2021
TS Eliot wrote in his essay The Three Provincialities (1922): ‘True literature has something which can be appreciated by intelligent foreigners who have a reading knowledge of the language, and also something which can only be understood by the particular people living in the same place as the author.’ Eliot goes on to mention how writers should be able to disturb the provincialism of not only a particular time but also a particular place. Vikram Seth’s poetry sets out to follow Eliot somewhat on this path.
Farrukh Dhondy has worn several hats as a writer, journalist, activist, screenwriter, broadcaster and is something of a literary celebrity. His is therefore the kind of autobiography one expects to be peppered with fascinating anecdotes and lurid confessions. But, perhaps as the title Fragments Against My Ruin—taken from The Waste Land—suggests, one has to be content with fragments and fleeting glimpses of the world around its author instead of a comprehensive account.
The Owl Delivered the Good News all Night Long is a mammoth compilation of folk tales from all the States in the Indian Union. With 108 tales from 57 languages and dialects across India, it is a stupendous effort to keep alive the spirit of these regions through words and stories that emanate from and are deeply inscribed in their lived realities. The book has an interesting organizational structure.
The Greatest Tamil Stories Ever Told, an eclectic collection of 30 stories, features eminent writers who are common household names and current favourites, dating from the 1930s to today. The editor Sujatha Vijayaraghavan’s unhurried indulgence in short stories by Thamizh writers and an earlier venture of reading more than 800 stories in three months’ time for her dance project came to fruition in compiling this edition, we infer from the foreword.
2021
The Tunnel is a short chapter book about a young boy named Ranji who is fascinated by the midday train. He travels on his bicycle from the village to a low hill and patiently waits by the tunnel to catch a glimpse of the engine roaring out of it. After the train passes through the tunnel, the sound of the engine fades and the stillness of jungle returns.
Duckbill has brought out a series of hOle Books, which invite you to ‘Jump into reading through a Duckbill hOle’ for children 7 and up. I jumped in with two books, and was glad I did.Chumki and the Pangolin is set in Bagmundi village in Purulia, at the edge of the Chhota Nagpur plateau. As the title says, it is about a girl called Chumki who discovers a pangolin and the adventure that then follows (not to worry, no spoiler alert here!). The main story is about the Indian pangolin being endangered, and how poachers are greedily destroying the few animals still left.
Dale Carnegie was an American author and lecturer. He developed several courses on improvement of interpersonal skills. He is well known for his books How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948). The book in review, Dale Carnegie for Children is an abridged version of his bestselling books, adapted by Ashwitha Jayakumar and divided into four parts.The readers are first introduced to the life and background of Dale Carnegie. This sets the tone for the rest of the book.
The book under review eloquently encapsulates not only the major achievements of the game but also sheds light on the stalwarts of Indian cricket, their achievements, approaches and vision. In order to carve out the chronology of events, the book has been divided into various sub-sections by the editor on the basis of several epochs of Indian cricket. This has certainly contributed to making it more reader-friendly. Importantly, it has underlined how cricket has become an integral part of Indian social life. Through its ability to capture the imagination of the people, it has succeeded in becoming a game for the masses. The role of the media—print and electronic, has greatly contributed towards this. Additionally, the book brings together memories and conversations of cricket enthusiasts and interviews of eminent Indian cricketers which provide deeper insights on the game. Its discussion of domestic as well as women’s cricket is equally enthralling.
2021
Yogesh Patel’s The Rapids is a collection of brisk poetic thoughts on a range of ideas that reflect on contemporary times. In the age of high-speed internet, data-deluge and fractured communication, Patel is conscious of his stance as a poet. Thus, instead of critiquing the world from an ivory tower, he comes down and invents playful patterns, inspired by everyday disjuncture.
The pandemic which engulfed the world in 2020 is, as the song says, a strange saga of which nobody can say with any certainty where its beginnings lie and where it will end. It is believed that it began in Wuhan in November 2019, exactly a hundred years after the Spanish Flu pandemic which took an enormous toll of human lives. And over the past 24 months or more, the various mutations the virus has been undergoing make it completely incomprehensible as to when it will, if ever, disappear.
2021
Despite all pronouncements to the contrary, poetry is not dead. But it surely is confronted with a crisis. Its publication and reception are fraught with a risk—a risk that in part springs from the prosaic proclivities of the present and in part from the indifference that noise-saturated sensibility—enamoured as it is by the surfaces—has for anything that demands nuanced engagement with and understanding of life verities.
The task of a poetry editor is both exciting and onerous. The most difficult genre to ‘judge’ for quality, poetry’s intimate and earnest vocabulary defies any fixed norms. While each poet is supremely individual, so is each reader, and therefore literary responses can be highly subjective. Nevertheless, if the incremental interest in this genre is to be systematized for public circulation, editors have to make choices within the amplitude confronting them. Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita Agrawal, editors of the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, 2020-2021 have fulfilled their task admirably though it is a specially difficult year when the pandemic has thrown up poetry as a favoured instrument of self-healing.
Anton Chekhov, analysing the structural elements of a short story, says, ‘writing a short story, therefore, is to write what the characters do, not what they think, or say’ (Friedland 1890). While there is no autobiographical evidence of Chekhov’s influence on Mannu Bhandari’s artistic development, one can see a Chekovian resonance, a kind of literary parallel. In Vidya Pradhan’s rich selection of eighteen stories under review, Bhandari’s characters do negotiate things as they exist. Her narrative canvas substitutes abstract philosophizing with lived realities.
T. Janakiraman. Translated from the original Tamil by Lakshmi Kannan. Introduction by Anita Balakrishnan
T.Janakiraman (1921–82), affectionately known as Thi Jaa, is one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century Tamil literature. He wrote about familial and interpersonal issues, with a focus on the ill-treatment of women, especially widows. His best-known novels, Mohamul, 1964, (The Thorn of Desire), Amma Vantal,1966, (English translation The Sins of Appu’s Mother) and Marappasu,1975, (Wooden Cow) present strong women with a mind of their own. Bilingual novelist, short story writer, poet and translator Lakshmi Kannan had published an English translation of Marappasu in 1979. She felt the need to do a revised version; the birth centenary of the novelist provided the occasion to publish it.
I belong to a generation that grew up reading Nayantara Sahgal. Her early works, like her autobiography Prison and Chocolate Cake, captured for us a time that many of us had not personally experienced but could vividly imagine through her writings.Even as India grew older, we aged and the idealism of youth began to lose some of its sheen, Nayantara Sahgal’s was a voice that never failed to make you pause and think.
2021
The canonical Hindi poet Mahadevi Varma (1907-1987) has to some extent suffered from being too revered. In well-meaning hagiography, she has been cast as overly pious, almost joyless in her asceticism for her art. In this context, Ruth Vanita’s attentive translation of Varma’s collection of sketches, My Family, has revitalized Varma as more spiritually buoyant, as someone deeply invested and in love with wider, larger, more spiralling notions of family and kinship—especially one that includes animal companions.
The number of celebrated poets and novelists who began their career reviewing books is probably much higher than is currently known. To start with, current literary culture, while being sustained invisibly by reviewing, is rather uncharitable towards the modest review. Writers too have colluded with this ethos and have tended to distance themselves from their own ‘jobbing work’ once they have achieved name and fame. Dr. Johnson of the eighteenth century was probably the last known writer of English literature who was as much of a ‘grandly generalizing sage’ as he was a ‘proletarianized hack’ (Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, p. 32.)
2020
Afterlives is the latest publication from Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2021. The Nobel Committee has very aptly remarked that Gurnah is being awarded for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents (The New York Times).
A book awarded the Saraswati Samman, Ramakathaiyum Iramayanankalum (2005) is an ambitious work by the Thamizh scholar AA Manavalan, a comparative study of forty-eight Ramakathas (though it references more) from the 5th century BCE to the 19th century CE, written in twenty-two languages—Pali, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Tibetan, Tamil, Old Javanese, Japanese, Telugu, Assamese, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi, Odia, Persian, Malay, Burmese, Filipino, Thai, Laotian and Kashmiri. We are fortunate now to have a meticulously done translation in English by CT Indra and Prema Jagannathan, one that is extremely readable without losing out on the scholarship and the research that has gone into both the Thamizh work and the translation.
The title of this well-researched book, reflecting a life-time’s work, is serendipitous. Mirrored in it is a couplet written by this medieval poet, which also figures as the epigraph:I have made my mind as pure as Ganga water,Hari follows after, calling out, ‘Kabir, Kabir’The echoing repetition of Kabir’s name, even more than the plurality which is a quintessential aspect of the cultural memory of this poet, suggests the indefinite and nebulous in the striving for the mystical. In an inversion of hierarchy, it is Hari who runs after Kabir, calling out to his devotee.