One would have liked to use the term “Andhras” but it is not an accurate one to describe the Telugu speakers. The Andhras in the present-day social and cultural context are confined to Nellore, Prakasam, Krishna, Guntur districts. Even those who belong to East and West Godavari districts have a distinct identity of their own, while those of the northern districts of Visakha-patnam, Vizianagaram and Srikakulam belong to a charming cultural world of their own.
Sanskrit narrative tradition synthesizes loka (loc-al) and shastra (scholastic or context free forms and expressions). It has been configurational, localized and ever acquiring new hues and semantic fields. Deshi (context bound forms) and margi (context free forms), in fact, have always been seen in continuity and have mutually enriched each other.
Harvest Song, an abridged and translated version of Sabitri Roy’s trilogy, Paka Dhaner Gan (1956, 1957, 1958) has been subtitled in English as a “novel of the Tebhaga movement.” The Tebhaga (sharing by thirds) movement was a militant campaign by sharecroppers, spreading over at least nineteen districts of undivided Bengal, especially the districts of Dinajpur, Jalpaiguri, Jessore, Khulna, Mymensingh and 24 Paraganas during the year 1946-1947.
Jogajog is perhaps Tagore’s least discussed novel, eclipsed by the political rhetoric of Gora and Ghare Baire, the romantic intensity of Chokher Bali and Shesher Kabita, and the philosophical density of Char Adhyay. Two recent translations, however, draw attention to this lacuna in Tagore scholarship: Hiten Bhaya’s translation Nexus, published by Rupa and Co., and the present translation by Supriya Chaudhuri.
One began with the premise, influenced purely by a perusal of the blurb, that this was one more novel about the coming-of-age of a slightly confused exemplar of urban youth today set amidst the ubiquitous urban landscape of contemporary Delhi. One presumed, therefore, that the novel would be about a slightly moony young man, being shunted around from job to job and love to love in search of existential bliss, and would be full of his ramblings in a booze or hash-induced state while walking the streets of the “unreal city”, in this case, Delhi.
The Passarola, or the great bird, was a flying ship that was supposedly a cross between a balloon and a glider, designed by a Brazilian Father Bartolomeu Lourenço in Portugal in 1705. Azhar Abidi takes this piece of information and weaves a tale of historical fiction based on the aviation pioneer and his brother Alexandre.