Love and Samsara is a historical novel set in the sixteenth century. It explores the consequences of the discovery by Vasco da Gama of the sea route from Europe to India.The importance of this discovery has been a subject of revision since the fifties; the quinquennial celebrations of his landing in Calicut were deemed politically incorrect and had to be abandoned.
Ever since he arrived on the literary scene in the second half of the nineteenth century, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee has never been out of the news, for the right or wrong reasons.
When Marx wrote Das Kapital, he theorized about the social relationships involved in the act of production of commodities under capitalism. But what happens when the commodities being produced are strictly speaking not of a material nature—for instance, what happens when stories are produced? Walter Benjamin addressed this question in one of his most brilliant essays, ‘Author as Producer’.
Having had the good fortune to have browsed through the animating ‘Soho Road to the Punjab’ Exhibition, curated by Rajinder Dudrah at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, in London last September, the journey through his book, Bhangra, was partly familiar terrain.
The British Museum has initiated a new series of books which, in detail, discuss the preponderant motifs or themes that characterize the art of a particular region or religion.
In few areas of public life in India does such consensus prevail as on the issue of population; this is indeed one area in which Indians utterly cease to be argumentative. My medical students, for instance, invariably list ‘the population explosion’ as India’s biggest health problem.