By Arupa Patangia Kalita. Translated from the original Assamese by Mitra Phukan

‘Rajmao: The Queen Mother’ traces the journey of Komola whose motherhood confers on her the identity of being Purobi’s mother, and it is in the attempt to fulfil her duties as a mother that she attains the grandiose name of Rajmao but only after paying a terrible price for it. ‘By the Clock’ introduces us to Ghori-Koka-Aita and the tyranny of the grandfather’s clock which becomes a metonym for the authoritarian presence of her husband.


Reviewed by: Shibani Phukan
Compiled by Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca.

Mendonca’s memoir unfolds the joys of having an eminent poet as one’s father, and at the same time, the unhappiness of growing up in a broken family. She remarks that he was overjoyed at her birth and called her his ‘best poem’. He named her ‘Kavita’, which means ‘poem’ in Hindi. According to Mendonca, he was a loving father to his three children, two daughters and a son—Kavita, Kalpana and Elkana.


Reviewed by: Shyamasri Maji
By Keki N. Daruwalla

Like Ted Hughes, Daruwalla draws our attention to the natural habitat, an earth that is home for birds and animals, plants and rocks. ‘Winter Migration’ has images of ‘dall sheep’, ‘rust-coloured rocks’, ‘dwarf birch’, ‘antlers’; ‘wolves’, ‘bear’, and ‘the Arctic tern’, ‘the marmot’ and ‘the squirrel’ wake up and move, or decide not to leave. The story of the ‘Alaskan Bear named Sky’ in the poem ‘Mother Bear’ brings alive the instinct of motherhood and responsibilities associated with it. The mother protects and nurtures her young cubs with much love and caution.


Reviewed by: Ranu Uniyal
By Anju Makhija

The poetry collection by Vinay Sharma moves deeper into an inner terrain. The idea of change is not driven by external factors alone, but by the dissolving of the inner boundaries. The slipping of selves happens so fluidly in this moving, shape-shifting book that I now hold in my hands. It becomes difficult, almost impossible to pin these poems down, for time and space seem to have no fixed hold over the words that inhabit these pages.


Reviewed by: Semeen Ali
Radhika Oberoi

While my novel will survive this onslaught (glorious endorsements, remember?), what shocks me is the type of critical analysis the piece is emblematic of–it felt like a personal attack rather than a rational debunking of the novel’s premise, its characters, etc.


Editorial
Edited and translated by Tridip Suhrud

Though short, her observations are penetrating and, at the same time, insightful. A case in point is an entry from 3 January 1947, in which she describes her visit (along with Gandhi and others) to a Harijan locality, named Namasudra. She describes this visit thus: ‘In the forenoon we went to visit the Harijan locality—they are called Namasudra—here. The inhumanity perpetrated on them makes one quiver’ (emphasis mine).


Reviewed by: Amol Saghar