India

Introduction

2018 has been a good year for Indian English literature. For the first time, the Jnanpith Award was given to an Indian English writer: Amitav Ghosh. Finely chiselled poetry by some new poets appeared in book form: Huzaifa Pandit (Green Is the Colour of Memory) and Arathy Asok (Lady Jesus and Other Poems) write resistance poetry with a sharp edge. Introspective thoughts in crisp lines are seen in Sujatha Warrier and Satyajit Sarna’s debut collections. Collaborative poems (including the Indo-Welsh project) and the use of illustrations has resulted in some very interesting collections. Collected poems by established poets like Keki N. Daruwalla, Gieve Patel, Gopikrishnan Kottoor, the late Vijay Nambisan, D. C. Chambial and A. N. Dwivedi appeared. In fiction, Neelum Saran Gour at last got some recognition when her sixth novel, Requiem in Raga Janki, won The Hindu Prize for fiction. Tabish Khair presents memorable characters in his seventh novel Night of Happiness, a nuanced portrayal of Hindu-Muslim relations in contemporary India. Many other established novelists — including Anjum Hasan, Keki N. Daruwalla, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitabha Bagchi, Anita Nair, Anuradha Roy, Andaleeb Wajid and Mahesh Rao — have also published new work. Radhika Oberoi’s debut novel, Stillborn Season, is an impressive study of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. Two books of non-fiction stand out: Shashi Deshpande’s autobiography, Listen to Me, and Why I Am a Hindu by Shashi Tharoor. Jasbir Jain’s Subcontinental Histories: Literary Reflections on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries and Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity by E. V. Ramakrishnan are the most significant books of literary criticism. In Order of Appearance: A Compendium of Indian Playwrights in English 1947–2010 by Abhijit Sengupta provides a road map for researchers of Indian English drama.

Poetry is flourishing; poetry clubs in several Indian towns meet regularly and many prizes have been instituted to encourage poetry. More than 140 volumes of poetry appeared in 2018. Due to space constraints, it is not possible to discuss all the significant poets. The following new poets are promising: Bivin A. Peter, Sufia Khatoon, Raja Chakraborty, Gayatri Lakhiani Chawla, and A. Annapurna Sharma. Other poets who deserve special mention are: Nabanita Kanungo, Srutimala Duara, Gopal Lahiri, Suhit Kelkar, Kripi Malviya, Kushal Poddar, Nikhat Bano, Vandita Liddle Dharni, and Ismail Aashna.

Keki N. Daruwalla’s 12^th collection Naishapur and Babylon (Poems 2005–2017) is divided into four sections. Journeying, central to his poetry, is also the main trope in this collection. The first section, “Naishapur and Babylon” is a poetic travelogue charting the poet’s experiences. The second, “Orpheus and Persephone” recreates episodes from Greek mythology such as the burial of Polyneices or the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The third, “Luxor Diary” courses through ancient Egyptian mythology. The final section has translations of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poems. The “map maker” from yore draws vivid pictures through poetry as he delves into his memory archive.

These Were My Homes: Collected Poems by Vijay Nambisan (1963-2017) has poems from Gemini I and First Infinities as well as new poems. In the new poems, the larger themes are of home and belonging. Nambisan adopts a sceptic’s tone in poems like “The Temple” and “Lent” — “There is no god here, only a house / They have come to since Time began”. The people come to the church as it is a space, “Only somewhere they have brought their vows / And worship because they can”. Remembering Christ’s sacrifice and the fasting during Lent, he asks — “And I think he must think it is very strange / That he thought by his thoughts anything could change”. In “The Evidence of My Senses” the poet introspects — “My ears are shells where sings the sea.” In another section he speculates, “If I had six tongues / And each loved one language, I would yet / Will each separate one to stay from speech”. Or “Now that I wear glasses, I feel the urge / To close my eyes more often. What burden / It is to see and keep on seeing.” Nambisan’s poetry is prism-like as ideas break into many images.

Ranjit Hoskote’s sixth poetry collection, Jonahwhale, is a poetry reader’s delight. The title evokes the Biblical Jonah as well as Captain Ahab obsessed with the whale in Moby Dick. The collection is in three parts — “Memoirs of the Jonahwhale”, “Poona Traffic Shots” and “Archipelago” — with detailed notes at the end of the book. A range of poetic forms are used in this collection. The poet circumnavigates the globe and invites the reader to interpret it — “and you can have any piece of my flaking jigsaw atlas”. Digging deep into the forgotten annals of history, Hoskote chronicles communities, dialects and other marginal entities to create an alternative history. The next section, “Poona Traffic Shots” shifts the locus of the ride landwards, showcasing the ravages of the rain in “puddled potholes” and “fate’s stony winds”. “Archipelago” carries, among others, a “Self-Portrait as Child in the Rain”.

Sukrita Paul Kumar’s Country Drive co-authored by the Canadian poet Yasmin Ladha is a jugalbandi (literally, “entwined twins” or, here, a vocal duet) between two spirited women whose verve is well played out in poetry. The poems have been illustrated by Anandana Kapur, culminating in artwork by Sukrita. Each section begins with “Talking Points” by the poets, followed by poems by each of the poets. Figures from history, mythology and everyday life are filtered through the sharp consciousness of these women absorbing all in their words: “Rumbling and whispering / with all the tales and myths / gurgling in the earth’s belly / I am on the lookout”. In “Draupadi”, Yasmin says, “This way or that way is search, a rummage” and Sukrita adds, “This way, but not that way. Does that not make each one go her own way?”. True to its title, the poems meander through Wagah (on the Indo-Pakistan border), the threads of the Pashmina and the leaves of Chinar to describe a forgotten idyllic past.

Frazil is Menka Shivdasani’s fourth poetry collection after Nirvana at Ten Rupees, Stet, and Safe House. It has poems from 1980–2017. Her poems are always a creative combination of the mundane with the esoteric. There are ten new poems, including one for her mentor, Eunice de Souza (whose final collection of poems had the title The Almond Leaf): “What can you learn from an almond leaf? … no longer flamboyant, / but still flame.”

Rochelle Potkar offers haibun poems in her second poetry collection, Paper Asylum. It is one of those books you want to go back to again and again. With a keen eye, Potkar gathers life’s experiences in her poetry. A teenage girl’s experience of eve-teasing (public sexual harassment) are recorded in “Seed”:

Did they see it? Do they know what happened to me? But not until my buttocks are pinched and breasts elbowed, not until lewd remarks change to lucid pick-up lines in the swelling years of my womanhood, do I realise there is an archive of ‘these very common things’, these unwritten norms.

And then comes the Haiku: “phosphorus sky / the gulmohar bursts / aflame”.

Ripples of conversations are created by art curator bina sarkar ellias in When Seeing Is Believing; Poetry in Images. A confluence of poetic artistry and visual delight forms speaking pictures in this collection. The pictures range from wood and video installations to paintings and other works of art. “Beneath the Boots” for Kashmir and Veer Munshi responds to a wood installation by Veer Munshi: “the valley weeps, / its children bleed / the hills are stricken/ by the army’s greed. / beneath the boots/ the earth recoils/ at man’s inhuman lust for spoils”. Written for Rohit Vemula, the student activist who committed suicide to protest caste-based discrimination, is the poem, “I am Dalit”: “i die as i question / your Manusmritism / i die as i condemn / your narcissism”.

Tanya Mendonsa’s The Fisher of Perch: A Fable for Our Times is the poet’s fourth poetry collection. Nature serenades the course and curves of this long poem. It captures the lissom aspects of nature, as lilies reveal “furry scarlet tongues” and weeds “powder the ground with violet”. In a conversational tone she declares: “Walking one morning, I find myself in a space that is unfamiliar: / for once, I do not know where I am going”. The poems reveal a keen observant eye for all the warps and wefts in nature.

Ranu Uniyal’s The Day We Went Strawberry Picking in Scarborough is the poet’s third poetry collection. The poems are marked by brevity and precision and a finesse that makes them a compelling read. In a reminiscing tone, Uniyal recollects incidents from life to understand them anew while looking at the present with ease and profundity. Violence mars life and “only daughters survive / now we are left with / the taste of tamarind / tart and pickle”. The anatomy of a woman’s body provides apt metaphors as she prefers the company of “some women”. They make her forget her “swollen thighs and cauterised uterus”, as the “healthy camaraderie / between us flits and warms / me inside out. Tucking in / the fragrance of / jasmine and basil, / we become whole / and lovely, all at once”.

Mrg Trishna and Other Poems, Indu K. Mallah’s second poetry collection, is divided into three sections, each one with an epigraph setting the tone of the poems that follow. For example, the third section has an epigraph by Antonio Machado and a deep sense of mysticism evolves gradually in the poems to culminate in the title poem, “Mrg Trishna”. It is based on the legend of the deer maddened by the fragrance of kasturi (musk). It searches everywhere for the fragrance of kasturi that actually lies within it until it finds it “in my hrdaya pundarika” (the space within the heart). This spiritual yearning lies at the core of this collection in its exploration of the nature of poetry, art and creativity.

Gopikrishnan Kottoor’s The Painter of Evenings has some new verses apart from poems from Father, Wake Us in Passing, Mother Sonata and A Buchenwald Diary. Marked by a nostalgic tone, the poems ponder over the many colours of life. The partially autobiographical, sensuously drawn “Mother’s Sari Box” contrasts with the stark tone in “Papa’s Iron Box”. Kottoor’s poetry sketches a miniature universe with its own characters, the toy maker, the coffin maker, Tirupati temple, John Lennon and many more.

E. V. Ramakrishnan’s fourth collection, Tips for Living in an Expanding Universe, has four sections including one with poems selected from earlier volumes. The first three sections, “Tips for Living in an Expanding Universe”, “Premonitions” and “Second Language” have different tones and stresses. Yet they fuse magically. They move from Taksim Square to the coastal belt of Kyushu and Honshu, right up to Tarkovsky’s tomb. In the title poem, an acute sense of shifting times and political fault lines in the world is visible:

Imagine far is near, the language

you hear in the streets is creolised

by machines that have a mind of their own…

Watch out

for alerts, travel advisories every morning

to know where you are, or rather, where you will

never be.

A Yaksha in America is a collection of new and selected poems by bilingual poet Thachom Poyil Rajeevan. A striking aspect of this collection is the use of Malayalam words. Flora, fauna and picturesque locales from Kerala dot the poetic frame. The language of nature transcends linguistic and spatial difference: “The snow in Chicago, / The rain in Iowa / The cold wind in Virginia / The trees on the Mississippi / All speak our language”. In the long prose poem “To the Conscience Keepers”, he adopts a satiric tone:

the conscience cannot be preserved in salt, ice or in spirit like tender mangoes mackerel or an unidentified dead body. It’s an appliance like a fridge washing machine piano computer car or a cell phone; never overuse it or leave it unused forever.

Malayalam writer G. N.Panikkar’s The Mute and the Sidelined contains poems on a wide variety of topics — love, including unrequited love, unhappy relationships, aging knee joints and the death of his dog Tutu (“the mute”).

Michael Chacko Daniels’ Chairman Mao Didn’t Brush and Other Poems is his fourth poetry collection. Illustrations by Aaron Bass and Kritika Ramanujan make for an intriguing read. Apart from 14 verse poems, it also carries 48 Haikus and Senryus, and a Haibun. The last poem, “1984: A Picture-Postcard Island, Property of the Grazing Animals, & Ronald Reagan Tethered” is followed by the author’s endnote in the form of a poem. The unsung song of the homemaker is seen in “What’s Fixin’ in the Kitchen?”: “Mother in the kitchen./ Economy of motion./ No Ph.D.s for that. / Only bouquets and brickbats”. The Haikus and Senryus in this book merge nature with sharp observations by the poet: “big red blooms brighten / a home near yellow schoolhouse / next house — plastic toys”.

Mustansir Dalvi has brought out his second poetry collection titled Cosmopolitician. The poems appear in an ensemble of varied architectural approaches given the poet’s professional expertise in architecture. Images of dilapidation are conveyed through architectural forms: “walls dampen words / to whispers”, “shingles accept a foot of pilaster / buttresses preclude slippage, disaster”, “sinks chug sewage”. In “Kinstukuroi” (the Japanese art of fixing broken bowls with gold), Dalvi seeks a “mending” with words. For him poetry might not heal, “but words can be birdlime / that keep the bricks of our fragilities in place”. Dalvi writes “Last Day in a lived-in house” in memory of Eunice de Souza. He reminiscences about her — “she calls back her strays like verses / but keeps the riff-raff on a tight leash”.

Reshma Ramesh has brought out her second poetry collection, Half Moon. One look at the titles of the poems will prepare the reader for an aromatic culinary journey. “Cinnamon”, “Mace”, “Asafoetida”, “Javitri”, “Tulsi” and many more tap the senses. The overpowering pungent whiff of asafoetida describes the lingering memory of a relation now ended.

Blank Shots is Shyamala Nair’s second poetry collection after A Side of the Sun. Contradictions are the defining feature of this collection. Banaras in “Moulting” “promises rebirth / In sun-kissed sacredness” even as the fish below struggle with the “sloughed ‘sin’ / Of ablutionary rituals”. All paradoxes merge only seemingly into bathers who “defy” even as the river “protests”, unable to maintain “A pretence of purity / in Passable white”.

Green Is the Colour of Memory is Huzaifa Pandit’s debut collection. The Kashmiri poet uses poetry as a medium to articulate resistance. Couplets from Faiz, Dard, Faraz and others hem his poems creating a tapestry. A strident edge is tinged with a sensitive and mournful tonality: “I will ask the snoring cobbler to stitch / the skeleton of my poem with threads of my memory”. Weaving is a leitmotif in his poetry: “fog-stained loom”, “Half-knit clouds”, “threads of my memory”, “monologues embroidered on skinned Jhelum”, “Sewn in my new red handkerchief” string together myriad thoughts.

After The Blue Note, Srividya Sivakumar has brought out her second poetry collection, the heart is an attic. Conscious of many lines of disparities, Sivakumar’s poetry opens up seams of the comfortably cocooned to make people peep outside their comfort zones. Critical of empty sloganeering and mere tokenism, the poet delves deep into the difference between the expected and the real.

Kiriti Sengupta’s Solitary Stillness has black and white sketches, with a newspaper parchment figuring as part of the illustration. Sengupta seamlessly amalgamates Bengali with English and their cultural contexts. “The Pilgrimage” derives the core idea from the medieval Bengali text, Chandimangalkavya. The poet’s witty tone and light-hearted manner seeps through even when dealing with grim topics. Poking barbs at patriarchy, he asks “Ma” in a jocular tone of her hatred for “rented accommodation”: “Was this because, other than/ the house you owned and bragged about, / all along you lived a life where/ Baba remained the chief, and you/ his subordinate?” The poems are in prose and verse.

Economist and translator Bibek Debroy brought out a book of limericks about social and political happenings in India in 2017; the limericks might make us laugh, but also prompt thinking. Assamese poet, Arbind Kumar Choudhary’s Majuli: The Vatican City of Assam is a collection of 261 stanzaic poems on Majuli, the river island which is the cultural capital of Assam. The Who-Am-I Bird by Anuradha Vijaykrishnan is the poet’s debut collection. Identity both real and speculative is considered sensitively in this collection.

Mrinalini Harchandrai’s poems in A Bombay in My Beat wrap Bombay in rhythmic cadences. Iconic songs by Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, references to jugalbandi and Hindustani classical, musical compositions by Bach and others hem the poems making them a veritable treat for music and literature lovers alike. The bangarwallah, bhelpuriwallah, snake charmer, Chowpatty, Cuff Parade and Queen’s Necklace are part of this world. Harchandrai’s preference for Bombay over Mumbai is played out in her choice of songs and in mapping the trajectory from “Bom Baia” to “Bombay” to “Mumbai”: “They rewrote history/ by sticking a post-it over it / renaming the streets, / the airport, / unsaddled the white man/ from the kala ghoda…”.

Arathy Asok’s poems in her debut collection, Lady Jesus and Other Poems, remain focused on harsh realities, exposing the social veneer to reveal a shrinking humanity quotient. “Yell” captures the horror and ravages of the Gujarat massacre: “Gujarat. / You sting me still. / When they come out in the night/ Their torn wombs hanging with dead children… His fingers chopped, / Then his hands and feet / Dragged by the fork / Thrown into fire”. In a distinctly forthright style, Asok’s poems remain centred on people and communities who stand on the margins. The untamed energy of the body is in tandem with the feral forces of nature. Images of motherhood and sensual rhythms of the body are placed within a dynamic understood as predatory.

The poems in Satyajit Sarna’s first poetry collection, The Profane, grapple with a sense of loss. Primal history and the place of man in the universe are placed alongside sensuality in death, the “death seduction” to which the girl torn between boyfriend and brother succumbs. The “kaleja” or liver, the metaphor for passion in Punjabi, is the part that takes longest to burn — “that old performer, the unsung actor”. And, yet, there is the joy of life. The collection also has a six-part poem on Khusrau’s Delhi. The fragrance of “flowers and incense, / spice and dung, silk and cotton” of 13^th-century Delhi has been replaced with the “world of plastics”.

Kochi-based Sujatha Warrier’s The Attic and Other Poems is her debut collection. The poems probe the mind’s attic for hidden thoughts in disarray — “A cluttered storehouse is my attic, / an overflowing archive of rankling thoughts … I wish I could vacuum my attic clean”. The poems are a pause in the cacophony of life and remind one of the stillness of time: “time / Floats down flooded gutters”, “crowded attic of my brain”, “Life gently rocks in its chair”, “Slithering through / crevices of thoughts”. In another, “Rusty latches” and “lingering echoes” give way to “This heirloom of woven memories”. Picturesque locales such as Munnar and Konark are part of Warrier’s poetic landscape.

Anisur Rahman’s debut collection, Earthenware, has two sections “Soil” and “Stone”. He pens instances from his life in the first part. Written lucidly, the poems take a trip down memory lane recounting the joys of childhood — riding “Tek Bahadur / our nana’s elephant”, the incompleteness of “new clothes pressed / but the new shoes unpolished / on the Eid day”, the heroic horse “Sultan, “the bullock cart laden with litchis” or the “muharram tazia” that “touched the sky”. The occasional appearance of Urdu words such as shukr, maghrib, maktab create a fine linguistic blend. The tone in “Stone” makes a sharp departure from “Soil” as it imparts wisdom of life’s long battles: “Hands can shake the world / do undo all / But hands are held best / in a handshake”. Rahman’s gentle touch makes the poems in this collection an endearing read. He is also a gifted translator, who worked as the Coordinator of the UGC Special Assistance Programme at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, at the inception of the ambitious project of translating all 300 of Premchand’s short stories (now published in four volumes). Rahman has also translated poetry; Hazaron Khwahishein Aisi: The Wonderful World of Urdu Ghazals is a sonorous journey into the ghazal world from its beginnings in the 16^th century to the present.

Over and Underground in Mumbai and Paris by Karthika Nair and Sampurna Chattarji, with illustrations by French illustrator Joelle Jolivet and Gond artist Roshni Vyam, is a work of art. The poems and illustrations offer perspectives of four creative artists on the two cities. Based on the Japanese renga, the last line of the first poem is the first line of the next one. The cacophony of Paris and Mumbai is presented through the arterial mesh of trains in the two cities. Trains from two different cities criss-cross maze like. “Line 4 One Day There Will Be” has “febrile fatigues” of “urban commutes” coupled with “a battered laptop case / that was not to survive the subterranean / joyride, spilling electronic innards somewhere / near Barbès-Rochechouart seconds before fortune / tellers, dreadlocked cellists, blue-rose vendors split / open the doors”. This glides arterially into the “Western Line” and the Mumbai train attacks as it moves from Churchgate to Virar, Khar, Santacruz and so on: “one day one hundred and eighty-nine people / will rise from their deaths/ and return unmaimed to catch the trains again”.

Ten poets from India and Wales participated in a project organised by Literature Across Frontiers to mark the 70^th anniversary of independent India. They also translated each other’s work into Welsh and Indian languages. In Open My Shadow, Khasi-Jaintia writer from Shillong, Avner Pariat, collaborates with a bilingual poet from Zambia, Rhys Trymble. Sampurna Chattarji from Darjeeling collaborates with Welsh poet and translator, Eurig Salisbury in Elsewhere Where Else. In A Different Water, Welsh and English poet, Siang Melangell Dafydd and Malayalam poet and translator Anitha Thampi come together. Aerial Roots brings together Bengali Subhro Bandhopadhyay and Welsh poet Nicky Arscott. For someone well-versed in any one of these regional languages, this would be a treasure-trove.

Journalist and writer Annie Zaidi has brought the much needed verve to the Indian English drama scene with her collection, Three Plays: Untitled 1|Jam|Name, Place, Animal, Thing. She won the Hindu Playwright Award 2018 for her play Untitled 1, centred on the writer Vishwas and his wife Dina. His work and his personal life are constantly monitored by the state through technologically generated communication graphs. Society is a panopticon in which everything is under scrutiny and “compliance” is sought. Vishwas refuses to be “compliant” and writes off the grid. Excerpts from his work interspersed in the main plot construct a parallel frame. Vishwas is convicted for printing something off the grid, with content “designed to create public disorder and to question the validity of the state”. Untitled 1 exposes state machinations to control writers. Jam is about two friends Surekha and Bina who meet after some years and are stuck in a traffic jam. The play moves back and forth from the college days to the present. The accidents in the play meander through the lives of the two friends and reflect social perceptions and expectations of women. Violence is seen as invasive and radiates into women’s lives in manifold ways.

Annie Zaidi’s first play, Name, Place, Animal, Thing, presents the intersectionality of class and gender. The play begins with Nancy’s story, a maid at the Maliks, an upper-middle class household. They have given her a new name and educated her like their own daughter, Monali. The play is also Monali’s story who marries against her father’s wishes. As she returns home after a failed marriage, Monali is rejected by her father and commits suicide. A sense of “naming” is important in social games. Nancy’s name has changed many times — Kalua to Puja to Nancy to Sanskaara — demonstrating how women are looked at as an object both at the level of class and gender. At the end, she wants to be Kalua, the name her parents have given her.

Antony Fernandez’s The Redemption is devoted to the memory of soldiers guarding the borders of the nation. The play presents a bird’s eye view of the social life and beliefs of people in Kerala.

Tabish Khair’s new novel, Night of Happiness, one of three books shortlisted for the Tata Book of the Year Award, has Anil Mehrotra, a rich businessman, recounting his weird experience at a Muslim employee’s home. The linguistic register is just what the Anil Mehrotras of India would adopt in real life. Complacent and self-satisfied, Mehrotra is typical of many educated Hindus; he considers himself progressive but is subconsciously uncomfortable with Muslims and harbours many misconceptions. Ahmed, his “right hand man”, is a model employee, always ready to work late; in seven years, he asks for leave only on one day a year, for Shab-e-baraat, a Muslim festival when “we recall our ancestors … And, of course, we make halwa at home”. When Ahmed reluctantly stays back at work on Shab-e-baraat, Mehrotra drops him home. Ahmed serves Mehrotra halwa and nimki (a salted snack) made by his wife Roshni and eats it with great relish; but there is no halwa on the plate, and Mehrotra has to pretend to eat it with the real nimki. Mehrotra hires a high-end detective agency to investigate; they tell him that she was killed in the riots in Surat in 2002 by a mob led by “politicians of the ruling party … easy to identify but never arrested, of course”, and he dismisses Ahmed because he may go “crazy at work”. On Shab-e-baraat the next year, Mehrotra finds a steel tiffin box with nimki and halwa on his table, and enjoys eating the halwa, fragrant with spices. When he goes to his house to thank him, he learns that Ahmed is dead. Khair introduces the supernatural element so skilfully that it becomes believable. Night of Happiness is not only about Hindu-Muslim relations and the Gujarat riots, but also a sensitive study of loss and trauma, and love which transcends death. Like poetry, this slim novel yields new perspectives with every reading; not a single word is out of place.

Neelum Saran Gour’s Requiem in Raga Janki is based on the life of Janki Bai Ilahabadi (1880–1934), one of the first singers in India to make a gramophone record of her songs. Her mother is forced into prostitution when a friend leaves them in a brothel, after decamping with her jewellery. Her mother works hard to engage teachers for her to learn classical Hindustani music, and young Janki creates a sensation with her voice, for she is not beautiful — her face has been scarred in a knife attack she barely survives. Though her great talent enables her to become rich and famous, she can never settle down to a normal domestic life; the man who marries her for her money, his first wife and relatives think of her only as a tawaif, a courtesan. Gour’s novel is as much about the musical culture of Awadh as it is about the singer’s unhappy personal life; in beautiful prose, the novel provides an insight into the intricacies of Hindustani music. The history of music from the time of Amir Khusrau (CE 1253–1325) is encapsulated through interesting anecdotes about artistes, past and present. The characters who people her world are presented vividly.

Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived, which won the Tata Book of the Year Award, has two real life persons, the German painter Walter Spies (1895-1942) and English dancer and dance researcher Beryl de Zoete (1879-1962) shaping the protagonist’s life. The novel is presented as the reminiscences of Myshkin about his childhood; he can never forgive his mother Gayatri for running away when he was nine years old. Gayatri’s letters to her friend, sent to Myshkin 60 years later, present her side of the story and fill in historical details like the war and the imprisonment of Walter Spies by the Dutch. Gayatri is the pampered daughter of a liberal father, who encourages her interest in painting and dance. When he suddenly dies, her father’s student Nek Chand is the only person who is ready to marry her. Myshkin’s childhood memories show clearly that they are quite incompatible — Nek preaches austerity and considers painting a hobby which she can follow only with his permission. The visit of Spies and Beryl de Zoete provides the opportunity to get away from this stifling life. Roy brilliantly recreates a bygone era as well as Myshkin’s abiding love of solitude.

A real incident triggers the action in Sumana Roy’s debut novel Missing. In July 2012, a teenager was molested by a group of thirty men when she came out of a bar in Guwahati. 54-year-old Kobita, an academic in Siliguri, leaves home to help the girl, but goes missing. Missing is set over seven days after Kobita’s husband Nayan, a blind poet, loses contact with her. The novel is about the agony of waiting, with no news of the loved one. Sumana Roy draws parallels with the Ramayana, the most well-known story of a missing wife, Sita. Another theme is the truth value of news: “Hardly anything that is published in the newspapers these days is true”.

Eating Wasps, Anita Nair’s tenth work of fiction for adults consists of linked stories of ten women from various socio-economic strata. The Prologue has Sreelakshmi narrating the events of 25 October 1965. Though she won the Sahitya Akademi award, society condemns her for writing frankly about sex; abandonment by her lover, a married priest, drives her to suicide at the age of 35. The episodes read like independent stories; earlier versions of three of them have been published. The novel is memorable not only for the portrayal of the challenges the women overcome, but also for its recreation of the ambience of Kerala and the use of Malayalam words without self-consciousness.

Andaleeb Wajid has published four widely different novels in 2018, changing her linguistic style to suit the narrative. The Sum of All My Parts, set in the small town of Vellore, is one of the best novels of the year. It begins with Mariam, a lonely old woman living alone, teaching crochet to four young women: Arifa, running the household single-handed, for her husband is working in Dubai; Nimra, a pretty girl, rejected by suitors because of her dark complexion; Amreen, who is terrified that her husband would remarry as they have no children after three years of marriage; and 15-year-old Shaista, hating her husband, marriage and pregnancy, dreaming of being back in her village home and completing school. The second part is the first-person narrative of Mariam, beginning in 1955, when she was 17 years old; she becomes conscious of her love for Aasim only on the day of her engagement. The teenagers realize that they cannot bring grief to their families by eloping, so they try their best to forget their childhood relationship, without success. Listening to Mariam’s sad story while working on different parts of a bedspread empowers the young women to take charge of their lives. The novelist presents an authentic picture of the life of middle-class Muslims in a small town in South India, though the situations and emotions depicted are universal.

Much of Wajid’s earlier work could be categorised as chicklit. Twenty-Nine Going on Thirty has shades of a Mills & Boon romance, but it is redeemed by the protagonist-narrator Priya and her professional work (she heads the social media marketing department at Citron in Bangalore) which provides an insight into office politics. Her mother pestering her to get married reflects Indian society, where an unmarried 30-year-old woman is an object of pity. Sreemoyee Piu Kundu explores the issue in detail in her non-fiction work Status Single: The Truth about Being a Single Woman in India, a compilation of her own journey as a 40-year-old single woman interspersed with interviews of 3,000 others.

The Legend of the Wolf is an adventure story for young adults, with a supernatural element. Madhu, Gaurav and Sunil are on a two-day trip to the forests of Chikmaglur hills with their classmates and teacher. They find a clay model of a wolf, but the old caretaker of the dilapidated bungalow warns them that the clay wolf turns into a “wolf of flesh and blood” when it senses human presence. The three young teenagers put their own lives at risk to rescue their teacher “Rajesh Sir” from the bloodthirsty wolf. House of Screams, a horror story about a haunted house, is not equally successful in its treatment of the supernatural.

Indira by Devapriya Roy, illustrated by Priya Kuriyan, presents a well-researched graphic biography of Indira Gandhi with a fictional frame. The novel begins with a schoolgirl, Indira, from a poor family; she has to write about her name for a school assignment. She listens to anecdotes from neighbours and relatives and makes friends with a graphic artist who is working on a biography of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Stillborn Season by Radhika Oberoi brings alive the fear and uncertainty of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots through stories of individuals from various areas of Delhi. The prologue captures the comic side of Peter Ustinov’s arrival in Delhi for an interview with Indira Gandhi. Book I begins on the afternoon of 31 October 1984, with the news of Mrs Gandhi’s death. The ten stories here are interlinked beautifully. Sukant, the assistant professor of the first story, is worried about his students; his girlfriend, Anita, is more concerned about the young Sikh couple living in the barsati next door. Another story features this couple, who are forced to vacate the room; we learn later that the landlord did this to save their lives, as the mob burns down the barsati and the upper story of his house. The characters are presented with their individual quirks, making them memorable. Old Major Budhwar, for example, is devoted to his vegetable garden and resents his five-year-old granddaughter and her friend Amrita, granddaughter of Jasprit living next door, trampling his plants. But Amrita saves her grandfather from the mob by dressing him up as the scarecrow in Budhwar’s garden. Each chapter is presented from the point of view of a different character, with a linguistic register revealing their personalities. There are stories of mindless violence, arson and looting as well as accounts of ordinary people who come to the aid of the Sikhs. A handicapped beggar saves the life of a Sikh man taking his son to school. Part II is set 25 years later; Amrita has grown up to be a journalist and is interviewing survivors and witnesses of the pogrom. “Myself Sub Inspector” reveals the complicity of the Congress leaders.

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s seventh novel, The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian, is set in the small town of Batia in 1949. The protagonist is the Sub-Divisional Magistrate Madhusudan Sen, I. C. S. (an older Sen appears in Chatterjee’s first novel English August as the father of Agastya Sen). His official residence is close to a temple, so he is forced to be a vegetarian. Nadeem Dalvi, his subordinate in office, supplies him non-vegetarian food. Sen’s investigation into the murder of his “principal protein and cholesterol supplier” Dalvi exposes the bureaucracy and the Indian judicial system, where the poor get no justice.

Keki N. Daruwalla, author of 12 volumes of poetry, has published his third novel with the quirky title Swerving to Solitude: Letters to Mama. The protagonist, Seema, recreates events of the period 1975 to 1985 through letters to her dead mother. The impulsive Seema speaks out against the emergency, much to the chagrin of her husband, a senior bureaucrat who is interested primarily in making money in collusion with the corrupt minister. Her mother’s diary takes the narrative to the 1920s, when she worked as a secretary for the Communist leader M. N. Roy in Mexico. The beautiful descriptions reveal the poet in Daruwalla.

Amitabha Bagchi’s fourth novel Half the Night is Gone is the story of two families, master and servant, over three generations in pre-and post-independence India. The novel begins with Vishwanath, a Hindi novelist, writing to his publisher Sarvesh Kumar; the story is interrupted in three more places by these letters. Bagchi inserts many quotations from Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas and “Hanuman Chalisa”; even the title is from an episode of the epic, where Rama waits for Hanuman to bring a medicinal herb to revive the fatally wounded Lakshmana.

Daman Singh’s third novel, Kitty’s War, set in the 1940s, presents a clear picture of the hierarchy among the British, the Anglo-Indians and the Indians in Pipli, a small railway town, as the Japanese advance towards India. Katherine Riddle (Kitty), a young school teacher, is representative of the Anglo-Indians who are torn between their allegiance to England and India.

Arup Kumar Dutta is better known for the 17 novels he has written for children and young adults. The Bag, his fourth novel for adults, depicts an idealistic young villager’s transformation into a militant of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and the effect this has on his younger, 12-year-old brother. Dutta presents a realistic picture of the cultural and physical landscapes which form the backdrop of this tragic conflict.

Landscape architect Meera Godbole-Krishnamurthy’s second novel Gardens of Love: Stories of a Marriage has an unusual structure; beautiful black-and-white full-page drawings by the author accompany each page of the text. The narrative follows a young couple from place to place as they talk to each other about their marriage. The novelist takes us on a tour of Lodhi Garden, Delhi; Forum Romanum, Rome; Central Park, New York, and Hanging Gardens, Mumbai, providing a detailed introduction to each trysting place and its history.

Mahesh Rao’s second novel, Polite Society, “reimagines Jane Austen’s Emma in contemporary Delhi”. Rao is faithful to the plot of Emma: beautiful and rich Ania Khurana, in her 20s, sets about finding a match for her aunt Renu (Miss Taylor). She then turns her attention to Dimple (corresponding to Jane Austen’s Harriet), who has a provincial background. While Emma is a coming-of-age story, Polite Society, as the title indicates, is an enjoyable satire on the old families of Lutyens’ Delhi. Rao pays more attention to the minor characters – Dimple is more mature than Harriet. The novel also stands out for Rao’s remarkable evocation of the sights, sounds and smells of the setting, ranging from central Delhi to a small town in Rajasthan.

Pilgrimage, Ira Singh’s second novel, compares unfavourably with her first, The Surveyor (2014). The novel has three linked stories, dealing with different time periods of the protagonist Monica’s life. The first part, written in the third person, has the middle-aged woman taking her critically ill father to a hospital in the city, but the road is blocked by unruly pilgrims armed with hockey sticks and travelling in trucks playing disco music. Singh shows how the pilgrimage paradoxically provides them with the licence to attack Muslims. “Transgressions”, the second part of the novel, is Monica’s autobiographical account of her life as a young research scholar in Delhi: she falls in love with a drug addict, who will do anything “to score”. The third part, written in the second person, is about her adolescence. Twinkle Khanna’s first full-length novel, Pyjamas Are Forgiving, compares unfavourably with her stories in The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad (2016). It is a somewhat boring account of Anshu, a divorcee in her 40s, who is still obsessed with her ex-husband. Twinkle is the daughter of superstar Rajesh Khanna; her first book, Mrs Funnybones (2015), was a bestseller. Amitabh Bachchan’s daughter Shweta’s debut novel, Paradise Towers, has neither plot nor memorable characters to recommend it.

Chandrahas Choudhury’s second novel, Clouds, has two disparate strands of narrative. 42-year-old Farhad Billimoria is a divorced Parsi psychotherapist, about to leave Bombay for San Francisco. Eeja and Ooi, an old Brahmin couple from Orissa, with rigid notions of purity and religion, live in another part of the city; Rabi, a young tribal from the Cloud people, looks after them because their son Bhagaban is in Orissa leading the adivasis in their protest against a bauxite mining company. Clouds is not only about life in Mumbai, but also a portrait of “development” and deprivation in contemporary India. Amrita Mahale’s debut novel Milk Teeth is another novel about Bombay. It traces the lives of Ira Kamat and Kartik Kini, childhood friends living in adjacent flats in Asha Nivas, an old apartment in Matunga. The landlord wants to knock down the old building and put up a multi-storeyed complex in its place, but the tenants, most of them middle-class Konkanis, refuse to move out. The crumbling Asha Nivas is a metaphor for the city’s torn social fabric; after the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the bomb blasts which rocked Bombay, the latent prejudice against Muslims finds an outlet as venomous hate.

Sharanya Manivannan has published short stories and poetry; The Queen of Jasmine Country, her first novel, presents the life of Kodhai, the young girl in ninth century Tamil Nadu who becomes Andal, the only woman among the twelve Alvars (devotional poets). Manivannan’s poetic prose excels in sensuous descriptions but tends to pall and hold up the narrative.

Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangi Swarup won the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award. It has a wide geographical and temporal sweep. It begins with Girija Prasad, a scientist in the Andamans, and his love for Chanda Devi, who is endowed with special powers and worshipped as a goddess, and ends with his grandson, also a scientist, in the Himalayas. Events are dominated by natural forces, the earth and the ocean.

Christopher C. Doyle’s Son of Bhrigu is the best thriller of the year. It has 15-year-old Maya and her classmate Arjun as central characters, making it great reading for children. When Maya’s father is murdered, the children are rushed to a hidden habitation, where they learn about the Sangha, a secret organization set up 5,000 years ago to save the world from the evil Shukra. Doyle’s fictional world is based on Hindu mythology; using Sanskrit mantras instead of meaningless chants for working magic gives a touch of realism to the narrative; he has also “invented” some mantras. Many other thrillers, such as Anurag Chandra’s The Ramayana Secret and Vineet Bajpai’s “Harappa Trilogy” (Curse of the Blood River, Pralay — The Great Deluge and Kashi: Secret of the Black Temple) are based on Indian mythology.

Retelling the epics from a new perspective continues to attract novelists. Anand Neelakantan returns to the Ramayana in Vanara: The Legend of Baali, Sugreeva and Tara. Aditya Iyengar’s A Broken Sun retells the Mahabharata stripped of “supernatural weapons or happenings”. Usha Narayan adds a lot to the Puranic story in Kartikeya and His Battle with the Soul Stealer. The title of Trisha Das’s third book of fiction, Kama’s Last Sutra, raises expectations that it would be related to Kamadeva, the god of love in Hindu mythology but is a historical novel, with a frame of time travel. The narrator-protagonist, Tara Singh, is an archaeologist, working at a dig near Khajuraho. A tantric woman transports her to the court of King Vidyadhara in 1022 CE. Das conforms to known facts, like the year-long siege by Mahmud Ghazni, and we get a clear picture of the life of the women of the time.

Sujata Massey is the author of a series of novels set in Japan, with Rei Shimura as detective. Murder on Malabar Hill (published abroad as The Widows of Malabar Hill) is the first Perveen Mistry book set in India (the first had Oxford University as its setting). The young detective is modelled on Cornelia Sorabjee, the first woman to study law; flashbacks reveal the failure of her marriage to an avaricious Parsi in Calcutta. She works in her father’s law firm and gets suspicious when the three widows of a rich Muslim client sign over their inheritance to a charity run by their dead husband’s secretary. Massey brings alive the Bombay and Calcutta of the 1920s and provides insights into Muslim and Parsi law.

Kalpana Swaminathan first introduced her detective Lalli, a 60-plus retired policewoman, in Cryptic Death and Other Stories (1997). After six novels, she has gone back to the short story form in Murder in Seven Acts. Arjun Raj Gaind’s Death at the Durbar is his second novel with Sikander Singh, the Maharaja of Rajpore, as detective. Singh’s investigation into the murder of a dancing girl involves little cameos of various rulers who came to Delhi in December 1911 for the Coronation Durbar, such as Krishna Raja Wodeyar of Mysore, the Maharaja of Kapurthala, the Gaekwad of Baroda (with nationalist leanings) and the Maharaja of Patiala (notorious for his sexual peccadilloes). Bulbul Sharma’s Murder at the Happy Home for the Aged is worth reading not as a detective story but for the way the elderly characters, rather bored with their routine, get energised when they set out to identify the murderer. Pournima Navani’s Lost without Her is the story of Inspector Anthony George, posted in the small town of Marsti in Tamil Nadu. He is devastated when his six-year-old daughter is brutalized and killed, and almost loses his mind when he finds no leads till he looks at similar cases of the past. In The Coin by Sandeep Sharma, serial murders in Delhi are linked to childhood sexual abuse. Sankha Ghosh’s The Sun Shines Down is a thriller with a good plot, but the somewhat poor language is a drawback.

A Day in the Life, novelist and poet Anjum Hasan’s second collection of short stories, was shortlisted for the Hindu prize. The 14 perfectly crafted stories offer a variety of characters and situations from contemporary urban life in India. Each character is individualized, with great attention to detail. Gentle humour pervades some of the stories. Witticisms and insightful comments on life (“What form would thoughts take if we didn’t allow them words?”) are woven into the stories, enriching them.

Susan Visvanathan’s third collection of short stories, Adi Sankara and Other Stories, has three long stories with protagonists of different faiths. The first is an imaginative recreation of the life of Sankaracharya (788–820 CE) the great saint of Advaita Vedanta. The second story is about a young Muslim woman in contemporary India, while the third is set in medieval Europe and is about a young boy whose mother buries his heart in Lund Cathedral. The six stories in Abhirup Dhar’s Stories Are Magical present a variety of narrators and situations; the reader realizes only at the end of the story “Once upon a Ghost” that the narrator, a reformed Naxalite, is himself a ghost. “Woof”, as the title indicates, is narrated by a dog who believes that “the most important purpose of a dog’s life is to spread happiness”.

Vithal Rajan has published two new collections of short stories. Whimsical Legends explores the possibility of Angel Gabriel comforting a poor boy, or an Indian finding his long-lost daughter through a wormhole, because Rajan believes that “Legends are made of the stuff of dreams”. Many of the stories are uplifting. The stories in Sunbeams through Monsoon Clouds are realistic, presenting a satirical picture of Indian society. Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories is Vandana Singh’s second collection of speculative fiction. Paro Anand’s The Other: Stories of Difference has nine stories of teenagers of a range of socio-economic classes, castes, cultures, language backgrounds and sexual orientations. At places, the writing tends to be laboured, as if she had selected the issue first and then written a story around it.

Some authors have made their debut with short stories. Sucharita Dutta-Asane’s Cast Out and Other Stories has a rather dark and foreboding atmosphere. Women and their struggle against patriarchy are the themes of most of the stories. Some of them have a touch of the supernatural. The Last Exodus: A Collection of Short Stories by Kishni Kumari Pandita is so disturbing that it cannot be read without breaks. The stories capture the agony of Kashmiri Hindus forced to flee to the plains of India in the 1990s, with no hope of returning to their homes. Many elderly people die because of the heat and the trauma of displacement. An old man living in a one-room tenement refuses to accept the fact that “[their] entire life’s savings, carpets, furniture, everything is gone”. The loss is not only material. The stories show how 28 years of exile are affecting the younger generation – they have lost touch with their customs and traditions, and many do not speak Kashmiri: “Very soon, they will be Kashmiris in name only.”

Anirudh Kala is a psychiatrist whose parents left their home in Sheikhupura, Pakistan, in 1947, when his mother was pregnant. The narratives in The Unsafe Asylum, based on his professional experience, show that the traumatic effects of the Partition linger for decades. In some of the stories, he dons the persona of Prakash Kohli, fictional author of The Diary of a Mental Hospital Intern. The eight longish stories in Parasmita Singh’s Peace Has Come, another first collection, are set in upper Assam, in the context of the agitation for Bodoland. The ceasefire puts a temporary stop to violence but brings its own problems for the common people.

Shashi Tharoor’s Why I Am a Hindu is a good guide to Hinduism, based on sacred texts like the Vedas and Upanishads and the work of other scholars. His exposition reveals the great difference between Hinduism and Abrahamic faiths: it is not confined to a single sacred book; it does not “claim to be the only true religion”. Personal anecdotes make the book more interesting, though the focus is on the rise of Hindutva, which he labels “an invented Hinduism”. His study of Narendra Modi, The Paradoxical Prime Minister, reveals how Modi can hold one view of an issue and implement the opposite. Two books of historical research, Manu S. Pillai’s Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji and Rajmohan Gandhi’s Modern South India: A History from the 17th Century to Our Times deserve attention for their lucid style and imaginative presentation.

The nuanced intermingling of the personal and the public makes Shashi Deshpande’s Listen to Me not just a lucid memoir of an acclaimed writer but also a vital chronicle of middle-class Indian life in the second half of the 20^th century. She traces her journey as a writer and the influences, ranging from the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita to Jane Austen and detective fiction, that shaped her writing. She expresses her views on a variety of topics: the treatment of women in India, Indira Gandhi and the Emergency, the growing intolerance after 2014, “Award Vapsi” (writers and artists returning their state awards to protest against the government) and the place of artists in society.

India has 24 languages recognized by the Sahitya Akademi and many tribal dialects. The volume of translations rivals that of poetry, drama and fiction, especially if we consider material published in literary journals. Because of space constraints, the India bibliography discontinued the comprehensive listing of translations in the 1980s since when the list has been confined to the work of translators who are creative writers in their own right. As this omission creates the unfortunate impression that there are no translations in India, the bibliography this year has resumed listing translations from Indian languages.

Translations won two major prizes in 2018. The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature ($25,000) went to Jayant Kaikini’s No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories translated from the Kannada; this is the first time a translation was honoured. The inaugural JCB Prize for Literature (at Rs25,00,000, the highest Indian literary prize) was awarded to Benyamin’s novel Jasmine Days translated from the Malayalam by Shahnaz Habib. An additional Rs10,00,000 was awarded to the translator.

We mourn the death of poet, novelist and academic Meena Alexander (1951-2018), bilingual poet and translator I. K. Sharma (1932–2018) and literary critic G. S. Balarama Gupta (1937–2018) who founded The Journal of Indian Writing in English in 1973.