Volume XXXVII No. 1 – JANUARY 2013

‘…she is special…not just because she is making a hundred but because she is Zohra Segal, dancer, actress, story-teller, lover —lover of all things—and loved by all things, great and small and those in-between…’. These words of Tom Alter truly sum up the personality that has been so central to our imagination of Hindi cinema.

Uma, the protagonist of the novel, a young woman from a well-to-do back-ground with a modicum of higher education in Delhi, is married into an aristocratic brahmin family in Kolkata, and thereafter delves into its family history with an almost unhealthy curiosity.

Tarun J. Tejpal is the founder-editor of Tehelka, well known for its investigative reporting; over the years, he has exposed various scams and malpractices in India.

In September, Harvard University Press published an edition of Jane Austen’s Emma with annotations by Bharat Tandon, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

The year gone by was the bicentenary of two Eminent Victorians—Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and Edward Lear (1812-1888).

This issue of Civil Lines appeared a decade after the previous issue, and this review a year after that.

It was said of Albert Camus’s Outsider that having read it, one cannot relate to the world again the same way as before.

In this beguiling novel, Ashokamitran shares with us the experiences of two men in the summer of 1964, who live and work in the film industry in Madras.

‘Communists are loath to talk about them-selves. […] the memoirs of communists are so frequently without any discussion of personal feelings, and certainly not of personal ambitions.’ Vijay Prashad, writer and academic, in Frontline magazine

Whether it were Lionel Trilling and Oscar Handlin in the 1920s or later in the postmodern period, the revision of literary canon to include the voice of women, gays and lesbians, has always carried political undertones.

What does it mean to be a dalit in Bengal, that is, in a culture where Tantric, Buddhist, Hindu and Sufi/Islamic thought have mingled and occasionally clashed for centuries? This collection of stories goes some way towards answering the question, though I have to record my disappointment that no women writers are represented among the sixteen authors translated in this volume.

Vignettes is the English translation of Dristhipaat, a Bengali novel published first in 1946, penned by Binay Kumar Mukhopadhyay whose nom de plume, Jajabor, apparently means, as this reviewer found out, ‘a person whose status in society is lower than of a homeless’.