Two very different books on the incomparable river Ganga: one, linking the river to a cultural continuity threading centuries into the past; the other, seeking personal inspiration and civic lessons from stories of hope and despair encountered along the river.
The elephant in India is an iconic animal writ large in our experience, culture and civilization. Several books have been written about it for centuries and they can fairly fill a book cabinet. The present offering is by the author, an environmental scientist.
Although Winston Churchill has often been projected, especially in recent times, as one sinister character behind the Bengal Famine of 1943 that wiped out over three million people, what role the members of the hallowed Indian Civil Service (ICS) played in anticipating.
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.
