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Books by young men who have studied abroad always seem to begin in aeroplanes. The moment you read the first lines—a description
of the view from a window as a flight to Lahore comes in to land—it is evident that The Wish Maker is unlikely to defy the conventions that have sprung up around what is now a flourishing subgenre: the novel of explanation, in which a young Indian or Pakistani sets out
to somehow explain to a newly-interested world the nuances of his country’s past and present, with its coming of age neatly coinciding with his own.

When I met Agha Shahid Ali’s father Agha Ashraf Ali a few months back, he told me about the latest collection of ‘Bhaiya’ (as the poet was lovingly called by his family) that had already come out in the US and was now being brought out by Penguin in India. He was excited about the launch of this collection…

In a chapter not quite characteristic of her general scholarly procedure as a historian, Gail Minault in the middle of this book cuts loose to attempt a sustained comparison between what she calls ‘the Delhi Renaissance’ and the far more lauded ‘Bengal Renaissance’—which should perhaps be similarly…

Fat, oblong, register-shaped, its densely packed (and extremely unwieldy) 347 page body encased in striking turquoise and gold,Mazaar, Bazaar: Design and Visual Culture in Pakistan, landed on my desk a couple of weeks ago; carrying with it the images, iconography and essence of a country and civilization…

This catalogue centres on the idea and image of the Jina or Tirthankara and was published to complement an exhibition recently held at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. The art objects include serene, solid, and stark images of Jinas that are a perfect foil for the rich palette of painted Jain cosmographs…

This is a succinct monograph on the morphology of the architectural motif of the torana, or the festooned or simply arched portal, that is a fundamental constituent, endlessly repeated in the history of Indian architecture. Lavishly illustrated and printed on heavy art-paper renders it a fairly weighty tome, no doubt one that scholars…