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]…
Bookshelf
An excerpt from her forthcoming novel Ret Samadhi offers a glimpse of what to expect from Geetanjali Shree; translated as Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell……[Read More]…
Bookshelf
In late 17th century Mewar miniaturist Allah Baksh illustrated the Gita. K.P. Shankaran reviews Alok Bhalla and Chandra Prakash Deval’s book that puts together for the first time the artist’s luminous work .…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Dharampal examines the idea that Indians have been docile towards power as children towards their parents; if they have stood up to it, as the non-cooperation movement showed, European ideas of disaffection and/or Gandhi are responsible. Through meticulous research, he documents a home-grown tradition of civil disobedience. Some extracts…[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]…
Bookshelf
In this conversation with Sukrita Paul Kumar, Jeelani Bano offers an insight into the impulses that drive her fiction, her journey towards her vocation, the emptiness of the ‘award culture’……[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]…
Personal Notes
Ismat Chugtai recounts her run-in with the law and the obscenity trial in a Lahore court alongside Manto, with playful courage, conviction and trepidation at what she had wrought …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Born into a Mahar Dalit family, Kumud Pawde finds her vocation as a Sanskrit scholar and writer in the intersectional byways of gender, caste and their subaltern ambiguities.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Women writers have to become sensitive to the new terror of fundamentalism and the oppression of the lower castes, landless labourers, dalits and the starving millions, if we are not to be party to this crime, warns Ajeet Cour .…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
As a “young educated tribal woman,” Disha Wadekar finds ‘Womanism’ a more inclusive concept than Feminism for the women of diverse marginalized sections of Indian society …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Of this exquisite meditation by Krishna Sobti on her mother, translator-poet Alok Bhalla says it is revelatory of her own personal integrity and of the stoicism she admired in her women characters. …[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]…
Visual Spaces
On International Women’s Day a salute to women at work, discovering a new sky. …[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Vinay Lal introduces the reader to Beethoven’s little-known familiarity with texts like the Bhagavad Gita and “Indian ideas of the sensorium” that helped the composer create what he calls “the music of advaita” …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
The insurrection by Trump’s supporters January 6th at the US Capitol building was viewed as an attack on the most ‘sacred’ site in USA. Laurie L. Patton deconstructs this idea to ask: who belongs in these buildings? …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
For Pankaj Dutt reading Victory Colony 1950 rekindled memories of his search for meaning, as a student, at a refugee camp in 1971; it brings to life ghosts of a past he thought was long past. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Rooted and abstract, the paintings of Manish Pushkale invite calm reflection of civilisation’s legacies of spirituality, change and survival. A glimpse of his work on display starting 25th February …[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]…
Between The Lines
Unfettered by and unmindful of warnings and petitions by locals against development projects, governments have repeatedly chased dreams of modernity. We are now paying the price of a ravaged ecosystem says Sarosh Bana. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
The farmers’ agitation is taking a new turn, away from New Delhi and its barricades towards the rest of India. Avay Shukla considers what this means for the power elites of the capital.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
In conversation with Sukrita Paul Kumar, Urdu and Hindi writers discuss their art, modernity/tradition, the critic and much more. Extracts of her conversations with Qurratulain Hyder and Nirmal Verma. …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Spain’s Moorish past—La Convivencia—an inspiration for multiple faiths to live together comes to life in this multi-dimensional novel. Bhaswati Ghosh talks with Joyce Yarrow, author of Zahara and the Lost Books of Light. …[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]…
That’s Life!!!
Poet, translator and essayist Alok Bhalla does a variation on Surjit Patar’s Panjabi Poem. …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Awakening from the illusions of imaginary utopias promised by ‘historical Time’ Ashoak Upadhyay avers can help us discover the book of an expansive Present with no beginning or end.
…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
(First published June 20 2018)
India’s rich heritage of conservation visualized the world as a “Community of Beings” involving humans and other beneficent elements–hills and rivers, woods and trees, flora and fauna–according such beings respect, even veneration says Madhav Gadgil. Then colonialism and free India’s ‘Economy of Violence’ broke its back. But the healing is on. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
(First published March 10 2020)
In this shape-shifting prose-poem of imagined conversations with Gandhi’s heteronyms, Ashwani Kumar riffs on Ashis Nandy’s essay on the four ‘Gandhis’ after Gandhi to meditate on life in this darkling plain…[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Those who arrange languages into structures of hierarchy obscure the distinction between words and daggers, making us, rues Alok Bhalla, “hard-bristled, sharp-fanged, knife-clawed creatures with merciless fires in our eyes.” …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Popular understanding has it that ethnic exclusion is incompatible with democracy. Kanchan Chandra argues it isn’t. Silences built into our understanding of democracy legitimize such exclusion through manipulation of citizenship laws.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The idea of ‘vikas’ excludes wide swathes of people, their memories and shared experiences; it attempts to erase multiple Presents and peddles illusory Futures says Ashoak Upadhyay
…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Cheri Jacob K. finds that despite its inability to move beyond the logic and the cliché of the filmic/popular dominant, somewhere, right at the very end, one comes face to face with a stillness that whispers the film’s essence “Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Writing in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vinay Lal takes us into the interstices of this pandemic and its forebears. Ashoak Upadhyay reviews the work
…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
Arup Chatterjee’s homage to the Indian Railways recalls those epiphanies that opened up for Darius Cooper . all over again, his own private operatic love affair with the “black beauties.” …[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]…
Personal Notes
Mayank Bhatt discovers he has pancreatic cancer and confronts questions of life and living, death and dying, the pain and hope of treatment and what it means to be an atheist…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Sarosh Bana on the year that was and the images that should haunt every Indian with pain and anger, but may not as willful indifference sets in …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Shamsur Rehman Faruqi doyen of Urdu literary tradition and champion of an Indic aesthetic passes on.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The ‘Farm Laws’ are being contested as unjust because they transfer adjudicatory power from civil courts to state authorities. MAHALAKSHMI PAVANI examines these provisions as violations of the principle of separation of powers.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
The ongoing farmers’ agitation and the farm laws prompting them need to be located within the larger crisis fracturing rural India. The NRAS report offers an analysis that does this. Excerpts.…[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Amidst recurrent communal riots and Hindu-Muslim tensions in colonial Bengal, Tagore and Begum Rokeya, with vastly different backgrounds, religious identities, upbringing and creative sensibilities, stepped out of their cultural and gendered borders to embrace the ‘other’ says Mohammad A. Quayum …[Read More]…