2020
In recent years, several translations of Bhyrappa’s novels have appeared in English making these available to non-vernacular readership. This spate of translations rectifies to a degree Bhyrappa’s relative lack of visibility outside the Kannada speaking world, so different from the more expansive trajectory of international repute traced by UR Ananthamurthy’s fictional works…
Karisal (black soil) literature is a facet of Tamil literature which encompasses soil-related dialectical literatures of several regions within Tamil Nadu. The southernmost part of the State made up of Nellai, Thoothukudi, Virudunagar, Theni, Madurai and Ramanathapuram districts reflect in their literature—an offspring of the Karisa, the rawness that is typical of the rural lives…
Gloria Steinem once said, ‘We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.’ In a way, Neela Padmanabhan’s Generations is a response to this aspect of crossing and building new knowledges. The story bridges tradition and modernity as it chronicles…
T Janakiraman’s novel The Crimson Hibiscus is, at one level, the story of an ordinary man prematurely burdened by duties and responsibilities. Equally though, it is the story of an entire era and of that complex eco-system called the joint family. This sensitively translated, beautifully produced novel..
The Tamil Brahmin community has for me been an enigma, mainly because of their rites and rituals that begin or close any event of everyday life. The rich symbolism in lifestyle patterns, the pragmatically intelligent womenfolk, the shrewd menfolk and the sharp children have always piqued…
‘Did he live? Did he die? Was it a search? Or a hunt? When she set him free, did she also succeed in setting herself free?’ In this eclectic collection of thirteen short stories, Ambai’s characters pose existential questions that are intriguing, even disturbing, because they defy mundane answers…
When Prema gets married, little does she know that she will have to toil endlessly and live like a tongue-tied prisoner, listening to the same litany of complaints from her husband every day. Pummelled for three years and ten days, she eventually walks out of her abusive marriage, securing ‘freedom with costs’…
2021
Pain knows no language, but languages do know pain. As first Malayalam and then English lend their scripts to narrate the violence and intensity of a Santhali woman’s pain; out of these narrations are born the images of those whose wounds make languages crumble and words shrink in impoverishment…
It is generally agreed that translation is an act of moving a text from one language to another. Those who have reflected critically on the processes of translation, like John Dryden (1631–1700), concur with this basic definition. Complicating this, possibly in the late eighteenth century England…
Words are like human beings. Behind every living word there are many dead words.’Theeyoor Chronicles deals primarily with the resilience of human beings in different situations to a certain extent and those who seek refuge in death when they are unable to do so…
Kadambari: The Flower Girl by Sethu is a work that surprised me on two primary counts. The first is that it is a self-translation, perhaps Sethu’s first attempt. It was originally published in Malayalam as Aaramathe Penkutty (2006). Self-translations are rarely attempted in Malayalam…
2020
The last couple of years have seen a quantum leap in terms of the sheer number and range of books being translated from Indian regional languages into English. While there has been a healthy market for bhasha translations of English works, the process
Letters to Jorina is a collection of eleven letters written by Alok Das, a University Professor from Odisha, to his woman friend Jorina McCarthy, a Guyanese settled in England. The book records Alok’s observations and reflections on home and abroad…
This is one of those books that puts a reviewer in a dilemma. It is so promising in its design and intent that one is tempted to characterize it as a near classic, but in its execution it leaves one dissatisfied. Of course, to say this is not to criticize the book, but merely to suggest the level that the book could have attained…
1978
Writers are not known to have taken to Pills, not yet. In any case, since males dominate the world of writing, proliferation of books cannot be stopped by any known oral contraceptives. Proliferation of books is certainly better than proliferation of weapons and conflicts. All books are not as stale as airlines food…
To give the essays in this collection a unifying theme, the editor raises what is perhaps the most interesting question about…
It is not an easy task to review a set of volumes, the first of which begins with the Paleolithic and Mesolithic ages, and the third ends with a chapter, devoted to the ‘Development of Socialist culture.’ In fact, considering that the contents of the first volume are far removed in time from October 1917 the title is a bit of a misnomer…
The world over, the bureaucracy is fair game for anyone who wants to have a go at it. Very few institutions have been as reviled, jeered at and abused as continuously as the bureaucracy. Not that it is entirely unwarranted, as anyone who has had to go to a Government office and deal with forms or permits knows…
Vidya Dehejia who has published two important books, Early Buddhist Rock Temples (1972) and Early Stone Temples of Orissa 91978), is a dedicated scholar of Indian art. But in the present publication she steps down from the high pedestal of specialized scholarship to perform what is a very important task…
Hegel said that every great man places history under an obligation to understand him. No student of history would today accept this dictum: rather, he would regard almost all so-called great men as irrelevant, if not diversionary nuisances. Yet it is worth spending a little time on C.R. First of all…