The question of women’s labour has been central to most women’s studies classrooms across the world.The book edited by Mary EJohn and Meena Gopal is pathbreaking because it takes the question of women’s labour out of the confines of traditional women’s studies by adopting an interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective. The book opens with a section that is almost akin to a masterclass on the issues of women and labour in India in specific, accompanied by a very exhaustive discussion of the shifting theoretical paradigms, scholarly debates and literature review.
The book under review focuses on the recent farmers movement that lasted for one and half years and ended only when the Union Government withdrew the three farm laws against which the farmers had put up a peaceful resistance, ensconced on the borders of the national capital territory of Delhi. The movement led the farmers’ unions to form their own party (Samyukt Kisan Morcha) in Punjab and enter into the electoral arena.
Arundhati Bhattacharya’s memoir has a literary flavour, mixing personal elements with the professional admirably. But it is distinctive in the way her experiences have been articulated from the perspective of a ‘working woman’. And this feat she accomplishes with elan, making her reflections a readable treat and compelling to empathize with.To begin with, it is a story of a girl growing up at Bhilai and Bokaro and then in Kolkata for higher studies before joining the wider world of professional banking.
This beautifully produced book brings together twenty diverse essays (including the excellent introduction) on the Ramayana tradition in visual, literary and performance cultures across a broad geographical swathe and across more than a millennium.In her careful examination of Ramayana-themed sculptures in the Chalukya and Hoysala period temples of Karnataka, Parul Pandya Dhar shows that the image of Rama as ideal ruler is seen from inscriptions of the sixth century onwards where kings are compared to the divine hero. Interestingly, the nobler aspects of Ravana are also occasionally represented.
Children nowadays are exposed to a wide variety of mythological stories from around the world, and so have become quite familiar with the creatures studding these stories. Whether it is the poisonous basilisk from the Harry Potter stories, the manticore and cyclops from the Percy Jackson books and movies, or dragons from any number of books and movies, children have abundant access to stories about western mythological beasts.
Madhavi Mahadevan presents to us the tale of Drishadvati, an illegitimate princess born of Yayati, the philandering Suryavanshi king of Hastinapur. She is blessed (or cursed?) with a book—that she would sire four kings. Drishadvati, it was prophesied, was also ‘blessed’ such that she would regain her virginity after every birth. This boon made her the coveted prize of her times.
2021
In October of 2017 California’s raging wildfires burnt down Sophia Naz’s home, taking everything, heirlooms, paintings, signed books, inter alia treasures, carelessly strewn around homes that bear witness to living—family photographs, handwritten journals, ‘the material history of a lifetime’. Her 2021 collection of poems, Open Zero is less a math of that uncountable loss, or its archiving—for its calculus, as the obliquely eponymous poem ‘After, math’, muses, ‘must be left at memory’s table’. The poems here map the fire’s aftermaths—of all that follows the event of loss.
With the arrival of his new collection, Anthropocene, a multi-genre book of poetry, literary prose and photography—Sudeep Sen takes a vertical plunge into deep history. From being a poet of Distracted Geographies, he now ventures to be a poet of distracted geologies and its sedimented pasts. If in his earlier major collection Fractals, he could be seen traversing across ravaged war zones from Kargil to Gaza to trace remnants of life—in this latest book, the entire planet with its disoriented seas, skies, seasons and sites, becomes his theatre of concern.
2021
Ranu Uniyal, a teacher of English, is here with her latest anthology of poems, in Hindi. Her poems, which she dismissively says are ‘just things I wrote’, are something of a portfolio of a traditional artist, shy and mild mannered, but with the promise of high artistry and an unfaltering grasp on her material and tools.There are poems about the different stages of womanhood, life in the streets (and within the mind), passing seasons, and of course the landscape of the heart. In her wide sweep of ideas, she reminds one of the nineteenth century Urdu/Rekhta masters who left us literal biographies of their towns—local and universal at the same time.
Devrani Jethani ki Kahani, first published in 1870, is often hailed as the first novel in Hindi, and this critical edition, with the first-ever translation into English as A Story of Two Sisters-in-Law, takes full cognizance of the book’s historical significance to bring it to a contemporary reader in all its layered complexity. The family saga marks a tryst with modernity against the backdrop of the colonial encounter, while offering a realist/reformist representation of the textures of Agarwal-Baniya community life around the Meerut region in the 1860s.
2021
Keeping in Touch by award-winning novelist Anjali Joseph is a love story centering Keteki Sharma and Ved Ved, two thirty-something individuals more or less settled in their hectic, jet-set lives. Though it is love at first sight for Ved, when he sees Keteki at Heathrow Airport in casual jeans and shirt, Keteki revels in her relationship with her new lover but takes her time making up her mind about settling down with him. Thus begins a dance of a relationship between two individuals entirely unknown to each other.
Trumpet Calls: Epic Tales of Extraordinary Elephants by Nalini Ramachandran is divided into nine chapters beginning with ‘What is an Elephant’ and ending with ‘The Keepers of Memory’. Each chapter has a short introduction to the theme in focus, a short ‘ele-fact’ i.e., facts about the elephants and additional information which is connected to the main story. The black and white illustrations are attractive primarily due to sketches and drawings by Annushka Hardikar.
Young readers and budding artists will be entranced by the beautiful illustrations that hit you as soon as you open The Girl who was a Forest: Janaki Ammal by Lavanya Karthik. The words have been chosen with care and are as intense and deep as they are few. It is a book for all age groups with the illustrations being an endearing, additional pull factor.
These are words from Saumya’s last letter to Duaa in the book Postbox Kashmir. This is a non-fiction book holding sixteen brief yet substantial letters between the two girls. The letters are strung together by Divya Arya giving elaborate historical details of events in and around Kashmir and references related to discussions that happen between the pen pals.
It is not unusual to hear children of all age groups chanting the Hanuman Chalisa. They learn to chant it with ease from their elders because of a magical lilt in the lyrics and a charm about the language known as Awadhi, a dialect of Hindi.In My First Hanuman Chalisa, the authors and the illustrator have remarked in the opening pages that they were taught the 40 verses of the Chalisa by grandparents or parents.
The book begins with a comprehensive overview and a strong introduction to why we should understand what went into making our present. Subhadra Sen Gupta, in her inimitable style, takes us on a journey around the world and offers a great many nuggets of information about the world’s earliest civilizations. We read about the Egyptian rulers who built lavish tombs for their afterlife
2021
With the onset of adolescence, girls and boys are pressured to conform to socially sanctioned gender roles. They are expected to follow the gender norms and practices that a particular society has set. The problem arises when children develop a gender identity that is set against a society’s expectation. There are cultures that are more fluid but there are many which discriminate against non-binary individuals because of stereotypes and misinformation.
2021
Arzu is essentially a coming-of-age story but the beauty of the book lies in the fact that it is able to beautifully capture the process of growth, change and hard work, which can be tremendously difficult to write about in an interesting way. Arzu’s efforts to develop herself and find her place in the world are inspiring, especially for young readers who are trying to figure themselves out.
A delightful if apocryphal story involves the legendary Hindustani vocalist Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan switching off the radio halfway through a Lata Mangeshkar broadcast, muttering to himself ‘Kambakht ladki besur hoti hi nahin hai!’ (The accursed girl doesn’t strike a single false note anywhere!). This facile technical perfection was in a sense deceptive. It…