Vasanthi Srinivasan
A political science professor at the University of Hyderabad, Vasanthi Srinivasan is clearly also at home in other disciplines such as philosophy, religion and history.
Reviewed by: Rajmohan Gandhi
Alok Bhalla
What is poetry? Is it as Wordsworth says a spontaneous overflow of emotions recollected in tranquility? If so, is it possible for language to reflect these emotions? Which leads us to the more troubling question as to what language is.
Reviewed by: K.B.S. Krishna
Madhuri Banerjee
Banerjee, a bestselling author, came out with her first book in the year 2011. The Mumbai based author has also doubled up as a screenplay writer for Bollywood, having written the script for Hate Story 2, and for another yet-to-released film.
Reviewed by: N. Kalyani
Ruth Vanita
I have always admired Ruth Vanita’s work on account of its articulate lucidity. Reviewing her translation of short stories by Mannu Bhandari, Rajee Seth and Archana Varma from Hindi to English promised to be an exciting possibility.
Reviewed by: Ratna Raman
Keki N. Daruwalla
ISLANDS
2015
2015
Daruwalla has written an entire volume of stories on islands. The stories extend to looking at people as islands spread across this world. The first story Island Sermon involves a nameless narrator who is visiting India to see a hermit and has certain fixed notions about what constitutes a good story. The swami reveals self-destructive tendencies and suffers from dementia. Further into the story, the inner ramblings of the mind are revealed—‘I have been obsessed with islands, their solitary existence, the way they cope with themselves.
Reviewed by: Semeen Ali
Margaret Paul Joseph
Indian fiction in English by women, visualized as Jasmine on a String by Margaret Paul Joseph includes writing not just by women who may or may not have lived in India but also those who may not be Indian by birth too.
Reviewed by: Baran Farooqi