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When ‘Hindi Crime King’ Surendra Mohan Pathak took the dais at the third annual Noir Literature Festival at the Oxford Book Store in Delhi’s Connaught Place in January 2017, he faced a rapt audience of fans tightly packed into and spilling out beyond the rows of folding chairs set up at the back of the store. Pathak grinned alongside festival organizer Namita Gokhale as the two unwrapped and posed with the hot-off-the presses release from HarperCollins India…

Dreams and reality merge in this 2016 dystopian novel by the well-known Hindi satirist and writer Purushottam Agrawal. The novel begins when a crocodile leisurely walks down a small street and begins to chew on the leg of an elephant who happens to be lying there. No one seems to notice. Then Suket, our protagonist, wakes from this disturbing dream, reaching for a glass of water. It is 3 a.m. In the next scene, over two hundred students are protesting Professor Suket for being ‘anti-national’.

Kunwar Narain was one of the few Hindi poets who believed in the universality of all indegenous poetic experiences and thought of himself as an integral part of the great brotherhood of world poets. His poetry stands as a testimony to this. Apart from poetry and literature, his concerns ranged from world cinema, music, theatre to various branches of knowledge.

The late Manohar Shyam Joshi (1933-2006) was an extremely talented writer who tried his journalistic hand in various directions—politics, sports, culture and films. He edited a leading Hindi weekly—Saptahik Hindustan for many years and also an English publication. At the same time, the DD serial ‘Hum Log’ penned by him was the first soap opera on Indian TV followed by ‘Buniyad’ and ‘Kakka ji Kahin’. He wrote many popular film scripts as well.

Four years ago Harsh Mander wrote a book called Looking Away. At the very beginning he quoted Martin Luther King. It’s a quotation worth remembering. King said, ‘Never, never be afraid to do what is right. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our souls when we look away.’

Sushma Agrawal is beautiful, charming and rich. She dresses in subtly-hued saris of unique artisanal design and is the Minister of the Sahitya Sanskriti Bhavan (The Centre for Literature and Culture) in Kolkata. She is also the villain of Mamta Kaliya’s caustic 2018 Hindi novel Culture Vulture. It was originally released serially for the Hindi journal Hans, and its wandering, episodic construction reflects those origins.