The pandemic which engulfed the world in 2020 is, as the song says, a strange saga of which nobody can say with any certainty where its beginnings lie and where it will end. It is believed that it began in Wuhan in November 2019, exactly a hundred years after the Spanish Flu pandemic which took an enormous toll of human lives. And over the past 24 months or more, the various mutations the virus has been undergoing make it completely incomprehensible as to when it will, if ever, disappear.


Editorial
Sanjeev Sethi

Despite all pronouncements to the contrary, poetry is not dead. But it surely is confronted with a crisis. Its publication and reception are fraught with a risk—a risk that in part springs from the prosaic proclivities of the present and in part from the indifference that noise-saturated sensibility—enamoured as it is by the surfaces—has for anything that demands nuanced engagement with and understanding of life verities.


Reviewed by: Anup Singh Beniwal
Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita Agrawal

The task of a poetry editor is both exciting and onerous. The most difficult genre to ‘judge’ for quality, poetry’s intimate and earnest vocabulary defies any fixed norms. While each poet is supremely individual, so is each reader, and therefore literary responses can be highly subjective. Nevertheless, if the incremental interest in this genre is to be systematized for public circulation, editors have to make choices within the amplitude confronting them. Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita Agrawal, editors of the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, 2020-2021 have fulfilled their task admirably though it is a specially difficult year when the pandemic has thrown up poetry as a favoured instrument of self-healing.


Reviewed by: Malashri Lal
Translated from the original Hindi by Vidya Pradhan with a Foreword by Namita Gokhale

Anton Chekhov, analysing the structural elements of a short story, says, ‘writing a short story, therefore, is to write what the characters do, not what they think, or say’ (Friedland 1890). While there is no autobiographical evidence of Chekhov’s influence on Mannu Bhandari’s artistic development, one can see a Chekovian resonance, a kind of literary parallel. In Vidya Pradhan’s rich selection of eighteen stories under review, Bhandari’s characters do negotiate things as they exist. Her narrative canvas substitutes abstract philosophizing with lived realities.


Reviewed by: Umesh Kumar
T. Janakiraman. Translated from the original Tamil by Lakshmi Kannan. Introduction by Anita Balakrishnan

T.Janakiraman (1921–82), affectionately known as Thi Jaa, is one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century Tamil literature. He wrote about familial and interpersonal issues, with a focus on the ill-treatment of women, especially widows. His best-known novels, Mohamul, 1964, (The Thorn of Desire), Amma Vantal,1966, (English translation The Sins of Appu’s Mother) and Marappasu,1975, (Wooden Cow) present strong women with a mind of their own. Bilingual novelist, short story writer, poet and translator Lakshmi Kannan had published an English translation of Marappasu in 1979. She felt the need to do a revised version; the birth centenary of the novelist provided the occasion to publish it.


Reviewed by: Shyamala A Narayan
Nayantara Sahgal

I belong to a generation that grew up reading Nayantara Sahgal. Her early works, like her autobiography Prison and Chocolate Cake, captured for us a time that many of us had not personally experienced but could vividly imagine through her writings.Even as India grew older, we aged and the idealism of youth began to lose some of its sheen, Nayantara Sahgal’s was a voice that never failed to make you pause and think. 


Reviewed by: Kalpana Sharma