India

Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic-prompted lockdowns have taken a toll on the publishing industry. Leading Indian publishers could not bring out as many books as planned. More than 30 books announced for 2020—fiction, non-fiction and translations—were not published. However, the impact of the lockdown has not been entirely negative. Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal had been working on Betrayed by Hope, a play on the life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, for the past nine years; the forced isolation of the pandemic gave them the requisite time to complete it. Tabish Khair’s trenchant satire, Quarantined Sonnets, published ten years after his fifth volume of poetry, was also occasioned by the pandemic.

Poetry collections and anthologies in 2020 have shifted the goalposts as they address issues related to gender, a/sexuality and otherness with new vitality. However, the mood has been pensive, given the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Ajmal Khan A. T. has made an impressive debut with The Mappila Verses. Localisms in Akhil Katyal’s bilingual volume Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue make it a very engaging read. Ranjani Murali’s Clearly You Are ESL experiments with form through the poetic collage. Gopal Honnalgere’s Collected Poems brings together the poet’s wide range of work, both published and unpublished. Adil Jussawalla has published his sixth collection and a new edition of Land’s End (1962), his first poetry collection. The novel of the year is Aruna Chakravarti’s Suralakshmi Villa, a sensitive study of women’s lives in Delhi and Bengal. Manreet Sodhi Someshwar, Namita Gokhale, Meena Kandasamy, Aravind Adiga, Jeet Thayil, Samit Basu, Michael Chacko Daniels, Jahnavi Barua, Kunal Basu, Kalpana Swaminathan and bestselling authors Chetan Bhagat, Ashwin Sanghi and Amish have published new novels. Amitav Ghosh hailed Megha Majumdar’s A Burning as “the best debut novel I have come across in a long time”. Shashi Tharoor’s The Battle of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism, and What It Means to Be Indian is a very significant non-fictional work. The lockdowns have also affected the India bibliography. Books were left out of the bibliography published in December 2020 as we could access them only after the lockdown was lifted. Several 2019 books are discussed here and listed in the bibliography which follows.

Written during the lockdown period, Denmark-based Tabish Khair’s Quarantined Sonnets: Sex, Money and Shakespeare is a rewriting of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The 21 sonnets begin with poking fun at contemporary life, its obsession with social media, sex and money, but gradually grow darker. The harshest satire is aimed at politicians and financial speculators profiting from the pandemic. Ordinary people hit hard by the pandemic find their voice: a nurse, a migrant worker, a man from the “working class abandoned to its fate”, and a prostitute. The sonnets are structured perfectly and follow Shakespeare’s rhyme scheme meticulously.

Memory and longing, the sense of loss and the will to hope are tropes in most poetry written during the pandemic. Many anthologies of poetry emerged as a response to it. They feature poets from India and different parts of the world. Poems originally written in English and also translations are included. Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology of Poetry under Lockdown presents poetry by 112 poets from across the world: India, Europe, Israel, Palestine, East Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas. Lines from Brecht’s poem, “Yes, there will also be singing./ About the dark times” at the beginning aptly sum up the nature of poetry to follow. Deeply introspective, the poems chronicle poets’ observations of life’s many turns experienced during the lockdown: the plight of the migrant workers, loneliness, existential angst and the resolve to look for slivers of hope, to name a few. Hibiscus: Poems That Heal and Empower is an anthology of short poems (a maximum length of 14 lines) by 104 poets. Poetic expression of the pandemic provides solace. The Lie of the Land (2019) brings together poems by 80 poets. Open Your Eyes: An Anthology on Climate Change comprises poetry by 58 poets and 4 prose pieces. The anthology is a wake-up call to address climate change. Ranjit Hoskote’s essay “In Lieu of a Manifesto” underscores the need to pay attention to environmental concerns. In Freedom Raga 2020, 74 poets pay tribute to the nation on the 74^th year of independence, mostly in the form of short poems.

The World That Belongs to Us, an anthology of queer poetry from South Asia, comprises poems in English and translations into standard English. Interestingly, there is a poem in “Hinglish” which the editors found impossible to translate into English. There is also a blank page for a “prominent poet” who refused the editors’ request for a “variety of reasons”. The anthology redefines the term “queer” as a signpost that encases myriad identities. The book includes along with LGBTQI many other categories such as the asexuals, Pansexuals, nupi maanbi, nupi mannba, Thirunangai to name a few. The book is an essential read to understand transformations in the field of Queer Studies.

R. Raj Rao’s fifth collection National Anthem (2019), a proud declaration of gay identity, comprises poems celebratory in tone. The poems reject the diktats of a heteronormative society to exercise choice and a firm assertion of identity. An 11-part poem is addressed to the Indian English canonical novelist Raja Rao. Chandramohan S. made his debut with Warscape Verses (2014). Love after Babel and Other Poems, his second collection, consolidates Dalit writing in the field of Indian English poetry. It comprises poems on the experience of marginalities: caste, class, gender, sexuality and religion. Poems resist societal disparities and reclaim lost space. Wearing the burkini draws attention: “Bruises sustained from frisking/ Metamorphose into festering wounds./ Gangrene could gnaw at your surname”.

Gopal Honnalgere (1942–2003) published his debut collection, A Wad of Poems (1971), with P. Lal’s Writers Workshop. Subsequently Honnalgere published most of his poems independently. As a result, his work has gone rather unnoticed for many years. Collected Poems brings together previously published as well as 20 unpublished poems, with an introduction by K.A. Jayaseelan and reminiscences of the poet by E. V. Ramakrishnan. All the poems were written between 1991 and 2001. Honnalgere’s poetry displays a secular sensibility and challenges established societal institutions. Marriage, its relegation of women to child bearing and rearing, and trenchant criticism of developmental models based on monetary expansion are chief concerns in his poetry. In his later poems, there is a noticeable shift to an assertion of the secular voice of the Bhakti poets: “Why worship/ wood, stones, steel,/ bronze, gold, uranium/ or miracle performing Babas,/ if your life is true,/ let it be broken/ like bread./ Then, we are/ one of its slices.” There is also a poem written as an obituary on his son’s death in a road accident.

Adil Jussawalla’s sixth collection Shorelines is in four sections: “Keep Clear at Slow Speed”, “Settling, Unsettling”, “Soundings” and “Horizon Unclear”. The number of poems in each captures the rhythm of a wave hitting the shore. The poems make one feel unsettled so as to look around and to introspect. A ravaged city, fragments on the shorelines are telling of the havoc wreaked by human civilisation: “Once a great hub, now a receiver of spills dud robots, pouches of spoiled powders”. At the same time, there is a sliver of hope as “it’ll soon be sunrise”. The inability of religion to provide succour gives way to a poem on Shakespeare’s 400^th birth anniversary, “Loafing”. The wreckage of existence from the first three sections culminates at Alang, a ship-breaking yard in Gujarat: “burning ground for ships that outlive their terms of service”. Will existence be reduced to debris? Hope is indicated in the final poem, “Lighthouse”, “as we are engulfed that all is not lost, calm happens”.

Akhil Katyal’s third collection Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue is bi-lingual and sub-titled Delhi Poems. Words and rhythms from English, Hindi and Urdu are all part of the Delhi palimpsest. The title of the book is from Agha Shahid Ali’s poem, “Chandni Chowk, Delhi”. The “visual grammar” for the book has been done by Vishwajyoti Ghosh. Spatial topography criss-crosses the architecture of queer love in the book. The poems trapeze through historical monuments, architecture, social attitudes and the general potpourri of the Delhi culture: “Our beginnings/ were rocky, we held hands/ infrequently and uneasily,/ like Def Col and Kotla,/ but then, in some years,/ often and more breezily,/ like Jangpura & Jangpura/ Extension”. Katyal’s How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross (2019) traverses different aspects of Kashmir with deftness. The poems draw attention to the painful realities of the valley where “peacetime/ the abacus of casualties” and a J&K tourism video is an effort on the editor’s part to “keep the dead out”. A few poems are common to both collections.

Ranjani Murali’s second poetry collection Clearly You Are ESL adopts the format of the cursive work book; different fonts, spatial design and even graphs have been used. Murali has also used the technique of a poetic collage, with material from different sources: “Discrishun” is a poetic collage of the letters of M.K.Gandhi, Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War and Robert Payne’s The History of Islam.

London based Shanta Acharya’s seventh poetry collection, What Survives Is the Singing, has poems on the inequalities in Indian society with a special focus on gender discrimination. Some of her poems explore the idea of home, identity and rootedness. The collection also carries poems on London. Divided into three parts, Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Calling over Water (2019) is a collection with a deep philosophical cadence offering varied musings on life. The book experiments greatly with fonts, space and style; all poems are integrally woven and there is ease of reading. Going beyond simple explanations, the footnotes thimble the poems and become extensions to the ideas presented in the main poem.

Art curator and poet bina sarkar ellias’s Song of a Rebel is a no-holds-barred collection of protest poems. Anger at the violence in the world and atrocities inflicted on minorities and women find expression in short pithy sentences. The poems are indeed “a roar of the dispossessed”: “life can be better/ if you repel–/ life can be better/ if you rebel.” “The Book of Life” is dedicated to rational thinkers, writers and activists who were murdered: Gauri Lankesh, Maleshappa M. Kalburgi, Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar.

Babitha Marina Justin’s I Cook My Own Feast (2019) displays an intense emotional quotient. Human portraits are tinged with humour and gentle cynicism: “I taste you with a ladle/ like a clumsy cook–you taste bland”. Linda Ashok’s waiting for the helicopter strings together, in different forms, the surreal with the concrete. There is sense of a long journey fatigued by life’s many episodes: “absurdity wears socks to hide her bright nails/ distance coagulates to prevent bleeding serendipity”. Gayatri Majumdar’s second collection I Know You Are Here has appeared 18 years after her first. Written in the first person, the poems are pensive explorations into spirituality.

Mohan Ramanan’s second collection My Son’s Father Confessor has poems written as a father’s confessions to his son, Bharat; he also shares his reflections on life. In “Thus Spake Sanjaya”, a series of four poems, Sanjaya, a character in the Mahabarata, shares his wisdom: “Do not speak the truth/ If it will harm someone,/ Or put anyone in difficulty — / But don’t lie to curry favour either”. RaSh’s Kintsugi by Hadni is a passionate poetic performance. Outspoken style, the bawdy and the sensuous invite a new way of looking at much jaded ideas like love. Amit Majmudar’s What He Did in Solitary is a wide ranged poetry collection written from the point of view of the American immigrant. It spans, among other things, episodes from Majmudar’s own life in Cleveland. “English is my native/ anguish. I was born here,/ read here, teased and torn here”.

The Girl and the Goddess by Nikita Gill is an engaging poetic tale about the life of Paro, interspersed with nine stories from Indian epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The stories of Draupadi, Shikhandi, the goddesses Shashti, Parvati, Kali, Sati inspire and guide Paro. Confronted with her bisexuality, Paro is disturbed about being “different”. Shikhandi tells Paro, “There are things to wish for. That is not one of them”.

Suhit Kelkar’s second collection Mumbai Monochrome has haikus and photographs clicked with a cell phone camera. Bidyut Bhusan Jena’s debut collection Pages (2019) presented the memorabilia from life in tender portraits. In his new collection, A Letterbox across Time, memories remain an important trope, the tone almost elegiac, as the poems bring forth recollections of people lost to time. Aneek Chatterjee’s third collection Of Ashes and Persiflage has a sense of movement from this world to the nether world: “Life watches from the eastern side/ of the iron rail, with the dead body,/ waiting to be pushed to the/ pyre on the west”. Rachna Joshi’s Monsoon and Other Poems, her fourth collection, draws from the different seasons to delineate her life’s journey and spiritual quest.

Originally from Shillong, Gujarat-based poet Purabi Bhattacharya’s Sand Column (2019) has observations on belonging and dislocation from one’s own place. References to places, rivers, flora and fauna are combined with the poet’s observations on belonging and dislocation from one’s own place. Ritwik Ghosh’s third book The Lamp through the Forest comprises poems, odes, songs, haikus and elegies.

Ajmal Khan A. T. declares his “self” as a Mappila (Muslim from North Kerala) in his first poetry collection, The Mappila Verses. His poems are an assertion of identity and dignity; the tone is one of protest against dictates that demand proof of one’s existence. Khan declares, “write me down/ I am a Mappila,/ Write it down/ My name is Ajmal./ I am a Muslim/ And an Indian citizen”. “Mapilla Verse — English Mala” is a tribute to Variyankunnathu Kunjahammed Haji, a leader of the anti-colonial struggle against the British in the 1920s. This is the first “Mala poem” written in English as they are generally written in Arabic Malayalam and are about spiritual leaders of Islam; this is the first Mala about Variyankunnathu: “Years of my search for your portrait ended with–/ They even destroyed all his pictures”.

Debut collections by English professors from Delhi have diverse themes. Anand Prakash retired from Hansraj College, Delhi University. His poetry collection, A World Above Telling, sifts through wisdom of the years to compel rethink on current societal issues; the poems are especially critical of society’s treatment of women. Release is sought in the expression of sensuousness and a language of touch. In an “Ode to Working Woman”, “A working woman shows difference/ in living, thinking./ It shows in values/ that raise head/ on plane of wakeful consciousness”. Calcutta Crow and Other Fragments by Brinda Bose has poems in prose and free verse. Words punctuate life’s wreckage and the shifts in time in a typically Wolffian style, string together moments from the past and present. The mythic crow of Calcutta becomes the “chronicler of its many lives” in a series of four poems: “a city ashen, turbulent,/ sparking caution and caveats of impoverished life/ dyingcity livingcity survivingcity”. Bose’s use of unusual compound words is striking: “your room braillemaps each time you/ return”. Richa Bajaj’s debut collection of poems Red Silk Cotton are sharp observations on contemporary issues by a woman of the present time as they register the contradictions of the new millennium with its increased stress on bourgeois life: “I dread the channels of the heart/triangles of the body, circles of the mind,/ all turn oppressive, week by week, hour by hour”. Literary critic and theatre activist Payal Nagpal’s debut collection In the Labyrinth has the tone of quiet and sombre reflection. The experiential poems reflect quotidian life. The vivid images, many from nature, have a sensuous quality: “the softness of fresh snow/ the caress of early morning breeze”. Natural processes have metaphorical implications: “The wood burns/ The sap sizzles/ The thick liquid/ Sticks to the bark/ And burns.”

Amlanjyoti Goswami’s debut collection River Wedding (2019) views the prosaicness of daily life with images at times simple and at other times disturbing: “I cannot talk,/ When she sits there, wheel chair strapped, alone/ Not when she dreams of sending her daughter/ Pistols for dowry”. Shamayita Sen’s for the hope of spring articulates loss with a gradual shift towards healing; the poems remain pivoted on deep personal experience. Film maker Ashish Avikunthak’s debut collection, Totem Spirit comprises 145 poems written in Dharavi (Asia’s biggest slum) between 1996 and 1999. Metonymic connections with the body describe life’s miscellany in concrete form. Syamantakshobhan Basu’s The Tempering of Steel derives its title from Nikolai Ostrovsky’s 1936 novel. Death and revival are some of the themes of this collection.

Many other interesting debut collections appeared in 2019: Antara Charkraborty’s On the Autorickshaw Ride Home, Gaurang P. Chattopadhyay’s The Party and Other Poems, Harkiran Janeja’s The Easel Man, Basudhara Roy’s Moon in My Teacup, Sarba Roy’s All That Will Remain, Meenakshi Jauhari’s The Fish Who Flew and Sahana Mukherjee’s August Ache.

Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal’s co-authored play Betrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt presents this 19^th-century poet from Bengal who began his literary career with English verse but switched over to his mother tongue, Bangla. The five-act play is structured around the work of Rubina Rahman, a young researcher from present-day Bangladesh. Each act deals with a specific phase of Dutt’s life. His abandonment of his first wife Rebecca and their children in Madras colours Rubi’s perception as she struggles to evolve an objective perspective about the writer. This tension remains right to the end. The play uses the epistolary form, Dutt appears on stage reading letters he wrote to his closest friend Gourdas Bashak and others. The authors have focussed both on the broad concerns of Dutt’s life and work as well as the minutiae on stage to create a live and historical picture of the poet-dramatist and his age.

Manjula Padmanabhan has published two collections of plays. The first, Blood and Laughter has six plays Lights Out (1984), The Mating Game Show (1985), The Artist’s Model (1995), Harvest (1996), Astro-Nuts (2006) and the completed version of Consequences (2014). About 11 performance pieces written from early 1990s to 2013, with a brief publication history, are a part of Laughter and Blood, the second volume. Antony Fernandez’s Juvenile Justice, a play about the prevalence of drug abuse among school children, has a simple plot, and the ending is abrupt. K. Venkatareddy’s Untouchable: A Three Act Play with an Epilogue is an adaptation of Mulk Raj Anand’s classic novel Untouchable (1935). The epilogue provides an imaginative sequel to the novel, with the protagonist Bakha rising up the social ladder.

Academic and translator Aruna Chakravarti’s fourth novel, Suralakshmi Villa, presents two different social worlds in vivid detail: that of Suralakshmi, the daughter of Rai Bahadur Indranath Choudhury I. C. S. in Delhi, who is rich enough to build houses for each of his five daughters and that of Eidun, the daughter of a goatherd in a village in Bengal. Son preference and marginalization of daughters prevails in both families. However, Indranath Choudhury’s wife insists that her daughters be educated and not pushed into an early marriage. Suralakshmi becomes a doctor; on a visit to Malda, she rescues 12-year-old Eidun, sexually abused by her father, and brings her to Delhi. In her 30s, Suralakshmi falls in love with Moinak Sen, 18 years her senior, already married and with children, and they all live happily in Suralakshmi Villa. But she walks out of the marriage and goes to Malda to serve the rural poor, abandoning her five-year-old son Kingshuk to the care of his stepmother. The novel is remarkable for the technical brilliance of its structure. The Prologue, set in 1997, has Kingshuk witnessing the demolition of Suralakshmi Villa, his mother’s house, while the epilogue has the house itself as narrator. Personal narratives by various characters and letters from different periods of time present individuals and societal mores over three generations. The novel captures horrifying details of domestic violence and class exploitation and presents an intimate picture of Hindu and Muslim cuisine and the syncretic culture of Bengal.

Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s Girls and the City covers six months in the life of Leela, Reshma and Juhi, three young women working in the corporate sector in contemporary Bengaluru. The novel is cleverly structured as a murder mystery, with a touch of romance. The first chapter, “Day Zero”, has 83-year-old Mrs Rao, Leela’s landlady, seeing a figure being chased by another in the torrential rain. The next section “Six Months Before Bengaluru Drowned”, introduces Inspector Ponnappa, investigating a death. Sections devoted to every month trace the course of his investigations; the suspense is kept up as the victim is not revealed till the end. Characters come to life through their reactions to Ponnappa’s questions. The city of Bengaluru is captured with all its problems, the novelist gets every detail right. The Indian bias against daughters is ever present. Reshma recollects that when her father was murdered, “the one thing she heard being told to Mama repeatedly was, ‘now if you had a son…’ As if a son was a miracle cure”. 21-year-old Juhi wants to get away from her family in small town Uttar Pradesh; she still suffers from nightmares, after helping her mother kill six or seven newborn sisters by smothering them, her “mother stayed in a state of perpetual pregnancy until she had a son”.

Samit Basu is the author of children’s books and several science fiction novels presenting humans with superpowers or imaginary worlds. Chosen Spirits is a profoundly disturbing futuristic novel, revealing the dystopia where India is headed. In the world two decades from the present, life is controlled by gadgets. Every action is under surveillance. Everybody has a “smartatt”, a device tattooed on their wrist, which keeps track of them. The rich live in huge farmhouses in “Culture Colony”, while the poor live in slums. In this authoritarian regime, Dalits are killed for trivial reasons and the police help mobs to burn down Muslim ghettos. The protagonist, 25-year-old Bijoyini “Joey” Roy, works as the “Associate Reality Controller” for a Flowstar, a kind of social media influencer. The rich are always Flowing — presenting an Augmented Reality version of their lives to the world. Joey cannot imagine what life must have been like “Before the Years Not to Be Discussed”, the freedom to criticise the powerful and corrupt. She gets drawn into the underground resistance when she tries to protect a childhood friend, Rudra. He is in trouble because he refuses to join his prosperous family business: marketing human body parts.

For the Indian reader, Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning is even more frightening than Chosen Spirits for its depiction of present-day India: rampant corruption, misogyny and the hysteria created by social media. It is the story of a young Muslim woman in Calcutta whose life is ruined because of an anti-government post on Facebook. With the prevalent anti-Muslim sentiment, she is accused of being in league with the terrorists and jailed. Two persons can vouch for her: her former physical education teacher, “P. T. Sir”, and Lovely, a hijra. The novelist gives all three characters distinct voices. Lovely and P. T. Sir face the moral dilemma of speaking up for her or bettering their own poor lives.

Meena Kandasamy’s third novel Exquisite Cadavers (2019) has an experimental technique: every page has two columns, the fiction in one column and her own comments in the other. The structure is a reaction to the reception of her second novel, When I Hit You; she was upset that many reviewers treated it as a memoir so she wrote “a story as removed from my own as possible”, about a London couple, Maya, who is English and Karim, a filmmaker from Tunisia. Her comments forcefully express her anger at caste atrocities and her guilt at being in England, away from Indian activism. However, the parallel text technique does not make for easy reading.

Namita Gokhale is the founder director of the Jaipur Literary Festival; her ninth novel Jaipur Journals captures the festival vividly: the hustle and bustle, the crowds moving from one event to another, the enthusiastic young volunteers, the fans chasing big names. Writers like Shashi Tharoor and the poet Javed Akhtar mingle with easy recognizable pseudonymous ones. Gokhale presents the back stories of all the characters with great sympathy.

Kunal Basu’s fifth novel Sarojini’s Mother is an exploration of motherhood. 27-year-old Sarojini Campbell, who was illegally adopted by a hippie, Lucy Campbell, and brought up in England, comes to Calcutta in search of her biological mother. The sights, smells and sounds of the city are depicted as vividly as the characters she encounters. Aravind Adiga (Amnesty) and Jeet Thayil (Low) have brought out lack-lustre novels; publishers promote them because their earlier novels won literary prizes (the Booker and the DSC Prize respectively). Adiga attempts to write about an illegal immigrant in Sydney, but the novel fails because the central characters are not credible. Danny (Dhananjaya Rajaratnam) works as a cleaner; the woman whose flat he cleans takes him to casinos or makes him wait outside their bedroom while she has sex with her Indian lover in the flat that her white husband has gifted her. Jeet Thayil’s first-person narrator comes to Bombay with his wife’s ashes; what could have been a study of guilt and loss turns into a trip through the city’s drug centres.

Michael Chacko Daniels structures his fifth novel We Once Were Gazelles as a series of 71 short episodes. After her “valedictory term as state Governor of West Bengal”, Susan is “decoding Mother’s green-lined notebooks and my brother Paul Paulose’s little red books”. We get an entertaining picture of the life of a Syrian Christian family from Kerala living in a two-room tenement in Bombay in the 1950s. Paul’s account reflects the psyche of an adolescent, who thinks of his father as a “punter”, while the mother’s letters reveal her “inimitable hurried style of English”. Humour is the dominant element of the narrative, which goes back and forth in time. Neighbours and the neighbourhood are depicted vividly, we see the complicated power relations within the family.

Prema Srinivasan’s first novel, And Finally, a Blessing, presents life in a wealthy Brahmin family in Tamil Nadu and the changes taking place over generations. 25-year-old Radhika, born and brought up in England, comes to Chennai to investigate rumours of a family curse which supposedly causes untimely deaths of firstborns over the last three generations. The straightforward narrative and lucid style serve to flesh out credible characters of her extended family. The Awasthis of Aamnagari by Shubha Sarma is another novel with a “feel good” conclusion. She presents an entertaining account of life in a joint family in Aamnagari (Allahabad) over several decades. Pandit Dinanath Awasthi, a prosperous lawyer, has four sons and three daughters. His wife Shakuntala is a domineering matriarch, running the huge household smoothly with the help of half-a-dozen retainers. Public events do not figure in the novel; the focus is on the characters and the power struggles within a joint family.

Tazmeen Amna, author of The Incredible Adventures of Mr Cheeks, a charming story for children, has published her first novel for adults, Goner, about coping with mental illness. It is structured in two parts, “Relapse” and “Recovery”, with a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue takes us straight into the dark world of the nameless narrator, a woman in her 20s who is caught in a downward spiral of depression. The novel is very powerful; the reader can experience the pain and helplessness of the protagonist. Another first novel, Nitasha Kaul’s Future Tense, reveals the pressures under which people are forced to live in contemporary Kashmir. Siddhartha Gigoo’s third novel, The Lion of Kashmir, is a searing portrayal of the last three decades of life in Kashmir.

Historical novels continue to be popular. Poet and academic Ruth Vanita, author of several books on gender and sexuality (such as Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, 2001) has published her first novel, Memory of Light. Set in 1809, it recreates the Lucknow of the time vividly. Vanita presents a sensitive account of same-sex love, with a courtesan as narrator. Malathi Ramachandran’s Mandu: The Romance of Roopmati and Baz Bahadur recreates the locale of this 16^th-century legend through beautiful nature descriptions. Vikram Singh Deol and Parneet Jaggi have chosen the Indus Valley civilization as the setting of their first novel The Call of the Citadel. Events of Gitanjali Kolanad’s Girl Made of Gold (a first novel) take place in Thanjavur in the 1920s. Amit Majmudar’s novel Soar has a Hindu and a Muslim soldier in the British Indian Army in the First World War. Indian mythology has inspired several novelists; debut novelists like Keerthik Sasidharan (The Dharma Forest) and Koral Dasgupta (Ahalya) have turned to the Mahabharata and the Puranas.

Several thrillers and detective stories appeared. Mainak Dhar’s Sniper’s Debt (the second book in the “7even” series) is a fast-paced thriller, with Aditya, an ex-commando, as hero, and can compare favourably with Tom Clancy’s novels. The Endgame by S. Hussain Zaidi is a thriller which provides a glimpse of the workings of the intelligence agencies. Raghu Srinivasan’s Xianqui involves biological warfare. Raagam Taanam Pallavi, Kalpana Swaminathan’s seventh book with retired policewoman Lalli as detective, would appeal especially to aficionados of Carnatic music, though the general reader can also follow her references to classical music. Bulbul Sharma’s Murder in Shimla recreates the ambience of the Raj beautifully. Inspector Ram Sen, the lone Indian officer in the police, and old Mrs Tweedy, who makes a living by writing “Mills and Boon” type romances, are the detectives investigating a double murder. In Ushasi Sen Basu’s A Killer Among Us, the characters are as important as the well plotted murder mystery. An unknown man is found murdered in the lift of Panorama Apartments in a Kolkata suburb. The old-fashioned residents do not approve of Ira Dutta, an unmarried young woman working in a newspaper office and coming home late at night; they try their best to pin the murder on her. The mystery is solved by 35-year-old Nandana Roy, a housewife. She has a hardworking husband and two nice children, but she is frustrated with her limited life and feels undervalued. Ushasi Sen Basu uses Bengali words for relationships and food items without any self-consciousness. Kiran Manral’s The Kitty Party Murder is set in the society of rich housewives. Chetan Bhagat’s latest bestseller, One Arranged Murder, is also a detective story. Bestselling author Ravi Subramanian has written a book for children: The Mystery of the School on Fire is the first book of a series featuring “SMS” — three ten-year-olds — as detectives.

Some notable first novels appeared. Deepa Anappara’s debut novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line has nine-year-old Jai living in a slum as protagonist. When one of his classmates disappears, Jai and his friends set off on the Purple Line of the city’s metro to find him. Sabin Iqbal’s The Cliffhangers is set in an impoverished fishing village in Kerala, with people depending on remittances from the Persian Gulf; the winds of change bring Hindu-Muslim tension to the village. Bhaswati Ghosh’s Victory Colony, 1950 is one of the few novels which deal with the impact of the 1947 Partition in Bengal. Amala flees to Calcutta after her parents are killed in communal riots. She moves to a refugee colony, and the novelist gives a graphic account of the sordid life there. With no help from the Indian government, the situation deteriorates and the refugees occupy a zamindar’s vacant plot of land to establish Bijoy Nagar (“Victory Colony”). Two novelists have made their debut with science fiction presenting dystopias: Gautam Bhatia, editor of the magazine Strange Horizons, with The Wall, and Lavanya Lakshminarayan with Analog/ Virtual and Other Simulations of Your Future. 15-year-old Minha Mehrin’s novel I’m Jaded has a teenager slowly recovering from amnesia after an accident; the names of her characters — Jadelyn Angus, her sister Peyton Angus, Amanda Bryant, Travis Bryant, etc. — suggest that it is set abroad, one wonders why.

With the Partition, the Sindhis lost their homeland irretrievably. A trading community with good business sense, they moved to Gujarat and other parts of India and the world. Murli Das Melwani, a Professor of English in Shillong, moved to Taiwan when faced with the agitation against “outsiders” in Assam. His third collection of short stories, Beyond the Rainbow, has 12 stories about the global Sindhi diaspora. Day-to-day events reveal their loss of culture and identity. The younger generation, brought up in Argentina, Mexico, USA or Japan, cannot read and write their language, their culture is like “Water on a hot plate” (the title of one of the stories). Jayshree Misra Tripathi’s What Not Words: Short Stories Set in India and the Diaspora are based on her personal experience of living in various countries. The ten stories in novelist Udayan Mukherjee’s Essential Items: Stories from a Land in Lockdown present an authentic picture of life in India; even death or the pandemic do not remove the entrenched boundaries of caste and class. Most of the stories in The Seaside Bride and Other Stories (2019) by Dasu Krishnamoorty (b.1926) have an autobiographical touch, yet they are full-fledged short stories which stand comparison with the work of masters like O’Henry or Chekhov. “Journey’s End” about the death of his wife is the most moving story in the collection. We get a clear picture of a bygone era in the title story; the narrator agrees to an arranged marriage because his mother is very anxious to fix up his marriage, “She detests celibacy as if it were some kind of cancer.”

Some writers have made their debut with short stories. Translator Jenny Bhatt’s Each of Us Killers has five short stories set in the American Midwest, England and Gujarat. Most of the stories use a first-person narrative. The title story is a powerful account of the ill treatment of Dalits in a Gujarat village, with the implication that all of us are complicit. Nisha Susan’s The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories features unusual characters and situations, such as a new writer at a lit-fest or a fat singer in love with a prince from Kerala.

Loss is novelist Siddharth Danvant Sanghvi’s first book of non-fiction. His essay on bereavement is based on his own experience of the death of his parents and of a pet. Two books provide lessons on responding to cancer. Mamta Srivastava recommends one step at a time in One Day at a Time: My Tryst with the Big C. Ananya Mukherjee succumbed to cancer, but her Tales from the Tail End: My Cancer Diary (2019) is full of life and laughter; she noted the comic side of everything.

More than 30 biographies and autobiographies were published. Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism is the first biography of this 19^th-century activist who was elected to the House of Commons in 1892. A bureaucrat, V. P. Menon, had a major role in integrating the 500 odd princely states into the Indian Union in 1947; his biography, V. P. Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India, is written by his great-granddaughter, Narayani Basu, who had access to his papers. SAI — Being Supreme by Sudarshan Kcherry is a very unusual biography. In his childhood, the author saw Shirdi Sai Baba (c1838–1918) sitting on a nearby hilltop in 1973; in 1998, Sai Baba repeatedly appeared in his dreams telling him, “You were one of my close devotees in your last birth”. The short biography provides a good introduction to the life and teachings of this holy man. Eminent economists Isher Judge Ahluwalia, her husband Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Meghnad Lord Desai and Devaki Jain have written their memoirs. Pascal Alan Nazareth of the Indian Foreign Service covers important international events in his autobiography, A Ringside Seat to History. M. K. Kaw I. A. S. has an eye for the ludicrous in Bureaucrazy Gets Crazier: IAS Unmasked. T. M. Raghuram, a practising psychiatrist in Manjeri, writes about his comic experiences in Malabar Musings: Glimpses into Small Town Life in Kerala

Shashi Tharoor has become the butt of jokes for his use of less known words. His response is to publish Tharoorosaurus, a 336-page compendium of 53 unusual words and the stories behind them. His latest book, The Battle of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism, and What It Means to Be Indian, is a scholarly analysis of nationalism. He observes that ethnic nationalism in the form of Hindutva is eroding India’s nationalism rooted in constitutional liberalism. The idea of India as a pluralistic society is endangered by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindutva agenda, which has no place for Muslims in India. Salman Khurshid’s Visible Muslim, Invisible Citizen: Understanding Islam in Indian Democracy examines the ground reality in the country. In Love Jihadis: An Open-Minded Journey into the Heart of Western Uttar Pradesh, two journalists interview Hindus and Muslims and reveal the attempts by some Hindus to foment communal unrest.

Translation activity continues to grow, with many Indian universities offering courses in translation studies. English versions of Indian language texts as well as translations from Indian English literature into other Indian languages appeared. Kunal Basu writes fiction in English as well as in Bangla; his Bangla novel Tejoswini O Shabnam (2018) has been translated into English by Arunava Sinha as The Endgame. With Manjhi’s Girmitiya Bharatvanshi (a play) and Pandey Kapil’s novel Phoolsunghi, English translations of Bhojpuri literature have been published for the first time.

In literary criticism, Jasbir Jain has brought out an enlarged edition of Beyond Postcolonialism: Dreams and Realities of a Nation, with a new chapter on literature of the 21^st century. Her Postscript, “The Limits of Postcolonialism and the Need to Go Beyond”, brings together all the debates about the usefulness of postcolonialism as a literary tool in the present era. M. K. Naik and Shyamala A. Narayan’s Indian English Literature 1980–2000 (2001) has been updated, with the publication of Indian English Literature 2001–2015: A Critical Survey. A reviewer comments, “What Shyamala A. Narayan has striven to do is provide a literary critical GPS for research travellers so that they can navigate their way” (Kavya Bharati No.32).

We mourn the death of biographer, journalist and novelist Ved Mehta (1934-2021), novelist and children’s writer Subhadra Sengupta (1952–2021), novelist, literary critic and Urdu poet Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (1935–2020), literary critic, translator and Odia poet Subhendu Mund (1950–2021), writer and columnist with the Hindustan Times Sadia Dehlvi (1957–2020) and cultural and art historian, founding Director of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Kapila Vatsyayan (1928–2020).