Between The Lines
Vijay Tendulkar’s oeuvre portrays women in myriad roles across the social spectrum–housewife, teacher, mistress, daughter, film extra, servant—and their complex emotions that reveal truths in slant. Balwant Bhaneja unpacks some of the plays for us…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
: Guyana-born, of Indian-origin, Canadian poet Cyril Dabydeen ponders the parable of the remembered place, the rhythms of another country… civilization at one’s fingertips, constrained to being in one place. In verse and a short story. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Digital platforms have been used by common people to create gender-inequality narratives that fuse the personal into the political, fact and feeling, to create “intimate publics” of solidarity avers Shweta Khilnani…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Paul Zacharia’s ribald remembrance of college in Mysore where he arrives from his small village in Kerala armed with a ‘sin-agenda’ and injected with the ‘alien seed’ of literature that would inch him closer to his literary vocation ..[Read More]…
Literary Trails
All conversations have a purpose: to be heard, to perhaps make others understand that grief and anger can be shared rather than multiplied. Poet-essayist Annie Zaidi runs us through a history of south Asia in five verses to illuminate this idea in our gloating darkness. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Kunwar Narain’s long narrative poem Kumarajiva is an imaginative meditation on the life of Chinese scholar, teacher and translator of Buddhist texts, Kumarajiva, born in 344 CE. In it the poet attempts to imagine a society where a people could learn to pay ‘mindful attention’ to all sentient beings. Alok Bhalla translates. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
South Asian SF Dialogues series, curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon features Soham Guha, bilingual speculative fiction writer and critic from Kolkata, on the genre’s rich SF tradition in Bengali and his own odyssey …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
South Asian SF Dialogues series, curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon continues with Tashan Mehta, who holds that SF/fantasy help explore the realities of disenfranchised groups. Her debut novel, The Liar’s Weave, was shortlisted for the Prabha Khaitan Woman’s Voice Award. Alok Bhalla joins in.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
This session features Sami Ahmad Khan, writer and SF critic/scholar from Delhi, India who teaches a course on this genre in conversation with Tarun K.Saint who curates this series for The Beacon. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Manjula Padmanabhan, playwright, comic strip artist, writer and columnist based in Delhi, India and the USA also writes literary and SF/speculative fiction converses with Tarun K. Saint who curates this series for The Beacon. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
The existential core of concerns about the pandemic, Ratnakar Tripathy believes, is that it yokes and synchronizes two contrasting anxieties that have hit us in unison: having to imagine a world without us while visualizing ourselves dangling in a vacuum...[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Two poetic meditations on women striving for empowerment and “lost sounds,” discovering worlds beyond the heart and hearth. By bilingual poet and translator, Gopika Jadeja …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Tomb of Sand marks Hindi novelist Geetanjali Shree’s latest fiction Ret Samadhi’s rendition into English by Daisy Rockwell. Both, texts, finds Mayank Jain Parichha are unique in their innovativeness and use of non-linearity to unfold the narrative. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Sardar Udham offers Nandini Bhattacharya the terrain to examine the concept of Ressentment as an ethical response to violations and genocide, counterposed to the prevailing discourse of forgetting nd/or forgiving crimes against humanity…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Sajida Zaidi who passed away in 2011 at the age of 84 was a noted educationist and Urdu poet. Riyaz Latif a bilingual poet offers up fresh translations of her philosophical and reflective verses.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
On a surface viea a simple tale, M.A.Susila’s fiction turns out to be a lesson for these pandemic-driven times. Translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Kannan …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In a response to Sudhir Chandra’s meditation on Gandhi’s first birthday and his assassination in Independent India, Ashoak Upadhyay finds evidence that his legacy lives, less in remembrance, more as moral quests.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
On October 09 2017, V.C. Harris, polymath literary critic. translator social activist and teacher-mentor met with a fatal accident. His students, poets A.J. Thomas, S. Jospeh and translator-critic Cheri Jacob K. pay tributes. ..[Read More]…
Literary Trails
An original rendition from Malayalam of a short story by the late polymath and teacher, V.C. Harris that almost reads like a creation myth. Translated by Cheri Jacob K. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Steering clear of postcolonial sensibilities, Indo-Guyanese poet and writer Cyril Dabydeen ‘reads’ V.S.Naipaul as a writer seeking that free state of an indwelling life committed to art while “pushing the boundaries of fiction and autobiography” towards the “heart of his organic nature”...[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Darius Cooper drives with son from Los Angeles to John Steinbeck country with a stop-over at Henry Miller’s Big Sur log cabin and discovers a little more about himself...[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Bilingual writer Paul Zacharia travels back in time to his childhood in a remote village in Kerala and to the birthing of his ‘invisible vocation’, reading and writing in a farmer’s household...[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
”To see our face in the mirror we cannot move. If we do, all we see is just momentum” finds artist Nirmala Singh. An award winning painter, she uses abstraction to draw the relation between mood and motion.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Chandana Dutta and Abu Zahir Rabbani profile Joginder Paul and his legacy for Sahitya Akademi series on Makers Of Indian Literature. In the second book by Chandan Dutta she engages with Krishna Paul. Both reviewed by Ranjana Kaul.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
With a deft combination of data and personal interviews Vivan Marwaha offers glimpses of what the young want, and what they get–a surfeit of degrees, dreams and despair. Review by Ashoak Upadhyay…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
What led Gandhi that “incorrigible optimist” to lose the will to live, crave death so soon into country’s independence? Based on his public confessions, Sudhir Chandra asks disturbing questions of us who celebrate his anniversaries, unmindful of his agonies.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
He died with the name of Ram on his lips. Who was this Ram he invoked all his life? The historical Ram? What did the name siignify for Gandhi? Tridip Suhrud offers some clues into a moral vision Ramanama held for him.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Playwright Atamjit on how he came by Makhan Singh the leftist, non-violent freedom fighter who negotiated between his cultural roots in India and belongingness to a distant Kenya and how the Indo-kenyan became the inspiration for the play The Red Prophet...[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Indulging in a flight of fantasy, Tridip Suhrud hones in on remembrances of Gandhi that reflect our desires to do away with him, not with bulllets but with statues and spectacle. And yet he lives……[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Sara Shagufta, the tragic young poet who took her life in 1984 aged thirty, comes to life in these fresh translations of her Urdu verses by Riyaz Latif …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
On the occasion of his birth anniversary,19 September, The Beacon pays tribute to Kunwar Narain (1927-2017), re-issuing a collection of his works, first published in this journal 30 April 2021. Also included are links to some of the events that were organized in his remembrance 17-19 September 2021.”…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
In her latest novel, Alka Saraogi weaves history, myth, geography and boundaries as metaphor for frailties and divisions into a story of flawed protagonists, of Kulbhushan Jain, shrugged off as an outsider who wants to be in. Translated by Nandini Bhattacharya, …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
These stories by Ambai translated by GJV Prasad from Tamil, resonate with love in its avatars, parental, carnal, divine; never explained just experienced. Pradeep Trikha reviews.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Prakash is a schoolboy whose odyssey towards a self-awareness and grounded education ought to be a lesson for us all on meaningful learning. A short fiction by Lakshmi Kannan…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Reading the memoirs of Dalits can help free the upper caste liberal of the pious but needless moral burden of defining them. Just listen to the internality of a Dalit life instead, urges Ratnakar Tripathy …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
A.J. Thomas reviews Tea: A Concoction of Dissonance by poets P. Ahilan and Geetha Sukumaran and artist Vaidekhi who create poem-pictures of tea-meditations in this bi-lingual compilation translated by Vidhya Sreenivasan. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Stepping back from the popular perception of Taliban ‘terror’ Padmaja Challakere traces the causes of Afghanistan’s blighted condition to America’s hegemonic war and its tyrannical legacies…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
South Asian SF Dialogues series, curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon is back with the next instalment of conversations, this one with Navin Weeraratne from Sri Lanka, who writes speculative fiction and military SF with a dose of hard science. Followed by a sampling of his fiction.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
South Asian SF Dialogues series, curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon has Vandana Singh, physicist and writer of speculative fiction engaged in a conversation on the importance of speculative fiction in re-imagining our world with alternative futures…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon, South Asian SF Dialogues engage with Saad Z. Hossain, fantasy, weird fiction, and SF/speculative fiction writer from Bangladesh. Followed by ‘The Endless’ his short fiction…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon, South Asian SF Dialogues series continues conversations about SF this time with Kehkashan Khalid.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
A year after he learnt of his fatal illness, its traumatic coping and chemotherapy, Mayank Bhatt dwells further on his struggle to find meaning to life and death, in love and writing...[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Interrogating notions such as “national identity” through the lens of creative writers can be rewarding feels Nicola Pozza as he delves into texts of S. H. Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ (1911-1987), who had regarded essentialist categories–“Hinduism”, “Indianness” or “Hindutva” — with much suspicion. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Mridula Garg looks back at our violence on nature that has caused endemic catastrophes in which the poor suffer the most as India shows. She draws on writings she considers fables for our futures.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
History, myth, fact and fable merge in Ashgar Wajahat’s story. In Afzal Ahmed Syed’s short poem words can stem an apocalypse of the dagger, herald a promise. Both translated by Alok Bhalla
…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Rooted in his faith and classical langauges, Abul Kalam Azad, should also be remembered for his love of Indic culture and his contribution to the institutional safeguard of its diverse expressions, says S. Irfan Habib …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Set in the 18th century North India . Ruth Vanita’s novel, narrated by a courtesan-poet about her life-changing love for another courtesan-poet, weaves an exquisite web of conversations, songs as memories.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Climate destruction, not change, and an endemic pandemic mark our dreadful times. An artist cannot look away and Sudeep Sen confronts the nightmare upon us with his poetry, camera and hope. Suhasini Vincent reviews Anthropocene…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Madhav Hada in this translation by Pradeep Trikha revisits long-neglected historical records and her poetry to reveal the real Meera Bai, less a romantic ascetic poet of legend, more an independent woman of substance. Reviewed by GJV Prasad
…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The archetypes in the Gond Ramayani are borrowed from the repertoire of Gond narratives, rituals, belief systems and socio-cultural moorings, It is not just a “Ramayan in inverse.” argues Molly Kaushal.…[Read More]…