According to a recent article in The Print, there are currently over sixty-five literature festivals in the country—in different shapes, sizes, and colours. Most of them are centred in particular cities and venues; others are more versatile, some are peripatetic. Some focus on celebrities and particular genres, and for some the dominant theme is the promotion of a brand.
2021
In Asoca: A Sutra, Irwin Allan Sealy attempts to present the ‘real man’ behind Emperor Ashoka the Great. He uses the spelling ‘Asoca’ to suggest a soft ‘k’, highlighting the way simple villagers pronounce the name, for his mother was not of royal birth. The ‘s’ is pronounced as a sibilant (‘assoka’) in place of the palatal ‘s’ of Sanskrit. Sealy employs the Pali forms for all the names, corresponding to actual usage, rather than written records—Susima, Mahinda, Sanghamitta rather than Sushumna, Mahendra and Sanghamitra.
Anees Salim’s The Odd Book of Baby Names is an expertly conceived novel comprising nine voices relating nine autobiographical narratives, all of which have one thread in common—each narrator has been begotten by the same kingly patriarch. The speakers, progenies born of legally wedded wives, or out of wedlock, many of them unknown to one another and unaware of their common paternity, narrate their quotidian experiences.
Koral Dasgupta’s Kunti is not the willful mother who apportioned a common wife to her five sons. She is the young, vibrant, beauteous and superbly intellectual woman who is wooed by the Gods. The book swings along the path of a celestial love triangle: Surya, Indra and Kunti. The offerings match every expectation of such an imperial romance—peevishness, jealousy, wile, guile, manoeuvrings and manipulations—melting the boundaries between the humans and the devas.
As the blurb on the attractive book cover says, Sonal Kohli grew up in Delhi and lives in Washington DC; she studied at the Sri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi and went on to do her MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, UK and The House Next to the Factory is her first book. These details are important because they help readers understand not just her writing style as a trained creative writer, but also her ability to capture a Delhi, and a world beyond, that we may all know and yet we get to know all over again when we encounter it in her simple yet evocative prose.
Early 2021 saw the Aleph Book Company bring out a dark hued hardcover with a centrally placed Mughal motif in sandy gold. Raza Mir’s novel Murder at the Mushaira felt pleasantly hefty on store shelves.The nicely produced volume looked rich and piqued curiosity. The excerpt at the back promised it to be the forerunner of a seriously good read
Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s Tagore & Gandhi: Walking Alone, Walking Together is an arresting book laced with fresh insights and perspectives, notwithstanding that it is about a subject that is well-trodden in the annals of academia. Tagore and Gandhi both bestrode the Indian firmament like two towering Colossuses. Attempting a book on either of them is fraught with danger.
Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse is a work of post-genre literature. It is at once story, scholarly treatise, history, anthropology, folklore, memoir, diary, manifesto, and prose poetry. To call it a text would be unfair, for its very polemical and philosophical axis is agency. Moreover, it has been crafted with that rare artistry which, concealing itself as spontaneity, confers on the work a complex organic wholeness.
One of the aspects studied by scholars of globalization is its antiquity. Questions have been asked about whether globalization is a novel phenomenon from the 20th century, or merely varying manifestations of an old pattern over periods of time. Convincing arguments have been made on either side. One pattern that is undeniable is the search for products, profits and resources, all contingent upon control of people and territory.
The paradigmatic method of studying the story of India is through its languages, declares Peggy Mohan with a rhetorical flourish in the title of her book, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through its Languages.Mohan’s thesis draws upon Jawaharlal Nehru’s archetypal statement about the Indian subcontinent which likened it to…some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought
It goes without saying that China is India’s most important neighbour and India-China bilateral relations is the most consequential diplomatic engagement for India in the 21st century. Despite greater attention being paid to China in India recently, there is still not enough research and writing that would stand the test of time.
2022
Among the cultural elite of Gujarat, it was a common practice to hire Bangla tutors, visit Shantiniketan and read or translate Bangla into Gujarati. I was told this by Niranjan Bhagat who wrote his first poem the day Tagore died. From the late nineteenth century to this day, generations of Gujarati writers have translated Bangla literature, and a galaxy of individuals have been shaped from their time at Shantiniketan.
2021
The troubling question in writing about Harijan, both the original Odia novel by the renowned Gopinath Mohanty as well as its meticulous and detailed English translation of the same name, is this: how does one write about an event in which the experiencing person is the one who has contributed directly to the degradation of a fellow human being?
A prolific writer, a respected journalist, connoisseur of arts, and a revolutionary, R Krishnamurthy, better known as Kalki, was a literary giant, whose body of work includes Alai Osai, and his famous trilogy, Parthiban Kanavu, Ponniyin Selvan and Sivakamiyin Sabatham. Kalki’s novels, written between 1941-54, belonged to a historical genre, a mix of drama, action, intrigue and passion
Serialized in the Malayalam weekly Mathrubhumi in 1983, and published as a novel a year later, CV Balakrishnan’s Ayussinte Pusthakam has become over the years a widely read work that is regularly prescribed in university curricula. The novel’s initial success was restricted to a more youthful audience, but today it has been published in 26 editions, a testimony to the acclaim and admiration which this work continues to elicit.
Saudamini Deo’s English translation of short stories by Bhuwaneshwar Prasad marks a significant event in Hindi literature. Not only does it reinvigorate a chronically under-appreciated Hindi writer in a new language, but it also attempts to rewrite the story of Hindi modernism as seen through the lens of non-canonical texts.
2021
This Hindi novel is a recent composition of the renowned Hindi novelist Maitreyi Pushpa who is widely known as the author of Idamnamama (that is, Idam Na Mama or ‘It is not mine’) and Chaak (Potter’s Wheel), and many other novels. She also made news with her subversive autobiographical narratives and is known as a feminist novelist who has based her writings on women’s issues.
Ranendra’s is an important—and bold—signature in contemporary Hindi literature. As a novelist, who also happens to be a poet, he enters the landscape of his creation with nuanced, almost poignant, sensitivity to map the existential, ideological and, by extension, ontological contours within contemporary spaces. While in his earlier novels—Global Gaon ke Devta (2006) and Gayab Hota Desh (2014)—he had etched the excruciating reality of the tribals.
2021
To say that Neelakshi Singh’s novel Khela or play is about the play of power-that-be in this civilization, controlling the price of crude oil and the collaterals of religious fundamentalism and terrorism would be less than half-truth. It is mostly about the journey of a middle-class girl, Vara Kulkarni, peeping through the jute-sacks of partition of a joint family to look at the estranged family’s life to her looking into a world riddled by conspiracies, violence and displacement.
2021
Sumati Saxena Lal writes in the preface to her novel Ve Log (2021):My village is located in my imagination. I have tried to make it appear credible to my readers. In this age and fragile health condition, it was impossible to experience village life first-hand and then write about it—the pandemic acted as a source of terror too.This terror is not simply about falling prey to the pandemic, but also inscribes the crises of the literary imagination during the said period.