Visual Spaces
Twenty years ago, Jangarh Singh Shyam, the Gond/ Pardhān artist took his own life. Akhilesh.traces his journey to fame as a sundering from “that mysterious world of Pardhān deities, which had, until then, sustained him. ” Translated by Aurogeeta Das. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Curated by Alok Bhalla, for The Beacon, ‘Asians in Africa’ offers glimpses of a diasporic existence as seen by various writers; experiences that carried the promise of belonging and the prospect of loss and flight. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
M.G.Vassanji runs us through a turbulent period of Asian –African history that birthed new literary and political initiatives of confluences, yet failed its promises. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Kenya’s South Asians were officially recognized in 2017 as its forty-fourth ‘tribe;, reversing the racialising populism of its founding father. Peter Kimani’s novel released five months earlier revisits this history with a Punjabi Muslim migrant cast as the father of the nation.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
In these two extracts from Land Lust, Joginder Paul traces the history of colonial Kenya through multiracial characters drawn with fine brushstrokes. The Slump translated by Chandana Dutta; Jambo Rafiqui by Usha Nagpal…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
A tribute to Makhan Singh, leftist thinker, who fought for Kenyan freedom, The Red Prophet, in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s words, “ is epic in scope and conception, and Brechtian in its unfolding.”…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Sukrita Paul Kumar remembers her childhood in Africa through two short verses...[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Neera Kapur-Dromson on ‘our Mama Mboga’ who delivered vegetables and fresh fruit to the house for thirty years in Livington Kenya. ..[Read More]…
Personal Notes
In these two vignettes of their remembrances of pre-Independant Kenya, Kishore Saint and then Prem Saint offer glimpses of working as teachers in a multiracial society ruled by a coloniser-mindset.
..[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon, South Asian SF Dialogues initiates conversations about SF from the subcontinent, with the authors who have helped shape the genre in recent times Here’s Bina Shah …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Curated by Tarun K. Saint for The Beacon, South Asian SF Dialogues series continues conversations about SF from the subcontinent, with authors who have helped shape the genre such as Anil Menon
…[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 M.G.Vassanji. Followed by an extract from his novel, “Nostalgia”
…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Darius Cooper responds to Geetanjali Shree’s “Growing up in Two Tongues” with delightful vignettes of multilingual possibilities and offers a clue as to why “English…determinedly adopted me.”..[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Keki Daruwalla pays tribute to Raza’s preoccupation with the Bindu, the point of creation, “Prana Bindu” in Raza’s words, that marked the late painter’s ‘re-birth’ as an artist. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Poet Gavin Barrett chats up ‘oral’ poet and calligrapher H. Masud Taj. Both from Bombay/Mumbai, they meet for the first time in Toronto and talk poetry, life and memories-in verse.
…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
This collection of emails between Asif Raza, poet, essayist and M. U. Memon, literary critic, essayist and editor is a dialogic feast of literary influences that shaped them and an ode to friendship. …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Odia novel Maya Purush by Paramita Satpathy is a first-person narrative of a man who feels he is nothing, an illusion, as he leads a dual life. The first chapter of forthcoming translation by Anuradha Sen …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Final Wishes is the original, first chapter of Paul Zacharia’s novel, in English. Dropped by common consent as the author explains in his Note it sets the stage teasingly enough for a fantasy about the art of lying, peopled by improbably ‘real’ characters ” …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (2019), a first-of-its-kind compilation offers a fascinating display of South Asian writing. In the Introduction, Tarun K. Saint takes us on a journey over its rich past and the exciting future of this genre..…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Political lies and falsehoods work their malevolent magic when they are transmitted as images of manufactured reality, illusions that create the complicit subject says Ashoak Upadhyay…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
“No friend can come to your side and one cannot, in good conscience hold that expectation of anyone.” In this desolate aloneness Anannya Dasgupta turns to haiku and the “aesthetic loneliness of sabi...[Read More]…
Bookshelf
A very timely parable on the need to distinguish between ‘humanitarian’ and the ‘human’, Manjula Padmanabhan’s one act play entertains and provokes.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Recent moves by the administrator of Lakshadweep will have severe ecological, social and cultural impact on the inhabitants not to mention on the fragile ecosystem around the islands says Vikalp Sangam…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A light-hearted tale of a serial talker whose company neighbours avoid and how he almost won the motor-mouth slug-fest; by Saeed Ibrahim, illustrated by Danesh Bharucha. . …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A story that works at two levels: the surface one, where Intizar Husain records man’s priority for commerce and at the deeper level of an unspoken bond with Nature that is wordless; memory speaks/suffices. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Inflected with ‘environmental sensibilities; Majeed Amjad and Amiq Hanafi offer us poetic visions that should open our eyes and make us think of the world and the ineffable. Both translated from Urdu by Riyaz Latif…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
A tribal matriarch nurtures forests like her own children. A rooted conservationist for fifty years, Tulsi Gowda was awarded the Padma Shri but her head is still turned towards her saplings.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Poet Vinod Kumar Shukla and late painter J. Swaminathan, created works that talk to each other about what should but doesn’t matter to us: Trees. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
In an intense examination of a writing life, Punjabi writer Ajeet Cour on what drives her: among others, an attempt “ to reconstruct life and interpret it in terms…more persuasive than reality.”…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Hindi fiction writer Geetanjali Shree on growing up in two languages invested with an objectionable colonial hierarchy, finding the ‘Centre’, her centre in the ‘Other’ that turns her vocation ‘visible’...[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In his short life (1904-1926) Srečko Kosovel produced diverse work: over a thousand poems, hundreds of essays, prose pieces and notes that continue to engage readers. Rabindranath Tagore cast a major intellectual influence on his work as the young Slovenian avant-garde poet sought answers to issues such as imperialism and nationalism, …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Indira Goswami’s life and work interrogate facets of women’s empowerment in India, foremost among them attitudes to the girl-child, marriage, widowhood, mapping a continuum of social change says Malashri Lal.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Jecinta Kerketta urges us to turn our attention from the horrors of floating corpses to the rivers that died or are dying; their mortality heralds the collapse of civilization itself. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Hindi poet Anamika interlaces themes of politics, society and domesticity in her poems, five from her first published collection in English and the rest from a forthcoming one. All translations by Vinita Sinha …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Time was when we stood in long lines in order to live: that was bad enough, but today we have to wait in longer lines in order to die… we also have to wait in line to be cremated or buried, three to a pyre or grave. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Image’ managers weave veils over the brutal incompetence of pandemic governance; but illusions and the Image-as-Spectacle are constantly manufactured to obscure ‘abyssal’ lines in our society, says Ashoak Upadhyay …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Pash comes to life as the poet talking back to the demons of our imes in these fresh translations from his work by Alok Bhalla…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Dead bodies piling up, losing friends and relatives: Ashwani Kumar expresses his anguish but his poem is also about the longer history of hatred, the ideology of the rulers- a virus that devastates us.; his vision is dark, dystopian yet lyrical. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In the twilight years of the Mughal era, a tragi-comic tale by Ismat Chugtai of a child-bride discovering dignity and selfhood as a world collapses around her. Translated by Ayesha Kidwai.…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Coping with his existential grief as the virus, ‘malaise and mortality’, enters his home, Riyaz Latif remembers Degas’ sublime, soft lines of his Whirling Nuns. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Ink and Brush Portraits by Akbar Padamsee of the heads of prophets scarred by suffering, shying away from our compassion and yet some glow with tints of mercy …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
A comprehensive response to the COVID crisis involves prioritising human and environmental concerns. Those should be the lesson rom the first wave, urges Vikalp Sangam Core Group. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Novelist Geetanjali Shree ruminates on man’s hubris and her own anguish as its ‘collateral beneficiary’. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Selections from the latest published volumes of prose and poetry by Kunwar Narain re-affirm the breathtaking range of his creative visions of lived experiences and their tilted truths…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Critiquing mainstream education as the legacy of the dismissal of colonized people as incapable of culture and epistemic pursuits, Sayan Dey casts around for alternatives he calls Pedagogy of the Stupid. …[Read More]…
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]…
Between The Lines
In a classic case of cognitive injustice, farmers are being blamed for falling groundwater tables in Punjab. Research Unit for Political Economy, a think tank, dissects that fake “toolkit” and points to the underlying causes of a policy-driven environmental disaster and more…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
The horrors of our inhumanity wreaked on children is captured viscerally in this brief poem by Keki Daruwala…[Read More]…