The importance of the book under review is not just that it remembers the nationalist movement at a time when it appeared to have been forgotten, but also tells us how to remember the nationalist movement. Chronologically speaking, reflections on the nationalist movement have gone through four stages.
The inequalities of income and wealth in our time are blatant. There is a feeling of outrage when we see the opulent demonstratively flaunt their scission from everyone else and contrast the abysmal poverty on display:
The Bangladeshi writer Nasreen Jahan’s The Woman Who Flew (2012) is a novel translated from the original Bengali Urukkoo (1993) by Kaiser Haq. The title of the novel indicates an act of ‘flying’ from the gross and unrefined in search of the ‘sublime’. The novel depicts the realities of life and the significance of art in the life of those people…
Sultana’s Dream by Begum Rokheya Sakhawat Hossain could well be every South Asian woman’s dream come true! This wonderful feminist fable, written in 1905, much before the word feminism itself made its appearance in India is a book that needs to be gifted to every woman and indeed man whom we love and care for.
From Ghalib’s Delhi to Lutyen’s New Delhi is an edited set of records, from the collections of the National Archives of India, pertaining to the founding and development of New Delhi from 1911 onwards.
Despite Aijaz Ahmad’s majestic rebuttal, Frederic Jameson’s claim that ‘all Third World texts’ are allegorical and are to be read as ‘national allegories’ seems credible, albeit minus its sweeping generalization, with reference to many fictional narratives produced across Indian languages in the twentieth century.