Feminist writing takes many forms, and of course the critic has to be able to classify a memoir of love and longing and loss carefully. The very bases of poet Indu Mallah’s writing is an obituary, elegantly written so that the conventional rendering of distress is transformed into a poetic idiom.
Jamil Urfi’s book of memoirs Biswin Sadi is a feast for all those who were coming of age in the 60s and 70s. Even though it is based in North India, anyone anywhere belonging to that generation is sure to exult and relive memories of Binaca Geet Mala, Chitrahaar, Bhoole Bisre Geet and the aggravating Krishi Darshan.
The principal plot of Goodbye to All That: A Delhi Story is not complicated. The young hero, a bachelor, member of the editorial staff of the Delhi branch of a large British publishing firm, has to find three bestselling authors, all of whom must be renowned economists, and get them to write books for the firm, or lose his job.
This novel is the second of a trilogy on the Kurukshetra War, we are told, and covers the thirteenth to the fifteenth nights of the war. Reading this novel one cannot but admire the courage of the author in stripping the Mahabharata of what he calls ‘the myth part of the story’ and ‘the supernatural weapons or happenings’…
Chroniclers of the diasporic Indian experience are many: celebrated names such as Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Meena Alexander and Chitra Banerji Divakaruni spring immediately to mind. Despite this crowded field, the fact that Indian Australian writer Roanna Gonsalves’s debut collection of short stories…
I must confess to never having read Chudamani earlier. Coming to political maturity in an age when Tamil Brahminness was considered dangerous, there seemed to be no need to read her, someone I had thought was the quintessential Brahmin writer. This is why this small book bowled me over.