Keki N. Daruwalla

In September 1968, the need for an Introduction to his collection of essays and reviews persuaded David McCut­chion to examine the state of the critic­ism of Indian writing in English. His assessment was characteristically res­trained but exacting: ‘the critical tradi­tion in India is weak,’, ‘Lack of critical, especially self-critical discrimination is certainly a feature of this situation’, ‘on the one hand it (takes) the form of dis­missive contempt.


Reviewed by: Vinay Dharwadker
Maloy Krishna Dhar

Maloy Krishna Dhar’s Train to India may be read as an antithetical account of another perilous journey described by Khushwant
Singh in his Train to Pakistan—both books offering harrowing insights into the colossal human tragedy that engulfed two countries in the wake of the partition of India…


Reviewed by: Aruna Chakravarti
Ali Sethi

Books by young men who have studied abroad always seem to begin in aeroplanes. The moment you read the first lines—a description
of the view from a window as a flight to Lahore comes in to land—it is evident that The Wish Maker is unlikely to defy the conventions that have sprung up around what is now a flourishing subgenre: the novel of explanation, in which a young Indian or Pakistani sets out
to somehow explain to a newly-interested world the nuances of his country’s past and present, with its coming of age neatly coinciding with his own.


Reviewed by: Mihir S. Sharma
Agha Shahid Ali

When I met Agha Shahid Ali’s father Agha Ashraf Ali a few months back, he told me about the latest collection of ‘Bhaiya’ (as the poet was lovingly called by his family) that had already come out in the US and was now being brought out by Penguin in India. He was excited about the launch of this collection…


Reviewed by: Nishat Zaidi
Gail Minault

In a chapter not quite characteristic of her general scholarly procedure as a historian, Gail Minault in the middle of this book cuts loose to attempt a sustained comparison between what she calls ‘the Delhi Renaissance’ and the far more lauded ‘Bengal Renaissance’—which should perhaps be similarly…


Reviewed by: Harish Trivedi
Saima Zaidi

Fat, oblong, register-shaped, its densely packed (and extremely unwieldy) 347 page body encased in striking turquoise and gold,Mazaar, Bazaar: Design and Visual Culture in Pakistan, landed on my desk a couple of weeks ago; carrying with it the images, iconography and essence of a country and civilization…


Reviewed by: Laila Tyabji