Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Konkani is spoken in four States—Goa and the coastal regions of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala. There are 40 lakh speakers, of which about 16 lakhs are in Goa. There are five scripts used for writing Konkani—Malayalam, Kannada, Devnagari, Roman and Arabic. Recently, the Konkani community from Kerala decided to switch the script from Malayalam to Devnagari. With such diversity, an apparent challenge that one may encounter in Konkani literature is of transliteration.

To comment on the current status of literature in Gujarati, overall and on contemporary literary trends, would be a contentious matter. It would be pertinent, thus, to limit the scope of this write-up to sharing some contemplations on the current status of Children’s Literature (CL), based on our experiences and engagement.The scenario in Gujarati CL is not encouraging.

Language is not only a means of exchange of ideas, it is one of the most reliable mediums of expression. It is also an importance means for the development and social-cultural identity of a society. Without language, humans are incomplete and disjunct from their traditions.

The Children’s Literature sector in India has seen many positive shifts in the last two decades. The market has grown, the work of the existing not-for-profit and for-profit publishers has strengthened, new voices and publishers have emerged, and efforts to strengthen the sector like children’s book awards have increased.

According to a recent article in The Print, there are currently over sixty-five literature festivals in the country—in different shapes, sizes, and colours. Most of them are centred in particular cities and venues; others are more versatile, some are peripatetic. Some focus on celebrities and particular genres, and for some the dominant theme is the promotion of a brand.

In Asoca: A Sutra, Irwin Allan Sealy attempts to present the ‘real man’ behind  Emperor Ashoka the Great. He uses the spelling ‘Asoca’ to suggest a soft ‘k’,  highlighting the way simple villagers pronounce the name, for his mother was not of royal birth. The ‘s’ is pronounced as a sibilant (‘assoka’) in place of the palatal ‘s’ of Sanskrit. Sealy employs the Pali forms for all the names, corresponding to actual usage, rather than written records—Susima, Mahinda, Sanghamitta rather than Sushumna, Mahendra and Sanghamitra.

Anees Salim’s The Odd Book of Baby Names is an expertly conceived novel comprising nine voices relating nine autobiographical narratives, all of which have one thread in common—each narrator has been begotten by the same kingly patriarch. The speakers, progenies born of legally wedded wives, or out of wedlock, many of them unknown to one another and unaware of their common paternity, narrate their quotidian experiences.

Koral Dasgupta’s Kunti is not the willful mother who apportioned a common wife to her five sons. She is the young, vibrant, beauteous and superbly intellectual woman who is wooed by the Gods. The book swings along the path of a celestial love triangle: Surya, Indra and Kunti. The offerings match every expectation of such an imperial romance—peevishness, jealousy, wile, guile, manoeuvrings and manipulations—melting the boundaries between the humans and the devas.

As the blurb on the attractive book cover says, Sonal Kohli grew up in Delhi and lives in Washington DC; she studied at the Sri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi and went on to do her MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, UK and The House Next to the Factory is her first book. These details are important because they help readers understand not just her writing style as a trained creative writer, but also her ability to capture a Delhi, and a world beyond, that we may all know and yet we get to know all over again when we encounter it in her simple yet evocative prose.

Early 2021 saw the Aleph Book Company bring out a dark hued hardcover with a centrally placed Mughal motif in sandy gold. Raza Mir’s novel Murder at the Mushaira felt pleasantly hefty on store shelves.The nicely produced volume looked rich and piqued curiosity. The excerpt at the back promised it to be the forerunner of a seriously good read

Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s Tagore & Gandhi:  Walking Alone, Walking Together is an arresting book laced with fresh insights and perspectives, notwithstanding that it is about a subject that is  well-trodden in the annals of academia. Tagore and Gandhi both bestrode the Indian firmament like two towering Colossuses. Attempting a book on either of them is fraught with danger.

Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse is a work of post-genre literature. It is at once story, scholarly treatise, history, anthropology, folklore, memoir, diary, manifesto, and prose poetry. To call it a text would be unfair, for its very polemical and philosophical axis is agency. Moreover, it has been crafted with that rare artistry which, concealing itself as spontaneity, confers on the work a complex organic wholeness.

One of the aspects studied by scholars of globalization is its antiquity. Questions have been asked about whether globalization is a novel phenomenon from the 20th century, or merely varying manifestations of an old pattern over periods of time. Convincing arguments have been made on either side. One pattern that is undeniable is the search for products, profits and resources, all contingent upon control of people and territory.

The paradigmatic method of studying the story of India is through its languages, declares Peggy Mohan with a rhetorical flourish in the title of her book, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through its Languages.Mohan’s thesis draws upon Jawaharlal Nehru’s archetypal statement about the Indian subcontinent which likened it to…some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought

It goes without saying that China is India’s most important neighbour and India-China bilateral relations is the most consequential diplomatic engagement for India in the 21st century. Despite greater attention being paid to China in India recently, there is still not enough research and writing that would stand the test of time.

Among the cultural elite of Gujarat, it was a common practice to hire Bangla tutors, visit Shantiniketan and read or translate Bangla into Gujarati. I was told this by Niranjan Bhagat who wrote his first poem the day Tagore died. From the late nineteenth century to this day, generations of Gujarati writers have translated Bangla literature, and a galaxy of individuals have been shaped from their time at Shantiniketan.

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?

 A prolific writer, a respected journalist, connoisseur of arts, and a revolutionary, R Krishnamurthy, better known as Kalki, was a literary giant, whose body of work includes Alai Osai, and his famous trilogy, Parthiban Kanavu, Ponniyin Selvan and Sivakamiyin Sabatham.  Kalki’s novels, written between 1941-54, belonged to a historical genre, a mix of drama, action, intrigue and passion

Serialized in the Malayalam weekly Mathrubhumi in 1983, and published as a novel a year later, CV Balakrishnan’s Ayussinte Pusthakam has become over the years a widely read work that is regularly prescribed in university curricula. The novel’s initial success was restricted to a more youthful audience, but today it has been published in 26 editions, a testimony to the acclaim and admiration which this work continues to elicit.

Saudamini Deo’s English translation of short stories by Bhuwaneshwar Prasad marks a significant event in Hindi literature. Not only does it reinvigorate a chronically under-appreciated Hindi writer in a new language, but it also attempts to rewrite the story of Hindi modernism as seen through the lens of non-canonical texts.