In the early 19th century, when slavery was abolished in the British empire, more than one million Indians were taken to various European colonies such as British Guiana, Fiji, Natal, Mauritius, Suriname and Reunion as indentured labourers. These labourers, the victims of systemic caste oppression, famine and drought in India, were forced to sign an agreement (a contract) before they began their arduous journey to these colonies.
At first glance it might seem like I am trying to compare apples and oranges in this review as Haritas is a political anthropologist of the city and Haripriya is a poet and a writer, so the books are quite different in their approach and perspective. The reason for doing a joint review is to understand the interdisciplinary nature of the concept of home, in relation to migration, survival and identity.
2022
Immigrant life is a complex mix of a search for new opportunity and yearning for a lost home. As older generations grapple with life in a new country and culture, nostalgic for people and places from their past, younger generations in turn strive to become full members of the only country they know, while being raised by parents and grandparents who are often at odds with the new culture.
The uniqueness of the book under review rests on the way the author has captured modern India—especially of the last six decades—through pen sketches of distinguished men and women whom he met and was most touched by. This tome is a collection of such reminiscences of people of various hues, very well known or hardly known outside their cloisters, from the fields of politics, academia, business, bureaucracy, public life and the like.
Growing up in the seventies, we cut out any bit of coloured paper that we came across, usually from advertisements in magazines, and all kinds of pictures from our black-and white newspapers: one never knew when something might come in useful for a school project or to add a dash of zing to a birthday gift wrapped in plain brown paper. Pictures, even in B&W, of monuments and animals were particularly treasured; besides collecting them against the proverbial rainy day, we spent hours looking at them.
It is not often that biographies of living persons are written. Vijay Kichlu (now in his 90s) is a fine classical vocalist and teacher but he chose to be an administrator, leading and giving shape to the Sangeet Research Academy, the ITC sponsored institution in Calcutta. He retired many years ago but clearly his friends, disciples and loyalists in the SRA wanted a record of the achievements. Meena Banerjee, the biographer, a well-known music critic has produced an engaging, appreciative account which although worshipful at times, has enough candour to make it a lively read.
An English tea planter, returning to India after two decades, learns of a bomb attack on his old home by a young man who looks ‘quite like’ him. A father, his shoulders drooping with weight because ten years back his son had walked out on him, goes on a shikar. A devout Parsi father turns to history—of the Islamic conquest of Persia—to stop his daughter from marrying a Muslim boy.
At a lecture1, Issac Bashevis Singer—the Yiddish Nobel Prize-winning author—was once asked: ‘What would you do if you were to meet God face to face?’ And Singer’s answer was: ‘I would ask him to collaborate with me on some translations. I would not trust him to do it himself.’ In other words, Singer is explicitly foregrounding the overarching role of translation in a writer’s literary journey; the necessity of collaborative translation, and the baggage of trust deficit that translators carry historically, among others.
On the very first page of this book, the translator anticipates and answers, or at least deflects, a question many askance readers may have in mind. ‘Those irked by yet another translation of Manto’s stories,’ says Nasreen Rehman, ‘should blame David Davidar, who suggested that I undertake this venture’ (p. ix). It turns out that Rehman had approached Davidar, the founder of the publishing company Aleph, with a modest proposal to publish a selection of fifteen stories by Manto about film life that she had translated, as a by-product of her PhD thesis titled, ‘A History of the Cinema in Lahore 1917-1947’. But if there is a publisher in India who readily deals in quantity and goes for doorstoppers, it is dear David. Further, if half a dozen publishers in India, Pakistan and Britain were already raking it in by publishing Manto in English, there was no reason why he should be left out, especially when he was ready to do it bigger if not better.
Karichan Kunju’s stormy social realism novel first published in Tamil as Pasitha Manidham in 1978 can be enjoyed today by non-Tamil readers in its English avatar. Translated into English as Hungry Humans by Sudha G Tilak, the novel within 264 pages and a well-appointed glossary at the back, works for the reader as a social commentary and as an incisive but dispassionate observation of human nature. The early twentieth century positioning of the novel about the social mores transacted in and around the villages of Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu and in particular of Kumbakonam, turns the gaze inwards to truths common to all human beings.
Telugu is one of the six select languages that were accorded the ‘classical language’ status in India. It was the second most spoken scheduled language till the 1981 Census (it has since slipped to the fourth position in the latest Census of 2011). In 1953, Andhra State became the first State in the country to be formed on a linguistic basis. These distinctions notwithstanding, Telugu—as a language, literature, and culture—figures poorly in the national, not to speak of the global, literary imaginary.
Amit Ranjan’s book John Lang poses a conundrum quite like the persona of the protagonist. Who was John Lang? Columnist, creative writer, lawyer, rebel, alcoholic or just a stupendous wit, masquerading as all of them? I have grave doubts about whether he was really an alcoholic or was it a rumour that suited his humour. There is no such entity as almost an alcoholic.
Shakoor Rather’s promising debut novel weaves an intriguing yarn around the mundane and the prosaic of Srinagar in 2008, including two lovers, a family and a neighbourhood simpleton. The plot-lines, in rather simple terms, are as follows.The lovers: Samar and Rabiya are law students who meet initially in the battered matador van they both take to reach their university. After a month of glancing shyly at each other and offering tentative ‘Hellos’, there blossoms a ‘friendship’ that allows circumspect exchanges about corporate law, exams, and so on (p. 59)
Dhrubajyoti Borah’s Elegy for the East: A Story of Blood and Broken Dreams is a poignant narrative set against the backdrop of the insurgency in Assam and the North East in the 1990s. Albeit fictional, the novel offers an insider perspective on the ideology and nature of the armed rebellion led by the United Liberation Front Asom, the subsequent counter-insurgency operations launched by the Indian state, and the tormented lives of common people who are caught between the two.
On tracing the history of Indian English literature, if one looks at the genre of poetry, it has been observed that anthologies have brought together voices not just from across the country but also collected varied ideas/perceptions/concepts that have been fermenting and brimming and searching for their readers.You can growyour inward silence indoors nowthe inessential park is closed.
Jayanti Naik says in the preface to the book: ‘This English translation will of- fer a glimpse into the true nature of Goansociety … different from the prevailing ste- reotyped and touristic images of Goa.’ The eleven stories in the collection are about ‘the salt of the earth’, that is, good and decent people who inhabit the villages in and around Quepem in South Goa. These people mainly belong to the ‘Bahujan Samaj’, as people of non-elite castes describe themselves. The 55- year old author and folklorist Jayanti Naik knows them well and her stories celebrate their myths, superstitions and folklore. Al- though the day-to-day lives of her charac- ters may be mundane what impressed me were the psychological insights extracted from them with her narrative skills.
Kiranmayi Indraganti’s book Her Majestic Voice gives us a broad socio-cultural study of the evolution of South Indian women playback singers of the mid-twentieth century. The book presents this vast but relatively unexplored field through the lives and careers of four important women playback singers, namely: P. Bhanumati, Ravu Balasaraswati Devi, Jikki Krishnaveni and K. Jamuna Rani, apart from a study of Lata Mangeshkar, whose career and choices are often set as a benchmark of comparison.
Books on performing arts in India have either been of the coffee table variety or dense and too theoretical. Books on classical dance in particular have often reiterated the existing primers and treatises like the Natya Shastra or the Abhinaya Darpana. Dance photography of course is a visual delight and some books on classical dance try to get by with a profusion of glamorous images. For too long, not much was written about the performing arts, for the tradition was sceptical of the written word and relied mostly on oral narrative accounts.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a prolific writer, social activist and a teacher of creative writing skills. In her latest work Before We Visit the Goddess she has deftly chronicled the diasporic enigmas spanning three generations and showcasing the agglutination of Indian and American cultural identities.
Here’s a real bonanza of stories! That’s what strikes one at first glance. Thirty-one short stories by well-known children’s authors … stories about school life-urban and rural, stories about dating and falling in love, futuristic stories that take one back to the crude past—that is, the present, strange stories about ghosts in boarding schools and school reunions, stories about stories that help make friends … it’s a lavish spread!