Material, Spiritual, Divine Ganga

An anthology is like an Indian thali—it serves small portions of different things, a couple of staples, and by providing a representative sample it facilitates further explorations. Like a thali too, it has something that appeals to everyone, but it is equally true that inclusion and exclusions usually fail to satisfy everyone who partakes of it. In the Indian context, the last decade has seen a welcome crop of city-centred anthologies, in the form of the Penguin series on Allahabad, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Delhi and Goa.1 In addition, Aleph has published a series of short ‘city biographies’.2 Most recently, Vinay Lal has edited the two-volume Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City. Some Indian rivers too have found their champions, most notably the Narmada, in Hartosh Singh Bal3 and Rumina Grewal,4 whereas the Brahmaputra and the Kaveri among many others still seek biographers to tell their stories down the ages.