Sujit Saraf’s ‘Island’ is a captivating exploration of isolation, ambition and the collision between modernity and indigenous life. Inspired by the tragic real-life encounter of American missionary John Chau with the Sentinelese in 2018, the novel reimagines this incident as...
How innocent we must seem when we don’t know our fate,” says Hanif Kureishi in ‘Shattered’. It is one of the truest lines I have read in a long time. A man is at his partner’s house in Italy, running...
Pain and suffering, the eternal woes of being mortal… How we all wish, at times, for the elixir of happiness, one that will grant us the supreme goal of contentment and free us from the cycle of desire. But what...
Madan Veera’s poetry, rooted deeply in the lived experiences of marginalised voices within Punjabi society, finds new life in English through ‘Narratives of the Excluded’, translated by TC Ghai. Spanning 85 selected poems from Veera’s five volumes published between 2001...
The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia. Westland. Pages 364. Rs 599 An impoverished young man, Jagat, is found guilty of murder and is sentenced to the sleep of death for a century. A century later, tensions run high in Peruma. As...
Past the middle of the 18th century, the East India Company had made a major stride at Plassey in its advent to the country when a king down the peninsula sought to check this imperialism. Thus, Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan...
The finest moment in Haroon Khalid’s new book is when Waris meets Bulleh Shah. Khalid’s imagination blazes, consuming and re-creating the fabled encounter. The writing is crystalline and dazzling, etching the encounter in a gem of an essay within the...
IN recent years, scholars have shown a growing interest in exploring the roots of Indian indigenous modernity, often termed “vernacular modernity”, and how it has shaped, and sometimes challenged, Indian secular democracy. In this context, ‘So Says Jan Gopal: The...
I write this from a metropolis, Delhi, caught in the thick of smog. Each year, as winter sets in, a toxic cocktail spreads through the north Indian airshed, leaving residents of the region equally vulnerable and frustrated. A cacophony of...
An excerpt from ‘Society Girl’ by Saba Imtiaz & Tooba Masood-Khan. Roli Books. Pages 331. Rs 595
South Asia Speaks is a recently formed writers’ collective that supports outstanding emerging talent from South Asia, given the precarious conditions of freedom of expression in the region. It offers annual fellowships to promising voices, including disabled writers. In 2022,...
Young Pitambar reluctantly limps his way to a ramshackle school to please his unlettered father. Looking for a formula to get rich, he chances upon the secret affair between the school principal and the music teacher, and using the magic...
Jim Corbett, who died in 1955, is widely known for ‘Man-Eaters of Kumaon’, his bestseller published in 1944, which was translated early on into several Indian languages. What is not as widely known is that Corbett himself was an early...
THE Victoria Cross (VC) was instituted by the British in 1856 as the highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy, but it was only in 1911 that the right to receive the VC was extended to Indian...
Punjabis are not known for documenting their history, even as they played an outsized role in shaping major historical events. As time went by, information about what they achieved was lost; but, diligent research by dedicated writers has brought to...
Devdutt Pattanaik has acquired the reputation of a scholar who scrutinises religious texts and traditions from a distance, but with compassion and sympathy. His gaze is always secular and critical, but never derogatory or even condescending. This time, he has...
HISTORIAN and food critic Pushpesh Pant, in ‘From the King’s Table to Street Food’, embarks on an appetising voyage through the historical and cultural influences that define Delhi’s culinary landscape. This delectable trip starts in the Indraprastha of yore, makes...
Dehejia takes a critical view of the western-trained art historians
Rajiv Dogra, who was an accomplished professional diplomat, has after his retirement become a successful author focusing on India-Pakistan relations, among other subjects. His latest offering — ‘Autocrats: Charisma, Power, and Their Lives’ — is essentially an essay on the...
Anurupa Devi’s ‘Maa’ is a period piece on the private world of Bengali women as viewed through the unique lens of a writer who belonged to and knew that society intimately.
Society Girl by Saba Imtiaz & Tooba Masood-Khan. Roli Books. Pages 331. Rs 595 It was October 1970. Poet and former civil servant Mustafa Zaidi had been found dead in his bedroom. In the next room, Shahnaz Gul, a married...
The ‘Pioneers of Modern India’ series by Niyogi Books has been bringing to readers monographs of legendary Indians. While in the past it has published books on personalities such as Charu Majumdar, Homi J Bhabha, Jamini Roy, RK Laxman and...
The Israeli Defence Forces’ ongoing heartless and meticulous detonation of every house in entire villages in Lebanon and Gaza and the flattening of multi-storeyed buildings with civilians still inside have been beamed worldwide, thanks to the social media. But this...
It can’t be this or that when it comes to Kashmir, which remains a conundrum. Journalist Rohin Kumar’s ‘Lal Chowk’, translated into English by Dharmesh Chaubey, unravels the complex layers of history, politics and human emotions tied to the Kashmir...
A book written by a distinguished educationist and thinker like Krishna Kumar is bound to arouse my interest and curiosity. And as I begin to read it, I realise that unlike his other works, such as ‘Political Agenda of Education’...
A legendary port, a dangerous secret and a deadly oath — Hamish Morjaria’s ‘The Curse of Muziris’ weaves a historical thriller a la ‘The Da Vinci Code’. It tells the story of Jayesh, a trader from the fabled city of...
A coffee table book, ‘Tigers and Tribes: A Silent Conversation’ is born out of a three-day art exhibition in Delhi, organised by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Sankala Foundation to commemorate 50 years of Project Tiger. These...
The blurb of Samyukta Bhowmick’s book promises a complex, fast-paced, high-society murder mystery. The story begins promisingly at a Chattarpur guest house, where a crime novel by first-time author Kajal Puri is being launched. The theme of the event is...
Set in the Heartstopper universe, the LGBTQ+ young adult graphic novel, ‘This Winter’, covers the events of a particular Christmas with the Spring family. It’s a tastefully done emotional roller-coaster, a story of being a teenager, of being hurt, all...
In 1950, Saadat Hasan Manto, the man who gave voice to the traumatic realities of Partition, wrote thus: “The partition of the country and the changes that followed left feelings of revolt in me... when I sat down to write,...