Naiyer Masud

Naiyer Masud is a great scholar of Persian and has three collections of short stories to his credit which include Seemiya, Itre Kaafoor and Taa’uus Chaman ki Mayna. A two-time winner of the Katha Award (1993 and 1997) for his stories ‘Ray Khandan ke Asar’ and ‘Sheesha Ghat’ and the winner of the Presidential Certificate of Honour


Reviewed by: Nishant Shah
Priti Kumar Mitra

Kazi Nazrul Islam is a legendary poet in the modern literature of India in the twentieth century. Inspite of the fact that Rabindra Nath Tagore was active and alive, he became the most popular poet of Bengali of his time. Unfortunately, for those who are not able to read him in the original Bengali


Reviewed by: Ashok Vajpeyi
Akhtar Husain Raipuri

Akhtar Husain Raipuri’s memoir The Dust Of The Road offers a varied fare to its readers. The wide range of his experiences and the eventful times through which he lived makes Raipuri’s memoir interesting. A man of sound secular upbringing and Marxist leanings, Raipuri’s account of his travels and travails is in fact a retrospective glance cast over a life lived to its full.


Reviewed by: Deeba Zafir
Francesca Orsini

Dil e nadaan tujhe hua kya hai Akhir is dard ki dava kya hai? Ghalib.
Sringara, viraha, ishq, prem, love—these are the themes of this cultural history of love in South Asia. The only way to succeed in such a mammoth venture is frankly to admit your limitations, which is exactly what the editor Francesca Orsini does.


Reviewed by: Gillian Wright
Christine Spittel Wilson

Memoirs fascinate me: not just because like most humans I have an insatiable curiosity about other people’s lives but because of the landscapes embedded in memories that emerge defiantly from nostalgic syrup and startle you with a rare insight. Often, whole cities,


Reviewed by: Ira Pande
Kokilam Subbiah

Mirage first published in 1964 as Thoorathu Pachai (the Green of the other side/ Distant Green) in Tamil has now found its English avatar. Written by someone who was involved in unionizing Tamil labourers in Sri Lanka, the novel is a hard-hitting account of the suffering of women on tea estates.


Reviewed by: G.J.V. Prasad