Archives

January 2025 . VOLUME 1, NUMBER
Edited by Harish Trivedi Sahitya

In his substantial and in-depth Introduction, Professor Trivedi has explained with clarity and precision the overlap and differences between History and Literature, and has laid before us ‘the Mill-Macaulay-Macdonell Mockery’ that had such a debilitating effect on indigenous scholarship in this area. Almost all the essayists praise the grand achievement of Sisir Kumar Das, who created his own model for Indian Literary Historiography with the two volumes, A History of Indian Literature:
Volume VIII 1800-1910: Western Impact: Indian Response, New Delhi


Reviewed by: Smita Agarwal
By Meena T. Pillai

Meena Pillai’s book, Translating Kerala, attempts to trace the traditions of translation in Malayalam with reference to their role in shaping new social imageries and literary practices. Though translation has a long history in Malayalam dating back to the 14th century, her focus is on the trends from early twentieth century onwards.


Reviewed by: EV Ramakrishnan
By Sumanyu Satpathy

What gives the book its cutting edge, however, is the well-thought-out interpretative perspective that considers the subject of Odia literary modernity from multiple standpoints, thus providing a polyphonic picture of the phenomenon. The fact that the book is done in English redounds further to its credit, for this enables the local story to take its place under the sun and alongside other publicized stories of modernity in the Indian bhashas. Together these stories add up to a narrative totality of Indian literature in its diverse bhasha output.


Reviewed by: Himansu S. Mohapatra
Edited by Sudha Tripathi. Guest Editor: Brajratna Joshi

The most prominent identification of Gagan Gill’s writings by commentators has been her Buddhist belief system. Several essays have engaged with this aspect of her writing commenting on her spirituality, her philosophical bent of mind and her meditative approach to the world. Radhavallabh Tripathi identifies the foundations of Gill’s writings to be the Buddhist principles of acceptance of suffering, searching the reasons for suffering, tearing off the illusion of craving and the concept of impermanence of the world. He notes that she belongs to the long intellectual tradition in India that after Buddha centres on suffering.


Reviewed by: Kopal
Translated and introduced by Srinivas Reddy

It is definitely breathtaking to see the width of traditions he has managed to bring under the ambit of his compilation which he has translated himself. Translations are generally a source of joy as the translator is adding his or her enjoyment to the words of the writer and this one is no exception. In this compilation, there are translations from works in Sanskrit, Prakrit and Tamil.


Reviewed by: Sudhamahi Regunathan
Translated from the original Kannada by Krishna Murthy

Such luminous moments of insight, introspection and self-awareness make for a richly rewarding reading experience. They highlight the grey zones in the moral and sociopolitical terrain that the narrator and a whole host of his fellow-citizens from the twin villages of Uralli and Makkigadde must traverse daily as they struggle to keep their rather tenuous lives and livelihoods on an even keel.


Reviewed by: Cheriyan Alexander
By Ambai. Translated from the original Tamil by Gita Subramanian

Subverting reader-expectations of hard-core detective fiction, Sudha Gupta compromises on sheer objectivity to come across as a compassionate, socially responsible person. The titular story of the collection is framed by two schemes of domesticity—Sudha, Naren and their daughter Aruna, including their household helps share a relationship of camaraderie and stability, while Naren’s researcher friend Kishen, Madhavi and two school-going daughters inhabit a home inscribed by fear, trauma and suspicion. Though the story guides us through the unravelling of a heinous crime,


Editorial

It, therefore, gave me particular pleasure to be able to edit this volume of remarkable Indian short fiction for Aleph. We don’t make any claims to the book being a comprehensive representation of all the great short fiction published in this country. Rather, what I have tried to do is present a wide selection of stories I have read and admired. As with all anthologies, there are stories that we have been unable to include as we were unable to track down copyright holders.


Reviewed by: By AJ Thomas
By Uddipana Goswami

The cyclical and dehumanizing nature of violence is a central theme in the collection. Structural violence refers to the ways in which social structures harm or disadvantage individuals by preventing them from meeting basic needs. In ‘Sin and Retribution’, Goswami revisits the 1983 Nellie massacre from the perspective of a perpetrator, unravelling the layers of dehumanization that lead individuals to commit acts of extreme brutality. The story critiques the inherent futility and moral erosion of communal violence, emphasizing how both victims and perpetrators are trapped within the structures of hate and fear perpetuated by historical injustices and political opportunism.


Reviewed by: Parvin Sultana
By Sudeep Chakravarti

Chakravarti extends the narrative of Fallen City up to the tumultuous time of the 1980s—the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the victory of Indira Gandhi, the anarchic behaviour of Sanjay Gandhi, the ‘unquestioned heir apparent to India-is-Indira-Indira-is-India’, the death of Sanjay Gandhi, Operation Blue Star (entry of the army into the Golden Temple at the orders of Indira Gandhi) and the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Fallen City ends with the subsequent anti-Sikh riots of 1984.


Reviewed by: Payal Nagpal
By Margrit Pernau

When Jamia Millia Islamia, under its visionary Vice Chancellor Mushirul Hasan, decided to name its newly built daycare facility after Gerda Philipsborn, this German-Jewish woman was resurrected from anonymity for Jamia’s younger generations. Slowly, fragments of her life began to appear in articles and discussions and then, Margrit Pernau decided to do a full-fledged biography of this spectral figure. Considering a general apathy for institutional histories and even greater disregard for the role women played in them, this was a remarkable move.


Reviewed by: Nishat Zaidi
By Nandan Dasgupta

The core consists of the Introduction (pp. 1-47) and seven chapters with sub-sections and Notes (pp. 48-317). ‘My narrative explodes some myths and questions many perceptions, including an explanation of how he became a spendthrift. To understand Michael, there is a mass of misinformation to cut through…’, says Dasgupta (p. 40).


Reviewed by: Dipavali Sen
By Shania Sarup

The Holocaust has undoubtedly birthed the most harrowing stories but Silana’s journey across countries, fleeing an infernal homeland to reach a safe haven in India doesn’t leave an impact. The Maharaja frets over British disapproval of his mission of saving several Jewish children and the need to keep their work secretive, yet it’s unrealistic how several foreign children lodged in his summer palace escape the attention of the Britishers. For a novel largely set in India, the WWII years that mark a crucial phase in the struggle for Indian Independence make a measly appearance. Even though the story has its heart in the right place, the writing is too dandified.


Reviewed by: Divya Shankar
Edited by Sanjukta Sunderason & Lotte Hoek

The essay explores at length the close relations between the workings of the PWA and AAWA. Besides deliberating upon the evolution and checkered history of the PWA in India and Pakistan, Ramnath also makes an attempt at studying the socio-political and cultural scenario in which the journal Lotus emerged. AAWA provided a common platform for the reunion of Progressive Writers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. While the journal Lotus ceased soon after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, attempts at forging an alliance between Africa and South Asia have continued unhindered.


Reviewed by: Amol Saghar
Edited by Anshu Malhotra O

Purnima Dhavan’s ‘A Feast for the Heart and Mind: Print Culture, Polemics and Religious Debate in Punjab in the 1870s’ discusses the evolution of Islamic literature after the arrival of print in late-nineteenth century Punjab focusing on the Baran Anva, a lengthy seventeenth-century text, and Pakki Roti, a short booklet written in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Muslim Punjabis, Dhavan uses these texts to discuss printing enterprises, script, language and education in the 1870s. Going against the grain, she argues that Punjabi Muslims learnt about Islam not from Arabic or Persian, but through texts in Shahmukhi script that were in Punjabi and occasionally Urdu.


Reviewed by: Vikas Rathee
By Anna Sailer

They were also not fixed in time but products of historical circumstances. Thus, the author points out, during the 1870s this system was used by the employers to maintain a ‘reserve army of labour, in a context of recurring labour shortages’. But during the 1890s, the multiple-shift system represented ‘a qualitatively new development’ in which the managers tried to control deployment of labour in certain crucial departments of jute industry in the name of standardization and rationalization. The process of control intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century and finally the multiple-shift system and work gangs were abolished by the early 1930s. Single-shift system was now imposed in many mills with increasing managerial control over the work process.


Reviewed by: Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay
By Pratap Padode

The urban disposition they have conceived is a triad, a three-legged stool, which must ‘articulate normatively where it begins and what motivates it, be able to think analytically about how cities actually work as well as about the nature of complex urban problems and move operationally to point to how one could get to different desired ends’. It is not a new urban theory or paradigm, but a process to engage with the problems of cities in order to produce new knowledge towards change that one desires, but crucially, it is never fully predetermined or a priori.


Reviewed by: AG Krishna Menon
By Amrita Saikia

The section on research methodology and methods is particularly engaging and insightful. Saikia has elaborately articulated how she accessed the field, which is far removed from her world. To inform herself about the Tibetans in exile before conducting her research, she referred to books, research articles, documentaries, and newspaper articles. She also identified and joined a week-long programme in Dharamshala (her field) to gain access to the community. This programme was run by a Tibetan NGO called Students for a Free Tibet (SFT).


Reviewed by: Juanita Kakoty
Edited by Meenakshi Malhotra, Krishna Menon, Rachana Johri Routledge

The themes the authors address represent different ways in which we seek to embody ourselves in the world, whether through negotiation, submission, dissent, protest or critique. We make the world what it is. The world no doubt exists out there with its structures and fixed meanings, through which we are viewed as embodied humans, but we too have the wherewithal to modify that fixity, and transform it to make our lives meaningful in the ways in which we seek to live. This brings agency to the foreground and emphasizes the role of the human subject in not merely living out a human life but in transforming that process in whatever way possible. Embodiment is therefore not fixed or unchangeable.


Reviewed by: Meenakshi Thapan
Edited by Ranu Uniyal and Fatima Rizvi

Gaele Sobott’s essay titled ‘I Can Hear Her Breathing: Disabled Writers Writing Disability’ explores possibilities for widening intellectual and aesthetic horizons through the disruption of dominant disablist narratives by writers with disabilities writing for themselves and telling their own authentic stories. Sobott herself is admittedly more interested in writing that supports a world with diversity, like works by disabled writers of colour and works translated into English rather than writing that strives to make the experience of disability more palatable to a non-disabled audience.


Reviewed by: Vedamini Vikram
By Jennifer Nandi

Specializing in customized tours to help the knowledgeable and discerning traveller ‘make connections with the soul of India’, Nandi says: ‘I use Nature, a central principle of human lives, which is not only beautiful but also good for us, that helps us regain our equanimity, that tunes our brain’s attention network, that keeps us so very happy; for this has made me who I am.’
No Half Measures describes a rambunctious excursion of several weeks in 2010 to the wildest reaches of the North East: parts of the country known for insurgency and instability, but which appealed to Nandi’s non-conformism and derring-do as much as that of her client’s.


Reviewed by: Govindan Nair
Edited by Harish Trivedi

The first section presents A Passage to India through translations in various languages, and film and stage adaptations, thereby building a memorable montage that the novel inspires. The opening essay is by a novelist, Anjum Hasan, and begins delightfully with Forsterian language that a child heard from a Forster-devotee father and didn’t know what it meant! The personal and the political merge over time and the book gains complex meaning for Anjum even as the heavily marked pages are, by then, being carried around the parental home in a plastic bag (p.
12). From that, we move swiftly to a bilingual essay by Rupert Snell ‘On Translating A Passage into Hindi’ based on an experiment with six Indian translators that yielded an astonishing variety of ‘equivalent terminology’ even with the title of the book.


Reviewed by: Malashri Lal
Edited by Usha Akella

As Adil Jussawalla points out, Keki Daruwalla’s works are ‘as relevant today as when they were first published (in 1970)’ (p. 59). Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca relays, ‘Mature poetic talent…literary stamina, intellectual strength and social awareness’ (p. 72), even in the poet’s debut collection, left an impression on Nissim Ezekiel. The ‘caustic’ and ‘incisive’ writing (p. 105) that shapes much of the poet’s oeuvre,


Reviewed by: Shamayita Sen
Edited by Amit Chaudhuri

I was eventually drawn to novels through exceptional paragraphs cited in essays. By my late teens, I was probably more likely to read a piece of criticism about a work rather than the work itself. His insight about novels is something which hard working teachers in their classes do not want their students to develop. Gratified with his epiphany, Chaudhuri looked for standalone paragraph(s) in novels which ‘belongs to a story but is also independent of it, in that it seems equally located in an irreducible life and textuality outside that novel as it is in the life narrated and contained within it’.


Reviewed by: Mohammad Asim Siddiqui
Edited and translated from the original Kannada into Sanskrit and English by Mangesh Venkatesh Nadkarni

A noteworthy section in the Introduction is: ‘Vacana Dharma and Hinduism’. Nadkarni shows here how the basic beliefs and practices of Vīraśaiva-Lingāyats are to be traced to Hinduism. For example, the idea of One God is very much there in the Rigveda (Ekam Sad viprāhbahudhāvadanti, etc.). The practice of chanting the holy mantra of ‘Om Namah Śivāya’ is from Hinduism.


Reviewed by: Sangamesh Savadattimath
By Deborah Sutton

From a diminutive rock smeared with vermillion, to logic-defying edifices cut out of sheer rock, to large complexes spread over hundreds of acres with the most spectacular architecture humans could ever envision, the Hindu temple can indeed be a bewildering space for the uninitiated and un-socialized.


Reviewed by: Lokesh Ohri
By Sanjay Subrahmanyan with Krupa Ge

The professional Carnatic musician’s path is highly templatized; countless have been through the grind. Start young, attend junior competitions, perform at AIR, and ensure that you make your way to the Music Academy performance slot. Subrahmanyan too traversed this well-trodden path, and spectacularly well at that, to join only a select few to receive the prestigious Sangeeta Kalanidhi (Oscar of Carnatic classical music) in 2015 when he was just 47 years!


Reviewed by: Bharat Kidambi
By Venki Ramakrishnan

Why are we born? Why do we die? Most people look for explanations in religion, but the author looks for answers in the world of science. What, then, is the difference? Simply that scientific theories can be disproven, while religious ones cannot. This is not to say that religion is not important. It indeed is and offers succor during trying periods of our lives, but in explaining the natural world, that is where superstition comes in.


Reviewed by: Mohan Rao
By Ravi Nandan Singh

The succeeding chapter ‘The City Multiple: Place-Names Play Dead’ describes the city of Banaras delineating the varied histories, cultures, traditions and legends of the place; analyses the idea of city and the meaning it holds for various people. Kashi, Banaras and Varanasi, the different names of the city, the author argues, underline the differences within the society.


Reviewed by: Amol Saghar
By Nita Berry. Cover design and illustrations by Mohit Suneja

‘The Third City: Tughlakabad is Built’ (1320-25 CE) tells children about Ghiyasuddin Tughlak’s ‘dream city’, built 8 km away from the Qutab Minar but abandoned due to lack of water. Perhaps it was also due to the curse of the Sufi Saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. When insulted by the Sultan, the Saint had cursed it to be reduced to the habitat of nomadic shepherds. However, children are also told about modern developments around it, such as the Tughlakabad Insitutional Area, the Inland Container Depot and the Dr Karni Singh Shooting Range.


Reviewed by: Dipavali Sen
By Malavika Rajkotia

The family narrative is woven into an exposition of Sikh history. The radicalism of the Khalistani movement, the conflict between Sikh and Hindu nationalist fanaticism, and the all-too-familiar twists of politics and politicians help the reader identify with the world and setting that the story delineates in such great detail.


Reviewed by: Malati Mathur
Edited by Deborah Anna Logan

The chapter dedicated to poetry has seventy-three poems that touch upon the themes of identity of Indian women, questions of society and culture, religion, mythology and folklore. Some philosophical questions expressed in poems like ‘Nature’s Message’ and ‘The Rocketand the Stars’ and questions related to nationalism in ‘The Bharat Mata’s Awakening’ speak about the myriad themes and concerns close to these women writers.


Reviewed by: Shazia Salam
By Angellica Aribam & Akash Satyawali

Gilchrist Gardens, Ammu’s residence in Madras, was the site for her social life and later a hub for Congress political activities. She was a founding member of the Women’s India Association (WIA) along with Annie Besant, Malathi Patwardhan and others. The WIA addressed the many ills of child marriage, Devadasi system, widow remarriage, divorce, inheritance, and advocated for female suffrage. Ammu introduced Lakshmi to politics, was a votary of the Sarada Bill and in time stood for elections and won a seat in the Madras Corporation. Ammu was vocal about her critique of caste, not sparing Jawaharlal Nehru for adopting the title ‘Pandit’.


Reviewed by: Malavika Menon
Edited by Dr. Indira Nityanandam, Dr. Kshipra Purani, Dr. Minnie Mattheew, Dr. Namita Sharma

Pranav Joshipura and Swati Vyas (Kapadia) portray the pain of Indo-Fijian communities in their essays, ‘Issue of Land and Indo-Fijian Reality’ and ‘The Displaced Migrants of Fiji’. Here, the ghosts of colonial exploitation are palpable. In these essays, land is more than soil—it is life, home, and memory, torn away under the weight of foreign rule. Their work offers a haunting reminder that colonization’s scars do not fade with time, binding generations to loss and dislocation.


Reviewed by: Intaj Malek
By Manzu Islam

Nationalism, a recurring motif in the novel, is presented as both a unifying ideology and a vehicle for violence and marginalization. Through the lived experiences of his characters, Islam interrogates how nationalist discourses justify systemic exclusion, displacement, and cultural erasure. It also reflects how even such a unifying force could not cut across social boundaries like caste.


Reviewed by: Parvin Sultana
By Kuvempu. Translated from the original Kannada by Vanamala Viswanatha

Translating 760 pages or more of intricate detailing of human lives and the vicissitudes of Malnad natural environs that enfold these lives is no mean task. Kuvempu is first and foremost a poet, therefore he and his work have to emerge poetic, vibrant, and buoyant in another language. The immediacy with which Kuvempu engages with Malnad life and the multiple patterns that he weaves, while straddling the caste, class, gender differences of a region have to be sustained in the translation and that again is not an easy task.


Reviewed by: Chitra Panikkar
By K.K. Kochu. Translated from the original Malayalam by Radhika P. Menon

Dalithan traces the socio-cultural history of the State of Kerala from a subaltern perspective. Sidelining himself, Kochu lays emphasis on the lost Dalit history and tries to reclaim it. Deliberating on the causes for fragmentation in Dalit memory, Kochu wonders whether the early nomadic lifestyle, and the constant displacements due to slavery and oppression, are the reasons behind the lost narratives. He recalls a poem of the Dalit emancipator Porkayil Appachan, which mourns the vanished history of the Dalits:


Reviewed by: Aazhi Arasi A
By Himani Bannerji

According to Bannerji, Tagore’s prose writings, including correspondence, are being read through new critical lenses to meet the need of our times. Three aspects of his socio-political thought become especially relevant from this point of view: his critique of nationalism and imperialism, including his assessment of various modes used and proposed for eradicating these; his universalist and humanist understanding of the politics of freedom and civilization; and lastly, the connection between the previous two issues and his modernism, as expressed by his philosophy and his projects of social reform.


Reviewed by: Somdatta Mandal
By Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay. Translated from the original Bengali by Sucheta Dasgupta

Well-known magic realists like Marquez, Borges, Kundera and Rushdie are known to have resorted to the mode because the world they lived in was beleaguered by political upheavals that aroused profound personal turmoil, and the totality of the experience could not be rendered entirely through realistic narrative. Marquez had recounted how his mother told him tales set in real surroundings that get permeated by something incredible, but with the blandest of expressions, as though to say nothing beyond the real had been superimposed on the real story, and that the unbelievable and absurd are also part of everyday reality.


Reviewed by: Nivedita Sen
By Mashiul Alam. Translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya

This gutsy collection’s outstanding short story is ‘Field Report from Roop Nagar’, a supernatural and grisly account of mysterious developments and utter anarchy in Roop Nagar, where the narrator’s parents are trapped. The narrator’s journalist friend, Shaagar Sengupta, sends him a gruesome video of a girl being hacked to pieces and then cooked to be eaten. The perpetrators commit this heinous crime as part of a plan to eliminate all loose-character girls from the town. All the denizens of Roop Nagar are in a metaphorical slumber and state of unresponsiveness. The story gets a supernatural twist when the narrator realizes that Shaagar died in Roop Nagar and it was his ghost who had sent him the video and was making regular phone calls.


Reviewed by: Shuby Abidi
By Geetanjali Shree. Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell

Overwhelmed by the impulse to record everything; to emphasize the inability to say what exactly happened at the moment of violence, Shree’s narrator deliberately interrupts comprehension. Why it happened is one prominent re-appearing question; several times, the narrative drives home the fatiguing logic that none ‘of this is sudden; it happened before too. Only now it’s coming out into the open.’ How to make sense of what happened is yet another, perhaps even harder, question: Shruti, the novel’s female protagonist, struggles to write about it. Shruti’s inability to write this affects her ability at being; she is, after all, a writer by profession.


Reviewed by: Aakriti Mandhwani
By Ruthvika Rao

This debut novel veers on a fairy tale, sinuously curving at times into the half-real, half-surreal feel of a folk story, allowing the extravagant to hover around the real. The description of the medieval gadi (a fort-like mansion, in which live members of the Deshmukh family) and its expansive grounds that merge into endless undulating emerald fields stretching in all directions is spectacular. As is the detailing of the opulent grandeur of the mansion within: the carved wooden furniture, colours of the textile furnishings, the clothes that this Zamindar family wears and the lavish food that it is served at every meal.


Reviewed by: Rohini Mokashi-Punekar
By Prayaag Akbar

Before I commence on the merits of this novel, I must commend the cover design by Bonita Vaz-Shimray which visualizes and encapsulates the plot brilliantly. Then, try as I might, I cannot ignore being struck by the name of the author, Prayaag Akbar. Being born and brought up under the ramparts of Akbar’s Fort in…


Reviewed by: Smita Agarwal
By Ruth Vanita

It is set in the 1920s, a time when young people began to question the social structures that sought to confine them. Their rebellion, subtle though it may be, is a significant aspect of the story. Today, many of the issues they faced might seem trivial, but in their time, these were revolutionary ideas. The merging of the inner and outer worlds, of personal desires versus societal norms, has been beautifully depicted. But the struggle to forge an authentic identity, one that grows and evolves with time, is never easy. The tension between what one wants and what is expected of them is portrayed with remarkable sensitivity.


Reviewed by: Semeen Ali
By Anuradha Marwah

The addition of a character like Nilima Gandhi also enriches the narrative because the frustrations of a housewife are also expressed. Even though Nilima comes from a middle-class family and has domestic help, the urge within her to be seen and validated for all she does for her family is strong and the author is empathetic to that need. She is also portrayed as a woman with patriarchal principles but that doesn’t hinder her capacity to bond with other women. The third protagonist is Dinitia (Dini), who is a social worker and a single mother.


Reviewed by: Jubi C. John
By Payal Kapadia

The human protagonists of the story are a pair of iconoclastic fifteen-year-olds, Asha and Zeb, who protest against the stifling system through illegal graffiti (the author mentions the British artist Banksy as an inspiration in the Afterword). Things escalate when the young rebels witness the callous murder of a word mid-transport by security forces during one of their furtive getaways and are eventually scapegoated as criminals.


Reviewed by: Satabhisa Nayak
Jonaki Ray

Constrained by the chicken-pox and trying to deal with it during the summer holidays, Paromita and her fellow chicken-pox afflicted neighbouring teens—Sunidhi, Agastya, Darius, and Nihal—decide to solve the mystery that has scarred all of the denizens of The Orchard.


Reviewed by: By Shabnam Minwalla
By Vardhini Amin

The story circles around a hidden sandalwood grove near the Sahyadri Range. The sandalwood trees are in the middle of a change of guard with the young Siah taking over from her mentor Bhuja when they come under the shadow of traffickers. To rescue her clan, Siah is willing to go to great lengths and even follow the forbidden paths. The story carries an element of speculative fiction at its core. Who set the fire that left Samr half burnt? What happened to the little girl who died mysteriously? Several parallel narratives seem to be unfolding simultaneously, making the plot pleasantly challenging and complex. All the threads converge in the climactic chapters and the ends are tied up neatly.


Reviewed by: Pooja Sharma
By Sanjeev Sethi

Memory is the well from which poets draw inspiration, but poetry is the ‘zazen’ that brings acceptance for loss. Thus in ‘Recognition’ the poet poignantly recalls:
The taste of twin Genoise sponge
baked and partly burnt
for my fourth birthday bash…
…the agency of


Reviewed by: Deepa Agarwal
By AS Bhasin

As a result of persistent and systematic discrimination by the Sinhala majority, the Tamil resistance movement had by the early 1980s turned militant, led by the well-armed Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In 1983 the Sinhalese reacted by systematic attacks on the Tamils, which of course further exacerbated violence by the Tamils.


Reviewed by: IP Khosla
Edited by Milan Vaishnav

The volume concludes with three important, though controversial organizations—the Police, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA). The NIA is the newest of the three, which was created following the Mumbai terror attack in 2008. Akshay Mangla and Vineet Kapoor’s chapter analyses the administrative capacity of the police in terms of police/population ratio and other resources at their disposal


Reviewed by: Ajay K Mehra
By Bob Woodward
WAR
2024

Writing on high level decision-making while history is being made is never easy. Woodward has mastered the art of getting principals, including Trump in the past, to speak of what they knew and why they did what they did in near real time. The book is thus fascinating in what it reveals of the working of Biden Presidency on foreign and security policy. War is a blow-by-blow account of Biden administration’s response to the Ukraine and Palestine crises.


Reviewed by: Shivshankar Menon
By Avidit Acharya and Alexander Lee

hey start with a clean example of Neche and Gretna on the United States-Canada border, where the citizens of Neche are closer to Gretna across the border than to any other American town. While the Americans in Neche do their shopping and socializing in Gretna, they cannot avail the welfare services offered by the Canadian Government in Gretna. Similarly, another American town, Point Roberts


Reviewed by: Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr
By Sreeram Chaulia

Chaulia terms the India-Japan partnership as a ‘quasi-friendship’, which though encouraged by the US earlier, has its own logic and internal dynamics today. He says one reason for Japan to turn towards India is its fear that the US would not defend it in the case of a frontal attack by China and that together, India and Japan are alternatives to the other countries vis-à-vis China in the Indo-Pacific. He argues that Japan has helped India sustain its regional predominance in South Asia (p. 91).


Reviewed by: Uma Purushothaman
By Kallol Bhattacherjee

These were soon joined by direct recruits, chosen by the Union Public Service Commission. Three officials especially marked out by the author for their contributions are K Natwar Singh, Brajesh Mishra and JN Dixit. MK Rasgotra and Muchkund Dubey were among the several other stalwarts who significantly contributed to India’s conduct of its foreign relations.


Reviewed by: Jayant Prasad
By Peter Martin

During the initial years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), an important task for the Foreign Ministry was to implement a united front strategy in the countries that had kept their recognition of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang regime. Emerged from CPC’s experiences during the war against Japanese imperialists, the united front strategy sought to establish relations beyond the formal governmental level with political parties, civil society organizations and individuals.


Reviewed by: Parimal Maya Sudhakar
By Bertil Lintner

Each of the chapters tries to focus on the BRI and its effects across the Indian and Pacific Ocean. Chapter one dwells on the various theories on ‘Silk Road’. The Chinese have tried to revive the idea of the ‘Silk Road’ by initially calling the overland route ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ and by water as ‘Maritime Silk Road’. The purpose was to make China ‘great again’ and to dethrone the US as ‘the world’s leading superpower’ (p. 2). Lintner views China’s initiatives and particularly the BRI from the prism of a new ‘Cold War’.


Reviewed by: Joyce Sabina Lobo
By Kulbhushan Warikoo

Warikoo refers to Kashmir as the undivided State of Jammu and Kashmir including Ladakh, Hunza, Gilgit, Baltistan and adjoining frontier territories. Following the Independence of India, when the Gilgit agency was restored to the Maharaja of Kashmir, the British launched a secret mission called Operation Datta Khel, employing their officers posted in Pakistan, Peshawar, and Gilgit to physically occupy Gilgit and hand over to Pakistan.


Reviewed by: Abidullah Baba
By Tahir Kamran

The book cogently touches upon the dichotomies that beset the nation during its nascent stage and some of which continue to haunt its path. Kamran argues that an inherent religious bias prevented democracy from flourishing in Pakistan. This was despite the nation’s conceptualization on lines of the western modern construct. The religious ‘rationale’ conflicted with ideas of democracy as interpreted and propagated by the West and instead an ‘establishmentarian democracy’ started taking shape.


Reviewed by: Priyanka Singh
Edited by Harsh V. Pant and Madhuchanda Ghosh

The concept of the Indo-Pacific itself is a debated one and is seen differently by various theorists, as pointed out by Shubhrajeet Konwer (p.105). It is seen either as a balancing strategy by the realists, or as a new institutional setting of cooperation among the countries of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean by the liberalists, or as an ideational construct of shared values to face a common enemy by the constructivists.


Reviewed by: Vyjayanti Raghavan
By Harun-or-Rashid

Bangladesh has had democratic governments with intermittent breaks when the military junta took over power through coup d’etat. The recent uprising was not an intervention by the army—to many it appeared to be spontaneous outburst of the masses although now, with the unearthing of many sources, the narrative does not correspond with that which attracted our attention at the outset.


Reviewed by: Bidyut Chakrabarty
By Lok Raj Baral

There is disappointment, particularly at the exclusion of Dalits in the Republic’s politics of representation as Nepal de facto returns to the pre-revolutionary political system of domination of hill khas Nepali upper castes. Dalits may be 14 percent of the population but in the November 2022 elections


Reviewed by: Rita Manchanda
By Antony Loewenstein

The world witnesses Israel’s barbaric destruction in Gaza, and people took to the streets to demand a ceasefire to end the horrific destruction on Gaza instigated in October 2023. The Israeli (occupation) defence and armed forces, along with private industries, seized this opportunity to market their goods. Israel uses video footage of their weapons in action to aim at boosting their sale of arms and surveillance technology.


Reviewed by: Azeemah Saleem
By Valdimir Hamed-Troyansky

In many parts of the Ottoman Empire, the massive immigration of Caucasian refugees created a demographically chaotic situation, as what Lord Curzon, Britain’s Foreign Secretary termed in the early 20th century, ‘unmixing of peoples’ which later on spawned a plethora of parochial nationalist and sub-nationalist movements in the post-Ottoman era.


Reviewed by: MH Ilias
By Manzu Islam

Nationalism, a recurring motif in the novel, is presented as both a unifying ideology and a vehicle for violence and marginalization. Through the lived experiences of his characters, Islam interrogates how nationalist discourses justify systemic exclusion, displacement, and cultural erasure. It also reflects how even such a unifying force could not cut across social boundaries like caste.


Reviewed by: Parvin Sultana
By Rahul Bhatia

Bhatia begins the book with a personal story of this transformation. He recounts how any discussion among family, friends and acquaintances over the past decade ended with Islamophobia-laced muscular Hindu interpretation of India’s past and aspiration for India’s future. To grapple with this change is to pose some version of the question, ‘Where is this poison coming from?’—as articulated, with poignancy and a tinge of bewilderment, by Nisar.


Reviewed by: Janaki Srinivasan
By Rosie Llewellyn-Jones

For a long time, almost till the beginning of the nineteenth century, military engineers (who began receiving formal training on a regular basis only when the Company’s Military Seminary was set up at Addiscombe in 1809) carried out the tasks of architects, civil engineers and town planners. Civil engineers as distinct from military engineers were not appointed by the Company prior to the end of the eighteenth century.


Reviewed by: Amar Farooqui
By Walter Reid

Reid implies that Churchill lost interest in India affairs thereafter. But like many historians, he fails to ask: was that not an act of gross negligence, given that War-weary Britain’s exit from India was inevitable by then? Those ‘wasted years’, with all top INC leaders held incommunicado in jail, August 1942 to May 1945, was precisely the time to prepare for the world’s greatest political carve-out. One result: Mountbatten’s frenzied, hasty actions of March-August 1947, when even the borders of the new independent states, India and Pakistan, were not publicly revealed till 17 August, two days after the Independence of India.


Reviewed by: Kishan S Rana
By Siddharthya Roy

In the final chapter, Roy talks about Kashmir. Here, he notes the plight of Kashmiris, who live on the edge of a cultural and political chasm that shapes their social interaction with the rest of Indian society. Also, in commenting on the complex lives of (militant) women in Kashmir, Roy tells us about their painful encounters with violent, patriarchal bands of self-righteous men.


Reviewed by: Satyaki Barua
By Dhirendra K Jha

The assassination of Gandhi marked a new stage in the history of the RSS. The organization, due to the immense public anger against it, and the imprisonment of Golwalkar, was forced to change its strategy. It was compelled to cease its violent actions and adopt measures which were acceptable in a sane society.


Reviewed by: Amol Saghar
By Vaibhav Purandare

Some, though not all, of these aspects emerge from Purandare’s lucid prose. Strangely enough, the book has no bibliography but in the notes the reader will notice the major secondary sources, including biographies, on which the book is based; NC Kelkar (Marathi, 1923), Bhagwat and Pradhan (English, 2016), NR Phatak (Marathi, 1972), and Keer (English, 1959) are copiously drawn upon.


Reviewed by: Anirudh Deshpande
By MK Gandhi. Introduced by Dhananjay Rai

Rai argues that during Gandhi’s lifetime, communal and caste conflicts emerged as the most serious challenges before India and Gandhi started many programmes and campaigns to tackle these problems.


Reviewed by: Jyotsna Kumari
By Lucia Michelutti, Ashraf Hoque, Nicolas Martin, David Picherit, Paul Rollier, Arild E. Ruud, Clarinda Still

The first chapter of the book titled ‘Backdrop’ maps out in detail the peculiar South Asian backdrop in which the stories unfold in the matrix often referred to as Mafia Raj. It also explores how ‘the art of making do’ (jugad) translates into ‘the art of bossing’ and how informal economy brushes with organized crime often supported by the political establishment.


Reviewed by: Shams Afroz
By Tara Desjardins

India’s secret recipe for red blown glass, much sought after by medieval courts in Europe, is no longer known, and our current method of producing coloured glass was learnt from European manufacturers! In Firozabad, famed for its beautiful glassware in Akbar’s day, and still a major glass centre today, folklore has it that the famed Murano glass makers in Italy originally learnt their skills from Indian craftspeople, especially the art of mosaic and millefiori glass. Whether this is truth or legend, I don’t know.


Reviewed by: Laila Tyabji
By AM Gautam

Another fascinating aspect Gautam explores is the rise of soft spirituality among Millennials, reflecting their quest for personal meaning in an increasingly individualistic society. This spirituality, focused on personal choice and the freedom to select one’s own spiritual guide or guru, is becoming more prevalent.


Reviewed by: Soumyajit Brar
By Tanika Sarkar

Sarkar lauds Jyotirao Phule as the century’s most remarkable social reformer for his intersectional analysis of caste, class, and gender while noting the occasional compromises of reformers like Ranade. The author dedicates limited space to Dalit social reforms, primarily focusing on the Self-Respect Movement and Dr Ambedkar, indicating a potential area for further exploration in Dalit reformist historiography.


Reviewed by: Sabah Hussain
Edited by Iqra Shagufta Cheema

Even though Alyssa Milano’s tweet in 2017 calling for the victims of sexual violence was a rage, Iqra Cheema begins by talking about the invisibility and exclusion of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) at the onset of #MeToo movement. An increased international awareness about intersectional feminism and recognition of the need for feminist justice is what #MeToo leads to.


Reviewed by: Sadia Hussain
By Urmilla Deshpande, Thiago Pinto Barbosa

Among Irawati’s writings about her experiences in the field, the most moving and significant is her description of a dig in Langhnaj, Gujarat, which she undertook with her Deccan College colleague, Hasmukh Dhirajlal Sankalia, Professor of Proto-Indian and Ancient Indian History.


Reviewed by: Shanta Gokhale

That we are now celebrating the half century mark has been made possible entirely due to the support and solidarity of our large panel of reviewers. If the journal is published with unfailing regularity every month, it is because we can confidently rely on our reviewers who never renege on deadlines, and deliver reviews in delectable prose and critical analysis. We are also thankful to the publishers for extending financial support by sponsoring issues, taking advertisements, underwriting the costs for seminars and organizing lectures


Editorial
By G.S. Cheema Manohar Books

The Empire was, by the end of the seventeenth century, essentially an ‘Empire of the Indian Subcontinent’, encompassing almost the entire subcontinent. In the formative phase of his military career Aurangzeb had gained his experience in Central Asia where he had been deputed by Shah Jahan for campaigns in Balkh and Badakhshan.


Reviewed by: Amar Farooqui
By Harit Joshi

Evaluating the nature of court histories and court chronicles, Joshi raises a few historiographical issues. Relating his concerns, he asserts that while these narratives depict the occurrences pertaining to official gatherings or festive events attended by elitist politically powerful male members,


Reviewed by: Meena Bhargava
By Ranabir Ray Choudhury

Urban improvement by accumulating funds through lottery was popular in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British colonies. The basic idea was that city-dwellers would voluntarily buy lotteries, and improvement would be funded from that money.


Reviewed by: Ritajyoti Bandhyopadhyay
By Aparna Vaidik

In the succinctly written Introduction, Aparna Vaidik, besides providing a bird’s eye-view of the book, discusses the complex nature of the primary theme of her study, viz., the historical-legal aspects of the Case, and the difficulties that she, as a historian, faced while working on it. An important challenge which she faced related to presenting a difficult theme in ‘accessible prose’


Reviewed by: Amol Saghar
By John Slight

From a geopolitical perspective, British involvement in the Hajj served multiple strategic purposes. It allowed the empire to assert control over trade routes and exert influence in key regions such as Jeddah. Simultaneously, the British sought to earn the loyalty and legitimacy of their Muslim subjects by facilitating the pilgrimage, a move that was both pragmatic and symbolic. However


Reviewed by: Parvin Sultana
By Sayali Goyal

Sometimes the amalgam worked well, as in the architecture of Lutyens Delhi; most times it was terrible! Luckily rural India and our temples and mosques remained more or less immune from this scourge.


Reviewed by: Laila Tyabji
By K.K. Gopalakrishnan

As a dancer, I found the chapter on ‘The Commune and the Community’ most interesting. It served to make for an understanding of the various offerings that every Theyyam makes. Some start by sowing seeds, worshipping the Goddess, worshipping nature, ancestors, warriors, heroes, animals, snakes, etc. All the three stratospheres are included. Multifariousness is its hallmark. People of all faiths are devotees. It is a suspense of logic or scientific thought. It also goes beyond dogma and prescribed faith. The Devi can be ruthless in blaming the people for their misdoings. But is also a forgiving and prophetic Mother.


Reviewed by: Leela Samson
Edited by Tapati Guha-

Mukherjee was nearing fifty when she cast the 12-ft high Ashoka at Kalinga. Sculpted in twenty-six parts, Mukherjee’s greatest worry at the time was to find a place to cast the complex work. Two-and-a-half decades later, she began work on another monumental sculpture, this time of the Buddha himself in whose teachings Ashoka had found his meaning of life. Having begun it in December 1996, the 14-ft high Buddha was conceived in sixty-six pieces, and she had cast most of it before she passed away in January 1998 of cardiac arrest.


Reviewed by: Kishore Singh
By Swapna Liddle and Madhulika Liddle with photographs by Prabhas Roy Niyogi Books

Nor was it only the royal men who commissioned gardens—Shah Jahan’s daughter Roshanara had an elaborate space named after her, quite near what was to be known as the Grand Trunk Road. Throughout the book, the Liddles provide us with interesting nuggets of information on Mughal history. Roshanara was close to her brother Aurangzeb, supporting him when he usurped the throne from their father. She was rewarded with the then enormous sum of five lakh rupees and made the head of the palace.


Reviewed by: Malavika Karlekar
Edited by Sumangala Damodaran

The next paper by Sazi Dlamini also discusses the ngoma not just as music but as organized sounds because ritual and ceremonial use of ngoma involves dance, possession by spirit, healing practices and initiation rites. The performance with the ngoma lungundi drum is central to the identity of the Venda ancestry and this memory also speaks of resilience in the face of conquest and migration


Reviewed by: Mohammad Kamran
By Anand Singh

In addition to lying on the Uttarapatha, Nalanda, says the author, is, ‘Geographically… a part of the Indo-Gangetic trough but some of its parts were connected with the Siwalik ranges in the northern part of Champaran district and partial fringes of the peninsular block in the south. Nalanda lies in the Magadha-Anga plain in the south Ganga region.’ It was also close to the ports of Champa and Pataliputra.


Reviewed by: Sudhamahi Regunathan
By Nadira Khatun

This secular and positive portrayal of Muslims in the 1950s and 1960s was largely due to the significant involvement of Muslims in the filmmaking industry during this period. While these portrayals often relied on certain stereotypes—such as the use of poetic Urdu, Lucknowi aristocracy, and elaborate costumes—the author argues that by the 1970s, the social genre introduced Muslim characters, especially women


Reviewed by: Harish S Wankhede
By Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav

The book later covers the last phase of Rai’s politics and his ultimate alignment with the Hindu Mahasabha. The work seriously engages with complete writings and required contextual readings and comes out with a coherent and fresh perspective on the life and thought of Lajpat Rai. Having said that, in her attempt to portray Lajpat Rai’s politics and work in a more coherent manner


Reviewed by: Krishna Swamy Dara
By Hilal Ahmed

This identity has various facets—historical, cultural, social, political, religious, and liberal—dealt with in separate chapters. Ahmed argues that there is a serious reconfiguration of these thematic aspects of Indian Muslim identity in the present time, the New India: arguably an ideological framework and a process that has redefined the Indian political context. This framework’s bent is on the ‘responsive government-responsive people’


Reviewed by: Mohammad Osama
By Aruna Roy

These are notes helping us fathom how our own imperfections make us dream of a perfect world, how each time we heal the world a bit, we heal ourselves. No one who reads the book will be left with the excuse of not daring to change because they are ‘ordinary’, for this is a story of how ordinary seeming people can harness their individual and collective strengths to create solutions that had never been imagined. Like the author says


Reviewed by: Ankita Anand
By Dinesh C Sharma

Encapsulating the development journey of Hyderabad in great detail, Sharma notes that the Great Flood of Musi on the fateful day of September 28, 1908 is considered a turning point. ‘It attempted to change it from being a late-medieval city to becoming a modern metropolis. The flood was a natural and ecological disaster but it triggered a project of modernisation of the city,’ he observes.


Reviewed by: K Venkateshwarlu
By Sadaf Wani

What makes this book truly unique is its blend of personal memory, collective experience, and anthropological insights. Wani’s narrative delves into the evolving identities of Srinagar’s residents, particularly the distinction between the ‘shahri’ and ‘gaam’ identities, showing how class, culture,


Reviewed by: Anahita Mir
By Shahu Patole. Translated from the original Marathi by Bhushan Korgaonkar

At the heart of Patole’s narrative lies the inextricable link between caste and food, a relationship that is inseparable in Indian society. As he insightfully remarks, ‘Just as caste is cemented at birth, so is diet.’ He challenges the pervasive caste and class divisions within Indian food culture, asserting,


Reviewed by: Pooja Duggal
By Bhagwan Chowdhry and Anas Ahmed

For the past one decade in particular, we have started expecting digital and technological solutions to become massively adopted by the masses for doing their day-to-day financial work through mobiles, apps, calls, internet, messages, IVR, touch screens, machine voices, et al. But we are hugely disappointed that people are not adopting. Why are people not doing online transactions? Why are people not paying online? Why are people not selling online? Why are people not receiving and sending money among their peers, and trusted relationships?


Reviewed by: Osama Manzar
Rubani Yumkhaibam

Nandi and Saria speak of contexts of proximity and blurring between Hindus and Muslims in the Hijra universe that are similar and yet clearly distinct. In Odisha for instance, Saria observes that ‘their beliefs and practices would often adhere to one while being claimed as characteristic of the other’, necessitating the ethnographer’s ‘fidelity to the way the crossovers between Hindu and Muslim theologies were lived—that is, both as an instantiation and a limit of the notion of religious syncretism’ (Saria, p. 14). Nandi suggests that the kinship hijras in her study in Bengal feel with Muslims is based on the Islamic practice of circumcision—with several hijras converting to Islam after their ritual initiation and constructing the hijra identity within a spiritual framework marked by celibacy and asceticism.


Reviewed by: Kalpana Kannabiran
By Kiran Manral

Each chapter posits a clue in the form of a tag line to the name. A short introduction to the individual is followed by the reason for choosing her story. The rest of the chapter is divided into sections that mark the twists and turns of that journey. The stories end by focusing on one dominant norm/stereotype of that life and the ‘hacks’ that the individual exercised to overcome or storm that norm.


Reviewed by: Bhashwati Sengupta
By Rajan Mehta

Mehta writes in one of the chapters that breaking a problem into parts helps not only in understanding the problem but also in developing solutions for it (p. 178); he follows a similar design by breaking down his thesis into short, concise chapters. These chapters find their thematic basis in the scientific knowledge of climate change present in the introductory chapters where Mehta provides fundamental information about the science behind environmental degradation. He highlights the causes of climate change and assesses the available data attributing these changes primarily to fossil fuels, industry, and land use changes


Reviewed by: Mir Wafa Rasheeq
By Swadesh Deepak. Translated from the original Hindi by Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt and Sukant Deepak

In the stories, Deepak emerges as a master narrator who calibrates movements of his characters to generate necessary suspense. The names of the characters are often revealed only after two-three pages. And often anecdotes and sub-plots thicken the texture of the stories. The settings in the stories are functional, and dynamic in the sense that their details keep recurring in a haunting way.


Reviewed by: Akshaya Kumar
By Syed Mujtaba Ali. Translated from the original Bangla by Nazes Afroz

The dobhasi (bilingual) love tale of Shabnam, an Afghan girl, and Majnun, a teacher from ‘Bangla-land’, unfolds against the backdrop of the Afghan Civil War of 1928–29, in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan. These two lovers bond over their shared passion for poetry. As political upheaval shakes the country with the rise of Bachae-e-Saqao (Habibullah Kalakani) and his Saqqawists challenging Amanullah Khan


Reviewed by: Sanobar Hussaini
By Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. Translated from the original Bangla by Prasun Roy Fingerprint

Prasun Roy’s translation keeps alive the uneasiness about the ghosts, whether they are antagonistic or friendly and generous, and their doings. But there are numerous sentences and phrases that sound grating to the ear. Tautological expressions like ‘a face soaked in emotional sympathy’ (p. 54), ‘was infamous for being uncannily notorious’ (p. 102), ‘immoral wickedness of this boy’ (p. 106), and ‘the forest was infamous for these notorious beasts’ (p. 128) could certainly have been altered to sharper and more cryptic, non-repetitive ways of saying them by the editor(s). Other hiccups that disrupted fluent reading included imprecise expressions like


Reviewed by: Nivedita Sen
By Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

The interplay between Anuradha, Vardhman and Nandini is central to this lyrical, melancholic novel and its complex exploration of love and life. Shanghvi’s prose is lush, poetic and enchanting in its use of imagery, painting vivid pictures in a story that resonates with the bittersweet music of life’s most enduring truths. The Last Song of Dusk does not offer any easy resolutions as it meditates on the fleeting nature of beauty and the inevitability of loss, told through the lives of characters who are as flawed as they are compelling.


Reviewed by: Ranjana Kaul
By Suresh Sundaresan

Within this circularity are trapped endless stories of the people Chandrakant comes into contact with, who teach him lessons in both life and music, and also of people he never meets, only hears about. The story moves back and forth in time, from Chote Ustad to Bade Ustad, Jaffar Ali Khan, and from there to his Ustad, Sajjad Hussain, who, in turn, had been a disciple of Ustad Muhammad Jafri, the originator of the Karachi Gharana.


Reviewed by: Rana Nayar
By Sudeep Chakravarti

To most Indians the grisly murder and its aftermath story may appear, given the preponderance of similar stories in contemporary times, as another run of the mill. But this is where Chakravarti intervenes to read an otherwise ‘routine’ crime in a most intellectually insightful and sensitive way. His novel analysis, most importantly, brings in the volatile urban political and spatial-temporal context of 1970s-80s Delhi to understand not only the specific crime committed against the Chopra teenagers but also reflects on, among others,


Reviewed by: Nabanipa Bhattacharjee
By Lakshmi Kannan Olive Turtle

The title story captures a tableaux moment when Bhagyalakshmi emerges. The baby elephant not only leaves its mahout out of breath but also splashes water on Pratibha, Sashi and Indira, who are on a trip without informing their families. The exuberance of the baby elephant matches the first taste of freedom by the young women. The story, ‘A for Apple’ highlights the longing of a young boy to taste the luscious apple that is printed in his textbook. When he does manage to steal some money, buys an apple and eats, it becomes a moment of disappointment. In an act of repentance, he buys flavour-rich guavas to share with his family.


Reviewed by: V. Bharathi Harishankar
By Shahnaz Habib

Habib’s anecdote about her trip to Paris with her partner and the insurmountable barriers encountered by her will certainly hit home to residents of a Third World country! The anxiety to ensure that her travel comes through by the end of the chapter will meanwhile compel the reader to encounter a degree of racial discrimination that the travel industry rests upon. And so, through a series of examples


Reviewed by: Suman Bhagchandani
By Aishwarya Iyer

Another theme running through the poems which strikes the reader is that of desire. But to understand how desire functions in Iyer’s poems, it will be fruitful to recollect Sara Ahmed’s question in her book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, namely, ‘What do emotions do?’; she later elaborates, ‘Emotions are simply not something “I” or “we” have. Rather, it is through emotions that surfaces and boundaries are made: the “I” and the “we” are shaped by, and even take shape of, contact with others.’ It is through this framework of illuminating both the object and the subject that the desiring-subject functions in Iyer’s poems.


Reviewed by: Ankush Banerjee
By Sharmistha Mohanty

Sharmistha Mohanty has a voice that has the ability to stay with the reader long after Book One has been read. In fact, this book would make the reader want to read more of her latest writings as well. It is a book that seems to come from a place of personal relevance; it carries within an unhurried pace, thus mirroring human thought itself. In these days of insta-living and gratification, it is only in the mind that we can lead a slow and defined existence.


Reviewed by: Sonya J Nair
By Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi. Illustrated by Stina Wirsén

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi who works and lives in a village in north Goa has won many awards for his writing, like the Betty Trask Award, UK, and the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy. He has been shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize for his novel The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay.


Reviewed by: Nita Berry
By Bijal Vachharajani. Illustrated by Rajiv Eipe

Through Amit’s experiences with Pokey, the author highlights that having a pet demands patience and involves responsibilities. From badly wanting a pup at home to wishing it leaves their home soon to embracing it wholeheartedly, Amit comes a full circle at the end.


Reviewed by: Divya Shankar