Abstract
Introduction
2016 saw the emergence of some new poets and novelists. Established poets and novelists like Jayanta Mahapatra, Eunice de Souza, Gopikrishnan Kottoor, Hoshang Merchant, Manohar Shetty, Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Tabish Khair, Lakshmi Kannan, Shashi Deshpande, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Manju Kapur, Namita Gokhale, and Aravind Adiga have published new work. Vasanth Kannabiran’s Menaka and Other Ballets is an interesting experiment in dramaturgy. However, the most interesting entries in this year’s list belong to non-fiction: Manju Jaidka’s moving account of bringing up a son with special needs, Nilanjana Roy’s essays in The Girl Who Ate Books, Amitav Ghosh’s book on climate change, and Shashi Tharoor’s exposé of the inequities of colonization in An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India.
There has been a surge of interesting poetry in 2016 from different parts of the country. While 2015 was marked by experimentation, this year poets chose to use a more stable form. Moving away from new styles in visual poetry, most collections are divided into sections, each with a set of poems that bear out the nuance of the title. The use of epigraphs to make intertextual references to the work of other writers abounds.
Recipient of the Padma Shri (2009) and the Sahitya Akademi Award (1981), Jayanta Mahapatra’s new poetry collection Hesitant Light, after The Lie of Dawns (2009), comprises 58 poems. A sustained tenor with tropes of memory, rain, light, shadow, and windows as connecting threads mark this collection. Violence by the powerful against women of the Kondh tribe in “Crossing the River” or a young girl in “Already the Houses Appear” create an atmosphere of gloom. There is a sense that myths one had lived by no longer support existence. The poem “Wish” focuses on the need for better times: The land some love to call holy is not the one I want to live in … when a mob watches and cheers in wild delight the sight of Fara’s rape and mutilation limb by limb … I want my government to hover like a butterfly over a garden; not be, as it is, like a wasp or snake.
Eunice de Souza’s Learn from the Almond Leaf is her fifth poetry collection. The poems tap the senses and urge the reader to imaginatively create a harmonious bond with the environment. The title poem “Learn from the Almond Leaf” sets the tone of the poems. As the almond leaves fall, “The ground is burning. / The earth is burning”. In “Close on the Heels” the otherwise cool winter months are seen as hot: “Close on the heels / of a hot October / comes a hot November / a hot December”. “Mother Crow”, “Baby Parrot”, “Drenched Crow”, and “Egrets” are all titles that bring us in touch with a world we have left far behind.
Hoshang Merchant’s My Sunset Marriage spans poetry from 2006 to the present. Subtitled “One Hundred and One Poems”, it presents an entire range of poems from earlier collections from Juvenilia and Flower to Flame to the more recent Sufiana and New Poems. Prefaced by the author, with an introduction by Kazim Ali, “New Poems” presents a sense of nostalgia about history with poems on Sankaracharya, Gandhi, and Tagore. “Ashes of Gandhi” with an invocation adapted from Pasolini’s “Ashes of Gramsci” rereads Gandhi’s bond with the nation: “Belonging to the nation and belonging / to no one. The nation too belonging / to no one — despoiled.”
A Homi Bhabha and a Sahitya Akademi fellow, Goa-based Manohar Shetty’s seventh poetry collection Morning Light carries a wide range of poems. “Mythologies” brings together multiple belief systems: “The Golden Temple shimmering / In a lake, Lord Shiva crowned / By a hooded snake, Buddha’s locks / Like a mound of peppercorns / And a whiplashed Christ crucified.” An interesting poem, “Accessories” is a combination of snippets with titles such as “Macho Theory”, “RIP”, and “Picky”. In “RIP” the expectation is quickly belied as the person who rests in peace is not liked by any one: “He was hated so / much that not a / soul went to his / funeral except / the grave digger”.
Happenspace is the eighth collection of verse in English by the bilingual writer Amarendra Kumar (b.1937). Most of the poems are philosophical reflections on contemporary life in a sombre tone. “Widow’s Wail” is a poignant comment on how crime affects women in India, because a widow cannot remarry or make a new beginning in life if her husband dies. The murder of a man kills not just an individual, but the hopes and ambitions of the family. Kumar employs alliteration with good effect and his imagery is quite original, as in these lines from the poem “Lamplight”: “Morning and evening / the sun whets its rays / like a knife to shed / bloodred wine for light”. The play on the two connotations of shed makes the reader think about the twin functions of the sun in India, giving life and destroying it through excessive heat.
I. K. Sharma (b.1932) is also a bilingual poet, writing in both English and Hindi; he is also a distinguished translator. His eighth collection of poetry has the unusual title Nirantaram (“without stopping”) and a Sanskrit subtitle: Charaiveti, Charaiveti (“Ever on the move, keep moving”). This collection of 52 poems has an impressive range of subjects. There are tributes to less known persons like the villager Dasarath Manjhi, who single-handedly built a road through a rocky mountain, or Bhanwari Devi, the social worker who tried to stop child marriages in Rajasthan. Descriptive poems like “Catching a Bull” capture the Indian scene effectively. Sharma writes equally well about inanimate objects like a shoe or his scooter. The thought-provoking poem “Desert” reveals the awesome power of nature. He employs a variety of poetic forms, using rhyme in many poems. The poem “Wood” written in couplets is in the form of a ghazal, with a perfect rhyme scheme.
Murali Sivaramakrishnan is a poet, artist and literary critic. His sixth poetry collection Silverfish presents poems rooted in nature and accompanied by illustrations to express the mood. The collection includes a poem tracing the quest for Buddha’s message, a poem dedicated to Rabindranath Tagore, and poems on animals. In “The True Folly of Wisdom” the poet asks, “What is there in being master, in being slave? / After all, you will then be equal to all of them / In the ashes of death”.
Winner of national prizes of the annual All India Poetry Society and the British Council, Gopikrishnan Kottoor’s latest collection My Little Tsunami has poems that take the reader through a journey that will not let her/him remain complacent. The title poem is the last one in the poetry section. Spanning over 39 sections, it presents the brutal rape of a young girl by a man who rescues her from the tsunami waves. The poem dwells on tender feelings of the 15-year-old who seeks companionship in the child: “Today is my fifteenth birthday. / If you were here with me, my little Tsunami, / I would have kissed you for being my birthday gift, / I was hoping we would go out to pluck the morning flowers”. And then when she meets with the “terrible hand, a small snake”, she holds the “ivory handle with both my hands / Sending the plunge slivering down his spine”.
Manohar Bandopadhyay’s Sequence of Lines is his seventh poetry collection, after Helium Fence in 2001. It focuses on political events, moods, the history of Delhi and contemporary ideas. A hard-hitting poem, “Market” expresses the anxiety of living in the present: “Life sold in the malls is not much unlike / the debris dumped off the door”. “Those Days in Delhi” creates the nostalgia of Delhi through a recounting of “India Gate”, “Gaylord”, “Janpath Coffee House”, “Palika Bazar”, “Jama Masjid”, and the “Red Fort”. In “Come to Delhi at Your Peril” the poet brings forth the cruel side of Delhi: “None wastes time here to defend a Diana / How does it matter anyway if she is Diana / or Draupadi?” The title poem explores the idea of lines in poetry: “What is beyond the line, lies within too”.
Kazim Ali’s All One’s Blue is a collection of new and selected poems from the poet’s earlier collections. Most poems remain within the ambit of religion, showing Ali’s struggles with this construct. Poems from The Book of Miriam, the Prophetess, The Far Mosque, and The Fortieth Day express the poet’s desire to improve upon this structure. In “Ghaziabad” he writes: “What then now of Hagar’s last recompense: that twelve princes would be born of her line. Not such a grand gesture after one considers their fates”. The book also has translations of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry. “New Poems” recount the welcome accorded to the refugees from Lebanon in the Israeli war of 1982 by the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos. In the poem of the same name, we read, “Yannis, you held him in the glare of the diamonded sea / Unteaching him his practical mantra of liberation / And saw in him a son to take care of you in your loneliness”.
Sudeep Sen’s Ero-text, divided into five sections, “Desire”, “Disease”, “Delusion”, “Dream” and “Downpour”, is experimental in nature and form. Also termed “microfiction”, they are poems that have an interesting range. “Disease” focusses on the mortality of the body and “Desire” brings out the erotic, especially in the context of ancient texts. The lines from poems such as “Heather” befit the title of the book: “I feel parched, dry, in spite of all the plenitude of water and our body-sweat. The sand too is sweating beneath us”. Or in “Sun-Blanched Blood”, the “Hardened sepia-stained lines / that once approximated to / a flock of metaphors, / now rearrange themselves / into a congregation of phrases”. The poetic process takes centre space in “Delusion”. “Dream” cuts across countries and “Downpour” brings back the idea of the erotic through rain.
C. L. Khatri’s fourth collection of poetry in English For You to Decide prompts you to think about the immediate world. It has poems that range from gender-based violence to problems in conflict zones. In “Deluge of Development” the poet is critical of the way in which man has plundered this world. In “Writing a New Ramayana” the Indian woman rewrites the script: she no longer waits like an “Empty pitcher” but is in control of the situation as she “knows how to dig tubewell / have her fill and sell the rest”. In “Traps of Nostalgia” the old man with a “kangari inside his overcoat” holds on to the warmth of kahwa with wife and children in memory. In the very next stanza, this warmth turns into the “frozen fire” from which he collects their ashes to give up to the River Jhelum.
Dilip Mohapatra’s fourth poetry collection Flow Infinite blends complex contemporary ideas in simple language. The most difficult of issues is presented with perspicacity. In “Survivors” the candle march against the Nirbhaya case is poignantly felt. It was the time “when Jyoti was rechristened / Damini or Nirbhaya / and a victim with a new name / the survivor”.
A young poet from Kerala, Chandramohan S. has brought out his second collection of poems, Letters to Namdeo Dhasal. Reminding us of the potential of poetry to deal with social issues, the poet focuses on both the history of Kerala as well as on contemporary issues, especially the position of marginalized caste groups, through short verse lines: “Twin streams of blood, voluble, / Flow from the festering wounds of Nangeli / With the semi-divine fury of Kannagi”. Characters from the epics, Hidimba and Shambuka, for instance, find a place in this volume.
Anindita Sengupta’s second collection Walk like Monsters comprises poems that have appeared in numerous anthologies. “Monsters” marks a violent dismemberment: “They started eviscerating us. Colossal, our limbs rose into sky / like glass towers … The plinth of our house sinks. I grow wings, inch by inch, / poking them out of my arms like scales”. The transition of girls from free and fun-loving human beings to women trapped in marriage is presented in “Girls on the Hill” as they transact all that for “a gash of gold around the neck”.
Kersy Katrak (1936–2007) has never quite received his due as a poet, perhaps because his books have long been out of print. Collected Poems, with a detailed introduction by William Mazzarella, includes poems from A Journal of the Way (1969), Diversions by the Wayside (1969), Underworld (1979) and Purgatory: Songs from the Holy Planet (1984) as well as poems published in journals. The collection has poems dedicated to various poets and writers such as Nissim Ezekiel, Keki Daruwalla, Jean-Paul Sartre, and William Empson. “Journey to the Winter Solstice” captures moments spent with Keki N. Daruwalla at Ranikhet: “The truth of course is this: / Holidays too need to be forgotten”. In “Advertising Executive” he describes this new person as “Fluently coloured, with the odd attractive way / Of speech, the slightly different smile that all / Make him a God quite out of reach”. However, “A zero equipoise of quip and smile / Betrays the death within”. In the words of Daruwalla, “Katrak’s poetry blends the serious with the laconic and comic, the spirit with the sexual”.
Pune-based Rohinton Daruwala, who writes code for a living, has made his poetic debut with The Sand Libraries of Timbuktu. It is divided into nine sections, with commonplace titles such as “Tea, Coffee and Cigarettes”, “Love Poems”, “Rain Poems”, “Meals, Large and Small” and “Words on Words”. In a Keatsian journey, the day-to-day leads to philosophical musings on life. In “Memories of Water” the image shifts from a dry parched speaker in the shower to a lack of water: “I suck dry taps, bottles, ice-cubes, / freezer frost till I threaten to burst”. Water reappears at the end imbued with the erotic: “And yet the sea is endless. The sea / holds worlds and worlds within itself”.
In Ceramic Evening Jyothsnaphanija, a writer with a visual disability, creates a poetic melange that tickles the palate and enlightens the senses, tracing a culinary journey through “panipuri”, “lassi”, “tamarind”, and “sandalwood”, to name a few. Food becomes a trope in poems such as “Pickles”: “Our cities dwell in pickles / Made by us in cartographic kitchens”.
Punjab-based Ramandeep Johal’s debut collection The Sea of Tranquillity combines literature with the world of science. A Physics teacher, his collection begins with the title poem dedicated to Neil Armstrong. As he walked on the moon the poet writes: “I was then nascent / inside my mother / perhaps I tossed like him / as mother listened to Man’s ascent / on the radio – / she felt my first small steps.”
Bengaluru-based Meera Chakravorty and Elsa Maria Lindqvist from Sweden present their poetry in The Remnant Glow. Written under their respective names the poems course through various literary places and figures. Chakravorty writes on Chinua Achebe and Shakespeare “to be one with the intoxicating art of myriad time”. In the poem “In Harmony (A True Incident)”, a five-year-old girl Emily plays Sita. On a sudden whim, she changes the plot and tells the one playing Ravana. Rereading the epic the poet reinforces the “path of love / with no enemy camps”. Lindqvist in her poems focuses on the idea of existence, questioning its anxieties.
Tanya Mendonsa’s second collection All the Answers I Shall Ever Get is an interesting poetic re-reading of fairy tales. Divided into three parts, each one has an epigraph by famous musicians: Mozart, Bob Dylan, and writer Tim Winton. In “Triangle into Square”, the popular nursery rhyme, “One, two, buckle my shoe” has been reinterpreted as a violent love story ending in “a hundred / thousand / waves of blood”. The Interludes have poems based on the different parts of the day — “Morning”, “Noon”, and “Night”. The second part has poems that keep nature’s bounty in the forefront.
Recipient of the UK-based Destiny Poet’s inaugural Poet of the Year Award, Mumbai-based Sunil Sharma’s Ideas, Images, Texts urges the reader to act. In a tribute to Faiz Ahmed Faiz he reinterprets “Bol” in his poem “Speak Up” — “Bol! / That is how Faiz Ahmad Faiz exhorts a sleepy community / Through his words fiery. / He wants the people to stand up and speak / Against injustice and inequality in a divided society.”
Dividing her time between India and Brazil, Shelly Bhoil won an Honourable Mention in Finger Lake’s Environmental Film Festival Checkpoint Story Competition at Ithaca University and also the Tahoe SAFE Alliance poetry contest in 2011. Her poetry collection An Ember from Her Pyre is a combination of terse poetic lines placed in visual poetry. “Numbered” traces a women’s genealogy of numbers: “22. Her mother was 18. / Our grandmothers were 13. She / is a mother at 23”.
Two poetry collections by K. Pankajam from Chennai appeared: Invisible Embodiment and Portrait of Inner Sight are journeys of self-exploration. The latter is dedicated to people with visual disabilities. Several poems in this collection describe the alienating world of the visually disabled as well as their determination to stand up against all odds.
Mumbai-based Dion D’Souza’s debut collection Three Doors has poetic fragments that coalesce with each other to form an abstract picture. It appears as if the lines hold dialogue with the title. In “A Dilapidated Cottage” the lines bear out the idea of a desolate place: “Bits of almost ancient roof / and wall crumbled / and caved in”. In a rectangular frame are fitted lines based on a photography exhibition in Germany after 1989. Titled “From the ‘World as One’ Exhibition” the poem describes the work in “Crumbling facades”, “abandoned parks”, “decaying flowers”, “vacant-eyed old men and women”. A long poem, “The Last Harvest” is based on an exhibition curated as part of Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary celebrations.
Writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, 2015, Rochelle Potkar’s Four Degrees of Separation is divided into seven sections, the title of each being a pronoun: “I”, “her”, “them”, “those”, etc. In the section titled “he” the poem “Sculptor of Radiance” brings forth the intense language of the body with phrases such as “wet clay lips”, “chest making ocean currents”. These memories are flanked by the “Black night, black white, black time”. The “Chat Poems” written in collaboration with Paresh Tiwari are a “verse-jugalbandi” of sorts, seen as an off-shoot of “tapestry poetry”.
This year has seen interesting haiku collections. San Francisco-based Michael Chacko Daniels has brought out his third poetry collection The Flea Driven Traveller, a set of 51 Haikus. These are a combination of haikus, senryu and haibun, making the book into a kind of travel journal. Each Haiku is like a little window that takes the reader through different parts of San Francisco, weaving together nature and humanity: “Man twirls cane – / Spring’s cherry blossoms sway / Boys play ball and shout”. Another interesting haiku collection, a collaborative effort by Dr Sigma Satish of Japan and Taro Aizu of India, Our Lovely Earth presents poems that encompass the globe to delineate the diversity of the countries. For instance, in haikus by Aizu, “Iran” is “Reliefs of soldiers / stand under the full moon / … Persepolis” and “Japan”: “Mt. Fuji/ rises in my mind / … a symbol of Japan”. In Dr. Sigma’s haiku, India is a “Land of great epics / Taj Mahal spreads love and peace / Amazing Kashmir”.
Interesting collections by young students have appeared. Delhi University undergraduate student Debarshi Mitra’s Eternal Migrant has poems that course through the poet’s personal spaces and his understanding of the world around. A student of architecture, Mansi Bhaskar’s The Soul Who Carried Her Corpse raises questions that trouble the young mind. In “A Questionnaire for Everyone” she puts forth searching questions: “Why rag pickers are considered impure, / When they clean away all our filth”. Another student pursuing higher education, Samrudhi Dash’s Dreamer’s Web, is her third poetry collection. Sensitive poems such as “The Initiation” dwell on the plight of the new born child held only to be rejected. The father hopes for a son to continue his lineage: “As daddy takes me up expectantly / Hoping for a first-born son to carry forward the lineage / Disappointment furrows his brows / Sadly, it is a girl”. A young student from Mumbai, Harnidh Kaur’s debut poetry collection, The Inability of Words has poems with intense prose lines that bear out a range of anxieties in each poem.
Forty under Forty: An Anthology of Post-Globalisation Poetry edited by Nabina Das and Semeen Ali has work by 40 younger poets, including Mihir Vatsa, Sohini Basak, Rochelle Potkar, Nabanita Kanungo, Mihir Chitre, and Aditi Rao. A Pocketful of Sunshine is an edited collection by Dolly Singh, founder of NewLeaf Poet’s Club. It presents poetry written by school students from different parts of India. Most poems concentrate on pertinent socio-economic issues. In “Rural Issues”, nine-year-old Riti Aggarwal from Gurgaon asks, “The poor farmer has not got enough education, / Do you think anyone can survive with only free ration?” Poems such as “Child Labour”, “Chhotu — Little Boy at Tea Shop” are thought provoking. Fourteen-year-old Mahima Dutta from Gurgaon laments in “Distressed Kashmir”: “Let the people sleep and Kashmir breathe, / The beauty of the paradise will be back, / I dream of that day when terror would be blank”. Fifteen-year-old Monu Bhagat from Nagaland praises the bounties of earth in the poem, “Wonderful Earth”.
Zubin Paul Driver’s Nine Monologues, One Play is an ensemble of nine monologues with titles such as “Silence”, “Rathod — The Roach-killer”, “Spider”, “Devi”, “Striptease” and so on. The binding thread is an engagement with the modern predicament and its contradictions. A monologue that stands out is that of “Devi”; it presents the woman as inherently schismatic in the modern world. Devi is bold and expressive in one avatar and meek and submissive as her husband gets home. Desire is her prerogative when she is on her own: “She strips off her clothing like a snake shedding its skin, effortlessly and magically. She walks into the inner sanctum and starts dancing”. But as it is time for her husband to head home she embodies “his” desire. She dresses up, takes a shower, and does all that is expected of her: “I walk into the next moment, leaving Devi to camouflage her form and merge with the night”.
Gender researcher, nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005, and a founding member of the Asmita Resource Centre for women, Vasanth Kannabiran’s Menaka and Other Ballads re-reads the women in the epics. The narratives of Menaka, Ahalya, and Gandhari are presented from the viewpoint of the women. These are off-set by the ballad “Peace on Earth” that presents the bravado of women who are able to resist social norms: Esther of the Old Testament, Mary of Magdala, Rabia of Basra and Akka Mahadevi. Menaka’s “temptation” of Vishwamitra, an oft-cited incident, is her “attempt to destroy and vitiate / my art, my body, my virtuosity of movement”. However, unlike Shakuntala, Menaka is able to stand independent as she resumed her art, “unfettered by love or motherhood”. The last ballad in this collection is that of “Rajasimha”. In it, Lord Narasimha is represented as a liberating force. The conclusion of the ballad “Peace on Earth” provides the crux of these ballads strung together: “Remember the passion and strength of / women who walked forth free and bold / in the quest for truth and peace”.
Gopikrishnan Kottoor’s My Little Tsunami is a poetry collection with a screenplay, “A December Night’s Train”. It focuses on the life of an old couple, Appunni Nair and Leela, travelling by train. The journey becomes a way of reminiscing about moments from their life, both good and bad. Appunni’s death and Leela’s neurosurgery at the end of the journey leaves one feeling numb.
Lakshmi Kannan, a bilingual writer who writes fiction in Tamil, has published four volumes of poetry in English. The Glass Bead Curtain is the first novel she has written originally in English; it recreates the past of the Tamil Brahmin community to which she belongs. It is structured as a novel within a novel: Shailaja, a novelist suffering from writer’s block after the death of her mother, is moved to write a novel about Kalyani, who has grown up in the first half of the twentieth century. The Glass Bead Curtain presents a nuanced account of the way two spirited women, Kalyani and her Athai (paternal aunt), face gender bias; many aspects of Hindu religion, customs, and society work against women. The novel shows the hypocrisy of their menfolk; they are quite progressive when it comes to the public sphere, but back home they bow down to the traditions imposed by their mothers, afraid of going against society. Kalyani’s child marriage ends her formal education because of the superstition that married girls would be widowed if sent to school. Her father arranges for Susan O’Leary, an Irishwoman, to teach her at home. The tutor not only fosters Kalyani’s love of English literature, she also encourages her passion for sports and builds up her self-confidence. Kalyani is sent to her marital home when she attains puberty; her backward mother-in-law and selfish sister-in-law compel her to discontinue her education. She also faces ridicule for being taller than her husband, and her mother-in-law does her best to stunt her growth: the young girl is made to starve in the name of religious fasts. Kalyani has a supportive husband and channels her energies to sports, joining a girls’ school as a badminton coach. Kalyani’s Athai Vishalakshi, a child widow, emerges as an intellectual in spite of the handicaps; she is far ahead of her times in addressing women’s issues. She educates herself and writes articles for magazines in Tamil and English, under two pseudonyms, one male and one female. If she had written under her own name, it would have “created ripples of disturbance in the family”.
Poet, novelist and literary critic Tabish Khair’s new novel Jihadi Jane (published outside India as Just Another Jihadi Jane) is very powerful and profoundly disturbing. The narrator Jamilla recounts her terrible experiences with Daesh to a Muslim author in Bali, where she has taken refuge. It is the story of the radicalization of two young Muslim girls in England. Jamilla is from an orthodox Muslim family, and wears a hijab; her father is a cab driver, who disapproves of working women, and insists on her learning Arabic. Ameena’s father is a banker, and they move to Jamilla’s building when her parents are divorced. She smokes, wears tight jeans, and is a rebel fighting with her mother who works as a teacher. They study in the same school; while Jamilla avoids all the boys, Ameena spends her time “necking with the boys behind the school building”. Their bond deepens after their classmate Alex rejects Ameena; slowly, under Jamilla’s influence, she starts changing. She attends Jamilla’s group at the mosque, gives up smoking, and starts wearing loose clothes. They spend more and more time following speakers and preachers on Facebook and YouTube. They are particularly drawn towards the beautiful Hejjiye from a Parisian suburb, who had converted to Islam after an online romance with a jihadi she had not even met. Khair shows how personal factors have a role in radicalizing people — it is not just the preacher in the mosque but also Ameena’s parents’ divorce, her rejection by Alex, the way her friends snub her, and her mother’s opposition to her wearing a niqab, which make her turn to the strictest interpretation of Islam. Ameena and Jamilla decide to go to Syria, where they find that life is very different from the impressions they had gathered from social media. A lot of research and perhaps personal accounts must have gone into the novel. Reading it, we feel that it is not fiction but the testimony of a woman who has gone through these terrible experiences. Another impressive aspect is Khair’s recreation of Jamilla’s home life and her mother’s unquestioning acceptance of male diktats, revealing the constraints a Muslim woman faces.
Shashi Deshpande’s 13th novel Strangers to Ourselves has Aparna Dandekar, an oncologist, as the protagonist. She has been carefully avoiding men after her failed marriage. She is invited to a classical music performance at her boss’s home and finds herself attracted towards the singer, Shree Hari Pandit. Hari is very sure that Aparna is the only woman for him. Aparna no longer believes in love; she cannot get over the way her father left her mother for an actress, many years after their marriage. But she cannot control herself. She wonders, “Does love make us strangers to ourselves so that we don’t understand what we are doing and why?” She is not concerned about societal concerns when Hari comes to her flat every evening, leaving early in the morning after they make love, but Hari cannot accept such an arrangement; for him marriage sanctifies sex. There are two other narrative strands — Aparna’s relationship with her patient Jyoti, whose flat she has rented, and the story of Ahalya in a manuscript Aparna finds in her father’s papers.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s eighth novel for adults, Before We Visit the Goddess traces the vicissitudes in the lives of three generations of women. The novel is meticulously plotted, with every chapter’s narrator and time period shown in the contents. In beautiful prose, Divakaruni explores their relationship with each other and the menfolk in their lives. Sabitri grows up in a village in Bengal, helping her mother make sweets. A wealthy customer sponsors her college education in Calcutta, but Sabitri falls in love with her son and is thrown out of the house. Her mathematics lecturer comes to her rescue, marries her and they have a daughter, Bela. Sabitri blames Bela for the breakdown of her marriage and finds her true vocation — making sweets — when she is widowed. Bela falls in love with a student leader and, much against Sabitri’s advice, runs away to America to marry her lover, an illegal immigrant, and never comes back to India. Her daughter Tara is traumatized by her parents’ divorce. The turning point in her life comes when she is asked to drive a visiting professor from India to a temple near Houston; Tara has never been to a temple and the professor has to tell her to wash her feet before they “visit the goddess”. He offers prayers in Tara’s name too, telling the priest that she has the same nakshatra and gotra as himself. Divakaruni’s prose brings characters and situations to life; the ambience, whether it is Calcutta, rural Bengal, or America, is presented perfectly. The Indian names are just right. All the characters, even minor ones like the visiting professor, are fully realized.
Shashi Warrier, author of thrillers like Night of the Krait (1996), The Orphan (1998), and Sniper (2000) and the memorable The Hangman’s Journal (2000) based on the life of Janardhan Pillai, the state executioner in Kerala, has published two novels in 2016. The Man Who Wouldn’t Be God is a novel which has the qualities of a thriller as well as the philosophical musings of The Hangman’s Journal. The protagonist is a newsman whose home life and career are breaking up because of his alcoholism. His growing self-awareness is more important than the way he solves the case of a godman accused of raping a woman who comes to his ashram. The Pillow Talk Movies is a less complex work, but a sharp satire on present-day India, exposing the ethical bankruptcy of our politicians.
Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day won the Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year Award for fiction, perhaps on the strength of his Booker Prize winning The White Tiger (2008). Mohan Kumar comes to Bombay from a village in Karnataka with his two sons, Radhakrishna and Manjunath. His only goal in life is to make them great cricketers, hoping their talent would be recognized on the day they select the team for the Ranji Trophy. Their mother has run away because Kumar beat her up badly, suspecting that she was having an affair with “some Christian”. Anand Mehta, born into a family of stockbrokers, invests in the boys: he pays Mohan Kumar money every month, the deal is that when the talented boys make it big in cricket, they will give him half their earnings. Kumar is so obsessed with cricket that his sons hate him: he imposes all kinds of restrictions, warning them against the “three principal dangers on their path to glory: premature shaving, pornography, and car driving”. None of the characters are fully realized. Mohan Kumar is not a credible name for a villager. His day-to-day life as a chutney seller has no details; anyone familiar with the climate in Bombay would realize that the chutney would turn rancid if peddled on a bicycle. There are too many loose ends. Manjunath’s friend Javed Ansari is probably gay, but why does he discourage him from playing cricket, especially as he himself is no longer a rival? We never know why the immensely talented Manjunath fails to make it big.
The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan was the other novel shortlisted for the Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year Award. In 1996, a car bomb goes off in a crowded market in Delhi, killing 11-year-old Nakul Khurana and his brother, 13-year-old Tushar. Their friend, 12-year-old Mansoor Ahmed, survives, but the trauma scars him physically and psychologically for life. The loss of their children has the effect of making the Khuranas look at all Muslims with suspicion. The novelist shows how terrorist acts impact the families of the victims, the survivors, and even the perpetrators.
Unlike her first novel, Not Only the Things That Have Happened (2012), Mridula Koshy’s second novel Bicycle Dreaming has a linear narrative, covering one year in the life of 13-year-old Noor, the daughter of a kabadiwala (a scrapdealer who goes from house to house collecting used items like old newspapers). She dreams of riding a bicycle through the streets of Delhi like her father. Her elder brother Talib makes a better life for himself by working in a call centre and moves out. Noor has a mind of her own and chooses to stay on with her father to look after him when her mother joins Talib. The novel begins with a description which could be straight out of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (not to be confused with the India of Vikas Swaroop’s Q&A); much of the time the novel focuses on filth and poverty and the discrimination women and Dalits face.
Manju Kapur’s sixth novel Brothers begins dramatically, with the murder of Himmat Singh Gaina, the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, by his younger brother Mangal Singh in 2010. The story goes back three generations to show the attempts of this family from a small village to rise out of poverty. Tapti, Mangal’s wife, is central to the novel. The family treat women as child-producing machines, not entitled to have any wishes or desires. Tapti, with a college education, resists this.
Namita Gokhale’s new novel, Things to Leave Behind, blends the history and mythology of Kumaon with a family saga. The people of Kumaon tried hard to keep the location of lake Nainital secret as it is considered sacred but the British eventually manage to take control of it and a town springs up on its shore. The novel shows the plight of women in the nineteenth century, but the most attractive feature of the novel is Gokhale’s evocation of the natural beauty of the hills.
Ratna Singh’s first novel Daughter by Court Order (2014) had autobiographical echoes: the mother, Kamini, is a journalist who marries the son of an established politician, just like Ratna’s own mother, Nalini Singh. It’s Not about You is different: set in Gurgaon and Delhi, it reveals the dark side of an elite school. The principal chooses to ignore bullying because the perpetrators are rich and powerful. Samaira, a single mother of two, struggles to get justice for her 16-year-old son who is brutally beaten up at school.
Dipika Mukherjee is the author of two volumes of poetry, and a collection of short stories. Her debut novel Thunder Demons (Gyaana, 2011) was on the socio-political situation in Malaysia. She won the 2016 Virginia Prize for Fiction with her second novel, Shambala Junction, about baby trafficking in India. Baby girls are unwanted and agents or shady orphanages make a good profit by selling them to Americans for adoption. It is also a very different coming-of-age story: Iris Sen, the only daughter of rich Indian immigrants, has come to India from Ohio for her engagement ceremony with childhood friend Danesh. Influenced by stories of camaraderie on Indian trains, she insists on travelling by train to Delhi. She gets off at Shambala to buy a bottle of mineral water, attracted by the wooden dolls being sold on the railway platform, but the train moves off and she finds herself alone, with very little money and leering men all around. Maitri, a social worker who runs a bookstall at the station, comes to her rescue and takes her to the slum where she lives, next door to Aman, the dollseller. Dipika Mukherjee skilfully recreates the vibrant chaos of the railway station and the poverty of the slum. Sixty-year-old Aman is a fully realized character — he is very upset that his wife has given birth to a third daughter, not a son who would support him. He leaves the baby outside an orphanage, but regrets his decision; when he goes back to reclaim the baby a little later, the orphanage denies all knowledge of it. Iris finds herself drawn into Maitri’s plan to trace the baby and stays on when her possessive fiancé comes to Shambala to claim her. The novelist gives a sympathetic picture of an American woman who yearns for a baby. Always guided by others, Iris learns to take her own decisions and forges a new relationship with her parents.
Savita Singh writes in English as well as Hindi and has published children’s fiction and “Mills and Boon” type romances. Red December recreates events of the 1971 war between India and Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh by following the stories of a large number of characters. It portrays the impact of the war on their womenfolk.
Ruskin Bond’s Death under the Deodars: The Adventures of Miss Ripley-Bean has eight new stories, all set in the Royal Hotel, Mussoorie. In his introduction, Ruskin Bond declares that his protagonist is “no Miss Marple; she did not investigate and bring criminals to justice — but she observed, remembered and recorded”. The stories are not classic detective stories, but present a variety of characters, ranging from a famous actor couple to a Daryaganj strangler. Upon an Old Wall Dreaming: More of My Favourite Stories and Sketches contains one new story, “The Skull”, and a new sketch, “A Fright in the Night”. Bond’s earlier work is being reprinted in new collections, many meant for children. Monkey Trouble and Other Grandfather Stories has the format of a graphic novel.
Anita Nair returns to crime fiction with Chain of Custody, her second novel featuring Inspector Borei Gowda after Cut like Wound (2012). Gowda is an honest officer who refuses to accommodate the powers that be and so he is always given unfavourable postings. His wife, a doctor, is not happy, and has taken a transfer to Hassan, where their son Roshan is studying medicine. Chain of Custody has Gowda investigating a murder which leads him to a ring of child traffickers. We get a glimpse of the life of the poor when 12-year-old Nandita, the daughter of Shanthi, Gowda’s domestic help, is kidnapped. Gowda is acutely conscious of the changes in Bangalore; what used to be a garden city and a “pensioner’s paradise” has been replaced “by a hard, ruthless urbanity that allowed trees to be felled with the same heartless ease as lives were dispensed with”.
A lot of crime fiction has been published in 2016. Some thrillers, such as Arnab Ray’s Sultan of Delhi and Prashant Yadav’s The Jeera Packer focus on the protagonist’s personality. Bhaskar Chattopadhyay, better known as a translator from Bengali, has published two detective stories: Patang is about a serial killer operating in Mumbai (Bombay) during the monsoons; in Penumbra, a murder is committed during a heavy storm. The Anniversary Killer is the 18th book by Joygopal Podder, who holds the national record for the most books of crime fiction published in the shortest time; his simple language and racy plots have made his books bestsellers. Aroon Raman’s Skyfire, a sequel to The Shadow Throne, is a very readable story of a megalomaniac controlling the weather and kidnapping destitutes and orphans to test new pathogens. Mukul Deva’s Pound of Flesh, his third novel with Ravinder Gill as detective, finds him investigating the trafficking of human organs.
This year’s debut novels have a wide variety of themes. Vikramajit Ram, a graphic designer, is the author of two travelogues, Dreaming Vishnus: A Journey through Central India (2008) and Tso and La: A Journey in Ladakh ((2012). His first novel, The Sun and Two Seas, is set in thirteenth-century Orissa, around the time the Sun Temple at Konark was built. Ram knows how to spin a good yarn, complete with a beautifully described sea voyage, a ruler who acquires a menagerie of unusual birds and animals, and court intrigues. Belonging (2015) by Uma Sinha is set in the period 1850–1920. The central character is Lila, orphaned at the age of 12 when her mother murders her father. She is sent to England from Peshawar, India, to live with her great-aunt Wilhelmina in 1907. The reader can piece together events through three narrative voices: Lila’s grandmother’s letters home to England till her death in 1857; her father Henry’s diary, and Lila’s autobiographical account. Rakesh K. Kaul’s novel The Last Queen of Kashmir is about Kota Rani in the fourteenth century. Nithya Ramkumar’s Harihara: The Legacy of the Scroll is set in a small village in contemporary Tamil Nadu, though the mystery of the scroll has its roots in the reign of Ashoka the Great (304–232 BCE). P. G. Rama Rao (b.1935) taught English at Utkal University, Bhubaneswar; The Ocean and the Waves, his first novel, is set in Andhra Pradesh. The narrator is forced to leave “the bracing intellectual climate of Boston” and return to the small town of Machilipatnam to sort out his ill father’s financial affairs. The contrast between Massachusetts and Andhra Pradesh is well brought out. Harsh Trivedi’s novel Against Ambedkar, against the World is set in Delhi in the year 2030; the protagonist, a research student of French (like the author himself), rails against caste-based reservation which makes it difficult for him, a Brahmin, to get a teaching position.
Sarnath Banerjee’s fourth graphic novel All Quiet in Vikaspuri presents a dystopic future; Delhi is torn apart by water wars. The central character is Girish the Psychic Plumber (introduced in Banerjee’s earlier graphic novel The Harappa Files), who drills his way through earth in search of the mythic river Saraswati. Harsho Mohan Chattoraj has worked as an illustrator for children’s books. Ghosts of Kingdoms Past, his first graphic novel, has a British paranormal expert meeting the ghost of Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal defeated by Robert Clive in the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The book is distinguished by Harsho’s attention to detail as he recreates Calcutta through his sketches.
Hindu mythology and folklore continue to attract writers. Madhavi S. Mahadevan’s The Kaunteyas presents incidents of the Mahabharata from the point of view of Kunti, the widowed mother of the Pandavas. Ms Draupadi Kuru, after the Pandavas by Trisha Das is a hilarious take on the women of the epic: Draupadi, Kunti, Amba, and Madri come to earth for a month because they are bored with life in heaven. Ryan Lobo’s Mr. Iyer Goes to War has Iyer put into a home for the dying in Benares, imagining himself to be Bheema, the powerful warrior of the Mahabharata; like a modern-day Quixote, he sets out to combat evil. Fables from India by Uday Mane is a collection of 22 stories based on folk tales.
The new stories in Keki N. Daruwalla’s Daniell Comes to Judgement: New and Vintage Daruwalla reveal what Malashri Lal terms a “creative crossover” — they are all written in the first person, with a woman as the narrator. Daruwalla, in his Afterword, also points out another change: “I have moved away from the rural outback to the city”. The best stories from his earlier collections have been included.
Shashi Tharoor’s son Kanishk has made his fictional debut with a collection of short stories, Swimmer among the Stars. It was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and won the Tata Hexa Literature Live! First Book Award. The 12 stories here have an impressive range of themes and are set in different places, cultures and time periods. Protagonists vary from a student in contemporary America to Odysseus, the Pharaoh Necko and Alexander the Great. The first story, “Elephant at Sea”, is a comic yarn about an elephant that India ships to Africa because a little Moroccan princess was fascinated by the picture of an elephant; by the time the diplomatic wheels move, the girl is “studying sociology in Paris”. “The Fall of an Eyelash” is about the pain of exile, while “A United Nations in Space” shows representatives of all countries watching from “MaidenX Orbital Hotel” as every country on earth is being destroyed by war or climate change. Many of the stories read like fables; there is something insubstantial about them, though Tharoor’s linguistic style and craftsmanship is admirable.
Saikat Moira’s Glimpses of Life is the reverse of Kanishk Tharoor’s book; all ten stories are in a realist mode, with strong plots. They are set in contemporary India and present characters and situations we can easily identify with; however, the language leaves something to be desired. Another debut collection, Shobha Rao’s An Unrestored Woman and Other Stories has 12 stories linked by common characters. The central theme is the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and its consequences for women. Rao’s language successfully recreates the interior lives of her characters. However, readers with personal experience of the Punjab will have problems with the stories because Rao gets material details wrong: for example, two years after coming to the refugee camp for women, Renu takes a train from Amritsar to Chandigarh — Chandigarh got a railway station only in 1954.
Dipika Mukherjee’s Rules of Desire has 17 short stories with a wide variety of narrators and settings. In “The Hierarchy of Grief”, the bereaved narrator attempts to come to terms with the death of her husband Aneesh and daughter Anwesa in the MH370 crash when they are on their way back to America. Though their forefathers had settled in Malaysia a century ago, they face “a brand of ethnic politics” and move to Chicago. But the narrator is guilt-ridden, because her daughter misses Malaysia and returns “home” for a few weeks in summer. “Circle of Life” has a writer who is haunted by the memory of the child she aborted illegally eight years ago. “Patriots of the Will” is set in Malaya in the 1940s; the protagonist claims to be pregnant with Subhas Chandra Bose’s child. In “The Jazz Bar”, set in Shanghai and Chicago, a gay man bows to social pressures by getting married and having children.
Twinkle Khanna’s Mrs Funnybones (2015) won the Crossword popular non-fiction award. Her first book of fiction, The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad, has four stories set in India. “Salam, Noni Appa” is about two old people who find love, ignoring social pressures. “The Sanitary Man of Sacred Land” is based on Arunachalam Muruganantham’s attempts to produce low-cost sanitary napkins and the ridicule he faced.
Sharanya Manivannan’s The High Priestess Never Marries: Stories of Love and Consequence has 26 stories of varying length (two to 30 pages). I feel a better subtitle would be “Stories of Dysfunctional Sexual Relationships”, because that is the only theme. I wonder why the book was shortlisted for the Tata Hexa Literature Live! First Book Award. The other book shortlisted for this award, Tanuj Solanki’s Neon Noon, also centres around sex. The narrative technique is innovative; the opening page is an email sent by “S”, a copy editor who got the job by pretending to be a lesbian, to “T”, describing the two drunken nights she spent with him. “T” is the narrator in the rest of the novel. He goes to Pattaya in an attempt to forget his girlfriend, Anne-Marie, who has left him. There is a lot of commentary about literature and writing, as both “S” and “T” are aspiring writers. Another book which throws much light on a writer’s struggle with words is Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words written in Italian (English translation by Ann Goldstein). Lahiri has been writing exclusively in Italian for more than two years now.
Sanil Sachar plays around with genres in his collection The Dark Side of Light (see
Most short story collections grow out of stories published in literary journals and magazines over the years. Rheea Mukherjee’s first book, Transit for Beginners, is no exception. The 15 stories here present a variety of characters, ranging from a young IT professional to a worker at a hotel. The title story is about a young woman travelling to Delhi from Los Angeles, who meets a man at Changi Airport. Tripti Sharan’s Chronicles of a Gynaecologist has 24 short stories based on her practice. Most of the stories are saddening, because they show how a woman’s life has no value in India. The majority of organ donors are women. Because widowhood would be an intolerable burden, a man should not be put at risk by donating a kidney. Ways around Grief by Anupama Krishnakumar has 12 stories showing characters in a variety of situations. She employs different narrative voices. The title story, in the second person, is about a woman trying to cope with “empty nest syndrome” — both sons have grown up and moved away.
Conversely, in The Next Milestone: A Mother’s Journal, Manju Jaidka writes: “Let the parents with empty nests not weep over their loneliness. Instead let them count their blessings for they have not suffered the pain of bringing up a child who will never fly”. Her son Raju was born blind, without the ability to walk and talk, to speak and hear. This is a book which bring tears to the reader’s eyes — tears of sorrow for the pain of a mother bringing up a special child, but also tears of joy at their indomitable spirit. One is full of admiration for Manju Jaidka, who mustered an “infinite amount of strength and patience”. Jaidka is Professor of English at Panjab University, Chandigarh, and the author of two novels and a collection of poetry. The journal is a record of the difficulties she faced when looking after her first born child who never grew up in 37 years.
Journalist, book reviewer and novelist Nilanjana Roy’s The Girl Who Ate Books, subtitled “Adventures in Reading”, is a collection of essays based on her columns, book reviews, and features. It is an expression of her passionate love for books; it is also a great introduction to Indian Writing in English. Her article on Dean Mohammed and the beginnings of Indian English literature should be prescribed reading for students. Facts and figures are presented in an engagingly entertaining way. “English, Vinglish”, an essay about the language disputes in India, has a note on the temple to “Angrezi Devi” (“English Language Goddess” built in 2010). The book includes interviews with five poets and 14 writers of fiction. The most serious essay in the book is “Empty Chairs” about mobs protesting against Salman Rushdie; she observes that “the gap between what happens in a reader’s head and a protestor’s mind is vast, and impossible to bridge”.
Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India is the most scholarly of his books on India (he has authored four books on India, co-authored two, and edited two more). The origin of this book is Tharoor’s speech at the Oxford Union debating the proposition “Britain Owes Reparations to Her Former Colonies”. The book differs in many ways from Tharoor’s speech. In Oxford, he was arguing one side of a debate; the book is confined to the Indian experience and takes into account the arguments in favour of the Raj. His refutation of all such claims is based on extensive research.
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh argues that the modern novel cannot deal with the improbable, only with comfortable bourgeois life, assuming man has control over everything; literature about the improbable is consigned to the periphery, science fiction, and fantasy. He presents a frightening scenario: low lying coastal cities like Calcutta, Mumbai, and New York could be wiped out by climate change. Security establishments in the USA and UK realize the danger of climate change, though the governments are in denial. According to Ghosh, anti-climate change research is funded by carbon corporations like Exxon.
Sunil Khilnani’s Incarnations: India in 50 Lives is based on a BBC Radio 4 series; the book spans 2500 years, from the Buddha to Dhirubhai Ambani, the twentieth century industrialist. Khilnani observes that his choice of subjects was “designed to provoke”. The surprising omission is Jawaharlal Nehru, though Khilnani refers to him in other lives. Many present-day politicians like Pranab Mukherjee and Margaret Alva have published autobiographies. Ramesh K. Srivastava, Professor of English at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, has published short stories and a number of books on Indian English literature; he has given the title My Father’s Bad Boy to his autobiography. R. Parthasarathy, who taught English in various colleges in south India, has published a memoir.
India has one of the largest railway networks in the world; V. Anand recounts his experience of working in different parts of India in Close Encounters on Parallel Lines. Zarina Bhatty was born into a family of landowners in pre-Independence India. Her memoir Purdah to Piccadilly: A Muslim Woman’s Struggle for Identity describes her life in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi and her experience of British society where she lived for nine years. Bama and Sister Jesme have written (the former in Tamil and the latter in Malayalam) about the malpractices inside a convent; Anne Correa’s Of Rumours Lived and Told is in a lighter vein, presenting the lives of nuns in her extended family, in the form of what she calls “creative non-fiction”.
Veteran journalist T. J. S. George lovingly describes the various facets of life in Bangalore: food, music, literature, theatre, and activist citizens. He has given the title Askew to his book because of the unbalanced growth of the city fuelled by the IT boom. When the fabled founder of Bangalore, Kempe Gowda, set out to build his dream city five centuries ago, his mother instructed him, “Build lakes, plant trees”. Most of Bangalore’s current problems are because authorities have done the opposite — they have filled up lakes and cut down trees. Esther David is one of the few Jews still living in India. Her four books of fiction are set primarily in Ahmedabad. In Ahmedabad: City with a Past she takes us on a tour of the history and geography of the city she loves, where old havelis (mansions) and dargahs (shrines built over the grave of a Muslim) stand side by side with new high-rises. We meet a variety of people who tell her stories about the city.
Ragini Ramachandra’s Poland: The Rising of the Phoenix is the sixth volume in her lavishly illustrated travel series. She had never thought of Poland as a tourist destination, but the two-hour walk through the Mines near Krakow (“an entire subterranean township”) cured her of this misconception. Anjaly Thomas describes her travels through Korea, China, Mongolia, Turkey, and parts of Africa in There Are No Gods in North Korea. In the five days she spent in North Korea, she realises that “The only gods that exist are the two ‘Great Leaders’ the country has had so far — Kim Il Sung (God No 1) and his son Kim Jong Il (God No 2)”. Sushil Reddy is a graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Powai (Bombay). The Sunpedal Ride: Solar Bicycle Adventure Journey of 79 days & 7424 Kilometres across India is an account of his efforts to spread awareness about solar energy by riding a bicycle fitted with solar panels.
Some unusual anthologies have appeared. A Book of Light: When a Loved One Has a Different Mind contains personal accounts by people whose family members suffered from mental illness. The book grew out of Jerry Pinto’s award-winning novel Em and the Big Hoom about a family struggling to cope with the mother’s illness. LetterFarms is an organization which aims to encourage letter writing. Thousands of postcards were received in their project of children writing to the late A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, India’s most popular president. Dear Kalam Sir reproduces 350 postcards, with paintings, sketches, poems, and “letters” in English and some Indian languages. Three anthologies record the experiences of the men of all ranks who fought in the Indo-Pakistan wars of 1965 and 1971.
Dieter Riemenschneider has already established his reputation as a bibliographer with The Reception of the Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934-2004 (Rawat Publications, 2005). In the last 50 years, he has published more than a hundred papers on Indian writing in English, its reception in Germany, and postcolonial literature; he has selected 15 of them in Essays on Indian Writing in English: Twice-Born or Cosmopolitan Literature? The range of topics is remarkable. There are essays on individual poets and novelists as well as on general trends of a period. A History of Indian Poetry in English edited by Rosinka Chaudhuri has a wide variety of contributors, parallelling Ulka Anjaria’s A History of the Indian Novel in English (2015).
We mourn the death of Indian-American novelist Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) and poet, novelist, translator and literary critic Shiv K. Kumar (1921–2017).