Edited by Meenakshi Malhotra, Krishna Menon, Rachana Johri Routledge

The themes the authors address represent different ways in which we seek to embody ourselves in the world, whether through negotiation, submission, dissent, protest or critique. We make the world what it is. The world no doubt exists out there with its structures and fixed meanings, through which we are viewed as embodied humans, but we too have the wherewithal to modify that fixity, and transform it to make our lives meaningful in the ways in which we seek to live. This brings agency to the foreground and emphasizes the role of the human subject in not merely living out a human life but in transforming that process in whatever way possible. Embodiment is therefore not fixed or unchangeable.


Reviewed by: Meenakshi Thapan
Edited by Ranu Uniyal and Fatima Rizvi

Gaele Sobott’s essay titled ‘I Can Hear Her Breathing: Disabled Writers Writing Disability’ explores possibilities for widening intellectual and aesthetic horizons through the disruption of dominant disablist narratives by writers with disabilities writing for themselves and telling their own authentic stories. Sobott herself is admittedly more interested in writing that supports a world with diversity, like works by disabled writers of colour and works translated into English rather than writing that strives to make the experience of disability more palatable to a non-disabled audience.


Reviewed by: Vedamini Vikram
By Jennifer Nandi

Specializing in customized tours to help the knowledgeable and discerning traveller ‘make connections with the soul of India’, Nandi says: ‘I use Nature, a central principle of human lives, which is not only beautiful but also good for us, that helps us regain our equanimity, that tunes our brain’s attention network, that keeps us so very happy; for this has made me who I am.’
No Half Measures describes a rambunctious excursion of several weeks in 2010 to the wildest reaches of the North East: parts of the country known for insurgency and instability, but which appealed to Nandi’s non-conformism and derring-do as much as that of her client’s.


Reviewed by: Govindan Nair
Edited by Harish Trivedi

The first section presents A Passage to India through translations in various languages, and film and stage adaptations, thereby building a memorable montage that the novel inspires. The opening essay is by a novelist, Anjum Hasan, and begins delightfully with Forsterian language that a child heard from a Forster-devotee father and didn’t know what it meant! The personal and the political merge over time and the book gains complex meaning for Anjum even as the heavily marked pages are, by then, being carried around the parental home in a plastic bag (p.
12). From that, we move swiftly to a bilingual essay by Rupert Snell ‘On Translating A Passage into Hindi’ based on an experiment with six Indian translators that yielded an astonishing variety of ‘equivalent terminology’ even with the title of the book.


Reviewed by: Malashri Lal
Edited by Usha Akella

As Adil Jussawalla points out, Keki Daruwalla’s works are ‘as relevant today as when they were first published (in 1970)’ (p. 59). Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca relays, ‘Mature poetic talent…literary stamina, intellectual strength and social awareness’ (p. 72), even in the poet’s debut collection, left an impression on Nissim Ezekiel. The ‘caustic’ and ‘incisive’ writing (p. 105) that shapes much of the poet’s oeuvre,


Reviewed by: Shamayita Sen
Edited by Amit Chaudhuri

I was eventually drawn to novels through exceptional paragraphs cited in essays. By my late teens, I was probably more likely to read a piece of criticism about a work rather than the work itself. His insight about novels is something which hard working teachers in their classes do not want their students to develop. Gratified with his epiphany, Chaudhuri looked for standalone paragraph(s) in novels which ‘belongs to a story but is also independent of it, in that it seems equally located in an irreducible life and textuality outside that novel as it is in the life narrated and contained within it’.


Reviewed by: Mohammad Asim Siddiqui