An autobiographical account of the childhood and growing-up of Chandralekha Mehta, the daughter of Vijaylakshmi Pandit and the niece of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the book, as the author prefaces ‘is an account of times long over, seen through the eyes of a young girl’.
This slim book has been brought out by NBT under its Nehru Bal Pustakalaya series and is a useful addition to literature for the young. Though it is not for the first time that a subject like this has been taken up by a publishing house, it is significant and different from others in its treatment of the subject.
Eklavya Publications has, with support from Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai, brought a decade old classic to Indian readers. Michael Apple and James Beane’s book was received with great enthusiasm when it first appeared in the mid-1990s.
It is quite likely that you have met someone like Kirpa, the protagonist of Ganga Jamuna Beech (Between the Ganga and the Jamuna). A woman whose speech carries the distinctive flavour of the village she grew up in but whose long sojourn in the city has contributed an idiom that makes it even more expressive.
A Place Within: Rediscovering India is a detailed personal account by M.G. Vassanji of a series of visits he made to India, between 1993 and 2007. Born in Tanzania, and now a resident of Canada, M.G. Vassanji received international recognition with the publication of his first novel The Gunny Sack in 1989.
In her preface to The Fatal Garland (1915), the English translation of Phulermala, Swarnakumari Debi Ghoshal declares: ‘it is of the greatest importance that Europe—and more especially England—should understand India. And this understanding can, I think only be brought about by a study of our literature’.