In line with Devdutt Pattanaik’s philosophy which portrays myth as a subjective truth, he essentially tries to tell a story that has been told innumerable times in history as a more flexible and consequencedriven recount of events. He takes on the Ramayana by delving into Sita’s psyche while breaking the epic into five seamlessly knit together chapters, each one unfolding as one of her choices. It is his perception on the reasons behind a character’s actions which makes it an original account. For a young mind, these justify the behaviour and choices of the various characters and highlighting their contrasting characteristics clearly.
2016
I have heard and read a hundred times stories about Ganesha, and thought I knew them all: how he refused Shiva entry following Ma Parvati’s instructions, which enraged Shiva so much he cut off the child’s head, and then repented and got him an elephant’s head Anju Virmani THE STORY OF HANUMAN Text by Mala Dayal. Illustrated by Taposhi Ghoshal Red Turtle/Rupa & Co., New Delhi, 2016, pp. 74, R395.00 GANESH By Subhadra Sen Gupta. Illustrated by Tapas Guha Rupa & Co., New Delhi, 2016, pp. 42, R295.00 instead; how he broke off a tusk so that the writing of the Mahabharata was seamless; how he encircled his parents three times to win the race against his brother Kartikeya. So it came as a bit of a shock that there are other versions of the familiar, conventional tales.
The stories of Hanuman, son of Vasu and Anjana, his adven- tures as a child, his role in the Ramayana, and then in the Mahabharata, are a cornerstone of Hindu mythology. Hanuman’s life is like an adventure movie—filled with acts of great strength and courage, in- terspersed with evidence of his learn- ing and wisdom—so that it can be as exciting for the youngest child as it can be profound for an adult. In ear- lier generations, children had the fa- cility of grandmothers and grandfathers to tell them stories from our rich and varied mythology. With ever shrinking families, the child must have access to other sources. In her book The Story of Hanuman, Maya Dayal introduces very young children to some of these tales. Told simply, the book touches upon many events he is famous for: swallowing Surya, then persuading him to be his teacher; becoming Sugriva’s minister as guru-dakshina, and then helping him and Rama get together.
The Rama story has been around for a long time. It has been a part of people’s life and thought for generations in this country. An inspiration for both saints and savants over the ages, its longstanding and continued appeal for common folk too has been no less clear to many observers of this land. Its spread has also been documented by eminent scholars in modern times. About three decades ago, this was done in fascinating detail, with India as the background, by A.K. Ramanujan in his acclaimed dissertation Three Hundred Ramayanas.
Reading Ret Samadhi and Tomb of Sand is exhilarating, challenging, even exasperating; such is its span and scope, its playful exuberance and idiosyncratic originality of style, playing out differently in the two versions. Given its more recent American/English avatar, one may evoke Whitman: it is vast, it contains multitudes. Given its incontrovertible rootedness in its Indian-subcontinental milieu, however, one must invoke the Mahabharata, the grand epic that it references at the very outset.
2018
As a fellow writer, the fifth novel of Geetanjali Shree leaves you wonderstruck with its sweeping imagination and the sheer power of language, unprecedented and uninhibited. She is known for her experiments with content and form, but this novel keeps you in grips with its storyline as well, which had not really been her forte earlier.
The postscript to this novel says it is dedicated ‘to the brave Uttarakhand police officer, Gagandeep Singh, who saved a young man from a lynch mob’. This dedication indicates the story line that one can expect: it is about individual acts of courage against an establishment that is overwhelmingly powerful.The timeline of the story is three days. On day one, the protagonist, Arjun, an author who is not yet thirty-three, gets a call from one of his ex-girlfriends telling him that her husband has disappeared.
Amuch-admired traditional genre of poetry, elegy does register the harrowing nature of grief that one experiences at the departure of someone very close to us and whose nagging absence never ebbs. The conventional elegy unravels an ever-growing sense of total despair in the form of sorrow, longing, yearning and pining entwined with loneliness, but it also appears banal, repetitive and undramatic.
Lhasa ka Lahu is a critical translation of three Tibetan poets writing from exile in India: Tenzin Tsundue (b. 1975), Bhuchung D Sonam (b.1972) and Tsering Wangmo Dhompa (b. 1969). Of the three, Dhompa is the only female poet in the collection and holds the distinction of being the first Tibetan woman to be published in English.
The excerpts* below have been taken from the Introduction to The Collected Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto–the first of a three-volume series which will contain all of Saadat Hasan Manto’s 255 known stories translated into English by Nasreen Rehman. Nasreen Rehman has written an absorbing and deeply insightful narrative, situating Manto’s work in his life and circumstances, as well as the larger forces affecting him and the people around him.
In his book Ghazals of Ghalib, a very novel effort at getting the selected ghazals of Ghalib translated into English by some accomplished poets, Aijaz Ahmad says that ‘good poetic translations, like good poetry itself, are very much a matter of divine luck: talent, skill, and labor have all to be blessed with the divine spark…Success can only be relative; the translator is in an impossible situation and translations of poetry can be not only rarely but also relatively good’ (Ahmad p. xvii).
That is the relation of novel with human existence? Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel says that ‘A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility.’ Take any work of Khalid Jawed, what one readily encounters is an acute focus on the exploration of characters’ inner life, their experience of being human and The Paradise of Food is no exception in this regard.
Ayesha Kidwai has already given us in English translation Anis Kidwai’s account of what happened immediately after Independence of India and the Partition—Azadi Ki Chhaon Mein (1974). Called In Freedom’s Shade (2011) in English translation, it not only marked Ayesha Kidwai’s debut as an impressive translator (she was already well-known as a brilliant scholar), it also ensured that her grandmother Anis Kidwai’s name and work would be known again to the world at large.
2022
Even when read in English translation, the immediacy of experience yielded page after page in the novel, Hymns in Blood, is remarkable, especially so since it is the throbbing story of something cataclysmic that happened as long back as nearly seventy-five years ago in 1947, during Partition. Undoubtedly, this speaks for the power of the novel written originally by Nanak Singh, the master story teller in Punjabi; but also indeed, it demonstrates the translator’s skills of transporting the vibrancy of the experience from the writer’s robust Punjabi to an English that is endowed with an idiomatic cultural proximity to the original.
2022
One of the best known Sanskrit classics, Narayana’s Hitopadesha is a fascinating collection of animal and human fables, augmented with polished verse epigrams and gnomic stanzas many of which have become proverbial. This satirical, often irreverent and sometime ribald text has been popular for centuries as a composition of worldly advice on matters ranging from state affairs to personal conduct.
2022
The city of Calcutta, like a heaving Leviathan is forever pulsating with energy carousing in its veins. This timeless vitality has been captured in famous novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the trend has continued into present times through a perceptible fascination with the dynamism between the place and its people.
Let me begin by saying right away that Mahanadi is a brilliant piece of novelistic work that combines anthropology, ethnography, history and fiction rolled into one. It is a significant addition to a growing number of new fiction in India that sees human lives and relationships as being inextricable from their surroundings. But one does not really care about fictional categories when confronted by a novel like Mahanadi.
2021
Bhai, there are maybe three or four thousand thieves and robbers and murderers and rapists here, at most. But outside, there are millions…An honest man is safe here, outside, his life is hell.’ This is how a beggar, convicted for no reason in the novel Imaan, shudders at the thought of being released from prison, only to confront corruption, violence, sexual predation and killings outside.
Someone who has not read Joy Goswami, in the original Bengali or in translation, would have missed the seminal compositions of one of the world’s finest poets. It is a daunting task to translate Joy Goswami, and it is no less daunting to review the brilliant translation of his book. Since I had not read Goswami’s trilogy in the original, I approached the translation with an open mind. In fact, it is Sampurna who has introduced Joy Goswami to the western world.
With Salt of the Earth, Matira Manisha, the classic Odia novel of 1930 by Kalindi Charan Panigrahi, has seen its third English translation. The first translation (done by Leela Ray and Narendra Mishra) went straight for the jugular in its choice of the title, House Undivided. What this eclipsed was the novel’s rural and agrarian setting, so unmistakably captured in the Odia title, from which comes the author’s romantic-idealistic concern with the soil.