Tag Archives: Literature

Picking up a book of poetry is a task I usually reserve for my lectures which requires an intellectual engagement with a purposeful end in mind. So with this book as well I had my resistance and fear on either side, ready for it to be replaced by my half read copy of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. After all, shouldn’t women talk about feminism…

Considered as a master in the art of writing short stories, Fakir Mohan Senapati (1843-1918) played a leading role in establishing a distinctive Odia identity and is considered to be the father of Odia nationalism and modern Odia literature. Told in the simplest terms, his short story ‘Rebati’ (1898) narrates the story…

Jairam Ramesh and I have known each other since 1982. We are both Iyengars to boot. In those days he was trying his hand at free-lance journalism, writing articles on the economy. I was a full-time journalist and remained one. But Jairam, as we shall see in this book, has had as many careers as the subject of this book, Edwin Arnold…

Ten minutes later, the Marker apartment was teeming with masked men and women, all reeking of hand sanitizer and nervous energy.Any time else, a murder scene crowded with masked people, air tinted with sanitizer smell and nervous energy, and a cordoned off building in the middle of a lockdown…

As an opening sentence, it is perhaps the best yet. A blind king, Dhritirashtra, asks his charioteer, Sanjaya, what his sons and the sons of Pandu, both of whom were wanting to fight, did on the battlefield?The suspense-filled question, however, occurs in the middle of the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata.  Sanjaya’s  account has come to be known as ‘The Book’ sacred…

Let me say this at the very outset. Kiran Doshi is a dear friend of 48 years and he is a reviewer’s nightmare. Once he wrote a novel in verse. I retaliated by writing the review in verse. Using that logic, I should write this review in what they call a ‘briefs’ form. But I am not going to let him get away that easily…

After writing four fictional works, Diksha at St. Martin’s, Day Scholar, Patna Rough-cut, and Patna Manual of Style, and attracting a fair amount of informed critical attention, Siddharth Chowdhury is back with a novel that his imagined editor qualifies as ‘short’ with the insert symbol on the cover…

One must marvel at the extraordinary image makeover in recent years of Jhumpa Lahiri, an acclaimed American author of Indian descent. From 2000 when Lahiri burst onto the literary landscape of USA with her debut collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies to 2013 when she published her second novel…

First, a disclosure: I have never been fond of Ishiguro. A lifetime of teaching and correcting has made me wary of the good student—the one who writes impeccable but boring papers, the one you are tempted to give ‘A’ without reading but force yourself to read to the bitter end because you are that kind of teacher, that kind of reader…

Jointly authored by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal, Betrayed By Hope is a play on the life of the nineteenth century poet, Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873). The play is based on extensive research by the authors spanning a period of nine years. A five-act play, the plot is structured around Dutt and the fictional character…

In just seventy pages, the author Prasad has packed a lot of punch in this meticulously researched monograph on Khushwant Singh. The engaging narrative is peppered with laconic one-liners, tongue firmly in cheek. While he notes that Singh was many things to many people—a writer

A way from the hypnotic overreach, exaggerated deeds and the over-ritualized texture in the earlier works on the Bhakti poet Kabir, Kiran Nagarkar’s The Arsonist foregrounds the persona of Sant Kabir through a recital of the mundane, ordinary and the normal run of things in his life.

Kabir’s works stand thoroughly translated and analysed, yet the appeal of his ideas and writings continues to invite further translations and interpretations. Chandan Sinha’s book makes an important contribution to the existing knowledge on Kabir and places this possibly…

Past is a land of possibilities—creative, discussive, interpretive. The seductive aura of its myriad ifs and buts has always kept creative imaginations in thrall. Novelists have often latched on to its narrative possibilities to augment their fictionality and make a meaningful intervention in the present… 

Stephen Alter’s Feral Dreams makes a creative and engaging intervention in the proliferating literary and cinematic industry that constitutes the afterlife of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. During the span of a century or more since this novel was first published

We come to appreciate light only when the sun sets or the lamps are out. Similarly, we really come to know what freedom is when we are in jail. One day in jail would give a detainee much more insight into what freedom is than can be gained reading and listening for a lifetime outside. (p. 177)…

There is both beauty and novelty in finding magic, but one hears less about the beauty and novelty of the everyday. Stuti Agarwal’s The Very Glum Life of Tootoolu Toop is a love letter to the everyday, ‘glum’ life that we all live. Told through the perspective of a ten-year-old witch of the ‘Oonoodiwaga’…

Bharati Jagannathan, an academic and historian who is already well-known as a children’s writer, debuts her collection of fiction for adults with this engagingly heart-warming set of stories. If the vibrant cover with the title ensconced inside a kolam isn’t suggestive enough, the glossary of Tamil…

What could be a better testimony to the perennial appeal of India’s epics than the fresh retellings and translations being published at fairly regular intervals? Each generation appears to need its own version in language that it can relate to. Now Uberoi’s 1996.

The three plays, introduced with a skilled and analytically detailed discussion, rise above parochialisms of time, space, culture and language.  They resonate with universal themes and emotions like love, duty, guilt and the sheer tedium of existence that saps one’s soul of vibrancy and one’s life of joy.