This Place ♦ By Amitabha Bagchi Fourth Estate / HarperCollins, New Delhi, 2013, 253 pp., Rs 499 (HB) ISBN 978-93-5116-018-2 After being suspended from his government job, Naresh Kumar, the title character in Amitabha Bagchi’s previous book, The Householder (Fourth Estate, 2012), finds himself a stranger in his own house. He waits desperately for the evening, …
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Aminatta Forna travels to Croatia for her fourth novel ♦ In her fourth book, Aminatta Forna ventures out of Sierra Leone and Africa, the setting for her previous titles (including the Commonwealth Writer’s Prizewinning The Memory of Love). Set in a small town at the foot of the mountains in Croatia, The Hired Man, like Forna’s …
A Conversation With: Literary Critic and Novelist Shamsur Rahman Faruqi ♦ India’s literary establishment is abuzz about the recently published novel “The Mirror of Beauty,” a 984-page fictional account about the life and times of Wazir Khanam, the mother of the famed Urdu poet Daag Dehalvi, set mostly in Delhi and its environs during the …
Guidebook ♦ I wrote several chapters for Fodor’s Essential India guidebook and helped update others for the second edition. This included articles on Indian history and culture, food, archaeological monuments and Delhi. You can preview some of the content here. Originally published in 2011, updated in 2012.
Ajay Navaria’s stories deal with the new customs of caste ♦ A tea cup, a clogged toilet, a pair of old gym shoes; these innocuous objects are transformed into loaded signifiers of caste in a new collection of short stories by Jamia Millia professor and writer Ajay Navaria. These concrete details and objects anchor the …
Nivedita Menon sets her sights on a broader audience ♦ Don’t attract attention, don’t get yourself raped. Do get married and definitely make babies. In the face of all these patriarchal rules, we want justice and it’s pretty much a given that we want it now. Feminist scholar and activist Nivedita Menon wouldn’t necessarily dismiss …
Uday Prakash’s stories bring downtrodden characters to life ♦ “I bet you’re thinking that I’m taking advantage of the one hundred and twenty fifth anniversary of the birth of Premchand, the King of Hindi Fiction, to spin you some hundredand- twenty-five-year-old story, dressed up as a tale of today,” writes Uday Prakash, in one of …
Learning Urdu in Delhi ♦ Growing up mostly in the US, my Hindi instruction was limited to brief bouts of Sunday school and reading that ubiquitous Children’s Book Trust Panchatantra with my mother. I did all right, but my family’s own connection to reading Hindi was slight, given that half wrote in Gujarati and the …
Anjali Joseph processes bewilderment ♦ If Anjali Joseph’s second novel is best devoured in one sitting, it’s not because it wouldn’t hold up to slow, literary scrutiny. Rather, it’s because Another Country is the refreshing opposite of that “urgent book” that demands moral engagement. It builds character-driven emotional momentum through protagonist Leela’s peregrinations through Paris, …