By K.K. Kochu. Translated from the original Malayalam by Radhika P. Menon

Dalithan traces the socio-cultural history of the State of Kerala from a subaltern perspective. Sidelining himself, Kochu lays emphasis on the lost Dalit history and tries to reclaim it. Deliberating on the causes for fragmentation in Dalit memory, Kochu wonders whether the early nomadic lifestyle, and the constant displacements due to slavery and oppression, are the reasons behind the lost narratives. He recalls a poem of the Dalit emancipator Porkayil Appachan, which mourns the vanished history of the Dalits:


Reviewed by: Aazhi Arasi A
By Himani Bannerji

According to Bannerji, Tagore’s prose writings, including correspondence, are being read through new critical lenses to meet the need of our times. Three aspects of his socio-political thought become especially relevant from this point of view: his critique of nationalism and imperialism, including his assessment of various modes used and proposed for eradicating these; his universalist and humanist understanding of the politics of freedom and civilization; and lastly, the connection between the previous two issues and his modernism, as expressed by his philosophy and his projects of social reform.


Reviewed by: Somdatta Mandal
By Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay. Translated from the original Bengali by Sucheta Dasgupta

Well-known magic realists like Marquez, Borges, Kundera and Rushdie are known to have resorted to the mode because the world they lived in was beleaguered by political upheavals that aroused profound personal turmoil, and the totality of the experience could not be rendered entirely through realistic narrative. Marquez had recounted how his mother told him tales set in real surroundings that get permeated by something incredible, but with the blandest of expressions, as though to say nothing beyond the real had been superimposed on the real story, and that the unbelievable and absurd are also part of everyday reality.


Reviewed by: Nivedita Sen
By Mashiul Alam. Translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya

This gutsy collection’s outstanding short story is ‘Field Report from Roop Nagar’, a supernatural and grisly account of mysterious developments and utter anarchy in Roop Nagar, where the narrator’s parents are trapped. The narrator’s journalist friend, Shaagar Sengupta, sends him a gruesome video of a girl being hacked to pieces and then cooked to be eaten. The perpetrators commit this heinous crime as part of a plan to eliminate all loose-character girls from the town. All the denizens of Roop Nagar are in a metaphorical slumber and state of unresponsiveness. The story gets a supernatural twist when the narrator realizes that Shaagar died in Roop Nagar and it was his ghost who had sent him the video and was making regular phone calls.


Reviewed by: Shuby Abidi
By Geetanjali Shree. Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell

Overwhelmed by the impulse to record everything; to emphasize the inability to say what exactly happened at the moment of violence, Shree’s narrator deliberately interrupts comprehension. Why it happened is one prominent re-appearing question; several times, the narrative drives home the fatiguing logic that none ‘of this is sudden; it happened before too. Only now it’s coming out into the open.’ How to make sense of what happened is yet another, perhaps even harder, question: Shruti, the novel’s female protagonist, struggles to write about it. Shruti’s inability to write this affects her ability at being; she is, after all, a writer by profession.


Reviewed by: Aakriti Mandhwani
By Ruthvika Rao

This debut novel veers on a fairy tale, sinuously curving at times into the half-real, half-surreal feel of a folk story, allowing the extravagant to hover around the real. The description of the medieval gadi (a fort-like mansion, in which live members of the Deshmukh family) and its expansive grounds that merge into endless undulating emerald fields stretching in all directions is spectacular. As is the detailing of the opulent grandeur of the mansion within: the carved wooden furniture, colours of the textile furnishings, the clothes that this Zamindar family wears and the lavish food that it is served at every meal.


Reviewed by: Rohini Mokashi-Punekar