India

Introduction

2014 has been a good year for poetry: established poets like Ranjit Hoskote, Shiv K. Kumar, Vijay Seshadri, Manohar Shetty, Imtiaz Dharker, Sukrita and Amarendra Kumar have published new collections. Some outstanding short story collections appeared. Meena Kandasamy, Ira Singh, Chitrita Banerjee and T. Dasu have made their debuts as novelists.

Marketing and management guru and popular columnist Suhel Seth has instituted the Khushwant Singh Memorial Poetry Prize–Rs. 2 lakh for Best Book of the Year and Rs. 5 lakh for Lifetime Award for Poetry in English (or in English translation from any Indian language) by an Indian poet. Five books were shortlisted for 2013–2014: Ranjit Hoskote’s Central Time, Keki N. Daruwalla’s Fire Altar (published in 2013), Arundhati Subramaniam’s When God Is a Traveller, Sridala Swami’s Escape Artist and Selected Poems by Joy Goswami translated by Sampurna Chattarji from Bangla. Arundhati Subramaniam was the winner. When God Is a Traveller is her fourth volume of poetry. Her feminism is understated. In the words of Imtiaz Dharker, this is “writing that creeps up on the reader quietly, sometimes with just the whisper of a sari, or the taste of a lullaby, and yet spins suddenly on the edge of stark recognition.” Hoskote’s Central Time is a sequel to his Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985–2005. It has a hundred poems written between 2006 and 2014, divided into five sections with intriguing titles: “Zoetrope”, “The Pilot’s Almanac”, “Gravity Leaps to the Eye”, “The Existence Certificate”, and “The Institute of Silence”. Escape Artist is Sridala Swami’s second collection; the first, A Reluctant Survivor, was published in 2007 with an introduction by Keki N. Daruwalla. She freely experiments with technique. “Redacted poetry is a message in a bottle” is in the form of prose stanzas of 50 to 100 words each, while the poem “h_ngw_m_n”, with lines from Paul Celan, is set up in two columns.

Vijay Seshadri’s fourth collection of poems, 3 Sections (2013), won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The thirty-four poems here are in a wide variety of poetic forms, from traditional stanza form to prose poems. The Three Urdu Poems, on Mirza Ghalib and Momin Khan Momin, are in couplets, the form used in ghazals. “Pacific Fishes of Canada” is twelve pages of prose, in four sections. Seshadri’s poems examine contemporary life playfully, yet seriously. “Light Verse” subtitled “Standard Time begins” shows how creatures like dogs live by the sun, not artificially controlled clocks: “It’s just five, but it’s light like six./ It’s lighter than we think./ Mind and days are out of sync./ The dog is restless.” The New Yorker has hailed Seshadri as “a son of Frost by way of Ashbery”.

Manohar Shetty has published Living Room, his sixth collection of poems, just two years after his fifth, Body Language (2012). His images are always fresh and unexpected, with short lines conveying a world of thought and emotion. The “Asides” are witty. The section “Lexis Local” contains eight short poems on the lines of Nissim Ezekiel’s poems in “Indian English”. In the poem “Toast”, for example, the speaker is welcoming his English daughter-in-law: “I am regretting not serving/ To our overseas guests the hot drinks/ But I am pure teetotal, that is,/ Consuming only the tea. . .” There are also a few poems for children.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is a poet, literary critic and translator. His Collected Poems: 1969–2014 has thirty-four new poems, along with poems from earlier collections and translations. Selections from The Absent Traveller: Prākrit Love Poetry from the Gāthāsaptaśatī of Sātavāhana Hāla (circa 24 C.E.) and  Songs of Kabir are followed by Mehrotra’s translations of the poetry of Nirala, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Mangalesh Dabral (from Hindi), Pavankumar Jain (from Gujarati) and Shakti Chattopadhyay (from Bangla).

Abhay K, an officer in the Indian Foreign Service, is the author of five collections of poetry. A certain lack of artifice marks his work. As Sudeep Sen points out, “Abhay K.’s words are gentle letters from his heart – sincere, soulful, earnest, and full of childlike wonder.” The Seduction of Delhi is a loving recreation of its landmarks, past and present; Abhay writes about Purana Qila, Feroz Shah Kotla and the Qutub Minar as well as Khan Market, Connaught Place, South Block, and Jawaharlal Nehru University among others. Historical figures like Amir Khusro, Nizamuddin Auliya, Dara Shikoh and the poets Ghalib and Zauq also figure in the book.

Imtiaz Dharker’s fifth book, Over the Moon, won her the 2014 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Most of the poems are set in London; the religious strife, terror and grief of her earlier work are present, but also joy and celebration. She is an artist, and her illustrations are an integral part of her poems. Sukrita Paul Kumar, a scholar and translator who teaches at the University of Delhi, is also a painter. She told an interviewer,

I have often thought that I oscillate between the two mediums, and often when I want to paint, I end up writing a poem, if for no other reason, then just because it is easier to sit at a desk and write words, rather than set up an easel, etc.

Author of five books of poems, she has published two new books: Dream Catcher and Untitled, with five monochrome paintings. Many of her poems talk about the creative process. Her images are original. Here are the first few lines of the “The Art of Wearing Bangles”:

The blank page wears words

With the fondness and patience

of girls wearing glass bangles

One by one, carefully and gently

Sukrita’s paintings appear in one more book, Sonnet Mondal’s Ink and Line, with her paintings on one side and Mondal’s poems on the other. He was so impressed with Sukrita’s paintings that he wrote poems about them. It is not a conventional collaborative effort; Sukrita confesses that “I went through the poems and saw that some paintings were obviously being interpreted and perceived differently from how I had seen them. Then I told myself that’s fine, this is how it has spoken to the other person.”

Alka Tyagi too teaches English at the University of Delhi. Whispers at the Ganga Ghat and Other Poems is her first collection, though she has been writing poems for the last twenty years, and her poetry collection in Hindi, Sun ri Sakhi was published in 2009. The sixty-two poems here are in three sections, “Speech”, “Whispers” and “Silence”. Many of them view nature as a path to the divine. She is a yoga teacher, and her doctoral research was on medieval Bhakti poetry; we can sense the influence of this on her poems.

Smita Agarwal’s second collection Mofussil Notebook: Poems of Small-Town India comments on contemporary life with a touch of humour. Her focus is on local problems like caste and honour killings. She freely experiments with poetic forms, using the refrain with variations, as in Hindi poetry recitals, in the poem “These Days”, and folk rhythms in “Binsar Barahmasa”.

Grills and Other Poems is Mohan Ramanan’s first book of poetry, with poems written over the last thirty years. In his Preface, he declares, “I believe that a poem must stand the test of comprehensibility.” The ninety poems here are eminently readable, yet gain a lot in re-reading. The poems about his family and the religious part of his being are emotional without being sentimental. His long experience as a Professor of English at the University of Hyderabad has inspired some satirical poems on seminars:

The seminar breaks

and hungry colleagues with thoughts of food

forget all the food for thought they have just been treated to.

The poetical tributes to scholars like Isaac Sequiera, C.D. Narasimhaiah and Meenakshi Mukherjee are thoughtful and witty.

C. N. Srinath, Professor of English at the University of Mysore, has published his sixth volume of poems, with the synaesthetic title Aroma of Light. The ninety-five poems in the book have wide variety: some are autobiographical; others are about places like Sri Lanka, the Niagara Falls, Houston and Tirupati. There are also some poems about literary figures like Keats and Melville. Dhoti and Other Poems is P. Raja’s fifth collection. Everyday objects are linked up with feelings and relationships. The title poem describes how he wore a white dhoti for the first time when he had to perform the funeral rites of his mother; he would normally wear trousers or a coloured lungi. Feeling that a dhoti was more comfortable, he wore his father’s dhoti. His father’s anguish at the death of his wife is captured in simple words:

Flicking away his rolling tear

My father whisked his dhoti away from me.

Giving me my lungi,

He said, “Wait till I die”.

Where Have the Dead Gone and Other Poems, Shiv K. Kumar’s tenth collection, has sixty-seven thought-provoking short poems. In the evening of his life, it is not surprising that there are many images associated with death: funeral processions, hospitals, mourning, shadows and ghosts.

Tense Patterns is Amarendra Kumar’s seventh collection of poetry in English. Like previous collections, all the poems are in free verse, and express his experience of life in India through vivid images. A sense of sadness and frustration permeates many of the poems. An outstanding feature of this volume is the evocation of natural beauty.

C. L. Khatri’s third collection of poems, Two-Minute Silence, has a wide variety of themes – there are emotional tributes to his mother, philosophical musings on life, and satirical sketches of contemporary India. “Homage to Maa” is one of the most effective poems in the book (which is dedicated to his mother). He describes how hard his mother worked to prepare food, “cooking food on chulhas fed with cow dung cakes”. In the poem “Conversation”, the poet uses the persona of a little girl to reveal the low status of women, by recounting the conversation he had with his eight-year-old daughter when he took her to the physics lab in college:

“Mummy also works with brawn.

Is she your peon?”

No. Peon is paid, mummy is not.

“Oh! She is worse than peon.”

Shut up!

The volume also has 55 haikus. K. Ramesh is another poet who has written haikus, collected in his volume with the title From Pebble to Pebble: Haiku and Tanka.

Indian English literature is somewhat poor in light verse. Manu Kant attempts satirical verse in Good Luck Chief Minister: Bittersweet Poems on Arvind Kejriwal, but most of his three-line verses lack punch. A lot of children’s literature has appeared (the bibliography lists only a selection). Anu Kumar, author of Inspector Angre and the Pizza Delivery Boy (2012) has turned to writing for children. Nilima Sinha, a well known children’s writer, has moved the other way, with her first novel for adults, Red Blooms in the Forest. Alok Bhalla’s Wild Verses of Wit and Whimsy: From Alpha to Zeta in 26 Movements can be enjoyed by children as well as adults. Every letter has a poem, with most of the words beginning with that particular letter. The poems reveal a new facet of Professor Bhalla, a senior academic and translator. The illustrations by novelist and short story writer Manjula Padmanabhan, who is also a cartoonist, add immensely to the fun quotient of the book. Many of the illustrations include a man, and he resembles Bhalla himself. For example, the letter C has a drawing of Bhalla water-skiing on two crocodiles, while a C shaped crocodile is drawn on the facing page. The poem begins:

A crystal-clear, charismatic, cantankerous Crocodile

crawled from the cold currents of a Coromandel canal

to a cruel, callous clubhouse of commonplace crinkled Crocodiles . . .

Me and My Plays by Mahesh Dattani has two plays – Where Did I Leave My Purdah? and The Big Fat City, and a fifty-page essay on his engagement with theatre. The playwright realizes: “I didn’t have an audience, because I didn’t have a language.” This translated into his early attempts at writing plays. Where Did I Leave My Purdah? is self-reflexive, commenting on performers and their performances. As in his play Final Solutions, characters live in two time frames: one in the present where theatre artiste Nazia is attempting to revive her favourite play, Abhigyana Shakuntalam, the other in 1947, when Nazia, her Hindu lover Suhel and her sister Zarine are travelling to India. When they are attacked by Muslim fundamentalists, the two women look for their burqah. Zarine realizes that Nazia is not carrying hers, and quietly gives her own to Nazia. Nazia survives this attack, but Zarine is butchered. The second play, The Big Fat City is a scathing satire on metropolitan life. The couple Murli and Niharika are upset as he has lost his job and calls an old friend of Murli’s, Sailesh, a bank manager, for dinner, so that he can bail him out. The dinner party is a disaster, what with uninvited guests dropping in. Lolly, a TV actress presently out of work, is not worried when her husband gets murdered, she instantly moves on to Sailesh, who, on his part, is relieved to have found a partner so that his wife “can now openly carry on with our neighbour.” The play introduces a new technique. The dialogues are interspersed with a series of text messages from various characters (the stage directions are: Screen-SMS). The play ends with credit rolls as in a movie.

Purohit and Bhakta’s screenplay I… He… &… She is the story of an alumnus of the Film and Television Institute of India at Pune, who goes there after thirty years in search of his lost love. In the present, he is mentioned as “I”, but as “He” in re-creations of the past, and both often appear in the same scene. R.P. Singh’s The Flea Market and Other Plays has three short plays. The Flea Market (in four scenes) has an Asian man visiting the eponymous flea market at Porte de Clignancourt in Paris, where he meets Corsea, a “woman in her forties, very seductive in appearance” and they talk and talk. “The Expired”, a one-act play, has elements of a ghost story; an anonymous voice tells us about Hastings and Alice, killed on 6 December, 1857. The third play, “A Scientist E” is five pages in length and has a scientist getting drunk because someone else has taken the credit for his research.

P. Raja’s play Water Please is about the engineer who brought fresh water to the White Town of Pondicherry in 1862; the French were dependent on water supplied by Indians living in the Black Town. The five-act play is quite imaginative – many scenes, especially in Act V, are set in 1520 A.D. and recreate the history of Aayi, a prostitute who constructed a pond to provide drinking water to the villagers when the king took her away to be part of his harem. Some stories of Tenali Rama, King Krishnadeva Raya’s court jester, make the drama more interesting. The variety of stage settings (ranging from a street to Krishnadeva Raya’s palace) might make the play difficult to stage.

More than fifty first novels appeared. The Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandasamy is a fictional recreation of a horrifying massacre of untouchables in Tamil Nadu in 1968. The untouchable farm workers go on a strike when their popular Marxist leader is murdered. The landlords use the police to intimidate them, and savagely assault Dalit women. When that does not crush their demand for fair wages, the landlords send their goons, who corral the villagers into a single hut and set fire to it. At least forty-two villagers are burnt to death, many others missing. Politicians of various hues come to the village to express support for the workers, but no action is taken to punish the perpetrators. Kandasamy (b. 1984) is a translator and activist, who has published two volumes of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010). She has a PhD in Sociolinguistics and she enjoys playing with the structure of the novel. The Gypsy Goddess begins with a prologue, a letter to the Chief Minister from a rich landlord requesting police protection. Meena Kandasamy uses a variety of narrative voices, including a section in the second person, of a journalist trying to write about the event years later. The serious novel is interspersed with passages of irreverent wit, including a Q&A session explaining her practice. The novel does not have an actual protagonist or a linear narrative.

The Surveyor by Ira Singh marks the emergence of a remarkable new talent. Her powers of description are impressive, whether she is talking about the lonely life of the surveyor in pre-independence India, the Partition riots, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the life of a college girl in Delhi, or the natural beauty of the hills surrounding Dehra Dun. The book is well-structured. Ira Singh, who teaches English at Delhi University, introduces the main characters through turning the pages of a photo album: Ravinder, his wife Jenny, and the two daughters, the fair-skinned beautiful Anushka, and the dark-skinned Natasha. The first four of the eight parts, with an omniscient narrator, are about Ravinder and his family’s fleeing to India during the Partition. He has an unhappy relation with his orthodox Sikh father, who disowns him because he cuts his long hair. Marrying an Anglo-Indian makes matters worse. The second half of the book, with Natasha as narrator, is about her relationship with Anushka: she admires her and wants to be like her but at the same time realizes that Anushka’s beauty has made her proud and selfish. All the characters are memorable – the hard-working Jenny, her mother Grace Robbins, who opposes the marriage, Ravinder’s brothers and sister, and even his colleagues in the Survey who make a brief appearance.

Chitrita Banerji (b.1947) has published many books on food such as Bengali Cooking: Seasons and Festivals (1997), Hour of the Goddess: Memories of Women, Food, and Ritual in Bengal (2001), and Eating India: An Odyssey into the Food and Culture of the Land of Spices (2007). Her first novel, Mirror City, is set in Bangladesh in the period 1973 to 1977. Calcutta born Uma Basu goes to an American university for higher studies, and falls in love with Iqbal, who is enrolled for a PhD in history. Her parents look upon Muslims as enemies, and cut off all ties with her. The couple move to Bangladesh in September 1973; they are confident that being Bengali, having a common language and culture, would be more important than religion in the newly created country. But euphoria soon gives way to disillusionment, with growing corruption in Bangladesh. Banerji presents a nuanced account of a decaying marriage, with political events impacting personal relationships. By not naming the leaders concerned, the novelist suggests that this can happen in any country. Uma is looked upon with suspicion as an “outsider”, and the military leaders who take over Bangladesh after killing the prime minister refuse to acknowledge the role India played in their achieving independence. The passionate love between Uma and Alim Choudhury, a businessman, is crushed by the atmosphere of terror that prevails, with every possibility of Uma being accused of being a spy and imprisoned. The novel is notable for her admirable use of language, whether she is describing the Bengal countryside, the monsoons, the songs of the Bauls, or food.

Bibhu Padhi, author of nine books of poetry (including Magic Ritual, which appeared this year) has published his first novel, Absences. The Prologue “Naan’s Story” sets the tone for the novel: the middle-aged college professor asks, “How does one bear absences?”. The narrator is a fourteen-year-old boy, who recounts his experiences as a child of five – his excitement when he goes to the airport with his father (Naan) to receive professors from America who have come to deliver lectures at the university. Padhi successfully presents the child’s point of view, and how he understands the full meaning of events when he looks back at them and attempts to come to terms with the absence of people and things.

The protagonist of Janice Pariat’s first novel Seahorse observes, “we are shaped by absence”. Nehemiah (Nem) is sent off to college in Delhi because his father does not approve of his relationship with Lenny, who is sent off for psychiatric treatment when he is found in bed with a stranger. In Delhi, Nem finds meaning in life when he meets his art professor Nicholas, and develops a relationship with him. But Nicholas suddenly disappears. Ten years later, when Nem is in London on a fellowship to study art history, he receives a note which raises hopes of his meeting Nicholas. The novel is interspersed with references to artistic works, artists, music and the Greek myth of sea-god Poseidon and his young lover, Pelops. Janice Pariat’s volume of short stories Boats on Land (2013) won her the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar Award and The Crossword Book Award for Fiction.

The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, a first novel, was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award 2014. The setting is a village in Jharkhand, and the religious practices of the adivasis are described briefly. The novel chronicles the influence of dahni-bidya (witchcraft) on three generations of the dysfunctional family of Somai-haram, a village chieftain. Rupi, his grandson’s wife, once the strongest woman in the village, is now bedridden. Shekhar uses many Santhali terms (without translation), but this can sometimes be an irritant for the reader.

I wonder why A Bad Character by Deepti Kapur, a debut novel, was shortlisted for The Hindu Prize for Fiction 2014. A twenty-year-old college girl in Delhi steps out of her utterly boring sheltered life when she meets a rich man in a café in Delhi. He initiates her into sex and drugs. They travel all over Delhi: the different parts of the city, with their distinctive features, are recreated in great detail. She feels utterly lost when she hears about his death. None of the characters is named – the only exception is the seducer’s driver Ali.

No character is given a name in another debut novel, Devdan Chaudhuri’s Anatomy of My Life – the central character is “the poet”, his friend is “the marketing trainee”, the women are “the pianist”, “the beloved”, “the sweetheart”, etc. A sixteen-year-old has moved to a new city with his recently divorced mother; he is happy to get away from the endless squabbles of his parents, but his mother finds it more difficult to adjust (“everything is finished”). He goes to college at eighteen, and meets a variety of women. All the characters are only pegs on which the novelist can hang his cogitations about the void: “Whatever terms may be used to describe the void, Mahashunya or cosmological constant, whatever way one might try to understand it – through spirituality or through science – the truth remains that the void is real, and it exists”.

Tamraparni Dasu has published translations of Telugu short stories. Her first novel, Spy, Interrupted: The Waiting Wife is a spy thriller which is also a love story. Nina Sharma falls in love with a New England aristocrat Stephen. She realizes his true vocation when they are almost killed by terrorists when they visit India. The natural beauty of the New England countryside is invoked with lyrical beauty, the scenes of their desperate escape set in India are very realistic. The characters – Nina, her parents settled in America, and Stephen – are well realised.

Maharaja in Denims is an interesting first novel by Khushwant Singh, a columnist and TV show host (not to be confused with the novelist and translator Khushwant Singh, 1915–2014). The protagonist, Hari, is a rich college-going young man, very popular with girls. While living a normal life, in the classroom or in bed with a girlfriend, he gets flashes of his past life as Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the founder of the Sikh empire. He starts believing that he is a re-incarnation of the great ruler, born to set things right in modern Punjab. Singh manages to present quite a credible story, with a surprise ending.

Chitra Viraraghavan’s first novel The Americans presents the stories of ten Indians in the U.S. from different strata of society, all facing problems of various kinds. The protagonist is Tara, who has gone to the U.S. from Chennai for three weeks to help her sister cope with her autistic son Rahul and teenage daughter Lavi. The difficulties faced by Shantanu, working in an Indian restaurant, remind us of Biju in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Viraraghavan exposes the myth of the over-achieving Indian immigrant; she also reveals the Indians’ interaction with other immigrants such as the Hispanic cleaners, the Filipino guards, an Israeli housekeeper, and an African-American student.

Akhil Sharma’s second novel, Family Life, which won the 2015 Folio Prize, is also set in the USA. The Mishra family move there in 1978. The protagonist-narrator is Ajay, the younger son, and the book describes his attempts to cope with the situation when his elder brother Birju has an accident which leaves him brain- damaged. Ajay’s father takes recourse to drink, while his mother, worn out with taking care of Birju at home runs after quacks promising miracle cures.

Amitabha Bagchi’s third novel, This Place (2013), was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Prize 2014 for fiction. Unlike his earlier novels, Above Average (2007) and The Householder (2012), which were set in India, This Place is about Jeevan Sharma, an Indian immigrant in the U.S., living quietly in Baltimore, having good relationships with his neighbours. But things change when the City of Baltimore decides to demolish the block they live in. Archana Painuly’s Where Do I Belong? presents a different take on Indians abroad: she writes about second generation Indian migrants in Denmark.

Neel Mukherjee’s second novel The Lives of Others was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014. It begins with a powerful scene of a destitute farmer killing his starving wife and children and committing suicide. The novel is about the huge chasm between the haves and have-nots. It is also about the widening chasms within a family, between generations and even between siblings. Prafullanath Ghosh (b.1898) with his wife Charubala (b.1903) is the head of the household; his four sons with their families live on different floors of the large house. Supratik, the eldest grandson, is idealistic, and leaves home to join extremists working to get justice for the landless farmer. Neel Mukherjee describes the political turmoil of the years 1967 to 1970 in Bengal. This long novel has been compared to War and Peace, and Mukherjee brings to life a large number of characters. The novelist wins the reader’s sympathy for those who adopt violent means to fight injustice.

Many established novelists have published new work. Kavery Nambisan’s seventh novel, A Town like Ours, presents the undesirable side of “development”, with villages growing into small towns in a haphazard manner. Sudha Murty’s The Mother I Never Knew has two novellas. Both begin with the death of the protagonist’s father. They are realistic stories of ordinary people in contemporary India. The focus is on human relationships; the author shows how love of money and false notions of honour lead to people losing moral values.

The Blind Lady’s Descendants by Anees Salim won the Crossword Book Prize 2014 for fiction. As was the case when his Vanity Bagh won The Hindu Prize for Best Fiction 2013, the reclusive author did not attend the award ceremony. The Blind Lady’s Descendants traces the life of a Muslim family in coastal Kerala. The novel is in the form of a suicide note by twenty-six-year-old Amir, covering different aspects of his life: his relationships with his friends, his siblings, his parents and the mysteriously absent Javi, his maternal uncle. The locale comes alive through Salim’s vivid descriptions.

Nilanjana S. Roy’s second novel The Hundred Names of Darkness is a sequel to The Wildings (2012) which won the Crossword Book Award. It takes up the adventures of Mara, a kitten in the house of kind “Bigfeet”. Her mentor Beraal’s tribe of Nizamuddin cats is starving because of urbanization; trees are being cut down, multistoreyed houses are coming up, stray dogs have increased. The book has wonderful descriptions of animal life; individual creatures are vested with human qualities. An example is Moonch, the villainous leader of the bandicoots interested only in personal aggrandisement, not the policy of “live and let live” advocated by his second-in-command Poonch.

Anita Nair’s Idris: Keeper of the Light is set in the seventeenth century, but it is not a “drum and trumpet” historical novel – she deals with ordinary people. One is reminded of Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992). Ghosh wrote about a real person, a slave from Kerala who rose up to be trading agent of Abraham Ben Yiju, a Jewish merchant from Egypt who lived in Mangalore for seventeen years. Nair’s fictional protagonist is from Somalia, “Idris Maymoon Samataar Guleed. Previously of Dikhil”. When he was a young child, Idris lost an eye in a dust storm; now he stands out as much for the golden eye he wears as for his height and his dark complexion. He accidentally meets a ten-year-old boy and realizes that he is his son, born of a midnight tryst with a Nair woman. His son Kandavar wants to join the Chaver, a band of warriors who have sworn to assassinate the Zamorin. To prevent him from losing his life because of false notions of honour, his uncle permits Idris to take him on a long journey to broaden his horizons. They travel by ship along the coast of southern India, past Ceylon, the Dutch settlement of Thoothukudi, and a port in Andhra to the diamond mines of Golconda. Anita Nair spins an exciting yarn, a gripping tale of adventure which also gives full details of the day-to-day life of the common people. Nair successfully uses many words from Indian languages like Malayalam to evoke the local ambience. We get a clear picture of the distinctive marriage customs of the matrilineal Nairs of Kerala. The woman continues to stay in her parental home, and has “sambandham” (“relationship”) with a man; this bond can be dissolved by mutual consent. The head of the family is the woman’s brother, whose own children take his wife’s name and grow up in her home.

Amit Chaudhuri’s sixth novel, Odysseus Abroad, was shortlisted for the Crossword Fiction Prize. Ananda Sen, an Indian student in London, wants to be a poet. His only friend is his mother’s brother, Rangamama, an eccentric bachelor who has settled down in London. Chaudhuri lovingly recreates the life of Ananda in a studio apartment; descriptions of other immigrants, their cooking, and Ananda’s parents’ early life are all worked in seamlessly.

Skanda, the protagonist of Aatish Taseer third novel The Way Things Were is a Sanskrit scholar, based in the U.S.A. He has inherited his love of Sanskrit from his father, a minor prince in Rajasthan. The novel begins in the present, with Skanda going to Geneva to take his father’s dead body to his home in Kalasuryaketu for the last rites. As Skanda visits the places of his childhood, the novelist skilfully narrates past events, personal and political. His parents fall passionately in love in 1975. The story of their marriage and its breakup runs parallel to national events like the Emergency, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, and the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992. The practical Uma soon gets disillusioned with the scholarly, ineffectual Toby, who leaves India permanently. She marries the crude Maniraja, a powerful leader of industry who can get things done, even though the means may be questionable. Perhaps Uma’s marriage can be read as a metaphor for India turning away from the intellectual Toby (with sattvic qualities) and embracing Maniraja, representing rajasic and tamasic qualities. Taseer’s depiction of events of the last three decades rings true, though place names do not sound quite right (e.g. “Kalasuryaketu”).

Novelist and poet Mamang Dai is the author of Stupid Cupid (2009), The Legends of Pensam (2006) and River Poems (2004). Her new novel, The Black Hill: The Tale of Kajinsha, Gimur and Nicolas Krick is set in North East India in the period from 1847 to 1855. Dai’s novel is based on a recorded event – the disappearance of Krick and the execution of Kajinsha for his murder. The three characters belong to different communities: Kajinsha is Mishmee, his wife Gimur is Abor, while Nicolas Krick is a zealous French priest who wants to set up a mission in Tibet.

Vikas Swarup’s third novel, The Accidental Apprentice (2013), presents life in a middle-class family. The landmarks of Delhi, the Hanuman Temple, Connaught Place and Jantar Mantar come to life. Twenty-three-year-old Sapna, the eldest of three sisters, has to give up her dreams of studying for a master’s degree and start working as a saleswoman when her father is killed in a road accident. The book has a well- constructed plot, though the surprise ending is not entirely credible. The book begins with a Prologue: Sapna Sinha is in jail, accused of murdering the elderly Vinay Mohan Acharya, the head of a huge business empire, who offered to make her the CEO if she passed seven tests. The seven chapters are devoted to the real life “tests”, while the Epilogue ties up loose ends. The narrator Sapna tends to be a paragon of all virtues, fighting against injustice on all fronts: Khap Panchayats, illegal organ donations, child labour, or reality shows on TV where the choice of contestants is already fixed.

Anurag Mathur’s claim to fame is based on his comic masterpiece, The Inscrutable Americans (1991), which is currently in its fiftieth reprint. His sixth novel, The Country Is Going to the Dogs, recounts the misadventures of seventy-four-year-old Radhey Radhey Kumar, a retired bureaucrat. He lives in a flat opposite a women’s college and takes great pleasure in ogling the young girls, though he professes to disapprove of their dress: figure-hugging T-shirts and skinny jeans. His monotonous life becomes exciting when the principal of All Saints College turns to him for help when their most famous alumna, the film star Miss Fofo, suddenly disappears. All the elements of pulp fiction are thrown in – gay parties, wife-swapping, porn films and corrupt politicians who manipulate the police. The redeeming feature of the novel is Mathur’s delineation of the protagonist’s hypocrisy and loneliness.

Another “Stephenian” to publish a novel this year is Upamanyu Chatterjee. His sixth novel Fairy Tales at Fifty has the usual unpleasant parents for fifty-year-old Nirip. The father has made money by exporting skulls and entire human skeletons. His mother spends her time hiding the ill-gotten wealth; by the end of the novel, she is doing her best to poison her husband. Nirip starts suspecting that he is not the biological son of his parents; in the course of the novel, he meets his brother, who is a serial killer. Chatterjee’s imagination has run riot: the focus is on the sensational and salacious, with very rare flashes of the social satire that enlivened his Sahitya Akademi Award-winning The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000).

Chetan Bhagat’s sixth novel, Half Girlfriend, presents a variation of the “rich girl loves poor boy” theme, very popular in Hindi cinema. It is designed as a film script, complete with a small role for the author, who figures in the five-page prologue. (All of Bhagat’s novels have been made into Hindi films.) Riya is from a very rich Delhi family, while the hero, Madhav Jha, is from Dumraon, 80 km from Patna. He is acutely conscious that he cannot speak good English. Both get admission in St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, under the sports quota for basketball. The bestseller reveals how the knowledge of English has created a new class division in India, and institutes like “Patna’s Pride English Learning Centre” flourish.

Another bestseller, God Is a Gamer by Ravi Subramanian, is a complicated story of big finance. A Nigerian phishing scam, bitcoins, and a startup, “Indiscape Gaming Corporation” are all involved. Set in Bombay and the U.S.A., it involves a senator and the Indian Finance Minister and has a surprise ending.

Indian English writers continue to be fascinated by the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Karna Pages by Sayantan Gupta is a novel recounting the Mahabharata with the focus on Karna, the most unfortunate character in the epic. Simian by Vikram Balagopal is a graphic novel about the Ramayana as seen from the eyes of Hanuman. Narendra K. Sinha (b.1932) holds a Master’s degree in Hindi, in Sanskrit, and in Pali, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics. He has published the first part of a novel about Krishna, The Story of Krishna: An Autobiographical Account. Twenty-five-year-old M.R. Sharan, enrolled for a Ph.D. in economics, presents the Ramayana through the eyes of a spy in Blue: Tales of Reddumone, the Two-Faced.

More than fifteen collections of short stories appeared. M. Mohankumar, who has seven books of poetry to his credit, has published his first collection of short stories, The Turning Point and Other Stories. Keki N. Daruwalla, author of short stories and one novel, For Pepper and Christ (2009), is better known as a poet. Islands is his fourth collection of short stories, after The Sword and the Abyss (1979), The Minister for Permanent Unrest and Other Stories (1996) and A House in Ranikhet (2003). The islands of the title are both physical and metaphorical; the stories are about people living on islands, as well as those dwelling in islands of their emotional isolation or memory. The poet in Daruwalla is revealed in the beautiful descriptions of islands and the sea. Some of the stories have a touch of humour. In the short story “Grotto”, a coffin is at the centre of a thriving “pilgrim industry”, with Christians (who have the first claim), Hindus and Muslims trying to get a foothold. The police arrive with a warrant to take away a corpse: “Habeas corpus, Father, produce the corpse”, says the court. The villagers are puzzled. The islanders had never heard of corpse production: “They had heard of film producers and film productions and Ronnie Screwvala.” “The Chronicles of Julio Esteban” satirises zealous missionaries.

Art historian and social activist Manju Kak has published her third collection of short stories, after First Light in Colonelpura (1994) and Requiem for an Unsung Revolutionary and Other Stories (1996). Just One Life and Other Stories has twenty-two stories of varying length, all dealing with the reality of present-day India. The author’s descriptions, whether of places, objects, natural beauty, or emotions, compel the reader to vividly experience the events narrated. The protagonist of the title story is Chotu, living under a flyover with his mother and three stepbrothers. This family of untouchables has fled to Delhi because “The Thakur landlords had gone on a rampage and killed many. Those fools were trying to be equal, asking for rights, for wages . . .” Little Chotu, with misshapen fingers, is caught when stealing a society woman’s handbag, and is beaten mercilessly by the police. The story ends with a laconic comment: “The newspapers gave it in small print: death of yet another minor, in police custody.” “A Valentine for Mrs. Lamba” is longer, at twenty pages, and describes the struggles of Mrs. Lamba, who runs a gift shop; her life has made her tough and cynical, and she has no sympathy for her younger son who does not worship money. The story “Amma” is just 300 words in length, but it captures the guilt of the young working woman who wants to bring her bed-ridden mother to her own house from her brother Ram’s house. All the stories talk about different types of pain—of a woman who is childless or a freedom fighter who is disillusioned with the state of independent India.

Lakshmi Kannan is a bilingual writer, in English and Tamil; while her poetry is written originally in English, most of her fiction is based on the Tamil original. Genesis has thirteen short stories and two longer ones, selected from different stages in her writing career. The “Author’s Note” gives us a clear picture of the changing (sometimes unchanging) cultural climate in India by tracing the reception accorded to the stories over the years. The long story “India Gate” was written in the 1980s, published in English in 1993, translated into Hindi in the mid-1990s and reprinted in an anthology in 2005. The reception accorded to “India Gate” reveals “a painful sociological truth”: in every decade, young women feel that this story of an educated woman who is relegated to a subordinate position in her marital home, “is the story of their lives.” All the stories except one are set in India, and deal with women struggling against traditional mindsets. “Sable Shadows” is set in Iowa City; it reveals that people are equally narrow-minded in international circles, they cannot envisage a friendship between a man from Africa and an Indian woman which does not involve sex. Jasbir Jain’s introduction has perceptive comments on reader response and on the art of translation. Another important essay on translation is David Davidar’s introduction to his anthology A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces.

Arya and Other Stories by Chandrika Balan is another collection which deals with women in India. Balan is a bilingual writer, a Professor of English Literature in Kerala. She translates from and into Malayalam; the stories here are based on her Malayalam originals. “The Story of a Poem” is a powerful portrayal of the hard choice Sushma makes; the housewife writes poems secretly while she works in the kitchen. Her husband admires his office colleague, a feminist, but does not want his wife to be a feminist or a writer. The story ends with the housewife tearing up her poem. Some poems have a touch of humour; the new spectacles the narrator wears in “An Optical Illusion” endow her with special powers to control people, but she only wants to go back to her ordinary life. “Sponsors Please” pokes fun at TV reality shows.

Abha Iyengar’s Flash Bites is a collection of flash and micro fiction, telling a variety of stories in a few words. “Red Dress of Gold”, for example, captures the memories of a dying grandmother in just 257 words. She asks for her “wedding dress” and the narrator finds “a red and gold frock which could be worn only by a small child”:

My hands shake as I place the dress on her body and she runs her fingers over it.

“1918 …” she whispers, “I was just five … and your grandfather six … we didn’t know we were getting married … thought it was a game … the lights and the elephants, the jewellery and the sweets … it was like a festival … and this dress … I loved it …”

She is lost now. “Take it, it’s yours,” she says. I am a forty-two year old single mother wearing shorts and sneakers but she does not care.

“Dying Where I Want” in 614 words captures the loneliness of the widower in an old-age home, who wants to come home to die. The stories have a variety of narrator-protagonists, and a range of situations.

A lot of non-fiction is published every year (the bibliography has listed only a selection). It seems as if every politician and civil servant in India wants to give his take on events. The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh by Sanjay Barua created controversy by stating what everyone in India believed – that Sonia Gandhi was monitoring Manmohan Singh’s decisions. Strictly Personal: Manmohan and Gursharan by Singh’s daughter Daman (author of two novels) describes his journey from Gah, Nowshera and Peshawar (now in Pakistan) through Amritsar, Patiala and Hoshiarpur to Chandigarh, Cambridge and Oxford, and the hardships he faced in getting a higher education.

Adil Jussawalla won the Sahitya Akademi Award 2014 for his book of poems Trying to Say Goodbye (2012). The Right Kind of Dog and Other Poems (2013) is suitable for children and young adults. He has given the title Maps for a Mortal Moon: Essays and Entertainments to his first collection of prose. Novelist Irwin Allan Sealy’s The Small Wild Goose Pagoda describes a pagoda named after the Small Wild Goose Pagoda of Xian which he is building in his backyard. The main characters are a gardener, a bricklayer and his assistant, and the writer himself. The book covers twelve months, in a diary format, so he has subtitled it “an almanac”. It is an extraordinary work, a collage of narrative, essays, poetry, pictures, recipes and miscellaneous notes.

Manohar Shetty, author of seven books of poems, has edited an anthology about Goa, where he has been living for the past three decades: Goa Travels has contemporary travel narratives as well as accounts of travellers from Holland, England, Germany, France and Italy during the 450 years of Portuguese rule. Of Mothers and Others, an anthology edited by the novelist Jaishree Misra, has stories, essays and poems about the various aspects of motherhood – bringing up a child with “special needs”, adoption, discrimination against the girl child, grandmotherhood, surrogate mothering and childlessness.

Novelist and short story writer Navtej Sarna is an officer in the Indian Foreign Service. His Indians at Herod’s Gate: A Jerusalem Tale is about an Indian presence in the heart of Jerusalem. The Sufi saint Baba Farid (b. 1173) visited Jerusalem, and spent 40 days meditating there. His disciples established a hospice there, called Zawiya al-Faridiya. In the twentieth century, it is maintained by the Ansari family from the small town of Saharanpur in India. Sarna weaves together personal conversation and historical research in his account of Jerusalem and its problems.

Spicestory by Hugh and Colleen Gantzer is both informative and entertaining. The opening chapter tracing the history of the spice trade is followed by eighteen chapters with catchy titles (e.g. “The Berry That Launched a Thousand Ships: Pepper”) devoted to different spices, their uses, and methods of cultivation. This coffee table book is embellished with beautiful colour photographs and interesting anecdotes.

Githa Hariharan’s Almost Home: Cities and Other Places has essays which contain elements of many genres: travelogue, history, philosophy and memoir. She explores the idea of home through the lives of people in cities not only in India, but in places as far away as Palestine, Algeria and eleventh-century Spain.

Bruce King’s Modern Indian Poetry in English (revised second edition, 2001) is considered the definitive book on its subject. He traces the thematic shifts in post-independence Indian Writing in English in his new book, Rewriting India: Eight Writers. The writers included are Arun Kolatkar, Keki N. Daruwalla, Amit Chaudhuri, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Pankaj Mishra, Tabish Khair, Susan Visvanathan, and Jeet Thayil. He states the reasons for his choice: “This book is mainly about eight writers who interest me and who I think are culturally and historically significant.” It is good that King discusses two writers who have not received the attention they deserve: poet, novelist and essayist Tabish Khair and Susan Visvanathan, author of three novels and two collections of short stories. However, one cannot understand why Amitav Ghosh, the best novelist of this period, and P. Lal, who mentored many writers, are considered less “culturally and historically significant”. King claims that the book is “primarily about the writings of eight Indian authors, how they portray modern India, what their works suggest about India, and topics such as literary influence and cultural heritage”. Shashi Tharoor, with The Great Indian Novel and Riot, is central to any discussion about the portrayal of modern India, but King prefers to write about Pankaj Mishra instead.

Sri Aurobindo’s Aesthetics and Poetics: New Directions by Murali Sivaramakrishnan brings together essays he has written over the last two decades. It is an important contribution to the study of Indian aesthetics, which is closely linked to spirituality. Dalit writing is gaining more attention, with a number of critical anthologies being published. A new edition of B. R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste has come out, with an introduction by Arundhati Roy. Kancha Iliah’s Untouchable God: A Novel on Caste and Race has been reprinted.

Translation studies are gaining more importance; many more Indian universities are offering courses on the theory and practice of translation. Angaaray is a collection of nine short stories and a play in Urdu by Ahmed Ali, Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan and Mahmud-uz-Zafar. First published in 1932, it was banned by the British authorities for its criticism of orthodox Muslim society. The ban led to the formation of the All India Progressive Writers Association (Indian English writers like Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, and Raja Rao were members). Two translations of this anthology have appeared: one by Snehal Singhavi can be considered the “authoritative” one.

Indian English literature lost three eminent writers in 2014: novelist, short story writer, columnist, and translator Khushwant Singh (1915–2014), poet and art critic Keshav Malik (1926–2014) and M. K. Naik (1926–2014), the last of the three “founding fathers” of Indian English literary criticism.

Bibliography

Research Aids

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India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century eds Simon Davies, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts and Gabriel Sanchez Espinosa 341pp Voltaire Foundation (Oxford) Pb £65.00.

Life as a Dalit: Views from the Bottom on Caste in India eds Subhadra Mitra Channa and Joan P. Mencher 492pp Sage (New Delhi) Rs1495 [2013].

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Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857. Volume V: Muslim, Dalit and Subaltern Narratives ed Crispin Bates 228pp Sage (New Delhi) Rs850.

Textual Travels: Theory and Practice of Translation in India eds Mini Chandran and Suchitra Mathur 198pp Routledge India (New Delhi) Rs695.

The Being of Bhasha: A General Introduction G. N. Devy 152pp Orient Blackswan (Hyderabad) Rs790.

Poetry

Abraham, Katherine Silenced by Love 318pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs250.

Acharya, Kamlesh Kindle the Spirit 174pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs200.

Agarwal, Smita Mofussil Notebook: Poems of Small-Town India 108pp Brown Critique and Sampark (Kolkata) Pb Rs125.

Ali, Semeen Transitions 38pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs100.

Anand, Mamta Treasure a Tear: Stories and Poems 74pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Arora, Vandana Storm to Serenity 84pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs150.

Bhalla, Alok Wild Verses of Wit and Whimsy: From Alpha to Zeta in 26 Movements illus Manjula Padmanabhan 68pp Tulika (Chennai) Pb Rs200.

Bhandari, Tulsi Towards a Touch Supreme 80pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Bhattacharjee, Manash Ghalib’s Tomb and Other Poems 80pp The London Magazine (London) £2.99.

Bhaya, Shabnam Breathing with You 96pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Bhelkar, Ratnakar D. Dissonance and Resonance 84pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Bhushan, R. K. Nerves of the Verbal Art (Songs in Follywood) 100pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Chakraborty, Subir Symphony for the Soul 67pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs150.

Chandra, Neelam Saxena Layers of Flickering Lights 134pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

—– Skylines 148pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs250.

Chandramohanti, Madana Mohanrao The Incredible Twins and Other Poems 100pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Chandrasekharan, P.M. OH GOD! (Bunch of Poems) 72pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Chatterjee, Samir Ranjan Under the Southern Sky 62pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs150.

Chatterjee, Tumpa Laughing Daffodils 70pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Chattopadhyay, Gouranga P. The Lonely Journey Begins 118pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs200. P

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Dey, Naina Snapshots from Space and Other Poems 58pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Dharker, Imtiaz Over the Moon 160pp Bloodaxe Books (Hexham, Northumberland) Pb £12.00.

Dominic, K.V. Multicultural Symphony: A Collection of Poems 82pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Gahlawat, Dalvir Singh and Kalyanrupa Parasar Smile from the Veil 56pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195

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Ghosh, Shambhobi A Stranger’s Conversation 68pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Goswami, Uddipana Green Tin Trunk 136pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Guha, Ananya S. Rhyme and Reason: Collection of Poems for Children 58pp Partridge India (Gurgaon) Pb Rs199.

—– There Is Winter by Touch 80pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

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Gupta, Sayantan Poems on Life 182pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs350.

Hoskote, Ranjit Central Time 220pp Penguin Viking (New Delhi) Rs399.

Jaggi, Parneet Live Love Light 76pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs150.

Jussawalla, Adil The Right Kind of Dog and Other Poems illus Gunjan Ahlawat 64pp Duckbill Books (Chennai) Rs200 [2013].

Joshi, Shubhangi To Stir up an Ornate Nest 70pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

K., Abhay The Seduction of Delhi illus Tarshito 94pp Bloomsbury India (New Delhi) Rs299.

Kant, Manu Good Luck Chief Minister: Bittersweet Poems on Arvind Kejriwal 68pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

—– Snow White and the Grumpy Maoists: 50 Satirical Poems on Arundhati Roy 70pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Khandekar, Sanjeev Mutatis Mutandis 52pp Poetrywala (Mumbai) Pb Rs200.

Khanna, Vandana Afternoon Masala 56pp University of Arkansas Press (Fayetteville, AR) Pb $16.95.

Khatri, C.L. Two-minute Silence 81pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Kishore, Usha On Manannan’s Isle 81pp dpdotcom digital publishing (Grianane, Isle of Man) Pb £5.99 ebook £4.42.

Kohli, Geetika The Lost Sonnet and Other Poems 80pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

—– Yonder 88pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Kottoor, Gopikrishnan Tell Me, Neruda (Poems) 76pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Kumar, Amarendra Tense Pattern: Poems 144pp Novelty & Co (Patna) Pb Rs150.

Kumar, Anand Eerie and Holy 120pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Kumar, Ashwani My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter 96pp Yeti Books (Kozhikode) Rs399.

Kumar, Eesha Random Access Memory 89pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs200.

Kumar, Shiv K. Where Have the Dead Gone and Other Poems 82pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Kumar, Shobhana Conditions Apply 86pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs200.

Lahiri, Gopal Living Inside 98pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Laskar, Indrani Parallel Lines 73pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs150.

Mahanand, Anand Outbursts: A Collection of Poems 107pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs250.

Mahesh, Sangeeta Ocean of Thoughts: Poems about Social Issues and Human Values 64pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Majumder, Atri Visible Infinity 54pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs100.

Malaviya, Shikha Geography of Tongues 96pp Indian Poetry Collective (Bangalore) Pb Rs350.

Malik, Keshav Water Falling on Water 70pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna Collected Poems: 1969–2014 328pp Penguin (New Delhi) Rs399.

Mohapatra, Dilip A Pinch of Sun and Other Poems 136pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs250.

—– Different Shades 138pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Mondal, Sonnet Ink and Line Paintings by Sukrita 55pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

—– Prismatic Celluloid 122pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Mullick, Paramita Mukherjee Life: A Collection of Poems 90pp Leadstart (Mumbai) Pb Rs95.

Naik, Dilip You I Could Hold 110pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs250.

Nair, S. Jagathsimhan Blue Sun and Blasé Rains 100pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Padhi, Bibhu Magic Ritual 110pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs225.

Panda, Ram Narayan A Long Sigh of Silence 54pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Pandey, Anjani Of Love, Life and Lamentations 74pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Panigrahi, Sambit The Lost Earth and Other Poems 100pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Parashar, Sujatha Poetry out and Loud III 88pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Prem, P.C.K. Tales of Half Man and Other Poems 122pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

R. S., Ramkumar Breeze: A Love Story 82pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs200.

Raghupathi, K.V. Between Me and the Babe: A Collection of Poems 104pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs225.

—– Voice of the Valley 118pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs250 [first pub 2003].

—– Wisdom of the Peepal Tree foreword by P.C.K.Prem 40pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs150 [first pub 2003].

Raja, P. Dhoti and Other Poems 80pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Ramanan, Mohan Grills and Other Poems 113pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs250.

Ramesh, K. From Pebble to Pebble: Haiku and Tanka 138pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs250.

Rana, Prashant The Temple Tree 71pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Rao, Aditi The Fingers Remember 132pp Yoda Press (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Rao, Mani New and Selected Poems 128pp Poetrywala (Mumbai) Pb Rs250.

Rath, Arnapurna and Bhaskarjyoti Das Devi: A Journey through Photo-Poetry foreword by Bibhu Padhi 123pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs295 [45 poems and photographs].

Rath, Ramakant Frontier Lyrics 108pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Rochishmon Let Us Understand the Dawns 130pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs250.

S., Chandramohan Warscape Verses 74pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Sahu, Nandini Sukama and Other Poems 106pp The Poetry Society of India (Gurgaon) Pb Rs150 [2013].

Sehrawat, Ajit Whispers of Love 66pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Seshadri, Vijay 3 Sections 67pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs299.

Shankar, Aditya Party Poopers 72pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Sharma, Sanjula For Rhyme or Reason 132pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Sharma, Sunil Mundane, My Muse 115pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs250.

Shetty, Jayashri Silent Screams 76pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs190.

Shetty, Manohar Living Room 96pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs299 ebook Rs199.

Singh, Balbir The Melodies of Wilderness 128pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs250.

Singh, Dolly The Awakening of SHE: A Collection of Poetry 74pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs200.

Singh, Durlabh Song for Myself 144pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Singh, Pooja Garg Everyday and Some Other Days 66pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Singh, Varsha Deluges: A Collection of Poems 82pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Sinha, Narendra K. Sonnets on Tao 100pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Sivaramakrishnan, Murali Selected Poems 152pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs295 [2013].

Sohal, Suhail Brand New Parachutes 52pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs100.

Srinath, C.N. Aroma of Light: Poems 133pp Dhvanyaloka Publications (Mysore) pb Rs150.

Subramaniam, Arundhathi When God Is a Traveller: Poems 116pp HarperCollins (Noida) Rs299.

Sukrita Dream Catcher 100pp Vani Prakashan (New Delhi) Rs225.

—– Untitled 71pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Swami, Sridala Escape Artist 88pp Aleph Book Company (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Talwar, Neelima Love Has Many Faces 74pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs200.

Tiwari, Mayura Wonderings 62pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Tyagi, Alka Whispers at the Ganga Ghat and Other Poems 88pp Mark Media (New Delhi) Rs250.

Vatsa, Mihir Painting That Red Circle White 78pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Vilekar, Soumya and Shaheen S. Dhanji Suroor of the Soul: The Ultimate Happiness 62pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs200.

Yadav, Shalini Kinship with You 92pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Drama

Dattani, Mahesh Me and My Plays 246pp Penguin (New Delhi) Rs299.

Purohit, Suraj and Bina Bhakta I… He… &… She 96pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs200 [story and screenplay].

Raja, P. Water Please 114pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs250.

Singh, R.P. The Flea Market and Other Plays 71pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Fiction

Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad An Evening in Paris and Other Stories ed Suresh Kohli 210pp Om Books International (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

—– Mera Naam Joker: The Complete Story ed and intro Suresh Kohli 264pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs299.

Adhikari, Prawin The Vanishing Act and Other Stories 240pp Rupa (New Delhi) Rs295.

Anand, Mamta Treasure a Tear: Stories and Poems 74pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Anand, Mulk Raj Untouchable intro Ramachandra Guha afterword by E.M.Forster 144pp Penguin Classics (London) £9.99.

Appupen Aspyrus: A Dream of Halahala 168pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs499.

Arora, Bhaavna The Deliberate Sinner 148pp Srishti (New Delhi) Pb Rs120.

Arora, O.P. Beyond the Mists 206pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Ashraf, Ajaz The Hour before Dawn 448pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs499.

Bagchi, Amitabha This Place 260pp HarperCollins (Noida) Hb Rs499 Pb Rs350.

Balagopal,Vikram Simian 260pp HarperCollins (Noida) Rs750.

Balan, Chandrika Arya and Other Stories intro K.Satchidanandan 128pp Orient Blackswan (Hyderabad) Pb Rs280.

Banerji, Chitrita Mirror City 408pp Penguin Viking (New Delhi) Rs499.

Basu, Kankana Lamplight: Paranormal Stories from the Hinterlands 200pp Pan Macmillan India, Rs250.

Basu, Samit The Adventures of Stoob: Testing Times 195pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs195 [for children].

Bedi, Ravi Lovers’ Rock 364pp Rupa (New Delhi) Rs395.

Bhagat, Chetan Half Girlfriend 260pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs175.

Bhaskar, P.G. Mad in Heaven 288pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs299.

Bhattacharyya, Madhumita Dead in a Mumbai Minute 320pp Pan Macmillan (New Delhi) Pb Rs299.

Biswas, R.K. Culling Mynahs and Crows 483pp LiFi Publications (New Delhi) Rs325.

Bose, Anirban The Death of Mitali Dotto 256pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs350.

Chandra, Neelam Saxena Can I Have This Chance 220pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Chandra, Raghav Scent of a Game 394pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs395.

Chandra, Shruti The Return of Beginnings 324pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs495.

Chatterjee, Upamanyu Fairy Tales at Fifty 343pp Fourth Estate (Noida) Rs599.

Chaudhuri, Amit Odysseus Abroad 241pp Hamish Hamilton (New Delhi) Rs499.

Chaudhuri, Devdan Anatomy of My Life 276pp Picador India (New Delhi) Pb Rs350.

Chauhan, Madhulika The One Night Affair and Other Stories 84pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Dai, Mamang The Black Hill: The Tale of Kajinsha, Gimur and Nicolas Krick 308pp Aleph Book Company (New Delhi) Rs395.

Dalal, Jayanti M. Selected Stories of Jayanti M Dalal 158pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Dange, Gouri Three-Dog Night 200pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs250.

Daniels, Michael Chaco The Mendonça Mystery and Other Stories 208pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs400.

Daruwalla, Keki N. Islands: Short Stories 208pp Tranquebar Press (Chennai) Pb Rs325.

Dasgupta, Priyonkar The Speaking Ghost of Rajpur 312pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs400.

Dasu, T. Spy, Interrupted: The Waiting Wife 344pp IndiaWrites Publishers Inc. (Boston) Pb $14.99 Kindle edn Rs185.

Daswani, Kavita Betrayed 272pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs299 [sequel to Bombay Girl].

Deva, Mukul And Death Came Calling 368pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs299.

Dhanoa, Belinder Echoes in the Well 296pp Zubaan (New Delhi) Pb Rs395.

Dhariwal, Radhika The Petpost Secret 256pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs250 [for children].

Dhyani, Girvani S.T.A.L.K.E.D. 200pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs250.

Dutt, Kylas Chunder A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945 ed Somdatta Mandal 86pp Shambhabi – The Third Eye Imprint (Kolkata) Rs160.

Gautam, Varun The Symbol 230pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs350.

Gunnery, Doug Lead Tin Yellow 241pp Partridge (Gurgaon) Pb Rs450.

Gupta, Sanjeev In My Beginning 192pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs300.

Gupta, Sayantan The Karna Pages 400pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs595.

Hazarika, Dhruba Sons of Brahma 240pp Penguin (New Delhi) Rs299.

Hossain, Begum Rokheya Sakhawat Sultana’s Dream illus Durga Bai 64pp Tara Books (Chennai) Rs180.

Iliah, Kancha Untouchable God: A Novel on Caste and Race 248pp Samya (Kolkata) Pb Rs350 [2013].

Iyengar, Abha Flash Bites 132pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs200.

Iyengar, Kartik Predator: Horn OK Please 264pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs250.

Jain, Ayush Is Every Girl an Angel? 112pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Jha, Piyush Anti-Social Network 236pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs295 [an Inspector Virkar Crime Thriller in the Mumbaistan series].

Jha, Radhika My Beautiful Shadow 280pp Fourth Estate (Noida) Rs499.

Junaid, Asad Ali And We Remained 269pp Privately Pub (Bangalore) Pb Rs249.

Kak, Manju Just one Life and Other Stories foreword by Nayantara Sahgal 128pp Imprint One (Delhi) Pb Rs350.

Kandasamy, Meena The Gypsy Goddess 281pp Fourth Estate (Noida) Rs499.

Kannan, Lakshmi Genesis: Select Stories intro Jasbir Jain 228pp Orient Blackswan (Hyderabad) Pb Rs350.

Kapoor, Deepti A Bad Character 223p Hamish Hamilton (New Delhi) Rs499.

Kaul, Nitasha Residue 348pp Rupa (New Delhi) Rs450.

Kaur, Prabhjot The Quiet Riot of Robin Shute P. 288pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Khan, Sameer Spinning Top and Other Stories 108pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Khare, Randhir Strangers on the Shore 344pp Niyogi Books (New Delhi) Rs399.

Komarraju, Sharath The Puppeteers of Palem 305pp Westland (Chennai) Rs350.

Kumar, Anu Atisa and the Time Machine in Search of Kalidasa 210pp Jaico (Mumbai) Pb Rs199 [for children].

—– How Did the Harappans Say Hello? And 16 Other Mysteries of History 125pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs150 [for children].

Kumar, Manjushree S. Edges of Ice 137pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs200.

Kumar, Shiv K. Rough Passage to the Bodhi Tree 248pp Random House (Gurgaon) Pb Rs299 [2013]

Kundu, Sreemoyee Piu Sita’s Curse: The Language of Desire 344pp Hachette India (Gurgaon) Pb Rs350.

Lal, Ranjit The Tigers of Taboo Valley 180pp Red Turtle Pb Rs250 [for children].

Lal, Yashodhara Sorting out Sid 320pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs250.

Madhuri Banerjee Advantage Love 191pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

—– Scandalous Housewives Mumbai 255pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Malhotra, Reenita Operation Mom: How I Got My Mom a Life … and a Man 240pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs299.

Malik, Suchita Women Extraordinaire 304pp Rupa (New Delhi) Hb Rs395 Pb Rs295.

Massey, Sujata The City of Palaces 480pp Penguin (New Delhi) Rs499.

Mathur, Anurag The Country Is Going to the Dogs 250pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Mohankumar, M. The Turning Point and Other Stories 112pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs225.

Mokkil, Vineetha A Happy Place and Other Stories 202pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs275

Mudagal, Vishwas Losing My Religion 350pp Fingerprint (New Delhi) Pb Rs199.

Mukherjee, Neel The Lives of Others 516pp Random House India (Gurgaon) Rs599.

Mukhopadhyay, Suvasish The Rise of the Setting Sun: Story of an Ordinary Indian 318pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs595.

Murari, Timeri Chanakya Returns 264pp Rupa (New Delhi) Rs495.

Murty, Sudha The Mother I Never Knew: Two Novellas 207pp Penguin (New Delhi) Rs250.

Nair, Anita Idris: Keeper of the Light 380pp Fourth Estate (New Delhi) Rs590.

Nair, Shyam Mission inside Edge: A Cricket Thriller 192pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs250.

Nair, Vikram Gone with the Vindaloo 256pp Hachette India (Gurgaon) Pb Rs350.

Namburi, Upendra 60 Minutes 372pp Westland (Chennai) Pb Rs350.

Nambisan, Kavery A Town like Ours 256pp Aleph Book Company (New Delhi) Pb Rs395.

Naravane, Vaiju Transgressions 286pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs350.

Narayanan, Usha The Madras Mangler 280pp Leadstart (Mumbai) Pb Rs195.

Nayak, Satyarth The Emperor’s Riddles 406pp Amaryllis (New Delhi) Pb Rs299.

Ojha, Sumedha Verma Urnabhih – A Mauryan Tale of Espionage, Adventure and Seduction 358pp Roli Books (New Delhi) Rs350.

Padhi, Bibhu Absences: A Novel 266pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs350.

Painuly, Archana Where Do I Belong? 386pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs495.

Pankajam, K. Beads of Memories 104pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs200.

Parajuly, Prajwal Land Where I Flee 265pp Hachette India (Gurgaon) Rs399.

Pariat, Janice Seahorse 294pp Random House India (Gurgaon) Rs 499.

Parikh, Mohit Manan 160pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs199.

Patil, N.S. Shakespeare and Tears: A Collection of Short Stories 116pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs250.

Rahman, Mahbubar In the Land of the Pandavas 105pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata)Rs300.

Ramu, Vimala And She Waited for 60 Years: A Novella 64pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs125.

Rao, K.B. The Common Room 247pp Frog Books (Mumbai) Pb Rs195.

Rao, Mahesh The Smoke Is Rising 328pp Random House India (Gurgaon) Rs399.

Ravi Shankar, M.V. The Call of Mayavi 414pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs595.

Ray, Kalyan No Country 551pp Bloomsbury (London) £18.99; Simon & Schuster Hb $27.00 Pb $16.00 ebook $12.99; special Indian price Rs599.

Roy, Nilanjana S. The Hundred Names of Darkness illus Prabha Mallya 313pp Aleph Book Company (New Delhi) Rs495 [2013].

Sahu, Dharanidhar The Prince in Disguise 358pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs350.

—– Vintage Love: A Collection of Twelve Stories 234pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs350.

Salim, Anees The Blind Lady’s Descendants 398pp Westland (Chennai) Rs599.

Sanghi, Ashwin and James Patterson Private India 470pp Arrow Books, Random House (London) Hb £18.99 Pb £7.99; Pb Special Indian price Rs350.

Sarkar, Himanjali Talking of Muskan 156pp Duckbill (Chennai) Pb Rs225.

Sekhsaria, Pankaj The Last Wave: An Island Novel 312pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs350.

Sharan, M.R. Blue: Tales of Reddumone, the Two-Faced 256pp HarperCollins (Noida) Rs250.

Sharma, Akhil Family Life 229pp Penguin (Gurgaon) Rs399.

Shekhar, Hansda Sowvendra The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey 210pp Aleph Book Company (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Shukla, Nikesh Meatspace 304pp HarperCollins (London) Pb £12.99 Special Indian Price Rs350.

Singh, Durlabh Cobra Village and Other Stories 370pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs595.

—– Days of Love: A Novel 166pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Singh, Ira The Surveyor 273pp Picador India (New Delhi) Pb Rs350.

Singh, Khushwant Maharaja in Denims 176pp Amaryllis (New Delhi) Pb Rs250.

Singh, Nidhi Games Girls Play 270pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs350.

Singh, Preeti Crossroads: It’s about Time… 266pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs200.

Singh, Vijay Prakash A Day in the Life of Ghulam Sarwar and Other Stories 104pp Writers Workshop (Kolkata) Rs250.

Sinha, Narendra K. Lust to Live for, Love to Die For 588pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs600.

—– The Story of Krishna: An Autobiographical Account Part I 194pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Sinha, Nilima Red Blooms in the Forest 242pp Niyogi Books (New Delhi) Pb Rs350.

Subramanian, Ravi God Is a Gamer 310pp Penguin (New Delhi) Rs299.

Swarup, Vikas The Accidental Apprentice 436pp Simon & Schuster India (New Delhi) Pb Rs350 [2013].

Tandon, Ismita Love Kills 252pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs299.

Taseer, Aatish The Way Things Were 563pp Picador India (New Delhi) Rs699.

Tiwari, Archana The Enchantress 260pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs395.

—– The Queen of Hearts 300pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs350.

Tyrewala, Altaf Engglishhh: Fictional Dispatches from a Hyperreal Nation 240pp Fourth Estate (Noida) Rs450.

Viraraghavan, Chitra The Americans 272pp Fourth Estate (Noida) Rs499.

Wig, Aditya The King’s Fall: Moryan Chronicles 256pp Penguin (New Delhi) Rs299.

Zaidi, Annie Gulab 200pp HarperCollins (Noida) Rs350.

Anthologies

Academic Lives of Fifteen Eminent Teachers of English ed Bijay Kumar Das 226pp Doaba House (Delhi) Rs250.

A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces: Extraordinary Short Stories from the 19^th Century to the Present ed David Davidar 515pp Aleph Book Company (New Delhi) Rs695.

Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry ed Arundhathi Subramaniam 328pp Penguin (New Delhi) Hb Rs599.

From India to Palestine: Essays in Solidarity ed Githa Hariharan 210pp LeftWord Books (New Delhi) Hb Rs350 Pb Rs295 [Githa Hariharan, Meena Alexander, Aijaz Ahmad, Ritu Menon, Nayantara Sehgal and others],

Goa Travels, Being the Accounts of Travellers From the 16th to the 20th Century ed Manohar Shetty 324pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Heartstrings: A Collection of Poetry eds Madhumita Ghosh and Aseem Abbasi 96pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs150.

India Junction ed Seema Sharma 296pp Rupa (New Delhi) Rs695 [articles about Indian Railways].

Indo-Australian Anthology of Short Fiction eds Rob Harle, Sunil Sharma and Sangeeta Sharma 387pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs595.

Of Mothers and Others: Stories, Essays, Poems ed Jaishree Misra, foreword by Shabana Azmi 285pp Zubaan (New Delhi) Rs495 [2013].

Parallel Speech: Fifteen Younger Contemporary Oriya Poets eds Bibhu Padhi and Minakshi Padhi 228pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Pb Rs400.

Scaling Heights: Anthology on Contemporary Indian English Poetry eds Gopal Lahiri and Kiriti Sengupta 302pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs595.

Shaping the World: Women Writers on Themselves ed Manju Kapur 276pp Hay House India (Delhi) Rs399 [23 novelists from the subcontinent, including Anita Nair, Manju Kapur, and Anuradha Marwah],

Short Stories from Modern India ed Suresh Kohli 325pp Om Books International (New Delhi) Rs395.

Swami Vivekananda: A Contemporary Reader ed Makarand Paranjape 272pp Routledge India (New Delhi) Pb Rs495.

Travelling In, Travelling Out: A Book of Unexpected Journeys ed Namita Gokhale 280pp HarperCollins (Noida) Rs599.

Urban Shots: Yuva ed Lipi Mehta 192pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs250 [short stories].

Voices across the Ocean: Poems from Australia and India eds Rob Harle and Jaydeep Sarangi 98pp Cyberwit net (Allahabad) Rs200.

Wings Over the Mahanadi: Eight Odia-English Poets ed Mangalesh Dash 108pp Poetrywala (Mumbai) Pb Rs250 [selections from the work of leading Odia-English poets, including Jayanta Mahapatra, Bibhu Padhi, Shanta Acharya and Rabindra K. Swain].

Translations

Angaaray ed and trans from Urdu by Snehal Shingavi 240pp Penguin Viking (New Delhi) Rs499.

Angarey: Nine Stories and a Play trans from Urdu by Vibha S. Chauhan and Khalid Alvi 105pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs195.

Godse, Vishnubhat Mazha Pravas trans from Marathi by Priya Adarkar and Shanta Gokhale as Adventures of a Brahmin Priest: My Travels in the 1857Rebellion 214pp OUP (New Delhi) Pb Rs650.

Goswami, Joy Selected Poems trans from Bangla by Sampurna Chattarji 216pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs350.

Jaya: Story of the Mahabharata adapted by Deepavali Sen illus Neeta Gangopadhyaya 280pp Children’s Book Trust (New Delhi) Rs200.

Mahabharata Volume 9 trans from Sanskrit by Bibek Debroy 760pp Penguin (New Delhi) Rs599 ebook Rs499.

Mahathi, S. Finding The Mother: Sage Valmiki’s Sri Sundarakanda in English Verse 358pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs995.

Ramayana–The Game of Life: Rise of the Sun Prince Book 1 Shubha Vilas 252pp Jaico (Mumbai) Rs250.

Sarna, Mohinder Singh Savage Harvest: Stories of Partition trans from Punjabi by Navtej Sarna 264pp Rupa (New Delhi) Pb Rs227.

Letters, Biography and Autobiography

Ao, Temsula Once upon a Life, Burnt Curry and Bloody Rags: A Memoir 248pp Zubaan Books (New Delhi) Rs395.

Kumar, Anu Swami Vivekananda, the Monk and the Reformer: What Swami Vivekananda Did, What Swami Vivekananda Said 169pp Hachette India (Gurgaon) Pb Rs195 [for children].

—– The Nightingale and the Freedom Fighter: What Sarojini Naidu Did, What Sarojini Naidu Said 160pp Hachette India Rs195 [for children].

Singh, Daman Strictly Personal: Manmohan and Gursharan 466pp HarperCollins (Noida) Rs699.

Singh, Harleen The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History and Fable in India xi+189pp Cambridge U Press (New Delhi) Rs645.

Singh, K. Natwar One Life Is Not Enough: An Autobiography 410pp Rupa (New Delhi) Hb Rs500.

Criticism

General Studies

“‘Am I a South Asian, Really?’ Constructing ‘South Asians’ in Canada and Being South Asian in Toronto” Sutama Ghosh South Asian Diaspora 6(1) pp35–55.

“C. N. Srinath’s Two Recent Translations” C. Naganna The Literary Criterion 49(1&2) pp75–86 [on Kannada translations of Raja Rao’s unpublished novel Song of Woman and Arun Joshi’s The Apprentice].

“Classical and the Folk: How Concrete Is the Distinction?” Manoj Das The Critical Endeavour 20 pp379–382.

Communication and Clarification: Essays on English in the Indian Classroom Murali Sivaramakrishnan 196pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs550.

Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond eds Judy Wakabayashi and Rita Kothari 232pp Orient Blackswan (Hyderabad) Pb Rs495.

English in the Dalit Context eds Alladi Uma, K. Suneetha Rani and D. Murali Manohar 192pp Orient Blackswan (Hyderabad) Rs695.

English Literature: A Quest for Ecosocial Justice ed T. Sai Chandra Mouli 416pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs1200.

English Literature in India: A Literary Communion Basavaraj Naikar 382pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs995.

“Glocalization and the Eclipse of Postcolonial Theory” Bijay Kumar Das The Critical Endeavour 20 pp14–25.

“Images of India as a Slumdog Millionaire: Trends in Post-Rushdie Indian English Fiction” P. Balaswamy The Critical Endeavour 20 pp83–96

India and the World: Postcolonialism, Translation and Indian Literature, Essays in Honour of Professor Harish Trivedi ed Ruth Vanita 286pp Pencraft International (New Delhi) Rs850.

Indian Booker Prize Winners: Images and Imaginations ed Vivekanand Jha and Rajnish Mishra 352pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs1500.

The Indian English Fiction: A Critical Spectrum Rajini Singh 254pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs1100.

Indian English Theatre and Drama: Enriching Experiments eds Sujatha Rao, Rajshree Trivedi, Jayashree Palit and Trupti Sabharanjak 180pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs700.

Indian Literary Criticism in English N. K. Acharya 264pp Ritu Publications (Jaipur) Rs995.

“Indian Literature or the Tower of Babel: The Role of Translation in Indian Literature” K. Satchidanandan The Critical Endeavour 20 pp383–386.

Indian Writing in English Today: Insights for the Future D. Gnanasekaran 204pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs800.

Indian Writings in English: Critical Insights Bijender Singh 256pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs995.

Jasmine on a String: A Survey of Women Writing English Fiction in India Margaret Paul Joseph 199pp OUP (New Delhi) Rs695.

Landscape of Indian Literature: Voices and Visions Sitakant Mahapatra 166pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs600.

“Landscapes of Self: Contemporary Indian Women’s Poetry” Asha Viswas Kavya Bharati 26 pp121–139

Literature and Cultural Studies Mallikarjun Patil 332pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs1200.

The Local and the Global in Postcolonial Literature Punyashree Panda 240pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs995.

Multilayered Literary Innovations: Sahitya Akademi Award Wining English Novels eds Vivekanand Jha and Rajnish Mishra 404pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs1600.

Orientation Matters: Studies in Transcultural Studies ed T. Sai Chandra Mouli ix+278pp Book Enclave (Jaipur) Rs995.

People Who Meet People: Interviews with the Stars Swapan K. Banerjee intro Ruskin Bond foreword by I. Allan Sealy 494pp Tranquebar Press (Chennai) Rs699.

Perspectives on Commonwealth Literature Basavaraj Naikar 254pp Book Enclave (Jaipur) Rs1295 [revised and enlarged edn].

Regional Language Fiction: Transformative Essays on Literary Translation V.V.B. Rama Rao 174pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs600.

Rewriting India: Eight Writers Bruce King 288pp OUP (New Delhi) Rs495.

Sahitya Akademi Award Winning English Collections: Critical Overviews and Insights ed Ketaki Datta 316pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs1200.

Studies in Transcultural Fiction ed T. Sai Chandra Mouli 315pp Adhyayan Books (New Delhi) Rs995.

Textualizing Trauma: Narratives from North-East India and Beyond Sarangadhar Baral 278pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs1100.

“The Theory of Rasa” Ravi Nandan Sinha The Critical Endeavour 20 pp368–372.

Towards Social Change: Essays on Dalit Literature eds Sankar Prasad Singha and Indranil Acharya 200pp Orient Blackswan (Hyderabad) Pb Rs495.

“Translating Indian Literatures into English: Theory and Praxis” Rositta Joseph Valiyamattam The Quest 28(1) pp10–32.

“Translating the Indian Past: The Poets’ Experience” Arvind Krishna Mehrotra The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(3) pp427–440 [on Toru Dutt, A. K. Ramanujan and Arun Kolatkar].

Travel Writing and the Transnational Author Sam Knowles 244pp Palgrave Macmillan (Basingstoke) £55.00 [Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie].

Trends in Indian English Drama: A Study and Perspectives ed Nagraj G. Holeyannavar 282pp Mangalam Publishers (New Delhi) Rs850.

Studies On Individual Writers

Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad “My Literary Credo” Khwaja Ahmad Abbas Indian Literature 282 pp111–117.

Adiga, Aravind “A Postmodern Reading of Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger” Raj Kumar Sharma Approaches 1(1) pp63–72.

—– “Irrelevance of Morality: The White Tiger and The 3 Mistakes of My Life” Kavita Arya The Quest 28(2) pp54–58.

—– “The White Tiger: The Narrative Manoeuvres” C. G. Shyamala Littcrit 40(2) pp108–117.

Anand, Mulk Raj Protest and Social Reform in the Novels of Mulk Raj Anand and Bhabani Bhattacharya Sudhir Nikam xiv+202pp Vital Publications (Jaipur) Rs795.

—– “Religiosity and Revolution in Mulk Raj Anand’s The Big Heart” B. Parvathi The Critical Endeavour 20 pp83–97.

Ao, Temsula “Woman as Historian: Personal and National Destinies in Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home” Rositta Joseph Valiyamattam The Quest 28(2) pp66–76.

Aurobindo, Sri Sri Aurobindo: The Sage Mallikarjun Patil 96pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs400.

—– Sri Aurobindo’s Aesthetics and Poetics: New Directions Murali Sivaramakrishnan 238pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs800.

—– “Sri Aurobindo’s Critique of English Poetry” Haladhar Panda The Critical Endeavour 20 pp347–367.

—– “The Petrarchan Sonnet in Sri Aurobindo” A.K.Jha Approaches 1(1) pp16–19.

—– “Who Evolves? A Note on Sri Aurobindo’s Sonnets on Evolution” Rudrashis Datta Critical and Creative Wings 1(1) pp8–14.

Bhagat, Chetan “Irrelevance of Morality: The White Tiger and The 3 Mistakes of My Life” Kavita Arya The Quest 28(2) pp54–58.

Bhatt, Sujata “‘Home Was Always Far Away’: Intertextual and Intermedial Poetic Appropriations of Double Consciousness in Sujata Bhatt’s Pure Lizard” Cecile Sandten South Asian Diaspora 6(1) pp7–18.

Bhattacharya, Bhabani Protest and Social Reform in The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand and Bhabani Bhattacharya [see Anand above].

—– “The Emancipation of Women in Music for Mohini” Approaches 1(1) pp97–103.

Bond, Ruskin “Cinematic Translation of Ruskin Bond’s The Blue Umbrella: An Analysis” Arti Nirmal The Quest 28(1) pp42–50.

—– “An Interview with Ruskin Bond” S. G. Puri and Arun Kumar Yadav The Quest 28(2) pp33–36.

Chaudhuri, Nirad C. “Homeward Journey Abroad: Nirad C. Chaudhuri and The Tradition of Twentieth Century Indian National Autobiographies” Sayan Chattopadhyay The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(2) pp157–172.

Das, Kamala “Critiquing Kamala Das’s Love Poetry in the Light of Queer Theory” Premalata Rout The Critical Endeavour 20 pp314–323.

—– “Indian Erotic Poetry in English: Kamala Das and After” C. N. Srinath The Critical Endeavour 20 pp387–392.

Das, Manoj “Manoj Das in Conversation with Bijay Kumar Das” The Literary Criterion 49(3&4) pp121–134 [interview].

Dattani, Mahesh “The Ambivalence of Gender in Mahesh Dattani’s Seven Steps around the Fire: A Theoretical Approach” Jnanranjan Padhi The Critical Endeavour 20 pp273–280.

Desai, Anita “Multicultural Myths in Journey to Ithaca” Teresa J. Heloise The Quest 28(2) pp19–25.

Desai, Kiran “From Comical to Contemplative in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss” Ramesh K. Srivastava 137–146.

—– “Social Exclusion in the Novels of Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai” Ipsita Nayak The Critical Endeavour 20 pp147–154.

—– “The Tale of Monkey Baba: Reading Kiran Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard” Jitendra Narayan Patnaik The Critical Endeavour 20 pp130–136.

Desai, Kishwar “Paradise Lost on the Shores of The Sea of Innocence: Kishwar Desai’s Angst about the Victims of Power Politics” K. Nirupa Rani The Critical Endeavour 20 pp172–181.

Desai, Padma “Two Memoirs: Padma Desai’s Breaking Out and Chaman Nahal’s Silent Life” Mamta Choudhary The Quest 28(1) pp72–87.

Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee “Moral Dilemma and Lack of Resolutions: Rendering of the Mahabharata in Chitra Lekha Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions” Sushila Singh The Critical Endeavour 20 pp155–171.

Ezekiel, Nissim “Nissim Ezekiel’s ‘Night of the Scorpion’: A Critical Analysis” Sumana Ghosh The Quest 28(2) pp91–96.

—– “Nissim Ezekiel’s Poetry: Theory and Practice” Satyasindhu Ghosh The Critical Endeavour 20 pp299–313.

Gandhi, M.K. “Experiments in English and the Question of Identity in Post-colonial Autobiographies: A Study of M. K. Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth” Amrita Satapathy The Critical Endeavour 20 pp281–298.

Ghosh, Amitav Amitav Ghosh: A Traveller across Time and Space G. A. Ghanshyam, Devasree Chakravarti and Rakhi Nara 240pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs995.

—– Amitav Ghosh: Champion of Human Rights Kinshuk Majumdar 159pp Prestige Books (New Delhi) Rs700.

—– “Inheritors of Imaginary Homelands: A Study of Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction” Sujatha S. Littcrit 40(2) pp131–137.

—– “Language, History and Society: An Assessment of Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace” Shivangi Srivastava The Quest 28(2) pp84–90.

—– “Migration as Subversion of History: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land” Swati Kumari The Quest 28(2) pp116–122.

Hariharan, Githa “Deconstruction of Misogynous and Colonial Discourse in Githa Hatiharan’s When Dreams Travel” Vemuri Rupa and C. L. L. Jayaprada The Literary Criterion 49(1&2) pp51–64.

Iyengar, K.R.Srinivasa “The Beginnings of a Reviewer and Essayist” Prema Nandakumar Journal of Indian Writing in English 42(1&2) pp1–11.

Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer “An Outsider’s Inwardness with India: The Case of Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust” Sonali Das The Critical Endavour 20 pp50–60.

Karnad, Girish “Contextualising Myths, Folklores and Legends in the plays of Girish Karnad” Pravat Kumar Mishra The Critical Endeavour 20 pp260–272.

—– “Locating the Postcolonial Modern in Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq” Kamalakar Bhat Littcrit 40(2) pp74–81.

Kolatkar, Arun “Arun Kolatkar’s Description of India” Vidyan Ravinthiran The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(3) pp359–378.

—– “Inscribing Our Times in an Epic: Arun Kolatkar’s Sarpa Satra” H.S.Komalesha and Hari M.G. TAB – Journal of Poetry and Poetics 2 (9) (online, Chapman University Publication).

—– “Sacred without God: Bhakti in the Poetry of Arun Kolatkar” H. S. Komalesha and Hari M.G. Asiatic – IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature 8(2) pp78–93.

Lahiri, Jhumpa “Mirroring India: A Cultural Study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine” Monica Littcrit 40(2) pp92–98.

Mahapatra, Jayanta “Gynocentric Leanings in the Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra” Anita Myles The Quest 28(1) pp1–9.

—– “Jayanta Mahapatra’s Land and the Question of Reader Response” Gagan Bihari Purohit Critical and Creative Wings 1(2) pp73–85.

—– The Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: A Study of Imagery Shiba Shankar Nath 174pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs700.

Mahomed, Dean “Narrating the Idea of India with Special Reference to Dean Mahomed’s Travels and Salman Rushdie’s Non-Fictional Works” Nishtha Saxena Littcrit 40(2) pp99–107.

Malgonkar, Manohar “Manohar Malgonkar: A Centennial Tribute” D.S.Rao Indian Literature 281pp104–112.

Malik, Keshav “Au Revoir Keshav Malik” Mansi Tikkoo Indian Literature 282 pp136–38.

—– “The Indian Writer’s Problems” Keshav Malik Indian Literature 282 pp139–142.

Markandeya, Kamala “Rukmani’s Identity and Survival in Nectar in a Sieve” Nandini Kumari Approaches 1(1) pp122–131.

Mukherjee, Bharati “Mirroring India: A Cultural Study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine” Monica Littcrit 40(2) pp92–98.

Nahal, Chaman “Two Memoirs: Padma Desai’s Breaking Out and Chaman Nahal’s Silent Life” Mamta Choudhary The Quest 28(1) pp72–87.

Naikar, Basavaraj Socio-Cultural Vision in the Creative Works of Basavaraj Naikar Pramod Ganganmale 208pp Indotech Publications (Nanded, Maharashtra) Rs 500.

Nair, Anita “Caste Hegemony versus Communism: The Kerala Society in Anita Nair’s Novels” Maya Vinai and Jayashree Hazarika The Quest 28(2) pp59–65.

Narayan, R.K. “Myth, Tradition and the Individual Talent in R. K. Narayan’s The Guide” Subismita Lenka The Critical Endeavour 20pp109–118.

—– “Patriarchy and the Predicament of a Woman in R.K.Narayan’s The Dark Room” Christina Mahainim The Quest 28(1) pp97–102.

—– R. K. Narayan: An Introduction Mohan G. Ramanan 201pp Cambridge University Press (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Padhi, Bibhu “An Interview with Bibhu Padhi” Nandini Sahu The Quest 28(1) pp114–118.

Raghavacharyulu, D. V. K. “Professor D.V.K. Raghavacharyulu: A Tribute” S. K. Sarma Journal of Indian Writing in English 42(1&2) pp14–17.

Raghupathi, K.V. Introspective Voyager: A Collection of Critical Essays on the Poetry of K. V. Raghupathi ed P.V.Laxmi Prasad 256pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs995.

Raman, Aroon “Read the Thrill: An Interview” Sravasti Datta The Hindu MetroPlus Bangalore Edn 17 Jan 2014 pp1,4.

Rao, Raja “Raja Rao and the Making of Indian English Idiom” Ragini Ramachandra The Critical Endeavour 20 pp119–129.

Reddy, T. Vasudeva The Rural Muse: The Poetry of T. Vasudeva Reddy K.V. Raghupathi 482pp Authorspress (New Delhi) Rs1600.

Roy, Arundhati “Social Exclusion in the Novels of Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai” Ipsita Nayak The Critical Endeavour 20 pp147–154.

Rushdie, Salman “Haroun and Luka: A study of Salman Rushdie’s Talismanic Stories” Madhumita Roy and Anjali Gera Roy Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49(2) pp173–188.

—– “Narrating the Idea of India with Special Reference to Dean Mahomed’s Travels and Salman Rushdie’s Non-Fictional Works” Nishtha Saxena Littcrit 40(2) pp99–107.

Sahgal, Nayantara “Impact of Gandhian Philosophy on the Novels of Nayantara Sahgal” N. Pratheeba and G.Baskaran The Quest 28(1) pp88–94.

—– Out of Line: A Literary and Political Biography of Nayantara Sahgal Ritu Menon xii+388pp Fourth Estate (Noida) Rs699.

Sharma, Bulbul “Food, Dieting and Questions of Female Self-esteem: A Comparative Study of Elizabeth Berg’s “The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted” and Bulbul Sharma’s “Sweet Nothings” Shymasree Basu Critical and Creative Wings 1(2) pp27–38.

Singh, Khushwant “There Is So Much More to Say about Khushwant” Rajvinder Singh Indian Literature 280 pp147–151.

Someshwar, Manreet Sodhi “Grandeur and Hardship: An Interview” M. A. C. The Hindu MetroPlus Bangalore Edn 17 Jan 2014 p5.

Syal, Meera “Celebratory Discourse of the Dispossessed: Diasporic Identities in Meera Syal’s Anita and Me” Divya Girishkumar The Quest 28(2) pp26–32.

Thakore, Anand “Anand Thakore’s Waking in December: A Journey Towards Self-Transcendence” Elizabeth V. Koshy The Quest 28(2) pp1–7.

Non-fiction

Ambedkar, B.R. Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition ed S.Anand intro Arundhati Roy 415pp Navayana (New Delhi) Rs525.

Bal, Hartosh Singh Waters Close over Us: A Journey along the Narmada 252pp Fourth Estate (Noida) Rs499.

Baru, Sanjay The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh 301pp Penguin Viking (New Delhi) Rs599.

Bond, Ruskin Love among the Bookshelves 185pp Penguin Viking (New Delhi) Rs299.

Chaudhuri, Amit Telling Tales: Selected Writing, 1993–2013 312pp Penguin Viking (New Delhi) Rs499

Dai, Mamang Hambreelmai’s Loom illus Kalyani Ganapathy 31pp Tulika (Chennai) Rs150 [retelling of a folktale of the Mishmee tribe].

Dasgupta, Rana Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-first Century Delhi 476pp HarperCollins (Noida) Rs799 [pub in US with the title Capital: The Eruption of Delhi].

David, Esther Ahmedabad: City with a Past 240pp HarperCollins (Noida) Pb Rs350.

Ferreira, Arun Colours of the Cage: A Prison Memoir 176pp Aleph Book Company (New Delhi) Pb Rs295.

Gantzer, Hugh and Colleen Gantzer Spice Story illus 268pp Niyogi Books (New Delhi) Rs1500.

Hariharan, Githa Almost Home: Cities & Other Places 248pp Fourth Estate (Noida) Rs499.

Jussawalla, Adil Maps for a Mortal Moon: Essays and Entertainments ed and intro Jerry Pinto 362pp Aleph Book Company (New Delhi) Rs495.

Ramachandra, Ragini In the Alpine Lands: A Visit to Switzerland and France photographs by S. Ramachandra 103pp Dhvanyaloka Publications (Mysore) Rs800.

Sahgal, Nayantara The Political Imagination: A Personal Response to Life, Literature and Politics 236pp HarperCollins (Noida) Rs499.

Sarna, Navtej Indians at Herod’s Gate: A Jerusalem Tale 208pp Rupa (New Delhi) Rs500

Sealy, Irwin Allan The Small Wild Goose Pagoda: An Almanack 290pp Aleph Book Company (New Delhi) Rs595.

Tripathi, Tulika Alice in Corporateland: Career Lessons from a Fairy Tale 136pp Penguin Viking (New Delhi) Rs299.

New Journals

Approaches ed Samir Kumar Sharma. 102, Madhukunj Apartments, Nehrunagar, Patna 800013. Email: [e-mail]. Annual sub Rs300 for individuals, Rs500 for institutions; 2 issues per year.

Critical and Creative Wings ed Tapati Talukdar, HB 7, Flat No.6, Salt Lake, Kolkata 700106. Email: [e-mail]. Annual sub Rs400; 2 issues per year.