Any time partition is mentioned, the mind immediately goes to 1947 and all the carnage that is usually associated with the birth of Pakistan. What many forget is that 1947 marked just one of two partitions Pakistan had to suffer.
A part from the title and a semblance of the mood, Aamer Hussein’s The Cloud Messenger shares very little else with Kalidasa’s lyric poem of 111 stanzas, Meghadutam. For instance, Hussein’s narrator-hero, Mehran, is no exiled lover. Hussein’s kunstlerroman borrows the lilting romantic tenor of the poetic conceit used by Kalidasa in his sandesa kavya…
With insurgent and resistant narratives thronging the repertoire of contemporary South Asian fiction, what stands undisputed are the truth-claims of Eric Hobsbawm’s theory regarding the paradox of South Asian nationalisms: new and old. Provocatively flaunting the gauntlet, the historian stakes his claim by stating that (almost) all insurgencies…
A wander through the fiction section of Delhi’s bookstores reveals rows and rows of colourful dust-jackets and attractive offerings by Indian and Pakistani authors. The volume is staggering, but though there is no shortage of choice, not all of it is good. Sadly, Invitation too promises more than it can deliver…
For the past couple of years, we have been told, often and loudly, that Pakistani fiction has come of age. It is unclear exactly what this means, but apparently a dedicated issue of Granta is an essential marker. In some recent essays, the Indian writers Amit Chaudhuri and Palash Mehrotra among others have argued that plaudits…
The bountiful nature of the publishing business in India in recent years has brought tens of new voices writing in Indian English to the bookstores and bedside tables. Not all of this mishmash of themes and writing styles makes for great reading, and almost always the blame lies in for pretentious, uninspiring writing…