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.
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.
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.
You know that a discipline has come of age when academics and practitioners talk the same talk. They discuss approaches and strategies to and of their common area of interest, and find that they are actually on the same page and not at the extreme ends of the spectrum.
The book under review is an anthol¬ogy of short stories put together by Indian novelist and publisher, David Davidar. The collection is inimitable with thirty-nine short stories by literary giants like Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand, R.K. Narayan, Saadat Hasan Manto, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer…
Natwar Singh’s book is like the man himself—to the point, sparse and understated. It covers mostly his public life and carefully spans over the pri¬vate in measured words. If there are expecta¬tions that he will ‘spill the beans’ and come out with juicy details over private life happenings…