By Subhadra Sen Gupta

I have heard and read a hundred times stories about Ganesha, and thought I knew them all: how he refused Shiva entry following Ma Parvati’s instructions, which enraged Shiva so much he cut off the child’s head, and then repented and got him an elephant’s head Anju Virmani THE STORY OF HANUMAN Text by Mala Dayal. Illustrated by Taposhi Ghoshal Red Turtle/Rupa & Co., New Delhi, 2016, pp. 74, R395.00 GANESH By Subhadra Sen Gupta. Illustrated by Tapas Guha Rupa & Co., New Delhi, 2016, pp. 42, R295.00 instead; how he broke off a tusk so that the writing of the Mahabharata was seamless; how he encircled his parents three times to win the race against his brother Kartikeya. So it came as a bit of a shock that there are other versions of the familiar, conventional tales.


Reviewed by: Anju Virmani
By Mala Dayal

The stories of Hanuman, son of Vasu and Anjana, his adven- tures as a child, his role in the Ramayana, and then in the Mahabharata, are a cornerstone of Hindu mythology. Hanuman’s life is like an adventure movie—filled with acts of great strength and courage, in- terspersed with evidence of his learn- ing and wisdom—so that it can be as exciting for the youngest child as it can be profound for an adult. In ear- lier generations, children had the fa- cility of grandmothers and grandfathers to tell them stories from our rich and varied mythology. With ever shrinking families, the child must have access to other sources. In her book The Story of Hanuman, Maya Dayal introduces very young children to some of these tales. Told simply, the book touches upon many events he is famous for: swallowing Surya, then persuading him to be his teacher; becoming Sugriva’s minister as guru-dakshina, and then helping him and Rama get together.


Reviewed by: Anju Virmani
By Arshia Sattar

The Rama story has been around for a long time. It has been a part of people’s life and thought for generations in this country. An inspiration for both saints and savants over the ages, its longstanding and continued appeal for common folk too has been no less clear to many observers of this land. Its spread has also been documented by eminent scholars in modern times. About three decades ago, this was done in fascinating detail, with India as the background, by A.K. Ramanujan in his acclaimed dissertation Three Hundred Ramayanas.


Reviewed by: A.N.D. Haksar
Geetanjali Shree. Translated from the original Hindi by Daisy Rockwell

Reading Ret Samadhi and Tomb of Sand is exhilarating, challenging, even exasperating; such is its span and scope, its playful exuberance and idiosyncratic originality of style, playing out differently in the two versions. Given its more recent American/English avatar, one may evoke Whitman: it is vast, it contains multitudes. Given its incontrovertible rootedness in its Indian-subcontinental milieu, however, one must invoke the Mahabharata, the grand epic that it references at the very outset.


Reviewed by: Maya Joshi
Geetanjali Shree

As a fellow writer, the fifth novel of Geetanjali Shree leaves you wonderstruck with its sweeping imagination and the sheer power of language, unprecedented and uninhibited. She is known for her experiments with content and form, but this novel keeps you in grips with its storyline as well, which had not really been her forte earlier.


Reviewed by: Alka Saraogi
Chandan Pandey. Translated from the original Hindi by Bharatbhooshan Tiwari

The postscript to this novel says it is dedicated ‘to the brave Uttarakhand police officer, Gagandeep Singh, who saved a young man from a lynch mob’. This dedication indicates the story line that one can expect: it is about individual acts of courage against an establishment that is overwhelmingly powerful.The timeline of the story is three days. On day one, the protagonist, Arjun, an author who is not yet thirty-three, gets a call from one of his ex-girlfriends telling him that her husband has disappeared.


Reviewed by: Meenakshi Shivram