Tag Archives: Literature

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. 

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.

Dazzlingly unpredictable, Ra Sh’s recent collection of poems, Buddha and Biryani, constructs a world of perception that is playfully irreverent but trenchantly real. The poet, known for his seductively tantalizing referentiality of erotica in The Architecture of Flesh (2015) and The Bullet Train (2019), strikes the raw chords of the readers again.

The cover of this slim volume of poems is of a flower blossoming and the uneven lines drawn on every petal sets the tone for the ideas that are enclosed within its spaces. On first glance, one is not prepared for what follows inside the book. The stereotypical set of ideas pertaining to flowers and colour schemes that one has been conditioned to, and the way one casually looks at the surface, does not prepare us for the powerful assemblage of poems that will shake you to your core.

Reviewers typically position themselves as being more or less superior to the work under review. Thus, the work being reviewed is discovered to be—discreetly or otherwise—deficient, in the light of the work that the reviewers themselves would write if only they could tear themselves away from important work—like reviewing. (Though it might be more accurate to say that they might have written if they could…) I’m afraid Rita Kothari’s Uneasy Translations: Self, Experience and Indian Literature offers no such comfort.

In 1936, the young and upcoming Hindi writer and poet, Sachidanand Hirananda Vatsyayan, ‘Agyeya’, wrote to Banarasi Das Chaturvedi, his mentor and friend at the time, ‘It is too early yet to tell secrets especially to you’ (p. 130). A few years later, in 1944, to another friend he wrote, ‘a person like me has a very small life outside but a big inner life’ (p. 267). Throughout his lifetime, and even after, those close to Agyeya variously described him as ‘reserved’, ‘quiet’, and ‘restrained’.

This book is part of the series ‘Writers in Context’ edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Chandana Dutta. The time for such a series has long come and I am glad that we finally have the first books in the series in our hands. To take up Indian language writers and put together an authoritative volume on their writings in English translation with excerpts from their works and their own essays and letters, interviews with them, biographical sketches and memoirs, bibliographical details, and critical readings of their works over the years answers to the needs of scholars of Indian literature all over the world.

Although Dalit literature has had a long and variegated presence in Bengal, especially through the oral traditions of Bauls, Fakirs, Sufis and other popular sects, it remains a relatively neglected area in Dalit studies and has only recently found greater visibility via translation. Under My Dark Skin Flows a Red River, seeks to fill this gap with an anthology that combines historical and theoretical frameworks with samples of creative writing across diverse genres.

The Mendicant Prince spans multiple genres: historical fiction, real-life mystery and a legal drama that inspired a long-drawn-out pamphlet war in pre-Partition Bengal. Aruna Chakravarti breathes life into the Bhawal Sanyasi case that has fascinated generations in Bengal and Dhaka, in yet another novel that demonstrates her mastery over the genre of fiction about colonial Bengal.

Somdatta Mandal’s The Last Days of Rabindranath Tagore in Memoirs is a uniquely conceived book that provides a comprehensive look into the final months of biswakabi Rabindranath Tagore’s life when the hallowed man was ‘oscillating between fitness and illness’ (p. 164), until he passed away after a fatal surgery performed against his wishes. The book consists of translated selections from several memoirs and biographies originally written in Bengali by the poet’s associates and other well-known writers and researchers.

What Debali Mookerjea-Leonard achieves distinctly in this book is to effectively showcase her own reasoned angst and that of the others, regarding the lesser visibility of diverse aspects of Partition literature on the Bengal side in comparison with the abundant and a rich variety of perspectives on Partition fiction from the western side of the subcontinent. In her detailed analysis of the critical writings of such critics as Srikumar Bandopadhyay, she convincingly draws the attention of the reader to the non-acknowledgement of different Partition themes presented by several Bengali authors.

Although the hyperbolic title of this just minted anthology indicates a performance in the realm of extravaganza, the forty stories included within its covers do offer a dazzling spread of assured and exciting writing. In itself the anthology contains a wealth of riches; the editorial decision to print only the best writing of authors belonging to the millennial generation and Generation Z catapults this book into a budding promise: a dynamic product rather than a finished volume, which functions like a tantalizing anticipation of that which is yet to come.

When one thinks of Deepti Naval, one immediately wants to frame her into a film sequence with Farooq Sheikh, both of whom have been remarkably great actors in Indian cinema. And so, when I eagerly picked up her autobiography, A Country Called Childhood, I was half-expecting at least a chapter or two on her life as a Bollywood actress who was at the fore of ‘parallel cinema’ which has left an indelible mark in the history of Indian films.