Sobti-Vaid Samvad ushers in a novel critical genre within the domain of Hindi literary-criticism. Here two literary stalwarts of Hindi literature, Krishna Sobti and Krishna Baldev Vaid, inspired by the intellectually stimulating surroundings of IIAS Shimla, enter into a significant dialogue on the intricacies of life and literature.
It is half a century since M.T. Vasudevan Nair—fondly called ‘M.T.’ by Malayalees—began his career as a novelist with his debut work Naalukettu. As OUP India now brings out its translation, Naalukettu: The House Around the Courtyard, it becomes a magnificent marker of M.T.’s literary jaitrayaatra (triumphal march) down the last five decades
I read Salma Ahmed’s book around the same time as I was reading the story of another Pakistani woman, Mukhtar Mai. The two stories, both about women battling against difficult odds, could not have been more different.
Street theatre in Delhi is synonymous with Safdar Hashmi. He was a gifted and committed artiste who spent his tragically short life in taking theatre to the workers and toilers, the poor and the dispossessed.
This is a difficult book to review. It is like reading an unfinished manuscript, a cluster of interesting but stray thoughts. Several of the pieces are no longer than a sentence or a paragraph.
If poetry reconstructs space, re-configures time, and re-conditions language, M. Athar Tahir’s effort is yet another at doing all these with certain finesse and dexterity.