No story has ever been fully told, it is said, because no story can ever be fully told. However, as Ranjana Padhi and Nigamananda Sadangi tell us in Resisting Dispossession: The Odisha Story, all stories are only half told. That said, it ought to be conceded that this book, which sets out to tell the story of development and its discontents in Odisha from 1948 to the present, tells it remarkably well.
Muslims in Assam comprise one-third of its population. Since Independence, the politics of Assam has been shaped by the question of alleged illegal immigration from erstwhile East Pakistan. The spectre of an illegal immigrant minoritizing the ‘khilonjia’(original inhabitants) of Assam has been a constant in the popular as well as political discourse.
Studies abound of Arthashastra, Mudrarakshasa, Panchatantra and Hitopadesha; not so many of Dasakumaracarita, Vetala Panchavimshati and Simhasana Dvatrimshika (2nd century BCE to 13th century CE). Srinivasan is the first to study them together vis-à-vis western political thought. It is the first study based upon Telegu translations which provide different versions of some tales.
One of the popular traditional games played by children in Bengal is kumir (crocodile)-danga (elevated land). One player who is designated as kumir has to catch the other players when they trespass their area (danga). This game encapsulates the very identity of Bengal and it is about the movement of players across the shifting territory of kumir and danga.
The author is a truly amazing doctor, a surgeon, and a writer of fiction. But many doctors write fiction, the most famous of course being Chekov, who I just discovered was not Russian, but Ukrainian, like Tchaikovsky. But unlike Chekov and most clinicians like Oliver Sacks, who mine their case histories for stories, Kavery Nambisan has a deep appreciation of the need for public health.
She donned many mantles. It is a well-known fact that Mahasweta Devi (1926-2016), the Bengali novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, columnist, editor, and above all a socio-cultural activist, had relentlessly worked for decades highlighting the problems of the rural poor and the tribals. Standing as she did at the intersection of vital contemporary questions of politics, gender, class and caste, she was perhaps the most significant figure in the socially committed literature field.