We are so obsessed with the legitimacy (or not) of many Ramayanas that we tend to forget that the Mahabharata also appears in almost every Indian language, that it, too, inhabits highly localized cultures; that outside the Sanskrit text, its characters often.
As a writer, Perumal Murugan has a politics of his own. Readers of Murugan know that following the protest against his 2010-Tamil novel, Mathorubhagan (One Part Woman) he wrote his obituary in 2015 saying, Perumal Murugan, the writer, is dead.
Self-identity and self-expression have never been very smooth for women, described by one of the translators of this volume of poems under review as ‘adi-dalit, the original broken, oppressed and silenced’ caste. When social, economic and linguistic norms.
One of the challenges of translating an Indian text into English is the constant tussle between the ‘Indianness’ of the original and the ostensible foreignness of the English language. But what if a Hindi novel is translated in such a way that the English.
‘The trouble with having everything so beautifully thought out is that if one link in the think chain snaps, you are left holding the loose ends with not half an idea between the ten of you about what to do.’ – Shanta Gokhale.
This debut novel offers a playful twist on the possible origins of chess. The narrative flips back and forth between the boardrooms of the 21st century and the battlefields of the 5th century. The protagonists are Ms Vinita Joshi.