Khalil Ur Rahman Azmi’s monumental and definitive study on the Progressive Movement in Urdu Literature is now available in English, thanks to his daughter and translator, Huma Khalil. It must indeed be a joyful experience for researchers and scholars alike.
In 2007, when Giligadu was originally published and was available to the Hindi readers, it was received warmly as yet another socially relevant realistic novel by activist-writer Chitra Mudgal. It was hailed as a critical portrayal of the disintegration of family.
Githanjali’s book of short stories, The Rock That Was Not, deals with Indian women who are striving hard to stay afloat in wedlock, while claiming their own identity. Marriage becomes a tool for patriarchy to suppress their identity.
In 2004 directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, having photographed and filmed children of the prostitutes of Calcutta’s red-light district Sonagachi, released their documentary Born into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids to the public. It opened.
The Fate of Butterflies by the redoubtable Nayantara Sahgal is another testimonial to the author’s versatile imagination. Interweaving the personal and the political like many of Sahgal’s earlier novels, the novel narrates a history of the present from a fast receding liberal-secular perspective.
Purushottam Agrawal’s edited book on Nehru, provocatively titled Who is Bharat Mata?—among many other admirable qualities—has the grace of opportune timing. It comes at a precarious moment of our history when the memory of Nehru is dimming, almost irrevocably one.