Dhrubajyoti Borah

Dhrubajyoti Borah’s Elegy for the East: A Story of Blood and Broken Dreams is a poignant narrative set against the backdrop of the insurgency in Assam and the North East in the 1990s. Albeit fictional, the novel offers an insider perspective on the ideology and nature of the armed rebellion led by the United Liberation Front Asom, the subsequent counter-insurgency operations launched by the Indian state, and the tormented lives of common people who are caught between the two.


Reviewed by: Ann Susan Aleyas
Jeet Thayil

On tracing the history of Indian English literature, if one looks at the genre of poetry, it has been observed that anthologies have brought together voices not just from across the country but also collected varied ideas/perceptions/concepts that have been fermenting and brimming and searching for their readers.You can growyour inward silence indoors nowthe inessential park is closed.


Reviewed by: Semeen Ali
By Jayanti Naik. Translated by Augusto Pinto

Jayanti Naik says in the preface to the book: ‘This English translation will of- fer a glimpse into the true nature of Goansociety … different from the prevailing ste- reotyped and touristic images of Goa.’ The eleven stories in the collection are about ‘the salt of the earth’, that is, good and decent people who inhabit the villages in and around Quepem in South Goa. These people mainly belong to the ‘Bahujan Samaj’, as people of non-elite castes describe themselves. The 55- year old author and folklorist Jayanti Naik knows them well and her stories celebrate their myths, superstitions and folklore. Al- though the day-to-day lives of her charac- ters may be mundane what impressed me were the psychological insights extracted from them with her narrative skills.


Reviewed by: Ben Antao
By Kiranmayi Indraganti

Kiranmayi Indraganti’s book Her Majestic Voice gives us a broad socio-cultural study of the evolution of South Indian women playback singers of the mid-twentieth century. The book presents this vast but relatively unexplored field through the lives and careers of four important women playback singers, namely: P. Bhanumati, Ravu Balasaraswati Devi, Jikki Krishnaveni and K. Jamuna Rani, apart from a study of Lata Mangeshkar, whose career and choices are often set as a benchmark of comparison.


Reviewed by: Kanav Gupta
By K.K. Gopalakrishnan

Books on performing arts in India have   either been of the coffee table variety or dense and too theoretical. Books on classical dance in particular have often reiterated the existing primers and treatises like the Natya Shastra or the Abhinaya Darpana. Dance photography of course is a visual delight and some books on classical dance try to get by with a profusion of glamorous images. For too long, not much was written about the performing arts, for the tradition was sceptical of the written word and relied mostly on oral narrative accounts.


Reviewed by: Krishna Menon
By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a prolific writer, social activist and a teacher of creative writing skills. In her latest work Before We Visit the Goddess she has deftly chronicled the diasporic enigmas spanning three generations and showcasing the agglutination of Indian and American cultural identities.


Reviewed by: Ashima Bhardwaj