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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.

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.

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.