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Block printing was the most widespread means of printing textiles, which was eventually displaced by the advent in India of roller printing in the 19th century and commercial screen printing in the 20th century. Indian block prints are hailed for their permanency of colours. The book is an account of the history of block printing, how it was a significant source of revenue and how it has evolved in an innovative way. There are relevant pictorial references to fabric, blocks, artisans making it an interesting read. The decline in popularity of block printed fabric and resurrection of the art has been documented quite extensively.

The Man Booker International Prize (MBIP) was awarded this year to Han Kang, a South Korean writer, for her novel The Vegetarians.* The MBIP 2016 attracted global attention not only due to the merit of the novel but also for the fact that it ‘celebrated’, as a MBIP web-post states, ‘the finest global fiction in translation’. Deborah Smith, the English translator of the novel, was thus accorded equal recognition by the MBIP committee: the prize money was evenly shared by them as was the glory. Indeed, as a Literature Across Frontiers report suggests, due to remarkable increase, in the visibility of translated books, and the translators themselves, translated literature (TL) is no longer a niche interest which ‘appeals only to a discerning but limited readership’ (The Guardian, 16 May, 2016). Recent surveys carried out by agencies such as Nielsen show that the global TL market is expanding like never before. India being no exception has also seen a rise in demand for TL or more specifically, Indian Literature in English Translation (ILET).

Hailed as a landmark literary work, a milestone in the literary history of Gujarat, Sarasvatichandra, Govardhanram Tripathi’s magnum opus is now available in English translation after an astounding 128 years of its publication in Gujarati. Now when it has been published in Hindi and English, the two link languages of India, what implications could it have for present-day Indians? It is but natural for two questions to arise in the mind of the discerning reader. Firstly, why was it not translated for these many years? Secondly, (coincidently, all the four parts of the novel have been published in Hindi translation at this very juncture), why has it been published in English translation after these many years? Answers to these questions are not easy to locate but must be addressed and contextualized by scholars and researchers working in this area.

The strife, the struggle and the anguish buried in the recesses of a Dalit’s psyche had to be understood in his own medium/language. The true victory is when they started writing their own history. Historically speaking, Dalit is a condition. The world experienced by the Dalit is altogether unrecognizable from the perspective of the present. It is time students as well as teachers—whether Dalit or non-Dalit— came face to face with the Dalit consciousness and the challenges they face as writers. For the first time ever an attempt to document Dalit ideology in the form of a textbook has resulted in the outstanding Listen to the Flames: Texts and Readings from the Margins.

Poets are always best at their craft when they leap to the magical imagination to elevate readers to new perceptions and milieu related to meaning and experience. Like the publisher-poet of this book, Jamie McGarry, I found the poem ‘The Lesson’, more akin to an opening overture of this collection, candidly meeting this benchmark. Through this poem, Saleem Peeradina’s savoir-faire as a poet successfully takes us on that enchanted journey to deliver us to the experience of things beyond a materialistic tuning.Take a sheet of paper the size of a drawing pad. The universe,as we perceive it, must be accommodated within the borders of this rectangle.

There are different ways of getting familiar with a city, and perhaps the descriptions of its monuments are among the most popular ways of doing so. Tourist guides and brochures of every major city in the world are replete with pictures and descriptions of its most visited and iconic monuments and buildings, more often than not, a newcomer to a city gets acquainted with it through its monuments, and therefore, a proper understanding of a city’s monuments and buildings is the crucial first step of getting acquainted with a city. The Great Houses of Calcutta by Joanne Taylor and Jon Lang attempts to familiarize a wide audience with the city of Calcutta, its socio-political and economic history and the lives of its people in an era gone by through a detailed analysis of some of the mansions of the local Bengali elites of colonial Calcutta.