A Book About Death
There are times, usually of media hype, when I don’t read a new novel that I would otherwise have read. Then there are novels I don’t read immediately because I am told by friends that I am certain to like them.
Vrindavan Through Different Lenses
Growing up, I used to treat going to my nani’s house for a sleepover as a great event. I would very seriously pack my night clothes, my tooth brush and my towel, and then toddle off down the road to her house.
Anthologize and Be Damned
Good intentions in anthology-making are never good enough unless they are backed by a clear sense of direction, a balanced overview of the ground under survey, and—if it is an anthology of translations—an uncompromising stand on the quality of translations coupled with a precise awareness of the ‘other language’ audience and its standards.
Of A Culture And A Time
V.I. Braginsky could as well have been describing Parveen Talha and her book of short stories, when he wrote in a review of Anna Suvorova’s Nostalgia po Laknau1 that ‘it is characteristic of her scholarly style to find a specific leitmotif to thread through each of her works and define the essence of discussion.
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Shakespeare is easily the most written about dramatist, so much so that one feels he might have taken fright, had he lived, to see his plays interpreted on so many levels—some of them well beyond his ken. And this has been the case mainly with his tragedies.
From Larger Day to Huger Night
Each age has poets and poems circumscribed by environmental pressures and the politics of the emotions of the age.
Being A Madiga
Gogu Shyamala paints a world in rural Andhra Pradesh where human lives are not separate from nature. They inhabit a vast space, feet planted in the ‘moist mud’ and faces touching in the sky. That these human lives are also segregated by society as ‘untouchable’ means that certain pleasures, such as ‘the scent of new rice’, the taste of jowar sap, the power to invoke the goddess, are theirs to enjoy; joys perhaps unknown to the upper castes.
Stray Summer Madness
Much has been made of Nandy’s poem on Calcutta. but it is best seen just as a period piece; the throbbing life that is Calcutta itself is missing in the poem (though Nandy obviously loves the city).
Stories Set in Plural Pasts
This is a brilliant collection of stories,personally chosen by J. Devika, Associate Professor at CDS, Trivandrum, and Mini Krishnan, the well known editor particularly of translated works, at OUP. As a result, there is a quality of the unusual, the comic, the macabre and the holy, in an odd sense of equivalence.
Stray Summer Madness
Indians writing poetry in English and not in their mother-tongue, Indo-Anglian poetry as it is fashionably known, has become quite a cult today.
Tagore’s Internationalism
Recently, in a talk given by Professor Nigel Leask at the University of Delhi on Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, he struck a comparison between Burns and Rabindranath Tagore. He mentioned how both appropriated Scottish ballads and folk music in their respective compositions and therefore, how both could be aptly titled ‘people’s poet’ or ‘poet of the soil’.
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