It seems that it is difficult to write a south Asian novel, especially one written by an expatriate without asking the extraneous questions about exile and memory, politics and individual life histories, some implications of sexual and ideological preferences and the meaning of it all.
A Fort of Nine Towers is the vivid recollection of a young Afghan author, Qais Akbar Omar, from the last years of the Russians in Afghanistan to the tumultuous years of factional fighting and the eventual dark and suffocating rule of the Taliban. It ends with 9/11 and the return of dance and music to the streets of Kabul.
In My Mother’s House is certainly not yet another book on the civil war in Sri Lanka. The book stands out on three key grounds. One, despite being one of the victims of war and becoming a refugee at a young age, the author, Sharika Thiranagama, does not build a narrative of herself, but of others in the society that she had left more than two decades ago.
When Orhan Pamuk and Mohammed Hanif, among many others, figure on the blurb of a book singing paeans to it, expectations run high and the reader feels apprehensive that she is bound to be disappointed by the actual reading of it. But this grand epic narrative lives up to every praise showered upon it and then some.
My first experience of Bombay was that of cognitive dissonance. This was partly due to the fact that my imagination of Bombay as a city was shaped, in substantial measure, by the newly emerging body of English literature based on the city and partly because the first place I was acquainted with, back in 2006,
In 2008, Nalin Mehta1 wrote about satellite television being not only a marker of the progress of the idea of India, but also being a fundamental contributor to it. Earlier in 2001, Robin Jeffrey2 had written about regional language newspapers being vital hinges on which the nation as a whole was supported.