By Chinmoy Guha. Translated into English from the original Bengali, and annotated by Zenith Roy

The Bengali intellectual displays this immense appetite for knowledge, and it does not matter where it came from. Whether it is Badal Sircar or Kunal Basu or Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, they are not afraid of looking far and wide to grasp, and even grab, ways of seeing and ways of writing. But this is overlaid on a deep Bengaliness. And that saves them in many instances from being blown off their feet.


Reviewed by: Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr
By L. Subramaniam and Viji Subramaniam

The genesis of the book lies in Subramaniam’s stint as a teacher at CalArts, during which he felt the need for a ‘handy guide of music theory’ potentially useful to ‘a practical musician and a composer’ (p. 1). This led to the authors collaborating on a work initially titled Euphony, of which the book being reviewed here is an extensively revised edition. The authors’ backgrounds attest to their formidable grasp over three distinct forms of music, namely the Hindustani, Carnatic, and Western classical systems.


Reviewed by: Abhik Majumdar
By K. Sridhar

But a complex formal puzzle is announced in the Author’s Note: ‘The chapters in this book are marked with a number and an alphabet. The alphabet marks its own absence in the chapter whereas the number is a more conventional ordering. And in embarking on this book, you are invited to follow either the numbers or alphabets and you will stilll be reading the same book…’


Reviewed by: Maya Joshi
By Ismail Darbesh. Translated from the original Bengali by V. Ramaswamy

Suman Nath, Riziya, and Tahirul, are all sensitive, intelligent, and thinking individuals who are victims of the social structures that they question but fail to surpass. Religion is not a matter of spiritual sublimation, as Riziya and Suman would like to believe, or a matter of juridical authority, as Tahirul would like to believe. It is twisted and deployed for politically motivated ends by the residents of Sadnahati.


Reviewed by: Nishat Zaidi
By Devangi Bhatt. Translated from the Gujarati original by Mudra Joshi

After this delusory incident for the first time nobody notices the change in Pauloma’s behaviour and however much she tries to confess to her husband that there was another world in the vessels, no one really cares about her irrational beliefs. Soon she is drawn to the storeroom once again and now she is transported to Cairo in Egypt where she lives as Princess Rabiya Abdi. Set during the period of the cultural revolution in Egypt during the 1950s, Rabiya is exposed to another world when her husband brings in an outsider, a bohemian painter from London, to draw her portrait.


Reviewed by: Somdatta Mandal
By Vaasanthi. Translated from the original Tamil by Radhika Meganathan and the author

Rohini, Malini, Malathi and Paatti are as shackled by their own upbringing and values instilled in them since childhood as they are buffeted by the winds of change and an awareness of what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal set up. There is no doubt that the ‘times they are a-changin’ as Bob Dylan sang. Yet there is a sluggishness with which it does exact a heavy price on women, leading to mental imbalance, loss and despair.


Reviewed by: Malati Mathur