Book reviews often depend on the affinity of the reviewer. The complex text of Indian femininity and feminism is not an easy phenomenon to be codified by any language of art and the art of the written word is no exception. R.K. Biswas’s Breasts and Other Afflictions of Women is a sensational draw for sure. Will it be Indian English’s answer to Eva Ensler’s Vagina Monologues? was the first question to come to my mind.
The eponymous story in this collection—a minor galaxy, to further the metaphor the title introduces—traces an encounter with the last speaker of a language, an elderly ailing woman in an unnamed location. All we can glean is that she is remote—geographically, culturally, and, of course, linguistically—from the team of young researchers who appear with their machines to record that which is inherently impossible—‘speech’ in a language of which she is the last remaining speaker.
Paul Cooper is audacious in not only situating his debut novel in as unlikely a setting as medieval Sri Lanka but in constructing it around an ancient Sanskrit poem. His daring choice of context, however, adds to the lustre of the book. River of Ink is a work of abundant creative ability: an adroitly-crafted love story, a morality tale about poetry’s triumph over oppression.
If I recall right, Keki Daruwalla, a noted poet and writer of short stories, first ventured into the jungle of novels relatively late in life, in 2009, with an intriguing book titled For Pepper and Christ. I am not sure if the book did well in sales. I rather think it did not, although it had much to commend it. The problem was with the way it had been structured. His second novel, Ancestral Affairs, should do better.
This monograph is the product of two decades of research by an amateur ethnographer who, based in the Nilgiri Hills, has devoted time both to the study and support of the Toda community. Chhabra’s work with the Todas crosses the spheres of research, advocacy and friendship. In 1992, he established the Toda Nalvazhvu Sangam (the Toda Welfare Society) to mediate between the local government and the community. Much of the monograph has been published elsewhere and the chapters remain relatively discrete but exceptionally rich explorations of particular facets of the Toda community’s cultural and religious life set carefully within the landscape, flora and fauna of the Nilgiri hills.
Lengthening Shadows, an anthology of short stories in the Portuguese-language from Goa, a former Portuguese colony, which covers a period of more than a century, from 1860 to 1980, was edited and translated into the English language by Paul Melo e Castro, an English scholar on Goan literature based at Leeds University. With the exception of ‘The Africa Boat’ by Laxmanrao Sardessai, the stories in this collection were painstakingly compiled by Melo e Castro from Goan newspapers, the Bulletin from the Institute Menezes Bragança (IMB), and private libraries. Therefore, while they are a novelty for the lay reader, they are a real treasure for literary scholars.