the running leitmotif of the plays.

The directors who shaped the contours of modern Indian theatre were born in the 1920s. Ibrahim Alkazi (b. 1923), Habib Tanvir (1923-2009), B.V. Karanth (1928-2002) and Utpal Dutt (1929-1993) are, arguably, our most important post-Independence directors.