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Volume 50 Number 8 August 2026
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By Romila Thapar

The latter, obviously, reeks of violent prejudice. However, while insisting solely or even primarily on the former identity acknowledges her courage and perseverance, it often forecloses the possibility of engaging with the rich, complex, even conflicting uncertainties that Thapar continues to engage with, with clarity, confidence and care. As she asks, almost plaintively: ‘Who would understand that I dreaded being stereotyped (p. 97)?’
As I worked my way through the volume, I could not help wondering whether Thapar’s deep engagement with Sanskrit texts, ranging from the Vedas and Upanishads to the epics, charitas,


Reviewed by: Kumkum Roy

By Gopalkrishna Gandhi

The essay has long been celebrated as a quiet instrument of thought—plain in style yet deep in reach, brief in length yet lasting in effect. It is neither a polemic nor a treatise, but a way of thinking aloud with discipline. Francis Bacon called his essays ‘dispersed meditations’, showing how a short piece could hold a lifetime of reflection. George Orwell demonstrated how plain language could carry moral urgency. Virginia Woolf turned everyday observation into meditation, as in Street Haunting, where a walk through London became a reflection on identity. Nirad C Chaudhuri blended memory with sharp commentary,


Reviewed by: TCA Ranganathan

By Jaladhar Sen. Translated from the original Bengali by Somdatta Mandal

I found myself revisiting the happy days of my childhood and the cherished memories of my youth’ (p. 158). Time collapses, ‘I momentarily forgot the sorrow, suffering, and hardships endured along the journey’ (p. 163). Sen’s receptivity to the divine surfaces despite his scepticism: ‘This beautiful, harmonious sound did not arise from any earthly musical instrument, rather, it seemed to flow into the ears of the pilgrims like a divine congratulatory hymn’ (p. 182). Why ‘congratulatory’? For reaching the final destination or attaining the peace that his bruised soul craved? Perhaps it brought a readiness to return to worldly pursuits.


Reviewed by: Malashri Lal

By Akhtarul Iman. Translated from the original Urdu by Baidar Bakht

Iman writes in some detail about his professional or sociable associations with a few of the progressives. As regards the political or ideological stance of the writers, he remains mostly neutral though at times somewhat critical, and sometimes, ostensibly, he tilts in favour of the rubrics of the Lahore-based Halqa-e Arbab-e Zauq (circle of the men of taste) literary movement, his poetic art, language and his poetic subjects crisscrossing both. As regards the Partition which he was witness to,


Reviewed by: Fatima Rizvi

By Rajendra Banahatti. Translated from the original Marathi by Jerry Pinto

The judicious use of footnotes, something not in fashion currently, to explain cultural practices like antarpat, a benediction from Sanskrit, or a line from Sant Ramdas adds value to the smooth and flowing narration. A brief introduction to the context of the writer (especially when s/he is a lesser-known writer in the English-speaking scenario) and the place of this text in the Marathi ecosystem could have added some gravitas to the text and helped readers to build a more adequate picture about the context of production. It is curious to see the narrator, a retired engineer who has had no whiff of literature or art by his own admission, using words like uxorious or non compos mentis.


Reviewed by: Vanamala Viswanatha

Told by Mallu Swarajyam to Uma Chakravarti, Vimala Morthala and S. Katyayini. Translated from the original Telugu by Purnima Tammireddy

As she observes after becoming an MLA, ‘Regardless of one’s political leaning or ideology, one must discover the issues that people face and evolve strategies within the legal framework to resolve them’ (emphasis added). Although she eventually became one of the most recognizable leaders of the Communist Party, she disarmingly remarks, ‘All my work in the movement was unplanned; it happened organically.’ Unlike many political memoirs, which retrospectively impose ideological coherence upon youthful activism, The Fire of Defiance presents political consciousness as something that emerged gradually through lived experience, family influence, and direct encounters with oppression.


Reviewed by: Vijay Kumar Tadakamalla

By Abdul Bismillah

But he also shares the darker stories of writers’ lives, of acute financial insecurity or plain poverty, of mental anguish and bleak prospects. Poet and wordsmith Trilochan spent his early days in Banaras subsisting on chana before doing the rounds of offices looking for work. Sometimes, he would count the chana to make sure it lasted him throughout the day. Amarkant was an established writer in the seventies but still lived in a one-room house in Allahabad with his family of five. Later in his life, he fell seriously ill but didn’t have the money to get himself treated. When Bismillah went to meet Harishankar Parsai in Jabalpur, he found the great satirist almost bedridden (he was afflicted with sciatica). B


Reviewed by: Poonam Saxena

By Mahadevi Varma. Translated from the original Hindi by Ruth Vanita

Because she lived on her own terms, her poetry was reduced to autobiographical confession. The patriarchs of Hindi criticism systematically sidelined her achievement. Ramchandra Shukla allocated her a scant half-page in his history, mocking her ‘addiction’ to pain and confining her to the realm of spiritual mysticism. Hazari Prasad Dwivedi found a different route to the same patriarchal condescension, judging her talent inferior to Jaishankar Prasad’s by claiming she lacked his intellectual constitution.


Reviewed by: Nikhil Kumar

By Rajendra Yadav

While growing up, the entire locality basically acted as the perimeter of her house but now, as she rightly points out, the flat culture has made us all ‘illiberal, lonely and insecure’. Unlike Yadav’s memoir which seems like a vignette of fleeting moments trying to latch on to some significant event of his life and instead tends to seem like a quest to impose self-importance, Bhandari’s words are rooted and lay down her life bare for all of us to witness. She talks of how she got married to Yadav while studying in Calcutta but soon realized that she had to single-handedly take care of their household as he had already declared that he had dedicated his life to writing. While both of them went on to become celebrated writers, they struggled financially. She talks about writing but also yearning to write more.


Reviewed by: Chittajit Mitra

By Anisur Rahman

Though the possibilities of mazmoons are endless—as Wali, Mir’s predecessor, so evocatively said, raah-e mazmoon-e taaza band nahin/ ta qayaamat khulaa hai baab-e sukhan—certain kind of mazmoons were admissible to this discourse, others were not. He argued that classical Indo-Persian and Urdu poetry should be evaluated by its internal, formalist poetics rather than Western standards of raw emotional realism. The genre of ghazal should be appreciated for its impersonal, stylized artistry, its structural ingenuity and depth rather than its adherence to literal truth or some facile notions of realism. This is amply illustrated in the commentary section of The Essential Mir where one can see infinite variations on some common themes and the ingenuity with which those themes have been treated from different angles.


Reviewed by: M Asaduddin

Edited by Zothanchhingi Khiangte & Manab Medhi

The poems induce intellectual contemplation, and perhaps even an emotional engagement. Even after the poems have been read and the book laid down, certain lines linger, for in these uncertain times, like Anju, we too ‘are no longer surprised/ By the tyranny of tyrants, and the betrayal of liars’. Along with her, we mourn our own lack of surprise in a world where headlines scream of doom and disaster, and ‘what was once habit has become a disease./ Reading the newspaper is a disease’, as Dhirjyu Basumatary laments.


Reviewed by: Sanam Khanna

By Paul Zacharia. Translated from the original Malayalam by A.J. Thomas, Gita Krishnankutty, S. Gayatri Devi, S.P. Ramesh, Anupama Raju and the author

‘A Day’s Work’ is a son’s letter to a prospective nurse for his aged mother’s 24×7 care. It is a neurotic’s over-detailed checklist, which incidentally also reflects his meticulous concern as it does the extreme demands of a nurse’s vocation. The exactness and clarity of the minute-to-minute routine, put down without apparent emotion and as if mechanically, is like a clock face that hides the force wound up in the spring.


Reviewed by: Rajesh Sharma

By Imayam

For the teacher is one of those whose education and exposure to the wider world have kept his caste consciousness from diminishing his self-confidence. A place name for him is just an address. Not so for the girl, who is one of the few in her community to have made it to that middle school full of ‘other’ children from ‘other’ villages. Ironically, her name turns out to be Arivoli—the Light of Wisdom. Her parents have given her the name of the literacy movement—Arivoli Iyakkam—of the 90s, which drew people from every nook and corner of Tamil Nadu to raise the literacy level to 85.5 per cent. But Arivoli did not do away with the caste system. On the contrary,


Reviewed by: Vasantha Surya

By Gauri Shankar Raina. Translated from the original Kashmiri by Pankaj Bhan

We are introduced to many of the travellers on the journey from Jammu to Srinagar, initially bickering but later on settling into a familiar rhythm of many an Indian trip. We witness some charming encounters in the wistfulness of Swaroop Nath, a recently retired government employee, who eavesdrops on a burgeoning romance between a young footballer Ashfaq Dar and a girl visiting her maternal uncle and his wife on her own for the first time. Swaroop Nath, clearly a romantic, moves to a seat behind his allocated one to allow both to talk freely.


Reviewed by: Maithreyi Nandakumar

By Nanjil Nadan. Translated from the original Tamil by S. Thillainayagam

Tormented by his failure to get a job and left with no option but to pursue the hereditary occupation of farming, he mocks at the incongruity of his own situation in a series of questions such as ‘Did I learn Kepler’s laws, Sangam poetry, Shelley, Byron, Pilgrim’s Progress, Manonmaniam, King Lear and Macbeth…only to weed our field?’ This is followed by another series of questions, queries, commands and comments that he would hear all the while from fellow farmers. (Nanjil Nadan is well-known for the way he piles on details to achieve an incremental effect.)


Reviewed by: T Sriraman

By Jeyamohan. Translated from the original Tamil by V. Iswarya

The former has a story line that will sound familiar to readers of Malayalam fiction revolving round ancient joint families (tharavad) with rivalries, vengeance, curses and mental illness running in the family for generations. It is a dark world of collective guilt which has its roots in the feudal past of rampant criminality and treachery which refuses to be exorcised, despite retellings in every medium from folk-ballads to celluloid dramas.


Reviewed by: EV Ramakrishnan

By Ravi Shankar Etteth

An interesting one titled ‘Shhh’ is about his grandmother who handed him a spiky shell before she died. She, the wife of one of the native officers in the Malabar Special Police, along with her small daughter, had gone out of curiosity to see Gandhiji. There were milling crowds but all he did was to raise his finger to his lips, and everyone went silent. The soldier who was on guard came and stood in front of the lady at which the crowd felt disturbed. She bent down and picked up something. Gandhiji caught her eye and signalled that she should leave. The crowd parted and she went home.


Reviewed by: Ahana Lakshmi

By Sakyajit Bhattacharya. Translated from the original Bengali by Arunava Sinha

She is an investigative journalist who writes a column on closed cases. The case she has picked up this time is of the murder of Amitava Mitra, a popular poet of his times. The prime accused was the dead man’s friend Arun Chowdhury, but he was released for lack of evidence. The case has remained unsolved and lies buried in police archives for the last four decades.


Reviewed by: Aruna Chakravarti

By Feisal Alkazi

One of the techniques that Alkazi uses to honour his side of this bargain is to frequently recreate whatever has happened in a kind of mental action replay by his chief detectives so that the reader is also reminded of all the variables that are colliding in this labyrinthine plot. As Fernandes suggests, ‘Re-enter the scene imaginatively in a way, and it is amazing how much detail you will recall.’ What makes Alkazi’s mystery novel so fascinating is that each time this happens, a vivid picture does emerge but with a twist.


Reviewed by: Anjana Neira Dev

Translated by Akshaya Kumar & Navdeep Singh

‘Cry of the Sky’ by Bhura Singh Kaler is a poignant documentation of Dalit silence and marginalization. ‘My Story, Everybody’s Story’ by Prem Gorkhy is the most ideological in its fictional intent. Underlined by a palpably Marxist tone and texture, it goes on to etch the contours of socio-sexual inequities that, within the context of multiple hierarchies, create a spectrum of mutually hostile caste situations. ‘Gaurjan’ by Ajmer Singh Sidhu, the last story in this collection,


Reviewed by: Anup Singh Beniwal

By Mohammed Khadeer Babu. Translated from the original Telugu by D.V. Subhashri

The translator says: ‘Let me warn you, it’s not just mispronunciations, but a few misspellings too that have crept in on purpose, such as Idyaniketan for Vidyaniketan, Ishvodaya for Vishvodaya, Enkateswara for Venkateswara, haeroplanes for aeroplanes, rishckaw for rickshaw, otel for hotel, iskool for school, kilas for class, etc. In addition to aiding the tone and humour, my intention was to represent how words are sometimes regurgitated solely by their sound, and how pronunciation tends to morph as it travels across class, region, age or education…. This is just to remind the reader that these stories come from hinterland, where the colloquial idiom is typically a mixture of languages and cultures.’


Reviewed by: R Azhagarasan

Translated from the original Bengali by Anchita Ghatak

When her mother arrives to make her home with them, the clashes between these two strong personalities result in so much strife that the family members are forced to take sides.
‘The Temple’ brings together two disparate characters, Aparna and Shaktinath. Aparna is the daughter of a zamindar whose days are spent in prayers and rituals. On her husband’s death, she returns to her father’s village and resumes management of the temple. This brings her into contact with Shaktinath, the son of the old priest.


Reviewed by: Madhavi Sethupathi

By Jeyamohan. Translated from the original Tamil by Suchitra

It remained there for around sixty years, until the Vijayanagara kingdom restored the temple in the city of Madurai and reinstalled the idol. Around this regional lore, the novel weaves its web of nostalgia for a faith in which gods were intimately connected with the lands they were consecrated on, in which social bonds of kinship and forms of affect associated with them could apply to the gods. Such faith was characteristic of the many kinds of worship that are now collectively referred to as ‘Hindu’. Nostalgia for such faith was prominent, for example, in the vociferous opposition of this section to the Supreme Court judgment of 2018 that allowed the entry of women of menstruating ages into the forest-shrine of Sabarimala.


Reviewed by: J Devika

By Madhav Hada. Translated from the original Hindi by Pradeep Trikha

Unlike many saint poets, Meera’s own personality also shines forth in her poetry. Hada notes her use of symbols and imagery related to the feminine body. ‘Words like kaakan (bracelet), moondro (ring), ghagroo (skirt or lehenga), duladi (double threaded beads), dovodo (a special ornament), akhota (ear ornament), jhootano (pendant), besari (nose ring), choodo (ivory bangles), rakhari (head ornament), are frequently used in her poetry.’ Intense emotions caused by separation also fill her poems and she can say ‘Phaarungi chir karun gal kantha, rahungi bairagan hori ri’ (I’ll tear my clothes, will renounce all material pursuits, clad in a patched robe).


Reviewed by: Mohammad Asim Siddiqui

By Volga. Translated from the original Telugu by Purnima Tammireddy

It is not knowledge which centres around ‘man’ as being the sole harbinger of ‘civilization’ with relentless power to subjugate whosoever fails to obey him. This is the wisdom Shabari expects from Rama and this is the wisdom with which she feels that the world is yet to realize the kernel of truth in her words. Shabari tells Rama, ‘I was looking forward to seeing you. My hope is that you will guide mankind into times when there would be no kingdom, no cities, no civilization’ (p. 118). ‘Mata! You’re trying to spin the wheel of time backwards, and that’s impossible’ (p. 119), pleads Rama. Shabari attempts to convince him that in his desire and duty to fight and punish, he is abiding by the rajdharma of breeding enmity. Rama shares with her the inevitability of humankind’s march towards civilization.


Reviewed by: Disha Pokhriyal

By Salma. Translated from the original Tamil by GJV Prasad

Her mother, Zohra, is gentle, obedient, and conservative. Her steadfast devotion to her husband’s authority renders her incapable of crossing the boundaries drawn by patriarchy. But all women in Rabia’s familial network do not belong to the same category; some openly rebel, while others find subtler ways of defiance. Through Rabia’s gaze and the polyphony of voices that surround her, Salma constructs a vivid theatre of women, living and dying; of women who, though confined to their cloistered lives, are dreamers and rebels, defiant survivors and victims, tragic sufferers and filled with laughter and gaiety, all at the same time.


Reviewed by: THE DARK HOURS OF THE NIGHT (IRANDAAM JAAMANGALIN KATHAI)

By M. Mukundan. Translated from the original Malayalam by Nandakumar K.

What was the way out? You loved life as much as the sea loves the shore. Your grouse was that life did not reciprocate even an iota of that love. The thought of suicide had never occurred to you. How could someone with a lust for life end his own life? Instead, you began to seriously consider the option of taking a vacation from life and going somewhere else.’ Witness the sensitivity with which the author captures the angst of an individual even while preserving the dignity and meaning of life! This showcases the essence of the writer’s contribution to modernist sensibilities in Malayalam literature. On the part of the translator, it requires sensitivity to the nuances of words, tones and voices in the text.


Reviewed by: V Bharathi Harishankar

By K Bharathi. Translated from the original Tamil by T. Sriraman

Married off before she has attained puberty, the fact (among other things) that she slowly grows taller than her husband, is pretty much a cause for complaint for her mother-in-law. Her fondness and talent for music is not allowed to flourish, and the veena she brought from her maternal home upon marriage is relegated to the forgotten confines of a store-room, never to see daylight or come alive under her deft fingers ever again.


Reviewed by: Malati Mathur

By Ki Rajanarayanan. Translated from the original Tamil by Shubashree Desikan

For me, one of the lesser problems in this translation is the tendency to annotate, to present words in the original language and give an endnote or explaining them in parenthesis inline. And I think it is perfectly alright if employed judiciously. But in the book, most often, such words from Tamil are not only explained within parenthesis in-line in the text, but also explained away in endnotes, and when it is done repeatedly on almost every page, unlike in the original, it impedes the narrative, acting as roadblocks as it were.


Reviewed by: Subash Jeyan

By Perumal Murugan. Translated from the original Tamil by V. Geetha

While translating them gives the reader unfamiliar with Tamil a sense of this, it also removes the linguistic tilt to the names. The first impression I had when reading this was a parallel to nicknames used by slave traders and white masters for their African American slaves. Using the original names would have retained the original flavour. There are many challenges a translator would face in translating Perumal Murugan, or indeed any author whose story lives in the soils of rural India and whose characters speak in unfamiliar dialects. This would involve a lot of interpreting, sometimes reading silences


Reviewed by: Shubashree Desikan

By Aa Madhavan. Translated from the original Tamil by Ramakrishnan V

The novel focuses on the relationship of a few families and their landlord, the protagonist of the novel, Guruswamy—an archetype of landlords across the country in the forties. With no particular skill or ability, he is granted respect and enjoys a standing in society conferred by birth as it were. Most of the action in the novel happens in and around a small coconut grove of some two acres owned by him.


Reviewed by: Ravi Menon

While other boys his age get girlfriends and go to the theatre, Sato Reang is forced to spend every night in prayer recitation. There are tragedies involving fire. Fire begins to feel like a slowly developing leitmotif, a stand-in for anger, rage, rebellion and other teenhood feelings.
And then father dies. What initially feels like freedom from religious duties quickly starts to escalate into a taste for violence for the teenager. He quickly realizes that his father can no longer force him to play by the rules. Sato Reang is suddenly and absolutely and violently free to do anything he pleases.


Editorial

By Tripurari Sharan. Translated from the original Hindi by Arunava Sinha

She narrates the story of George V’s visit to Ramanpur and the miles-long red carpet laid out to welcome royalty, as well as the vice-like regulations exercised over caste norms, female mobility and education within which constraints she is brought up. It is perhaps these strongly ingrained notions of caste purity that inform Dadi’s antipathy to her husband’s pet dogs. This can only be surmised, for Laura appears to have no answer to the same question raised repeatedly in her narrative.


Reviewed by: Rohini Mokashi-Punekar

By Syed Muhammad Ashraf. Translated from the original Hindi by A. Naseeb Khan

A book which Chotey Mian’s father considers to be ‘just an account of a journey and a few superstitions’, but which becomes an obsession for the young boy, one from which he has to be weaned away by incantation and prayer. Written across generations of the family, it contains accounts of journeys stretching way back into the past including a remarkable encounter between one of his ancestors and the spectre of Timur in Samarkand.


Reviewed by: Ranjana Kaul

Translated from the original Bangla by Anita Kar in collaboration with John Mackrell. Illustrations by Krishnendu Chaki

The first person, however, has no place in Sripantha’s storytelling about Kolkata. He narrates objectively and knowledgably. In contrast, the personal reminiscences of the authors’ relationship with the city are revived in books like Ashok Mitra’s Calcutta Diary (1977), Amartya Sen’s Calcutta after Independence (2019), Amit Chaudhuri’s Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013) and Suresh Kohli and KA Abbas’s Evening in Calcutta (2015).


Reviewed by: Nivedita Sen

By Daisy Rockwell

The first part of her book swoops and soars through metaphors that can suggest, if not sum up, these relations. Among those metaphors are Lego, Fred and Ginger, a Bridge, a Genie in a Bottle, a Monster, a Phantom Limb, and a Three-legged Race. The middle of the book is a series of Kafkaesque nightmares as Rockwell narrates her own experiences of trying to secure the rights to translate the works of various ‘great’ living (but almost dead) writers.


Reviewed by: Arshia Sattar

By Maitry Roy Moulik. Translated from the original Bangla by Chandana Dutta

William Smith, the ‘living legend’, did have a few sympathetic friends like cartographer and publisher John Cary and Dr Fitton, aristocrat, Member of Parliament, the Royal Society and the Geological Society of London. Yet, Smith was entirely alone in upholding independent research in the fast-changing scenario of industrialization and mechanization of rural Britain.
A lifetime of personal suffering and professional humiliation was partially compensated with the award in 1832 of the first Wollaston Gold Medal, for Smith’s contribution to the emerging science of geology. The ceremony, held in Oxford’s historic Sheldonian Theatre Hall, begins with an eloquent address by a young man, recently enlisted as Professor in the geology department of the university.


Reviewed by: Jayati Gupta

By Ashoke Mukhopadhyay. Translated from the original Bengali by Zenith Roy

We never have a chance to fully cognize its impact and fallout. Problems inexplicably get resolved ‘off-stage’; for instance, a character who is preparing to abduct her own son from the home of her hostile in-laws and philandering husband—arguably a very high-stakes situation—has her son suddenly and voluntarily handed over to her by said in-laws and husband.


Reviewed by: Aishwarya Jha

By Ajay Navaria. Translated from the original Hindi by Nita Kumar

The novel begins with his encounter with a sex worker, Ayesha, and ends with the birth of his girl child, Maya. The presence of the sex worker becomes the catalyst for the protagonist to deliberate upon his relationships with other women: his earlier affair with an older married woman, his failed relationship with his first wife who eventually commits suicide, and the strained relations with his present wife, which lying about his past precipitates. Interestingly, the protagonist resists the charms of Ayesha throughout the novel, only to exchange a kiss towards the end.


Reviewed by: Deeba Zafir

By Kusum Khemani. Translated from the original Hindi by Banibrata Mahanta

For many contemporary Hindi readers, me included, this ‘high’ style can feel alienating, and relief comes only in the dialogues, where the idiom is more fluid and accessible. Against this backdrop, the translator’s fear that his English version might sound ‘too academic’ (p. 241) feels ironic, since reading the Hindi original is no less a challenge for the reader. Khemani’s preference for this elevated register may not be accidental. Her ancestors migrated to Kolkata in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the bhadralok elite valued Sanskritized Hindi and formal diction as marks of refinement.


Reviewed by: Umesh Kumar

By Kamal Desai. Translated from the original Marathi by Shanta Gokhale Speaking Tiger Books, 2025, pp. 128, ₹ 399.00

Who burnt the studio and the film has been kept hazy, but the thrust of the novel suggests that she herself would have set it on fire. Writer-critic Prakash Deshpande-Kejkar writes, ‘The heroine of Hat Ghalnari Bai mortgages her body for giving shape to the movie of her dreams; this freedom of body is a noble culmination of women’s freedom.


Reviewed by: Nadeem Khan

By Praveen Kumar Jha. Translated from the original Hindi by Pooja Priyamvada Vani Prakashan,

The agreements themselves were drawn up in English and translated into Hindi or Urdu. Despite being detailed, the agreements meant very little to the workers, most of whom were illiterate and had no real way of knowing what they were agreeing to. Most agreements had four main clauses: both parties were to sign before a British Government officer; the period of indenture was five years, extendable by another five; on completion, the labourer was to be returned to Calcutta; and the ship carrying them was required to provide food, sanitation and a doctor. The machinery that fed this system was no less corrupt than the contracts it produced. Jha traces the role of the arkaati, the local recruiting agents who frequented the villages of Bihar and Awadh, luring poor and desperate men and women with tall promises of jobs and prosperity.


Reviewed by: S Deepika

By Mamta Kalia. Translated from the original Hindi by Jerry Pinto

One of the strengths of the novella is the compassion with which Kalia portrays each character, without making anyone the villain. The parents’ sorrow is real and recognizable. They are not demanding people. They are simply unable to reconcile themselves to a world in which children no longer see their future in the same place as their parents.


Reviewed by: Malati Mukherjee

By C.V. Raman Pillai. Translated from the original Malayalam by G.S. Iyer

The moral compass of the novel, expressed in the word ‘qualities’, is the key to differentiating Parukutty’s prince-like lover, presumed dead, and Padmanabhan Thampi, who is wooing her. This takes us beyond the legalistic question of who the rightful successor to the throne should be. Had Thampi been that person, he would still be deemed unworthy in the moral scheme that the novel upholds. In this sense, Marthandavarma is a profoundly moral novel.


Reviewed by: Himansu S Mohapatra

By Basudev Sunani. Translated from the original Odia by Raj Kumar

Burnt is the story of Makaru’s journey, both in life and on the train, the latter holding a tight grip on the narrative as the protagonist—if a victim may be so called—recollects the anguish of both witnessing and suffering atrocities perpetrated on the untouchable class of Lathore. The narrative begins with a realist description of the train compartment in which Makaru (who appears to be the alter ego of the novelist) is travelling. He looks upon his fellow passengers, many of whom are from the more privileged class of society but with hardly any civic sense, smoking like a chimney, throwing peanut shells and even allowing little girls to urinate on the floor.


Reviewed by: Sumanyu Satpathy

By Gourahari Das. Translated from the original Odia by Manoranjan Mishra Thornbird

How the mind plays tricks in the most complex of situations is illustrated in this novel, which the translator has brought out effectively. Debadatta, who detested everything about the place he has been posted to, suddenly realizes he has formed an attachment to the same place he thought vile.


Reviewed by: Sabita Radhakrishna

By Madhaviah Translated from the original Tamil by Meenakshi Tyagarajan Katha

The novel opens in a small village in Tirunelveli district in south Tamil Nadu. Our protagonist Narayanan is a shy and sensitive young boy and his honest testimony in the court of law leads to his father Sitapathi Iyer’s imprisonment. Despite his father’s misdeeds and notoriety pushing his family into penury, his virtuous mother’s upbringing and erudite teacher Rajagopala Iyer’s guidance infuse right values in him.


Reviewed by: Divya Shankar