Fiction
Koral Dasgupta’s Kunti is not the willful mother who apportioned a common wife to her five sons. She is the young, vibrant, beauteous and superbly intellectual woman who is wooed by the Gods. The book swings along the path of a celestial love triangle: Surya, Indra and Kunti. The offerings match every expectation of such an imperial romance—peevishness, jealousy, wile, guile, manoeuvrings and manipulations—melting the boundaries between the humans and the devas.
As the blurb on the attractive book cover says, Sonal Kohli grew up in Delhi and lives in Washington DC; she studied at the Sri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi and went on to do her MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, UK and The House Next to the Factory is her first book. These details are important because they help readers understand not just her writing style as a trained creative writer, but also her ability to capture a Delhi, and a world beyond, that we may all know and yet we get to know all over again when we encounter it in her simple yet evocative prose.
Early 2021 saw the Aleph Book Company bring out a dark hued hardcover with a centrally placed Mughal motif in sandy gold. Raza Mir’s novel Murder at the Mushaira felt pleasantly hefty on store shelves.The nicely produced volume looked rich and piqued curiosity. The excerpt at the back promised it to be the forerunner of a seriously good read
2021
This Hindi novel is a recent composition of the renowned Hindi novelist Maitreyi Pushpa who is widely known as the author of Idamnamama (that is, Idam Na Mama or ‘It is not mine’) and Chaak (Potter’s Wheel), and many other novels. She also made news with her subversive autobiographical narratives and is known as a feminist novelist who has based her writings on women’s issues.
Ranendra’s is an important—and bold—signature in contemporary Hindi literature. As a novelist, who also happens to be a poet, he enters the landscape of his creation with nuanced, almost poignant, sensitivity to map the existential, ideological and, by extension, ontological contours within contemporary spaces. While in his earlier novels—Global Gaon ke Devta (2006) and Gayab Hota Desh (2014)—he had etched the excruciating reality of the tribals.
2021
To say that Neelakshi Singh’s novel Khela or play is about the play of power-that-be in this civilization, controlling the price of crude oil and the collaterals of religious fundamentalism and terrorism would be less than half-truth. It is mostly about the journey of a middle-class girl, Vara Kulkarni, peeping through the jute-sacks of partition of a joint family to look at the estranged family’s life to her looking into a world riddled by conspiracies, violence and displacement.
2021
Sumati Saxena Lal writes in the preface to her novel Ve Log (2021):My village is located in my imagination. I have tried to make it appear credible to my readers. In this age and fragile health condition, it was impossible to experience village life first-hand and then write about it—the pandemic acted as a source of terror too.This terror is not simply about falling prey to the pandemic, but also inscribes the crises of the literary imagination during the said period.
2021
Dhaai Chal is the second novel by the writer of Janta Store, and resumes the tale told before with an action-filled look at the political manoeuvres that look deep inside a world riddled with allegations of rape, rape before marriage, kidnap, elopement, intent to push a minor into flesh trade, micro-managed bid at self-immolation, and murder, only to be further complicated by caste, religion, power play, and media, to indulge in corruption, betrayal, and bloody revenge.
After Bloodline Bandra (2014), Godfrey Joseph Pereira returns to Bombay in this provocatively titled historical fiction, to document the story of Charlie Strongbow, Cross Island and the erstwhile ‘urbs prima in Indis’, Bombay, in the 1940s and 1950s. The brick red, orange and blue cover with the silhouette of a boat, and a bird aggressively pushing through a torn page, arouses curiosity and promises a story that is full of surprises.
If one could travel as easily as the mind tours the world in a matter of seconds, where would one go? Would one go to a place from memory or a to a place one hasn’t ever ventured to even in one’s wildest dreams? Who would a traveller such as this meet and what would be the stories one would inadvertently become a part of?
In India everyone buys gold. We are the world’s largest gold consumers. Indian households are the world’s largest holders of gold and household gold is believed to be 40 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. The country’s obsession with the precious metals has been there since time immemorial. Gold has always been held as a symbol of success. Considered auspicious, it has helped many people and families sail through in both good times and bad. Gold symbolizes the aspirations, the dreams, the success that everyone seeks.
2021
In October of 2017 California’s raging wildfires burnt down Sophia Naz’s home, taking everything, heirlooms, paintings, signed books, inter alia treasures, carelessly strewn around homes that bear witness to living—family photographs, handwritten journals, ‘the material history of a lifetime’. Her 2021 collection of poems, Open Zero is less a math of that uncountable loss, or its archiving—for its calculus, as the obliquely eponymous poem ‘After, math’, muses, ‘must be left at memory’s table’. The poems here map the fire’s aftermaths—of all that follows the event of loss.
With the arrival of his new collection, Anthropocene, a multi-genre book of poetry, literary prose and photography—Sudeep Sen takes a vertical plunge into deep history. From being a poet of Distracted Geographies, he now ventures to be a poet of distracted geologies and its sedimented pasts. If in his earlier major collection Fractals, he could be seen traversing across ravaged war zones from Kargil to Gaza to trace remnants of life—in this latest book, the entire planet with its disoriented seas, skies, seasons and sites, becomes his theatre of concern.
2021
Ranu Uniyal, a teacher of English, is here with her latest anthology of poems, in Hindi. Her poems, which she dismissively says are ‘just things I wrote’, are something of a portfolio of a traditional artist, shy and mild mannered, but with the promise of high artistry and an unfaltering grasp on her material and tools.There are poems about the different stages of womanhood, life in the streets (and within the mind), passing seasons, and of course the landscape of the heart. In her wide sweep of ideas, she reminds one of the nineteenth century Urdu/Rekhta masters who left us literal biographies of their towns—local and universal at the same time.
Devrani Jethani ki Kahani, first published in 1870, is often hailed as the first novel in Hindi, and this critical edition, with the first-ever translation into English as A Story of Two Sisters-in-Law, takes full cognizance of the book’s historical significance to bring it to a contemporary reader in all its layered complexity. The family saga marks a tryst with modernity against the backdrop of the colonial encounter, while offering a realist/reformist representation of the textures of Agarwal-Baniya community life around the Meerut region in the 1860s.
2021
Keeping in Touch by award-winning novelist Anjali Joseph is a love story centering Keteki Sharma and Ved Ved, two thirty-something individuals more or less settled in their hectic, jet-set lives. Though it is love at first sight for Ved, when he sees Keteki at Heathrow Airport in casual jeans and shirt, Keteki revels in her relationship with her new lover but takes her time making up her mind about settling down with him. Thus begins a dance of a relationship between two individuals entirely unknown to each other.
2021
Arzu is essentially a coming-of-age story but the beauty of the book lies in the fact that it is able to beautifully capture the process of growth, change and hard work, which can be tremendously difficult to write about in an interesting way. Arzu’s efforts to develop herself and find her place in the world are inspiring, especially for young readers who are trying to figure themselves out.
This historical fiction tells the stories of a ten-year boy, Madhav, and the family of Sridhar Sahu and Ratna. Their stories, spread across two invasions of Delhi—of Muhammed of Ghur in 1192 CE and Taimur in 1398 CE, tells another very important tale—the way the ‘medieval past’ seems to haunt the present. Madhulika Liddle writes in the mode of scholars who focus on Delhi, such as Sunil Kumar (The Present in Delhi’s Pasts), Percival Spear (Delhi, Its Monuments and History), RE Frykenburg (Ed. Delhi through the Ages), Narayani Gupta (Delhi between Two Empires 1803-1931) and Upinder Singh (Ancient Delhi).
The major difference one draws upon when discussing history and fiction is that while history is based on facts, fiction is based on imagination. Given this context how would one describe a historical novel, which is a blend of history and fiction? One of the normative responses would be that a historical novel is set in a period of history and conveys the social and cultural oeuvre of that period. This statement has undergone a sea change as the concept of history has altered in contemporary times.
Farrukh Dhondy has worn several hats as a writer, journalist, activist, screenwriter, broadcaster and is something of a literary celebrity. His is therefore the kind of autobiography one expects to be peppered with fascinating anecdotes and lurid confessions. But, perhaps as the title Fragments Against My Ruin—taken from The Waste Land—suggests, one has to be content with fragments and fleeting glimpses of the world around its author instead of a comprehensive account.