Abstract
Introduction
2017 has been a productive year for Indian English poetry. Renowned poets such as C.P. Surendran, Manohar Shetty, and Shanta Acharya have brought out their new and collected poems. Anand Thakore, Adil Jussawalla, Bibhu Padhi, Dilip Mohapatra, Rumki Basu and Tishani Doshi published new collections. Three outstanding novels are concerned with the current cultural situation in India: Nayantara Sahgal’s tenth novel When the Moon Shines by Day, Arundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and journalist Prayaag Akbar’s debut novel Leila. Two plays with thought-provoking insights into the literary and scientific world have also been published.
Adil Jussawalla’s Gulestan, literally “Rose Garden”, is a long poem that follows four poetry collections: Land’s End (1962) Missing Person (1976), Trying to Say Goodbye (2011) and The Right Kind of Dog (2013). Jussawalla started writing Gulestan in 2010, in the aftermath of the attack on Mumbai in 2008. A ten-part poem, spanning six pages, Gulestan laments the loss of paradise. The rose is a metaphor for a gulestan that is now aflame – the attack burnt paradise to “embers” and “ash” leaving behind “A severed hand,/ a bleeding foot,/ a small jaw,/ now here, now there, in the garden”. The loss of paradise creates the need for faith. The poet asks: “will He bring me/ Belief, the one word I lack…?” The final section ends with the notion that “Belief hasn’t come round/ this time as well” and so it is important to repeat the words “Yezed, Harvesptavan, Harvespagah, Harvespakhuda…”, the “first [four] of the one-hundred-and-one names of God in Zoroastrian scripture”.
Manohar Shetty’s Full Disclosure is a collection of new poems and selections from his previously published seven collections written 1981-2017. Since A Guarded Space in 1981, Shetty’s poetic concerns have evolved to understand life from a more mature perspective. The precision in earlier collections is supplemented with wisdom and a candid sharing of thoughts in the new poems. The woman’s voice is worth noting. The lonely old woman in “Alone” “gazes around absently/ at her wall of family portraits,/ her bloodline scattered/ in Sydney, Toronto and Swindon”. She “fumbles in her/ medicine cabinet” and makes sure she has her “seven strips of sedatives”. There is a nostalgia for old things: “typewriter”, “blotting paper”, “bottle of ink and pens with nibs”. Birds like the crow, pigeon, eagle and animals such as cats, mice or snakes find mention in the new poems. The collection ends with the portrayal of the modern-day supremo who might not have a white cat in his lap but certainly has “Pit bulls snarl like boxers”, “armoured/ jeep”, “sentries”, “revolver strapped to his armpit”.
C.P. Surendran’s Available Light: New and Collected Poems is his fifth poetry collection after Gemini II, Posthumous Poems, Canaries of the Moon and Portraits of the Space We Occupy. Surendran’s tribute to the poet Vijay Nambisan published in The Hindustan Times a few hours after the demise of the poet in 2017, is sensitively written. It gives us a glimpse into Surendran’s interactions with Nambisan, creating alongside a picture of the difficult lives of the Bombay poets of the 1990s. In Surendran’s simple style, lived moments are rendered poetic through an imagination vital and vivid: “I try hard to add the zero of my life without a sound”. Interesting juxtapositions are used: “sunlight on soot” or “Nights short/ Like tweets”.
Shanta Acharya’s Imagine comprises new and selected poems. Combining various forms of expression from music to art, the collection presents a cosmic view where life and nature are woven together into a myth. Imagination and colour find a special place in Acharya’s new poems. “L’Atelier Rouge”, a poem after Henri Matisse’s painting, The Red Studio, delves into different shades and hues: “You painted this studio a radiant scarlet –/ a luminous sunset.” Or a little later “Uncovering the blue and yellow beneath the red,/ I note the walls were white”. In “Red”, the colour is sketched in “blushing cheeks”, “Fields of poppies”, “Red button in the Mandarin’s cap” or “Shades of red earth”. The different hues make the poetic corpus a compelling read.
Accomplished Hindustani classical vocalist Anand Thakore’s Seven Deaths & Four Scrolls is the poet’s fifth collection. He is the founder of Harbour Line, a publishing collective and Kshitij, an interactive forum for musicians. The poems chart seven deaths. The first is the execution in 2012 of the “surviving gunman” of the 2008 terrorist attack followed by the suicide of a Buddhist monk in 2013. Mapping the gunman’s growing-up years in Faridkot against the teachings of the mystic, Baba Farid, the poet draws a picture of utmost depravity: “There was so little left by then in our lives to praise,/ And his talk of delight in poverty had come to seem/ Like senseless rant”. And yet in the last moment all that he asks for is to meet his family: “Those I ran away from; gharwalon ko milna hai”. Moving a decade back, the third is the death at the Rue de Gramont in Paris, 1990. The fourth reminisces the death of the tabla player and tanpura accompanist Yashvantrao Kamolkar, the shagird of Ustaad Ameer Hussain Khan Saheb. Myth and folklore are used in the next two poems as Kamadeva muses upon the death of the body and Holika over her death. The final poem in the collection, “Bilas Khan Addresses his students on the night before his death” presents in poetic form the relationship between Tansen and his son Bilas Khan: “Wanted to cry out and call him father-/ But always I restrained myself, and this perhaps was wise, For always I was to him disciple first”. It recreates the legend of how Tansen’s corpse raised his right hand and finally nodded his head in approval at his son’s utterance of the new raga, now known as Bilaskhani Todi.
Bibhu Padhi, a prolific writer, has brought out his 12th poetry collection, Sea Dreams. It ranges from philosophical musings to poetic travelogues. Padhi experiments greatly in this collection. Poems are in prose stanzas of varying lengths. The title poem is divided into 32 sections whereas others like “Summer, Dhenkanal” and “Cuttack” use shorter stanza forms. In the poem “Sea Dreams” the vastness of the sea parallels the poet’s experiences as he walks with his son on the beach:”My son, his small hands in mine,/ dances and talks incessantly/ about the future”.
Dilip Mohapatra’s Taming the Tides, comprising fifty new poems and fifty selected from various literary journals, is his fifth collection. The range of emotions sketched out is vast. ranging from the biographical to the critical. Stringing together the “saffron”, “kufi cap” and the “pristine white”, he yearns for the secular and observes: “Dispersed into many hues/ I don’t know where I belong”. In “Graffiti” the form resembles the “commoners” and not elites like “murals or frescos” who do not “care/ for the raised eye brows/ of the prude/ or the law enforcers/ and speak their heart/ lending voice/ to the otherwise dumb walls”.
Tishani Doshi’s third poetry collection after Countries of the Body and Everything Begins Elsewhere, is titled Girls Are Coming out of the Woods. It is marked by rhythmic consistence and purposefulness. Poems written in sentence form are pruned and woven to create a unique precision. Images from nature form the core of Doshi’s poetic oeuvre. “Contract” seeks “to reinvent every lost word” and to “forgo happiness/ stab myself repeatedly” so that “you may live/ seized with wonder”. This collection focuses on women’s sensibility in present times. The girls come out of the woods, “carrying iron bars and candles/ and a multitude of scars”, to tell their stories. The last line of this poem “They’re coming. They’re coming” signals resistance and hope for the future.
Polychrome Sentiments by Rumki Basu is the poet’s third collection. The book carries the sub-title, “Poetry Is Still Possible”. This is also the title of the opening poem which uses the island as a metaphor for the poem: “but your shores protect me/ I penetrate your waters/ I dive deep”. The section “I am a Woman Therefore…” expresses the strength of being a woman. To Meera, she says, “I am a little apprehensive of your Krishna, Meera,/ Reciprocity stands for icons too,/ is fidelity a word for mortal dictionaries alone?”
Esther Syiem’s Many Sides of Many Stories is the poet’s third collection. She teaches English literature in North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, writes in Khasi as well as English, and has worked on oral discourse in Khasi folk narratives. Syiem’s poems make a case for asserting the identity of the North-East people and preserving oral culture. Syiem is quick to point out the inability of people from the “mainstream” to understand North-eastern culture. In “To the Rest of India from Another Indian” she mentions how they do not have Rama, Sita or Arjun, but their own characters and adds that if you were to “twist your tongue around ours/ as we learnt to twist ours around yours,/ you’ll get a taste of/ webbed legends”. There are poems from a previous collection and also poems dedicated to G.N. Devy, who works for preserving tribal languages.
Poet, author and professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai), Ashwini Kumar is currently a Senior Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research. His recent collection, Banaras and the Other is the first of a trilogy on religious cities in India. It begins with the poem “Overture to ‘Banaras’” by Jatin Das. The first poem, “Anatomy of Baranassey as told by Major James Rennell” interweaves history with myth and folklore as it moves from the “chaityas”, “aghoris” and “Parrot astrologers” to “The Great Leader, in Golden Afghan jacket”. Major Rennell was the first Surveyor-General of Bengal and had conducted the first geographical survey of most of India. Baranassey refers to Abul Fazal’s use of the word for Banaras. In other poems, the nation remains a central concern: “Nations are bodies,/ that attract each other./ But die without making love”. The poems in the first four sections are in stanzas whereas the last section, “Submission to the good Barbarian”, has a long prose poem titled, “Fascism, fascism, fascism…”, inspired by Robert Bolano’s “Reunion”.
The Cosmonaut in Herge’s Rocket is Arjun Rajendran’s second poetry collection after Snake Wine (2014). This collection maps significant moments from the poet’s personal life as part of a generation that grew up reading Archie, Indrajal comics, savouring sugar coated Phantom cigarettes and enjoying the magic tricks of P.C. Sorcar. Rakesh Sharma’s landing on the moon in 1984 is a fitting occasion for the title poem with the shift from “Sorry” to “Saare Jahan se Achcha”. The poems have a wide range where the beetroot “will haemorrhage the pot, turn/ it a commie red” and the Bible is “the oldest bestseller about hell”. Contemporary events figure with a poem on demonetisation: “The ATM queue outside my house stretches till the border./ You’re a patriot at either end, closer to bullets”.
Co-editor of the journal 1913 and founder of the independent press, Anew Print, Biswamit Dwibedy’s Ancient Guest is marked by brevity. The word “ancient” is explored in many ways in this collection. Precise images in sensuous combinations of words create a poetic rhythm marked by freshness. Some of these are: “my stanzaic water”, “desire accumulating delays”, “leaves with eyes” or the “burnt corners of/ icebergs”. Distinct phrasing is packed with intense ideas: “I thought the book was a war/ in the middle/ of which we/ just run/ out of lives”. Some poems are interspersed with visual poetry.
Cyborg Proverbs is Nitoo Das’s second collection after Boki. A poet from Assam, Das teaches English in Indraprastha College for women in Delhi. Her poetry connects the natural world with the cyborg. Birds, grass, flowers and nature at large find their way into the poems. Das’s concerns are sharply feminist. “At Age Eleven” focuses on the social construction of a woman and her resistance through poetry: “I’d poured poetry/ into my ears by then, turned deaf/ and never heard them speak again”. Of special interest are the poems “Margherita” and “Ten Love Slides” as they find representation both through words and sketches in the form of a strip. The collection also carries a “Ladakh Travelogue” charting the poet’s perceptions of the place.
The Metaphysics of the Tree-Frog’s Silence by journalist, theatre and voice artist, and chocolatier Ajithan Kurup (1957-2015) appeared posthumously. It was supposed to be his debut collection; however, A Fistful of Twilight became the first published collection. A year after the poet’s sudden death, Jussawalla offers a tribute to “make amends”: “This preamble is my gift to you”. Kurup uses words from different specialties such as science and mathematics. Experiment is the norm. In “The Greek theatre”, he writes, “Philoctetes screams a parabola/ And the spin of voices gather words into helical streams”. Kurup’s poetry ranges from literary intertextual references to combining words and ideas from varied disciplines. Epigraphs from and references to Faustus, Henry IV, Blake, Gadamer, Hopkins, Zarathustra and others form the contours and content of his poems.
Ayaz Rasool Nazki’s Songs of Light is a delicate window into the life and locale of the beauteous Kashmir valley. The Kashmiri mind-set is etched sensitively to draw attention to a prolonged history of pain. The loss of human population is a painful reminder of violence in the valley, for instance, in this short poem: “The man with the lantern/ turned the corner/ lantern dangling under his cloak/ that was the last/ anyone saw of him/ in that dark night”. The valley known for its splash of colours in tulips is now “ash to ash/ colour to colourless”. He is critical of the elite in “Uptown Kashmir” where there are “huge mansions/ for small men”. And then in “Downtown Kashmir” he presents the warmth of the ordinary Kashmiri “narrow lanes/ they had/ open minds”. The collection has poems as a tribute to the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali and the 19th century mystic, Shamas Faqir. In “Agha Shahid Ali” he says, “for I too belong to/ The Country Without a Post Office,/ and part of Half-Inch Himalayas/ is also mine.”
After a debut novel, Letters from an Indian Summer, and a short-story collection, The Sacred Sorrow of Sparrows, Siddharth Dasgupta has brought out his first poetry collection The Wanderlust Conspiracy. The poems form a travel diary as the poet pens his perceptions of the different countries and cities he visited. Written in prose form, the poems offer continuity and profundity. If “Plush little boutiques nestled softly in poignantly dilapidated/ houses” define Hauz Khas, then Tokyo is a conglomerate of “A disco riot of sirens, techno tripods” and “Zen confessions”. Interspersed with numerous alliterative cadences, prose builds on the poetic mode. For instance, “Perfectly portioned, positioned, partitioned” or “Drench, drench, drabble dram” lend a unique bounce to these lines. The history of English Literature is reflected in “All the World’s a Page”, an essay on the famous Paris bookshop, Shakespeare & Company. It presents the effort of George Whitman in setting up the shop where “a wild sense of rebellion has always been central/ to the bookstore’s ethic”.
Nilesh Mondal’s debut collection Degrees of Separation visualises separation in different forms and aspects of life: “Discussions of diseased states/ Hung like hyphens/ between our now silent/ Conversations”. “Clarinets on Campus” refers to the tussle between the system and the youth in campuses. The poet suggests that campuses are considered to be a “dangerous place”, but in reality, the students only “Play clarinets all day”. The poet declares, “‘Even if the police came every day/ Our clarinets wouldn’t stop playing,’ they promise”.
Yuyutsu Sharma brought out Quaking Cantos (2016) on the Nepal earthquake. Sharma and Prasant Shrestha’s photographs of the aftermath of the earthquake are part of this collection. Lines such as “The kiss/ of Death/ as a baby crawls/ on the cold/ chest/ of earth/ looking for/ his dead/ mother’s/ nipple” convey the horrors of this disaster. The poems catalogue fragments of pain, loss and death reminding us of our helplessness in the face of natural disasters.
Editor in Chief at Inklette and Poetry Editor at the Corner Club Press, Trivarna Hariharan’s Letters I Never Sent is her first published collection. She has used different forms ranging from prose poetry to haiku. Hariharan uses the metaphor of the cartographer in various poems. In “Traces, Silhouettes and Maps” she writes, “there are no maps of you today, and I was a cartographer only yesterday” or in “Maps”, “I draw you in my mind/ like I would draw up a map”. In “Shadow”, Hariharan applies Jungian psychology to unravel the mind-set of a woman who has been through various emotions: exploitative, introspective, assertive and many more.
O Shrineless Silence by Priti Aisola is her second poetry collection. She has also written a novel and a spiritual travelogue. “Let Us Share a Story” is based on Casper David Friedrich’s painting The Monk by the Sea and “Shall We?” on Edvard Munch’s Girls on the Pier. In the former she assumes the persona of the “contemplative monk” to find answers in “the sky’s expanse”. Munch’s painting inspires her to “gaze at the lake that will mirror our fears, our desires”.
Anand Kumar’s anthology Poets’ Travelogue: The Grand Indian Express is an eclectic assemblage. It traverses 40 destinations and collates the travel experiences of 39 poets who visited different parts of India over a period of time. Mamang Dai recreates Arunachal Pradesh as she combines the “first drop of rain to dry earth” with the way the “dead are placed pointing West—/ when the soul rises”. In “Tsunami Instincts” Sukrita Paul Kumar commends the Jarawas’ understanding of nature as they “Heard the whispering earth/ Felt her rumbling belly/ Smelt death” and managed to escape the tsunami. Many poets recreate the magic of Delhi and its heritage. Tabish Khair strikes a realistic note as he draws attention to the city’s seamy side in “South Delhi Murder”. Anand Kumar captures the sounds and vibrations in Auroville. Bibhu Padhi paints the verdure of Dhenkanal in his poems. He reminds us of “But old tales of rain-wet-earth”, “secluded rooms” and a “fine, gentle sleep”. There is a poem for each season and mood.
After Deluge (2014) and Unbangled (2015), Varsha Singh brought out two collections this year: Parbati: The Traitor and Recluse: Contemporary Verses. The focus of Parbati is on women’s space in society. The woman Parbati who thinks for herself is perceived as a traitor according to social mores: “Self-love, for you/ is an act, whoresome,/ a blasphemy/ towards your ‘owner’,/ you harlot!/ How could you;/ you selfish, bundle of ego/ even fantasize/ absoluteness for self”. The last poem, “Poetry” experiments with typography: “I <s-t-r-e-t-c-h> the syllables”.
Many young scholars have published their debut collections. Arunima Arun’s Inked Reveries is the poet’s musings on being a woman. Each poem in this collection is penned keeping in mind the perceptions of women in this world. For instance, “Pen had the choice to/ fill in the blue, red/ black and sometimes,/ the green./ But she had to bleed,/ only in red”. A graduate from Delhi’s Zakir Hussain College, Utsav Kaushik has brought out The Silent Hour. Medha Singh’s Ecdysis has poems that are intense and experiential. The words are simple but used in complex ways, endowed with movement: “A day collapses/ into the/ next”. Phrases such as “vacant gaze” and “naked pillows” draw complex images. Diganta Ray, an M.A. student of English from Jadavpur University, has published his third poetry collection, Pen at the Pollen. His use of phrases employing contradiction such as “shackles of the sky”, “waterless seas”, or strange combinations such as “swampy heart”, “muddy heart” form an interesting assortment of images.
Winner of The Reuel International Prize for Poetry in 2016, Lily Swarn’s collection A Trellis of Ecstasy is a veritable delight. She makes use of many forms and devices such as the tanka, the limerick, alliterative verse, the Roseate sonnet, the mesostic poem, palindromes and free verse. The poet’s understanding of nature is a defining feature of this collection. The poems are highly alliterative: “Fragrant frangipani flaunting/ seductive scents sublime”; “Panoramic, pandemonium/ Guttural ghoulish gargantuan/ Creeping in covetously”. Swarn derives lineage from women writers such as Kamala Das and Maya Angelou in poems such as “My Story” and “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”.
Santosh Bakaya’s new collection Under the Apple Boughs is dedicated to the people of West Africa and, more specifically, Ghana and its capital Accra. In some poems Kashmiri words are used: the father’s “soi shalak” becomes a “love-balm” and in the very next line the reality of the valley is thrust at the reader: “Ah, sad day it was, when off his head was blown off the shelter/ He ran helter-skelter, alas soon to be branded a stone-pelter”. 14 poems in the last section, “O Africa!” give us a glimpse into the culture and urban landscape of Accra: “Swaying palms, mosques and churches standing cheek by jowl”. She associates the people with “a never-say-die spirit/ A die-hard optimism”.
Bob D’Costa’s The Poet Pundit Speaks is a collection of 25 poems that create a realistic picture of Calcutta. It begins and ends with the poet’s love for the place, but the tone remains composed: “The city where even the mad man of the street quotes from Tagore’s Gitanjali to Shakespeare’s King Lear”. The plight of the marginalised groups, especially the prostitutes in Calcutta, finds special mention in this book: “The waves are the makeshift roofs/ of tumbledown hovels of the pavement dwellers/ in an up-and-down ride of broken homes/ where the tired thoughts of pavement prostitutes reside”.
Malsawmi Jacob is the author of Zorami (2015), the first novel from Mizoram; Four Gardens and Other Poems is her first volume of poetry containing selected poems spanning the period 2004 to 2016 and covering various aspects of life. The section “Roots” is a glimpse into the life, culture and history of the Mizos. “Pi Muaki’ is a poem on the first Mizo poet whose “prophetic voice” spoke against the misdeeds of the tyrants. This was resented by the powerful who shut her out “from golden sunlight/ wind and call of chuk-chu-ri-kur”. Her music continues to reverberate under the earth. In another section is the poem, “At Andheri” where people are “shoulder to shoulder/ bumper to bumper”. In it “Masses of flesh/ wriggle squirm/ hurry bury”. The “Masses masses/ no faces/ yeh hai Mumbai meri jaan”.
Novelist Irwin Allan Sealy has expressed his poetic sentiment in Zelaldinus: A Masque. The title stands for Jalal-ud-din Akbar, the Great Mughal. The long narrative poem is in prose form interspersed with the Jesuit Father Monserrate’s report from Akbar’s court to Rome in 1579. The narrator Irv takes the reader from the ramparts of Fatehpur Sikri to the Rann of Kutch. The ghost of the Emperor walks the roads of Sikri only to disappear at the end of the section. He reappears and there begins the story of Perce and Naz, the love between the Indian and the Pakistani. This section ends with the emperor helping Perce cross the border, reflecting on Akbar’s secular nature. In the last part, masque is explained as “public utterance, admitting no private voice, but in coda where death has emptied both citadel and narrator”. There is an indication that the streets of Sikri are no longer what he thought them to be.
The Square Root of a Sonnet by Nilanjan P. Choudhury, a play in five scenes, is based on Indian American astrophysicist S. Chandrashekhar’s work. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with William A. Fowler and the Chandrashekhar Limit is named after him. The problems faced by the Nobel Laureate have been dramatized. Real names are used: Chandra, his wife Lalitha and Cambridge Professor, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington. With a strong grip on scientific concepts, the play re-imagines the debates in the world of astrophysics. The title comes from Eddington’s lines: “For that’s what we poor humans are – the square roots of sonnets – impossible conundrums, unsolvable equations”. The play makes use of lines from Shakespeare’s Tempest, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men”.
Novelist and academic Anuradha Marwah has brought out her play, Ismat’s Love Stories, as an ebook. It was shortlisted for The Hindu Playwright Award, 2016. Many of her plays have been performed, and a one-act play, A Pipe Dream in Delhi, was published in Postcolonial Text 7(3), 2012. Ismat is an exquisite literary experience, “bio-fiction” that revisits the relationship between the two literary giants of the twentieth century: Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chugtai. Marwah states: “I am making no claims regarding accuracy or verifiability. I am seeking to explore Ismat’s early writings and get under the skin of her mercurial friendship with Manto. The connections I make are with the view of a dramatist”. The play delves into sensitive areas such as the relationship between Manto and Chugtai, Manto and his wife Safiya and also Ismat and Safiya. Chugtai’s sentimental reminiscing of Manto’s shift to Pakistan and his death is portrayed with sensitivity.
The outstanding novel of 2017 is Nayantara Sahgal’s When the Moon Shines by Day. Sahgal presents an India where the forces of Hindutva have taken over. Arati, wife of the rich hotel owner Nalin Ashwin, is pregnant for the fourth time, because “Patriotic Hindus” are advised to have at least five children, following the Nazi ideology of propagating a superior race (Sakshi Maharaj, a BJP Member of Parliament, declared in January 2015 that every Hindu woman must produce at least four children to protect the Hindu religion). The protagonist Rehana is the daughter of an eminent Hindu historian, whose books on medieval history have been struck off syllabi and dropped from his publisher’s list because they do not present the “official” version of history. Sahgal’s Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel Rich like Us (1985) revealed the suspension of human rights during the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi; the atrocities of that period pale in comparison with the situation in When the Moon Shines by Day, her tenth novel. An untouchable is murdered and his shop ransacked by well-trained armed men because he had the temerity to open a shop selling kitchen utensils, instead of lifting “roadside garbage and high-caste shit”. Muslims are herded into ghettoes “for their own safety”; mass graves are dug beforehand, and more than 500 men, women and children are killed when the ghetto is burnt down in “an accidental fire”. When Rehana meets the D.C.T. (Director of Cultural Transformation) and tells him that it is a case of arson, he justifies the actions of the murderous mob, “Is it not reasonable that they should do to our tormentors what our tormentors did to us?”
Arundhati Roy’s second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has appeared twenty years after her Booker Prize winning novel The God of Small Things. In the interim, Roy published a dozen non-fiction books about the wrongs that the Indian state engendered. Every event that occurred in India in these years is included here: the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat, the armed rebellion in tribal areas where the legitimate aspirations of the people are brutally suppressed, Anna Hazare’s fast demanding the end of corruption, the painful complexities of Kashmir, etc. Short snippets provide the political history of the country, from the Emergency of 1976 to the present rise of the BJP. Roy attempts to link the various stories through the life of Anjum, a transgender, who lives in a graveyard in Delhi.
Manu Joseph’s third novel, Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous, also describes the rise of the BJP and its charismatic leader Narendra Modi, but the novelist has failed to transmute journalistic reportage into fiction. The novel is based on the death of Ishrat Jahan Raza and Javed Sheikh, killed in a fake encounter and framed as terrorists in 2004. Joseph has simply changed the names: Prime Minister Narendra Modi becomes Damodarbhai (followers chant “Damo” instead of “Namo”). Ishrat, a 19-year-old student in Mumbai becomes Laila Raza, while Javed is renamed Jamal. The frame story has an interesting character: Akhila Iyer, a young woman whose website PhilosophicalThugs.com makes fun of “rich Marxists, socialists, environmentalists”.
Salman Rushdie’s 13th novel The Golden House proves that “You can take an Indian out of India, but you can never take India out of an Indian”. Rushdie’s love for Bombay, the city of his childhood, is evident, especially in the final section of the novel. This story of a crooked Indian businessman, who calls himself Nero Golden when he escapes to New York, is the most boring novel Rushdie has ever written. Rushdie uses twenty words where two would do: Golden comes from a “country that could not be named”, but four pages later Rushdie writes, “the country was India, of course”. References to films and literary texts abound – T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock”, The Great Gatsby, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Adorno. The novel makes references to every recent public event: the terrorist attack in Mumbai in November 2008, the 2G scam, the poison-tipped umbrella murder in London, Obama’s election, and eight years later, a real estate mogul (Rushdie calls him “the Joker”) being elected President.
Kiran Nagarkar’s “Ravan and Eddie” trilogy was distinguished by its light, satirical humour. Jasoda is very different, in tone and subject matter; it is the harrowing story of a woman from the rural hinterland of India who survives against all odds. The novel opens with Jasoda giving birth, all alone, as her cow is grazing, but she immediately strangles the baby girl. Her abusive husband has never taken responsibility for his family, busy ingratiating himself with the local prince, a debauchee. Jasoda raises and feeds her sons but kills every new-born daughter. She has internalized Indian feudal patriarchal principles to the extent that she considers female infanticide a duty. Facing famine, Jasoda moves to Bombay with her three sons and sick mother-in-law. Because of her eldest son Himmat’s pleas, the daughter born in the city is allowed to live, but there is no change in Jasoda’s attitude. Every evil of Indian society is revealed: casteism, misogyny, rural and urban poverty, and the misuse of power by the rich.
Poet Meena Kandasamy’s first novel, The Gypsy Goddess (2014) was about caste-based violence in Tamil Nadu. Her second novel When I Hit You or a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, shortlisted for The Hindu Prize for Fiction, is a powerful indictment of the treatment of women in Indian society, an exposé of toxic masculinity which demands that leaders from Mahatma Gandhi to Narendra Modi be celibate. In a marriage, the husband is to be treated as a god, all adjustments have to be made by the wife. Kandasamy presents a first-person account of a battered wife who falls in love with a communist ideologue. She realizes very soon that he is a control freak: he forces her to cut off communications with old friends, believes that he owns her, and punishes any resistance from her with beatings and rape. Writing is her only means of coping with the situation, but her husband does not let her publish anything, so her strategy is to “Open a file, write a paragraph or a page, erase before lunch”.
While many Indian English novels fictionalise Mahatma Gandhi, Neelima Dalmia Adhar’s The Secret Diary of Kasturba (2016) is the first Indian English novel to centre around his wife, Kasturba. The fictional device of a diary is quite successful in bringing out Kasturba’s sorrow at the Mahatma’s troubled relations with their eldest son, Harilal (the real-life Kasturba was illiterate). Gandhiji never provided for his education, and she is heartbroken when Harilal turns to drink after all his business enterprises fail. The Diary reveals the Mahatma’s cruelty to his own family and his fear of female sexuality: he took a vow of celibacy without considering his wife’s views.
Michael Chacko Daniels (b. 1943) is a poet and novelist with six books to his credit. His fourth novel, the 635-page Savages and Other Neighbours can be considered his magnum opus. The protagonist, Solomon Jacob, with an Indian father and a Dutch mother, is working to renovate abandoned homes to provide housing for the poor. He fulfils his murdered father’s wish to bring his Indian grandparents to Riverside, a small town in Michigan. His grandmother, a schoolteacher, is an attractive character, very sensitive, seeing good in everyone and dispensing wise advice along with her famous cocoa cakes. Grandfather Jacob is a devout evangelist who wants to convert everyone to his narrow concept of Christianity, a thoroughly unpleasant person who does not care for other people’s feelings. There is a touch of humour in the way people of Riverside tend to judge them on their appearance. Solomon’s colleague Jennifer thinks they are savages come to the office for a handout. Solomon, his grandmother and sympathetic neighbours advise Jacob not to hold his “Bringing-Christ-Back-to-America” prayer meeting, but he is too stubborn to listen to them. A mob chanting “Burn, heathen, burn” sets fire to the house; the opposition has been orchestrated by the real estate mafia who want to get rid of Solomon.
Thrity Umrigar’s first two novels Bombay Time (2001) and The Space between Us (2006) dealt with the life of Parsis in Bombay. Her later novels present the problems of adjustment faced by Indian immigrants in U.S.A. Her seventh novel, Everybody’s Son, does not have any Indian characters. It deals with the parent-child bond and issues of race and class, through the story of Anton, a young black boy adopted by a rich white family.
Friend of My Youth, Amit Chaudhuri’s seventh novel, blends autobiography and fiction; it is an account of a novelist called Amit Chaudhuri who visits Bombay for a book event. He hopes to meet his old school friend, Ramu Reddy, but he is in a rehabilitation centre. As the narrator travels around Bombay, he moves back and forth in time, reminiscing about his friend. As in Chaudhuri’s other novels, there is hardly any plot, but the detailed descriptions of everyday objects and events make the book worth reading.
Jeet Thayil’s first novel, Narcopolis (2012), won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. The Book of Chocolate Saints, his second novel, traces the life of octogenarian poet and painter Newton Francis Xavier in Bombay and New York. Major sections are by his biographer Dismas Bambai. Xavier is based on the poet Dom Moraes and the painter Francis Newton Souza. Another character, Narayan Doss, seems like a composite of the bilingual poet Arun Kolatkar and the Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal. Many of the “Bombay poets” of the 1980s appear under their real names. The novel is about the creation of art, especially poetry, but the artist emerges as drunken, misogynist, and sexually violent.
The Indian reader might find it difficult to relate to the characters in The Book of Chocolate Saints but would respond to the people and events in Pratima Srivastava’s The Driftwood. The novel presents two upper middle-class families in Allahabad. Shashank, a university professor and his wife Bina are coping with two traumatic events in their lives: their teenage son Udit running away from home just because Shashank scolded him, and their daughter’s Shweta’s road accident which has left her paralyzed from the waist down. Their neighbours, an older couple, Dr. Arvind Johri and his wife Yashoda, yearn for the visits of their sons to Allahabad; the elder one is working in London, while the younger is in Bangalore. The life of Udit, working as a chef in a hotel in Mussourie, is another narrative thread. The novelist presents a vivid picture of life in Allahabad, particularly good in the minutiae of women’s everyday lives.
Anees Salim’s fifth novel, The Small-Town Sea, is his most melancholic. The narrator is a 13-year-old boy whose father relocates to the town of his childhood when he suffers from cancer. The book begins with the nameless protagonist’s letter to a literary agent and ends with an epilogue (“What is a good book without an afterword, Mr. Unwin?”). His father had written three novels, but the manuscripts were rejected by publishers. The Small-Town Sea presents a vivid picture of small town life, but what stands out is the loneliness of the boy forced to grow up before his time, coming to terms with the death of his father, grandmother and classmate.
Sujit Saraf’s fourth novel Harilal & Sons won the Raymond Crossword Book Award 2017. It is a kind of tribute to the author’s own community, the Marwaris from Rajasthan who run small business establishments all over India. The 12-year-old Harilal Tibrewal leaves the desert region of Shekhavati in 1899 to make a living in far-away Calcutta. Over the years, as he moves from Calcutta to Bogra in East Bengal, and to Bihar after Partition, his shop selling spices, rice, and cigarettes grows into a huge business, Harilal and Sons. The story of his life covers important public events in the Indian sub-continent till 1972, such as the struggle for independence, Partition, and the birth of Bangladesh. It is also about internal migration, Indians moving from one region of India to another.
Poet, lyricist, short story writer and film-maker Gulzar (b. 1934) has translated his novella Two originally written in Urdu (Do Log, 2017). He traces the lives of Hindus and Sikhs fleeing from the small town of Campbellpur, when they realize that Partition is not just a rumour. Rich and poor, including Panna Bai, the prostitute, board Fauji’s truck and pick up others, survivors of the carnage they witness on the way. The economy of style is remarkable: each character is etched clearly. The orphan nurtured by Panna Bai grows up to be a successful auto parts dealer in Delhi but is killed in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984.
The Assassinations by Vikram Kapur, subtitled “A Novel of 1984” recreates the horrors of the riots which followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The mob in Trilokpuri, a Sikh-majority area of Delhi, is led by “a local Congress neta. There were several other men with him, including a police constable in full uniform”. Kapur’s focus is on two upper middle-class families in Delhi, and how the riots affect them. Her parents and brother are shattered when Deepa, a Hindu, is killed in a bomb blast. Amarjeet, a doctor with a flourishing practice, is forced to leave Delhi just because he is a Sikh and is reduced to running a convenience store in Seattle. Not only Indira Gandhi, “so much more was assassinated – amity built up over generations, friendship, trust, decency”.
Kanwaljit Deol, an Indian Police Service officer, traces events in the Punjab from 1980 to 1984 in her novel The Year of the Hawks. Fareed and Shera are carefree boys in Moranwale village, but they feel the impact of Bhindranwale, who is agitating for a separate Khalistan. Fareed is bullied into joining the militants because he is afraid of being called a traitor. The other important character is Sikand, a middle-aged journalist in Delhi. The novelist employs Sikand to present the historical background to the agitation in Punjab. She also comments on the culpability of all the agents – Indira Gandhi, the Akalis under Sant Longowal, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the army and the police – for the ensuing calamity.
Poet and short story writer Temsula Ao who won the Sahitya Akademi Award for her short story collection Laburnum for My Head (2009) has published a novel, Aosenla’s Story. Young Aosenla has won a scholarship to go to college, but her dreams of higher education are cut short when she is forced to get married to a much older man. She slowly realizes “what it meant to be a woman”. Ao is a poet and makes good use of spatial imagery, as in the beautiful opening chapter, which shows the protagonist gazing at “the big house, the house that had symbolized authority and domination over her life” as opposed to her own new smaller house, within the same estate.
Easterine Kire’s Don’t Run, My Love is her 11th novel; like Son of the Thundercloud (2016) which won the Tata Literature Live Book of the Year Award, it explores themes of love and rejection, with elements of the folklore of Nagaland. 18-year-old Atuonuo and her widowed mother Visenuo are struggling to harvest their paddy when a handsome young man called Kevi helps them. Atuonuo is attracted towards him but also vaguely uneasy; she is terrified when she realizes that he is a were-tiger, but Kevi is not ready to leave her.
Janice Pariat’s second novel The Nine-Chambered Heart uses an experimental second-person narrative in an attempt to present various facets of love: “You are so upset you leave. I ask if you’re coming back later, and I get the cab door slammed in my face”. Nine characters write about an unnamed young woman they loved. The relationships are more about lust and exploitation than love and the protagonist “you” is completely devoid of self-worth.
Quite unlike her earlier novels, male characters occupy centre stage in Anuja Chauhan’s fifth novel, Baaz, the story of Flying Officer Ishaan Faujdaar set against the backdrop of the 1971 war which led to the creation of Bangladesh. Anuja Chauhan’s characters are always realistic, the kind of people one could meet anywhere in India. Ishaan comes from a small village, but his reckless daring as a fighter pilot enables him to overcome all obstacles and win the sobriquet “Baaz” (“falcon”). His friends Rakesh Agarwal and Madan Subbiah are very credible characters whose camaraderie is brought out well (they claim that “Baaz” is short for bastard). The book is a tribute to the bravery of our armed forces but also shows the seamy side of war and its futility through the character of the anti-war photo-journalist Tehmina Dadyseth whom Ishaan loves.
Leila by Prayaag Akbar won the Tata Nexon Literature Live! First Book Award. It is a powerful social critique presented through the story of a mother’s longing for her missing daughter. Recent years in India have witnessed an increase in residential social segregation, and Akbar presents a scary picture of what this could lead to. The city of the future is divided into exclusive housing complexes based on region and religion, such as the Tamil Brahmin Sector or the Bohra Muslim Zone. They are guarded by “Repeaters”, brutish young men who enforce segregation, with the support of the Council, led by a “Man-God”. Their slogan is “Purity for All”. There is extreme inequality – the privileged live in areas connected by “flyroads” so that they never have to move on the filthy roads at ground level where the “Slummers” live. Shalini, from an upper middle-class family, rebels against this segregation and marries her Muslim school fellow Riz. They have a daughter, Leila; when she is three years old, a gang of Repeaters storm into their house to take her away, so that she can be brought up with “Purity”; however, Leila and her nanny, Sapna, have disappeared. Riz dies resisting the mob and Shalini is taken away to a “Purity Camp” and has to live with other widows outside the city. The rigid patriarchy of the Council is not only xenophobic, it believes in the ostracism of widows. The novel begins with Shalini and the spirit of Riz lighting candles outside the Wall on Leila’s birthday, sixteen years later. Shalini still hopes to meet her daughter. Akbar’s economy of style is impressive; there is never an extra word in the novel and making Shalini the narrator captures a mother’s pain effectively.
Another impressive first novel is Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People, which won The Hindu Prize for Fiction. Thousands of people from Kerala have gone to work in the “Gulf”. Aadujeevitham (2008), a Malayalam novel by Bahrain-based Indian author Benyamin (the English translation by Joseph Koyippally appeared in 2009 with the title Goat Days) was probably the first fictional representation of abused migrant workers. Goat Days, based on a real event, is the story of one man; Temporary People is about a variety of migrant workers, men and women, whose dreams of a better life are shattered. The 28 pieces are divided into three “Books”: “Limbs”, “Tongue” and “Home”. Unnikrishnan employs a variety of stylistic registers, sometimes using a kind of pidgin English with words from Malayalam and Hindi. “Pravasis” reads like a poem consisting of a list of terms: “Expat. Worker./ Guest. Worker./ . . . . Illegal. People. . . .Deported. Left./ More. Arriving”. Some stories are Kafkaesque: a Mitsubishi elevator is guilty of child molestation, cockroaches wear clothes, a labourer swallows his passport and turns into a passport. “Birds” is in standard English and employs magic realism – Anna is a Malayalee nurse who works at construction sites every night, patching up workers who have fallen from the buildings; she uses glue, a needle, and some horsehair. “Taxi Man” is a 14-page monologue by a taxi driver.
Stuck like Lint by Shefali Tripathi Mehta is an impressive debut novel composed of stories of varying length. The novel has an interesting structure: the narrator, a publisher’s editor, is reading the new book by an authored named Trisha, a collection of 15 woman-centred stories. The narrator’s egoism and her complex relationship with “her” author Trisha is delineated vividly through her comments on each story.
Preti Taneja’s debut novel We That Are Young is King Lear set in contemporary India. 75-year-old Devraj Bapuji is the founder of a conglomerate with interests in many areas: transport, hotels, apparel, real estate and construction, consumer goods. He decides to divide up his business empire among his three daughters, Gargi, Radha and Sita, on the basis of their loyalty to him. Sita, his favourite daughter, refuses to flatter him, and runs away from home rather than marry the man he has chosen for her, so she is deprived of any share in the Company. The novel presents a clear picture of the machinations of the characters when huge wealth is involved. Devraj’s attitude serves to highlight India’s corruption, misogyny and communal distrust.
Anil Chopra’s debut novel, Unforeseen Desires presents one year in the life of Arun, a young doctor, who comes to Dehradun as an intern in 1976. Another strand of the plot is about Victoria, an English missionary devoted to her calling, who does not want to leave India. The novel captures the beauty of Dehradun, and also reveals the rampant corruption in the appointment of doctors in government hospitals.
Many authors have turned to crime fiction. Jerry Pinto, whose first novel EM and the Big Hoom (2012) won multiple awards, has now written a thriller, A Murder in Mahim. It presents the seamy side of life in Mumbai, with men being blackmailed for homosexual affairs. It is also a novel about friendship and family relationships, as the protagonist Peter Fernandes, a retired journalist, joins the investigation as he fears that his son might be involved. Sidin Vadukut, the author of the Dork trilogy, which poked fun at corporate culture, has published Bombay Fever, a meticulously researched medical thriller. Men, women and children in Bombay are struck down by a mysterious disease, which begins with a mild cough and ends with the body disintegrating into a puddle of blood. Vadukut gives a plausible (and rather frightening) picture of an epidemic.
Greenlight by Kalpana Swaminathan is her sixth book with the narrator Seeta’s aunt Lalli as detective. Lalli was a credible character in earlier novels; here she is a superwoman: her talents include mastery of karate, she can wield a knife effectively, and race like a Formula One driver. Madhumita Bhattacharyya’s Murder at the Temple, a thriller set in Bangalore, is quite different from her earlier three novels, set in Kolkata, Mumbai and Goa, with a young woman as detective. In the evening of 8 November 2016, shortly after the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announces demonetisation of Rs500 and Rs1000 notes, Kavya, the trustee of a temple, finds the dead body of the priest. She realizes that her uncle might be implicated in the crime and runs away to safety. The novella presents a good picture of the chaos and illegal transactions unleashed by Modi’s decision. In Keron Bhattacharya’s Snakes without Ladders, the investigation into the gruesome murder of an old widow in New York goes 100 years into the past.
The Book Hunters of Katpadi by Pradeep Sebastian is subtitled “A Bibliomystery”. The novel gives us a lot of information about rare books and booklovers’ clubs. Sebastian recreates the ambience of an antiquarian book shop in Chennai run by Kayalveli Anbuchelvan and Neelambari, and pokes fun at typical Tamil Christian names by calling the great rivals Nallathambi Whitehead and Arcot Templar. The Groaning Shelf and Other Instances of Book Love (2010) was a collection of Sebastian’s articles; it is not surprising that bibliophily rather than the mystery surrounding a rare fragment of Richard Burton’s writing dominates The Book Hunters of Katpadi.
Sami Ahmad Khan’s Aliens in Delhi is a fast-paced science fiction thriller: secret agents from India, Pakistan and the Conglomerate (a secret society of seven men who manipulate the world’s economy) are trying to get a special crystal which is an endless source of energy. It has been planted in a remote area of the Himalayas by aliens, eight-foot high reptiloids, who plan to use radiation from cell phone towers to conquer the earth.
Deep Wood Trance is a different kind of science fiction, with allegorical characters like the Seeker, living in the Ethical Telepathic Age. An interesting feature of this novel is the variety of styles, incorporating stories and poems that Devi wrote many years earlier. R.K.R. Nair’s Orbits has lovers who are in telepathic communication with each other. Aditya, a disillusioned film star, falls in love with a young fan, Seema, but she marries a rich industrialist who loves her. She cannot forget Aditya and remains faithful to her husband by being with Aditya in spirit, through telepathy. Anway Mukhopadhyaya’s After the Three Eyes, subtitled “A Trilogy on the City of Kali” fictionalises folklore and history. The first part is about Krishnananda, who had a vision of the image of Goddess Kali, with three eyes and a protruding tongue; the second part is about the founding of Calcutta, while the third, set in the present, has vignettes of Durga Puja celebrations.
Historical novels continue to attract novelists. Biswakesh Tripathy (b. 1931), a retired Indian Police Service officer, has turned to the 13th-century King Narasingha Dev in his third historical novel, Konarka. He recounts the popular stories about Narasingha Dev and the huge sun temple he built but gives his own version of the disappearance of the teenage architect-sculptor who completed it. Ashok K. Banker as well as Komal Bhanver write about young Prince Ashoka and his campaign in Taxila. Legend of Kuldhara by Malathi Ramachandran is about a village in Rajasthan two centuries ago. Empire, Devi Yesodharan’s debut novel, is centred around the dominant naval power of the Cholas, when Nagapattinam was the richest port in 11th-century India. Inspired by records of female guards in King Rajendra Chola’s palace, Devi Yesodharan has made her protagonist a young Greek girl, left behind by Greek pirates.
Novels based loosely on Indian mythology proliferate. Sita: Warrior of Mithila is the second book of Amish’s bestselling Ram Chandra series. Like Scion of Ikshvaku (2015), the first book, the characters and incidents are very different from those of Valmiki’s Ramayana. Vamsee Juluri, Aditya Iyengar, Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, Vineet Aggarwal, Kavita Kane and Anuja Chandramouli, all have protagonists from Indian mythology.
Film-maker Tanuja Chandra has made her fictional debut with a collection of short stories, Bijnis Woman: Stories of Uttar Pradesh Told by My Mausis, Buas, Chachas. She makes good use of Hindi words (“Mausis”, “Buas”, “Chachas” rather than the vague “aunts” and “uncles”, for example) to anchor the stories to a specific milieu. The tone is of members of a family talking about ordinary people and events. Small town society in India, where a woman is expected to be always subservient, is recreated with a touch of humour.
Ruskin Bond’s Small Towns, Big Stories is a collection of 21 of his finest “small town” stories, three of them new: “Strychnine in the Cognac”, “When the Clock Strikes Thirteen”, and “The Horseshoe”, which is a memoir rather than a story. Parveen Talha’s second collection of stories, A Word Thrice Uttered: Stories on Life’s Realities, has a somewhat wider canvas than her first, Fida-é-Lucknow (2013) which was confined to Lucknow. Some stories bring back the past of Awadh and its culture, with a touch of folklore or the supernatural. The title story is about the practice of men divorcing their wives by uttering the word “Talaq” thrice. Kauser’s first husband abandons her and their mentally handicapped son by uttering “Talaq” thrice; her second husband uses it to threaten her. But the story takes an unexpected twist: the divorce has the effect of liberating and empowering her.
Madhulika Liddle is better known for her novels featuring Muzaffar Jang as detective. Woman to Woman is her second collection of stories after My Lawfully Wedded Husband and Other Stories (2012). The twelve stories here have women from various socio-economic strata of society as protagonists. “Two Doors” reveals the desperation of a career woman under pressure to have a baby. “The Sari Satyagraha” has a touch of comedy. Some of the stories have a twist in the tale, showing the woman rising up against her oppressor. Breasts and Other Afflictions of Women (2014) by R.K. Biswas presented a true picture of contemporary India through stories about women. She has now published a collection of 11 short stories about men, Immoderate Men, under the pseudonym Shikhandin.
Siddharth Dasgupta’s The Sacred Sorrow of Sparrows has ten stories, set in various places, from Japan to Bombay to Dubai to Lebanon, with diverse protagonists. “The Baker from Kabul” shows an Afghan refugee who has set up a bakery in Dubai; he is excited that his son is coming on a visit from America and plans to hand over the business to him. But the son prefers to work in America. “Gulmohar Drive” has Shehnaz Wadia visiting her home in Poona after ten years; she had moved out as her parents did not permit her to marry her boyfriend because he was not a Parsi.
Each of the 15 short stories in Isaac John’s debut collection, Buffering Love: Stories from the App Store, centres around the use of an app, often with unexpected consequences. “Launched”, for example, has a protagonist who is very fond of texting; “Home Delivered” is about the misadventures of Zubin when he orders food through a mobile app. The stories faithfully reflect the life of busy professionals in urban India.
In Lone Fox Dancing: My Autobiography Ruskin Bond gives us an intimate insight into his life, sharing his failures in love and problems with money. The four sections, covering childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and his later life in Dehra Dun and Mussourie, present the changes in India, while examining the issue of identity: “And what was I, anyway? English, like my father? Or Anglo-Indian like my mother? Or Punjabi Indian like my stepfather and half-brothers?” Like his fiction, Bond’s autobiography is enlivened by gentle wit and humour. Malay Kumar Roy’s An Elsewhere Place: Boyhood Days in Hazaribagh recreates the charm of Hazaribagh in the 1950s, when it was a quiet little town, surrounded by forests. Roy includes stories about the ordinary people in his life, such as the gardener, the maid and the vegetable seller; the section “Mentors and Mates” is about the priests who set up St. Xavier’s School in 1952.
Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India by Sujatha Gidla adds a new dimension to Dalit discourse. When she moved to America at the age of 26, she realised that caste did not determine one’s identity in other countries. Ants Among Elephants based on Gidla’s interviews with many members of her family, is a history of India in the second half of the 20th century, which reveals that caste prejudices still continue.
Celebrity chef and model Padma Lakshmi’s memoir Love, Loss, and What We Ate (2016) traces her life from early childhood in Chennai to motherhood in America with frank details of the men in her life, including Salman Rushdie. The best part of the book is the portrait of her grandmother, the food she cooked and the Tamil Brahmin customs she followed.
Through My Blogged Eyes by Vimala Ramu is a compilation of 55 humorous blogs, some of them first published in the newspaper the Deccan Herald. She recounts various funny incidents of day-to-day life in India, such as the time she kept searching for her cell phone; she had tucked it inside her blouse and realized this only when her husband stared at her cleavage when it rang. Grieving to Healing by Vinita Deshmukh, a journalist known for her Right to Information activism, is a commemorative volume for her husband, who died suddenly. It has poems and prose pieces, as well as tributes by friends and family members. The most valuable part of the book is the practical advice she gives on coping with loss.
Sudhin N. Ghose (1899–1965) was the first Indian English novelist to employ Indian modes of storytelling in his fiction. He has not received the critical attention he deserves because his work was long out of print. Speaking Tiger Books has reprinted his tetralogy: And Gazelles Leaping (1949), Cradle of the Clouds (1951), The Vermilion Boat (1953) and The Flame of the Forest (1955). Subhendu Mund has edited and introduced the works of Shoshee Chunder Dutt (1824-1885) in Sahitya Akademi’s “Reprint of Rare Book Series”. The 680-page book contains The Republic of Orissa: A Page from the Annals of the Twentieth Century (1845), the earliest Indian English fictional text, as well as The Young Zemindar (1883), Reminiscences of a Kerani’s Life (1872-73) and Shunkur: A Tale of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (1874).
Children’s literature is flourishing, encouraged by publishers like Tulika and Duckbill Books. Many awards for children’s books have been instituted in recent years, such as the Sahitya Akademi Award for Children’s Literature, the Crossword Book Award for Children’s Writing, The Hindu Young World-Goodbook Awards and the Tata Literature Live “Big Little Book Award” which honour illustrators as well as writers. The list below includes only a selection of prize-winning children’s books.
We mourn the death of the poet Vijay Nambisan (1963-2017), novelist, literary critic and translator Ranga Rao (1937-2018), and poet, novelist and literary critic Eunice de Souza (1940-2017). Some books of poetry and fiction may be missing from the bibliography below; in spite of repeated requests and reminders, many big publishers in India, such as Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan and Hachette India did not provide us with a list of books they published in 2017.