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Volume 49 Number 10 October 2025
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This being said, we need to think of translation differently from the dominant western paradigms, which are steeped in the grammar of “target language”, “source language”, and “fidelity”. In the multilingual, multicultural, and multiethnic milieu of India, where every individual speaks more than one language, we need to think of translation and the publishing and reviewing of translation beyond the readily available vocabulary of ethno-nationalism. In addition, there is a need to recognize translation as rooted in its moment of production, encapsulating characteristics symptomatic of history wherein, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “past comes in constellation with the present”.’


Editorial

By Sanghadasagani Vacaka. Retold and translated from the original Prakrit by Sudhamahi Regunathan

Vasudevahindi also contains the story of the Ramayana, nestled in a chapter called ‘Madanavega Lamba’, narrated by someone called Dadhimukha who in the Valmiki Ramayana, is a minor monkey whose only role is telling Rama and Sugriva that the monkeys who are returning from the south must have been successful because drunk on honey, they have just destroyed the grove which was under his protection.


Reviewed by: Arshia Sattar

By Deeba Zafir

Chapter 1 provides the much-needed historical overview and discusses the contribution of lesser-known pioneers in this domain. While it is a critical commonplace to posit Hindi Dalit Writings as a post-Mandal phenomenon, Zafir traces, in a historical overview, Dayanand Batohi’s short stories, pre-dating them to even Satish’s ‘Vachan Baddh’, published in 1975 (hitherto believed to be the first Dalit short story in Hindi).


Reviewed by: B. Mangalam

Translated from the original Hindi by Awadhesh Tripathi

The book encapsulates the vision of a man whose faith in the spirit of oneness guided all his actions. It was his motherland that mattered to him. He was convinced that religious animosity and distrust must go, and caste barriers should be annihilated. Part one, ‘Self Portrait’, is a vivid account of Bismil’s childhood, life at home with his parents, adolescent years and the influence of his Gurudev Swami Somdevji. He also writes about his relationship with his mother. She was a constant source of encouragement to him.


Reviewed by: Ranu Uniyal

By Dhrubajyoti Borah. Translated from the original Assamese by the author

The novella also situates the miners’ struggles within the volatile identity politics of the region. Parallel to the strike, political agitation in distant Shillong against ‘infiltrators’ portrays the labourers’ demands for safety as an existential threat to the rights of indigenous tribals. The workers who are already marked as outsiders, become scapegoats for broader anxieties over demographic change.


Reviewed by: Parvin Sultana

Series edited by Mini Krishnan. Translated from the original Kannada by Susheela Punitha

‘The Idol that Chennappa Destroyed’ by Yarmunja Ramachandra shows us a picture of contemporary politics of the time. This is about Periyar’s ‘idol-breaking’ mass movement that originated in Tamil Nadu. It becomes a fanciful notion in the head of a wealthy, idle young man with no real ideological convictions. The poverty-stricken maker of clay idols in the village is sucked into this drama.


Reviewed by: S Jayasrinivasa Rao

Edited by Amit Chaudhuri

Any reader who has relative familiarity with the Bollywood film industry is sure to enjoy the next entry in this collection featuring Bollywood filmmaker Anurag Kashyap. In this interview excerpt, Kashyap candidly narrates the creative backstory of some of his box-office successes and misses such as Dev D (2009), Udaan (2010), The Lunchbox (2013), Sacred Games (2018), Lust Stories (2018), and more.


Reviewed by: Ann Susan Aleyas

By Jeet Thayil

While Ammu experiences ‘Elsewhere’ as a kind of ‘spiritual calling’—an inward choice rather than an external imposition—for others, it represents not merely a physical location, it is also a condition of unbelonging (p. 88). To be elsewhere is to be outside: of nations, of relationships, of language, of continuity. The primary narratorial voice belongs to Jeet, the son of Ammu and George. Like his parents, he is an Elsewherean, equally shaped by displacement and dislocation. Jeet retraces paths already taken: working for the Hong Kong magazine his father once led


Reviewed by: Amandeep Kaur

By Shabnam Virmani

A word now on sources and translations. As clearly perceptible from the quoted excerpts of the poems, Virmani’s translations are focused on capturing the spontaneous wit and crackling immediacy of Kabir’s vani. Towards this end, she dispenses with debates on literary translation; her endeavour is to get as close as possible to the lived, current idiom in the English translation so as to bring Kabir to non-Hindi audiences.


Reviewed by: Rohini Mokashi-Punekar

By Nandini Sahu

The collection opens with the titular poem ‘Medusa’ and immediately the poet wrests the narrative back with the announcement, ‘I will never reduce the illumination of my sparkling eyes./ Because you claim, my eyes have been your solitary gain’, followed by the declaration that ‘My “ecriture feminine” takes encounters/ with conformist patriarchal schemes.’ While making these assertions and refusing to be reduced to just a body part


Reviewed by: Shibani Phukan

By Sukrita

Such poems don’t lead you to a ‘deterministic’ meaning, rather they allow the reader to explore and find his/her own. The poet lets the reader embrace them as his/her ‘own’ poemlet. It’s as if the poet is side stepping, allowing the reader to take over and participate in the process of building up of a poem while reading it. It is both creative and courageous on her part to use a Hindi word


Reviewed by: Durga Prasad Panda

By Dr. Intaj Malek

Virtually all readers of this collection will recognize the many themes in these poems that tie into the well-known stories told about Krishna such as his childhood playfulness, his love for Radha, and the philosophical wisdom shared with Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. This poem builds on the boundless love of the Gopis,


Reviewed by: Christopher Key Chapple

Edited by Shweta Singh and Amena Mohsin

Gendered populism, as discussed in the third section, is masculine in its very essence and is often a key element of Right-Wing populist movements. It relies heavily on the politics of exclusion and ‘othering’; and governments use it to moralize political conflicts, demonize their political opponents, thereby mobilizing the masses. The final section, ‘Militarism and Militarisation’,


Reviewed by: Reshmi Kazi

By Kamal Nayan Choubey

Recent academic works have increasingly sought to critically engage with the complex and contested process of tribal identity formation in India. Much of this discourse locates the origins of such identity constructions in colonial epistemological and administrative frameworks. Early colonial representation depicted tribal communities as primitive, uncivilized, and as vestiges of a pre-Aryan, non-Vedic past.…


Reviewed by: L David Lal

Edited by Yatindra Singh Sisodia and Pratip Chattopadhyay

There are a few chapters in the book which present a systematic study on issues which have been rarely discussed in the academic discourse of electoral politics in India. For example, Ashutosh Kumar’s ‘Election Economy in India’ is one of the most crucial chapters in this volume, which discusses the advancement and working of election economy in India after Independence.


Reviewed by: Kamal Nayan Choubey

Edited by Shilpi Goswami and Suryanandini Narain

This is seen clearly in one of the most interesting essays: Suryanandini Narain’s ‘Yatra Chitra/Parivar Chitra: Mrs Gupta’s Photographic Record of a Family amidst a Changing Nation’. Mrs Gupta lived in Brindavan with her husband, the Principal of a local college, and their three children—Guddu, Guddi and Dabloo. Her photo albums of her family’s holidays in the 1960s to historical places of interest show the historic/tourist sites plus the whole family, which, according to Narain, ‘frame Mrs Gupta’s aspirations of looking at the family and nation as part of the same continued trajectory…’.


Reviewed by: Ranjana Sengupta

By Mohammad Asim Siddiqui

Organized in six incisive chapters, the book draws on concepts and methods from new critical close reading, deconstruction, and semiotic as well as discourse analysis to generate important insights into Hindi cinema. The opening chapter titled ‘From “History” to Circus: Politics of Genre and Muslims’ Representation in Hindi Films’, examines the representation of Muslims in historical films, war narratives, and biopics of Urdu literary figures. It contrasts the inclusive vision once embodied in films such as Mughal-e-Azam (1960), with more recent works that employ history to promote a Hindutva-oriented perspective wherein Muslims are depicted as ‘the other’.


Reviewed by: Nishat Haider

By Prateek Raj

In Rule 3 titled ‘Hear the Atypicals’, the author highlights the importance of how activities and products are ‘Designed’, which in turn will decide for whom the ‘design’ is suitable and/or how inclusive it is. The author provides an interesting chart (spread over pages 120 to 124) that lists industries in one column, the externalities that are specific to that industry in the second column,


Reviewed by: Padmini Swaminathan

By Aynne Kokas Oxford University Press

Based on this event, Kokas lays out her premise with clinical clarity. The global movement of data constitutes more than a privacy concern. American firms, driven by profit and often blind to the policy implications of their actions, have enabled Chinese regulators to assert digital sovereignty far beyond their borders. In the process, user data becomes not just a commercial asset, but a tool of statecraft.


Reviewed by: Bhavna Jaisingh

By Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor

Narayanan and Kapoor urge readers to resist the temptation to think of AI systems as fundamentally ‘unknowable’, as a priori hype obstructs accountability from people making billions by deploying AI tools to predict complex social phenomena. Prediction here also suffers from what is called ‘teaching to the test’ (p. 22), where the training occurs on the same data that is later used for evaluation to achieve high-performing results.


Reviewed by: Yusra Khan