The problem with a multicultural and multilingual nation like India is that most of the time we are alien to the works published in the different bhasha literatures other than our own mother tongue. Thus the link language becomes English and the only way to savour the rich heritage of our regional fiction is through translation.
The Tamil Dalit woman writer Bama has been a phenomenal name in the contemporary Dalit literary terrain. Widely celebrated for her life-writing Karukku (which completed its 25th year of publication in December 2017), her recently published book Just One Word, a compilation of fifteen short stories translated from Tamil into English by Malini Seshadri heralds a new chapter in her literary life.
Ocean Rimmed World by Joe D’Cruz, ably translated by G Geetha, is the story of a way of life. True, it is an insider’s account tracing life as it was lived in a Tamil Catholic fishing community of Parathavars in Uvari, a village near Thoothukudi. But its sweep and depth is a tribute to the way people lived as communities barely a few generations ago.
The arrival of commercial print in the 19th century, across the subcontinent allowed for the emergence of the professional writer, one who could make a living from writing alone. Where professional poets and writers had earlier subsisted on patronage from kings and nobles, the 19th century created opportunities for a writer to make a living from the market.
This volume edited by Uwe Skoda and Birgit Lettmann is a significant contribution to understanding the visual media. It moves away from the approach taken by Gayatri Sinha in a previous book published in 2009 called Art and Visual Culture in India, 1857-2007 which primarily located visual culture within art and art history. Skoda and Lettmann’s edited volume…
Three great sitarists blossoming in the second half of the last century—Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan and Nikhil Banerjee—enriched our instrumental music tradition decisively. Their personalities, largely shaped by their background and upbringing, were very different, as was their impact on the public psyche, at national and international levels. But for his untimely death, Nikhil Banerjee would have also had a much wider audience and perhaps been as acclaimed as the other two.