Archives
January 2021 . VOLUME 45, NUMBER 1
The Tirumala temple and its deity Lord Venkateshwara are no strangers to the use of superlatives. The temple is often described as the richest in India, if not the whole world; the deity as being the most beloved; so it is not surprising that a book devoted…
The genesis of this essay lies in two memorial lectures that I gave in 2019 in Delhi. The first was the Nemichand Memorial lecture on ‘The Presence of the other: Religion and Society in Early India’, given on 16 August 2019. The second was the V M Tarkunde Memorial lecture on ‘Renunciation, Dissent and Satyagraha’, given on 6 December 2019..
Editorial
Street theatre or nukkad-natak has a staccato rhythm. Those who have been part of it will know. There is no rule or convention within which it finds safety. It is both ephemeral and risky. Actors, audiences, the venue, the script, everything is provisional…
Sometimes, a meticulously worked-out political calculation can go awry. The beautiful mind of Kanshi Ram had, in 1981, computed the DS-4 (Dalit Shosit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti) formula, comprising Dalits and other oppressed groups like Shudras, Muslims, and women…
This book unlocks the mesmerizing mojo of medieval Braj region. Masterfully written by Irfan Habib and Tarapada Mukerjee, it is an exemplary work of intense research. The primary source materials for this work are the Vrindavan Documents––a treasure trove of information…
It is in the realm of public imagination that one can hope to find deep-seated beliefs and behavioural patterns of societies and cultures. Edgar Rice Burrough’s eponymous character, Tarzan of the Apes, for instance becomes in the hands of one of the most distinguished American literary-cultural critics of the 20th century…
A spectator’s reach from the gallery of a circus tent into its colourful and complex world of amusement and action is simply thin and tiny like an ant’s eye view. Given the most common experience of the viewer to connect with the excitement of circus remains within a narrow line of sight…
In 2019, the Aleph Book Company brought out an imprint of Fatima Bhutto’s freshly penned book New Kings of the World: The Rise and Rise of Eastern Pop Culture. They decided to wrap the hardcover meant for Indian audiences in a shocking bubblegum pink. And placed a smirking Shah Rukh Khan top centre…
2020
Loss is a set of essays and the first work of non-fiction and memoirs written by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi. The book engages with the universal and rhetorical question of death and grief, based on a string of the author’s personal losses—the death of his father, mother and his dog…
2020
The Covid-19 pandemic appears not just as a background in Zadie Smith’s collection of essays titled Intimations. Rather, it infects and pervades every subject matter that the author addresses. The book begins with a seemingly unpremeditated and light-hearted observation on tulips and the author’s fondness for peonies instead…
Ways of Dying: Stories & Essays is the sixth publication in the Aleph Olio series. Much like other works in the series such as Love and Lust, Notes from Hinterland, In a Violent Land, Ways of Dying is an ‘olio’ or miscellany of remarkable works of fiction and non-fiction, all of which harp on the sure companion of life: death…
Victory Colony, 1950 is the story of Amala and Manas, whose lives intersect in a post-Partition relief camp, unfolding multiple other refugee stories with them as the novel progresses. Bhaswati Ghosh’s novel begins with the tragic event of forced migration of people from East Pakistan, across the borders of India…
The memoir is a winner of Nine Dots Prize that is given for ‘innovative thinking as a means of tackling pressing problems facing the modern world’. The entrants were supposed to respond to the question, ‘Is there still no place like home?’ in a 3000-word essay…
There is a certain caricature of Mumbai that is constantly evoked in popular representations—‘the city of dreams’ that came up from the sea, doting on the city’s unique heritage that remains severed from a history of its origin, where a rich sensation of the present prevails over…
2019
Angshu Dasgupta’s Fern Road is far removed from the leafy promise of its title. It’s a tender tough novel which records the growing up years of Orko, a sensitive child, who has an extraordinary sense of empathy. Listening to the story of the Titanic, he finds himself plunging headlong into the ocean in his imagination…
2020
Thadangal is the second novel by MA Susila who has published several collections of short stories and critical essays. In addition, she is an acclaimed translator. Her Tamil renderings of the legendary Fyodor Dostoevsky earned her many prestigious awards. She was a former Professor of Tamil and a committed activist for women’s issues in Madurai…
2020
Leesa Gazi’s Hellfire originally came out in 2010 as Rourob, marking her debut as a bold voice in the tradition of women’s writing from the subcontinent. Hellfire engages with certain tropes that remain relevant and persistent contexts in conversations about gender and the complex legacies of patriarchy…
Throughout the arts, the human state of loneliness has been a theme that has been explored, analysed and taken refuge in, recurring throughout cinema, fiction and art. In Arupa Patangia Kalita’s collection of fifteen short stories, which is the English translation of her 2014 Sahitya Akademi winning…
2020
‘Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.’—Hannah ArendtPerhaps the greatest achievement of Bitan Chakaborty’s collection of short stories The Mark (Chinha–in Bengali) is that it reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it…
Syed Muhammad Ashraf’s The Silence of the Hyena, is a collection of stories and a novella that offers observations and commentary on the variegated lives and emotions of animals and humans which are often difficult to differentiate. The stories present a complex scenario populated by figures…
‘Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.’- Ezra PoundAs I began reading this anthology of poetry and prose, these lines by Ezra Pound seemed to reverberate across the entire volume of writings. In a new phase of world that we are living iere always exists a binary relationship between light and darkness—one remains incomplete if the other is not around…
In a day and age where a lot is published about pushing the limits of physical endurance and creating new records, Kailash: Jewel of the Snows by Rajinder Arora, mountaineer and creative entrepreneur, is a wonderful narrative that focuses on the wonder and beauty of nature in Mt. Kailash…
Being homebound during lockdown, I looked forward to reading about travel and adventure. It would help get me out of the four walls of home and out into the beautiful, exciting world beyond. Therefore, I opened the book, Let’s Go Adventuring excitedly and am happy to say that it did not disappoint me…