It would be no exaggeration to say that Amartya Sen has an iconic and towering presence in the world of economics in present times. The sheer range as well as depth of his work is formidable even by the standards of his fellow Nobel laureates in the subject in the last thirty-five years or more.
Biography, according to Lytton Strachey, is “the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing”. It is also a difficult art particularly when the story told is that of Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who strode the world like ‘a gentle colossus’ until very recently, and whose life was an open one, openly lived almost in ‘the glorious privacy of light’.
Sharankumar Limbale’s autobiography Akkarmashi was published in 1984 and received critical acclaim. The author was twenty-five years old at the time. Written in a dialect of the Maharas, Akkarmashi was considered a path-breaking milestone in dalit autobiographical writing in Marathi.
Astride the Wheel is an accomplished translation of Yantrarudha, a 1967 Oriya novel by Sahitya Akademi Award winning writer, Chandra Sekhar Rath. Its appearance is yet another example of the ongoing attempt on the part of publishers and translators alike to rescue Indian bhasa literatures from the ghettos of provinciality to which they had hitherto been consigned.
A Village Divided is a wonderful book, well worth spending money to buy and time to read.Rurially autobiographical, Rahi Masoom s Adha Gaon (1966) is a record of the life d times of his village in UP where Muslims d Hindus lived together in an accord which y has begun to seem mythical.
What do you do when faced with nothing much to quarrel about with a book under review? Concur. Quote. Applaud. Celebrate. Concurrence, however, breeds few words, and a lot of yawning space. Quibbling, on the other hand, might come to your rescue. New Poetry in Hindi offers both the paths.