By Zara Chowdhary

The memoir is spread in five sections, namely ‘Fire’, ‘Threads’, ‘Flowers’, ‘Air’ and ‘Water’, which are indicative of violence’s contamination of the most basic elements of the everyday. The section titled ‘Fire’ tells us about her association with fire in the train burning, and the burning of the Gulbarg society, which saw the killing of Ahsan Jafri and Bilkis Bano’s gang rape. The chapter discusses violence that is personalized through its effect on the hearing body and writing body, in this case, the narrator, and her attempts to formalize an affective intimate public sphere to form an affective community. She writes, ‘When I hear the story of the night Bano spent in the forest, I will think often about Bano’s body


Reviewed by: Aman Nawaz
By Rudolf C. Heredia

Despite securing prestigious opportunities to study abroad, Heredia was confronted with personal sacrifice, as he was unable to attend his father’s funeral while in Chicago. He pays tribute to the influential Jesuits who shaped his journey, including Fr. Joseph Neuner, Fr.
George Soares, Fr. Jose Ugarte and Fr.


Reviewed by: Amala Valarmathy A
By Noorjahan Bose. Translated by Rebecca Whittington Edited by Monica Jahan Bose

The memoir is set out in eight parts and begins with life on the family’s remote island home on Katakhali. A lack of infrastructure—safe drinking water, electricity, sanitation, roads, schools, housing, etc.—compounded by natural calamities made life hard for the people living here. Moreover, accessing basic amenities such as education beyond primary school or even medical assistance required crossing the turbulent Agunmukha which regularly claimed lives.


Reviewed by: Asma Rasheed
By Rakhshanda Jalil Roli Books, Delhi

The Loharu family as ‘the Habsburgs of north India’, whose network of alliances enabled them to be successful in their quest for social, cultural and political advancement is described in chapter five. This first part of the chapter provides details of the matrimonial alliances forged between the Loharu family and other Muslim princes in different corners of India.


Reviewed by: Vikas Rathee
By Kalpish Ratna

An even more disappointing presence, though sparse, is of the female characters. While they are hardly a part of the narrative, whenever they do appear, they seem to be objects of desire or cunning plotters hungry for power through their male counterparts.
‘The nautanki-wali’s breasts showed dark and bulbous beneath the thin pink silk of the baju. Rohidas, who could not tear his eyes away, recognized them at last for large purple brinjals,


Reviewed by: Suman Bhagchandani
By Manjeet Baruah

Further, in the overarching context of the structural relations of modes of production, Baruah introduces three distinct cultural forms/windows—memoirs, ballads and world views—and their articulations by the respective figures of the hunter, the peasant and the rebel to draw attention to, as mentioned earlier, the combined nature of the underlying structure of colonialism in Assam.


Reviewed by: Nabanipa Bhattacharjee