Literary Trails
Mrinalini Harchandrai imbibes the rhythms of jazz and the soundtracks of the city that throbbing as its heartbeats to distil both into her poetic expressions. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
The poems of John Chiramel meditate on the poignancy and pleasure, however futile and fleeting, of mysterious forbidden love.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
The horrors of our inhumanity wreaked on children is captured viscerally in this brief poem by Keki Daruwala…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Elegaic memories bridge the gap between life and death, the black night and the bright star, in the poetry of Malashri Lal .…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Poet-translator Robin S. Ngangom on the creative unity of life ruptured in that forgotten nook called home where rivers choke on garbage, a falling tree whispers its tears and bad places sprout…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Manto weaves a shocking tale of human grossness out of a chapter from our inglorious history that foretold the horrors of partition, in this translation by Alok Bhalla …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In a deconstruction of Manto’s short fiction about 1919, Alok Bhalla offers an elegant yet forcefully insightful, studied but not ponderous alternative reading of South Asia’s ‘vile’ histories …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Alok Bhalla, translator-poet’s brief and poignant salutation to life and its infinite possibilities to be sought and savoured. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In this metaphysical spin on a father’s sense of loss poet-translator Asif Raza expresses an anguish that reflects the fragile rootedness of our lives …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
The story of female sexuality by Ismat Chugtai written in 1942, that won her an obscenity trial in which she stood by her story, refused to apologise and had it dismissed. Told from the viewpoint of a young girl …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
For Mahasweta Devi dreams are a fundamental right often denied us; they help us survive this nightmare-India with its sham freedoms and manufactured histories. Her speech at the 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair still resonates. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A harrowing tale by Ajeet Cour set in Punjab during its ‘troubles’ that turns into a parable for our times as bullets, death and intense grief trigger a profound compassion and search for humanity. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Zohra Devi! Is she a metaphor for an enchantment fleetingly glimpsed, stupefyingly absent for the protagonist of this series by Asif Raza, trapped between the “same old vile earth under our feet/ And the same old sordid sky above”? …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A little known tale by Saadat Hasan Manto on partitions that continue to rupture languages, identities and people. Translated by Alok Bhalla…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Ignored in his lifetime by mainstream Urdu poetry movements, Majeed Amjad pointed Urdu lyric in new directions, to nature as threatened life, to Time in the here-and-now. Riyaz Latif translates the poet’s exquisite yet earthy visions. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In the isolation of our homes, messages from prophets and oracles sound false, memories slip away, fragments from the personal past surface. A selection of poems by E.V. Ramakrishnan …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Riyaz Latif meditates on a cosmogony of the elements and our precarious finitude within it as ‘lost signs’…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
After a dry spell and in the midst of a spiritual journey, poetry happens to A.J. Thomas as manifestations of the Great Mother explode in his consciousness.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
With an irreverence that interlaces several myths into a subversive vision of our entangled lives, Ashwani Kumar serves up his unique brand of ‘mythical realism.’ …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Meena a dalit student who has realised her ambition to become a doctor in the face of bullying teachers is still afflicted with self-doubts.. By Dalpat Chauhan translated by Hemang Ashwinkumar…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Among the poets that Miraji (1912-1949) translated with his freewheeling style and rhythms was e.e. cummings. Geeta Patel translates the Urdu modernist’s reading and offers a glimpse into his poetic visions…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
To Vidhya Sreenivasan poetry is a choreographed expression of the collective of memory, wishes, questions-anything that is born out of the conversations we have with the world around us.”…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
At a station on board a superfast to Prayag, great but illusory expectations. Two poems by Hemang Ashwinkumar…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Poet translator and dramatist Mukhtar Siddiqui (1919-1972) shaped modern Urdu literature with innovative lyrical content evident in these poems translated by poet Riyaz Latif…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Poet and translator A.J. Thomas meditates on the delights of fish eating and wonders about sardines in Sardinia …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
The aura of victimhood and romance around Dara Shikoh’s last days and death has obscured his command of Vedanta, Sufism and Philosophy. He was besides, a serious Persian poet avers Shamsur Rahman Faruqi…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
His poetry interiorises suffering and outrage such that the public /private binary dissolves in his visions of abandoned love and injustices across space and time. Here’s Robin S. Ngangom
…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Asif Raza reviews Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s novel ‘Kai Chaand Thay Sare Aasmaan` (The Mirror of Beauty) over ten months of immersive and reflective readings in this riveting dialogue with the author.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Poet, painter and literary critic Sukrita Paul Kumar draws on her experience of working with the homeless street children and natural-disaster victims to search for meaning in poetry and painting …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Poet A. J. Thomas turns his gaze to the city he didn’t want to love, did when he was away from it even though “It’s at once like an ocean that throws up/ Everything it takes in, and like a volcano/ That consumes anything thrown in” …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Gazing at the stars, Iraq War veteran,memoirist and poet Brian Turner ‘reads’ love, Time, silence and solitude in their fleeting fiery train of light. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A short fiction by Shinjini Kumar of a chance encounter on a bus unfolds a tale of love with happy beginnings and ambiguous endings in evasive memories. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In his lyrical elucidation of the archangel Israfil’s death, Noon Meem Rashid issues an elegiac imperative—weep tears for the death of the bearer of all sounds, for the silence that relegates all into nothingness.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Hungarian poet musician and writer Gábor Lanczkor dwells in verse on what it means to be between two cultures for an artist in these poetic vignettes about the life of painter Amrita Sher-Gil mirrored through different voices…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Born in Kerala, poet and translator A.J. Thomas evokes a bond with the heart of Bengal in this poetic memoir, fusing the personal and the physical, seeking amidst its squalor and hopelessness “a familiar wag of humanity’s tail”.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
For Asif Raza if a poetic speech is formulated in the dark recesses of a poet’s psyche attuned to its subterranean rumblings, then it registers on the page as “the tremors of his soul.” Seven Sisters and other poems are examples.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In this second story Dilip Kumar uses light brush strokes to delve into the humanity dwelling beneath the routine of ritual in a temple town with its web of relationships in this translation by Vidhya Sreenivasan…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In a response that is equally intense and provocative, Asif Raza reads Riyaz Latif’s essay on the red-breasted rosy starlings as a prose poem, offering up a text that stands weightily on its own acuity of vision.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Vidhya Sreenivasan translates from Tamil two stories by Dilip Kumar about life in a temple town, With light brush strokes Dilip Kumar sketches a layered portrait of the routine of ritual and its web of relationships stirred by the unexpected. Here’s the first one.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A dreamscape etched by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, in which time collapses, characters merge and separate, narrative moves between memoir and fiction, the ghost of Mir comes alive in encounters defined by dialogic imagination. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Scholar-author Geeta Patel comes to Chennai is locked down with poet-friends and finds herself in lyric. And why not? Reading, translating Miraji’s “queer hauntings,” her hidden ‘vocation had to surface.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
As she rides a cab in Mumbai and the driver steers her through an unfamiliar city’s sights, sharing stories and histories, poetry and silences Vidya Rao experiences the warmth of memories, kindness, kinship…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Urdu polymath Shamsur Rahman Faruqi deconstructs our inherited ideas on culture, nation and history; points to a rich tradition of Indian or Indo-Muslim identity evolving against a colonial ethos. And it is still intact. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
At the window, the eye is fated to register much more than the red-breasted rosy starlings Riyaz Latif waits for. Your vision of linearity sweeps over panoramas of disenchantment. Then the birds arrive, sketching the skies in unison …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Geetha Sukumaran, poet and translator blurs boundaries in her poems to negotiate multiple identities; diasporic Indo-Canadian, career woman and diverse inheritances of Western and a glorious Tamil women-poets’ tradition. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Sri Lanka’s civil war extracted a heavy toll on ordinary people. The poetic visions of P. Ahilan intersect individual grief of ruptured relationships and the collective trauma of war while engaging with personal and political realms. Geetha Sukumaran his translator opens the door to his work. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In a tribute to Miraji on his 70th death anniversary Geeta Patel reflects on his poetic queerness and its gift to readers of the ecstasies of incomplete meanings.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Translating his own poems from Urdu, Riyaz Latif offers a poetic vision of an odiferous Wasteland in which metaphor is meaning, Time space, permanence nothingness, and desire is death . …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Asif Raza translates his own poems from Urdu in this collection that reverberates with loss, remembrance and apocalypse as time itself collapses.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A short story by Gangadhar Gadgil , of communal riots in a Mumbai chawl, profiles the rot within ordinary individuals, succumbing to the spectacle of mob violence, bigotry and predatory instincts in this translation from Marathi by Keerti Ramachandra. …[Read More]…