News

Missing is set in a disturbing milieu: India’s North East in 2012. Critical reports from an English newspaper from July 24, 2012 to July 30, 2012 form an integral part of the novel—not to speak of the general derision with which news, per se, is viewed. Although much of the action happens in the relatively calm city of Siliguri, the characters are all profoundly influenced either directly or indirectly by the unrest in nearby Assam, in particular by the clashes between the Bodos, and the refugees from nearby States (including from Nepal and Bangladesh). If the news reports are to be believed, at the relevant time 48 deaths were reported apart from about 400,000 persons housed in 270 relief camps.

Rahi Masoom Raza (1927-1992) came from a well-established and well-educated middle class family of Muslims in Ghazipur, a district in Eastern UP. His village, or at least the literate people in it, were Marxist sympathizers or active Communists. Masoom Raza’s elder brother, Moonis Raza (1925-1994) gained national reputation as a Leftist intellectual and card carrying Communist. Still later, he won fame as Jawaharlal Nehru University’s founding Chairman and Rector. He also had a distinguished tenure as Vice-Chancellor, Delhi University.

Istart with a confession—I am half Maharashtrian, speak Marathi fluently, understand the ethos of that culture thoroughly, and yet I have only a nodding acquaintance with Marathi literature, having come to it very late in life. Therefore, I had not read Smritichitre before this and was delighted to be asked to review it. However, when I mentioned to my Maharashtrian side of the family that I was just not able to get into the book even after reading about a hundred pages, there was outrage, indignation and curt dismissal—’What will you English speaking types understand!’

Memory is a palimpsest—a reusable surface. Palimpsest by its definition is a page of writing or a page from a document that has been rubbed smooth in order to be used again for writing something else on it, except, that the traces of the original writing shows through. And that is what memory becomes for us—a rewriting over the years of the same incident.

Anjali Nerlekar’s study of Arun Kolatkar’s poetry in English and in English translation is a rich and multilayered evocation of the work of a poet and an artist, and of his association with bilingual literary culture in a cosmopolitan city like Bombay. It attempts to track the meaning and nuances of modernity in post-Independence India as articulated through literary expression and publishing initiatives seen in this period.

Though sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, a ring is almost never just a ring.
Mention of the ring evokes four names: Kalidasa, Wagner, Browning and Tolkien. Rings are embedded in Doniger’s psyche starting with the gimmel ring her father gave her mother inscribed, ‘REF to SHU’. Baffling! That referred to her favourite volume of the 1911 edition of the Britannica. Then there is Doniger’s own wedding ring which she retained even after divorce.