Literature
The first book is a collection of eight prize-winning entries in the category Creative Non-Fiction for children in the 9 to 12-year bracket of the Competition for Writers of Children’s Books organized by the Children’s Book Trust (CBT). Seven of the profiles are of Indians, while one is of a Kenyan, Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. The seven Indians are of varied backgrounds: a soldier, Param Vir Chakra winner Albert Ekka; Everester Arunima Sinha; solo-forest planter Abdul Kareem; Hockey Olympian Dilip Tirkey; visually impaired Jawahar Kaul; ‘India’s James Herriot’, Vet Dr. Naveen Kumar Pandey and sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik.
Difficult to translate my son’s response on reading the new English translation of Sukumar Ray’s Gonph Chor (Catch that Moustache Thief!). Perhaps ‘How funny!’, but that does not entirely convey the element of surprise, affection, and familiarity that he feels. In the short poem, boro babu, the boss in an office, is frantically looking for his stolen moustache.
‘…his fans remained mute loyalists for want of an ecosystem to applaud… We have so far managed to build one museum for cartoonist Shankar…and the rest is history waiting to be made. We let our democracy and cartoons fend for themselves.’RK Laxman: Back with a Punch is expert cartoonist EP Unny’s tribute to a master of the art. Written in a succinct, racy style, it is a unique biography which looks at the shifting scenario of Indian politics through the eyes of RK Laxman’s cartoons.
Reading A Bite in Time by Tanya Mendonsa, I had a feeling of coming home to a country without borders, a house without walls, for what Tanya has written about, whether people or recipes, was familiar to me. I had either met, or heard of, the people she mentions in the book, and tasted many of the recipes in the book.The publication of the book establishes her versatility as a writer, though she is primarily a poet, and a very gifted one at that.
The title of this poetry collection is rather intriguing. The ‘Foreword’ implies that it can be understood as an exposure ‘to the bare bone, a sort of nakedness which is an uncomfortable feeling, to say the least’.Ada Limon, the current U.S. Poet Laureate says, poetry helps us ‘walk into the room of ourselves’, and in the very first titular poem the poet sets the tone with, ‘A transparency against the sunlight I stand, in the class room self-revealed to you striking a pose clothed in much verbiage, books and notes.
This cleverly titled book focuses on an enigmatic and neglected aspect of Lord Krishna.Krishna’s death has hardly received attention compared to his birth and childhood celebrated still as Janmashtami.In the Mahabharata, he was mistakenly shot in the foot by a hunter. But who was the hunter and how did he happen to be on the spot?
Sara Rai, a renowned contemporary author in Hindi who is at home with its literary and sociocultural landscape, notes that she has chosen to write about writing, as well as the journeys of her family and their times, in English. Perhaps it is to reach a wider reading public. Or perhaps, it is a language which allows emotional and intellectual distance. For Raw Umber is a literary memoir fashioned with circumspection in some ways, and with an evocative lyricism in others.
2022
Despite featuring in any number of literary works in English, Delhi never got to be immortalized in the definitive way that contemporary Bombay/Mumbai was in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. Black River’s title is, of course, a salute to Delhi’s river, Yamuna, one of whose names is Kalindi, quite besides the fact that pollution and effluents in the last few decades have rendered her nearly black.
2022
In yet another riveting piece of literature, Anees Salim revives the theme of death as perceived by a young adult protagonist. The bellboy consistently maintains the ever-imposing doom of death by suicide and/or accident seen from a safe distance of ‘forced indifference’. During the course of the novel, we see the keen observer of deaths, Latif, turn into an amateur anthropologist who starts making mental notes of suicides in Paradise Lodge.
Yet another book on critics and criticism by Terry Eagleton, the most celebrated among the present-day cultural and literary critics of Britain! And it is a book on the heroes of a bygone era as well. Surely another book on TS Eliot, IA Richards, William Empson, FR Leavis and Raymond Williams—may be with the exception of the last named, who is still regarded as a guru of the prevailing cultural studies approach—will likely have as few takers as, for instance, another book on the English novel from Dickens to Lawrence.
Reporting on the stupendous footfall at Jashn-e-Rekhta recently, The New York Times reported, ‘That 300,000 people celebrated Urdu verse during a three-day festival was testament to the peculiar quality of language in India’ and the report was titled, ‘Where Romantic Poetry in a Fading Language Draws Stadium Crowds’. Even though Urdu poetry, in its entirety, is indeed not romantic, yet every time it is mentioned, it invariably invokes the idea of romance.
Karbala: A Historical Play, was written during the second half of 1923 and published in 1924: a period of great significance in the history of India’s struggle for freedom. The writer, Munshi Premchand, also a man of significance, was a well-known Urdu and Hindi writer. Perhaps there is nary a child in India, or a man of some intellect, who has not read his Godan, the greatest Hindi novel of modern Indian literature written in 1936, and Eidgah, a well-known story published in 1933.
The Kumbh-mela is one of the major Hindu religious pilgrimages and festivals. It is celebrated in a cycle of approximately twelve years, to commemorate every revolution Brihaspati (Jupiter) completes, at four river-bank pilgrimage sites across India: Prayagraj or Allahabad (at the confluence of the rivers Ganges, Yamuna, and Saraswati), Haridwar (Ganges), Nashik (Godavari) and Ujjain (Shipra). The mythological story goes that after the churning of the ocean, the gods found the nectar for immortality
Happily, over the last few years there has been a boom in English translations of Indian language literatures. Among other publishers, HarperCollins India has been bringing out interesting books from different regions of India, focusing on contemporary fiction in various Indian languages. Chronicles of the Lost Daughters, a translation of Debarati Mukhopadhyay’s Bengali novel Narach, is part of this exciting exercise. In the hands of Arunava Sinha, one of our best translators, this critique of 19th century Bengal comes alive in English as a gripping, engrossing text.
Mention ‘Dr Zhivago’ and people will recall the 1965 blockbuster movie, not Pasternak’s novel published in 1958. Not surprising, because the movie focuses on the emotive love story. The book, on the other hand, reveals the complexity of the events of that tumultuous period in Russia’s history (from 1905 to the Second World War) and their influence on human relationships.
Autobiography is a genre of literature where an individual narrates his/her own life to others through the act of writing. Generally, this is done by the privileged to display their inherent superiority and worthiness to other members, less worthy. Even when personalities from minority or disadvantaged groups are recognized, the standards of evaluating the life of these individuals might be reinforcing the dominant group’s evaluative criteria.
The adage ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ could not be more apt to describe the collaborative nature of a project the scope of Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women. A team of translators, researchers, experts, and advisors helped the editors assemble, order, and arrange the travel accounts of the forty-five authors included in the compilation. They selected accounts written across the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century, from diverse languages and locations including Arabic, English, Indonesian, Punjabi, Turkish and Urdu.
Between Heaven & Earth is an exhaustive compendium authored by contemporary literary stalwarts and travellers who utilize descriptive writing to produce pages of text reminiscent of Shansui paintings. Bulbul Sharma’s and Ruskin Bond’s cataloging incorporates a plethora of voices, and echoes of the past. The reader is treated to Ruskin Bond, Khushwant Singh, and Keki Daruwalla alongside Bill Aitken, Jim Corbett, Thomas Munro and Rumer Gooden.
2022
It is a tragic irony of our times that the cultural space for poetry is fast shrinking in our midst, and so are its readers and/or publishers. Known to us, humans, as one of the most primordial and also sublime forms of self-expression, poetry is moving out of our lives, almost imperceptibly. Sadly enough, the poetry that speaks the real language of the human heart, doesn’t appear to have many takers, at least, in our hyper-real times.
It is difficult to review this book, as the smooth writing tempts you to pause and ruminate on techniques used, which inspires you to attempt a few pieces. Nikita Parik’s poems are lessons in creative writing. Both My City is a Murder of Crows, and her debut collection Diacritics of Desire, are important reads for emerging poets working on their craft. Invariably, Parik will teach them concise writing.