Vijai Pillai, the author of this posthu-mously published work, was terminally ill with cancer when he wrote to a friend: ‘Death for me is a great theme, worthy of a greater subject than my pains, and I wish to approach it with my mind and spirit in full flow in open amazement that my life, like any life, ever was, and is now going…
Sikeena Karmali’s ‘Chahar Bagh: The Mulberry Courtesan’ is the longest in this collection of twenty-two stories. Like Tabish Khair’s‘Night of 16th January, 1955,’ Uzma Aslam Khan’s ‘From Trespassing’ and Mohsin Hamid’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist,’ it is an extract out of a novel, although this one was awaiting…
Tlism-i-Hoshruba, an epic fantasy, a part in the long series of Hamza dastans, was in many ways a watershed in the popular Urdu literature of its time and continues to generate academic and popular interest till date. In that it compares with Greek myths or Homer’s epics. In India, Tilism-e-Hoshruba is available in two versions…
Editing a substantial collection of short stories is a daunting task; it becomes especially so when the editor also doubles up as the trans-lator—that too of not one or two stories in the collection but all 22 of them. That Amina Azfar is a prolific translator is apparent from a quick look at the fly leaf of her new book…
This book grew out of a seminar organized in March 2008 by the India Theatre Forum, which had the idea of bringing together alarge group of theatre persons, academics, activists, thinkers and critics, and permitting them over three days to talk about issues relevant to India’s theatre today. The book is not a record of what was said…
Lakshmi Subramanyam’s book, Modern Indian Drama:Issues and In-terventions is a welcome endeavour given the lack of substantial theoretical work on postcolonial Indian drama. So does Subramanyam’s book break new ground in undertanding drama, theater and performance studies in India? Perhaps a closer look at the book could provide answers…