By Paritosh Sen Classix,

The play of colour, shapes, forms, and contrasts of light and dark is Sen’s métier, making cognition of the precepts in this volume predominantly visual. Even though this volume is black-and-white, he captures the Arjuna tree’s transformation across the day in captivating prose. When it catches the first rays of the sun, it looks like Gautama Buddha in deep meditation. At high noon, in the harsh mercury-white light and lamp-black shadows,


Reviewed by: Chitra Gopalakrishnan
By Kiriti Sengupta

This restrained fury runs through the collection’s most recent poems. They come from a tradition of Bengali literary conscience that has always understood literature as a moral act. Sengupta continues that tradition without announcing it. His poem ‘Tradition’ turns a familiar concept into something quietly subversive:


Reviewed by: Arpan Mitra
By Paro Anand. Illustrated by Priya Kuriyan

they were branded as criminals by the British under the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act, which made their traditional way of life illegal. Junglee, a Pardhi girl herself, protects a vulnerable tiger cub, even though her community is blamed for hunting such animals.


Reviewed by: Shagun Tomar
By Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar. Illustrated by Proiti Roy. Book Design by Saurabh Garge.

The ‘secret question’ works like a small lesson in resistance. When the ghost copies the mother’s voice, the girl uses what she knows about her widowed mother. She remembers that her mother does not apply alta. She even breaks the rule about not touching the chuhla to burn the ghost’s wolf-foot,


Reviewed by: Eishita Tiwari
By Jaya Tyagi

Should he have mentioned his name Ashoka more often? Again, if this was a name specifically connected with his Buddhist affiliation, he may have preferred not to use it in inscriptions meant for a wider, diverse readership/audience, choosing other epithets instead. And, given that we now have the label inscription from Kanaganahalli, mentioning Rāyo Asoko, it is possible that people were familiar with the name. Further, although perhaps anachronistic,


Reviewed by: Kumkum Roy
Edited by David Lunn with an Introduction by Samira Sheikh

limited in their study to lives and worldviews of individuals. However, with the waning of the teleological, unilineal view of history, historians are now beginning to realize the need to place human experiences, emotions and everyday events within the larger historical context. With this has come the realization that personal accounts are not just records of individual experiences but rather reflect an incessant interaction of the individual self with the wider socio-cultural discourse in diverse spatial and temporal contexts. The current work by Simon Digby, a renowned British scholar of pre-Mughal India,


Reviewed by: Shivangini Tandon