First, a disclosure: I have never been fond of Ishiguro. A lifetime of teaching and correcting has made me wary of the good student—the one who writes impeccable but boring papers, the one you are tempted to give ‘A’ without reading but force yourself to read to the bitter end because you are that kind of teacher, that kind of reader…
Breakfast with Evil and Other Risky Ventures: The Non-Essential Ashis Nandy is a collection of columns, essays, forewords to books, interviews, and lectures by Ashis Nandy originally published between 1975 and 2018. The book contains thirty-six chapters and is divided into five parts. In these texts…
Jointly authored by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal, Betrayed By Hope is a play on the life of the nineteenth century poet, Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873). The play is based on extensive research by the authors spanning a period of nine years. A five-act play, the plot is structured around Dutt and the fictional character…
Of all the figures from the celebrated ‘Bengal Renaissance’ still remembered today, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar (26 September 1820-29 July 1891) seems the most unlikely candidate of all to have been at the centre of a political storm in the run up to the 2019 general elections (when a bust of his was broken during a rally)…
Ever since the sesquicentennial birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore in 2011, there has been a steady increase in scholarly publications on him from various perspectives and even a decade later, the trend is still continuing. Tagore practiced all the major literary genres—poetry, drama, fiction…
Complementing Gandhi’s famous autobiography and structured as an inter-woven narrative, Restless as Mercury: My Life as a Young Man, an edited life story, is a monumental endeavour, and an experiment in creating a new genre. The book is both deeply illuminating and challenging…