Murray Laurence’s Subcontinental Drift begins with wide-eyed observations on his first journeys in India as a callow backpacker in the 1970s, enthralled and baffled by the incomprehensibility of the country and its people. Forty years later, in the twenty-first century, he is still trying to make sense of the sub-continent’s diverse histories and cultures, but in a more pensive and introspective mood.
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry’, wrote W.H. Auden in memorial for W.B. Yeats. The sentence herds the reader straight into the heart of the matter. It implies that there is a relationship between the poet, or rather poetry, and the social order that condition all literature. In Auden’s overall view, however, this does not amount to much: ‘For Poetry makes nothing happen.’
Ipsita Roy Chakraverti (b. 1950) created a sensation when she declared that she was a witch in 1986. She started administering Wiccan ways of healing to the people. She went to the aid of women in rural Bengal, where it was (and still is) common for a poor widow to be labelled a witch. ‘If I had come from a different rung of society, or was illiterate, the reaction wouldn’t be the same,’ she observes, and uses her position to help others.
What is the place of grief in the pursuit of greatness? George Saunders explores this theme in his new book Lincoln in the Bardo. The year in the book is 1862 and the American Civil War is a year old and no one knows yet what changes it will bring. President Lincoln and his wife Mary are organizing an annual reception, an event which would later be variously described in the memoirs and diaries of their contemporaries.
Ksemendra was a classical Sanskrit poet who flourished in the reign of Ananta ( 1028–63 CE) and his son Kalasa. He belonged to Kashmir, home to such great poets like Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta.
In a general, widespread opinion, the Rama story is old and ageless and its narration in Valmiki’s adi-kavya both original and authoritative.