Akhtaruzzaman Elias Translated from the original Bangla by Arunava Sinha

Some writers become legends in their own lifetime; respected and admired by their peers, loved by legions of readers despite a slender output. The Bangladeshi novelist and short story writer Akhtaruzzaman Elias is one such. He wrote just two novels and five collections of short stories and yet earned fulsome praise from fellow writers. Mahasweta Devi saying ‘I would have considered myself blessed if I could have achieved a fraction of his quality in my writing’ reminded me of the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib saying that he would have happily given away his entire collection of poetry for this one sher by Momin Khan Momin: ‘Tum mere paas hotey ho goya/Jab koi doosra nahi hota.’


Reviewed by: Rakhshanda Jalil
Mehr Afshan Farooqi

Literary biographies, as a genre, has remained popular in the West, covering a wide spectrum, from the purely documentary and factual to the wildly and extravagantly imaginative. The latest in the genre that created a buzz when it came out was The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff that had as its subject Joseph Conrad, the great writer of Polish origin and stylist of the English novel.


Reviewed by: M Asaduddin
Pia David

The book traces the journey of Jia, an immigrant of Pashtun origin living in a place that is not named. The story unravels following a family’s life story partly in England and partly in Pakistan. The predicament that is being faced by the protagonist leads her to journey on the path of reluctant self-discovery. A father murdered, a feudal lord dead, Jia Khan trained as a Barrister is compelled to face what was to be done as she belongs to a clan which has connections with a crime syndicate, a family business…


Reviewed by: Pia David
Nivedita Sen

The portrayal of children who resent getting stifled within the regimen of home and school is a recurring feature of children’s fiction in Bangla, although they are by and large unable to break free of it. In the sub-genre of domestic fantasy within it, the child tries to find an outlet from the regimen of home and school for a while, but the most radical implications of her/his breaking out of the system get contained within the predominantly middle-class worldview of the narratives. Detective stories deviate from this sub-genre umbrella inasmuch that the child gets caught or initiates an adventure in which s/he is able to realize her/his fantasy of solving a mystery.


Editorial
Abir Mukherjee

In 2016, the publishers Harvill Secker/Daily Telegraph announced a crime-writing competition and the winner was Abir Mukherjee, a young chartered accountant based in London, whose five-thousand-word entry has ultimately resulted in the debut novel A Rising Man. The historical whodunit spans a few days in April 1919, beginning in a diary-like form on the 9th of April to be exact. Set in Raj-era Calcutta of the 1920s decade, it features English cop Captain Sam Wyndham, and his Indian sidekick, Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee or Surrender-not, as his British superiors were wont to call him…


Reviewed by: Somdatta Mandal
Pinaki Roy

In the history of Bengali detective fiction—arguably one of the more often accessed sub-genres of popular literature in India itself—one could find the example of a gradual dwindling from something quite serious into something that is read mostly by children and young adults. When one speaks about such post-modern Bengali fictional detectives and adventurers like Satyajit Ray’s ‘Feluda (Prodosh Mitra)’, Samaresh Basu’s ‘Goyenda Gogol’, Sunil Gangopadhyay’s ‘Kakababu (Raja Roy Choudhury)’, Sayed Mustafa Siraj’s ‘Colonel Niladri Sarkar’, Suchitra Bhattacharyya’s ‘Mitin Mashi’, Shasthipada Chattopadhyay’s ‘Pandav Goyenda’ and ‘Goyenda Tatar’, Samaresh Majumdar’s ‘Arjun’, or Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s ‘Goyenda Baradacharan’, it reveals a list which consists of writings meant for the young adults…


Editorial