VOLUME XLVII Number 2 February 2023

Mention ‘Dr Zhivago’ and people will recall the 1965 blockbuster movie, not Pasternak’s novel published in 1958. Not surprising, because the movie focuses on the emotive love story. The book, on the other hand, reveals the complexity of the events of that tumultuous period in Russia’s history (from 1905 to the Second World War) and their influence on human relationships.

Autobiography is a genre of literature where an individual narrates his/her own life to others through the act of writing. Generally, this is done by the privileged to display their inherent superiority and worthiness to other members, less worthy. Even when personalities from minority or disadvantaged groups are recognized, the standards of evaluating the life of these individuals might be reinforcing the dominant group’s evaluative criteria. 

The adage ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ could not be more apt to describe the collaborative nature of a project the scope of Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women. A team of translators, researchers, experts, and advisors helped the editors assemble, order, and arrange the travel accounts of the forty-five authors included in the compilation. They selected accounts written across the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century, from diverse languages and locations including Arabic, English, Indonesian, Punjabi, Turkish and Urdu.

Between Heaven & Earth is an exhaustive compendium authored by contemporary literary stalwarts and travellers who utilize descriptive writing to produce pages of text reminiscent of Shansui paintings. Bulbul Sharma’s and Ruskin Bond’s cataloging incorporates a plethora of voices, and echoes of the past. The reader is treated to Ruskin Bond, Khushwant Singh, and Keki Daruwalla alongside Bill Aitken, Jim Corbett, Thomas Munro and Rumer Gooden. 

It is a tragic irony of our times that the cultural space for poetry is fast shrinking in our midst, and so are its readers and/or publishers. Known to us, humans, as one of the most primordial and also sublime forms of self-expression, poetry is moving out of our lives, almost imperceptibly. Sadly enough, the poetry that speaks the real language of the human heart, doesn’t appear to have many takers, at least, in our hyper-real times.

It is difficult to review this book, as the smooth writing tempts you to pause and ruminate on techniques used, which inspires you to attempt a few pieces. Nikita Parik’s poems are lessons in creative writing. Both My City is a Murder of Crows, and her debut collection Diacritics of Desire, are important reads for emerging poets working on their craft. Invariably, Parik will teach them concise writing.

Dazzlingly unpredictable, Ra Sh’s recent collection of poems, Buddha and Biryani, constructs a world of perception that is playfully irreverent but trenchantly real. The poet, known for his seductively tantalizing referentiality of erotica in The Architecture of Flesh (2015) and The Bullet Train (2019), strikes the raw chords of the readers again.

The cover of this slim volume of poems is of a flower blossoming and the uneven lines drawn on every petal sets the tone for the ideas that are enclosed within its spaces. On first glance, one is not prepared for what follows inside the book. The stereotypical set of ideas pertaining to flowers and colour schemes that one has been conditioned to, and the way one casually looks at the surface, does not prepare us for the powerful assemblage of poems that will shake you to your core.