By Aparna Bandopadhyay

Aparna Bandopadhay’s book creates a narrative out of the heartrending journey of desire and defiance that women in colonial Bengal went through for daring to assert the aspirations of their hearts. Caught between a patriarchal society and a patriarchal state, it shows in detail how classic patriarchy excludes and punishes women who challenge its control over their sexuality. The chapter ‘Quest for Legitimacy’ recounts the instances when women from kulin Hindu and Brahmo families asserted their right to choose their life partners. The Hindu ideal of marriage was a non-consensual marriage at a pre-pubertal age. Although the Brahmos accepted the concept of mutual consent, they too imposed restrictions of caste endogamy, Brahmo endogamy, regional endogamy, and obtaining the approval of the families. Any choice that did not meet with these criteria was considered transgressive. Young kulin women, haunted by the spectre of lifelong spinsterhood or marriage to a polygamous older man and subsequent early widowhood, married men who were not vetted by their families.


Reviewed by: Nilanjana Ray
Edited by Uma Chakravarti

This timely collection of essays is in equal measure a product of and a detailed comment on an important moment in the history of feminism in India, in which feminists reject the need for a unified subject of feminism, and turn towards a deeper interrogation of the activist/academic divide in making sense of feminism itself. It contains excellent essays that reveal the extent to which feminism in India has become alive to the intertwining of many different strands of power shaping of our patriarchies. The editor in her introduction remarks that the essays in the volume are about ‘doing’ gender rather than just ‘thinking’ it, but many of these essays show that feminism in India has often complicated that divide—it is not always just thinking, they seem to say. Rather, it was often the effort to develop a praxis in the fullest sense.


Reviewed by: J. Devika
By Michelle Moran

The Last Queen of India is an excellent piece of historical fiction by Michelle Moran. The novel revolves around the life of Rani LakshmiBai, the Rani of Jhansi, and chronicles the period of the Great Revolt of 1857. While many of the characters around whom the story revolves in the novel exist and are documented to various degrees of accuracy in historical records, the protagonist seems to be an entirely fictional construct of the author. Sita, the medium through which the story is told, starts out as a young girl, who manages to enlist with the Queen’s all-female bodyguard called the Durga Dal. The novel is presented as the memoirs and recollections of Sita writing many years after the events, and thus frames the first person narrative that Moran favours reasonably well.


Reviewed by: T.C.A. Achintya
By Han Kang . Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

Now at least I can look at you in peace. I don’t eat you anymore. (Kafka to Max Brod, his estate keeper, upon seeing a fish in an aquarium at the Berlin zoo.)The aphorism ‘the personal is political’ may be what Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is all about. This is a story of personal revolt caused by a psychosomatic condition that may be symbolic of a political and social revolt—women making choices for themselves and their households independent of the men they marry and a rejection of family traditions and customs, mirroring dissent to the rigid politics in Korea. Han Kang has expressed her alarm at the authoritarian streak of the President, Park Geun-hye, the daughter of an assassinated military dictator.


Reviewed by: Rohini R. Karnik
By Eiluned Edwards

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.


Reviewed by: Manisha Bakshi
By Manoj Kumar Panda . Translated from the Odiya by Snehaprava Das

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).


Reviewed by: Nabanipa Bhattacharjee