T Janakiraman’s novel The Crimson Hibiscus is, at one level, the story of an ordinary man prematurely burdened by duties and responsibilities. Equally though, it is the story of an entire era and of that complex eco-system called the joint family. This sensitively translated, beautifully produced novel..
The Tamil Brahmin community has for me been an enigma, mainly because of their rites and rituals that begin or close any event of everyday life. The rich symbolism in lifestyle patterns, the pragmatically intelligent womenfolk, the shrewd menfolk and the sharp children have always piqued…
‘Did he live? Did he die? Was it a search? Or a hunt? When she set him free, did she also succeed in setting herself free?’ In this eclectic collection of thirteen short stories, Ambai’s characters pose existential questions that are intriguing, even disturbing, because they defy mundane answers…
When Prema gets married, little does she know that she will have to toil endlessly and live like a tongue-tied prisoner, listening to the same litany of complaints from her husband every day. Pummelled for three years and ten days, she eventually walks out of her abusive marriage, securing ‘freedom with costs’…
Pain knows no language, but languages do know pain. As first Malayalam and then English lend their scripts to narrate the violence and intensity of a Santhali woman’s pain; out of these narrations are born the images of those whose wounds make languages crumble and words shrink in impoverishment…
It is generally agreed that translation is an act of moving a text from one language to another. Those who have reflected critically on the processes of translation, like John Dryden (1631–1700), concur with this basic definition. Complicating this, possibly in the late eighteenth century England…