If one could travel as easily as the mind tours the world in a matter of seconds, where would one go? Would one go to a place from memory or a to a place one hasn’t ever ventured to even in one’s wildest dreams? Who would a traveller such as this meet and what would be the stories one would inadvertently become a part of?
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.
2021
The history of twentieth century Indian drama has hitherto focused mostly on the work of playwrights such as Girish Karnad, Badal Sircar and Vijay Tendulkar. The enormous work of Bengali writer, actor and director, Utpal Dutt (1929-1993) has hardly received the appreciation due to it. Ananda Lal’s recent English translation of Utpal Dutt’s Barricade has shifted the spotlight to the vast oeuvre of his work as also to the absence of sustained discussion around it, especially to a non-Bengali reader/audience.
The English word ‘dry’ doesn’t even begin to cover what the Urdu word ‘khushk’ conveys. Khushk pricks and chafes, like the continuous rubbing of sandpaper. There is bruising, never enough for the sort of attention that makes one rush to the Emergency Room, but bad enough to remain a painful slow burn. As a metaphor for unacknowledged damage, there couldn’t be a better term.
The idea of migration and the internal/external struggle that a migrant undergoes has been looked at through various lens and forms of writing. Migration can be a forced one or can be construed as a voluntary one forced by economic circumstances or for seeking a better quality of life. Either way the shift is not just in terms of geographical locations but also in the way one has come to perceive the world and one’s surroundings.
The tastefully produced Run for the Shadows reaches my desk. It’s a happy sign for poetry, for our ecosystem. This is Sridala Swami’s third book of poems. A Reluctant Survivor (2007) and Escape Artist (2014) are her other creations. Run for the Shadows is a bouquet of 46/50 poems (if one counts Three False Starts and a Conclusion as one or five poems).
The Book of Dog is an anthology of 45 stories and is an ode to canine companionship expressed through essays, dramatized tales, poems and pictures. The book features contributions from leading voices in eclectic domains: animal welfare activists; academics; media personalities and journalists; bestselling authors, poets, filmmakers and playwrights; graphic artists, and chefs.
As India’s influence in global politics increases, there has been a corresponding increase in the number of books on Indian foreign policy. Increasingly, one sees more books and articles based on India’s archives. However, the impact of India’s domestic politics on the formulation of foreign policy remains an under-researched area.
he publication of two important books on India-Africa relations in early 2022 is a striking event. The authors are Foreign Service Africanists with multiple assignments on the Continent. They complement each other rather well.Rajiv Bhatia addresses the wide historical canvas, and a range of political and other connections.
Euriphides once remarked, ‘There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one’s native land.’ It does not augur well for today’s modern civilized world that a whopping number of people are born and die in refugee camps, and millions of people each year are forced to leave their countries and seek refuge in other countries, while many others are displaced within their own countries.
Eric Hobsbawm in the introduction to Nations and Nationalism since 1780 notes that although the idea of nationalism is constructed chiefly from above, it needs to be studied from below as this is where it takes root and is most powerful and capricious. Shail Mayaram’s new book The Secret Life of anOther Indian Nationalism: Transitions from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana is a sincere attempt in this direction.
The Great Tech Game comes with a promise to explain one of the pre-eminent challenges of our times, which concerns the rapid growth in the technological domain and its implications for the economic and strategic sectors in countries across the world. The fact that a book on geopolitics is written around the theme of technology underscores the high stakes now attached to the gadgets and algorithms that were once dismissed as a domain for ‘geeks and freaks’.
The debates on colonial construction of tribal identity and the need to revisit the concept are gathering space in academic discourse in recent years. Dasgupta stretches this debate a little further from her previous work. Tribal identity is similar to caste used extensively by colonial ethnographers, anthropologists, and census enumerators to fix identities of the numerous communities living in India.
No story has ever been fully told, it is said, because no story can ever be fully told. However, as Ranjana Padhi and Nigamananda Sadangi tell us in Resisting Dispossession: The Odisha Story, all stories are only half told. That said, it ought to be conceded that this book, which sets out to tell the story of development and its discontents in Odisha from 1948 to the present, tells it remarkably well.
Muslims in Assam comprise one-third of its population. Since Independence, the politics of Assam has been shaped by the question of alleged illegal immigration from erstwhile East Pakistan. The spectre of an illegal immigrant minoritizing the ‘khilonjia’(original inhabitants) of Assam has been a constant in the popular as well as political discourse.
Studies abound of Arthashastra, Mudrarakshasa, Panchatantra and Hitopadesha; not so many of Dasakumaracarita, Vetala Panchavimshati and Simhasana Dvatrimshika (2nd century BCE to 13th century CE). Srinivasan is the first to study them together vis-à-vis western political thought. It is the first study based upon Telegu translations which provide different versions of some tales.
One of the popular traditional games played by children in Bengal is kumir (crocodile)-danga (elevated land). One player who is designated as kumir has to catch the other players when they trespass their area (danga). This game encapsulates the very identity of Bengal and it is about the movement of players across the shifting territory of kumir and danga.
2021
The author is a truly amazing doctor, a surgeon, and a writer of fiction. But many doctors write fiction, the most famous of course being Chekov, who I just discovered was not Russian, but Ukrainian, like Tchaikovsky. But unlike Chekov and most clinicians like Oliver Sacks, who mine their case histories for stories, Kavery Nambisan has a deep appreciation of the need for public health.
2022
She donned many mantles. It is a well-known fact that Mahasweta Devi (1926-2016), the Bengali novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, columnist, editor, and above all a socio-cultural activist, had relentlessly worked for decades highlighting the problems of the rural poor and the tribals. Standing as she did at the intersection of vital contemporary questions of politics, gender, class and caste, she was perhaps the most significant figure in the socially committed literature field.
An itinerant and renowned journalist with a distinguished career and several books to his credit, Saeed Naqvi continues his literary output with a play in three acts. It would be difficult to give details about the play and yet do justice to its ringing tones of anger over a heritage betrayed, or the distress over what has come to pass.