Month: March 2023

The miniature paintings of The Gita by Allah Baksh, from the late 17th century Mewar. commissioned by Udaipur’s Maharana Jai Singh. Allah Baksh’s luminous work on the Gita has no precedent in India’s art tradition. He has illustrated Krishna’s ecstatic song, verse by abstract verse. His images, meditative and unostentatious, are free from both heroic posturing and spiritual pride points out Alok Bhalla in this perceptive Introduction to the volume he edited with Chandra Prakash Deval…[Read More]…

Salman Rushdie’s Victory City is the epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire, Bisnaga into existence in fourteenth century southern India only only to be ruined by hubris. Rushdie employs his usual ‘narrative engineering’ to weave a historical epic, moving across time and from politics to poetics and back, says Pradeep Trikha…[Read More]…

In this collection of poetry from across the multiple languages of South Asia in translation, Ashwani Kumar provides a context that is itself a meditation on poetry as liminal geography of human experience…[Read More]…