By Ismat Chugtai. Translated from the original Urdu by Tahira Naqvi

Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991) was known, and is remembered for her frankness in writing, be it the topics she chose for her stories or the language her characters used. A distinguished writer in Urdu, Chughtai has a huge body of work to her credit—five collections of short stories, seven novels, three novellas along with various sketches. Surprisingly, not much academic work on Chughtai (in English) has been published as a compilation.


Reviewed by: Saba Mahmood Bashir
Marion Molteno

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869) is one of the great poets of the world and certainly nineteenth-century India’s greatest Urdu poet. Even after one and a half century of his death his reputation is not only intact but grows with every passing day. The reasons are several, the most abiding being that there is a certain metaphysical and existential core to his poetry that will never get dated despite the technological onslaught of modern times.


Reviewed by: M Asaduddin
Bhartrihari

The most lauded and quoted Sanskrit poet after Kalidasa, Bhartrihari’s genius and his continuing popularity lies in the fact that he speaks to the wholeness of human life. In his Three Hundred Verses (Shataka Trayam or Trishati), he identifies and addresses three universal human preoccupations in one hundred verses each—worldly pleasure, love and renunciation or, more accurately, detachment from the vicissitudes of the world.


Reviewed by: Arshia Sattar
Tariq Khan

This book seems to have been published with the primary motive of proving me wrong. You see, for the past fifteen years or more, I have been going around the world proudly proclaiming that there was no translation in India before the British came (—as indeed there was no Calcutta or no English). When I made this brave assertion at a conference at Columbia University in 2004…


Reviewed by: Harish Trivedi
A. Banerjee

Among the different incarnations of energy, electrical power occupies a unique position for its ease of use and range of applications. Switch off electricity from modern life and you might as well turn off all industrial development, agricultural prosperity, urban and rural services and indeed lose most of the amenities that help improve our quality of life. It is therefore not surprising that successive Indian governments since Independence have given top priority to the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity.


Editorial
Annie Chandy Mathew

The books under review are two collections of short stories by wife and husband Annie Chandy Mathew and P.Chandy Mathew—their first creative efforts. As writers they acknowledge their debt to each other as their lives enrich each other’s ‘story’, yet their short stories need to be looked at as independent works (even though both the collections are imbued with a yearning for basic human values which will restore some order to the chaos of divisive voices, warring interests and frenzied passions.


Editorial