2015
Set against the backdrop of the Partition, this novel narrates the story of Jamshed Alam, a Bihari Muslim boy born in the infamous Camp Geneva in Dhaka and raised in Kolkata, a city his poor refugee parents migrate to hoping for a legally secure, economically rewarding and socially dignified life. But does the city deliver what the Alam family seeks? The unfolding lives of Jamshed, his polio-stricken elder sister Miriam (Miri), tailor-father Abu, and seamstress-mother Ruksana in 14, Zakaria Street in northern-central Kolkata and beyond show how the city,
A World Elsewhere, a self-published novel by Shanta Acharya, is about a new world, a search for a state of being, a quest for meaning and for home—wherever that may be. Set in Orissa, India in the turmoil of the post-Independence years, in the clash of old and new world views, Anglophilia and Anglophobia, we are introduced to a hardworking, academic Hindu family who believes in the power of education, who struggles to maintain stability both within the family as well as in society, who understands that progress is needed for growth yet is bound by the demands of a closed society, especially when it comes to women.
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. (Ernest Hemingway)The opening sentence of Prabhu Ghate’s By Thumb, Hoof and Wheel: Travels in the Global South sets the tone for what the traveller-reader should expect from the book: ‘Apart from trying to communicate the sheer joy of travel, and its huge educational possibilities, and weaving a bit of contemporary history into the story, I hope to persuade readers in this book that one does not have to be particularly rich to travel, or young for that matter (just young at heart, reasonably fit, empathetic, and curious.)’ The book catches the fervour of our times, when interest in travel and travel writings is growing among people, especially catching on with Indians.
This nosegay of memories, personal and collective, has many a bright offering which takes the reader by the hand through the lesser-known and familiar byways of the Doon valley. Every generation treasures memories of days gone by: a slower paced world, a world warmed by the sandpapering of time. Nothing can ever remain the same again. Memories of Another Day brings to life the old and the familiar to those of us who lived in this once green valley. Vanished landmarks like Kwality restaurant, Landour Clock Tower and others are symbols of the loss.
The painting of tall, grim-looking Afghans on the cover of In A Land Far From Home makes for possibly one of the most deceptive book covers. You’d believe that here is a heavy, boring, fact-addled tome on Afghan history. Nothing could be further from the truth. Syed Mujtaba Ali’s book, a travelogue that should be treated as a slice of history, is possibly one of the most delightful books ever written, and equally delightfully translated by Nazes Afroz from the Bengali original, Deshe Bideshe.
Travelogues from the past are more than mere journeys over a land mass or stretch of sea. They speak to us of life-styles, of economic strengths and weaknesses, of politics and race and of nationhood and family relations—all interlinked and woven together in the writer’s imagination. The translator and editor of both the volumes which have appeared in quick succession, Somdatta Mandal, herself a tireless traveller and an equally indefatigable translator, is determined to bring the invisible past before us. A few years ago she had brought to the public another Bengali woman’s travelogue Attiya’s Journey and in the years in between she has edited two volumes of critical essays on travelogues from Indian languages.
Gora in Bengali is considered to be the best novel by Rabindranath Tagore for its epic range. Though written between 1907 and 1909 (when the author was in his forties), the action of the text is clearly set at least thirty years earlier, in the early 1880s and takes into account events that happened even earlier. If one takes into consideration the moment of Gora’s birth, then the action of the narrative should be said to begin from the year 1857. The novel is considered central to the nation question because it captures the Indian nationalist upsurge of the late nineteenth-early twentieth century in all its tragic complexity. Gora is produced in an awareness of Lord Curzon’s proposed partition of Bengal and the consequent crystallization of the Bengal-Indian identity.
As our journey into the future continues—the present moment drifting away, our own biographies lengthening, our pasts receding inexorably, quietly becoming “history” in the distance— so certain aspects of those retreating eras seem to come more sharply into focus and claim our attention. The longer view allows us to see these features of the recent past as truly defining characteristics of those decades that we lived through.’—William Boyd.
2014
Astory about the secret life of a novelist and short-story writer, and a famous one at that, never fails to interest, and this novel does not disappoint. Mainly covering the twelve-year period between 1912 and 1924 when the conception and writing of the classic novel, A Passage to India, took place, Damon Galgut takes us through the repressed life of E.M. Forster, a creature of Empire who was also the victim of its restrictive class, racial and morality norms. Forster’s homosexuality was known among his inner circle but never to his wider audience of readers until his posthumous novel Maurice was released.
Nancy M. Tischler’s first definitive biography of Tennessee Williams appeared in 1960 when the dramatist had all but exhausted his trajectory of great writing. Tischler’s book entitled Tennessee Williams: The Rebellious Puritan was, in many ways, the first critical appreciation of the great American dramatist’s work. It wove his life—family and background—into his work and tried to offer a psycho-biographical interpretation. Another significant biography appeared in 1985—two years after the dramatist’s death.
One’s first encounter with fiction has been generally through the reading of or listening to fairy tales, mystery tales, superhero stories, popular stories, classic love stories and fantasy novels. And while reading and enjoying them we hardly give a thought to how this enchanting form, both long and short fiction came into existence. Defining the novel is a tricky task since it mediates through various forms of art and adapts itself to the demands of the changing cultural milieus
The process of institutionalizing radical protest politics and their demands include a swathe of dilemmas and complexities that include the possibility of de-radicalizing and blocking the political and collective sense that such politics grounds them on. Thus, radical politics on the one hand wishes to witness institutionalization and mainstreaming of their politics to redefine political landscapes, while on the other, they wish to continue as radical protest politics maintaining the fervour and the process of wedging open social narratives that had little space hitherto. It has often been witnessed that political movements that institutionalize themselves in law, policy, and formal institutions carry the anxiety of deradicalizing themselves. The protests get entangled in legal dilemmas as has happened with the sub-caste politics, where mass mobilization was replaced by technical detailing of who is or is not eligible for reservations, or as has been the case with domestic violence where with 468(a) the issue was individualized, and became a matter of accessing the judiciary,
India is endowed with a rich philosophical tradition, which dates back to ancient times, a tradition which is also varied along various axes. One of the main concerns of Bhikhu Parekh is to show the richness of this tradition from the perspective of the norms and standards of argumentation within the political and philosophical discourses. His main concern is how standards were maintained when discussion and debate went antagonistic—publicly. Parekh thinks it is worthwhile to investigate this aspect because he is of the opinion that earlier studies, particularly the work of Amartya Sen is not satisfactory enough. Although he agrees with much of Sen’s work in The Argumentative Indian, he ‘departs from him in several respects’. The word ‘argumentative’ in the book is used sometimes ‘in the sense of being methodical in one’s reasoning and weighing up arguments before reaching a conclusion’ and sometimes it seems that it is being used in the negative pejorative sense and in a ‘more common and conventional sense, it refers to someone who argues for the sake of arguing.’ Moreover, Sen does not emphasize the importance of having a tradition of ‘public debate’. Sen only focuses on ‘disagreements between two individual or schools and overlooks the equally and, in some contexts, far more important public debates conducted before large audiences, having formal structure and involving a binging verdict.’ The aim of the book partly is to introduce to the reader the methods in which this public debate took in the ‘Indian tradition’.
Pavan Kumar Malreddy’s slim volume discusses and synthesizes three concepts with concrete examples: orientalism, terrorism and indigenism (Dalit Bahujan movements), with an involved reading of academic literature as well as the popular media. He draws from the contemporary literary studies in South Asia to discourse on orientalism and contemporary manifestations of terrorism (9/11 for example). What gets highlighted in the process are contradictions inherent in the way South Asia has viewed and comprehended postcolonialism, as analysed in the Subaltern Studies and the way the West has viewed it. The book makes an attempt to position Orientalism in a postcolonial world in transition with terrorism and identity-based cleavages occupying axis-space for discussions. The use of the work of prominent literary figures from South Asia to analyse the three concepts is an innovative analytical tool in the study.
In the times we live in—where, often acknowledging, tolerating and celebrating differences is seen as a sign of weakness nothing opens better the debate on gender, as this quote from Marguerite Yourcenar’s ‘With Open Eyes’ written and published in 1980: ‘… Anyway, women who say “men” and men who say “women”, usually to complain within one group as within the other, instill in me a great sense of ennui, like do those who stumble through all that is formulaic.There are virtues that are specifically ‘feminine’ which feminists seem to scorn, this does not by the way mean that these were ever the prerogative of all women : gentleness, goodness, finesse, delicacy, virtues so important that if a man did not possess them at least in small proportions, he would be considered a brute, not a man.
A report on a book discussion held at the India International Centre on May 24, 2016, with Indu Agnihotri, CWDS, in the chair and Vidhu Varma (JNU), Kusha Tiwari (Shyam Lal College) and Baran Faoorqi (JMI) in the panel.Prostitution is about the only job in the world in which you earn the most on your first day. As the days pass, your income declines before you finally burn out within 10–15, or if you are lucky, twenty years. Prostitution consumes your body, destroying it with the abuse, insecurity and poverty that often comes with it. The bouquet of three books under discussion approaches the subject of prostitution from multiple angles. A statement that emerges with tremendous force from these three books could be, ‘Prostitution is a choice where there is no choice.’
Rekha’s book attempts to chart the complex terrain of women’s writing in post-Independence India, while declaredly wishing to avoid the pitfalls of the ‘generalizations’ that are attendant on both mainstream Women’s Studies methodologies and what she calls ‘Indo-centric’ approaches to the subject. Rekha also wishes to address what she considers a significant gap in the existing oeuvre of critical work on women’s writing in India: the privileging of the ‘temporal axis’ and the insufficient attention paid to the politics of space in the shaping of women’s experience, especially as reflected in the literature produced by them. In view of this, she makes what she calls a ‘representative sampling’ of women’s prose fiction from the country, choosing the work of five major writers: Krishna Sobti (Hindi, b. 1925), Mahasweta Devi (Bengali, b. 1926), Kamal Desai (Marathi, 1928–2011), Ambai (her pseudonym, she writes as C.S. Lakshmi when she writes as a critic in Tamil and English, b. 1944) and Githa Hariharan (English, b. 1954).
Tehrik-e-Niswan, a pioneering performance group, working on gender and politics turns thirty in 2009. The group organized its first theatre festival in Karachi in 2009, followed by a Conference in 2010. The book at hand is an outcome of that conference. The volume has been originally published as Gender, Politics and Performance in South Asia by Oxford University Press, Pakistan and Women Unlimited has brought out the Indian version by arrangement with OUP. The volume has 14 papers divided into four sections, with an introduction on (Re)-presenting the Nation by Syed Jamil Ahmed. Gender is a predominant category of analysis in most papers, even though the definition of the same varies from writer to writer. Most of the articles are based on Tehrik-e-Niswan’s history, productions and reception. As such it is an amazing document of the group. The others deal with women who have paved the way for newer perspectives by their lives and works right from the late 19th century to the present. Syed Jamil Ahmed has documented the history of the play Kabar, an iconic play on Bengali Renaissance in Bangladesh in 1953. There is one article on archaeological findings of dancing and singing figures in Sindh region of Pakistan. India is represented by the introductory article and Madhu Kishwar’s article on Bollywood films.
By Aloysius Irudayam , Jayshree P. Mangubhai, & Noe I.G. Lee National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights
Dalit Women Speak Out: Caste and Gender Violence in India is a sobering book. The study, encompassing four states in India (Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu—Pondicherry) and based on interviews with 500 Dalit women, sets out to explore ‘the phenomenon of violence against Dalit women, a subject hitherto little addressed by academics, human rights activists and the Indian state’ (p. 31).The study forces our attention on a grim truth that is widely known yet ignored precisely because of its everydayness—when viewed from the constitutional and human rights perspective (human rights, the authors remind us, are ‘the foundation of human needs’ (p. 5)), the right to equality remains unrealized and inaccessible for Dalit women. Extreme forms of sexual violence and economic exploitation shape the lives of these women. Staking claim to a piece of land or one’s rightful wages or to the common resources of the village are treated as major acts of transgression.
Gender and Caste Hierarchy in Colonial Bengal by Deboshruti Roychowdhury explores how different ranks of caste groups in colonial Bengal contemplated the ‘ideal woman’. The subtitle suggests that the book might talk about significant ‘interventions’ by subordinate castes on the ‘women’s question’ in colonial Bengal, interventions that could possibly bring out the contested and variegated nature of the ideal(s). Reading the book, however, makes it clear that the author’s point is about ‘Brahmanical hegemony’ being ‘something truly total in nature’ (p. 217). Thus the author argues that claims of superior status in terms of caste were organically linked to claims of ‘purity’ which, in turn, placed oppressive burdens of chastity, fidelity, subservience and self-sacrifice invariably on women. Amid unprecedented opportunities offered by the colonial regime, low caste groups saw their improvement of social status in the imposition of oppressive patriarchal norms, ‘Brahmanical in nature’ (p. 216), on their women. Roychowdhury assumes that this meant a loss to lower caste women’s erstwhile relative freedom ‘whose way of life was subjected to fiercer scrutiny than ever before’ (p. 204). To quote her: ‘The absence of free choices for women thus became a ubiquitous phenomenon prevalent across almost all the social strata of colonial Bengal’ (p. 9).