By Rajkamal Choudhary. Translated from the original Hindi by Mahua Sen

Later, after her death, she seems to carry the legacy of sexual promiscuity and is a prime example of how a woman’s reputation is shaped, created and navigated in a man’s world. Her daughter, Priya, comes to terms with her own sexuality and sexual identity much later, but strangely when sexually assaulted, the act of violence is deemed to be a necessity to ‘make her a normal straight woman again’ (p. 156). One must read this in the context of the social fabric of the 1960s but also realize that such prejudice and ignorance about gender roles and sexuality are prevalent to this day.


Reviewed by: Sayan Aich Bhowmik
Edited by Hmingthanzuali and Mary Vanlalthanpuii

The first few essays focus on women’s fashion in Mizoram, early Mizo songs, the gender imbalance in the production and consumption of food, folklore and trailblazing women such as Nuchhungi Renthlei who became the first Mizo to document Mizo folktales in the Serkawn Graded Readers, a reader that has enabled young schoolgoers to become familiar with their own cultural past. The pursuit of this cultural materialist approach is indicative of a growing interest amongst Mizo scholars in both tracing shifts in their culture and understanding how these changes have shaped their identity or influenced their relationship with tradition.


Reviewed by: Shibani Phukan
By T.C. Ghai

‘The Fiend’, mute spectators who are cursed with self-awareness and introspection as they watch, with a sense of alienation and existential angst, the world changing so fast as to become unrecognizable and, in the process, unhousing them from all that gave them a sense of belonging to it. These characters form a quartet with the sculptor in the final story, ‘The State’, as he hefts a hammer in a futile but courageous attempt to undo his crime of complicity in the creation of a dictator who set out disguised as a revolutionary before his true face was revealed.
‘The Blackout’ and ‘Smell’ are both richly complex allegories and the fabular structure serves as a window into a world that is disorienting in its unpredictability and


Reviewed by: Anjana Neira Dev
By Rekha Sethi. Translated from the original Hindi and edited by Hina Nandrajog

Gagan Gill writes with a sense of detachment pondering over philosophical and melancholic meanderings of life from a woman’s perspective. She does not declare herself as avowedly feminist; however, her works are in pursuit of peace and truth imbued with the preachings of Buddhism. An activist and a journalist, Katyayani enriches the existing prolific tradition of socio-cultural poetry in Hindi, although with very few women’s voices to boast about. Her commitment to a truly egalitarian society guided by Marxist thoughts examines the practices of structural inequalities along gender lines. The vision of women as autonomous beings with a consciousness of their own is the most important highlight of her oeuvre.


Reviewed by: Anchala Paliwal
By Jaydeep Sarangi

On 24 August 1690, Job Charnock set up the East India Company’s headquarters on land that was spread over three villages of Bengal—Sutanuti, Kalikata and Gobindapur. Named as Calcutta, this city became the capital and headquarters of the British Empire in India till the early twentieth century. The spirit of Job Charnock, who is looked upon as the founder of Kolkata, haunts these poems in more ways than one. While the Calcutta High Court convincingly established in 2003 that Charnock could not be considered the founder of Kolkata given the fact that settlement in the region predated him, Charnock remains a significant presence in the cultural history of Kolkata and in the psyche of these poems.


Reviewed by: Basudhara Roy
By Anil Golani

Love constitutes another dominant strand of the collection. Appearing in multiple forms—romantic, devotional, remembered and lost—it becomes a recurring emotional landscape through which many of the poems travel. In works such as ‘Love, Eternal Love, Love Unleashed’, ‘The Pangs of Love’, ‘Love and Lust’ and ‘Redamancy’, love is portrayed as a spectrum of experiences encompassing ecstasy, longing, fulfilment and heartbreak. Golani’s treatment of love avoids excessive sentimentality; instead, it acknowledges the inseparability of joy and pain within human attachment. Images of fire, thirst, wounds and union recur throughout these poems, creating thematic continuity and emotional resonance.


Reviewed by: Usha Mujoo Munshi