Dimitrova declares in the Introduction of the book, she understands ‘“Indian cultural identity” in a non-essentializing sense, as a pluralistic, open-ended, and dynamic concept that is inclusive of all religious, cultural, and socio-political traditions and currents in South Asia and beyond’
Social as well as political movements have a long and sustained history in India. In post-Independence India, the decade of the 1980s saw a wave of new social movements focused on identity, culture and lifestyle instead of just political or economic issues.
I remember my father, a doctor, having stacks of jasoosi naavil (detective novels) on his bedside table. Printed on flimsy paper, often with lurid covers, they were dog eared and clearly well read.
Firdous Azmat Siddiqui’s novel Zindaan, written in Urdu, brilliantly takes us through the gloomy days of 2020, when we were imprisoned in our own homes at once after the outbreak of the Corona virus. It explores human emotions and psychology in times of turmoil. The book highlights the helplessness of human beings before the might of a virus.
The book seeks to juxtapose individual feelings of desolation and deprivation with universalizing aesthetics in an idiom shaped by a blizzard of words.
Masnavi is one of the three genres known to have been imported from Persian into the Urdu language, the other two being the Ghazal and the Rubayi.