At first glance, both the books under review appear to be slick Mills and Boons, the perception reinforced in no small measure by the titles.
Acollection of spiritual-religious hymns, translated from the vernacular in English always anticipates criticism and even dissatisfaction because the original is deemed sacred and by that rule evokes divinity and any attempt to translate is considered an academic exercise which precludes any spiritual insight.
Fahmida Riaz is a Pakistani feminist, a crusader for human rights and an iconoclast. Apart from being a well-known poet, short story writer and a novelist in Urdu, she has been closely associated with the women’s movement in Pakistan.
Pakistani writers are of course in fashion. They are writing in all genres—the serious novel of note, rambunctious social novels, epic sagas, and of course, the simplest and yet the most complex writing form of all—the short story.
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,’ writes Jane Austen in the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice, ‘that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ The same alas cannot be said of a woman of good fortune,
2009
On August 9, 1945, Hiroko Tanaka’s life changed forever. As she rejoiced at the thought of her future with Konrad, her German lover, a mushroom cloud enveloped Nagasaki. Hiroko survived, the design on her silk kimono burning its imprint on her back.
Tash Aw, the Malaysian novelist living in England has been making waves. His The Harmony Silk Factory won the Whitbread Award for a first novel, and also the Costa Award. Incidentally he was reported to have been paid an advance of 500,000 Sterling for that one, though he has denied it.
The languorous beginning of this 500-page novel complements the aura of indolence that also marks its unnamed first person narrator.
Several years ago when I was still a green, young and aspiring editor, Ravi Dayal, then editorial head of the Oxford University Press, gave me my first book to edit.
Epistemologies of Elegance is a book comprising twenty-one ghazals of Ghalib that are favourites of Azra Raza and Sarah Suleri Goodyear. Raza is, surprisingly, a research scientist and cancer specialist who was born in Karachi and now lives in Manhattan.
Diary writing is a very personal and spontaneous recollection of and reflection on everyday life events. A true diary is never written with the intention of publishing it and only rarely assumes importance to people beyond one’s immediate periphery.
The book is the South Asian edition of Geopolitical Exotica: Tibet in Western Imagination which attempts to bring together representations of Tibet and the study of international relations.
The work under review is a carefullyresearched resource on the Tibetan movement in exile, focusing in the main on the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA)—for all intents and purposes, the Tibetan government-in-exile—based in Dharmasala in Himachal Pradesh, India and headed by the 14th Dalai Lama.
2009
The story of Burmese resistance to military junta’s oppressive rule and its democratic struggle has been chronicled by many scholars, journalists and activists from different perspectives and preferences.
As a student of ‘ethno-nationalist’ conflicts in South Asia, it was with a sense of awe and challenge that I watched Nepal’s Maoist revolutionary upsurge unsettle conventional conflict theories.
Until just a few years ago history had still not escaped the overpowering influence of Leopold van Ranke, the great German historian of the nineteenth century.