Manoranjan Byapari. Translated from the original Bengali by Arunava Sinha

Bhai, there are maybe three or four thousand thieves and robbers and murderers and rapists here, at most. But outside, there are millions…An honest man is safe here, outside, his life is hell.’ This is how a beggar, convicted for no reason in the novel Imaan, shudders at the thought of being released from prison, only to confront corruption, violence, sexual predation and killings outside.


Reviewed by: Nivedita Sen
Joy Goswami. Translated from the Bengali by Sampurna Chattarji

Someone who has not read Joy Goswami, in the original Bengali or in translation, would have missed the seminal compositions of one of the world’s finest poets. It is a daunting task to translate Joy Goswami, and it is no less daunting to review the brilliant translation of his book. Since I had not read Goswami’s trilogy in the original, I approached the translation with an open mind. In fact, it is Sampurna who has introduced Joy Goswami to the western world.


Reviewed by: Rumki Basu
Kalindi Charan Panigrahi.

With Salt of the Earth, Matira Manisha, the classic Odia novel of 1930 by Kalindi Charan Panigrahi, has seen its third English translation. The first translation (done by Leela Ray and Narendra Mishra) went straight for the jugular in its choice of the title, House Undivided.  What this eclipsed was the novel’s rural and agrarian setting, so unmistakably captured in the Odia title, from which comes the author’s romantic-idealistic concern with the soil.


Reviewed by: Himansu S Mohapatra
Jagadish Mohanty.

Published in 1990, Jagadish Mohanty’s Battles of Our Own offers a piercing portrait of the dying years of ‘Nehruvian socialism’ when the rot was practically, ‘out in the open’. Marked by an excessive government and bureaucratic control, failed labour movements, toothless trade unions, and widespread corruption, the late 1980s was a period of intense disillusionment with socialist ideologies and principles.


Reviewed by: S Deepika
Basudev Sunani

Mashani Sahara Dilli is an important book for many reasons, one of which is its sheering honesty. This Odia novel tells us stories that are marginal to the aspirational India we are supposed to inhabit these days. These are narrated from the vantage point of Anurag, a Government of Odisha officer who is now posted in Delhi for work.


Reviewed by: Sailen Routray
Hiren Gohain

Hiren Gohain is easily one of India’s tallest public intellectuals. He was professor of English at Gauhati University until his retirement in 1999.  Whether in his core academic corpus—Tradition and Paradise Lost: A Heretical View (1976), a book based on his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge and Asamīyā Jātīya Jīvanat Mahāpuruṣiyā Paramparā (1987), his much-acclaimed work on Śaṅkaradeva among others—or his political interventions, Gohain directs our glance at ideological structures that insidiously dominate our language and cultures.


Reviewed by: Ajitabh Hazarika