In the year commemorating Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary, the highest gain has been in taking ‘Gurudev’ be-yond Bengal. The attractive and erudite volu-me, The Essential Tagore, edited by eminent scholars, Radha Chakravarty from India and Fakrul Alam from Bangladesh immediately makes…
Feelings and emotions, however trite, can never be classed as meaningless, but one’s way of portraying them can often fall short of an aesthetically acceptable standard. The Salt Doll is erotica without style. It is peopled with characters whose actions are largely conditioned by their own private compulsions…
Mulk Raj Anand’s first novel Untouchable was published in 1935. Anand, then a Bloomsbury intellectual, had written the first draft over a long weekend in 1930: ‘the book poured out like hot lava from the volcano of my crazed imagination’. He revised the book after a short stay with Gandhiji…
This is the first novel of a writer who has so far been well known to Bengali readers as a poet. But her novel is not poetic in the usual sense of the term.In a style that is cerebral as well as graceful, Nabaneeta Deb Sen writes of a situation uneasily familiar…
The principal purpose of Nigel Harris’ book seems to be to attack some of the more durable prejudices underlying urban policy in India. The analysis of Bombay’s problems is merely an instrument for putting forward what could be described as a radical economist’s view of city planning…
I read Through the Eyes of the World with a growing sense of frustration harassed by the thought that none of the contributors really came to grips with the American phenomenon. It is difficult enough to come to an understanding of, say, Japan or France, nations made up, for the most part…