Translator, poet and writer Maithreyi Karnoor has received the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship for creative writing and translation at Literature Across Frontiers, University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. She has won the Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati Prize for translation and has been shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and the Montreal International Poetry Prize. This is her debut novel.
Since the dawn of history, in every age and in every place, these men have been there. Sometimes they wear skull caps, sometimes their foreheads are smeared with vermillion or sandalwood paste, sometimes crucifixes dangle from their necks. Like the colours of a chameleon, their outer appearance keeps changing, but they are the same men—their eyes reddened by anger and fear, hearts blackened by hate, hands grasping shovels, swords and chains that gleam with bloodlust.
Aruna Chakravarti is well known for her translations and evocative novels about Bengal. This striking collection of stories displays her taut control over the genre of short fiction. Each of the stories reads like a novella, vividly creating varied locations, houses, communities while revealing interior landscapes. They open a window to new worlds by playing with ‘perceptions’, which is also the title of one of the stories.
Tapestry of Women in Indian Mythology is an anthology of poems with contributions from 70 poets, both women and men. The book has an epic-like range and draws attention not only to women from mythology who are part of the popular imagination but more importantly, to those whose narratives have been ignored, suppressed or completely glossed over.
Yamunaparyatan, deemed to be the first Marathi novel, was published in 1857. It was written by Baba Padmanji Mulay, a formidable activist-intellectual and public persona of his times (1831-1906). It has now been translated into English as Yamuna’s Journey by Deepra Dandekar, a keen chronicler-critic of Padmanji’s times and texts.
Women’s role and contribution to Urdu literature and journalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth century remains a relatively under-examined area. CM Naim’s A Most Noble Life: The Biography of Ashrafunnisa Begum (1840-1903), makes an important intervention as it tells the tale of an extraordinary woman who was deeply devoted to the cause of women’s education, and enriches the reader with a wealth of material that highlights the social, cultural, and literary context that shaped the contours of ordinary Muslim women’s lives in the nineteenth century.