The Routledge Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English 1032245573, 9781032245577

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Acknowledgments
Encyclopedia Entries
Our Contributors

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THE ROUTLEDGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

Today, Indian writing in English is a field of study that cannot be overlooked. Whereas at the turn of the 20th century, writers from India who chose to write in English were either unheeded or underrated, with time the literary world has been forced to recognize and accept their contribution to the corpus of world literatures in English. Showcasing the burgeoning field of Indian English writing, this encyclopedia documents the poets, novelists, essayists, and dramatists of Indian origin since the pre-independence era and their dedicated works. Written by internationally recognized scholars, this comprehensive reference book explores the history and development of Indian writers, their major contributions, and the critical reception accorded to them. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English will be a valuable resource to students, teachers, and academics navigating the vast area of contemporary world literature. Manju Jaidka, former Senior Professor and Dean at Shoolini University, Solan, HP, and former Chair and Professor at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India, is the recipient of several national and international fellowships, including a Fulbright, two Rockefeller awards, and a Lifetime Achievement Award. As a speaker and academician, she has made presentations in fora across India and abroad. Jaidka has been organizing international conferences annually. She has published widely, more than twenty-five books, including two collections of poems, a play, and four novels. Tej N. Dhar, Professor of English, Shoolini University, has taught in universities in Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, and Asmara (Eritrea) and held fellowships at the BHU, University of Southern California, and IIAS, Shimla. He has authored History-Fiction Interface in the Indian English Novel, Under the Shadow of Militancy: The Diary of an Unknown Kashmiri, and The Tale of a Beleaguered Soldier; edited fourteen books; and published over fifty critical essays and four hundred book reviews.

THE ROUTLEDGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

Edited by Manju Jaidka and Tej N. Dhar

Designed cover image: © Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Manju Jaidka and Tej N. Dhar; individual chapters, the contributors. The right of Manju Jaidka and Tej N. Dhar to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-24557-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-24558-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-27927-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003279273 Typeset in Galliard by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Prefacevi Acknowledgmentsviii Encyclopedia Entries

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Our Contributors

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v

PREFACE

The Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English is intended to showcase the burgeoning field of Indian English writing. Though Indian writing in English (IWIE) began during the preindependence times with the efforts of Indian poets, novelists, essayists, and dramatists, it registered a phenomenal growth during post-independence times. Now it has international visibility and well-deserved recognition as a major subcategory of contemporary world literature. The present encyclopedia is meant to be a reference book for students taking undergraduate/postgraduate courses in the field and for serious scholars. For the layman, it could be a source of useful information about significant writers and texts in the field. Although English was a colonial imposition in the Indian subcontinent, a part of imperial strategy, it was steadily appropriated by the Indians, especially writers, who produced a distinct body of work, seen at its best in the early writings of Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, and R.K. Narayan. However, it was the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, in 1981, which gained it a foothold in the international literary arena, by making the Indian terrain come exuberantly alive in a way the older texts could not. Because of this, in universities all over the world, in departments of English, South Asian studies, comparative literature, etc., IWIE is now an important component of the curriculum. The publication of Rushdie’s The Vintage Book of Indian Writing in 1947–1997, with its primary focus on Indian writers who had rerooted themselves in foreign lands, and Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize for her novel, The God of Small Things, established firmly that IWIE had come to stay. The sales of publishing houses in India skyrocketed, and more and more aspiring writers joined the ranks of IWIE. Research in departments of English in India and other parts of the world started focusing on emerging writers in the field. Since then, the interest in the subject has only increased, especially with all the literature festivals that dot the literary terrain in India, making the country a vibrant hub of literary activity. With the increased popularity and penetration of IWIE in literary and academic circles across the globe, there is need for a reference book that provides significant details about the writers who have roots in India, their major contribution, and the critical reception accorded to them. Such a compendium would serve as a useful ready-reference guide, much needed by both the scholar and the beginner. Our aim, while putting together this encyclopedia, has been to make an honest assessment of the work done in this field, without being influenced by any political or ideological dogma, vi

Preface

and provide details related to (a) writers of Indian origin who use the English language (not translated works), and (b) their works that stand out for rightful spotlighting. These are placed in alphabetical order, which makes it like a dictionary of IWIE. While the encyclopedia is aimed at both the researcher and the professional, our aim is to go beyond the confines of academia and make knowledge accessible to the general public as well. We hope that the Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English will meet international standards as a handy reference guide in personal and institutional libraries across the globe. Co-editors: MANJU JAIDKA & TEJ N. DHAR

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors and editorial assistants of this Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English would like to extend a warm thank you to all those who have contributed toward its initial conception and final completion. First, the writers, scholars, and academicians who have contributed entries merit a word of praise. But for their cooperation and patience, this task would have remained unfinished. Some senior scholars who lent support in the early phases are Amritjit Singh, Rajeshwari Pandharipande, and Richard Cohen. The idea of bringing out the encyclopedia first germinated on the premises of Shoolini University, Himachal Pradesh. The campus, with its serene beauty and its ambience of research and dedication, provided the perfect setting for collaborative work. The faculty of the Department of English, Shoolini University, Solan, India, has contributed by writing/editing/proofreading the manuscript. For this humungous feat their efforts are gratefully acknowledged. Saving the best for last, the warmest gratitude goes to Routledge Publishers for their faith in this project. MANJU JAIDKA TEJ N. DHAR

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ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES

ABBAS, K.A. (1914–1987) Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, popularly known as K.A. Abbas, was a novelist, short story writer, journalist, and filmmaker who preferred to see himself primarily as a “communicator of ideas.” Born into a middle-class Muslim family in Panipat, Haryana, Abbas completed a BA in English literature and a LLB from Aligarh Muslim University. In 1933, when he was still studying at Aligarh, Abbas started his career as a journalist, working with the newspaper National Call. In 1935, he started the newspaper Aligarh Opinion. Abbas moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1935 and joined the Bombay Chronicle as a journalist. He made Bombay his new home, where he became closely associated with the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) and the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), which would shape his career as a writer and filmmaker. In his prolific career, Abbas wrote seventy-four books and several short stories, in addition to scripting and directing several films. He wrote in Urdu, English, and Hindi. Some of his wellknown works are I Write as I Feel (1948), Inqilab (1958), I am not an Island: An Experiment in Autobiography (1977), The Naxalites (1979), and The World is My Village (1983). Many of his short stories were posthumously edited and published by Suresh Kohli. They include An Evening in Lucknow: Selected Stories (2014), Sardarji and Other Stories of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (2014), An Evening in Paris and Other Stories (2014), and An Evening in Calcutta: Selected Stories of K. A. Abbas (2015). “The Last Page,” a column that he started on June 22, 1941, in the Bombay Chronicle, which he later continued in The Blitz, became one of the longestrunning columns. A selection of one hundred and fourteen entries from 1947 to 1981 were published in a collection titled Bread, Beauty and Revolution in 1982 by Marwah Publications. The three words in the title encapsulate Abbas’ lifelong concerns. Abbas wrote his first story “Ababeel,” translated into English as “The Sparrows,” when he was twenty-six. His last story “Mother and Child,” which was based on the Bhopal gas tragedy, was posthumously published in the Illustrated Weekly of India in June 1987. Abbas’s literary writings, which many commentators consider as not literary enough, are concerned with the life of the downtrodden. Abbas was of the conviction that while literature should engage with the inner life of men, it should also deal with the external social forces that shape the inner life. In collections such as Rice and Other Stories (1947) and Cages of Freedom and Other Stories (1952), Abbas addresses the questions of poverty and starvation. His stories 1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003279273-1

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and novels also feature strong women characters who break out of the shackles of tradition. Abbas was an ardent fan of Gandhi and Nehru, as is evident from his autobiography. As a follower of the Nehruvian idealism, his stories are concerned with questions of nation-building, caste, etc. However, in the later part of his life, after disillusionment with the Nehruvian ideal, he praised radical left movements, as can be seen in the novel The Naxalites. Inqilab, a historical novel on India’s freedom struggle set in the 1920s and 1930s, is concerned with the Hindu– Muslim unity. As a film director, Abbas is known for films such as Dharti Ke Lal (Children of the Earth, 1946), Saat Hindustani (Seven Indians, 1969), and The Naxalites (1980). He also wrote the screenplay for films such as Naya Sansar (New World), Neecha Nagar (Lowly City, 1946), Mera Naam Joker (My Name is Joker, 1970), and Bobby (1973). Abbas also set up a film production house called Naya Sansar in 1951. While Abbas’s fictional writings have yet to receive much critical attention, some scholarly works have focused on his overall career. In his discussion of the film Awaara, for which Abbas wrote the screenplay, Gyan Prakash points out that Abbas shifted the agenda of the Progressive Writers’ Movement into the register of affect and morality. In addition to being a filmmaker, Abbas was also a film critic. He used the emerging forum of film journalism to put forward his vision about the potential of cinema. He saw the cinema as a medium of political intervention, and he even wrote a letter to Gandhi (who condemned cinema as “a sinful technology”) requesting him to change his stance. This shows his belief in the medium of cinema. Throughout his career, Abbas was committed to the ideas of progress and modernity. His writings and films can be seen as his reflections on the social transformations that were underway in which conflicts between tradition and modernity figured prominently. As Rashmi Doraiswamy opines, Abbas’ works were new narratives for the new age.

Further Reading Abbas, K. A. I Am Not an Island: An Experiment in Autobiography. Vikas Publishing House, 1977. Doraiswamy, R. “New Narratives for the New Age: The Cinema of K. A. Abbas.” Sahapedia, 21 Aug. 2018, www.sahapedia.org/new-narratives-the-new-age-the-cinema-of-ka-abbas. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Fatima, Iffat, and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed, editors. Bread, Beauty, Revolution: Khwaja Ahmad Abaas, 1914–1987. Tulika Books, 2017. Gopal, Priyamvada. “Straight Talk or Spicy Masala? Citizenship, Humanism and Affect in the Cinematic Work of K. A. Abbas.” Literary Radicalism in India. Routledge, 2005. Prakash, Gyan. “The Cosmopolis and the Nation.” Mumbai Fables. Princeton UP, 2010. Vasudevan, R. S. “Film Genres, the Muslim Social, and Discourses of Identity c. 1935–1945.”  BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies,  vol. 6, no. 1, 2015, pp.  27–43. Sage Journals, https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0974927615586930. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023.

P. MUHAMMED AFZAL

ACHARYA, SHANTA (1953–) Shanta Acharya was born on July  14, 1953, in Cuttack, Odisha, to Brundaban Chandra Acharya and Rashmi Rekha Acharya. She was sent to the St. Joseph’s Convent School and to Ravenshaw College in Cuttack. She completed her masters in English from Utkal University, Odisha. Being bright in academics, she had shown exemplary performance throughout her career, receiving the Rai Bahadur Janakinath Bose Prize for the best all-rounder at Ravenshaw College, a gold medal at Utkal University, and finally, in 1979, a scholarship to Oxford for a doctoral degree when the doors of Worcester College opened for educating women for the first 2

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time. At Worcester she completed DPhil and was awarded the Violet Vaughan Morgan Fellowship. For two years, from 1983–1985, she was a visiting scholar in the Department of English and American Literature and Languages at Harvard University. In 1985 she moved to London, joined Morgan Stanley Asset Management, and since then has been working as an investment banker. Her interest in English literature did not wear off, and she has continued to publish poems, novels, and essays along with books of finance. Her doctoral thesis was published as The Influence of Indian Thought on Ralph Waldo Emerson by Edwin Mellen Press, USA, in 2001. While being published in major poetry anthologies across India, the United States, and the United Kingdom, she also has seven poetry collections to her credit. These include Not This, Not That (1994), Numbering our Days’ Illusions (1995), Looking in, Looking Out (2005), Shringara (2006), Dreams that Spell the Light (2010), Imagine: New and Selected Poems (2017), and What Survives is the Singing (2020). In 2015 she published her first novel, A World Elsewhere. She has received Lifetime Achievement of Excellence as a Poet by Skylark Publications in 2015 and the Word Masala Award for Excellence in Poetry at the House of Lords in 2016. For Shanta Acharya, poetry and music have been integral to her life and existence as an Odia who was raised up singing Sanskrit shlokas and bhakti songs from Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda. It was at Oxford that her friends and associates discovered a poet in her. Her experiences, both at the personal and the professional level, enriched her poetic world. Coming from a family of academicians, administrators, and writers, she has taken the tradition of her family ahead and carved a niche for herself as a versatile writer. As a poet of international repute, Acharya believes in singing even in dark times. Through her poems she undertakes an existential journey to seek herself. Her voyage toward death is her desire for love. She adorns herself like a bride and gets ready to attain nirvana “towards what end I cannot say” (“Shringara”). In death, she travels to meet lovers without bothering about the “unpredictable circumstances.” She sets herself free from sexual morality and opts for a performative existence as Radha in her textual world. As a writer of diaspora, she takes on the onus to bridge the gap between herself and the people of her roots with the entire world. Hence using the poetic techniques of the Sanskrit poet Jayadeva, Acharya has attempted to unify the entire humanity, creating an erotic homo-social space that sustained by eternal love.

Further Reading Acharya, Shanta. Looking In, Looking Out. Headland Publications, 2005. ———. “Three Poems by Shanta Arya.” Taylor and Francis Online, 4 Oct. 2020, https://doi.org/10.10 80/17449855.2020.1822579. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. ———. “Shanta Acharya.” Shanta Acharya, 2022, www.shanta-acharya.com. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. “Shanta Acharya.” Asia Literary Review, no. 26, Winter 2014, www.asialiteraryreview.com/users/shantaacharya. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023.

RASHEDA PARVEEN

ADIGA, ARAVIND (1974–) Aravind Adiga was born on October 23, 1974, in Chennai to Madhavan and Usha Adiga. When the family moved to Mangalore in 1980, he went to Canara High School and then to St. Aloysius College, from where he passed his Secondary School Leaving Certificate in 1990. After the death of his mother, his father moved to Australia, where Adiga went to James Rose Agricultural High School, Sydney. Then he studied literature in Columbia University, New York, wherefrom he graduated in 1997. After that he went to Oxford to do his MPhil. 3

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Soon after his studies at Oxford, Adiga decided to become a journalist because that would enable him to see different parts of the world. He joined the Financial Times and wrote on business matters and investments. During this time, he also published a review of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. From the Financial Times he moved to the TIME Magazine as its South Asia correspondent in New Delhi. He left the job after three years to be a freelancer and moved to Mumbai, where he lives all by himself. Adiga has published five books. The first one, The White Tiger, became an instant bestseller, won the Booker Prize in 2008, and established him as a novelist of great promise. It is a fastmoving first-person narrative of Balram Halwai who, in a series of letters to the Chinese premier, traces his rise from a poor schoolboy in Bihar to a successful businessman in Bangalore. After his grandmother forces him to leave school and work in a tea shop, he decides to be a chauffeur. He works for a businessman in Dhanbad, moves to Delhi with his son Ashok and his wife Pinky, and barely escapes from going to jail for Pinky’s crime. In search of a better life, he murders Ashok and runs away with his bag containing seventy-thousand rupees to Bangalore, where, with the help of police, he establishes a successful business. The main thrust of the novel is to show that the officially projected view of India as a land of spirituality and values is different from the real India of poverty, pollution, and corruption. Even successful businesses thrive on immoral and corrupt practices. Adiga’s second book, Between the Assassinations, consists of fourteen interlinked stories about a mixed population of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, set in the recognizable signposts of Kittur. The stories cover the time frame of the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. Except for three of them, which explore the complexities of the human mind, they deal with communal strife, corruption in government offices, poverty and squalor, iniquities of the Hindu caste system, and pollution. The stories include one about a Muslim boy who refuses to join a terrorist, a footpath bookseller who sells pirated books, a journalist who becomes insane because of the layers of untruth he uncovers in his profession, and a communist worker who suffers disillusionment. The stories are of uneven quality though, for some look raw and somewhat incomplete. Adiga’s second novel, Last Man in Tower, focuses on what its narrator calls “the den of real estate.” It describes how the peaceful lives of the inmates of Vishram Society are disrupted by a real estate dealer, Dharmen Shah, because he offers unexpectedly high prices to them for their flats so that he may raise a new set of luxury apartments. Because some members refuse the offer, he works relentlessly, through his wily agents, to break their resistance. When only one called Masterji is left to block his plans, Shah works on the minds of other willing members so compellingly that they plan his murder but make it look like an accident. Masterji’s efforts to seek the help of police, law courts, press, and students fail because of Shah’s corrupt and violent ways. The novel’s elaborate plot of well-knit scenes and happenings and complex and convincing characters provide for its pleasing breadth and depth. The third novel, Selection Day, deals with the pervasive influence of the game of cricket in India on the lives of poor people and rich businessmen. Mohan Kumar lives in a slum but dreams big by training his sons Radha and Manju to become cricketing stars. Though he uses eccentric methods for that, he succeeds in making them do well and goes to Ali Weiner International School, where Tommy Sir introduces them to Aman Mehta, who agrees to support them financially in exchange for royalty on their future earnings, which enables them to move into a house in Chembur. In school, Manju does well and wins a scholarship to go to England. On the selection day, Manju gets selected because of his excellent performance, but Radha fails the test. Out of frustration, he attacks another player and runs away to his village to escape the police. Manju becomes friendly with another cricketer, Javed Ansari, who encourages him to quit 4

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cricket and pursue his dream of becoming a scientist, but because he makes sexual overtures to him, he returns to his home and cricket. He plays for India Under-19 team and Mumbai team, and then for a league, but is made to quit at the age of twenty-seven. The novel has various incidents about people who make a living out of the game, with a good share of comic scenes and sad happenings too. Adiga’s latest novel, Amnesty, published in 2020, has a plot that encompasses a day in the life of its protagonist Danny – Dhananjaya Rajratnam – a Sri Lankan Tamil, in which his moves in the present are combined with the unraveling of bits and parts of his past. He lives the life of an illegal immigrant as a cleaner in Sydney because, after coming to Australia as a student to escape the harassment of his country’s police who take him for a terrorist, his application for a refugee status is denied by the government. To provide a new direction to his life, he works on cultivating a new identity by improving his appearance and his speech, making friends with a nurse Sonja, and cultivating an attractive working style. While working in the home of a client, he learns about the murder of his former client Radha and suspects her lover Dr Prakash to be the murderer. Their telephonic conversations deepen his suspicion. Prakash warns him that he would reveal the truth about him if he went to the police. Confronted with a moral dilemma, Danny chooses to inform the police, who arrest Prakash, but also order Danny’s deportation. Except for Amnesty, Adiga’s novels and stories expose rotten aspects of life in India: stark social inequalities and corruption in business, bureaucracy, police, high offices, and even sports. For this, some critics have praised him for being bold and courageous and speaking for the poor and the downtrodden. But others think that he does that to improve the sale of his novels, which lack artistic merit, because he uses them as attractive covers for wrapping his nonfiction materials.

Further Reading Dhawan, R. K., editor. Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger: A Critical Response. Prestige Books, 2010. Monika, S. Contemporary Social Issues in Aravind Adiga’s the White Tiger and Last Man in Tower. Sara Book Publication, 2015. Nimsarkar, P. Aravind Adiga: An Anthology of Critical Essays. Creative Books, 2011. Rati, Manav. “Justice, Subalternism, and Literary Justice: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 55, no. 2, pp.  228–245. Sage Journals, journals.sagepub.com/doi/ abs/10.1177/0021989418777853. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Saini, A. K. Perspectives on Aravind Adiga’s the White Tiger. Aadi Publications, 2012.

TEJ N. DHAR

AGRAWAL, VINITA (1965–) Vinita Agrawal was born in Bikaner, India, in 1965; she did her schooling in Kalimpong and Kolkata and went to college in Baroda. A gold medalist in MA Political Science from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, she was also awarded a UGC scholarship. She has worked as a freelance writer and researcher ever since and has remained a poet at heart. She has published four books of poetry: Two Full Moons (1918), Words Not Spoken (2013), The Longest Pleasure (2014), and The Silk of Hunger (2015). An award-winning poet, editor, translator, and curator, she is now based in Indore, India. She is a joint recipient of the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 and winner of the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence, United States, 2015. Currently, she is Poetry Editor with Usawa Literary Review. She has edited an anthology on climate change titled Open Your Eyes (2020) and a 5

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memoir-anthology on the Kashmiri poet Ghulam Rasool Nazki in 2021. Most recently, she has co-edited the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2020–21. She is on the advisory board of the Tagore Literary Prize. Vinita Agrawal’s poems are considered very insightful and help to make sense of human existence and life in general. When people seek poetry for consolation and solace in difficult times, and in today’s context when the world is going through challenges posed by the pandemic, Her poems address people’s existential angst by using meaningful forms of expression and words distilled through many years of deep foraging into life experiences. Agrawal’s poems do much more than what Hafiz says about the power of poetry, that it “makes one drop the sword,” for they make one retain a sense of equanimity despite the surrounding chaos and provocation. Her words, soaked in wisdom, offer comfort and strength. Known for her modesty as a poet, Agrawal deliberately uses simple language attuned to everyday speech. Having developed a mature and strong voice in poetry, she creates poems that linger in the mind for long after one reads them. Without resorting to didacticism, Her poems yield messages that speak of a special sensitivity to nature and environment. Though the depth of her poetic voice is impressive, her poems are not overbearing in their tone, nor is there any pretentious posturing in the style. Her poetry is shaped by the power of her intuitive self. Agrawal’s poetry has made a strong mark both nationally and internationally. Her poems deal with existential concerns: experiences of loss and grief, betrayal and pain, and life and death. The universal perspective built into the poems makes them appealing and effective. “Endurance,” she says, “in any form, is the core of my writing.” That is how the poet describes her creativity that veers toward a state of stillness. This also reflects her engagement with spirituality. Using vivid imagery and emotive language to project her point of view, she probes the truth of human existence through a positive and hopeful perspective. While there is a transcendental strain in her poems, the poet is grounded in her alertness to gender-related social issues like female infanticide, the rights of the girl child, and women in general. It is the innate sense of human values and the pain of social injustice that compel the poet to write poetry that evokes both awareness as well as healing for the reader. Vinita Agrawal upholds peace and solidarity essential for good living, and her poems articulate her concerns and commitments passionately.

Further Reading Bhat, Kiran. “Open Your Eyes: Poetry’s Response to Climate Change.” The Chakkar, www.thechakkar. com/home/golchakkar1. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Priyadarshni, Nalini. “Review of Two Full Moons by Vinita Agrawal.” Setu Magazine, May 2019, www. setumag.com/2019/05/review-of-two-full-moons-by-vinita.html. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Sen, Sudeep. “Essay: Poetry for Every Day of the Year, For All Seasons.” Hindustan Times, 22 Jan. 2021, www.hindustantimes.com/books/essaypoetry-for-every-day-of-the-year-for-all-seasons-10161130516 6952.html. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023.

SUKRITA PAUL KUMAR

ALGEBRA OF INFINITE JUSTICE, THE, by Arundhati Roy The Algebra of Infinite Justice is Arundhati Roy’s first essay collection, published in 2002. With a foreword by John Berger, the collection features eight essays on a wide range of topics. Some of these essays have also been published as stand-alone pieces or in other essay collections, which affirms their significance in contemporary discourses on globalization, power, and politics. 6

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In “The End of Imagination,” Roy addresses India’s nuclear capabilities after the successful nuclear tests in Pokhran/Rajasthan in 1998. “The Greater Common Good” highlights the problematic nature of dam-building in independent India as Roy situates the displacement of millions of people within larger environmental issues. “Power Politics” develops this topic further by examining the increasing “corporatization of essential infrastructure like water and electricity” and the ensuing disenfranchisement of certain populations in India, framing this as a human rights issue. This essay also criticizes American politics as imperialist, a charge that figures in several of Roy’s essays. In “The Ladies Have Feelings, So . . . ,” Roy discusses the role of writers and artists in society, referring to herself being described as a “writer-activist” after the tremendous success of her writing in the late 1990s. “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” focuses on the so-called “war on terror” in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. Roy contextualizes current political events in the wake of American imperialist practices and aggressive foreign policy and criticizes President Bush’s “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” comment as a “piece of presumptuous arrogance.” The essay, “War Is Peace,” continues her critique of warfare, as Roy writes: “we know that Infinite Justice for some means Infinite Injustice for others. And Enduring Freedom for some means Enduring Subjugation for others.” In “Democracy – Who Is She When She Is At Home?” Roy explores the Hindu–Muslim tensions in the state of Gujarat at the beginning of the new millennium as a domestic concern that India has to face. The last, and one of the shorter essays in the collection, “War Talk,” returns to the topic of nuclear weapons, ending the collection with a poignant question: “That’s what nuclear bombs do. Whether they’re used or not, they violate everything that is humane. . . . Why do we tolerate them? Why do we tolerate the men who use nuclear weapons to blackmail the entire human race?” Roy’s essays address contemporary issues both in India and around the world. The author asks uncomfortable questions on a wide range of topics, revealing herself to be a critic of neoliberal India and an increasingly corporatized world governed by resurgent imperialist practices. Roy uses wit, irony, and play on words, among others means, to convey her thoughts, arguments, and passion to the readers. While some critics see Roy’s writing as “pamphleteering” and “literary sloganeering” on the political left (S. Prasannarajan, India Today, 2002), several critics have praised the collection of essays. Mehraan Zaidi calls Roy’s work “brilliant . . . thoughtful and poetic at the same time . . . clear-voiced and daring . . . consistent in its concern for the oppressed and contemptuous in its criticism of the state” (Hindustan Times, 2006). Mithu Banerji points out that “the very single-mindedness with which she builds her arguments can be construed as lacking balance,” but the critic also states that “even if you do not happen to share her views, Roy compels you to have an opinion on matters she feels are important” (The Guardian, 2002). In 2006, Arundhati Roy was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Algebra of Infinite Justice, but she declined to take it, for she suspected that the institution was supported by the Indian government, which she had criticized in her writing.

Further Reading Banerji, Mithu C. “Goddess of Big Things.” The Guardian, 17 Nov. 2002, www.theguardian.com/ world/2002/nov/17/globalisation.fiction. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Ghosh, Ranjan, and Antonia Navarro-Tejero, editors. Globalizing Dissent: Essays on Arundhati Roy. Routledge, 2009. Prasannarajan, S. “Book Review: Arundhati Roy’s ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice.’ ” India Today, 7 Jan. 2002, www.indiatoday.in/magazine/society-the-arts/books/story/20020107-book-review-ofarundhati-roys-the-algebra-of-infinite-justice-796037-2002-01-07. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

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Encyclopedia Entries Sam, Bibin, and Danish S. Georshia. “Distinctive Voice and Vision: Arundhati Roy’s Style in The Algebra of Infinite Justice.” Ashvamegh, vol. 3, no. 34, Nov. 2017, Ashvamegh, https://ashvamegh.net/distinc tive-voice-and-vision-arundhati-roys-style-in-the-algebra-of-infinite-justice/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Subramanian, Samanth. “The Prescient Anger of Arundhati Roy.” The New Yorker, 12 Jan. 2019, www. newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-prescient-anger-of-arundhati-roy. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Zaidi, Mehraan. “Bookshelf: The Algebra of Infinite Justice.” Hindustan Times, 8 Jul. 2006, www.hindu stantimes.com/india/bookshelf-the-algebra-of-infinite-justice/story-SUd1nHPkY8EpeimEQEpEsI. html. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

JANA FEDTKE

ALI, AGHA SHAHID (1949–2001) Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi and grew up in Srinagar, Kashmir. He left for the United States in the mid-1970s, where he received a PhD in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and a master of fine arts from the University of Arizona in 1985. Prior to his graduate degrees, he studied at Burn Hall School, an all-boys Irish Catholic school in Srinagar, the University of Kashmir, as well as the Hindu College at the University of Delhi. He died of brain cancer in 2001 and is buried in Northampton, Massachusetts near Amherst. Ali was born into a Shia Muslim family, a minority among the Muslims of Kashmir. They valued education, and Ali’s grandmother was one of the first women in Kashmir to receive education. Ali’s father, Agha Ashraf Ali, who taught at Jamia Millia University in New Delhi and was the principal of the Teacher’s College in Srinagar, received a PhD in comparative education in Muncie, Indiana, where the twelve-year-old Ali also attended school for three years. After completed his undergraduate degree in Kashmir, Ali moved to New Delhi, where he received an MA before embarking for the United States on a PhD scholarship from Pennsylvania State University. Ali had a rich academic and creative life. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship, and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship. He was appointed as a professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in 1999. He also taught in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, at the MFA Writing Seminars at Bennington College, and creative writing programs at New York University, Baruch College, Warren Wilson College, and Hamilton College. Known for his ghazals, Ali authored nine poetry collections in addition to a book of literary criticism titled T.S. Eliot as Editor (1986). He was also the translator of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s selected poetry, The Rebel’s Silhouette (1992), and edited an anthology that was seminal in updating knowledge of the ghazal form in the United States: Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000). Writing in Bone Sculpture (1972), his first book of poems published by Writers Workshop in Kolkata, Ali defined the themes of nostalgia, exile, and grief that would characterize his work: “I have my hopes/hopes which assume/shapes in alien territories.” His second book, In Memory of Begum Akhtar (1979), is dedicated to his mentor whom he first met in New Delhi in the 1960s and who was a singer in her own right. She nurtured Ali’s love for the ghazal form. Writing in Scroll.in, Manan Kapoor summarizes the lasting impressions that Akhtar had on Ali, such as his memory of her face and her favorite brand of cigarettes, which Ali recalls in a poem, “I Dream I Am the Only Passenger in Flight 243 to Srinagar”: “Her picture: she smiles: she lights a Capstan./Sharp in flame, her face dissolves in smoke.”

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Amitav Ghosh writes that Ali and Akhtar shared a special relationship: “the strongest bond between Shahid and her was, I suspect, the idea that sorrow has no finer mask than a studied lightness of manner.” Ali came to critical acclaim in the United States with his third poetry collection, which is titled after an American idiom, A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987). He also published another book of poetry in the same year, The Half-Inch of the Himalayas, the prologue of which, “Postcard from Kashmir” presents a longing for Kashmir and the loss of a home that was once familiar and will never be the same. A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991) offered melancholy poems that travel through several landscapes and childhood homes in both America and Kashmir. His sixth collection, The Country Without a Post Office (1997) received further praise and acclaim. Ali took as a starting point the 1990 Kashmiri uprising against India, which led to violence and the shutting down of the country’s post offices for seven months. The title poem, “The Country Without a Post Office” is well-known and loved. It was initially published in the Graham House Review as “Kashmir Without a Post Office” and is composed in four sections, the final one of which concludes with a muezzin who recites a call for people to buy postal stamps instead of a call to prayer. Ali dedicated this poem to his long-time friend, the poet James Merrill. Rooms Are Never Finished (2001) was a finalist for the National Book Award. In his final collection, Ali recounts the death of his mother and the journey back to Kashmir with his mother’s body. He writes of a specific intensity of grief that steals language: “with laments found lost on my lips.” Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003) and The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems (2009) were posthumously published and continue to be widely read and taught in schools globally. The University of Utah Press hosts the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, which is granted annually to a manuscript of unpublished poems.

Further Reading “Agha Shahid Ali: 1949–2001.” Poetry Foundation, 28 May  2022, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ agha-shahid-ali. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. “Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize.” The University of Utah Press, https://uofupress.com/ali-poetry-prize. php. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Ghosh, Amitav. “The Ghat of the Only World’: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn.” Amitav Ghosh, 1 Jan. 2002, www.amitavghosh.com/aghashahidali.html. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Kapoor, Manan, and Sahapedia. “How the Legendary Begum Akhtar Influenced the Life and Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali.” Scroll.in, 12 May 2019, https://scroll.in/article/923025/how-the-legendarybegum-akhtar-influenced-the-life-and-poetry-of-agha-shahid-ali. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Pace, Eric. “Agha Shahid Ali, 52, a Poet Who Had Roots in Kashmir.” The New York Times, 26 Dec. 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/12/26/arts/agha-shahid-ali-52-a-poet-who-had-roots-in-kashmir.html. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. “Review of Rooms Are Never Finished, by Agha Shahid Ali.” Publishers Weekly, 22 Oct. 2001, www.pub lishersweekly.com/9780393041491. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

SHAZIA HAFIZ RAMJI

ALI, AHMED (1910–1994) Ahmed Ali was born on July 1, 1910, in New Delhi to Syed Shujauddin, a civil servant, and Ahmed Kaniz Begum. He completed his formative education at Wesley Mission High School in Azamgarh and Government High School in Aligarh. In 1926, he joined Aligarh Muslim

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University for higher studies where he met Raja Rao, one of the early great writers of Indian English literature. Under the tutelage of Eric C. Dickenson, Ali published his first poem in Aligarh Magazine. Later, he joined Lucknow University, where he published his first English short story in the Lucknow University Journal titled “When the Funeral was Crossing the Bridge.” In 1930, he graduated with the highest scores in English in the history of the University. He went on to complete his MA in 1931 from the same university and became a lecturer there. In 1931, Ali met Syed Sajjad Zahir, Rashid Jehan, and Mahmud-uz-Zafar, and together they collaborated and published an anthology titled Angarey (Burning Coals) in 1932. This collection of poetry emerged as a path-breaking venture for its radical political content and style. Though Angarey was criticized by many for its obscene content and was banned eventually, the anthology led to the birth of one of the most important moments in the history of Indian literature. In 1936, Ali along with the three other authors of Angarey initiated the All India Progressive Writers’ Association. Committed to a socialist and progressive understanding of art, the Association proved to be the cornerstone in the early history of Indian literature. However, a rift soon took place between Ali and others on account of their different interpretations of the nature and value of art. After dissociating himself from the Association, Ali left for London carrying the manuscript of his first novel, Twilight in Delhi. While living in London, he met writers like E.M. Forster whose influence played a huge role in the publication of Twilight in Delhi by Leonard Woolf of Hogarth Press in 1940. On his return to India, he became the director of listener research for BBC, Delhi. In 1944, he took up the post of Professor at Presidency College, Calcutta. In 1947, he took up the assignment of British Council Visiting Professor of English, National Central University of China, Nanking. While still based abroad, Ali heard the news of the partition of the Indian subcontinent and decided to relocate to Karachi in the newly formed state of Pakistan. From 1949 onward, Ali published prolifically. Ranging from translations and anthologies to novels, Ali’s oeuvre was not only massive but also proved pivotal for the growth of Pakistani literature in English. Writing about China’s Muslim population (1949), translating Indonesian poetry into English (The Flaming Earth: Poems from Indonesia, 1949), translating Urdu poetry into English, and establishing the Pakistan E. N. Miscellany with his long-time friend Shahid Suhrawardy, Ali remained committed to finding a voice for other kinds of literature within the global context. His literary exercises did not end here, and he kept on publishing translated poetry anthologies like The Bulbul and the Rose (1960), Ghalib: Selected Poems (1969), and The Golden Tradition (1973). In 1980, he also produced a translation of the Holy Quran published by Akrash Publishing, Karachi (1984) and by Princeton University (1988). In 1981, he was awarded the Sitara-i-Imtiaz (Star of Distinction) by the Government of Pakistan for his exemplary literary achievements. Ali published three major novels. The first one, Twilight in Delhi, (1940), is considered a classic in the world of letters. This novel deals with the gradual decline of the Muslim elite of North India in the early decades of the 20th century. The story of Mir Nihal’s younger son, Asghar, and his love for Bilqeece and their subsequently doomed marriage provides a vividly tragic picture of the decline of the conservative, upper-middle-class Muslim gentry. Navigating various strands of socio-political life during the first two decades of the 20th century like the coronation of King George V, the First World War, the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1919, and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, Ali documents a family in turmoil grappling with global socio-political change. The multiple deaths and the loss of stature of Mir Nihal’s family mirror the downfall of the Muslim aristocracy and concurrently, reflect the rise of the British colonial administration. 10

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Ocean of Night (1964), Ali’s second novel, again articulates a transitional social world. Dealing with the love affair between a courtesan of Lucknow and an aristocrat, this novel gives voice to the changing texture of Hindu–Muslim dynamics before the eventual partition of India. As in his first novel, Ali showcases how class segregation and colonialism led to degeneracy within Muslim aristocratic families. Set in Lucknow between the two World Wars, the contemplative mood of the novel mirrors the depravity festering within the Muslim households of North India. Ali’s third novel, Of Rats and Diplomats (1984), is a satirical take on how corruption and depravity are often mirrored in a material manifestation. The narrative is about a diplomat, General Surirada Soutanna, who grows a rat tail. This Kafkaesque transformation takes place while the general is posted at Ratsanian, the capital of Micea, a place that Soutanna had been unable to locate on any map of the world. This physical metamorphosis is a reminder of humanity’s depraved existence as the general says, “Mankind has been caught in it as completely as the rats.” Ahmed Ali’s poems and short stories like “Humari Gali” (Our Lane, 1942) are stylistically similar to his novels in his use of the stream of consciousness technique to outline lucid pictures of the familiar and the known. Ali’s poems, stories, and novels describe individual moral corruption intersecting with the broader political picture.

Further Reading Hashmi, Alamgir. “Ahmed Ali and the Transition to a Postcolonial Mode in the Pakistani Novel in English.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 17, no. 1, 1990, pp. 177–182. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/3831410. Malak, Amin. “Ahmed Ali and the Emergence of Muslim Fiction in English.” Muslim Narratives and The Discourse of English. SUNY Press, 2005, pp. 19–27.

INDRANI DAS GUPTA

ALL ABOUT H. HATTERR by G.V. Desani The only novel of G.V. Desani, and often compared with James Joyce’s Ulysses’, All About H. Hatterr is unique in Indian fiction as much for the audacious originality and experimental exuberance of its prose style as for its thematic appeal. First published in 1948 in London, this book has received acclaim and praise from writers like Salman Rushdie, Anthony Burgess, and T.S. Eliot. Rushdie states Hatterr’s “dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language,” and also admits that the language of the book served as a linguistic model for writing Midnight’s Children. The protagonist-narrator, H. Hatterr, born of a European seaman father and a non-Christian Malaysian mother, sets the tone of the book for the mini-universe of his experiences. Hatterr moves from innocence to experience, registering a zigzag growth, gathering on the way a diversity of lessons from life. Hatterr’s is an instant name where H stands for Hindustaaniwalla, and Hatterr is suggested to him by the “too-large-for-him-hat” worn by the “reverend” who ran the Scottish school. Hatterr has a head injury during his childhood and is warned by the doctor that he may develop a mental disorder. At the age of one, his father dies, and he is adopted by an English Missionary Society. At the age of fourteen, he runs away from school, and ironically enough, his real education begins then. He says, “I have learnt from the school of Life; all the lessons, the sweet, the bitter, and the middling messy.” His main “educators” are the five fake Indian sages, three women, and a South Indian loanshark. Hatterr meets seven Indian gurus in the course of his investigation into the mysteries 11

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of life in the form of spiritual encounters. Each of the seven chapters begins with a pseudoteaching given by a phony guru, and each guru is named after a place. According to the order of appearance, they are “the illustrious grey-beards, the Sages of Calcutta, Rangoon (now resident in India), Madras, Bombay, and the right Honourable the Sage of Delhi, the wholly worshipful of Moghalsarai-Varanasi, and his naked Holiness Number One, the Sage of All Indian himself!” There is a “Digest” for each chapter, which describes the philosophical dilemma to be addressed, much like many religious dilemmas are summarized in a chapter. The “Instruction,” which invariably takes the shape of an abstruse Sanskritic/Socratic discourse with the specific guru in question, follows the Digest. This is followed by a “Presumption,” which is a generalization, often incorrect, formed by Hatterr based on the Instruction received, resulting in a parody of the mistakes committed in translation. With each subsequent chapter, The Life confronts a more complex dialectical dialectic in which the Instruction and/or the Presumption are either elaborated upon or sarcastically refuted. In each chapter Banerrji, his Indian friend, launches him on a foolish enterprise to meet a guru, and at the end of each chapter, he is there to receive him back with many literary allusions. Hatterr’s life is a comic record of a simpleton who is repeatedly gulled, threatened, bullied, and robbed. Desani does not locate the character in any particular country and is seen throughout the novel as a rather rootless individual experimenting with various kinds of truths. He is not limited by any aspect such as ethnicity, nationality, or language. The novel plays with language at various levels. Some critics have called it a mere “rambling.” Desani himself calls his language a “rigmarole” and at the very beginning, he writes that the afterthought is written by Y. Rambeli, a pun on “rambling.” The novel is an attempt to subvert the hierarchical relations of a sage and a disciple and debunk religious hypocrisy and pretentiousness. The protagonist questions truth, journeys across colonies and classes, and uses language to mock religious leaders who claim privileged access to Truth. Considered by most readers a difficult and complex read, the novel gone out of print until rescued by Anthony Burgess, who in his introduction to the book calls the language “gloriously impure.” T.S. Eliot writes: “In all my experience, I have not met with anything quite like it. It is amazing that anyone should be able to sustain a piece of work in this style and tempo at such length.”

Further Reading Oram, Richard. “Throwback Thursday – 1948’s All About H. Hatterr.” Ransom Center Magazine, 20 Aug. 2015, https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2015/08/20/throwback-thursday1948s-all-about-h-hatterr/. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023. Singh, Amardeep. “Re-Introducing All About H. Hatterr.” I Power Blogger, 19 Sept. 2005, www.lehigh. edu/~amsp/2005/09/re-introducing-all-about-h-hatterr.html. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

NAVREET SAHI

ANAND, MULK RAJ (1905–2004) A giant of the Indian literary and cultural scene of the 20th century, Mulk Raj Anand’s long and distinguished career as a writer, critic, political activist, and cultural commentator spans both colonial and post-independence India. Born in Peshawar in 1904 to a humble working-class family, his father was a soldier and a coppersmith. Anand studied at Khalsa College in Amritsar and graduated in 1924. While in college, he became involved with Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement and was even imprisoned for a while. He joined the University 12

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of London in 1925 and subsequently moved to Cambridge, where he earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1929. In London, Anand became involved in several left-leaning circles, including the India League led by Krishna Menon where he was often a featured speaker. During his time in London, Anand forged friendships and associations with the leading literary and intellectual luminaries of the time, including the Bloomsbury group. He worked for a while at the Hogarth Press, founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and at The Criterion started by T.S. Eliot. He also came to know E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Herbert Read, Lawrence Durrell, Stephen Spender, John Strachey, Bonamy Dobrée, and André Malraux, among others. A staunch believer in international socialism and its inextricable connection with literature as a powerful medium to influence people, he wrote against fascism and British colonialism in socialist forums. In 1935, along with Syed Sajjad Zahir and Ahmed Ali, Anand founded the influential Progressive Writers’ Association and helped draft its manifesto. In 1937, he traveled to Spain to take part in the anti-fascist uprising against General Franco and spent the War years of 1939–1942 working for the BBC as a broadcaster and scriptwriter in its films division. Anand turned down an appointment at Cambridge and instead lectured in literature and philosophy at the London County Council Adult Educational Schools and the Workers’ Educational Association from 1939 to 1942. He married Kathleen Van Gelder, an aspiring actress and Marxist activist, in 1938, and they had a daughter Rajani, before divorcing in 1948. Anand moved to India in 1945 where he founded the Arts journal, MARG. He married acclaimed classical Indian dancer, Shirin Vajifdar, in 1950. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in Anand’s life and work as he epitomizes the transnational intellectual connected with a vast network of influential activists and writers. His writing has been examined in terms of its relationship with global modernism and, especially, in terms of a postcolonial framework for its passionately anti-colonial polemics supplemented by a materialist humanist sensibility that indicts the evils endemic to Indian society such as caste oppression and the dehumanizing impact of poverty made worse by illiteracy, superstition, orthodoxy, and blind faith. Even a cursory glance at his enormous and varied body of work comprising novels, short story collections, autobiographical fiction, nonfiction books, and essays on subjects as wide-ranging as Persian Painting (1930), Curries and Other Indian Dishes (1932), The Hindu View of Art (1933), Homage to Tagore (1946), The Indian Theatre (1950), The Hindu View of Art (1957), Kama Kala (1958), Homage to Khajuraho (1960), Is There a Contemporary Indian Civilization? (1963), Indian Ivories (1970), Ajanta (1970), Seven Little-Known Birds of the Inner Eye (1978), Madhubani Painting (1984), and Amrita Sher-Gil (1989), among others, reveal an astonishing polymath figure, a public intellectual who played an outsized role in shaping the discourse on social, political, and cultural issues in postindependence India. First and foremost, Anand is famed as a novelist who, along with R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao, was instrumental in raising the visibility of the anglophone Indian novel through a remarkably prolific career as a novelist, critic, political activist, and public intellectual. His first novel, Untouchable (1935), was published by Wishart, a left-leaning publishing company in Britain. It follows a day in the life of an adolescent youth, Bakha, who is a sweeper and toilet cleaner, and his slow awakening to rebellion against the injustice of caste discrimination. As toilet cleaners, Bakha and his family are outcasts, untouchables, whose very shadow defiles the upper castes, so much so that they must announce their presence as they walk in public spaces so that people can take precautions to avoid contact with them or their very shadows. Written as a novel of social realism and protest, the text details with visceral effect a series of humiliating and demeaning events that Bakha experiences in the space of a single day. These include several instances of being beaten and insulted for being an untouchable, as well as the sexual assault of his sister by 13

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a priest. The distraught Bakha is determined to run away, and as he walks toward the railway station, he comes across a political gathering where Gandhi is delivering a speech against the evils of untouchability and the importance of creating a more inclusive society. He hears about the invention of a modern flushable toilet that will transform the filthy work of cleaning toilets manually. The novel closes with Bakha returning home excitedly to tell his family about this wonderful invention. Critics have examined the Untouchable in terms of the tensions of colonial modernity, Gandhian nationalism, and a radical anti-caste rhetoric that animate its social realist aesthetics and make it a classic. Anand’s next novel, Coolie (1936), followed quickly on the heels of the Untouchable and amplified its indictment of the inhumaneness of man to man. It tells the story of a young orphan boy, Munoo, who lives in the hills of Punjab. Forced to leave the house of his uncle and aunt because they cannot support him, Munoo finds a job as a servant in a well-to-do household. Here he is abused and overworked and slowly begins to learn about the subordinate position of people like him. Soon he runs afoul of the mistress, runs away, and finds work in a pickle factory, only to learn about betrayal and dishonesty as his kind boss is cheated by his partner and goes bankrupt. Munoo joins a circus that is traveling to the big city of Bombay where he finds work in a factory. Here his imagination is sparked by a colleague, Ratan, who is a wrestler and trade union leader. He is inspired by the rhetoric of workers’ rights even as he becomes a limp version of his former bright and vital self in the daily routine of harsh labor and discipline of the factory. One day, he meets with an accident and is taken in by the AngloIndian woman who was driving the car that hits him. She takes him with her to Shimla, but the kindness comes too late as Munoo has already caught tuberculosis and dies soon after. Coolie explores issues of class inequality, casteism, and poverty that are exacerbated by colonial rule and suggests that only a radical restructuring of Indian society can offer hope to the millions of exploited masses who struggle and die in vain. Both these novels are imbued with an affective humanism that makes a compelling moral argument for the function of art to fight against the dehumanization of human beings in violent capitalist structures and toxic social institutions like the caste system. Anand continued his advocacy for the disenfranchised in the Lalu Trilogy – The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1939), and The Sword and the Sickle (1942). Written on an epic scale, the trilogy traces the transformation of a Punjabi peasant, the young Lal Singh, from a state of oppression and ignorance to enlightenment and revolutionary consciousness. The Village details the squalor and petty tyrannies of village life circumscribed by a rigid social structure and a never-ending cycle of debt and poverty. Threatened by arrest for a crime he did not commit, Lalu enlists in the army as an escape. Astonishingly, he finds himself shipped from the sweltering heartland of Punjab to France and thence to the killing fields of Ypres and Flanders in Belgium. Completely unprepared for the cold and dank weather in Europe, Lalu and his company of Indian soldiers are flung into the miseries of trench warfare. Across the Black Waters is one of the rare fictional works to represent the little-known role played by Indian soldiers on behalf of the British in World War I. It captures brilliantly the bewilderment of the rustic, ill-trained Indian soldiers transported to Europe, solely to be used as cannon fodder in a war that was not of their choosing. However, the experience is also an eye-opener for Lalu as he survives the war and returns to India revolutionized by the experience of being among free people, determined to fight for the freedom of his people from the British, and to reform the peasant society back home. The Sword and the Sickle depicts Lalu’s transformation into an effective organizer of the peasantry against the excesses of colonial land revenue policies which are further exacerbated by corrupt officials and petty moneylenders. In a sensitive reading that perceives Anand’s advocacy of Indian art as integral to his humanist and nationalist mission, 14

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K.D. Verma, in his Understanding Mulk Raj Anand, underscores the fact that Anand’s anticolonial critique predates Frantz Fanon and other thinkers identified as pioneers of postcolonial studies. Anand went on to publish a host of other novels, including the critically acclaimed The Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953), which analyzes the huge disruption that the abolition of princely states caused to hundreds of rulers in kingdoms big and small. From 1951 onward, he also worked sporadically on his ambitious seven-volume autobiography, The Seven Ages of Man. The very first of these volumes, Seven Summers was published in 1951, followed by Morning Face (1968), Confession of a Lover (1976), and The Bubble (1984). Anand would become a literary institution in India feted with several honors and appointments. He taught at various universities in India and was appointed Fine Art Chairman at the Lalit Kala Akademi. He continued to support a host of domestic and international cultural associations such as the World Peace Council, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, the National Book Trust, and the UNESCO Dialogues of East and West. A little analyzed aspect of Anand’s work is his advocacy of the Indian performing and visual arts. In 1945, Anand founded MARG, an acronym for Modern Architectural Research Group, published as a quarterly. MARG adopted a holistic view of art embracing architecture, photography, sociology, heritage, textiles, and archaeology in conversation with the contemporary art and architecture of Europe and the United States. Anand would invite a distinguished roster of artists, art critics, and art connoisseurs to contribute articles on their area of expertise to the journal. MARG continues to be an institution as one of the longest-running art magazines dedicated to the arts in India. MARG reflected Anand’s lifelong quest to pay homage to the rich cultural heritage of India, not from the perspective of blind nationalist adulation stuck in past glory, but as a thriving and vibrant aesthetic tradition that was evolving in response to new influences and socio-political mores.

Further Reading Baer, Ben Conisbee. “Shit Writing: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, the Image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers’ Association.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 16, no. 3, 2009, pp. 575–595. Berman, Jessica. “Toward a Regional Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Mulk Raj Anand.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 55, no. 1, 2009, pp. 142–162. Cowasjee, Saros. So Many Freedoms: A Study of the Major Fiction of Mulk Raj Anand. Oxford UP, 1977. Ranasinha, Ruvani. South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford UP, 2007. Snaith, Anna, et al. “Introducing Mulk Raj Anand: The Colonial Politics of Collaboration.” Literature and History, vol. 28, no. 1, 2019, pp. 10–26. Verma, K. D. Understanding Mulk Raj Anand: His Mind and Art. Vision Books, 2017.

RAJENDER KAUR

ANTONY, SHINIE (1965–) An award-winning author, editor, columnist, and curator of literature festivals, Shinie Antony grew up in Mumbai and Delhi. She obtained her BA in English from St. Teresa’s College, Kochi, and PG specialization in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi. Mother to two daughters, she is based in Bengaluru. Antony has worked with many leading media houses in Delhi, Bengaluru, and Mumbai, like The Mid-Day, The Economic Times and The Financial Express, besides teaching creative writing at Symbiosis and NIFT (Bengaluru). She received the Asia Region Award from the Commonwealth Broadcasting Corporation for her short story, A Dog’s Death, in 2002. 15

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Antony’s first collection of short stories, Barefoot and Pregnant, daringly deals with the darker side of motherhood. Laced with piercing, dark humor, she blows up typical stereotypes of blissful motherhood and instead offers an unusual spectrum of reluctant and/or depressed mothers, surrogates, and even a man who longs for the experience of giving birth. The book also includes “Somewhere in Gujarat,” which won a commendation from the Commonwealth Broadcasting Corporation in the short story category (2001). Antony wrote the short story collection, The Orphanage for Words, after she lost her father (who was a defense officer) unexpectedly and was forced to explore the significance of words in life and relationships. The book is about words that have lost their meaning with time or have been forgotten. It explores the transitoriness of human emotions and modern-day existential dilemmas. Cheating men and women, a young child longing for a dead dog, a dead child describing her own death, and other ordinary moments of life are presented with surprising perspectives, rendering them renewed and fascinating, sinister and mysterious. The book ends with a monologue on words. Her novel, When Mira Went Forth and Multiplied, is an ironic and spirited account of what happens after a 30-something, less-than-perfect, single woman falls for a married man who is only looking for a one-night stand. Her novel, The Girl Who Couldn’t Love, is dark yet funny. It is a thriller, love story, and murder mystery all rolled into one. The novel studies every aspect of human darkness as secrets of the single, aloof, and cynical Roo slowly tumble out. Antony typically probes the domestic landscape, the dynamics of its relationships, its loss, and its pain. Her writing style is ironic, provocative, full of understatements, and mixed with black humor. She has also written a children’s book, Goddy Tales, co-written A Kingdom for his Love (published by Amar Chitra Katha), and compiled a number of anthologies including Why We Don’t Talk which has a foreword by Shashi Deshpande and offers a glimpse into the wide spectrum of themes and experiments in both form and content in contemporary Indian short fiction in English. An Unsuitable Woman is a collection of seventeen pieces from different genres ranging from historical and mythological to autobiographical and poetic about women who struggled and fought and emerged victorious. Boo is a collection of spooky stories and has an impressive lineup of contributors like Shashi Deshpande, Kanishk Tharoor, K.R. Meera, etc. Antony regularly writes for CNBC, The New Indian Express, and Times of India on a diverse range of subjects related to popular culture, ongoing trends, and women’s issues. As co-founder of the Bangalore Literature Festival and director of Bengaluru Poetry Festival, Antony’s prime concern is “where literature and writing are right now, especially in the context of women writers.” She also curated an online literature festival called “Chasing Love” in 2022 and is the curator of the Women Writer’s Prize on an online portal SheThePeople, a prize started in 2022.

Further Reading Burke Praker, Jean. “Jean’s Literary Vlog Tour of India: Episode 6 Shinie Antony.” You Tube, 20 Jun. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IekcILmG-vU&t=10s. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Dubey, Divya. “Boo Who: Author Shinie Antony’s New Anthology Promises to Send Chills Down Your Spine.” India Today, 19 Nov. 2017, www.indiatoday.in/magazine/leisure/story/20171127-shinieantony-new-anthology-boo-13-stories-horror-genre-1087657-2017-11-19. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Purohit, Sudarshan. “Twist from the Past.” The New Indian Express, 2 Dec. 2017, www.newindianexpress. com/lifestyle/books/2017/dec/02/twist-from-the-past-1715233.html. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Sreedharan, Janaky. “Sad Truths of Life.” Deccan Herald, 26 Jul. 2015, www.deccanherald.com/con tent/491430/sad-truths-life.html. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

GEETANJALI MAHAJAN

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AO, TEMSULA (1945–2022) Temsula Ao, an acclaimed Indian author of several poetry collections, short stories, and ethnographic works was born in Ao-Naga community, a sub-ethnic group of the Naga tribes. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2007 and later the Sahitya Akademi Award for her short story collection, Laburnum for My Head, in 2013. Ao lost both of her parents in quick succession within nine months, which was a very painful, life-altering experience for her. In her memoir, Once upon a Life: Burnt Curry and Bloody Rag: A Memoir (2013), Ao has offered a very honest and candid portrayal of this loss and other tragedies of her fractured childhood and the consequent emotional dislocation she underwent. Living a life of hardship and deprivation, Ao somehow managed to complete her master’s degree in English from Guwahati University, Assam, and later her PhD from North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong. She later joined NEHU in 1975 where she served as a professor of English until her retirement in 2010. Ao was also a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Minnesota during the year 1985–1986. Ao began writing relatively late, and her first book of poems, Songs That Tell, was published by Writers’ Workshop in 1988. This was followed by another collection of poems, Songs That Try to Say (1992). Her third book of poems, Songs of Many Moods (1995), was published by Kohima Sahitya Sabha in association with Har-Anand Publications, New Delhi. Songs from Here and There  (2003) and Songs from the Other Life  (2007) are other remarkable poetry collections of Ao. Ao has confessed that she “turned to poetry for succour,” and many of her songs brought to the fore “moments of internal turmoil.” Her poetry has often been lauded for its retelling of the oral traditions of Ao-Naga community, depicting the loss of distinctive cultural/ community identity (due to the colonization, modernization, and globalization of her community), the struggles and strength of women, and the vigor of the human spirit. Ao argues that turning to fiction writing was “almost a fortuitous fluke,” which happened at a very critical moment in her life when she felt “utterly devastated” and her poetic imagination had almost evaporated. Her first collection of short stories, These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone, which she calls “an excursion away from poetry,” was published by Zubaan in 2005. Her themes deal broadly with the painful anguish suffered by ordinary men and women in the war zone. Ao writes about everyday events and how ordinary people deal with catastrophes of lived history. Her stories are living documents of people’s lives: dull, monotonous, simple lives but not without unfathomable miracles of the commonplace. These stories bring to the fore the violence and trauma people experience during conflicts, and how such conflicts move beyond “the physical maiming and loss of life” scarring the very soul of the survivors. Her second short story collection, Laburnum for My Head (2009), marks her evolution into a much more exciting storyteller. She penetrates the emotional and psychological depths of her characters reflecting everyday existential dilemmas, which adds to the richness and liveliness of characterization in her work. The collection consists of eight stories “Laburnum for My Head,” “Death of a Hunter,” “The Boy Who Sold an Airfield,” “The Letter,” “Three Women,” “A Simple Question,” “Sonny,” and “Flight.” Ao’s novel, Aosenla’s Story (2017), presents us with the life of the young college-going girl Aosenla, who is forced to marry an affluent old man. It traces the stifling of Aosenla’s dreams, her struggles with patriarchy, and her evolution as an individual. Written in the third-person, the novel is about Aosenla’s search for her true self, freedom, and contentment. Ao’s fiction, written in polished, lucid language, foregrounds the complexities of human emotions. Though her world might appear local and peripheral to some, the worldview she shares with her readers is universal. Ao possesses the objectivity of a chronicler, and through her stories she records the traditional Naga way of life, the conflicts within and outside the 17

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community, their rites and rituals, myths and lores, customs and beliefs, and the threats this way of life has encountered owing to modernity, urbanization, and progress. There is neither anger, nor a high-pitched sense of victimization in her writings: her stories are expressions of deep, intense moments of silence and understanding. Her writings are profoundly embedded in her homeland and reproduce Ao-Naga politics of identity and its cultural frameworks where an ancient culture is reluctantly negotiating with the onslaughts of modernity.

Further Reading Ao, Temsula, and Rashmi Narzary. “Temsula Ao and Rashmi Narzary Talk About Their Life, Books and Society.” Interview by Hemanta Barman, and Gautam Kumar Bordoloi. YouTube, uploaded by Sirf Sach, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxXxIcSrpGc. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Das, Prasanta. “Indian English Writing from the Northeast.” Dibrugarh University Journal of English Studies, vol. 16, 2007, pp. 23–47. Jain, Jasbir. “Caught in a Spider’s Web: A Journey from Innocence Towards a Fraught Independence.” Indian Literature, vol. 62, no. 6 (308), 2018, pp. 182–184. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26792331. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Kohli, Suresh. “Review of These Hills Called Home, by Temsula Ao.” Indian Literature, vol. 50, no. 2 (232), 2006, pp. 192–194. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23340944. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Lalbiakdiki. Re Imagining the Ao Naga Identity in the Works of Temsula Ao. Mizoram University. PhD Dissertation. 2020, https:// shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/handle/10603/356739. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Prakash, H. S. Shiva. “Review of Songs from the Other Life, by Temsula Ao.” Indian Literature, vol. 52, no. 4 (246), 2008, pp. 208–211. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23347983. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

RAHUL CHATURVEDI

ARRIVING SHORTLY by K. Srilata K. Srilata has published five volumes of poetry and a novel, in addition to academic publications and translations. Arriving Shortly, her second collection of poems, was published in 2011 by Writers Workshop, Kolkata. In this collection, sixty-one poems are arranged in seven different sections titled – “Many Poems Nestled Inside Houses,” “Arriving Shortly,” “Bionote,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Verse,” “Meditations,” “Sea Poems,” and “The Wingspan of Words.” The first section, titled “Many Poems Nestled Inside Houses,” consists of thirteen poems. Their themes are diverse, but there is an undercurrent of domesticity and challenges in the lives of women connecting these poems. Poems like “Kamalamma,” “Gomati,” and “Alone in a Childless Way” draw pictures of lived experiences of ordinary women. This section also carries some poems with autobiographical elements. One of the most intense poems in the section, “For Jeanne Mukuninwa,” honors Congolese war-crime victims and asks a poignant question, “There must be a way, surely,/of baking fistulas into a poem?” The second section, “Arriving Shortly,” has eight poems, set in different parts of the world, which speak of the outward beauty or appearances of cities and places and then, in a twist, also reveal the dark secrets hidden in these places. The third, titled “Bionote,” is a section of poems with several elements drawn from the poet’s own life. The title poem situates the poet in old Madras, the city she grew up in. At the outset she declares, “I am middle class/and very Madras.” Several poems are about an absent father and growing up with grandparents. Some poems speak about motherhood and its joys and challenges. The brief fourth section titled “The Unbearable Lightness of Verse” consists of just three poems: one about dosai, one about an email from a friend abroad, and one about a washing machine. 18

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“Meditations,” the fifth section, carries seven poems spanning a range of themes. They share deeper thoughts and are reflective in nature. Some focus on themes like the process of writing, the passage of time, and various freedoms. The short sixth section, centered on a recurrent theme, is titled “Sea Poems,” which are set in the backdrop of the sea and carry the sadness of waves, the secrets hidden by the vastness of the ocean, the cycle of life, and the connectedness of things. They also deal with gruesome things connected to the sea, present-day tragedies like unclaimed suicides and abandoned children as well as historic ones like slave ships. The seventh section titled “The Wingspan of Words” is composed of eleven poems connected to the themes of poetry and writing. The poems take on a life of their own as the poet explores the ideas of inspiration, reflection, the act of writing, and even ideas that never actually went on to become poems. She states that of all the many ways to stop a poem, the most popular method “is to explain it.” Arriving Shortly, which came out almost eleven years after Srilata’s first book, was very well received. Poet Anupama Raju, in a very positive review of the book in The Hindu, writes that the collection, “takes us through these experiences through varied tones and images; sometimes predictable, at times gently surprising and now and then shocking.” Shyamala A. Narayan applauds the collection for the touch of humor and the range of concerns it raises. At the same time, she notes that the poems are full of local references that might not be accessible to readers who are not familiar with Madras. The book is also significant for the fact that, in her later works, Srilata revisits some of the themes of this collection and develops them further into full anthologies. For example, the theme of familial bonds and absent people from the section “Bionote” is central to her latest collection The Unmistakable Presence of Absent Humans (2019).

Further Reading Narayan, Shyamala A. “India.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 47, no. 4, 2012, pp. 509–534. Raju, Anupama. “Experience Has No Theme.” The Hindu, 1 Oct. 2011, www.thehindu.com/books/ experience-has-no-theme/article2499950.ece. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

SHEEJA RAJAGOPAL

ARTIST OF DISAPPEARANCE, THE, by Anita Desai Published in 2011, Anita Desai’s The Artist of Disappearance is a collection of three novellas on art, namely, “The Museum of Final Journeys,” “Translator Translated,” and the third one bearing the same title as the book. The trilogy weaves together the relationship between the art and the artist, the narrative and the narrator, the alternating emergence and disappearance of the artist’s voice, the translator and the art/politics of translation/transcreation, modernization and environmental issues, and the shadows of the past in the present. In “The Museum of Final Journeys,” the unnamed narrator, a civil servant who has been transferred to a desolate provincial town, struggles to adjust to his sense of uprootedness. He also reflects on his secret desire to become a writer. His monotonous life takes a turn when he learns about the presence of a dilapidated museum in his town. The clerk/curator/keeper of the museum wants the government to take it over. He walks the narrator through a number of doors sheltering artifacts and objects shipped from abroad by Srimati Sarita Mukherjee’s son Jiban Mukherjee, who had proceeded on a world tour. The narrator ponders whether it is a museum or a mausoleum because it houses the dead desire of Sarita Mukherjee to reclaim the lost glory of the family. 19

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The second novella, “Translator Translated,” recounts the tale of a college teacher/ translator Prema who is captivated by the work of a provincial Odia writer, Suvarna Devi. Despite being discouraged by her friends, Prema decides to write her doctoral thesis on the writer, who wrote in what was also the language of her deceased mother. One day, she comes across her schoolmate, Tara, an all-rounder who has recently set up a publishing house. Tara persuades Prema to translate Suvarna Devi’s work and promises to commission it. In the process of translation, Prema realizes the sluggishness and monotony in Suvarna Devi’s voice and decides to exercise her translating liberties to introduce significant changes to the original work. After the publication of Prema’s translation, a relative of Suvarna Devi raises a hue and cry when she notices that Prema has altered the language and the content of the original book. As a result, Prema is penalized by her publisher, Tara. Prema decides to retire from her current life and thinks of narrating her own story, but to her utter shock, she has lost her narratorial voice as she has submerged her identity in the authorial persona of Suvarna Devi. The third novella “The Artist of Disappearance” is about the psychological trauma of the protagonist, Ravi, an adopted son of wealthy parents who, being ill-treated, struggles to find his own space. The story is set in Mussoorie, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Ravi continues to stay in the burned family house atop a hill because he always wanted to live in isolation. He develops and curates a garden to give expression to his suppressed desires. When a film crew comes from the city to document illegal mining and the resultant environmental degradation, Ravi views this as an intrusion and decides to go underground. In his newfound solitude, he creates a small garden within a matchbox, hidden from the eyes of the world, thus refashioning his art. The book was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction in 2012 and has been received well by readers and critics. While Hector Tobar is fascinated by Desai’s “minute, multifarious world, totally unlike any other,” Maggie Gee lauds Desai’s vision and her “brilliant miniature exposé of contemporary culture.” Razia Iqbal, who reviewed the book for Wasafiri, praises Desai’s collection as the masterpiece of a seasoned artist pondering “on the nature of art, its role and how it will survive” in a country/culture which is faced with the conflict between “centuries of tradition and the new forces of capitalism.”

Further Reading Gee, Maggie. “The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai – Review.” The Guardian, 26 Aug. 2011, www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/26/artist-disappearance-anita-desai-review. Accessed 30 Jun. 2022. Iqbal, Razia. “Review: The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai.” Wasafiri, 17 Jan. 2015, www.wasafiri. org/article/razia-iqbal-on-the-artist-of-disappearance/. Accessed 30 Jun. 2022. Tobar, Hector. “Book Review: ‘The Artist of Disappearance’ by Anita Desai.” Los Angeles Times, 11 Dec. 2011, www.latimes.com/books/la-xpm-2011-dec-11-la-ca-anita-desai-20111211-story.html. Accessed 30 Jun. 2022.

PAWAN KUMAR

ATLAS OF IMPOSSIBLE LONGING, A Novel by Anuradha Roy Anuradha Roy’s lyrical debut, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, A  Novel, was published in 2008. The novel presents the family saga of Amulya, his younger son Nirmal, and Amulya’s adoptee, Mukunda. In 1907, Amulya takes his family from Calcutta to Songarh, a small mining

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town in western Bengal surrounded by forests. There he builds a large house and sets up a factory to manufacture herbal medicines and perfumes. While Amulya cherishes his solitude in Songarh, his wife, Kananbala, finds it depressing. She goes slightly insane and is kept locked in her bedroom. From her window, she watches her neighbors, Digby and Larrissa Barnum. In 1929, Nirmal’s wife Shanti dies during childbirth; Amulya also passes away. About a decade later, in 1940, Nirmal, who had abandoned his newborn daughter Bakul and his home following Shanti’s death, returns permanently to Songarh to undertake an archaeological dig in the ruins of the local fort. During a previous visit, he had brought home sixyear old Mukunda, whom Amulya had financially supported. In Songarh, Nirmal is drawn to Bakul’s caregiver Meera, his cousin’s widow; but she leaves. The family’s unease over the closeness between the adolescent Bakul and Mukunda (of unknown parentage/caste) is resolved by sending Mukunda to a school in Calcutta. Mukunda vows never to return. The novel’s third part, set in the 1950s, is narrated by Mukunda. For the past few years, he had been living in the home of a Muslim couple – Suleiman Chacha and Chachi – who entrusted their home to him when they left Calcutta for Rajshahi. A husband and father, Mukunda works for a property developer who sends him to evict Nirmal and Bakul from their home, since Nirmal’s older brother has sold the property to Mukunda’s boss. Mukunda and Bakul are drawn to one another. To prevent Bakul’s displacement, Mukunda buys the property from his employer in exchange for Suleiman’s house. Sensing Mukunda’s disloyalty, his wife Malini deserts him. A  few years later, Nirmal requests Mukunda’s help with selling a house in Manoharpur that Bakul had inherited from her maternal grandfather. There, Mukunda is finally reunited with Bakul. Through this complexly tangled plot, Atlas explores interpersonal relationships and the relationships between people and places. The houses in the novel are sites of isolation and refuge, ends and new beginnings, as well as assets. Their disintegration is a metaphor for the collapse of the old order. The historical canvas spans Bengal’s experience of the first half of the 20th century: the first partition of Bengal and the swadeshi movement (Amulya manufactures indigenous goods); the escalating communal rivalries and the repartitioning of Bengal in the 1940s, complete with the Calcutta riots and Suleiman Chacha’s departure for Pakistan; and in postindependence India, Mukunda’s freedom to reinvent himself. Atlas exposes caste inequalities – Mukunda’s exclusion from the Saraswati Puja; likewise with gender – when Amulya names his house “3,” it is not a street address; instead, “The ‘3’ stands for him and his two sons;” his wife’s existence remaining unacknowledged. And there is a poignancy to Amulya’s spending hours tending to his kanan (“garden” in Bengali) while remaining deaf to his wife Kananbala’s (literally the “the woman in the garden”) pleas for companionship. But the women characters in Atlas fight back: Kananbala’s outbursts of obscenities are a rebellion against the suffocating silence with which she lives; Meera breaks food taboos for Hindu widows by consuming fish; Malini leaves her unfaithful husband; while Bakul is “not afraid of anything.” Kananbala’s condition in Atlas is reminiscent of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; while Mukunda recalls Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; and Nirmal, like Apu in Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Aparajito, abandons his child upon his wife’s death during childbirth and stays away. The novel has been well received. Neel Mukherjee writes in TIME Magazine that, “Roy’s prose does not hit a single wrong note: its restrained beauty sings off the page.” Similarly, Marie Arana’s review in The Washington Post praises it, noting, “Every once in a great while, a novel comes along to remind you . . . why you read fiction at all. Anuradha Roy’s An Atlas of Impossible Longing is such a book.”

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Further Reading Hanquart-Turner, Evelyn. “ ‘Who Shall Inherit Bengal?’ A Reading of Anuradha Roy’s an Atlas of Impossible Longing.” Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema, edited by Cornelius Crowley, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, and Michel Naumann. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, pp. 79–86. Rofail, Lydia Saleh. “The Postcolonial Indian Gothic in Anuradha Roy’s an Atlas of Impossible Longing.” The Gothic: Studies in History, Identity and Space. Brill, 2012, pp. 31–39.

DEBALI MOOKERJEA-LEONARD

ATLAS OF LOST BELIEFS, THE, by Ranjit Hoskote The Atlas of Lost Beliefs (2020) is Ranjit Hoskote’s ninth poetry collection – of the ten published so far. The cosmopolitan work of this Indian poet, art critic, cultural theorist, and curator includes twenty nonfiction books, some co-authored, as well as several edited books and translations, and fifty-plus curated exhibitions in places as far-flung as Bombay, Venice, Gwangju, New York, and Tokyo. Hoskote’s self-description as “a post-gharana poet,” a qualification appropriated “from Hindustani classical music” (“my name is Ocean”), speaks to the many languages, traditions, and genres the renaissance man integrates into The Atlas of Lost Beliefs, a fifty-four-poem volume, one as indebted to Ovid and Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar as it is to Brian Eno and Amitav Ghosh – this in addition to a compendium of other sources, East and West, classical and contemporary, literary, visual, and aural. The book’s third piece is the three-quarter-page title poem. It evinces Hoskote’s reflexive fêting of geographic and cultural mobility. Hoskote thereby complicates epic formations which traditionally narrate the nation. In “The Atlas of Lost Beliefs” readers encounter an epic list, one including, among other human subjects, “gandharvas,” “beenkars,” “dharma bums,” “friars minorite,” and “wise men of Gotham.” Yet before readers reach this epic catalog they are exhorted to “turn to page thirty-seven/in The Atlas of Lost Beliefs,” where they encounter the Brian Eno homage, “A Constantly Unfinished Instrument.” Adding a supplement to interruption, Hoskote highlights in his hyper-allusive “Notes,” “A Constantly Unfinished Instrument” is based on a 2010 Guardian interview of Eno, the “pioneering musician and cultural thinker” who celebrates how the synthesizer, being free of the baggage of traditional sonic conventions, designs sound, thus inspiring the combination of “a number of cultural references into one new thing.” Combination and recombination are the key themes in Hoskote’s The Atlas of Lost Beliefs. After all, part “I,” by virtue of being titled “Memoirs of the Jonahwhale,” educes a reprise of his previous verse collection, Jonahwhale (2018). Hoskote makes a virtue of re-viewing and re-presenting. Before the direct injunction to flip twenty-pages forward in “The Atlas of Lost Beliefs,” the speaker has already accented the unpredictable and fragmented essence of human – and, by extension, national – experience. In “The Map Seller,” the speaker mocks the “nuclear powers/that started as papaya plots or guano archipelagos” before he references Borges’ “On Exactitude in Science.” Addressing, but not co-opting, readers with the second person, the speaker whimsically offers doomed ideas barely disguised as tangible things: “you can have any piece of my flaking jigsaw atlas.” The speaker’s disposition, however, is far from ill-fated. Stunningly simple lines like: “Birdsong disturbs the king of incomplete lives./He wakes up in the middle of the novel he’s writing,” from the opening piece “The Churchgate Gazette” nuance possibility, not finality. Birdsong, here, educes another awakening. Another choice. Another reading. Another mapping. And another overlapping. Thus, the ironically inviting very first words of the speaker: “Last word on the subject, I promise.” 22

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Words invite more words, and it is the rendering of words, as captured in the piece “Render,” which renders fourteen definitions of the word “render,” that proves thematically integral to The Atlas of Lost Beliefs. Central to “Render” is the infinitive “to translate,” which, being as elemental as bird calls and breaking surfs, interposes unexpected rhythms over (or against) predictable ones. The nouns that follow the irruptive “to translate” in the poem “Render” are “form,” “shape,” “painting,” “motion capture,” “piece,” and “score.” These words, in turn, imply the ekphrastic possibilities Hoskote’s speaker commemorates. Hoskote’s words, evolving from old sea to riven city to art islands through the book’s three parts, manifest as an offering. The speaker’s dialogic and reflexive voice enjoins readers to traverse centuries, languages, and seas. Astute readers, in the style of the erudite poet, jump back and forth between shape-shifting poems and illuminating annotations, which include portals – or portholes – to an assortment of artistic enactments available online. Hoskote’s poetic palimpsest, his layering of stories, ultimately celebrates topographic and artistic solidarities that transcend national borders, real and imagined.

Further Reading Hlavajova, Maria, and Ranjit Hoskote, editors. Future Publics (The Rest Should and Can Be Done by the People): A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art. BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, 2015. Hoskote, Ranjit. “Global Art and Lost Regional Histories.” Art in the Global Present, vol. 2, edited by Nikos Papastergiadis and Victoria Lynn. UTS e-Press, 2014, pp. 186–192. ———. “My Name Is Ocean: Three Poems and a Conversation.” Guftugu, https://guftugu. in/2018/06/29/ranjit-hoskote-souradeep-roy-jonahwhale/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. ———. “Ranjit Hoskote Speaks to Souradeep Roy about Jonahwhale.” Guftugu, https://guftugu. in/2018/06/29/ranjit-hoskote-souradeep-roy-jonahwhale/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Sen, Sudeep. “Central Time by Ranjit Hoskote.” World Literature Today, vol. 88, no. 5, 2014, pp. 86–87.

JASON S. POLLEY

AUROBINDO, SRI (1872–1950) Sri Aurobindo Ghose was born on August  15, 1872, in colonial Bengal. His father, Dr. Krishna Dhun Ghose, was a doctor who greatly admired the English culture, and his mother Swarnalata was a homemaker. Originally given the name Aravinda Ackroyd Ghose by his father, Ghose chose to de-anglicize his name by omitting his middle name. He was a profound philosopher, prolific writer, visionary leader, revolutionary, social-thinker and reformer, mystic and a karmayogi. Sri Aurobindo began his schooling at Loretto Convent School in Darjeeling. In 1879, he and his brothers were sent to England. For the first few years, he was kept under the care of Rev. Drewett and his wife in Manchester, under whose mentorship he learned Latin, history, and English literature. In December 1889, he was admitted to St. Paul’s school, where he was introduced to classical English literature, French literature and languages like Italian, German and Spanish. He appeared for the Indian Civil Services (ICS) Examination and joined King’s College, Cambridge, on scholarship as ICS probationer in 1890. Even after clearing the initial test with distinction, he did not appear for the final riding test because he was not very fond of a bureaucratic job; he was more interested in philosophy and literature. Sri Aurobindo returned to India in 1893. He worked for Sayajirao Gaekwar, the maharaja of Baroda estate from 1893–1907 in different capacities before becoming a professor of English and vice-principal at Baroda College. However, in the wake of the partition of Bengal in 1905, he resigned from his position at Baroda College and joined the Indian freedom struggle. 23

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He started participating in revolutionary activities in Bengal and came in contact with eminent revolutionaries of this time such as B.G. Tilak, Sister Nivedita, Satyen Bose, and Hemchandra Das, to name a few. He wanted to arouse the masses to the exploitative British policies, partition tactics and manipulation of state machinery. He was arrested in the Alipore Bomb case in 1908 and acquitted after a long trial. After his release, Sri Aurobindo started writing on pressing issues of the day such as the British education system, governance, Indian culture and native writers. Through his revolutionary thought process and literary flair, he wished to awaken the souls of his people for the cause of India’s freedom. He actively contributed to Bengali weeklies and magazines. In his articles written for Induprakash, a Marathi-English Weekly, he criticized Congress policies and leadership. He also became the joint-editor of Bandematram, a revolutionary paper started by Bipin Chandra Pal, which eventually served as the think tank of the Bengal National Movement. In 1909, he started the Bengali weekly, Dharma, to spread the philosophy of sanatana dharma. He was also charged with sedition by the British colonial government for his signed article “To My Countrymen,” written for the weekly newspaper Karmayogin, consequent upon which he had to go into exile. Sri Aurobindo landed in Pondicherry on April 4, 1910, where he stepped into a yogic life from that of a revolutionary. He curtailed his public life and started devoting his time to yoga sadhana. This transformation also determined his life as a writer henceforth: he became inclined toward classical Indian knowledge, mysticism and philosophy. On March 29, 1914, he met a French national, Mirra Alfassa (popularly known as The Mother). On the insistence of Mirra Alfassa and her husband Paul Richard, Sri Aurobindo agreed to launch Arya, a journal to disseminate knowledge related to Indian philosophy and yogic experiences. Significant essays on yogic knowledge and experiences of Sri Aurobindo and some important translations appeared in Arya, but it was discontinued in 1921. Sri Aurobindo’s oeuvre consists of voluminous work related to philosophy, literature, yoga and translation. He also wrote poetry, plays, articles and essays. For instance, The Secret of Vedas, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, Letters on Yoga (two volumes), Letters on Poetry and Art, Essays on the Gita, The Renaissance in India, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and his magnum opus, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, are testimonies to his genius and intellect. Savitri is a narrative poem based on the story of Savitri and Satyavana as described in the Mahabharata. Sri Aurobindo described it as a literary/creative experiment to explore yogic consciousness. The Human Cycle is a collection of essays which were originally published under the title “The Psychology of Social Development” in Arya from August 15, 1916, to July 15, 1918. He also translated some portions of the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and classical Sanskrit literature. His translation of some Upanishads was published posthumously as Eight Upanishads in 1953. On December 5, 1950, Sri Aurobindo proceeded from the physical world into the realm of eternal peace and silence. In order to commemorate the unflinching spirit of Aurobindo for humanity, academic centers were opened in universities, postal stamps were released and most significantly, Auroville, an Aurobindo Ashram was established at Pondicherry by The Mother in 1968, which is characterized by Aurobindo’s idea of universal citizenship. He was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize: for Literature in 1943 and for Peace in 1950. Roman Rolland adjudged him as “the greatest thinker in India” and praised Arya as “the most complete synthesis so far achieved between the genius of the West and the genius of the East.” James Cousins hailed “[t]he poetry of Aurobindo Ghose .  .  . [as] a meeting place of Asiatic universalism and European classicism.” In his “Homage to Aurobindo,” Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “Rabindranath, O Aurobindo, bows to thee!/O friend, my country’s friend, O voice incarnate, free.” 24

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Further Reading Cousins, James H. New Ways in English Literature, 2nd ed. The Cambridge Press, 1919. Heehs, Peter. The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. Cambridge UP, 2008. Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa. Sri Aurobindo. Arya Publishing House, 1945. Pandit, M. Sri Aurobindo. New Delhi Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1983. “Writings.” Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2022, www.sriaurobindoashram.org/sriaurobindo/writings.php.

PAWAN KUMAR

AZADI by Chaman Nahal Azadi (1975) is Chaman Nahal’s critically acclaimed novel in English, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Federation of Indian Publishers’ Award for Excellence in 1977. The novel is chronologically placed last (though written before the others) in The Gandhi Quartet (1993) – a series of four novels focusing on Gandhi as the pivot of the national freedom movement. A fine work of partition literature, it was well received. Mulk Raj Anand published a lead review, titled “A Vital Novel in Indian English,” in The Hindustan Times. Nahal kept the Urdu word “Azadi” as its title, since he felt that the English translation “Freedom,” did not quite convey the correct nuances of the freedom struggle. Azadi presents a realistic account of psychological trauma that resulted from mass exodus, jingoistic frenzy, heart-wrenching massacres, and communal hatred which engulfed people on both sides of the borders of the newly partitioned India and Pakistan. The story spans the period from the announcement of the Cabinet Mission Plan on June 3, 1947, up to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948. The tripartite narrative structure of the novel consists of three sections – “The Lull,” “The Storm,” and “The Aftermath.” Nahal’s firsthand experiences of the tragedy of partition accounted for many of the episodes and characters he portrays in the novel. He steered clear of apportioning the blame of genocide on any one community and presented a finely balanced and neutral view of the historical trauma of partition. He categorically rejected the two-nation theory and firmly believed that common masses suffered a terrible fate due to a lack of foresight in Indian politicians and the abrupt desertion of colonial territory by the British. The plot of the novel revolves largely around Lala Kanshi Ram, who is a grain merchant, living in Sialkot with his wife, Prabha Rani, and son Arun in a rented house belonging to Bibi Amar Vati. As an Arya Samaji, he lives a morally upright and disciplined life. In the wake of the news of the creation of Pakistan, Lala Kanshi Ram has to take the heart-breaking decision of leaving Sialkot when his shop is looted and the news of his only daughter Madhu’s and her husband Rajiv’s murders on a train bound for Sialkot reaches him. The murders of Madhu and Rajiv are poignantly autobiographical as Nahal had, as a matter of fact, lost his sister Kartar Devi and her husband in a similar gory incident. Lala Kanshi Ram leaves with his family and other neighbors, including Bibi Amar Vati, Sunanda, her husband Suraj Prakash, Niranjan Singh, their domestic help Padmini, and her daughter Chandani. However, the bigger tragedies of displacement befall them in the most unprecedented ways. Arun is separated from his first love Nur, daughter of Lala Kanshi Ram’s friend Chowdhary Barkat Ali. The initial vows of love and conversion to Islam are abandoned at the altar of filial duty and safety. The devastating life in refugee camps on the outskirts of Sialkot coupled with lurking threats of communal aggression culminating in real attacks on the Hindu refugees adds to their misery. During an attack on the refugee camp at Narowal, Sunanda is raped by Captain Rahmatulla Khan (Arun’s classmate and in charge of the camp) and Arun, in a 25

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moment of indignation and impulse, kills him. Nahal shows how the latent instincts of violence become manifest when the situation becomes appalling and questions of identity and dignity take precedence over righteousness. Arun, who falls in love with Chandani during their stay at the camp, loses her too as she is kidnapped, and Sunanda’s husband, Suraj Prakesh, is stabbed to death. The convoy finally reaches Amritsar via Dera Baba Nanak and thereafter, Lala Kanshi Ram moves to Delhi with his family. Notwithstanding the scars, festering wounds, and dispirited people that the partition left in its wake, Lala Kanshi Ram picks up the shreds of life, and even after facing prejudice in Delhi, he starts a small grocery shop to earn his livelihood. Sunanda too starts tailoring work to support herself. The novel, despite its overtones of distress, disillusionment, and devastation resulting from the harrowing experiences of the partition, ends on a note of promise and healing.

Further Reading Jha, Rama. “Azadi by Chaman Nahal.” Indian Literature, vol. 21, no. 5, Sept.–Oct. 1978, pp. 114–118. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24158558. Nahal, C. Silent Life: Memoirs of a Writer. Roli Books, 2005. Sharma, K. K., and B. K. Johri. The Epic and Psychological Delineation of the Theme: Chaman Nahal’s Azadi, The Partition in Indian English Novels. Vimal Prakashan, 1984.

SUNAINA JAIN

BADAMI, ANITA RAU (1961–) Indo-Canadian writer, Anita Rau Badami, was born in Rourkela, Odisha, on September 24, 1961. She studied at the University of Madras and Sophia Polytechnic, later worked as a journalist in India, and then migrated to Canada in 1991 with her husband and young son. She received an MA from the University of Calgary and published her first novel, Tamarind Mem, in 1997. She has since published three other novels: The Hero’s Walk (2001), Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2006), and Tell it to the Trees (2011). Drawn from her experiences as the daughter of an officer in the Indian Railways, Badami’s first novel Tamarind Mem (published as Tamarind Woman in some editions) captures the complicated relationship of a mother and daughter, Kamini and Saroja. Kamini tells us of her childhood in railway colonies and her observations of her parents’ difficult relationship and her mother’s frustrations and acid tongue. The novel also captures postcolonial life in India through the settings in various railway colonies and explores extramarital relationships, isolation, and the mother’s quest for identity after widowhood. Since the narrator, Kamini, lives in Canada, the novel’s themes include memory, nostalgia, and loss felt by immigrants. The second novel, Hero’s Walk, tells of Sripathi, an aging man whose daughter and son-inlaw in Canada die in an accident, and he becomes the guardian of their young biracial daughter whom he has never met. Nandana, the traumatized granddaughter, refuses to speak, and Sripathi and his family work with compassion to understand the child and help her acculturate. The novel also has a subplot involving Sripathi’s sister, Putti, and her controlling mother who refuses to let Putti marry. Putti’s romance with a neighbor of a different caste highlights the necessity of reforming social values. Along with the narrative’s central concerns about grief and loss, the themes of intergenerational conflict, difficult marriages, parent-child relationships, filial responsibilities, women’s sexual desires, and the struggles of the middle-class in a rapidly changing

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India are also dealt with. The novel’s lens on the diasporic experience is focused on the family left behind rather than the person who emigrates. The novel won a Regional Commonwealth Literature prize and was nominated for several other prestigious awards. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? explores the Indian diasporic experience through the history of Sikhs in Canada. Weaving the stories of three women, Sharanjit Kaur (Bibiji), Nimmo (Sharanjeet’s sister), and Leela (a recent immigrant), the novel tells the story of Sikh immigration to Canada (British Columbia) from the 1914 Komagata Maru incident through the story of India’s anti-British resistance, the partition, the Khalistan movement, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, and the bombing of the Air India flight in 1985. The involvement of the Sikh community in Canada with political life on the subcontinent and the internal tensions within the diasporic community (both Sikh and non-Sikh) are also important to the narrative. The novel underscores how Indians of different faiths experience life in independent India and how the experiences of migration, displacement, and loss impact different groups. Tell it to the Trees is set in a small, isolated town in British Columbia where an Indian immigrant family copes with domestic violence, social isolation, mental illness, and dark secrets. Told from varying points of view, the novel begins with the Dharma family finding their tenant, Anu, dead in a blizzard. As the story unfolds, we hear of Vikram Dharma’s marriage to Harini (Helen) who abandons them and dies mysteriously; of the traumatized teen daughter, Varsha; of Suman, the second wife who is docile and victimized by her violent husband; their young son Hemant who follows everything his half-sister tells him to do; and Akka, the matriarch, who sees patterns of violence repeating themselves and urges her daughter-in-law to escape while she can. Each person’s story adds new dimensions to the family’s difficulties, and Badami’s portrayal of the psyches of each one is nuanced and insightful. The novel offers insights into intergenerational violence and the trauma of immigrant life. Central themes in Badami’s fiction include migration, domestic violence, young female children’s experiences of dysfunctional families, multigenerational trauma, and the resilience of those who survive. Her novels are deftly plotted, and characters carefully developed with great psychological depth. She has gained significant recognition in Canada as a South Asian diasporic writer for her intimate portrayals of immigrant lives.

Further Reading Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Anita Rau Badami. Tamarind Woman.” World Literature Today, vol. 77, no. 2, 2003, p. 91. Bhat, Shilpa D. “Sikh Diasporic Negotiations: Indian and Canadian History in Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?” Sikh Formations, vol. 14, no. 1, 2018, pp. 55–70. Iyer, Nalini. “Multiple Migrations: Partition and South Asian Canadian Writing.” South Asian Review, vol. 37, no. 1, 2016, pp. 51–69. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2016. 11933045. Pirbhai, Mariam. “The Poetics and Politics of Snow: Re-Orienting Discourses of Gendered Violence and Spousal Sponsorship in Anita Rau Badami’s Tell It to the Trees.” Canadian Literature, vol. 219, no. 219, 2013, p. 39. Ryan, Laurel. “Constructing ‘Home’: Eros, Thanatos, and Migration in the Novels of Anita Rau Badami.” South Asian Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 2008, pp. 156–174. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/02759527.2008.11932583. Sharma, Maya. “The Local and the Transnational in Badami’s the Hero’s Walk.” South Asian Review, vol. 26, no. 2, 2005, pp. 276–287. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.200 5.11932413.

NALINI IYER

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BALDWIN, SHAUNA SINGH (1962–) Shauna Singh Baldwin was born in Montreal, Canada, to Sikh parents of Indian origin who had moved to Canada shortly before she was born in 1962. Her father, Sukhcharan Singh Pasrich, was one of the two turbaned Sikhs in Montreal at the time, but he decided to return to India, where Shauna grew up and studied in Delhi. Shauna holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Delhi and a master’s degree in business from Marquette University, in Milwaukee. She retained her Canadian citizenship and applied for an MFA degree from the University of British Columbia. Since her childhood, she wanted to be a writer and started writing at the age of eleven. While pursuing her degrees, she wrote and published poetry and essays that appeared in literary magazines in the United States, Canada, and India. She also produced an independent radio show, “Sunno,” where her short stories were much appreciated. Some of these stories became part of her first collection of short stories, English Lessons and Other Stories. Before that she had co-authored with Marilyn M. Levine a nonfiction book entitled A Foreign Visitor’s Survival Guide to America (1992). She married an American, David Baldwin, with whom she owned an espionage-themed restaurant, Safe House, in Milwaukee. As a writer, poet, playwright, radio producer, web designer, and restaurateur, Baldwin has tried her hand at many professions, but she created a niche for herself as an Indo-Canadian novelist, with three novels and three collections of short stories to her credit. Her first novel, What the Body Remembers (1999), received instant acclaim and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Canada/Caribbean region). Set in Lahore, in the decade leading to India’s independence, it uses the personal trajectory of the two wives of Sardarji – Satya and Roop (inspired by Baldwin’s grandmother) – to depict the turbulent times that people lived through during India’s partition. Sardarji, an Oxford-educated irrigation engineer in Lahore, loved his efficient wife, Satya, but her failure to have a child made him marry young Roop. Satya, the powerful matriarch, feels rejected and humiliated by the three children that Roop adds to the family. She purposely afflicts herself with tuberculosis, and after her death, Roop struggles to manage the household. The threat of partition adds many challenges for her and the family. When Sardarji realizes that Lahore and his property will become a part of Pakistan, he sends Roop and his children in a car with servants to Delhi. On the way, the car breaks down, and Roop fights a gang of Muslim mobsters waiting to loot and rape. She thinks of how Satya would have protected her family and manages to scare the men with her boldness. Sardarji collects some official documents before leaving for Delhi and joins Roop and the children after a perilous journey. The Tiger Claw is inspired by the life of Noor Inayat Khan, a female spy during World War II. In the novel, Baldwin gives a personal reason for Noor to join Special Operations Executive and traces Noor’s transition after her liberal Muslim father, a Sufi musician and teacher, passes away. Her conservative uncle, Tajuddin, takes over their house in France and their lives. With the help of her brother Kabir, he convinces Noor to give up her love for Armand Rivkin, a Jewish American pianist. Once World War II begins, Noor’s family moves to England, and Kabir joins the English Air Force. Noor joins the Special Operations Executive to financially support her family and also to secretly look for Armand. She assumes multiple identities and returns to France to work as a radio operator, transmitting messages from different safe houses while continuing her search for Armand. When she comes to know that he is imprisoned in Drancy, a concentration camp, she risks her life and mission in order to send him a token of her love – the tiger claw, her lucky charm, a family heirloom gifted to her by her grandmother. While Armand survives the camp with the hope of uniting with Noor, Noor and her team are caught by the Nazis. In prison, she secretly writes letters to her imaginary child with Armand. 28

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While Kabir and Armand, in their own ways, look for Noor after the war, it is the readers who learn of her tragic end. English Lessons and Other Stories is a collection of stories about difficulties faced by Indian immigrants in assimilating into multicultural Western societies. The themes of adaptability and a search for identity help in binding together various stories set in different time periods and geographical locales. We are not in Pakistan is a collection of diverse short stories by Baldwin that transcend temporal and spatial boundaries. It addresses many questions about relationships within and outside the family and the consequences of events like the 9/11 bombings, India’s partition, and the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. Baldwin’s only play, We are so different now, brings back the mythical character Draupadi from the Indian epic Mahabharata to help Sheetal, a modern middle-class woman. Draupadi draws Sheetal out of her despondent state before moving on to help other Indian women. Baldwin’s recent book, Reluctant Rebellions, is a compilation of fifteen speeches and essays on different issues ranging from the personal to the socio-political. It covers many themes, which include writer’s block, problems faced by the South Asian Diaspora in Canada, and understanding mythology from a feminist perspective. Some of these speeches were later developed into novels. Through her work, Baldwin explores major themes in diasporic writing, such as India’s partition, sectarian violence in India, familial conflict, the status of women in different societies, and the immigrant experience. She skilfully uses real incidents to create the socio-political milieux of India and Canada and stirs myriad human emotions through her multiethnic characters.

Further Reading “Asian Heritage in Canada.” Toronto Metropolitan University Libraries, https://library.torontomu.ca/ asianheritage/authors/baldwin/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. “Award Winning: Writer, Poet, Playwright, Radio Producer (b at Montréal 1962).” Sikh Heritage Museum at Canada, http://shmc.ca/events-exhibitions/shauna-singh-baldwin. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Baldwin, Shauna Singh. Shauna Singh Baldwin, www.shaunasinghbaldwin.com/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Marshall, Susanne, and Emily Johansen. “Shauna Singh Baldwin.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 30 Apr. 2014, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/shauna-singh-baldwin. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Methot, Suzanne. “Lives of Girls and Women.” Quill and Quire, 1999, https://quillandquire.com/ authors/lives-of-girls-and-women/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. “Shauna Singh Baldwin.” Penguin Random House, www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/1265/ shauna-singh-baldwin/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

URVASHI KAUSHAL

BANKER, ASHOK (1964–) Born on February 7, 1964, in Mumbai, India, Ashok Kumar Banker is best known for his retelling of Indian mythological epics – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Some of his other books explore cross-cultural themes and portray pressing Indian urban issues. Banker is included in anthologies such as The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature and The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. Banker’s best-selling eight-volume Ramayana Series has been credited with the resurgence of the mythology genre in India. However, most of the recently released books falling in the mythology genre lack the engaging authenticity of Banker’s retelling of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, for he has not compromised on authenticity. 29

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Valmiki’s Ramayana is quite detailed in some parts and not so detailed in many other parts. Hence, Banker had to bring some balance to his version – something he did not have to do in his Mahabharata, which is primarily a treasure trove of detail with all its mystery and magic. His Epic India Library is a colossal attempt at retelling the major myths and legends of the Indian subcontinent in one big story cycle consisting of around seventy volumes. This Library includes Banker’s Ramayana Series, Krishna Coriolis, and Mahabharata Series – fascinating books that also offer many words of wisdom. Banker’s Valmiki Syndrome also provides the reader with insights from ancient puranic texts that can be applied to solve several modern-day problems. It is regarded as the first book in his Vedic Wisdom series. Banker adopts a new style of writing to tell the stories, which is neither academic nor a commentary. This style of writing evolved from his understanding of various existing translations, oral and folk retellings, various tribal versions, and the original shlokas. Banker was best suited to write these books primarily because he had a mixed family background – his mother was a Roman Catholic, his grandmother British, and his biological father a Hindu. As religion was not forced on him, there were no religious biases or presumptions for him. He read the ancient epics as a great record of his ancestors. Perhaps that is why he still regards the Mahabharata as the mother of all great stories. Banker’s first novels were published in the 1990s. He has written crime thrillers, novels, and short stories on urban and feminist issues. His crime thriller series, Kali Quartet, for example, is inspired by the rise of violent crimes against women in India. This series, which begins with A Blood Red Saree, is a feminist thriller series, quite contemporary, a radical featuring only women protagonists. Three of Banker’s early novels gained him widespread attention and still continue to be regarded with critical approval. The Iron Bra, much more hard-boiled than his other novels, is the gory tale of a female investigator, Sheila Ray’s action-packed life. With her finger resting on the trigger of her gun, she protects the reputation of her family. Banker also wrote the TV series A Mouthful of Sky and a multimedia serial called Vortal. Because of his early association with the science fiction genre, some of his works fall into the futuristic category too. These, too, have garnered attention in many literary circles. The stories of the “Devi” series, short works featuring avatars of the quintessential Hindu goddess or Devi, have appeared in various science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazines. In his novel, Gods of War, Banker takes the reader to a land of fantasy and science fiction. However, the fact remains that it was his recasting of Indian mythology in the mold of “western-style fantasy” that got him popularity. Banker also tried moving away from the classical mythology genre that defined his early career to the genre of autobiography. There is a strong autobiographical element in some of his novels too. Vertigo, the first one, though the fifth to be published, is about a man working hard to make a successful career while struggling with domestic life in Mumbai. It is intimate, personal, and intense and based on the author’s life at the time it was written. Another novel titled Byculla Boy takes its name from the Byculla suburb of Mumbai where he and his mother grew up; and his Beautiful Ugly is a tribute to his mother, depicting the sorrowful events of her life. Banker’s literary achievements also include novels such as The Eclipse of Dharma (2020), The Kingdom of Beasts (2020), The Sons of Misrule (2020), and A Dark Queen Rises (2021). His latest work titled Burnt Empire Saga, which targets the global reader, can be regarded as a literary by-product of his Mahabharata. It has elements that any epic fantasy reader would love to see in a thriller – a huge cast of characters, a quasi-historical setting with magical elements, exotic cities, quaint cultures, battles, political conflicts, weird creatures, sorcery, magical powers, and interesting protagonists entangled in an exciting plot.

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Further Reading Chowdary, Asha. “Ashok Banker on Real Art, Honest Emotions.” Entertainment Times, 6 Apr. 2012, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/books/features/ashok-banker-on-real-art-honestemotions/articleshow/12341160.cms. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025. John, Sujit. “Smartphones Drive eBook Sales in India.” The Times of India, 25 May  2014, https:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/smartphones-drive-ebook-sales-in-india/articleshow/35573256.cms. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025. Madhukar, Jayanthi. “Writing Epics Was Healthier and More Sustainable.” Bangalore Mirror, 18 Mar. 2012, https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/entertainment/lounge/writing-epics-was-healthierand-more-sustainable/articleshow/21412666.cms. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025. Vakkalanka, Harshini. “An Epic Undertaking.” The Hindu, 21 Mar. 2012, www.thehindu.com/features/ metroplus/an-epic-undertaking/article3024600.ece. Accessed 24 Jan. 2025.

RAJESH WILLIAMS

BARUA, JAHNAVI (1967–) Jahnavi Barua was born in Guwahati, Assam. Her father was in the Indian Administrative Service, and her mother was a doctorate in English literature and taught English at the university level. Because of her father’s frequent postings, she studied in seven different schools in Shillong, Guwahati, Delhi, and also in England. She did her MBBS from Guwahati Medical College and enrolled for her MD at St. Johns Medical College, Bangalore. However, she could not complete her medical studies for personal reasons. Growing up, she read a lot and also wrote some short fiction, but it was only after she took a break from medicine to look after her young son that Barua’s writing journey commenced in an almost accidental way. Confined to her home for over four years, she wrote short stories, not with the intent to publish but for her own pleasure. One of these stories, however, won a contest and secured her a Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship in Creative Writing in 2006. Subsequently, Penguin India published one of her stories in their anthology, First Proof. In 2008, they published her first collection of short fiction, Next Door, which was subsequently long-listed for the Frank O’Connor Short Story prize. Then followed Rebirth, her first novel in 2010, which was short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize and also the Commonwealth Prize. After a long break, she published her second novel, Undertow, which won the AutHER Award and the Kalinga Literary Festival Prize and was also long-listed for the JCB Prize and the Atta Galatta BLF Prize. Her short stories have been anthologized in many collections and her books are on many university syllabi. The stories of Next Door were written between 2002 and 2005, a time when Barua was largely at home with her newborn son who had been ill. During this period, she read more than she had ever read before and spent some time looking back at her life. All the stories in this collection are set in Assam and center around family, friendship, and finding one’s inner self. They explore love and loss, belonging and unbelonging, and nature and nationhood, ideas that hold a deep meaning for Barua. Barua’s first novel, Rebirth, stemmed from her own experience of motherhood which she describes as humbling and empowering at the same time. Rebirth is the story of a young woman who faces challenges in her arranged marriage. She is calm, subdued, and not used to being assertive or demonstrative. She leaves her hometown in Assam to join her husband in Bangalore but encounters unexpected challenges in her marriage and finds herself thrown into deep water. She does not know the city and does not have any friends or neighbors to share her experiences with. Out of her feeling of isolation, she ends up talking to her unborn child. Rebirth

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also explores the complex and subterranean dynamics at play between people, men and women, between members of a family, friends, and their natural and political environments. Her latest novel, Undertow, explores in detail issues that she has written about earlier, most importantly the concept of home. The story is strongly rooted in place, which becomes more than a setting, for it impacts a character in both trivial and deep ways. The river Brahmaputra becomes almost a living and breathing creature. The book is about finding a home in every sense of the word. In the course of this journey, Barua explores the issues of migration, being an outsider, family, and the love and destruction that migration can bring in its wake. She also examines the very complex relationships between siblings, husbands and wives, and between the concepts of nationhood and identity.

Further Reading Goswami, Uddipana. “Home, Away from Home: Violence, Womanhood and Home/Land in Jahnavi Barua’s Fiction.” South Asian Review, vol. 41, no. 3–4, 2020, pp. 273–287. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2020.1835135. Kakoti, Priyanka. “Voices from the Periphery: Indian English Writing from the Northeast.”  International Journal of Innovative Research and Advanced Studies, vol. 4, no. 5, 2017. IJIRAS, www.ijiras. com/2017/Vol_4-Issue_5/paper_48.pdf. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Sharma, Shiva Prasad. “Memory and Space in Jahnavi Barua’s Rebirth (2010).”  European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine, vol. 7, no. 3, 2020, pp. 4803–4810. EJMCM, https://ejmcm.com/ article_5168.html. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

HASAN NASSOUR

BASU, KUNAL (1956–) Kunal Basu was born on May 4, 1956, to Sunil Kumar Basu and Chabi Basu in Kolkata. He was brought up, by his own admission, in a bohemian setting with a great focus on literature and art. He attended Jadavpur University to get a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and was an active and vocal member of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) throughout his time in college. After his studies, he worked as a journalist, filmmaker, and lecturer at Jadavpur University. He pursued an academic career, earning a doctoral degree from McGill University in Canada and taught at various institutions including McGill University and IIM-Calcutta. Currently he teaches at Oxford University. Deeply influenced by the historical fiction of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, a keen evocation of Indian history remains a cornerstone in Kunal Basu’s writing style. Themes of memory, loss, and the nuances of intensely emotional relationships are a defining feature of his writing. As an immigrant to the West himself, he captures the cosmopolitan ethos and networks of cultural and linguistic exchange that mark the globalized world of today. His ability to traverse multiple cultural worlds is evident in his works in both Bengali and English. Basu published his first novel, The Opium Clerk, in 2001. Set in the backdrop of the colonial opium trade carried on by the British and Indian merchants with China in the late 19th century, the novel follows the experiences of Hiran, a clerk in the Calcutta opium auction house. The novel marks his early foray into the exploration of cultural contact, especially within the context of South-East Asia, which modern national memories may have no space for. Basu paints an evocative and vivid portrait of the world of the opium clipper ships and the various people and locales and diverse cultures brought together in this far-flung business. Basu’s most critically acclaimed work is his second novel, The Miniaturist (2003). Set in the lavish backdrop of Akbar’s court, the life story of the brilliantly talented painter Bihzad brings 32

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to life a complex historical epoch and also explores the relationship between art and the artist. Through his protagonist’s travails in the intrigues of the Mughal court, he explores the nuances of an artist’s view on reality and artifice as he attempts to leave an indelible imprint on the world around him. The novel effectively captures the panache of Mughal India at its political peak, without compromising the philosophical depth of the text. Most of Basu’s novels delve deep into historical contexts to deal with questions of cultural exchange and the functioning of historical memories that resonate in our political atmosphere. His novel Racists (2006), set in 1855, explores whether racism is innate to humanity or a learned response to societal prejudices. The Yellow Emperor’s Cure (2011) is about the Portuguese surgeon Antonio Maria who falls in love with a Chinese woman, Fumi. In his quest for a cure for his father’s syphilis in the East, he ends up losing faith in Western medicine. The novel exemplifies Basu’s unique perspectives on using historical stories to understand modern anxieties. His most recent novels have been set in more contemporary contexts. Endgame (2020) describes the experiences of an Indian war correspondent following the American military in Iraq, suggesting a new evolution in Basu’s recent work. Basu’s collection of short stories, The Japanese Wife (2008), revolves around ordinary characters engaged in experiencing extraordinary emotions and living through times filled with the potential for both happiness and heartbreak. His penchant for exploring the possibility of sharing intimacies across cultural boundaries defines his vision of the world even as his stories flow from Zurich to Tiananmen Square.

Further Reading Basu, Kunal. “In Conversation with Kunal Basu.” Interview by Rituparna Roy. IIAS Newsletter, vol. 48, Autumn 2008. IIAS, www.iias.asia/sites/default/files/nwl_article/2019-05/IIAS_NL49_16.pdf. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Doctor, Geeta. “Kunal Basu’s Novel, Opium Clerk, Is an Exuberant Tale of Mud and Need.” India Today, 9 Jul. 2001, www.indiatoday.in/magazine/society-and-the-arts/books/story/20010709-book-reviewof-kunal-basus-the-opium-clerk-773756-2001-07-08. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Jhaveri, Dileep. “Review: Contemplating Death.” Indian Literature, vol. 53, no. 4, 2009, pp. 248–252. Rai, Indrani. “Kunal Basu’s ‘The Japanese Wife’: Can True Happiness Exist Only in Acceptance?” LangLit, vol. 2, 2016, pp. 189–191. Roy, Rituparna. “Of Art and the Artist: Kunal Basu’s the Miniaturist as a Mughal/Modern Novel.” Writing India Anew: Indian-English Fiction 2000–2010, edited by Krishna Sen and Rituparna Roy. Amsterdam UP, 2013, pp. 111–126.

AMITRAJEET MUKHERJEE

BASU, SAMIT (1979–) Samit Basu was born in Kolkata on December 14, 1979, in a Bengali Brahmin family. He attended Don Bosch School and graduated from Presidency College in Kolkata with a degree in economics. He enrolled at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad but dropped out to pursue a broadcasting and documentary filmmaking course at Westminster College in London. He resides and works in Delhi and Mumbai at present and publishes the Duck of Dystopia newsletter. Basu rose to prominence in India in 2003, when Outlook Magazine named him one of the sixteen Indian achievers under the age of twenty-five. He was also named the “most promising emerging Indian” in the Indian Market Research Bureau survey in 2007. Basu has written and directed film scripts. House Arrest, his first feature film, premiered in 2019 on Netflix and quickly became one of the most popular Indian offerings that year. 33

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In 2003, Penguin India released his debut book, The Simoquin Prophecies. It was the first installment of the Game Trilogy. The plot hinges on two prophecies that were made 200 years before the time covered in the novel, during the “Great War.” Isara, Princess of Asroye, and Nasak, the Demon Hunter, were Ravian heroes who vanquished the enemy, Danh-Gem of the Rakshasas, two centuries ago. Even so, Danh-Gem promised to return at the appropriate time, considering himself to be the perfect dark lord. While the chosen hero is away on a quest, another young hero learns of the terrible things the hero must do in secret and the tough choices he must make to save the world. The arrival of the devil is seen in the opening scene of the second book of the Game World Trilogy, Manticore’s Secret. Heroes assisted the Ravians’ entrance into this world. Danh-Gem wishes for their master Rakshas to return and rule the world. The Game World Trilogy depicts the arrival of heroes to resist the power of the dark lord. When the hero and the dark lord appear, both are equally powerful. The Unwaba Revelations is the final installment of the Game World Trilogy, which was released in 2007. The Unwaba is a chameleon borrowed from a similar creature in Zulu tradition and serves as the narrator of the story. To save the world and defeat the gods at their own game, a solution must be found. God has complete power over everyone, including the heroes. He gives the heroes ultimate power so that no one could defeat them. In Turbulence (2012), all 403 passengers onboard the British Airways flight 142, from London to India, acquire special abilities they dream of due to a turbulence in the air. For instance, one develops into a brilliant inventor, another can control the weather, and a third can make multiple clones of oneself. The protagonist, Aman Sen, finds that everyone else on board has extraordinary abilities that match their deepest desires. Resistance (2014) is a sequel to Turbulence. The narrative now shifts into the near future. The world has undergone a significant change as people slowly discover which flight paths give them additional abilities. There is a shift in the balance of power. Some of the original characters from Turbulence are still working to improve the world. However, some unruly elements begin to target and kill both heroes and villains from New York to Tokyo, and it is up to the former to put a stop to them. The City of Inside (2022) is the latest novel by Basu. It was earlier published as Chosen Spirits in 2020 by Simon and Schuster, India. The novel examines temptation from parallel perspectives, as seen through the eyes of two future Delhi residents – Joey and Rudra. Joey, a reality show producer, manages his college friend, Indi, who is quickly becoming one of South Asia’s most popular internet personalities. Once part of a powerful and wealthy family, Rudra is now socially isolated and spends most of his time playing video games. After his father’s death, he is almost coaxed back into the family business before Joey steps in and offers him a job. At the beginning of the story, neither protagonist cares much about politics, but as the plot progresses, they begin to recognize the stark contrast between the powerful and the rest of society. Basu’s writing style examines power-relations through multifocal lenses and creates new spaces and dimensions of power-play in his works.

Further Reading Basu, Samit. “Interview with Samit Basu.” Conducted by Abhijit Bhaduri. Abhijitbhaduri.com, 2010, www.abhijitbhaduri.com/blog/2010/06/13/interview-with-samit-basu. Accessed 11 Nov. 2022. ———. “Everyday Dystopia: Conversation with Samit Basu.” Interview by Arley Sorg. Clarkesworld: Science Fiction  & Fantasy Magazine, no. 189. Clarkesworld, 2022, clarkesworldmagazine.com/basu_ interview/. Accessed 11 Nov. 2022.

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Encyclopedia Entries ———. “Exclusive Interview: ‘The City Inside’ Author Samit Basu.” Interview by Paul Semel. PaulSemel. com, 2022, paulsemel.com/exclusive-interview-the-city-inside-author-samit-basu/. Accessed 11 Nov. 2022.

NITIKA STAN

BECOMING INDIAN: THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION OF CULTURE AND IDENTITY by Pavan K. Varma Pavan K. Varma, an Indian politician and author-diplomat, follows up his book Being Indian with a meditation on the legacy of colonialism in his Becoming Indian. Varma explores the myriad ways by which colonialism is given a new lease of life through a discussion of the Indian cultural psyche. His Introduction clarifies that his main aim is to study the afterlife of colonialism in the domain of culture and identity in postcolonial India. Here, Varma asserts the use of “unfinished” in the title to indicate the ongoing and incomplete project of the “reappropriation of one’s cultural space” in the 20th and 21st centuries. The first chapter outlines his familial background, especially his father’s upbringing in preindependence India, and his acute awareness of his positionality as a privileged, upper-class, upper-caste, English-speaking man. Drawing vastly from his own cultural background, Varma’s main argument in this chapter revolves around the cultural amnesia that has gripped the formerly colonized. This in turn leads to a “de-culturization” where one is made unfamiliar with one’s own past and cultural heritage. Varma then takes a historical turn in chapters two and three and analyzes, predominantly, the legacy of Thomas Babington Macaulay and his problematic attitude toward Eastern knowledge. Varma delves into the continued presence of Macaulayan ideology in Indian pedagogy where English dominates over the vernaculars. Additionally, this chapter focuses on the Indian reformer, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, and the Urdu poet, Mirza Ghalib, to emphasize the creation of a well-meaning, educated Indian elite that ultimately accepts the modernizing Western ideology. In chapter  4, Varma looks at the architectural legacy of the British Empire, visible most prominently in Lutyens Delhi and the city of Chandigarh. The question that underlines this chapter is: Why do Indians prefer modern, Western forms of architecture and pride over the remnants of British colonial architecture when India has a profound and exceptional architectural history? He surmises that there lies “an inequity in the creative interaction between the colonizer and the colonized.” Following this argument, the next chapter deals with the brilliance of Indian cultural heritage – mainly classical music, dance, and native art forms – that is getting increasingly Westernized. Once again, in a prescriptive tone, Varma nudges the target audience to revive the original artistic spirit of India to regain self-respect. The last two chapters take on the themes of cultural identity, diversity, and multiculturalism in the light of diasporic experiences. Varma stridently argues against getting co-opted in a fastpaced globalizing world that homogenizes individual identities. The chapters consider how the minority Indian population in Britain has made a place for itself in a hostile, anti-immigrant environment. Varma maintains that individual, religious, and cultural differences should not and cannot be ironed, no matter what the assimilative agenda of a country’s government may be. In the final chapter, Varma reiterates, “Empires metamorphose; they do not die the moment direct rule ceases.” Varma’s erudition is evident in the number and quality of sources he cites in favor of his arguments. His references include notable scholars and writers such as Amartya Sen, Bhikhu Parekh, and Edward Said, among many others. In chapters that deal with India’s cultural past, Varma’s breadth of historical knowledge is evident in his discussion of the ancient Indian treatises he 35

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cites. However, a host of Varma’s arguments are backed by his personal experiences. He derives his arguments from various dinner conversations with notables, tête-à-tête over tea, informal and formal talks during celebrity meetings, etc. Varma, a well-traveled diplomat, also draws from his experiences of visits to places of cultural significance. As such, this book is an amalgamation of anecdotal and scholarly writing. The book ends on a prescient note. Varma notes that such homogenizing powers will lead to the birth of counterforces that will resist assimilation through religious extremism and fundamentalism. Twelve years after the publication of the book, one can only marvel at Varma’s foresight in predicting the present state of India. The book, although coming across as stringently prescriptive at times, has much to offer to those interested in South Asian and Empire studies.

Further Reading Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton UP, 1993. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon and Schuster, 1996. Metcalf, Thomas R. Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge UP, 1995. Parekh, Bhikhu C. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Harvard UP, 2000. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. Columbia UP, 2014.

SHEKHA KOTAK

BHAGAT, CHETAN (1974–) Born in New Delhi to a lieutenant colonel father and an agricultural scientist mother, Chetan Bhagat comes from a relatively privileged upper middle-class background. He attended the Army Public School in Delhi, judged among the very top in the chain of private schools run by a welfare society for children of army personnel. After his schooling, he joined the IIT Delhi in 1991 to be trained as a mechanical engineer and graduated in 1995. He earned his MBA from IIM Ahmedabad in 1997 and began his career as an investment banker in Hong Kong. Bhagat started writing during his tenure as an investment banker and quit the job in 2009 after his first three books sold well. He has authored ten novels so far and three of his nonfiction books have attracted a lot of publicity through newspapers. The first novel, Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT (2004), revolves around three friends at IIT Delhi who lag behind on a very rigorous academic path. Their attempts to dupe the academically demanding IIT system, while having some fun along the way, lead them into serious trouble with the authorities, particularly with their conservative and harsh head of the department, whose daughter befriends Hari, the main narrator and protagonist. A love affair, suspension from college, an attempted suicide in the present, and a successful one in the past, heighten the drama in the novel. The title refers to the relatively lower grade points of the three friends among their classmates. The novel could be read as a critical take on the over-demanding academic system of the IITs within the larger themes of love and friendship, which sustain most of Bhagat’s early work. The next novel, One Night @ the Call Center (2005), apparently tries to tackle the issues peculiar to call centers, particularly the necessity of hiding the true identity of Indians catering to American clients. A call from God sets right the course for six main characters whose lives are going haywire. 3 Mistakes of My Life (2008) is set in Gujarat and follows the friendship of three young men whose passion for cricket and business provide the themes for the novel in the backdrop of the three major real events in the state of Gujarat: an earthquake and two related but distinct horrifying communal events. These two novels begin with the author meeting the 36

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people whose stories are told in these novels. 2 States: Story of My Marriage (2009) is a comic reworking of the experience of the author’s own marriage to a South Indian woman. The narrative technique of people meeting the author to share their true stories, as in One Night and 3 Mistakes, continues in Bhagat’s next three novels, Revolution 2020 (2011), HalfGirlfriend (2014), and One Indian Girl (2016). These three novels are about choosing a life partner, which the heroines of these novels invariably must do. After the latter three, Bhagat’s novels are those which may be placed in the genre of crime fiction. In The Girl in Room 105 (2019), the author meets Keshav Rajpurohit, who is also from IIT Delhi but much junior to him, and the novel tells the story of Keshav’s love for a girl named Zara Lone from Kashmir. In an attempt to find the murdered Zara’s killer, this novel transforms Keshav and another friend, Saurabh, into detectives, who later in One Arranged Murder (2020) and 400 Days (2021), continue as two techies pairing up as amateur detectives gradually going on to become seasoned sleuths. All the novels by Bhagat have been commercially very successful. This success afforded him regular space in newspapers wherein he comments on all the major economic, social, and political problems in contemporary Indian society. He also touts himself rather successfully as a public speaker claiming to motivate professionals and students alike. Bhagat deliberately and effectively distances himself from the serious sort of literary fiction. This distancing leads him to be either ignored in critical literary discourse or to be summarily dismissed owing to the nature of his fiction – sustained by glamour, prurience, spectacle, and crime – full of clichés, stereotypes, and repetitions. The fact that many of his novels have now been made into mainstream commercial films attests to, and pushes forward, a type of writing which relies on external events getting more and more shocking and implausible. The relationship of these novels with the reality felt and experienced by people in Indian society is tenuous. The commercial success of Bhagat’s novels and the tidy sums of money involved (destination wedding at 5-star resort, fifty crore rupee loans, seven crore prize, last-minute bookings at Taj Hotel, and the like) in his novels obfuscate the evaluations of his contribution to society and its understanding through literature. He seems to have applied his techno-managerial and marketing prowess to an old human instinct for stories, particularly so in a poor and aspiring section of society, to his great benefit. His work could be called a phenomenon in the publishing industry though not quite so in the realm of belles-lettres.

Further Reading Anjaria, Ulka. “The New Provincialism.” Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture. Temple UP, 2019, pp. 27–52. Joshi, Priya. “Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India.” History of Indian Novel in English, edited by Ulka Anjaria. Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 310–323.

YASH PAL

BHASIN, KAMLA (1946–2021) Kamla Bhasin was born on April 24, 1946, in Shahidanwali village (now in Pakistan) in the Punjab province of British India. Even though she was born more than a year before the independence of the country, she proudly considers herself belonging to the Midnight’s generation. The experience of her earlier life where she spent the formative years of her life living in various rural locations enriched her learning, which possibly helped form the undeniably firm conviction she possessed in pursuing her aim of achieving equality in terms of gender and caste. 37

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She completed her master’s degree from a university in Rajasthan and was later awarded a scholarship to study sociology of development in West Germany. Coming back to India upon completion of her doctorate and a year-long teaching stint, she joined Seva Mandir (founded by Dr Mohan Mehta in 1968), a grassroot NGO based in Udaipur in Rajasthan, involved primarily in natural resource development and sustainability, village development, women empowerment, education and health care, continuing education, and children’s welfare. It was while working for the various endeavors of Seva Mandir that she realized the power of the tentacles of caste system within the Hindu society. Also, at the same time, she saw the inferior position of women not just within the structure of caste but the society in general. Her realization arose out of her experience on the ground; among the poor it is the women who occupied the position of the poorest, when it came to the Dalits, it was their women folk who formed the most vulnerable lot. It was at this point of time that she became a conscious feminist, evolving from a developing worker to a feminist developmental worker, seeing for herself how gender and caste mingled to make things impossible for millions. Her consciousness about feminism, which she saw not as a war between men and women but as a war between two ideologies, developed into expressing her concerns through writing: poetry, songs (she has written more than two hundred) and social thesis. Her poem “Kyunki Mein Ladki Hoon Mujhey Padhna Hai” (Because/Since I  am a Girl I  Have to Study) is a powerful expression of what she embodies – developmental feminism. The poem is a dialogue initiated by a girl’s father, followed by the rest of the total five stanzas where the girl child lists her fears, apprehensions, obstacles and aspirations for which she has a single solution, the only way forward – education. A  famous song written by her is “Tod tod ke bandhanon ko, dekho behne aatee hain” (Sisters Do Come, Having Overcome and Dismantled Their Obstacles and Restraints). Most of these songs proved to be very powerful during protests and marches. She was the pioneer or a part of many initiatives for social change in South Asia – Women’s Initiative for Peace in South Asia (WIPSA), Pak India People’s Forum for Democracy and Peace (PIPFDP), and One Billion Rising campaign against sexual violence. She co-authored, along with Ritu Menon, one of the most seminal texts on the condition of women during the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 – Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. The book was published in 1998. The book provided firsthand accounts of the pain, dislocation, suffering, humiliation, and exploitation of women during the partition of India and Pakistan (both East and West). It was possibly the greatest migration in the history of humankind. The book takes all pains to go into the details that are normally ignored in traditional historical writing. The saga of the body of the partitioned woman, of either nationality or religion, form the core of the thesis. The book showed in very unambiguous ways how such an important aspect can compel scholars to write history from a very different point of view. Her What is Patriarchy (1993) sets out to ask very important and fundamental questions about the entire paraphernalia of the male subordination of not just women but everything else beside it. The questions seek to find out whether it subordinates all women in the same way everywhere else in the world or whether there is also an institutional character inherent in tendency and the age-old practice and prevalence of patriarchy. The questions seek not just answers but tend to shake the very tyranny to its roots. Her minor booklets also follow her passion for an attempt to drive in a basic understanding of feminism, carrying out also sensitization of issues related to women, their rights, privileges and their struggles. They include Feminism and its Relevance in South Asia (1986), Understanding Gender (2000) and Exploring Masculinity (2004). Bhasin also made a relentless attack 38

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on Capitalism as she believed that it was an instrument of patriarchy. Her feminism was against patriarchy, against sexism and also against discrimination. She authored Laughing Matters (2004) along with Bindia Thapar who contributed in terms of cartoons and sketches. The book is a collection of jokes typical of the feminist way of looking at things, with an extraordinary ability to laugh at themselves. This novel’s attempt aimed at creating humorous situations around the themes of struggle of feminism so that things could be enjoyed and understood at the same time. The jokes and cartoons are divided under thirteen different categories ranging from “Home” to “Growing up,” “Sex” and “Marriage”. The book was translated into Hindi as Hasna to Sangharshon Mein Bhi Zaroori Hai. She wrote many nursery rhymes and books for children, including Malu Bhalu (1999), illustrated by Bindia Thapar. After rendering twenty-five years of service to the United Nations, she began to work for Sangat, a community of gender activists to promote genuine development and meaningful progress in the society, which was the result of “realization of the fact that the space for transformatory gender work was steadily declining.” She had a great faith in the power of theory: the theory of struggle and the theory of change as she believed in a genuine mixture of theory and action to be able to achieve any substantial results. She did not advocate the supremacy of women over men or the predominance of women’s issues over the others. All she struggled for all her life was equality. She died of cancer in 2021.

Further Reading Roy, Rituparna. South Asian Partition Fiction in English: From Khushwant Singh to Amitav Ghosh. Amsterdam UP, 2010.

HARSH VARDHAN KHIMTA

BHATT, SUJATA (1956–) Sujata Bhatt was born on May 6, 1956, in Ahmedabad in a Gujarati Brahmin family and spent her childhood years in Pune. She moved to the United States with her family in 1968, graduated with an MFA from the Writers’ Workshop, University of Iowa, and at present resides with her husband, the German writer Michael Augustin, and daughter in Bremen, Germany. She has nine poetry collections: Brunizem (1988), Monkey Shadows (1991), The Stinking Rose (1995), Point No Point: Selected Poems (1997), Augatora (2000, published in India by Penguin Books as My Mother’s Way of Wearing a Sari), A Colour for Solitude (2002), Pure Lizard (2008), Collected Poems (2013), and Poppies in Translation (2015), all published by Carcanet Press, Manchester. Nothing is Black, Really Nothing, a bilingual (English-German) edition of her poems, appeared in 1998 (Wehrhahn-Verlag, Hannover). Bhatt has translated Gujarati poetry into English; she also translates from German into English. She has been a visiting writer/poet-in-residence at the University of Victoria, British Colombia; Dickinson College, Pennsylvania; the Poetry Archive, London; and in Ireland. Bhatt won a Cholmondeley Award, 1991; the Italian Tratti Poetry Prize, 2000; and the German Literature Award, Das neue Buch, 2008. She is the first recipient of the Mexican International Poetry Prize, 2014. Bhatt’s use of Gujarati and Sanskrit words in the original script along with English in her poetry is striking. Bhatt’s debut collection, Brunizem, won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. The title, a French and Russian coinage, is a dark prairie soil that reflects the poet’s composite experience of Asia, Europe, and North America, where it is found. Brunizem brings together characters from history and mythology – Sujata, the first disciple of Buddha; Eurydice; Marie Curie; Parvati; Van Gogh; and others. Gender 39

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concerns are resolutely etched out in a poem on menstruating woman who is considered “untouchable.” Monkey Shadows highlights the primeval in mankind. As the “young human child” and the “langur” stare at each other strangely, one thinks of the innocence once possessed and now lost. The feral quality of the poems challenges the flawed idea of development in human societies. The poems of The Stinking Rose challenge the orthodox rejection of garlic. From “Russown” in Gujarati to “Knoblauch” in German and “Ninniku” in Japanese, garlic is presented in different ways. Garlic has five of the six earthly rasas; it possesses vitality and healing powers. Point No Point carries poems from the three earlier collections. A Colour for Solitude (2002) has ekphrastic poems inspired by the work of the German modernist painter, Paula Modersohn-Becker and the sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff, wife of poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The collection gives active agency to these two women artists and brings forth the camaraderie between them and their relationship with Rilke. Pure Lizard examines the beautiful and the grotesque through a complete ecosystem peopled with the lizard, the crow, hyacinths, snake, monkey, and many more from the natural world. It also carries poems in response to etchings and lithographs by Paula Rego. Bhatt’s Poppies in Translation distills nature’s circadian rhythms. The frogs sing to the nightingale, she to the fields, the gecko’s call brings in good luck, the ornithologists are “silent poets,” butterflies have the “Soul of a leopard.” Poignantly conscious of the orality of language, Bhatt asks – “How many languages must you learn/before you can understand your own?” “Magelang Morning” journeys through different languages, “Bahasa Indonesia, Sanskrit, Gujarati, and English,” to show how emotions and concepts are translated from one to the other, how the Indonesian cinta resonates with the Sanskrit chinta. With roots in Gujarat and a life in Germany, Bhatt twines the diasporic experience into a multicultural mosaic in her poetry.

Further Reading Basu, Lopamudra. “The Languages of Diaspora: Meena Alexander, Sujata Bhatt, Imtiaz Dharker.” A History of Indian Poetry in English, edited by Rosinka Chaudhuri. Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 389–404. Chaudhuri, Sutapa. “The Poems of Sujata Bhatt.” Muse India, vol. 47, 2013. Mujumder, Aarati R. “Mapping Multicultural Identities in Sujata Bhatt’s Poetry.” The Quest, vol. 21, no. 2, 2007, pp. 32–44. Paul, Premila. “Sujata Bhatt.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 323, South Asian Writers in English, edited by Fakrul Alam. Thomson Gale, 2006, pp. 35–40. Paul, Sharrad. “The Memory of the Tongue: Sujata Bhatt’s Diasporic Verse.” Mascara Literary Review, Jan. 2011, www.mascarareview.com/the-memory-of-the-tongue-sujata-bhatts-diasporic-verse-by-paulsharrad/. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023. Sandten, Cecile. “In Her Own Voice: Sujata Bhatt and the Aesthetic Articulation of the Diasporic Condition.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 99–120.

PAYAL NAGPAL

BHATTACHARYA, BHABANI (1906–1988) Bhabani Bhattacharya was born in Bihar and graduated with a degree in English literature from Patna University in 1927. He subsequently studied at the University of London where he completed his doctorate in history in 1934. Here he was influenced by several Marxist groups, in particular the Marxist political philosopher Harold Laski who shaped his political views. This association shaped Bhattacharya’s social and literary perspective and finds expression in his lifelong empathy for the underclasses. A much-traveled man, Bhattacharya had a checkered 40

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career in which he worked as a journalist and a diplomat before settling into an academic career in the United States at the Universities of Hawaii and Seattle. He passed away from a heart attack in 1988. Bhattacharya has published several fiction and nonfiction books. While a student in London, he published in reputed publications like The Spectator, The Bookman, and The Manchester Guardian. In 1930 he published a well-received translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry, The Golden Boat. His writing attracted the attention of Tagore, who consequently became an informal mentor and urged him to write in English. In 1947, he published So Many Hungers! and in 1954, He Who Rides a Tiger, his two novels on the Bengal Famine of 1943. Music for Mohini, published in 1952, is perhaps his most popular novel, and he followed that up with A Goddess Named Gold in 1960. In 1966 he was honored with the Sahitya Akademi Award for Shadow from Ladakh. An edited collection of essays by Tagore, Towards Universal Man: Essays by Rabindranath Tagore, was published in 1961, and a book on Gandhi entitled Gandhi: The Writer, in 1969. In 1969 he accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Hawaii and settled permanently in the United States by 1972. Of all his works, Bhattacharya’s two novels on the Bengal Famine of 1943, So Many Hungers! and He Who Rides a Tiger continue to receive scholarly attention even today. Published in the immediate aftermath of the famine, which raged from 1943–1946, Bhattacharya indicts the artificial nature of the famine created by mismanagement and British colonial policies. It is a scorching indictment of the scarcity of rice caused by hoarding and profiteering. Written in the social realist style, the novel portrays the plight of the starving masses in Bengal – especially the peasants, who migrated to Calcutta in search of food but were instead met with callousness and active hostility – with moving empathy. Hunger also functions as a metaphor for sexual desire, greed, as well as for dignity and food. Kajoli, the young peasant woman who struggles to feed her mother and brother, abandons the temptation to prostitute herself as a means of supporting her family and decides to sell newspapers instead. In He Who Rides the Tiger, a scathing satire on the hoarders and “pillars of society,” Kalo, a blacksmith who is jailed for stealing a bunch of bananas, vows revenge on society. Both novels are ambivalent about the efficacy of Gandhian nonviolence in the face of starvation, while at the same time shying away from violence as a strategy to change institutional and social structures for a more just society. In Music for Mohini, Bhattacharya debates the possibility of melding Eastern traditions with the advances of Western science and modernity in the story of Mohini, a city-born girl who weds Jayadev, a scholar-activist based in rural India who believes in progressive politics that should reform a caste-bound and superstitious society. Mohini becomes an ardent partner of her husband working to change the lives of the poor by changing their social outlook. The novel features many characters, each of whom represents a particular social outlook. Thus, for instance, Jayadev’s mother is a firm believer in tradition and custom and has conservative views about the role of women and about caste relations. One of Jayadev’s and Mohini’s big triumphs is to change her to embrace their social reform mission. Shadow of Ladakh is a philosophical novel of ideas that pits Nehruvian Developmentalism and the belief in modernization and industrialism against Gandhian notions of a village-based society and agrarian economy embodied in the characters of Bhaskar, an Americanized CEO of a steel mill, and Satyajit, the leader of a utopian peasant community of Gandhigram respectively. Set against the backdrop of the Sino-Indian war of 1965, the novel opens with the shocking news of the invasion of Ladakh by the Chinese. The female characters in the novel, Suruchi and Sumita, Satyajit’s wife and daughter, help bring about a reconciliation between the diametrically opposed views of the two men. 41

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In Gandhi the Writer, Bhattacharya traces the evolution of Gandhi as a writer and highlights the circumstances that made Gandhi wield his pen with purpose and power. Gandhi was a huge influence on Bhattacharya, and in this book, he explores the power of Gandhi’s writings on Indian literature and on writers like himself. In many ways, Bhattacharya’s novels are marked by polemics; they often function as a thinly designed vehicle for his ideas and reveal the conflict between the need for radical change and the status quo. There is an anxiety about the outbreak of violence that will upend millennia old social structures and customs that lend Indian culture its peculiar grace and richness. And yet, the novels also recognize the need for harmonizing modernity and tradition to lead to the much-needed progress and reform of Indian society.

Further Reading Anjaria, Ulka. Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form. Cambridge UP, 2012. Desai, S. K. Bhabani Bhattacharya. Makers of Indian Literature. Sahitya Akademi, 1995. Gopal, Priyamvada. “ ‘Curious Ironies’: Matter and Meaning in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Novel of the 1943 Bengal Famine.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 32, no. 3, 2001, pp. 61–88. Kaur, Rajender. “The Vexed Question of Peasant Passivity: Nationalist Discourse and the Debate on Peasant Resistance in Literary Representations of the Bengal Famine of 1943.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 50, no. 4, 2014, pp. 269–281. Shimer, Dorothy B. Bhabani Bhattacharya. Twayne, 1975.

RAJENDER KAUR

BLACK HILL, THE, by Mamang Dai Mamang Dai’s The Black Hill (2014) is one of the finest novels to have come out of the 21st century India. A historical fiction set in the mid-19th century, the novel tells the story of “a man, a woman, and a priest.” It is the story of a young man named Kajinsha, of the Mishmee tribe, who is accused of and later executed for the inexplicable murder of Father Nicolas Krick, a French Jesuit priest whose mission in the 1950s was to establish a church in Tibet. Mamang Dai supplements this historical event with a poignant romance between Kajinsha and Gimur, a girl from the Abor tribe. The novel begins with a prologue in which the narrator communicates directly in the first person to the readers. The rest of the story is told from a third-person omniscient point of view, sometimes moving to and fro in time. The novel follows two parallel narratives of Gimur, the Abor girl of Mebo village, and of the French priest Nicholas Michel Krick, which intersect when the characters meet. The narrative begins in the year 1847 when Mebo village is in a stir with the news of the arrival of the British – the migluns – at their doorstep. In her village which is now “alive with the brightness of bamboo flares, the pounding of feet and cries of welcome,” Gimur meets Kajinsha who falls in love with her. Kajinsha’s father had left his place in the constantly warring tribes to live in peace in a place on the route to Tibet. To avoid the conflict Kajinsha’s father had made a pact with the people of Tibet that he would not let strangers enter the place through that route and in return they would not disturb their peace. Months pass and the British presence grows. Gimur becomes pregnant and informs Kajinsha, who tells her that he already has a son Awesa, from Tibetan girl named Auli, who he had married to strengthen the ties his father had made but did not live with her. Nevertheless, Gimur decides to leave Mebo and elopes with Kajinsha. Far away in France, in October 1848, a twenty-nine-year-old Jesuit Priest Nicolas Krick joins 42

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Société des Missions Étrangères (the Society of Foreign Mission of Paris) and wants to build a church of Christ in Tibet. Since the Chinese did not permit the routes to Tibet via China, Krick travels to Tibet through the southern side via Assam. Later in the novel, Krick is murdered and Kajinsha is sentenced to death by the British for assassinating him. The novel is history metamorphosed into fiction. Dai, while exploring the worlds of the Adi and Mishmee community, reconstructs the history of the region, intertwining it with narratives of love and loss. The novel foregrounds the most lasting effects of British colonization on the tribal communities of Northeast India, especially the spread of Christianity. The arrival of Krick is an important historical event that marks the beginning of Christianity in the region. Although Dai’s perspective on the influence of Christianity remains ambivalent and Krick has been portrayed as a liberal humanist and devout Christian with a spiritual calling to spread the word of God, the writer presents the strained relationship between the Christian priest and the clan. The novel also underscores the critical historical rupture colonialism introduced and the disruptions it wreaked on the age-old existing social structures of the hills. It reveals how memories of oral cultures and ritualistic performative traditions have been systematically erased and eliminated due to onslaughts of colonialism. Kajinsha meets a tragic death, but his final words to Gimur echo the postcolonial angst: “Tell them we also had something to say. But we cannot read and write. So we tell stories.”

Further Reading Baishya, Amit. Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival. Routledge, 2020. Misra, Tilottoma. The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India. Oxford UP, 2011. Mukherjee, Sumana. “Book Review: The Black Hill by Mamang Dai.” Mint, 6 Feb. 2015, www.livemint. com/Leisure/TUOEFuIRdb4LjdAmJJ3NyK/Book-Review-The-Black-Hill-by-Mamang-Dai.html. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

RAHUL CHATURVEDI

BOND, RUSKIN (1934–) Born in 1934 in Kasauli (a hill town in Himachal Pradesh), Ruskin Bond is an Anglo-Indian novelist, short story writer, columnist, essayist, and poet who has over five hundred works to his credit. His contribution as a writer of children’s fiction has received global acclaim, and many of his works have made their way into the Indian curricula at the school and collegiate levels. His location as an Anglo-Indian writer in the Indian literary scene and his conflicts with the question of identity have often been subjected to critical scrutiny by scholars. With a career that spans over six decades, Bond’s authorial journey witnessed and unraveled against the backdrop and evolution of the nation itself – from its colonial past through its independence to its post-independent present. The quaint locales that Bond resided in – which include but are not limited to Jamnagar, Delhi, Mussoorie, Shimla, Channel Islands, and London (among others) – often make their way into his writings through their topographies, cultures and characters. Bond’s works have featured in newspapers and magazines like The Independent, Deccan Herald, The Asia Magazine, and The Telegraph. While his literary output can be easily categorized under “post-colonial literature,” it must also be emphasized that his narratives touch upon a wide and extensive range of themes. However, a substantial number of his short stories revolve around real and imagined experiences of childhood. Bond entered the literary scene at the young age of seventeen with the novel The Room on the Roof (1956), for which he won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize the subsequent 43

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year. A unique novel about adolescence, narrated primarily through the voice of an adolescent protagonist, it comprises a narrative that follows the life of a young Anglo-Indian boy. Rapt with semi-autobiographical elements, the story unfolds against the picturesque landscapes of Dehradun. The Room on the Roof voices the young author’s complex negotiations with loneliness and longing. The work received favorable reviews, and its new edition was brought out in 1987 by Penguin India. Bond is a versatile writer who straddles varied tropes and themes. Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra (1991) is a collection of fourteen semi-autobiographical short stories, which include “Calypso Christmas,” “Escape from Java,” and “Desert Rhapsody.” This compilation, like many of his other works, attempts to paint vivid, detailed images of the landscape in which the stories are set. Through succinct, real, and fictionalized conversations between families, friends, and acquaintances, the work presents a dialogue that knits together myriad stories – each with its own stock of myths and memories. These stories take the reader on an imaginary voyage in varied geographical locations, from Java and London to Delhi and Dehradun. Bond received the Sahitya Akademi Award for this collection in 1992. A Season of Ghosts (1999) is a collection of ten stories, which includes “Whistling in the Dark,” “On Fairy Hill,” and “The Black Cat.” Tapping into familiar superstitions, Bond attempts to chronicle gripping fictional accounts using the supernatural and the folkloric as key narrative tropes. While experimenting with the genre of horror he is careful to sketch these stories using images that are palatable to a young audience. Bond has also brought out a larger compilation of short stories titled A Face in the Dark and Other Hauntings: Collected Stories of the Supernatural (2004) that deals with similar themes. His penchant for reinventing folk tales, legends, regional belief systems and local myths is exemplified at its creative best in the collection Tales and Legends from India (1982). Bond’s autobiography, Lone Fox Dancing: My Autobiography (2017), is a candid glimpse into his evolution as a writer. Imbued with a striking candor, the authorial voice weaves together many experiences from his life that curated his literary aspirations. He dwells upon the many towns he resided in and why these locations are crucial to the fictional worlds he creates. In lucid prose, he reminisces his childhood, his search for a family, his failures, his travails, and his early literary adventures. Lone Fox Dancing helps understand Bond’s literary imagination and the many experiences that informed his fictional and poetic narratives. Bond has also penned a memoir titled Scenes from a Writer’s Life: A  Memoir (1997) that aptly captures his early memories and struggles with his Anglo-Indian identity. The work, alongside its many remarkable aspects, also serves as a poignant record of his earliest confrontations with the feelings of abandonment and loneliness which ensued because of his parents’ strained marriage and domestic conflicts. Scenes from a Writer’s Life also highlights the author’s early engagements with books. How to be a Writer (2020) is yet another work of nonfiction by Bond. It has been written in the form of tips, tricks and practical advice aimed at enlightening aspiring writers as well as readers about his writing process. Replete with insights into his writing career, this work, along with his autobiography and memoir, sheds light on the influences – literary and otherwise – that shaped Bond’s career. Two works – Confessions of a Book Lover (2017) and Love Among the Bookshelves (2014) – detail Bond’s views on books that sparked his interest in literature. These works, containing select snippets from the books that influenced him and the narratives he grew up with, also highlight the author’s critical insights into the nature and significance of such works. In addition to the works discussed earlier, it is worth mentioning a few among the rich body of literary and non-literary texts that Bond has produced over the years. The Adventures of Rusty

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(1981), The Whistling School-boy and Other Stories of School Life (2015) and The Blue Umbrella (1974) are among his well-known works in the genre of children’s literature. The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories (1988) and Time Stops at Shamli (1989) are compilations of Bond’s acclaimed short stories. He has also produced a significant corpus of poetic output including but not limited to the following: Hip-Hop Nature Boy and Other Poems (2012), I was the Wind Last Night: New and Collected Poems (2017), and Ruskin Bond’s Book of Verse (2016). Bond co-edited (with Ganesh Saili) a cookbook titled The Landour Cookbook: Over Hundred Years of Hillside Cooking, and it was published in 2005. His novella, A Flight of Pigeons (published in the early 1970s), was adapted into a film named Junoon (1978), directed by Shyam Benegal. Some of his other works include A Little Book of Life (2012), A Handful of Nuts (1996), Book of Humour (2008), Roads to Mussoorie (2005), and Angry River (1972). For his exceptional contribution to the Indian literature in English, Bond was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014.

Further Reading Khorana, Meena G. The Life and Works of Ruskin Bond. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003. Pal, Arup. Ruskin Bond’s Desh: Celebrating Root and Defining Identity. Bloomsbury India, 2020. Saili, Ganesh. Ruskin Bond: The Mussoorie Years. Niyogi Books, 2013.

MAALAVIKA AJAYAKUMAR

BOOK OF GOLD LEAVES, THE, by Mirza Waheed The Book of Gold Leaves is the second novel by Mirza Waheed, a Kashmir-born novelist and journalist. Published in 2014, it is set in the city of Waheed’s birth, Srinagar, and its cover features a family heirloom: a gold, papier-mâché jild painted by Waheed’s grandfather. Appropriately, the novel opens with papier-mâché artist, Faiz, completing his painting for the day. Readers are delivered Faiz’s perspective via a close, third-person omniscient perspective, before the point of view shifts to the novel’s next central character, Roohi, a beautiful, highly-educated, woman. The novel’s early action centers on Roohi’s and Faiz’s secret romance, which blossoms despite their concerns over being from different Muslim sects. Soon though, the Indian military’s presence begins to affect Faiz’s and Roohi’s families. Roohi’s younger brother, Rumi, joins a small militant operation in the city, the “Panthers,” and Faiz’s older brother, Zafar, is left maimed in a military operation. Unable to sleep as the violence in his city escalates, Faiz decides to train as a militant in Pakistan. Faiz and Roohi are separated for the entirety of the novel’s second act, which details Faiz’s training in Pakistan, as well as the mounting tensions in Srinagar. Sumit Kumar, a major in the Indian Army, is first introduced when Farhat’s school becomes a military base, and he soon emerges as a key character in this section. A  seemingly thoughtful man, concerned for the future of the school he occupies, Kumar’s actions against the inhabitants of Srinagar become increasingly drastic as he feels the pressure from his commanders to keep the situation under control. By the time Faiz returns, the number of soldiers in Srinagar has increased tenfold, and Major Kumar has begun patrolling the rivers, as the city’s occupants flee in droves. Though Faiz has no stable home, and despite his active participation in covert operations, he and Roohi are married in a small, home ceremony shortly after his return to Srinagar. While the couple enjoys a brief honeymoon, and as news of Rumi’s father Kabir Khan’s death spreads, a protest ensues at the shrine near Roohi’s family home. Faiz and Roohi watch from their

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bedroom window as General Kumar shoots a volley of bullets in an attempt to disperse the gathering. Kumar then aims directly at the couple, and the novel ends with the implication that they have been shot. The Book of Gold Leaves shares many of the themes of Waheed’s first novel, The Collaborator. Both question the morality of collusion with the Indian government and raise questions about how to balance militancy with love for the family. But Gold Leaves also raises questions about the status of art in wartime, sectarianism in the Islamic community, and the concept of fate. It is this latter theme, alongside Roohi’s idealized view of romantic love, that has left some reviewers of the novel unconvinced. Chitra Ramaswamy, in a review for The Guardian, opines that Roohi’s character is never fully realized. The novel was short-listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2016, and more appreciative critical responses have often praised Waheed’s unflinching account of violence in Kashmir, as well as his ability to inhabit the plot convincingly with characters on both sides of the conflict.

Further Reading Mridha, Somjyoti. “The Poetics and the Politics of Kashmiriyat: A Study of Mirza Waheed’s the Collaborator and the Book of Gold Leaves.” Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature. Routledge, 2021. Ramaswamy, Chitra. “The Book of Gold Leaves Review – Mirza Waheed Speaks Up for Kashmir.” The Guardian, 1 Nov. 2014, www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/01/the-book-of-gold-leavesmirza-waheed-review-novel-kashmir-conflict. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Shoaib, Muhammad. “Desecration of the Earthly Paradise: An Ecocritical Reading of Mirza Waheed’s Novel the Book of Gold Leaves.” Journal of Research (Humanities), vol. 55, 2019, pp. 77–94.

MORGAN RICHARDSON DIETZ

BOOK OF RACHEL, THE, by Esther David The Book of Rachel was written in 2006 by Esther David, an Indian Jewish author hailing from the state of Gujarat, India. The novel won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2010, and like the previous works of David, such as The Book of Esther (2002) and The Walled City (1997), chronicles the experiences of the small and relatively obscure Bene Israel Jewish community in India. The Book of Rachel tells the story of the life of its protagonist, the eponymous Rachel (Dandekar) and her battle to protect one of the last monuments of the Bene Israeli Jewish community in Danda, Alibag – its synagogue. The novel is narrated from the point of view of an omniscient narrator, and the protagonist Rachel is an aging widow who is one of the last few descendants of the first Jewish settlers on the Konkan coast of India. After the demise of her husband Aaron, and the departure of her three children, Jacob, Zephra, and Aviv, to Israel, Rachel finds herself unwilling to leave India because she remains bound to the land by memories of her youth. While most members of the Jewish community have left their hometown in Danda, Rachel continues to be one of the few to stay back. She becomes the de facto caretaker of the synagogue in Danda, now an ignored and partially crumbling edifice. The conflict in the novel’s plot arises due to the presence of Mordecai, the secretary of the synagogue’s trust and former family friend of the Dandekars. Mordecai attempts to sell the synagogue and the land surrounding it to a real estate developer, Mr. Satish Shenoy, who wishes to develop a resort in the locality. A young lawyer, Judah, comes to Rachel’s help and prevents Mordecai from selling the land by exposing his claim to the land as false. Judah and Rachel prove that the land originally belonged to the Dandekar family and are helped in their attempts

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to save the synagogue by Rachel’s daughter, Zephra, and Zephra’s friend Kavita Shenoy, the wife of the real estate developer Satish Shenoy. Besides the novel’s surreal portrayal of the divine intervention of Jewish prophets, the novel infuses its narrative with detailed descriptions of Jewish customs and religious rituals that define the lives of the Jewish community in India. Equally notable is the confluence of both Marathi and Jewish songs and prayers that have now become a part of Rachel’s experience as a contemporary Jewish woman in modern-day Maharashtra. The novel is heavily invested in Jewish culture and religion as is evident in the many instances where Rachel invokes the aid of the prophet Elijah. A particularly striking instance of this is when the invocation of the prophet Elijah results in the real estate developer Satish Shenoy’s sudden change of heart. He undergoes this transformation after he is visited by the prophet Elijah in a vision and consequently refuses to buy the land on which the synagogue is built. The novel also infuses its narrative with detailed descriptions of Jewish daily customs and religious rituals that define the lives of the Jewish community in India. The form of David’s novel is particularly distinctive for the paratexts that characterize her work. Each chapter of the novel is preceded by David’s artwork and includes a detailed recipe of culinary items prepared by Rachel. These recipes are often a fusion of Jewish and Indian recipes and testify to not only the Bene Israeli Jewish community’s assimilation into the Indian way of life, but also to the emotional tone of each chapter. The preservation of the modern-day legacy of the Bene Israeli Indian Jewish community thus constitutes one of the primary concerns of David’s work.

Further Reading David, Esther. Book of Esther. Penguin Random House India, 2018. Giftsy, Dorcas E. “Reinventing Roots in Esther David’s Book of Rachel.” Writers Editors Critics, vol. 7, no. 1, Mar. 2017, pp. 55–59. Varghese, Shiji Mariam, and Avishek Parui. “Memory and Meals: Remembering and Representing the Jewish Cultural Codes and Identity Markers in Esther David’s Book of Rachel.” CASS Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2019, pp. 153–159.

V. NEETHI ALEXANDER

BOOKLESS IN BAGHDAD by Shashi Tharoor Bookless in Baghdad (2005) by Shashi Tharoor is a compilation of his nonfiction writings on literary and cultural topics that have previously appeared in newspapers, opinion pieces, editorials, and at other places. This collection is marked by Tharoor’s interest in subjects that are singularly literary in nature. The first section, “Inspirations,” offers a close look at the motives that underlie Tharoor’s early works such as The Great Indian Novel, Show Business, and Riot, to name a few. The first piece titled “Growing Up with Books in India” paints a composite picture of the peculiar position of his postcolonial upper-middle-class upbringing in the India of the 1950s and 1960s. This essay also addresses the distinct ways in which the younger generation imbibed both its colonial legacy and its native cultural traditions: “It is, I suppose, a uniquely Indian experience to embrace both Biggles and Birbal, Jeeves and the Jatakas, Tintin and Tenaliraman in your own reading.” Subsequent essays such as “Mining the Mahabharata” familiarize the reader with the writer’s deep admiration for the Indian classic. Tharoor notably differentiates the Ramayana from the Mahabharata by calling the latter a “purely secular epic” and notes that its diversity

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and depth fueled his better known and much acclaimed works: The Great Indian Novel. He thus states: Throughout my novel runs an acknowledgement of the multiplicity of truth, and a conscious evocation of the many truths that have helped give shape and substance to the idea of India. My fiction is infused, in this sense, with the “greatness” of India, of the Maha Bharata – greatness that has emerged from the fusion of its myths with the aspirations of its history. The second section, “Reconsiderations,” offers a series of reviews and retrospectives on a range of authors that Tharoor as a reader and aspiring writer both admired and disliked. One of the most loving tributes is Tharoor’s essay on P.G. Wodehouse, “Right Ho, Sahib-Wodehouse and India,” which takes the reader on a survey of the many comic quotes by the famous humorist. Equally notable are his opinions on stalwarts of Indian writing in English such as R.K. Narayan and Nirad C. Chaudhuri. An admirer of the content and stories of Narayan’s oeuvre, Tharoor laments the writer’s lack of craft in the English language. Nevertheless, Tharoor lauds Narayan for his Hindu humanism which makes “even his most poignant stories comedies of suffering rather than tragedies of laughter.” This section also contains essays on other authors such as V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie (to whom he devotes at least two more essays in the subsequent sections as well), Pablo Neruda, and Pushkin. “The Literary Life” features a series of essays on Tharoor’s opinions on literary festivals, book fairs in America, functional illiteracy in America, Capitalism and the publishing industry in America, literary gatherings in France, and an account of his authorial defensives against bad reviews. The penultimate section, “Appropriations,” ruminates on issues concerning appropriations and adaptations of classic literary works and their legacies. Hence, Tharoor writes about the branding and marketing of literary figures such as Hemingway in luxury furniture and the cinematic adaptation and marketing of Tharoor’s Show Business into the film called Bollywood. He also reminisces about a 1980s trip to Huesca, Spain; the pan-Indian, inclusive education he received at his alma mater, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi; and his conflicted yet ultimately favorable opinion of Roland Joffe’s film City of Joy. The final section “Interrogations” commences with the eponymous “Bookless in Baghdad” which chronicles a trip to a book souk in Al Mutanabi in Baghdad in late 1990s Iraq. It narrates the tragic loss of a culture steeped in learning and the civilizational collapse caused by the war. Other essays in this section deal with his relationship with an imagined readership as well as global politics in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Tharoor concludes his essay with a renewed assertion of faith in the value of pluralism and an urgent appeal to preserve its practice. Bookless in Baghdad offers a sprawling canvas that paints a picture of the unique sensibilities that defined Shashi Tharoor as a reader and writer of Indian literature in English in the 20th century.

Further Reading Lal, Nandini. “Book Review: Bookless in Baghdad by Shashi Tharoor.” India Today, 28 Feb. 2005, www. indiatoday.in/magazine/society-and-the-arts/story/20050228-book-review-bookless-in-baghdadby-shashi-tharoor-787974-2005-02-27. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Meadows, Susannah. “Nonfiction Chronicle.”  The New York Times,  13 Nov. 2005, www.nytimes. com/2005/11/13/books/review/nonfiction-chronicle.html. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

V. NEETHI ALEXANDER

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BRATA, SASTHI (1939–2015) Sasthi Brata, named Sasthibrata Chakravarti at birth, was born and raised in Calcutta, India, and educated at Presidency College, Kolkata. Early in his literary career he changed his name in order to drop the surname Chakravarti and split his first name, distancing himself from his family and place in Indian society. He continued this separation geographically when he moved from India to England in his mid-20s where he stayed for the rest of his life, despite frequent visits to his home country over the years. His desire to reflect upon his birthplace in his literature and simultaneously escape it makes Sasthi Brata an interesting figure in life and literature; he embodies a dichotomy of extremes. He studied science at the university, dabbled in Marxist ideology, imagined himself to be a youthful prophet-genius, fell in love, struggled with faith, and pondered over his role in the universal comedy. Disillusioned and unable to make peace with himself and society, he migrated to the West and decided to be a writer. Wherever he looked he discovered that the barriers to his aspirations were not only the social mores and the contours of his own destiny, as some people would like to suggest, but also something dark within him that tormented him, and perhaps within human nature too. Brata’s writing primarily focused on India in spite of his desire to leave it behind. Known as the enfant terrible of Indian letters, he wrote in several genres: long fiction, short story, poetry, and nonfiction. Even though he authored several novels, most critics note a thin veneer of fiction over his primarily autobiographical storylines. He is quoted in support of this assessment, for having once said, “All of my books are autobiographical . . . I don’t have the imagination to write a novel” (Menon). His first major work was My God Died Young at the age of 29; it broke out on the literary scene in 1968, shocking audiences with its attack on antiquated Indian society and its detailed sex scenes. His disillusionment with religious and cultural rituals is written large throughout the narrative of this engaging book. An extended but platonic love affair with a girl he briefly dated while in India catalyzed his move away from conventional morality and intellectual idealism. In the book, he writes paradoxically about a lot of issues including the status of women, education, youth, and most notably superstition and bigotry, which are just as corrupting as destitution and famine. His 1971 book, Confessions of an Indian Woman Eater, was even more sexually explicit, though applauded for its prose. Commenting on his Confessions during an interview, he is reported to have said “[it] was regarded as salacious. In fact, I have written somewhere else that people who were looking for porn wouldn’t find it and people who were looking for enlightenment wouldn’t find it. It was a straightforward confession, a young man trying to make sense of his life” (Bhattacharya & Rayala). His 1980 novel, The Sensuous Guru: The Making of a Mystic President, was one of the most clearly fictional and satirical of his literary works. Critical responses to Brata can often be as extreme as his own writing. Some critics have reflected upon his attempts to shock readers with his harsh criticisms of India and detailed sexual exploits as merely a way to gain favor in England. Others, like Shyamala A. Narayan, note that “Brata is capable of writing very good fiction, but needs to temper his autobiographical obsession.” However, the New York Review of Books contributor, Edmund Spencer praised his “lucid, vibrant English prose” (Menon). No matter what his critics have to say, Brata is sure to garner a strong reaction one way or another. Bhattacharya and Rayala succinctly sum up: “Sasthi Brata makes for an interesting reading because of the rich ground he covers in his writings and studying his works is relevant because of the overarching reason that he is one among the first generation of non-resident Indian English writers.”

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Further Reading Bhattacharya, Amitendu, and Sudarshan Kumar Rayala. “Never at Home: The ‘Strange’ Case of Sasthi Brata.” The IUP Journal of English Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, Sept. 2011, pp. 21–31. Hariharan, Meenakshi. “Aesthetic Sensibility in Expatriate Writing with Reference to Sasthi Brata and V. S. Naipaul.” Modern Indian Writing in English: Critical Perceptions, vol. 2. Sarup and Sons, 2005. Menon, Suresh. “A Pair of Keen Eyes.” Outlook, 17 Nov. 2008, p. 88. Narayan, Shyamala A. “Brata Sasthi.” Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. Taylor and Francis, 2004, pp. 141–142.

JOSIANNE LEAH CAMPBELL

BUTALIA, URVASHI (1952–) Urvashi Butalia was born in Ambala, Haryana, to a progressive Punjabi family. She did her graduation from Miranda House in 1971, a master’s degree in literature from Delhi University in 1973, and a master’s degree in South Asian studies from the University of London in 1977. She started her career initially with Oxford University Press, next, as an editor with Zed Books, London, and followed it up with teaching at Delhi University for around twenty years, thereafter, as a visiting professor at Ashoka University. Alongside that, she has been writing, publishing, and organizing numerous social campaigns, conferences, and events. She in fact has been a pioneer on several fronts. Along with Ritu Menon, she set up Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house in 1984. In 2003, she founded Zubaan, a unique publishing house which publishes books “on, for, by, and about women in South Asia.” Zubaan has also published English translations of works by leading women writers writing in various regional languages. Over the years, Butalia has published several books that are considered classics in women and gender studies in India and elsewhere. Though not affiliated with any political setup, Butalia, time and again, has actively pursued campaigns to urge India and Pakistan to work together to move beyond their common history of violence during partition to implement peace in the region. Butalia has won many awards for her contribution, including the Pandora Award from Women in Publishing in 2000, the Padma Shri for literature and education jointly with Menon in 2011, and the Goethe Medal from the German Federal Republic in 2017. She is the author/editor of several books and regularly contributes articles to journals, newspapers, anthologies, etc. Butalia has written extensively on subjects including gender, communalism, fundamentalism, women and minority rights, and disability. Her primary focus, however, has remained on the partition of India in 1947. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (1998), her pioneering work on oral histories of the victims of partition, is rightfully considered one of the most influential books in South Asian studies. Over a period of ten years, Butalia conducted interviews and read through diaries, letters, memoirs, and many official documents to reveal how partition ripped apart the lives of ordinary people. The book traces the consequences of their forced movement across boundaries along religious lines. Her narrative, based on her family’s history and the experiences of numerous other people, has helped put a human face on the suffering and trauma of around twelve million people affected by the tragedy. Butalia meticulously unfolds the play of patriarchal constructs around gender, sexuality, identity, family’s “honour” embodied in women’s bodies, the pull of economic compulsions and greed, mixed with fanaticism, prejudice, and intolerance leading to large-scale killings and widespread destruction. Women, as she reveals, experienced partition in a uniquely adverse manner. Their bodies became a site of the community’s “purity” and “honour,” as well as trophies of war, and a means to take revenge on the other. Hence, they were abducted, raped, mutilated, murdered, or else, steeped in the same values; they committed suicide or offered

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themselves to be killed by their fathers, uncles, and brothers, to escape dishonor; a fate considered worse than death. Since many victims were also aggressors inflicting similar violence on the other side, the only way left to deal with the guilt and horror was to shroud the details in silence, or else to speak about them in a roundabout way. Butalia, in this book as also in her numerous articles, continues to retrieve forgotten details from the black hole of suppressed memories. In her edited Partition: The Long Shadow (2015), she concedes that the act of remembering the partition may have contentious ramifications, but forgetting and not talking about India’s dark legacy cannot be an option. Nations have to find a way of acknowledging what people have lived through, so that there may be a healing of selves. Otherwise, as Butalia reminds us, there are repetitions, and every time a communal riot erupts, the memories of partition come alive to haunt and impact the present. Butalia continues with her work on documenting trauma. As narrator/recorder, she is compassionate and detached and avoids making judgments; at times, she even withholds certain portions from her subjects’ narratives to protect them from further victimization on account of their confessions or their complicity in similar acts against others. Butalia’s work is central to research on partition narratives and ensures that no historiography on the partition is compiled without taking into account the human cost of what is thought to be a political event.

Further Reading Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. California UP, 2006. Didur, Jill. Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory. U of Toronto P, 2006. Hasan, Mushirul, editor. Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India. Oxford UP, 2000.

JAPPREET KAUR BHANGU

CHANDRA, VIKRAM (1961–) The Indian American writer Vikram Chandra was born in New Delhi, India, to a family of prolific writers and filmmakers. He completed his secondary education at Mayo College in Ajmer, Rajasthan. After attending St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, for a short time, he moved to Kenyon College in the United States as an undergraduate. He got his bachelor’s degree from Pomona College, Claremont, California, with magna cum laude BA in English in 1984. Thereafter, he attended the Film School at Columbia University, New York, but left it midway to work on his first novel. He received his master’s degree from the Writing Seminars at John Hopkins University in 1987 and taught at George Washington University and the University of California, Berkeley. Vikram Chandra’s first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), is set in 18th–19th century Mogul India. The author has employed the story-within-story technique to relate the stories of a young Indian student, Abhay, and a monkey. Abhay, while on a vacation to Bombay, India, accidentally shoots a monkey. The monkey, while recuperating, remembers his past life. To keep himself alive, the monkey begins to narrate his tale, much like Sheherazade of the Arabian Nights. The novel centers on the theme of dislocation and identity crisis during the expansion of the British Empire. The title of the novel has been taken from an ancient Tamil poem Kuruntokai that celebrates the termination of differences. Chandra’s next novel, Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), is a collection of short stories comprising five short stories that describe the protagonist’s navigation of life through career, family, and love. The stories in the book are narrated by Mr. Shiva Subramanium in a gloomy

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bar in Colaba called the Fisherman’s Rest. The short stories are “Dharma,” which describes a soldier, Major Antia, who is forced to amputate his leg to save his life; “The Kama,” which can be called a detective story that exposes the corruption in the underside of Mumbai; the short story “Shakti” is based on the feud between two ambitious women of society belonging to two business families; “Artha” deals with two lovers based in Mumbai, who juggle their career and personal life; Mr. Subramaniam’s personal encounter with a woman is the main theme of the final story of this anthology titled, “Shanti.” The third book, The Srinagar Conspiracy (2000), is the author’s first thriller novel set against the backdrop of the rebellion in Kashmir. The book gives a vivid description of the upsurge of militancy in Kashmir and describes how human lives were shaped by the incidents in Kashmir. Vikram Chandra’s fourth book, Sacred Games (2006), is also a thriller. Set in Mumbai, it investigates the city’s corruption, crime, and politics that underlie India’s economic renaissance. The novel has an epic sweep and beautifully interweaves the lives of the famous and the privileged, the desolate and the vicious. The book moves forward on two different paths: one that focuses on the underworld crimes of Mumbai during the 1980s and 1990s and the second on the tight present-day chase behind the dead gangster’s eccentric last words. The story develops with the police officer, Inspector Sartaj Singh’s invitation to pursue the boss of Mumbai’s underworld crime, Ganesh Gaitonde, and the last words before taking his own life. The novel has a dark side and a plot that involves friendship, violence, and betrayal of the modern city. The novel was further adapted as a web series of the same title produced by Phantom Films. The web series also received criticism and awards as the novel. The book, upon its release, won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award in 2006, the Salon Book Award in 2007, and was nominated for the National Book Critic Circle Award in the same year. Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code (2013) comprises essays exploring the connection between literature and programming. In this book, he talks about being a programmer and writer, two vastly different fields, and how his interest and experience in the field of coding help him in his creative endeavors. Delineating the history of coding, the book is a memoir of the author’s life as a novelist and a computer programmer. To create a distinctive history of coding he refers to the writings of the tenth and 11th-century Kashmiri thinker, Abhinavagupta. Chandra’s book, Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software (2013), also talks about the experiences of computer coding and code as a form of art. He also discusses Sanskrit literature. Vikram Chandra’s next novel, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (2015), is the author’s first work of nonfiction. The book is a high-yielding exploration of the aesthetics of computers and coding where the programmers consider themselves no less than artists. It provides the readers with a brief history of computer programming and how it works. The book draws connections and tensions between the two worlds of art and technology. Chandra’s latest book, Shanti: Faber Stories (2019), tells the story of two scared people who undergo transformation over time. The author borrows the structure from the Mahabharata to weave a very complex form of embedded narrative, bringing the tale of Shiv and Shanti to his audience. The story revolves around a twenty-year-old boy, Shiv, mourning for his identical twin brother in a small town in Uttar Pradesh where he is stopped by the sight of a woman, Shanti, jumping on to the train tracks. Shanti travels the country in search of her husband, who is a missing fighter pilot. With the two exchanging stories of the loss and suffering with each other, they became different people. Besides publishing books, Vikram Chandra’s short stories were also published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review. He was the co-writer of the Bollywood movie Mission Kashmir (2000) with Suketu Mehta directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, starring Hrithik Roshan as the 52

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lead. Vikram Chandra’s novels frequently emphasize the importance of multilayered narrative in shaping the complexity and variety of the world we live in. These stories blend timeless themes like love, death, and redemption with a concern for more particular social and political musings on imperialism’s crushing force, class and ethnic conflicts, and the underworld’s unlawful operations.

Further Reading Leigh, Patricia Brown. “An Author’s Vision of the Mean Streets of Mumbai.” The New York Times, 10 Jan. 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/01/10/books/10chan.html. Accessed 25 Jul. 2022. Pereira, Lindsay. “More Love and Longing in Mumbai.” Rediff News, 10 Aug. 2006, http://specials. rediff.com/news/2006/aug/09sld1.htm. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Powel, Bonnie Azab. “UC Berkeley Lecturer Vikram Chandra: From ‘Weird Little Kid’ in India to Master Storyteller – and Winner of a Publishing Jackpot.” UC Berkley News, 7 Sept. 2005, https://news archive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/12/07_hungry.shtml. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

NAVREET SAHI

CHASING THE RAINBOW: GROWING UP IN AN INDIAN VILLAGE by Manoj Das Manoj Das was born in 1934 to an affluent family in a remote village in Balasore, in the northern part of Odisha. His memoir, Chasing the Rainbow (2004), documents the early years of his life, between four and fourteen, spent in and around his village Sankhari by the Bay of Bengal and in Koraput district. Das notes that some of the events and characters have left such a deep impact on him that they became motifs in his works. The memoir was earlier published in Odia as Samudra Kulara Ek Grama (1996). Chasing the Rainbow is a memoir of bygone times, enchanting childhood experiences of scenic rural India, which is threatened and disappearing rapidly. Das summarizes the critical distinction between the era he grew up in and the contemporary world. In the former, a child grew up as “a child of the village and not the exclusive responsibility of any particular family,” underlining the massive transformation of the village whose communitarian social formations have been undermined steadily by forces of modernity. Yet, Das is not naively romantic, or as he says, “sentimental in the Goldsmithian way. . . . Changes are inevitable as technology, development, and education are spreading.” In the chapter, “Mysteries of the Missing Toe,” Das narrates how his elder sister’s wedding was on the verge of being called off as his grandmother thought the groom did not have any toes as he was wearing a sock. Thus, the sock, a metaphor of modernity, creates a momentary panic in the villagers and arouses humor and alerts us to the ushering of modernity for which the village was not ready. Through humor, Das reminds us of the uneven march of modernity suggesting that the experience of the old India is becoming extinct. In the initial chapters, we can see the lasting impact of these “lost moments” on Das as he retraces young Mantu’s communion with his natural surroundings, trying to comprehend the profound mysteries of nature. The chapters reinforce early signs of Das’ ability to spin yarns and tell stories as he scares his friend by conjuring a tale of a non-existing boat. Das’ characteristic humor and investments in the “language of wonder” are evident in the initial chapters. As H.P. Shukla contends: “Chasing the Rainbow is an extraordinary text that offers direct insight into the process that molded Manoj Das into one of the greatest spiritual storytellers of our time.” The impact of these significant events and characters on Das’ life can be gauged from their repetition in his other works. For example, the humorous encounter between modernity and 53

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an Indian village figures again in Mystery of the Missing Cap; World War II and the Japanese invasion reappear in these initial chapters of Myths, Legends, Concepts and Antiquities of India. If on the one hand, the memoir documents the artist’s growth, it also offers a social history of Odisha in the 1930s and 1940s. “Two Nights to Remember” and its sequel “A Twilight Encounter” provides a thrilling account of the dacoity that took place at his house, invoking the times and the precarious existence of law and order. If Fakir Mohan Senapati’s autobiography Atmacharita (1918) provided the dark picture of Odisha during the 1866 famine in which three million Odias died, Das’s narrative recounts the horrible tragedy resulting from the cyclone of October 1942. Das mixes details of devastation with fantastic tales associated with what the villagers call pralaya. Such a mixture of empirical, social, and anthropological detailing with mythology, folktale, and local legend is typical of Das’ style, which can be traced in his other works too. Das credits his upbringing in such an atmosphere where the “real” and the “non-real,” the human and the non-human, are very proximate, inhabiting overlapping spheres in chapters like “An Evening with Woo” and “The Tiger of the Goddess.” His nuanced exploration of the human psyche and sensibilities lead to unresolved mystical, philosophical, and spiritual questions in a seemingly realistic narrative.

Further Reading Das, Manoj. “Your Writer Speaking.” The Bridge in the Moonlit Night and Other Stories. National Book Trust, 2015, pp. vii–xv. Haldar, Santwana, editor. “Manoj Das Special Issue.” Special issue of the Journal of the Odisha Association for English Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2022. Jena, Sangram, editor. “Manoj Das Bisesh Sankhya.” Special issue of Konark, vol. 203, 2021. Pandab, Shatrughna. Katha Shilpee Manoj Das. Friends’ Publishers, 1994. Raja, P. Many Worlds of Manoj Das. B. R. Publishing Corporation, 1993. World of Manoj Das: Lights on a Blessed Son of Mahasaraswati, www.worldofmanojdas.in/index.php.

UMASANKAR PATRA

CHATTERJEE, UPAMANYU (1959–) Upamanyu Chatterjee is a retired Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer who began publishing fiction soon after joining the service and has published eight works of fiction. He began by exploring the personal and professional frustrations of a bureaucrat and moved on to deal with middle-class urban Indian life in which the characters become enmeshed in the widening networks of corruption. English, August: An Indian Story (1988) is Chatterjee’s first novel and deals with the experiences of a distinctively urban and cosmopolitan fresh recruit into the Indian Administrative Service. It is an account of Agastya Sen’s training period (as an IAS officer), his alienation from the vast Indian heartland and its complex problems, the results of unimaginative governance. The novel’s witty and sophisticated sarcasm is the direct result of the reaction (and rejection) of the protagonist and the omniscient narrator to their surroundings. The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000) is a follow-up to the experiences of Agastya Sen, who is now a veteran in the profession. The novel is an extensive allegory about the mismanagement of resources, corruption of morals, and lack of governance ethics within the bureaucratic system that comprises the administration of the welfare state. Stylistically, it is a genre-bending narrative interspersed with official memoranda, questionnaires, news headlines, and quotations from diverse official sources. The novel’s action is diffuse; the landscape is that of a vast bureaucratic wasteland of paperwork and purposeless dead-end cross-reference. 54

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Endurance of a life less than ordinary and yet a life of extraordinarily focused mental energy characterizes novels like The Last Burden (1993), Weight Loss (2006), and Way to Go (2010). Weight Loss (2006) chronicles the life of Bhola, a sexual deviant, whose erotic misadventures with a variety of characters across the social spectrum (the family cook, a working-class couple, and his landlady) occupies center stage. Obsessed with retaining a sense of aimlessness in his choices and harboring a deep-seated ennui with modern existence, Bhola’s life from his middleschool days till his death in his mid-thirties is of a piece with his sordid fantasies and fleeting longings for random figures. The Last Burden (1993) and Way to Go (2010) merit consideration together because the same set of characters inhabits both novels. While the first deals with the protagonist Jamun’s relationship with his parents in the wake of his mother Urmila’s impending death, the second novel details his father Shyamanand’s sudden disappearance from the family home. All the three novels explore the lives of urban protagonists who are overtly unremarkable and yet whose inward vicious longings touch the heart of modern, urban middle-class life. In Fairy Tales at Fifty (2014), Chatterjee takes up the issue of venality and moral corruption in the socio-political life of India. The narrative scope spans the heartland, the small town, and the metropolitan center. An experience of the world of crime is offered through the character of Nirip, the son of a criminal mastermind Pashupati. In this macabre world where ill-gotten wealth and the mastery of criminal opportunities are given the greatest consideration, Nirip’s affluent social existence, partly fueled by drugs and dissipation, aptly responds to an urban heterogeneity of conflicting social practices and misplaced notions of social progress. The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian (2018) stands out from Chatterjee’s oeuvre because, as a detective novel its concerns are different from those of his earlier works. Thematically, Chatterjee’s fictional universe expands to flesh out his first protagonist, Agastya Sen’s “history” as this novel presents the life of Madhusudan Sen, Agastya’s grandfather, during his tenure as an Indian Civil Service, and later, Indian Administrative Serivice officer. Madhusudan is obsessed with a rather inexplicable murder case. It is the death of a minor official and his family in an accidental fire. As Sen investigates the alleged accident – the “accidental” fire that the police claims killed the family as it slept – he increasingly suspects the family servant Basanta Kumar Pal as the cold-blooded murderer who, in order to cover his tracks, had set fire to the crime scene. The novel’s social comedy arises from the protagonist’s attempt at negotiating the quirks of being a non-vegetarian administrator in a dominantly vegetarian Indian town and draws in some of Chatterjee’s earlier concerns about the convoluted nature of administration and social justice in India. His seventh work, The Assassination of Indira Gandhi (2019), is a heterogeneous collection of twelve stories that can be divided into three categories – stories that highlight the power of pure narrative, stories that are remnants of dead ends of Chatterjee’s earlier fiction, and stories that comment on the quiet desperation of everyday middle-class urban life. In the first category, narratives from the times of Mughal Emperor Jahangir, the myth of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Coleridge’s famous poem on the story of the Ancient Mariner are taken up to highlight the social process that transforms historico-mythical experiences into a reported fact. In the second category, inconsequential bits of narrative from Chatterjee’s earlier novels are taken up and appear as stand-alone narratives in their own right. In the final category, a diverse cast of characters (urban, upper middle-class parents, teenagers, and foreign travelers) experience prejudices, expectations, and different levels of alienation from everyday urban existence. Apart from national (Sahitya Akademi Award for writing in English) and international recognition (Order of Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government), Sen’s work has received acclaim for his trendsetting urban fiction and for charting a novel way of representing the rhythms and voices of the urban, English-speaking Indian middle class. 55

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Further Reading Gandhi, Leela. “Some Notes on the Rise of the St. Stephanian Novel.” The Fiction of St. Stephen’s, edited by Aditya Bhattacharjea and Lola Chatterji. Ravi Dayal Publisher, 2000, pp. 151–158. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “The Anxiety of Indianness: Our Novels in English.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 28, no. 48, 1993, pp. 2607–2611. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4400456.

NILAK DATTA

CHATTOPADHYAY, HARINDRANATH (1898–1990) Harindranath Chattopadhyay was born in Hyderabad on April  2, 1898, in an illustrious Bengali family from Bikrampur in present-day Bangladesh. His father Dr. Aghorenath Chattopadhyay was the first Indian to acquire a DSc degree from the University of Edinburgh, and his mother Varada Sundari Devi was a notable singer and a Bengali poet. His sister Sarojini Naidu was a renowned Indian English poet and the first Indian woman to become the president of the Indian National Congress. Another sibling of Chattopadhyay, Virendranath, was an international communist revolutionary. Chattopadhyay started his formal education in a secular and liberal social atmosphere. He started writing poetry at a very early age and published his first volume of poems, The Feast of Youth, in 1918. Chattopadhyay married Kamaladevi Dhareshwar, a child widow and social activist, in 1923. Soon Chattopadhyay moved to London to pursue his academic career and joined Fitzwilliam Hall to pursue research on William Blake and the Sufi tradition. Kamaladevi also went to London shortly after and enrolled in sociology and economics at the Bedford College. During this time Chattopadhyay regularly published his writings. The couple, however, did not complete their degrees and returned to India in the wake of the Civil Disobedience Movement. Back in India, Chattopadhyay continued writing poetry and drama and also joined politics. In 1951, he won the Lok Sabha elections from the Vijayawada state as an independent candidate. In 1955, Chattopadhyay and Kamaladevi decided to end their marriage. Later on, in 1962, he married Sundari Rani Chattopadhyay. From this time onward, Chattopadhyay started acting in Hindi films and earned wide recognition. He also worked in a few Bengali movies directed by Satyajit Ray. Chattopadhyay was awarded Padma Bhushan in 1972 and passed away on June 23, 1990. Chattopadhyay was a polymath. His creative oeuvre in English consists of poems, plays, and songs. His first volume of poetry, The Feast of Youth, came out in 1918. Divided into three segments, “The Feast of Youth,” “Sonnets,” and “Songs of the Sunlight,” the volume has thirty-two poems which bear witness to Chattopadhyay’s romantic engagement with themes of nature, love, and life, which show the deep influence of British Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. Chattopadhyay’s training in Vedic philosophy and Sufi teachings is reflected in The Feast of Youth, which presents a fine amalgamation of romanticism, spiritualism, and philosophical musings. Chattopadhyay was a prolific writer. His notable works are Coloured Garden (1919), The Magic Tree (1922), Perfume of Earth (1922), Ancient Wings (1923), Blood of Stones (1944), The Son of Adam (1946), The Divine Vagabond (1950), Spring in Winter (1955), Marks and Farewells (1961), and Virgins and Vineyards (1967). The poems included in these volumes speak of a consciousness that is continuously in search of the beauty and peace that nature symbolizes but human society has lost permanently. Under Chattopadhyay’s veneer of romanticism lurks his deep dissatisfaction with the human condition, which leads to his spiritual quest for beauty, peace, and stability in life. 56

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In fact, all of Chattopadhyay’s works revolve around this spiritual quest. His plays, such as Abu Hassan (1918), The Windows (1937), and Siddhartha, Man of Peace (1956), are no exceptions in this regard. Abu Hassan, which is a semi-verse play based on a tale from the Arabian Nights, highlights his need to distance himself from the mundane world. The social play The Windows presents Chattopadhyay’s views on Karma (good or evil deeds) and the oppression of the marginalized by the dominant classes of our society. His most famous play, Siddhartha, Man of Peace, too is an experimental historical reenactment of the life of Gautama Buddha that seeks to understand what it takes to be happy and contented in life. As a writer, Chattopadhyay is plagued with questions, such as, “what is life?”, “who is in control?”, and “what could redeem man of the pangs and problems of life?” The more he grows as a writer, the more he becomes troubled by these queries. To safeguard the unity of his “self” amidst all these upheavals, Chattopadhyay strongly feels the need to find an anchor that could either resolve all his crises or allow him to find his bearings. His philosophical quest ends with God as his anchor. This in spite of the fact that he was an avid follower of Marxism, which helped him to identify the evils of society and represent them in his works. Chattopadhyay had no qualms in accepting or acknowledging God as an omnipotent presence and as the sole guarantor of the peace and stability he searched for all his life and of which he saw a reflection in nature.

Further Reading Chandra, N. D. R. Modern Indian Writing in English: Critical Perceptions, vol. 1. Sarup and Sons, 2004. Das, Sisir Kumar. A History of Indian English Literature, 1911–1956: Struggle for Freedom: Triumph and Tragedy. Sahitya Akademi, 2005. Dwivedi, A. N. Papers on Indian Writing in English. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2001. Gupta, G. S. Balarama. “Social Plays of Harindranath Chattopadhyaya.” Indian Literature, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 1973, pp. 164–172. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24157439. Iyengar, K. R. S. Indian Writing in English. Sterling, 1987. Myles, Ashley E. An Anthology of Indo-Anglian Poetry. Mittal Publications, 1991.

MAMATA SENGUPTA

CHAUDHURI, AMIT (1962–) Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, literary critic, singer, and cultural activist. He was born in Calcutta and grew up in Bombay. He studied at the Cathedral and John Connon School and graduated in English literature from the University College, London. He completed his doctoral dissertation on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry at Balliol College, Oxford. Chaudhuri has written seven novels. His other published works include collections of short stories; poetry; and essays; as well as a book of nonfiction, Calcutta, a critical study of D.H. Lawrence’s poetry; a memoir; and a book of criticism on Indian classical music, Finding the Raga. Chaudhuri’s first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, was published in 1991 and republished in 2016 as a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. It went on to win that year’s Betty Trask Award for first novels in the traditional realist style and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. The novel recreates in detail Calcutta as experienced by a young boy, Sandeep (aspiring to be an English writer), whose visits to his extended family during his summer and winter vacations follow the rhythms of middle-class life in Calcutta households. He provides a series of vignettes that accentuate a specific kind of idleness evident during the middle school holidays. 57

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His second novel, Afternoon Raaga (1993), gently lingers over life in Oxford, Calcutta, and Bombay, absorbing the textures and dynamics of these cities and magically transforming them into a dream world. The novel springs from Chaudhuri’s own experiences as a graduate student at Oxford and as a young man negotiating between two homes, an inherited one and an adopted one. His writing is exploratory, unhurried, and somewhat unexpected for the readers. The novel enacts and embodies the distinctive nature of the feeling of not being at home. The third novel, Freedom Song I (1997), is set during the time of the post-Babri Masjid demolition to chronicle the silence that the situation created and also evokes the mundaneness of everyday life in Calcutta. Published in America, it won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Chaudhuri crafts the characters skillfully to examine the contradictions of middle-class life in Calcutta. A New World (2001) is Chaudhuri’s fourth novel that narrates Jayojit Chatterjee’s story, an ambitious professor at a Midwestern college, who returns to Calcutta with his seven-year old son to visit his aging parents after a divorce. Chaudhuri makes this plot-free story a compelling drama of alienation, which analyses repressed and stunted emotions. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award. Chaudhuri’s collection of short stories, Real Time, was published in 2002. Set mostly in Calcutta or Bombay, many of the pieces are autobiographical, like “Portrait of an Artist,” in which a 16-year-old learns poetic tradition from a melancholy English tutor. “Four Days Before the Saturday Night Social” is about a schoolboy’s approach to “the echoing, fantastic-hued chambers of rock music.” “The Great Game” is a vignette that employs the spectacle of soccer to highlight tensions between India and Pakistan. More extensive stories include “White Lies,” a controlled piece about the perplexing relationship between a guru who offers singing lessons to wealthy matrons. Odysseus Abroad (2015) unfolds in London over the course of a single day in July 1985, following the twenty-something student protagonist, Ananda who aspires to be a poet. Ananda is homesick, but there is something romantic about his isolation. His uncle Radhesh is a failure and an eccentric loner who lives in Hampstead. Chaudhuri gradually reveals the background to their lives with care and humor as they walk through London together and find an unspoken solace in each other’s company. Friend of My Youth was published in the United Kingdom and India in 2017 and in the United States in 2019. Chaudhuri’s seventh novel is an account of a novelist called Amit Chaudhuri who visits Bombay, a city where he grew up, for a book event. It is a taut book: part novel and part manifesto, a work of fiction about friendship, and experiences in the city of Mumbai, which also discusses the failures of fiction to account for the realities of memory. Among Chaudhuri’s nonfiction works, D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, co-authored by Tom Paulin, explores Lawrence’s position as a “foreigner” in the English canon and demonstrates how his writing questions the notion of “Englishness” itself. It also shows how Lawrence’s aesthetic set him apart from both his Modernist contemporaries and his Romantic forbears. Chaudhuri edited the anthology, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature  in 2001 and also edited  Memory’s Gold: Writings on Calcutta (2008). His major works of nonfiction are Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013); On Tagore, a collection of essays on Rabindranath Tagore, awarded the Rabindra Puraskar in 2012; Origins of Dislike (2019); and Finding the Raga (2021), an exploration of Hindustani classical music. Currently, Chaudhuri is the director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University, India.

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Further Reading Chaudhuri, Amit, editor. The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. Picador, 2002. Chaudhuri, Amit, and Anita Roy. “A  Conversation with Amit Chaudhuri.” India International Centre Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1, 2009, pp. 150–163. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23006479. Galván, Fernando. “On Belonging and Not Belonging: A  Conversation with Amit Chaudhuri.” Wasafiri, vol. 15, no. 30, 1999, pp.  42–50. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/026 90059908589662. Majumdar, Saikat. “Dallying with Dailiness: Amit Chaudhuri’s Flâneur Fictions.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 39, no. 4, 2007, pp. 448–464. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29533839. Sen, Sudeep. “Introduction: Writing from Modern India.” World Literature Today, vol. 84, no. 6, 2010, pp. 28–30.

SUCHETANA BANERJEE

CHAUDHURI, NIRAD C. (1897–1999) Nirad C. Chaudhuri was born on November 23, 1897, in Kishorganj, Mymensingh, East Bengal, (now Bangladesh). He received his early education in Kishorganj, in Ripon College in Calcutta and then in Scottish Church College, Calcutta, where he studied history for his graduation and topped the university merit list. Although he had enrolled himself in the master’s course at the University of Calcutta, he did not complete it. He worked as a clerk in the Accounting Department of the Indian Army and later as a journalist and an editor. He also founded two Bengali magazines, Samasamayik and Notun Patrika. In 1938 he worked as a secretary to Sarat Chandra Bose, the elder brother of Subhas Chandra Bose. He also worked as a political commentator for the Calcutta branch of the All India Radio before working for the Delhi branch in 1941. He resigned after the controversy regarding his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. In 1955 he was invited by the BBC to give lectures and visit England for five weeks. In 1970, he left India to settle permanently in Oxford, England, where he lived in England for the rest of his life, continuing his literary journey till the very end. He died in 1999 at the age of 101. A prolific writer, he continued writing until the ripe age of ninety-nine. In 1951, at the age of fifty-three, Chaudhuri published his first book, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, a memoir which he dedicated “To the memory of the British Empire.” It is divided into four books, each consisting of a preface and four chapters. The first book is titled “Early Environment,” and it has four chapters: “My Birth Place,” “My Ancestral Place,” “My Mother’s Place,” and “England.” This book made him a prominent writer of his time because of his English prose and his penchant for admiring everything British. It is significant to note that it is not “conceived basically as an autobiography” but a “contribution to contemporary history.” Besides, it is an account of his growing up in his birthplace, Bangram, and also at his mother’s village, Kalikutch, and the broadening of his intellectual horizon in Calcutta amidst the cultural and political developments of the time. The book presents “his inner conflict and the conflict of the whole race.” Part of the book has been included in the New Oxford Book of English Prose. Chaudhuri’s visit to England in 1955 resulted in the publication of his second book A Passage to England (1959). It is a collection of twenty-six essays, divided into four parts: Part I: The English Scene; Part II: The English People; Part III: The Cultural Life; and Part IV: The State of the Nation. During his stay in England, Paris, and Rome, Chaudhuri writes about music, works of art, natural landscape, his ideas about the commingling of the Aryan and the British races in India, and the reasons for their suffering due to weather. With curiosity and balance, Chaudhuri describes the external and the inner behavior and the cultural life of the

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British. The book is remarkable for his historical insight, erudition, and the courage of his convictions. The Continent of Circe, Chaudhuri’s third book, published in 1965, is a collection of essays on India and her people, in which he provides his own rational and scholarly account of the image of India, the definition of India, the history of India, the aboriginals of India, the sociopsychological study of Hindus, Hindu pacifism and nonviolence, the treatment of Hindus by the British, Hindu view of sexuality, and the different minorities that inhabit India. He refers to India as Circe, a mythic figure of Homer’s The Odyssey, and her power as a sorceress to turn human beings into beasts. Different in tone and temper from his earlier books, Chaudhuri’s fourth book, The Intellectual in India (1959), is about intellectuals and their activities in India. He examines the problems of the so-called intellectual, drawing heavily on the Hindu, the Muslim, and the Westernized traditions of intellectual activity. According to him, the Western intellectual tradition in India merged with a larger movement – the Indian Renaissance. He believes that the Western intellectual inquiry impacted the Indian intellectuals, opening new horizons for them. He offers ways and means to revive national self-respect and confidence. He shows how to imbibe the tenets of the Western culture into the indigenous tradition and the way the people of India need to comprehend the British rule and the influence of Western ideas on Indian independence. Western ideas according to him have influenced only a small number of modern intellectuals whom he calls the “intellectual minority.” Along with his advice to intellectuals in his homeland, Chaudhuri provides a three-fold definition of the “intellectual” in India based on interpretation, observation, and mutual interaction. To Live or Not to Live (1971) is Chaudhuri’s fifth book. It is about how to live a happy social life. Happy life in family relations is the first stage of living well, Chaudhuri suggests. He examines the social life in cities like Delhi, Bombay, and Madras, ruefully commenting that the greatest drawback of our social life is gender inequality and separation between the sexes. Chaudhuri’s Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor: The Right Honourable Friedrich Max Muller, P.C. and Robert Clive of India, published in 1974 and 1976 respectively, are biographies. Scholar Extraordinary won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1975. It is the story of Muller’s academic brilliance and his domestic life. Chaudhuri discusses his youth, his interest in Indian religions, his work, and his stay at Oxford. Robert Clive of India is a reassessment of the personality and achievement of a historically controversial figure. Culture in the Vanity Bag (1975), Chaudhuri’s seventh book, is “an essay on clothing and adornment passing and abiding in India.” It is based on the principle that “apparel proclaims the man.” The book deals in interesting detail with the orders and taxonomy of clothing and the concept of the Indian way of dressing which came into conflict with Muslim and British fashions. Chaudhuri’s last three books in English are Hinduism: A Religion to Live By (1979), Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1987), and Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse (1997). Hinduism is a perennial interest and a “bewildering subject” for Chaudhuri. It is a religion to live by with all its myths, cults, taboos, and contradictions. It is an attempt, as Chaudhuri declares, “to give a description and interpretation of the religion of the Hindus as practiced and experienced by them.” Thy Hand, Great Anarch, a sequel to the Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, covers the years from 1921 to 1952. A commentary on the social and political events of the period with a highly subjective perspective on important men and manners, the book is also filled with Chaudhuri’s descriptions of his personal life. Chaudhuri’s Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse was written by him in the 99th year of his life, which he proudly mentions in its preface. Symbolically, the three horsemen are Individualism (the white horse), Nationalism (the red horse), 60

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and Democracy (the black horse). The three horsemen, as Chaudhuri propounds, are responsible for the contemporary decadence in England, India, and America. In 1990, the University of Oxford conferred on Nirad C. Chaudhuri an Honorary Degree of Letters, and in 1992, he was chosen as the Honorary Commander of the British Empire. He is remembered for his writings, which are based on an insightful historical sense, cultural understanding, political judgment, and the belief in “the power of the word to animate life.” An intellectual who envisioned a world in his own idiosyncratic manner, Chaudhuri remained throughout his long productive life a scholar extraordinary, “a beautiful mind: diminutive and mammoth.”

Further Reading De Souza, Eunice. “Nirad C. Chaudhuri.” An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Permanent Black, 2003, pp. 209–218. Gandhi, Gopalkrishna. “A Beautiful Mind: An Ode to an Indian, Diminutive and Mammoth.” The Telegraph Online, 26 Mar. 2022, www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/a-beautiful-mind-an-ode-to-anindian-diminutive-and-mammoth/cid/1839849. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Mishra, Sudesh. “The Two Chaudhuris: Historical Witness and Pseudo-Historian.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 23, no. 1, 1988, pp. 7–15. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “We Say Desh: The Other Nirad Babu.” Nirad C. Chaudhuri: The First Hundred Years, edited by Swapan Dasgupta. Harper Collins India, 1977, pp. 78–90. Naikar, Basavaraj S. Critical Articles on Nirad C. Chaudhuri. Sivranjani Publications, 1985.

ANIL K. PRASAD

CHAUHAN, ANUJA (1970–) Anuja Chauhan was born on September 17, 1970, in Meerut (Uttar Pradesh) and educated in Delhi. She currently lives in Bangalore with her partner and children. She has had a long career with the advertising company, JWT, retiring as the executive creative director in 2010 to work as a full-time author and screenplay writer. She has several popular commercials under her belt. Her published six novels have all been bestsellers; two of them have been adapted into Hindi films. She has written three scripts for Hindi movies. Her first novel, The Zoya Factor, published in 2010, drew on her decade-long expertise of working with an advertising agency. The story revolves around Zoya who begins a love affair with a cricketer while working with the team. Zoya comes to believe she is the lucky charm of the cricket team, but she is soon humbled. Chauhan’s second novel, Battle for Bittora, is the story of a young woman, Sarojini Pande, working as an animator in Mumbai, who is convinced by her grandmother to return and fight the Lok Sabha elections from her hometown, Bittora. The story unfolds with hilarity as she finds herself contesting against an ex-Bittora royal with whom she has had a romantic entanglement. The story is a familiar tale of underhand and illegal means used to win elections; Chauhan makes a subtle commentary on corruption in the Indian electoral system. Those Pricey Thakur Girls was published in 2013 and is set in the pre-liberalization period, foregrounding the life of five girls from a privileged family in the 1980s–1990s India. The story is partially autobiographical and adopts a nostalgic tone toward the lifestyle of a conventional Indian family from that time period. It revolves around the Thakurs of Hailey Road, an uppermiddle-class Rajput family of five alphabetically named sisters. The story also explores questions of journalism, positing the tension between free journalism and a media house working as a mouthpiece for the government. The book has been adapted twice as a television series. The House That BJ Built was published in 2015 and is a sequel to Those Pricey Thakur Girls, taking 61

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forward the story of the five sisters after twenty years. The plot revolves around a family dispute over the selling of their ancestral home on Hailey Road. Her fifth novel, Baaz, published in 2017, tells the story of a reckless Jaat boy from rural Haryana who is an Air Force Officer posted in West Bengal. The story is set in 1971, with the India – (then) East Pakistan war casting a long shadow over the romance that is the main theme while Chauhan makes a subtle, continual commentary on the theme of war and love. Her sixth novel, Club You to Death, published in 2021, revolves around a murder that occurs in the privileged enclaves of a Turf Club in Delhi. The story unfolds as a mystery with many characters turning into suspects with a lively commentary on societal hypocrisy. She has also edited An Atlas of Love: The Rupa Romance Anthology, a collection of stories that examine love and the many ways in which the young live and love in contemporary India. Chauhan’s works are popular, as evidenced by the selling figures and the interest in adaptations. There has been criticism from several quarters that her books are written with weak characterization and cliche plot lines that almost mimic Hindi films. Her works have often been dismissed as being “chic-lit” or frivolous and aimed at commercial success. Others have opined that she manages to find interesting sites for her novels to allow the unfolding of cultural battles. Keeping true to her writing style, all her novels use Hinglish (a combination of Hindi and English) deftly to capture the spoken language of the young in contemporary times, for they, indeed, are the central characters in her books. The usage of such colloquial words and deliberate mispronunciations, now becoming ever more common with the internet allowing this flourish, has garnered both praise and criticism. Some find her work kitsch, whereas others have noted that she brings wit grounded in colloquial expressions into the domain of popular fiction. Her characters are the products of the conflict between modernity and tradition, each occupying the other interstitially. Her characters are idiosyncratic, exaggerated, and often have picaresque mannerisms that allow the reader to recognize the setting beyond a doubt.

Further Reading Gupta, Suman. “Indian ‘Commercial Fiction’ in English, the Publishing Industry and Youth Culture.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 47, no. 5, 2012, pp. 46–53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41419848. Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder. “After ‘Midnight’s Children’: Some Notes on the New Indian Novel in English.” Social Research, vol. 78, no. 1, 2011, pp. 203–230. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23347209.

SHAMBHAWI VIKRAM

CHOWDHURY, KUNDAN LAL (1941–2021) Born on March  7, 1941, in Srinagar, Kashmir, Kundan Lal Chowdhury was the son of Shri J.L. Chowdhury, a famous criminal lawyer, and Shrimati Dhan Rani. A medical doctor by profession, Chowdhury obtained his MBBS from Panjab University and his MD from Delhi University before moving to London to complete his fellowship in neurology. Dr. Chowdhury served as a clinician, a medical researcher, and a professor of Neurology at the Government Medical College, Srinagar, and also established his reputation as a prolific writer, poet, and social commentator. Chowdhury is well-known for his work with the Kashmiri Pandits who were forced to leave Kashmir and take refuge in Jammu and other adjoining cities due to growing Pakistan-backed militancy that aimed to cleanse the valley of Kashmir of its last remaining Hindu population during the early months of 1990. He established the Shriya Bhat Mission Hospital and Research

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Center, which focused on providing medical assistance to displaced Kashmiri migrants. He was also a popular personality on air, as his radio programs articulated the horrors experienced by the Kashmiri Pandits during the exodus. As mentioned in the dedication of the short story collection Room in our Heart and Other Stories, a passion for storytelling was instilled in him at a very early age by hearing anecdotes about Indian epic heroes and real-life incidents from his parents. Thus, his short stories are characterized by an unparalleled ability to narrate the experiences of the Kashmiri people whose lives were devastated by the brutalities of 1990. For instance, in his short story collection Faith and Frenzy and Other Short Stories, published in 2012, he reflects on the bifurcation of religion into a faith and a frenzy, the delicate divide that was increasingly blurred by the religious militancy that virtually destroyed the cultural diversity in Kashmir. His next short story anthology, Why Don’t You Convert and other Short Stories, which was published in 2015, engages with the rhetoric of embracing Islam as a survival tactic. These concerns are brought into wider focus through his third and most popular short story collection, Room in our Heart and Other Stories, first published in 2019. The stories lay bare the concerns of the everyday man through a narrative style that is simple and poignant enough to capture the unending woes of those who witnessed or suffered through the horrors of a brutal war that none of them had asked for. For instance, in stories such as “Mind of a Terrorist,” which recounts the story of Kakaji Gurtoo and Mushtaq Nalicha, two neighbors since their childhood who had to part ways due to the growing militancy in Kashmir, and in “Yousef,” which narrates the story of a Kashmiri villager, readers witness Chowdhury’s attempt to portray the humanity that surpasses the petty politics of the day. His appreciation of the love of humans for each other that goes beyond religious and communal divides is remarkable and seen at its best in Room In our Heart and Other Stories. Chowdhury’s creativity is not constrained to his short stories; his poetry collections such as Of Gods, Men and Militants, A Thousand-Petalled Garland and Other Poems and The Final Frontier: Dialogues between Mother and Son captivate the readers with moving depictions of human love, loss, and courage. Moreover, in his book Homeland after Eighteen Years: A 48-Hour Travelogue, Chowdhury adopts a different narrative style to revisit a city that was snatched away from him and his people. Chowdhury received honors and awards both for his work with the displaced community of Kashmiri Pandits and his excellence as a writer. These include “Kashmiri of the Year,” the Rajiv Gandhi Shiromani Award in 2007 for his work with the displaced Pandits, the Prem Nath Bhat Amateur Journalist Award 2004, and the Best Book Award for Excellence in Literature in 2008. With his literary and social work spanning over three decades, Chowdhury established himself as a strong voice of the Kashmiri Pandits and an excellent writer.

Further Reading Chowdhury, K. L. “Stories from Dr. K. L. Chowdhury’s ‘My Medical Journey’: Compiled by M. L. Raina.” Praagaash – Net-Journal of Project Zaan, 2021, https://mkraina.com/wp-content/ uploads/2021/11/Stories-from-Dr.-K.L.Chowdhurys-Medical-Journey.pdf. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Khan, S. “Noted Physician and Writer Dr  K L Chowdhury Passes Away.” Greater Kashmir, www. greaterkashmir.com/kashmir/noted-physician-and-writer-dr-k-l-chowdhury-passes-away. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. “KL Chowdhury.” Bloomsbury Publishing, www.bloomsbury.com/in/author/k-l-chowdhury/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

ISURU AYESHMANTHA RATHNAYAKE

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CHOWDHURY, SIDDHARTH (1974–) Siddharth Chowdhury was born in Patna in 1974. He studied English literature at Hindu College, University of Delhi, and began his writing journey at the young age of nineteen. His first book, Diksha at St. Martin’s, was published in 2002 by Srishti Publication to considerable critical acclaim. In 2005, his second book, Patna Roughcut, was published by Picador India. Day Scholar, his third book, was published in 2010 by Picador India and was short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. His fourth book, A Patna Manual of Style, was published in 2015 by Aleph Books. The Time of the Peacock, Chowdhury’s latest release, was published in 2021 and is a story about the literary circuit in India. Chowdhury is now based in Delhi where he works as an editorial consultant with the house of Manohar. Diksha at St. Martin’s is a collection of stories that reflect the social and cultural life of the cities of Delhi and Patna, two cities separated by seven hundred miles. The stories explore themes of love, youth, alienation, loneliness, and heartbreaks. They are characterized by a dark comic tone. Patna Rough Cut spans over forty years and explores the love relationship of a young man called Ritwik and a woman called Ila, five years his senior. Ila leads Ritwik into the world of literature, theater, and art. The story features an assortment of characters and how they grow up in the last half of the 20th century. The novel manages to capture the small and big achievements of individuals in a society slowly and quietly seeding. Day Scholar is a coming-of-age story that begins in 1991 when two young men from Patna arrive in the North Campus, the aggressively male-dominated world of Delhi University. It explores the years between adolescence and adulthood of Pranjal Sinha and his best friend, the narrator of Day Scholar, Hriday Thakur. It is a story about ambition, love, and the fragility of both. One of the fearsome Delhi musclemen who control the city’s politics in secret is Zorawar Singh Shokeen of Chandrawal. He has a home nearby the University North Campus that he rents out as a dorm for young men. He occasionally hosts his mistress, Madam Midha, at the hostel. Otherwise, he enlists foot soldiers for his bloody campaigns from among his young tenants, their leader a lanky MA (Previous) student from Bihar known as the fabled Jishnu da. It is 1992, the Shokeen Niwas lads are worried about elections, girls, and exams during the transitional years between adolescence and adulthood. Hriday, who aspires to be a writer someday, finds himself imprisoned by a sequence of errors of judgment that brings him to the doorsteps of Madam’s house and her apple-cheeked daughter Sonya. The everyday purifying act of reading and writing is the only thing that can save Hriday from meeting a tragic end. This book explores the fragility of love and ambition. Day Scholar is a clear-eyed, gritty exposition of innocence under pressure. It identifies Siddhartha Chowdhury as one of his generation’s extraordinarily talented writers. A Patna Manual of Style is an account of the life of young Hriday Thakur, a writer, lecturer, publisher, ad-man, and lover of women, from heartbreak to marriage in post-liberalization India. In nine interconnected stories we meet Hriday Thakur’s former Delhi University classmate and current “importer of blondes,” Samuel Crown, Hriday’s mentor, who instills in him an unbreakable love for the craft of “book-making.” The array of women in Hriday’s life includes austere, doe eyed Charulata, love of his youth; his wife Chitrangada, who strives hard to be accepted in his world of books, art, politics, and activism; Sadaf Khan Abdali, who enjoys the fragrance of Listerine in the morning; and Imogen Burns, the intrepid chronicler of graveyards among others. When taken as a whole, Siddharth Chowdhury’s stories are an affectionate nod to an idealist generation that was isolated in a world of publishing, academia, gin-soaked brunches, and Marxist philosophy. They are unsentimental to the point of being condescending and deal with intimate, sensual, and occasionally ill-defined relationships. 64

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In The Time of the Peacock, Chowdhury is particularly interested in the process of making books. In this book, as in his other works, he returns to Patna, his hometown. Hindi and Bhojpuri vocabulary is used without being italicized. Local terms are occasionally utilized solely for their shape and sound and to advance the plot as a code among close friends. The expectations and prejudices that define writing about the non-white world are not present in Chowdhury’s writings. There is no mystique, nothing foreign, no cultural fascination, no spiritual or moral liberation. Chowdhury’s characters are failed authors, dreamers, lovers, and revolutionaries, and they live in dusty, frequently tragic worlds that are populated with a variety of films and books.

Further Reading Hillion, Marianne. “Re-imagining Delhi as an Ordinary City: Siddharth Chowdhury’s Quiet Revolution.”  Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol.  42, no. 1, 2019. OpenEdition Journals, https://doi. org/10.4000/ces.999. Singh, Prabhat K., editor. The Indian English Novel of the New Millennium. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

HASAN NASSOUR

CHRONICLE OF A CORPSE BEARER, THE, by Cyrus Mistry This novel turns the spotlight on a Parsi sub-community – the Kandhias (corpse bearers) – about whom little is known outside the Parsi community. The secluded world of the Kandhias in the Doongerwadi is made available through the voice and recollection of Phiroze Elchidana. The novel, however, is more than just the story of Phiroze. Divided into three sections, the narrative begins in pre-independent India, moves through independence, and ends in the 1970s, allowing itself the space to traverse a large historical swathe which traces the changes in customs, attitudes and mores of a community and a city. Nicknamed “Piloo,” Phiroze is the second son of Framroze, who is the head priest of a small fire temple in Bombay. Because of the high standards of ritual cleanliness and spiritual rectitude maintained by his father, the temple is well-known for its ritual purity and spiritual integrity. Phiroze, who could not speak till the age of three, is constantly watched for signs of dull wittedness. His bouts of irrepressible giggling at the most solemn moments/ceremonies add to his mother’s fear that he is mentally and cognitively impaired. While his father hopes that he would become a great priest, Phiroze “craved something more robust than books,” and failed to clear the matriculation exam. After he falls in love with and marries Sepideh, he needs to live as a corpse bearer, and becomes a Nussesalar (“Lord of the Unclean”). His duty is to protect the living from contamination supposedly spewed by corpses and is thus assured to forever escape “the cycle of rebirth, decrepitude and death.” The narrative focalizes the treatment meted out to Kandhias as “the very embodiment of shit . . . untouchable to the core,” and asks important questions about why there is much repugnance and revulsion associated with the dead. We are repeatedly told the life stories of people who joined as Kandhias – Temoorus, Rustom, Kobaad, Khushro – to escape dire poverty and were labeled untouchables, which tainted the future of their children as well, Vera and Farida being two examples. The novel turns its subaltern gaze upwards to underscore hollow and hypocritical practices in the community. The importance given to ritual cleanliness and purity by Phiroze’s father, for instance, “congealed into a grim religiosity” which marred daily domestic life for the family. The rot runs deeper. After a humiliating incident which revolves around ritual purity, Sepideh’s mother, 65

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Rubadeh, stops seeking his money, turns to prostitution and is killed. What is worse, the proceeds from the flat that should have been shared with her are not given to her, and her ruby earrings which he ostensibly kept for safekeeping are not returned. The image of saintliness that Framroze so carefully cultivated by his external actions comes thoroughly undone by the end of the novel. With the Quit India movement in the background, Phiroze orchestrates a successful strike in 1942 to demand better work and living conditions, unleashing a vociferous debate between the orthodox and reformist factions in the community. The questions that this debate opens up increasingly gain in prominence and color the attitudes of characters like Buchia (Nusli Kavarana), who turn increasingly conservative as the novel progresses. The novel ends on an uncertain note with vultures dying out, Phiroze aging, his parents and friends passing away, and bits of land of the once-sylvan Doongerwadi being sold to private players. His father’s moral intransigence, when combined with the social ostracization that he suffered all his life, leaves him withdrawn, bitter, and disinterested. As Mistry states in the Afterword, he was commissioned to write a proposal for a documentary on the lives of the Kandhias for a BBC Channel 4 documentary. The documentary could not take off, but his meetings with people from the community provided him with the material to write a novel. Other than some mainstream reviews, the novel has not received much critical attention. Many commentators have faulted the novel for providing very little insight into Sepideh, for its uneven narrative pace, and for the mismatch between the literariness of the language used by the narrator and his meager educational accomplishments.

Further Reading Almeida, Rochelle. “In the Right Place at the Right Time: A Tale of Two Brothers, Rohinton and Cyrus Mistry.” Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market, edited by O. P. Dwivedi and L. Lau. Palgrave, 2014, pp. 164–179.

VAIBHAV IYPE PAREL

CLEARING A SPACE by Amit Chaudhuri Clearing A Space by the Indian author-critic, Amit Chaudhuri, is a remarkable contribution to the literary-cultural criticism that has been produced on India. Apart from seven novels, Chaudhuri has a few nonfiction titles to his credit: Telling Tales (2013), The Origins of Dislike (2019), Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music, and the edited volumes, Picador Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (2002), Memory’s Gold: Writings on Calcutta (2008), and Literary Activism: Perspectives (2017). Clearing a Space, published in 2008, is his first book of critical essays on Indian literature and criticism. Apart from a comprehensive introduction, the book includes twenty-five essays, most of which have been previously published on different platforms such as The London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. His attempt in the essays is to “clear” the space in literary-cultural studies on India, which, for him, have so far been occupied by such current trends like postcolonialism, globalization and nationalism, to make a case for modernity as an alternative discursive framework for remapping a history of literary and cultural practices in and on India. The essays in the book are divided into two parts: 1) “Towards a Poetics of the Indian Modern,” and 2) “Alternative Traditions, Alternative Readings.” The first part comprises essays that are largely theoretical in nature, while essays in the second part focus more on individual

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authors and works. Bringing together authors and works that are otherwise studied and analyzed in/along different contexts and movements, the book presents “modernity” – which Chaudhuri also identifies with “Bengali humanism” – as a “creator of myths, fictions, and artistic practice, as a phase in our history, as a site under threat, as a mutating sign,” and as an important discursive framework for better understanding these works and authors. “Modernity” is analyzed in the book by exploring it through different conduits: “the strangeness in Indian literature,” “the Indian Gothic,” Indian forms of secularism, the apparent conflict between vernacular literature and Indian writing in English, the category of the West, the global, Bollywood and Hollywood. Indian popular and high culture, Hindutva politics, globalization and cosmopolitan practices, diaspora studies, urban landscapes, and spaces such as Paris, Bombay, Dublin, Calcutta and New York are revisited through a detailed examination of the works of O.V. Vijayan, Rabindranath Tagore, Arun Kolatkar, V.S. Naipaul, R.K. Narayan, Rudyard Kipling, Jibanananda Das, Salman Rushdie, Jayanta Mahapatra, Raj Kamal Jha, and many others. No other book on modern Indian literary history has dealt with so vast a field of inquiry. The bringing together of these various essays, previously published elsewhere, might lead some to doubt the collation, especially when looked at through “modernity” as the defining frame of analysis of these different authors located in different spatio-temporal spheres. This is also, as some have pointed out, precisely the problem: how can these authors and texts, situated in different spaces and temporalities, make themselves available for such an analysis of modernity? “The periodization,” as pointed out by Sharon Pillai, “is arbitrary and generates its own aporias in understanding high cultural practices in nineteenth-century India.” Also, many of the essays in the collection seem to assume that terms such as modern, modernity, and modernism are interchangeable, especially in an attempt to bring out the interpretive potential of the “Indian Modern.” As a result, the use of “modernity” is unclear and sometimes unspecific at best. However, some of the essays in the book, especially the one on Jibanananda Das, provide fresh insights into authors who are otherwise inadequately explored in the Indian literary context. The essays advocate new ways of thinking about Indian literature and culture that veer strikingly from the models and frameworks that were established especially since the publication of Midnight’s Children. The book is a must read for anyone who is interested in Indian culture and literature, for offering many ideas on modern Indian literary cultures, practices and criticism.

Further Reading Anjaria, Ulka. A History of the Indian Novel in English. Cambridge UP, 2015. Chaudhuri, Amit. “Introduction. Modernity and the Vernacular: The Construction of the Indian Novel in English- A Note on the Selection.” The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. Picador, 2001, pp. 1–26. Pillai, Sharon. “Review of Clearing a Space: Essays on Literature, India, and Modernity, by Amit Chaudhuri.” College Literature, vol. 36, no. 3, 2009, pp. 231–234. Project Muse, https://doi.org/10.1353/ lit.0.0072. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. Penguin, 1992. Sengoopta, Chandak. “Review of Clearing a Space, by Amit Chaudhuri.” The Independent, 25 Jul. 2008, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/clearing-a-space-by-amit-chaud huri-876220.html.

THEMEEM T.

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COLLECTED POEMS by Nissim Ezekiel Collected Poems, 1952–1988 is an anthology of poems by Nissim Ezekiel published by the Oxford University Press, which has a preface by Leela Gandhi and an introduction by John Thieme. It collects all of Ezekiel’s poems from his previous published volumes and some other uncollected poems as well, which have been arranged chronologically. The poems from A Time to Change (1952) cover themes ranging from desire, art, morals, nature, God, love, women, and indifference to the horror of indifference. Some of the poems like “Words in a Gentle Wind,” “Commitment,” and “Failure,” profile the wise poetic persona, a staple of Ezekiel’s oeuvre. Ezekiel also displays an engagement with a variety of poetic forms, ranging from free verse to rhymed and metered lines, and to prose poems like “Preferences,” “The Prophet,” “Reading,” “Declaration,” and “Encounter.” The female form emerges as a crucial subject in Sixty Poems (1953) such as “A  Poem of Dedication,” “Situation,” “Two Nights of Love,” “Description,” “The Old Abyss,” and “The Female Image,” among others. A concern with the finitude of life and language figures in pieces such as “Sotto Voce” and “Speech and Silence.” A religious tenor is displayed in poems such as “Prayer,” “Transmutation,” “Psalm 151,” and “Cain.” Other themes include urban life, art, music, nature, etc. Intertextual references to William Carlos Williams and Flaubert also figure in them. The poems from The Third (1958) dwell on similar concerns, that of women in “Declaration,” “Episode,” “Encounter,” “Gallantry,” and “At the Hotel.” Cosmos and religion figure in “Portrait,” “Insectlore,” and “Song of Desolation.” A number of poems also dwell on love, banality, and the urban quotidian. The poems from The Unfinished Man (1960) touch on themes such as urban fantasies, rural life, love, hills, urban upper-middle-class life, marriage and jobs, the poet’s persona, the artist figure, conjugality, and prayer. Poems from The Exact Name (1965) continue some of the thematic concerns of Ezekiel. Further interest in the rural and the peculiarity of the Indian experience is covered in “Night of the Scorpion” and “In India.” “In Retrospect” revisits Ezekiel’s life in London while “Paradise Flycatcher” juxtaposes prose and verse in the same piece. The book includes a selection of poems from 1965 to 1974 that dwell on recurring thematic concerns like women, love, nature, solitude, and faith. “In the Theatre” describes the experience of acting on the stage. Another section in the book includes poems written in 1974. The poems explore the life of a servant, along with themes related to aging, talking, time, and women’s bodies. Hymns in Darkness (1976) continues some of the themes that run through Ezekiel’s oeuvre. The opening and the closing poem, “Subject of Change” and “Hymns of Darkness,” respectively, are concerned with the infinitude of the cosmos and the finitude of human life. “The Railway Clerk” and “Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S.” introduce Ezekiel’s exploration of the peculiarity of Indian English. “Passion Poems” include a series of verses exploring, women, sex, and desire. Latter-Day Psalms (1982) dwell on race, urban scenes, the perspective of a minority, and continues Ezekiel’s exploration of Indian English in “Very Indian Poems in Indian English.” The collection also includes poems from 1983 to 1988 which display a mature poet at work. It ends with a poem found in the poet’s papers, “The Second Candle.” In the introduction to the collection, Thieme classifies Ezekiel’s work into two phases, noting that early Ezekiel bears the “imprint of his European Modernist influences” while the “mature Ezekiel . . . defies easy categorization . . . to create a highly personal Indian landscape.” 68

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Further Reading Bhatnagar, M. K. “Ezekiel’s Family Poems.” Indian Writings in English, vol. 7. Atlantic Publishers & Dist, 1996, pp. 195–212. King, B. “The Poet’s India I: Ezekiel, Ramanujan, Patel, Daruwalla, Shiv Kumar.” Modern Indian Poetry in English: Revised Edition, latest ed. Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 110–128. King, B. Three Indian Poets: Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, A. K. Ramanujan, 2nd ed. Oxford UP, 2008. Mishra, S. The Poetic Art of Nissim Ezekiel. Atlantic Publishers, 2001. Swann, J. “Open Boundaries: Encountering Nissim Ezekiel and A. K. Ramanujan.” Translation of Cultures, edited by P. Rudiger and K. Gross. Brill, 2009, pp. 21–34.

DEBARUN SARKAR

COLLECTED POEMS by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra Collected Poems, 1969–2014 is an edited volume of a selection of poems from Mehrotra’s four volumes of poetry, Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984), and The Transfiguring Places (1998), his translations, and some uncollected poems, with an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri. The book begins with a selection of Mehrotra’s uncollected poems published previously in literary magazines and some unpublished ones too. The new ones include historical pieces such as “A Hindu Panegyrist Remembers Sultan Mahmud,” “For a Slave King,” “Mirza Ghalib in Old Age,” and “Bharati Bhavan Library, Chowk, Allahabad.” Some deal with the long-standing concern with the quotidian: the simultaneity of the quotidian and the historical is in evidence in poems like “Number 16” and “In a Greek City Egypt, 315.” Poems such as “Oink!” and “The Nulla-Nulla in Nullah” display the playful side of Mehrotra. The poems from Nine Enclosures (1976) are characterized by a tonality that diminishes in his later works. A sense of an assured grandeur is evident in “Songs of Ganga,” in which the Ganges is the speaker, and in poems such as “The Sale,” “Songs of the Good Surrealist,” and “The Book of Common Places,” which display a surrealist, or in “Genealogy” and “Continuities” which dwell on parents and childhood. Some of the themes recur in Mehrotra’s oeuvre, but stylistically his poems become simpler in their structure and style. From the poems of Distance in Statute Miles (1982), the influence of surrealism is evident in “Lies.” New themes and motifs of marriage, conjugal life, and life in the hills figure in poems such as “Letter to a Friend,” “Kite,” “Canticle for My Son,” “Not Through Glass,” “Engraving of a Bison on Stone,” “Distance in Statute Miles,” “River Stop,” “Two Lakes,” and “Natural History.” Poems such as “Inland,” “January,” and “October” display the turn toward the quotidian while “Company Period” and “On the Death of a Sunday Painter” to the historic. References to poets like Hanshan, Kabir, and Maluk are also made in these poems. In the poems of Middle Earth (1984) and uncollected poems from 1972 to 1983, the impact of surrealism is visible in “The Exquisite Corpse,” “Let’s Face It,” “Telegram,” “The Cotton Tree,” “New Golden,” and “Disiecti Membra Poetae.” “House by the Mill” explicitly refers to the date the Emergency was announced by Indira Gandhi in 1975, while the concern with nature figures in “Classification” and “The World’s a Printing-House.” In The Transfiguring Places (1998), the quotidian and historical emerge as one of the primary thematic concerns. The poems are also concerned with old age, especially in pieces such as “Approaching Fifty,” “The Fracture,” and “To an Unborn Daughter.” The engagement with nature continues in poems such as “The House,” “Last View from Church Lane,” and “The Vase That Is Marriage.” The section ends with “The Cartographer” which sums up Mehrotra’s concern with the mapping of time and space. 69

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The collection includes a selection of translations from Gāthāsaptaśatī and Kabir, and Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi poetry. Mehrotra eschews academic translation for a stylistic, creative, and contemporaneous translation which gives the poems a feel of the age. A piece remixes Kabir with Janabai, Aurelius, Bhartrihari, and Horace mediated through various other translators to evoke a poetic babel. The collection was well-received by a reviewer for Mid-Day, who noted the “economy of his language.” A reviewer for Asymptote commended Mehrotra for his translations.

Further Reading Khullar, Ajit. “Poet of Found Metaphors.” Indian Literature, vol. 27, no. 3 (101), 1984, pp. 125–130. Souza, Eunice de. “Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.” Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets. Oxford UP, 1999, pp. 99–109. Zecchini, Laetitia. “ ‘We Were like Cartographers, Mapping the City’: An Interview with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 53, no. 1–2, Mar. 2017, pp.  190–206. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2017.1296631.

DEBARUN SARKAR

COLLECTED POEMS, THE, by A.K. Ramanujan The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan, published posthumously, was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award. The collection includes Ramanujan’s three volumes of poetry, The Striders (1966), Relations (1971), The Second Sight (1986), and a previously unpublished volume, The Black Hen. Ramanujan often compared his poems to newborns who needed to be washed regularly. He worked on them for a long period and composed and decomposed them until he was convinced that they were worthy of publication. This is clear in “Elements of Composition,” a long poem that he wrote in 1985 but published in The Second Sight in 1986, splitting it into smaller poems, with different titles: “Elements of Composition,” “Questions,” “The Watchers,” “Snakes and Ladders,” “A Poor Man’s Riches 1 and 2,” “Aliens,” “Drafts, ” “Middle Age,” “The Difference,” “Dancers in Hospital,” “Connect,” “Looking for the Centre,” and “Waterfalls in a Bank.” A prominent feature of Ramanujan’s poetry is his interaction with nature, which is reflected in poems that deal with rivers, trees, and animals. Particularly striking are poems about animals, which have an amazing depth in them. Ramanujan’s poems show his familiarity with Hindu and Western/Christian traditions. In The Striders he makes a reference to Jesus Christ walking on water: “No, not only prophets/Walk on water . . . .” His poem, “Death and the Good Citizen,” shows the tension between the West and East stated through their different funeral practices: “They’ll cremate/Me in Sanskrit and sandalwood/Have me sterilized/To a scatter of ash,” and in the West: “They’ll lay me out in a funeral Parlour,/embalm me in a pesticide,/Bury me in a steel trap, lock/Me out of nature.” A sprinkling of the Hindu idea of reincarnation shapes “A Meditation,” in which the poet is a walnut tree that is cut and made into many shapes: a table, a chair, and paper. When the poet writes on paper, he thinks that he is writing on the various parts of his own body. A recurring theme in Ramanujan’s poems is the human body, in which he deals with death and afterlife. Death is not going to overtake him in the distant future, but it is something on which the poet has put a day and a time: “A Saturday at three-fifteen/At home in a foreign place . . .” (“Saturdays”). In “A Hindu to His Body,” he has a Hindu talk to his body: “You brought me: do not leave me/Behind.” A sense of separation between the self and the body can be felt in these lines, a 70

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separation that runs right throughout his poems. Themes of death and decaying body appear recurringly in Ramanujan’s poems. Though the collection of poems was received well by critics, reading or interpreting his poetry is not easy. As David Starkey said alluding to Ramanujan’s eponymous poem in The Striders, his poems “often seem to walk on water while drowning in their ‘tiny strip/of sky.’ ”

Further Reading Ramanujan, Attippat Krishnaswami. The Collected Poems of A. K. Ramanujan. Oxford UP, 2005. Starkey, David, and Richard Guzman, editors. Smokestacks & Skyscrapers: An Anthology of Chicago Writing. Wild Onion Books, 1999.

M. ALROY MASCRENGHE

COLLECTED SHORT STORIES, THE, by Ruskin Bond Born in 1934 in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, Ruskin Bond is an acclaimed Indian author of British descent. With a rich corpus of short stories, novellas, and children’s fiction to his credit, he won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1957, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992, the Padma Shri in 1999, and the Padma Bhushan in 2014. The Collected Short Stories (2016) is a compendium of over eighty short fictional narratives by him. The compilation begins with his first short story – “Untouchable” – a narrative about the regressive norms of caste discrimination in India. It charts the unlikely friendship between the young author and a sweeper boy who is unfairly categorized as “untouchable.” Initially, he hesitates to seek his company, but his fear of darkness and the loud thunderstorm that rages outside compels him to do so. The story traces the slow evolution of their amicable relationship, even though they differ starkly in their social standing. Journeys and strange encounters are recurring tropes in Bond’s stories. The journey becomes not just a framing narrative but also an interpretive filter for the narrator to observe and record fleeting encounters, chance meetings, and unexpected scenes. “The Night Train at Deoli,” “Going Home,” “The Woman on Platform 8,” “Time Stops at Shamli,” and “The Eyes Have It,” all deploy the act of journeying as a primary theme. It is also worth mentioning here that Bond focuses mostly on journeying by train, which features alongside detailed, evocative descriptions of train stations and travelers. “The Woman on Platform 8” and “Night Train at Deoli” are two stories that unravel the first-person narrator’s fleeting encounters with strangers he met on the station platforms. While the first story details the tacit understanding between the narrator and a stranger on the platform who pretends to be his mother, the second deals with the narrator’s infatuation with a young girl he met at a small station in Deoli. The playful activities of children and reminiscences of childhood locales and memories often enliven Bond’s stories. He, in fact, modulates the narrative voice in ways that aptly reflect the limitations, immaturities, and playfulness of children. “The Photograph,” for example, describes a select memory of the narrator when he was just ten years old, when he was involved in a conversation with his grandmother. Even when the primary plot does not revolve around young characters, they have a marked presence in the narrative. “The Fight,” “A Rupee Goes a Long Way,” “As Time Goes By,” “My First Love,” and “The Prospect of Flowers” are punctuated by innocent, childlike observations. Owing to Bond’s careful attention to enumerating scenes from nature and provincial and/ or rustic settings, a significant body of eco-critical scholarship has grown around his stories. A significant number of them have strikingly visual descriptions of landscapes of Dehra, where the author spent most of his childhood. In “My Father’s Trees in Dehra” and “Coming Home 71

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to Dehra,” the moods of the primary narrative voice seep into the ecological descriptions of Dehra. The latter story, for example, ends with the narrator opening the window in his room, gazing out at an unkempt garden where marigolds spread among the litchi trees. The chaotic, disorganized garden aptly represents the narrator’s unsettled mind following his first homecoming after his father’s demise. In “Death of the Trees,” the author laments the felling of the trees to make way for a new road. He goes on to list the trees – the deodars, oaks, maples, and pines – and mourns for the many creatures that inhabited these trees, the long-tailed magpies, minivets, and the langoors, among others. Over the years, Bond has been able to curate his own unique style of nature writing. Abounding in lucid descriptions of Indian topography and succinct descriptions of the unique characters that he encounters at different points in his life, Bond’s stories aptly enumerate the aesthetic and cultural ethos of the locales that he sets his stories in. Even as he grapples with distinct locations and unique characters, his exploration of familiar tropes of love, longing, regret, and infatuation gives a distinctive poignancy and narrative depth to his short fiction.

Further Reading Bandyopadhyay, Debashis. Locating the Anglo-Indian Self in Ruskin Bond: A Postcolonial Review. Anthem Press, 2011. Bond, Ruskin. A Book of Simple Living. Feel Book Private, 2015. Sinha, M. P., et al. Ruskin Bond: A Critical Evaluation. Atlantic Publishers, 2012.

MAALAVIKA AJAYAKUMAR

COLLECTOR’S WIFE, THE, by Mitra Phukan The Collector’s Wife is a novel written by Mitra Phukan, a prominent literary voice in English from the Northeast. It is rooted in real time and space and set in Parbatpuri, a conflict-ridden region in Assam, a picturesque town “encircled by mile upon mile of lush tea-greens.” But more importantly “the very nerve-center of the ferocious unrest” that “threatens to rip apart the very fabric” of the lives of the local population. The plot of the novel weaves the changing sociopolitical dynamics of the state with decades of hollowness in Rukmini’s life to skillfully capture the “ostensible reformations of power and resistance, both in personal and political terms.” Rukmini lives a sheltered life in the officer’s bungalow with her district collector husband, Siddhartha Bejboruah. Though married for a decade, the couple is childless and the inability to conceive disturbs Rukmini. She works as an English teacher in a local college and finds it disappointing that the students have little interest in reading literature. Her life is monotonous and routine until she meets a handsome young tire agent, Manoj Mahanta, with whom she has an extramarital affair, experiences love and companionship, and finds pleasure in stolen moments of intimacy. Assam has various cultures, traditions, languages, and a rich history. It has also been the ground for a lot of conflict, violence, and bloodshed. The novel presents a complex intertwining of political and personal spaces to bring out how violence and social instability affect the lives of individuals. Episodes of insurgency, students’ protests, and ethnic clashes aggravated by kidnappings, extortions, and armed robbery present a very realistic picture of Assam that was torn between immigrants and natives. The novel is based on the Assamese Students’ Agitation of the 1970s and 1980s which started as a movement for self-determinism and search for identity in the midst of a huge influx of Bangladeshi immigrants into the state. Several groups in

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Assam recruited youths and trained them to use weapons, which caused rage, resistance, political unrest, and loss of lives in the state. There are many secrets in the novel that the author strategically crafts into the story to keep the readers hooked till the end. The physical intimacy between Manoj and Rukmini, the fling between Siddharth and Priyam, the truth about the child that Rukmini is carrying, and the true identity of Rukmini’s driver – all of these are held together to create a dramatic impact as they gravitate toward the tragic death of Manoj and Siddharth in an encounter with the terrorists, leaving behinds a lamenting Rukmini: “Tears for two men. One who had died, not knowing that he was going to be a father. And another, who had been prepared to be a father to an unborn child, not his.” The novel brings out the plight and vulnerability of women in unsafe positions – physically and emotionally. However, it provides an educated, upper-class woman’s perspective on the situation, and for the very same reasons it fails to include the lives of ordinary people and the situations they face in real life. The Collector’s Wife also examines the emerging new woman in the patriarchal setup of the Assamese society where Rukmini struggles with the social stigma attached to infertility. The discriminatory approach toward barren women as carriers of bad luck is evident in the comments of the older generation: “What times we are living through! In my days, even the shadow of a barren woman wasn’t allowed to fall on the bride.”

Further Reading Bhuyan, Dikshita. “Depiction of New Woman in Mitra Phukan’s the Collector’s Wife: A Study of the Character of Rukmini.” IJAR, vol. 9, no. 12, Dec. 2019. Mandpe, Poornima. “The Collector’s Wife: A Civilian Point of View to Political Instability in Assam.” YKA: Where Young India Writes, 5 Oct. 2020, www.youthkiawaaz.com/2020/10/the-collectors-wife/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Showalter, Elaine. “Towards a Feminist Poetics.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth. Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Thornber, Karen L. Eco-Ambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literature. U of Michigan P, 2012.

PRACHI PRIYANKA

CONTINENT OF CIRCE, THE, by Nirad C. Chaudhuri The Continent of Circe, Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s third book, published in 1965, a winner of the Duff Cooper Prize for 1966, is a collection of essays on India and her people. Chaudhuri provides his own rational and erudite account of India’s image, definition, history, the sociopsychological study of Hindus, Hindu pacifism and nonviolence, the treatment of Hindus by the British, the Hindu view of sexuality, and the different minorities that inhabit India. He considers India as Circe, a mythic figure in Homer’s The Odyssey, and her power as a sorceress to turn human beings into beasts. Indians have become her victims for centuries living under her spell, as a result, they have lost their physical prowess and rational spirits. However, Chaudhuri claims that he has freed himself from her magic spell: “I have rescued my European soul from Circe . . . .” Chaudhuri begins by stating that the description of India by the so-called economists, diplomats, novelists, Indian or foreign, newspaper correspondents, and Western journalists or writers “ring false.” He attributes this falsity to some kind of “timidity” and “fairly serious ignorance.”

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He offers his word of caution to foreign observers of India, telling them that they should understand the different layers of Indian ethnography to understand its historical evolution and demography. The central foundation with which Chaudhuri advances his argument further is that Hindus, the children of Circe, are immigrant Aryans, of European origin. Unlike the modern Hindus, they were not hypocritical about the aboriginals of the land and the color of their skin. On the other hand, they display admiration for the aboriginal physical beauty. Chaudhuri mentions incidents of Sabri from the Ramayana and Eklavya, the “non-Aryan boy” from the Mahabharata to prove his point about the existence of “Hindu Apartheid.” He is critical of India’s move toward industrialization as it threatened peoples’ peace of mind and dignity and destroyed the beauty of open spaces by transforming them into urban rabbles. Besides, in his opinion, industrialization poses a lurking danger to the aboriginals and even to the civilized population of India. Chaudhuri analyzes the socio-cultural and psychological make-up of India and her people from his subjective yet pragmatic perspectives. The spiritual background of Hindus bequeathed to them through Vedas and Upanishads is not reflected in their psycho-moral behavior. He calls them Janus-faced; one face looks toward materialism and the other toward violence and militarism which is hidden under the veneer of their proclamation of peace and nonviolence. Yet they do not present themselves only with two faces and that is why he calls them not only Janus Quadrifrons but even Janus Multifrons. Chaudhuri further portrays the Aryans as a European community who suffered from the tropical climate of the Indian subcontinent and never got used to the heat. Amid the nostalgia for their old but forgotten home, the Aryans in India suffered physical and mental pain. As some kind of perverse recompense, they took recourse to defiance, severe penances, asceticism, and self-mortification. Evocation of the occult also provided them with “consolation and confidence.” According to Chaudhuri, Hindus romanticized the physical reality of the sex act as an anodyne. Chaudhuri explores the Hindu mind in its totality, against the backdrop of different ethnic communities that came to India in the past and the conditions that were created as a result of this diversity. India, the continent of Circe, is inhabited by Muslims and half-caste (Portuguese, Goanese, Eurasians, Indian Christians, etc.) minorities living side by side with dominant minorities (Anglicized Hindus, officers of the armed forces, bureaucrats, managers, and professionals, etc.). Some reviewers consider Chaudhuri’s book one of the best books on India investigating its post-independence political and socio-cultural scenario, “quirky, at times wild, but rich and always stimulating.” Some others consider it a pseudo-historical account of India in which the Indus Valley Civilization and the Dravidian culture of South India have been ignored.

Further Reading Kamani, Chetan. Nirad C. Chaudhuri. Twayne Publishers, 1980. Mishra, Sudesh. “The Two Chaudhuris: Historical Witness and Pseudo-Historian.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 23, no. 1, 1988, pp. 7–15. Murthy, L. Radhakrishna. “Nirad C. Chaudhuri.” The Two-Fold Voice. Navodaya Publishers, 1971. Naipaul, V. S. “The Last of the Aryans.” Encounter, Jan. 1966, pp. 61–65. Sinha, Tara. Nirad C. Chaudhuri: A  Sociological and Stylistic Study of His Writings During the Period 1951–1 972. Janaki Prakashan, 1981. Verghese, C. Paul. Nirad C. Chaudhuri. Arnold Heinemann India, 1973.

ANIL K. PRASAD

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COWASJEE, SAROS (1931–2019) Saros Dara Cowasjee is an India-born Canadian writer, critic, anthropologist, commentator, and screenplay writer. He was born on July 12, 1931, in a Parsi family in Secunderabad to Dara and Meher Cowasjee. After completing his BA and MA from the University of Agra, he did his PhD from the University of Leeds, where he wrote his thesis on Sean O’Casey under the supervision of G. Wilson Knight. After working as an assistant editor at Times of India for two years, he joined the University of Saskatchewan, where he became a professor in 1971, and Professor Emeritus after his retirement in 1995. He also taught in universities in Australia, India, the United States, and Denmark. Most of his published research papers and articles have been archived by the library of the University of Regina. Besides being an academic, Cowasjee is also an acclaimed writer. He has written two novels, Goodbye to Elsa (1974) and Suffer Little Children (1982); two volumes of short stories, Stories and Sketches (1970) and Nude Therapy (1978); and a screenplay for The Last of the Maharaja’s (1980) based on The Private Life of an Indian Prince by Mulk Raj Anand. Cowasjee has also edited ten anthologies, which include Modern Indian Short Stories (1982) and Orphans of the Storm: Stories on the Partition of India (1995). He has commendable knowledge of Indian English fiction, is an authority on the fiction of Mulk Raj Anand, and has edited and written introductions to various books, such as Stories from the Raj (1983), More Stories from the Raj and After  (1986), Women Writers of the Raj: Short Fiction  (1990), Four Raj Novels  (Omnibus) (1994), The Oxford Anthology of Raj Stories (1999), Author to Critic: The Letters of Mulk Raj Anand to Saros Cowasjee (1973), and the trilogy comprising The Village, Across the Black Waters, and The Sword and the Sickle by Mulk Raj Anand (2016). Cowasjee’s first novel, Goodbye to Elsa (1974), is the autobiographical narrative of Tristan Elliott, an Anglo-Indian, working as an assistant professor of history at Canadian Plains University, who tries to relate himself to the people around him to overcome the loneliness and sense of alienation of his Anglo-Indian-ness. His father, a British pilot, died when Tristan was just four, and his Anglo-Indian mother who worked as a nurse in Delhi found herself a new lover. Deprived of love and affection in his growing years, Tristan has affairs with a variety of women from his graduation years to the time of his marriage. They only contribute to creating a mess in his mind that leads Tristan to become uncertain about life and makes him take some hasty decisions, including that of his marriage. With time, Tristan feels overburdened by the chaos he experiences around him and turns blind in one eye, which points to the beginning of the deterioration of his mental and physical abilities. He realizes that he must get rid of his overweight wife Elsa and his ugly son, both of whom he detests, and end his life. He moves into a deserted farmhouse, where he remembers his life spent in India, Canada, and England. Preparing diligently to end his life, he one day meets Marie, the daughter of a grocer, who falls in love with him and encourages him to face life. His second novel, Suffer Little Children (1982), the revised version of which was published in 1996 as The Assistant Professor, is a sequel to Goodbye to Elsa. Tristan is now an assistant professor, who has just been discharged from the mental asylum where he says he was admitted unfairly. Soon enough Tristan falls in love with Maura, a divorcee. The rest of the narrative reads like a crazy ride through a small Canadian town, with its local university, its battling academics, its feminists, and young mothers. Suffer Little Children is a farce and focuses on Tristan’s involvement with the feminist movement and his failed attempts to find a life partner. In Cowasjee’s fiction, the unexpected turns of life reflect its comic absurdity. Being an expatriate, his writing deals with the feeling of alienation, the anxiety of loneliness, and the theme of

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exile. Some of his short stories in the second collection like “My Father’s Medals” focus on the socio-political issues in India of those times.

Further Reading Benson, Eugene, and L. W. Conolly, editors. Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2005. Cowasjee, Saros. “Saros Cowasjee.” University of Regina, www.uregina.ca/library/services/archives/col lections/writing-theatre/cowasjee.html. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Natrajan, Nalini. Handbook of Twentieth-Century Literatures of India, edited by Emmanuel Sampath Nelson, et al. Greenwood Press, 1996.

KRITIKA VARMA

CUCKOLD by Kiran Nagarkar Cuckold (1997) is the most widely acclaimed novel by the Indian novelist and playwright Kiran Nagarkar for which he was awarded by the Sahitya Akademi in 2000. It is a historical novel set against the backdrop of the 16th century Mewar, closely following the life of Maharaj Bhoj Singh who was married to Mirabai, the legendary Saint-Poet and devotee of Lord Sree Krishna. The novel deals with the tension between the couple due to Mirabai’s complete dedication to Lord Krishna which her husband could not understand and her inability to accept Bhoj Raj as her husband which she visualized as an act of betrayal to her real partner Lord Krishna. The male protagonist of Cuckold, who is modeled after Maharaj Bhoj Singh of Mewar, is called Maharaj Kumar while his wife, who is modeled after Mirabai, is referred to as the Greeneyes. The novel revolves around the state of confusion and utter desperation that Maharaj Kumar finds himself in when his wife confesses on their wedding night that she considers herself to belong not to the husband but to someone else. This revelation destabilizes the very foundation of Maharaj Kumar’s self-esteem both as a man and as a prince as he thinks that he has been cuckolded by a woman. Maharaja Kumar swears to find the third person in this marriage. He surreptitiously spies on his wife, reads everything she writes or reads, and eavesdrops on every conversation she has, and finds her poems while searching for her secret lover. The poems express her fervent love for a man named Shyam, Giridhar, etc. When Maharaja Kumar confronts his wife about this, she reluctantly points to the Lord Krishna idol she worships, but he does not trust her. Maharaja Kumar’s image as the cuckolded husband becomes a national concern. Deeply troubled by all this, he tries all possible means to find out the secret lover, but his search yields no positive outcome. Because of this, he grows suspicious of Greeneyes’s psychological stability and summons witch doctor, Bhootni Mata, to examine her, but to no avail. It is at this precise juncture that Maharaja Kumar accepts that the third person in their marriage is no human but Lord Krishna himself. During this time, Maharaja Kumar is exiled from active politics for a number of political reasons. This somehow brings him close to Greeneyes, at least emotionally, as they can finally spend some time together without any interference from the outside. Around this time, there is a sudden outbreak of cholera in Chittor. As Maharaja Kumar rushes there to help the needy, Greeneyes decides to accompany him to work for the masses. Though Maharaja Kumar is still unable to accept his rejection by his wife, this camaraderie wipes out at least some of the discomfort from their relationship. Nagarkar ends his novel without giving his readers any specific solution to the marital crisis of Maharaja Kumar and his wife. Though an ambitious novel, Cuckold failed to attract 76

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critical or popular attention. But with time, it became popular. The novel is a detailed study of a man whose self-image has been badly hurt by sexual rejection and the resultant public humiliation. Initially for him, vengeance is his only key to reestablish his masculinity and thereby reassert his control on his subjects – both the gendered and the social ones. But, to fight against a presence that exists only in the mind of his wife is not an easy task. This exacerbates Maharaja Kumar’s crisis. He is only able to understand his wife when he finally engages with her not as a sexual object but as a human being. This finally leads Maharaja Kumar to self-discovery. When, at the end of the novel, he surrenders to Lord Krishna, it signals the final dissolution of all his conceits, merging all differences into a oneness where all roads meet and confusions end.

Further Reading Deshpande, Anirudh. “Interpretative Possibilities of Historical Fiction: Study of Kiran Nagarkar’s Cuckold.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 37, no. 19, 2002, pp. 1824–1830. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/4412103.

MAMATA SENGUPTA

CURRIMBHOY, ASIF (1928–1994) Asif Currimbhoy was one of the most prolific Indian playwrights of English drama during the first quarter after independence, who wrote around thirty plays. He was born in a privileged family of Khoja Muslims, followers of Agha Khan, and was educated in St. Xavier’s College of erstwhile Bombay. Thereafter he pursued his higher education at the University of Wisconsin in the United States and embarked on a lucrative corporate career with Burma Shell Oil Company. However, he eventually gave up his position in order to fully devote himself to his career as a playwright and received considerable international acclaim, even though he did not receive comparable recognition in India for a long time. Currimbhoy started writing his plays at a time when independent India had just started its journey as a nation-state, and his plays vividly documented many of the obstacles and upheavals the country encountered during its first two or three decades by focusing on a kaleidoscope of political, military, social and cultural events, cutting across diverse regions of India. While Goa (1964) focused on the liberation of the eponymous former Portuguese colony, Captives (1963) dealt with the consequences of the Sino-Indian war; The Hungry Ones (1965) and The Miracle Seed (1973) explored the terrible famines that ravaged parts of Bihar and Maharashtra, and The Dissident MLA (1974) foregrounded the political turmoil involving students’ agitation and subsequent imposition of President’s Rule in Gujarat. Bengal, during the 1960s and 1970s was marked by a succession of socio-political upheavals on account of farmers’ agitations, growth of the Naxalite movement, the freedom struggle of Bangladesh and a great influx of refugees. All these intersecting issues dominate the space of Currimbhoy’s plays like Inquilab (1970), The Refugee (1971) and Sonar Bangla (1972), which together form what has come to be known as the Bengal Trilogy. He also focused on the lives of eminent individuals in such plays as An Experiment with Truth (1969), which obviously focused on Mahatma Gandhi or Angkor (1973), which dealt with Dalai Lama’s escape to India after the Chinese conquest of Tibet. These plays earned Currimbhoy the moniker of being a “dramatist of the public event” (Nazareth) and marked a significant departure from the kind of dramatic tradition which was established by the plays of Tagore or Sri Aurobindo. However, his avid engagement with contemporary history and topical reality, despite being filled with journalistic 77

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details, did not generally explore in-depth, either the psychological responses of the characters entangled in such events or the ideological matrixes which propelled their actions. This, however, is not to suggest that Currimbhoy was not interested in the psychological or the metaphysical aspects of life. In fact, The Tourist Mecca (1959), his earliest play, focuses on the psychological conflicts within Keshav, a tourist guide, who falls in love with an American tourist, Janet, which eventually culminates in his psychological breakdown. Such combustible inner conflicts also figure in other plays like The Dumb Dancer (1961) where a Kathakali dancer who identifies himself with Bhima spirals into a life of delusions and eventually succumbs to a gruesome, tragic ending owing to the interventions of Prema, the superintendent of a mental asylum, who becomes interested in him. These entanglements of desire, identity and death also play a major role in The Doldrummers (1960) in which four young men and women stumble through a world of despondence, purposelessness and predicaments culminating in the suicide of a scholar on the one hand and the guilt-ridden survival of his beloved with a child in her womb. This particular play earned Currimbhoy a certain degree of notoriety because the play was initially banned by the censors, and it could be staged only after protests were lodged by the likes of Khushwant Singh and Mulk Raj Anand and a court-verdict was issued in favor of the play in 1969. Currimbhoy’s plays, however, received considerable international success, particularly in the United States. Goa was staged at the University of Michigan and the Martinique Theatre on Broadway; The Hungry Ones was performed in Boston and New York. Even The Doldrummers was first staged in the United States. Following such international success, his plays were translated in different Indian regional languages as well and were staged in various metropolitan cities.

Further Reading Agrawal, K. A. The Best Plays of Asif Currimbhoy: A Critical Study. JBook Enclave, 2007. Anshika, Barkha. “A Study of Race, Class and Gender in Asif Currimbhoy’s Plays.” International Journal of English and Education, vol. 2, no. 4, 2013, pp. 198–202. IJEE, http://ijee.org/yahoo_site_admin/ assets/docs/20.271150036.pdf. Bowers, Faubion, editor. The Complete Works of Asif Currimbhoy. IBH Publishing House, 1970. Nazareth, Peter. “Asif Currimbhoy: Dramatist of the Public Event.” The Journal of Indian Writing in English, vol. 4, 1976, pp. 13–18. Pan, Daphne. “Asif Currimbhoy’s Goa: A Consideration.” The Journal of Indian Writing in English, vol. 8, 1980, pp. 77–97. Reddy, P. Bayapa. The Plays of Asif Currimbhoy. Writers Workshop, 1985.

ABIN CHAKRABORTY

DA CUNHA, NISHA (1934–) Born in 1934, Nisha Da Cunha spent some time in Germany and came to Bombay along with her father during World War II. Though a small child of four years, she saw the brutal extermination and incineration of Jewish people in Hamburg, which affected her deeply. After completing her schooling from Shimla, she graduated from Miranda House College in Delhi and completed her postgraduation in English literature from Newham College Cambridge, UK. Cunha taught for five years in Miranda House and then at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, for the next twenty-five years till 1985. As a theater lover and artist, Nisha Da Cunha directed plays like The House of Barnard Alba and The Glass Menagerie for the two colleges where she worked.

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Apart from this, she also directed Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Henrik Ibsen’s Wild Duck for Theatre Group Bombay. She lives in Bombay with her son. After her voluntary retirement, Cunha devoted herself to creative writing and published five collections of short stories. The first one, Old Cypress: Stories, was published in 1991. Though her stories have an undercurrent of sadness, with her female protagonists largely suffering from bouts of loneliness or depression, her real life did not have any such marital or familial problems. She acknowledges the profuse affection she received from her father as she feels endowed by “his belief in education and the pursuit of knowledge and a great love of reading forever and ever.” In the Preface to this volume of short stories, Cunha also records her gratitude to her husband for providing her “with a unique and great freedom within a marriage and friendship – always a critical encouragement.” As for a sad ambience permeating in her stories, she thinks it rather as a result of her own temperament. The Permanence of Grief, her second collection, was published in 1993. Nisha Da Cunha’s female Indian protagonists seem to believe that grieving is permanent and that no resolution is possible. They do not facilitate their healing but work against its accomplishment. Little wonder then that most of them end up committing suicides. (Almeida 94) Set My Heart in Aspic is her third book that came out in 1997. It is about a man who feels broken over the death of his lover from AIDS. Her fourth book, No Black, No White: Short Stories, was published in 2001. “Letting It Go,” “The Dearly Beloved, Kept Woman,” “Salad Days” and “Ember Days” are a few remarkable stories in the collection. Most of Cunha’s stories are open-ended and the readers have to imagine the lives of those left stranded in the lows of their lives. For her female heroines, the loss of the loved ones is irreplaceable by anything as the author herself beliefs that “the grief goes on and on despite the passage of several years” (Almeida). Alison in “Partly Living,” Allegra in “African Bird,” and Safia in “The Quiet of the Birds” are women whose agony never comes to an end. Cunha’s short stories have not received much scholarly attention despite her unquestionable dexterity in delineating the vulnerability of the human condition and bringing to fore the ordeals of married women in multiple roles. As “an indefatigable observer” (Chowdhury) she continues to derive inspiration from a blend of both imagination and reality and nearly all of her stories paint a much more nuanced canvass of human emotions. Her female protagonists always find themselves in an unresolved dilemma and the resultant pain is largely caused by the men in their lives. Most of her heroines are left in the lurch by their husbands because they prefer young women. However, some women also leave their husbands for bringing only pain to them, having only sullen temperaments and never an appreciating eye. Marriage for these women is an institution of suffering and not a heavenly bliss. Similarly, motherhood too remains a tale of suffering which never ebbs away but continues to crush a mother under the weight of countless expectations.

Further Reading Almeida, Rochelle. The Politics of Mourning: Grief Management in Cross-Cultural Fiction. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2004.

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Encyclopedia Entries Chanana, Kuhu. “Review of The Quiet of the Birds by Nisha Da Cunha.” Indian Literature, vol. 49, no. 5 (229), Sept. 2005, pp. 227–232. Chowdhury, Nandita. “Nisha Da Cunha Weaves Melancholy Tales.” India Today, 15 Dec. 1997, www. indiatoday.in/magazine/society-and-the-arts/books/story/19971215-nisha-da-cunha-weaves-melan choly-tales-831082-1997-12-14. Accessed 21 Feb. 2022. Roy, S. Nilanjana. “Book Review: Nisha Da Cunha’s ‘No Black, No White.’ ” India Today, 4 Jun. 2001, www.indiatoday.in/magazine/society-and-the-arts/books/story/20010604-book-review-of-nishada-cunha-no-black-no-white-775151-2001-06-03. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

HEM RAJ BANSAL

DAI, MAMANG (1957–) Novelist, folklorist, journalist, essayist, and ethnographer, Mamang Dai was born to Odi and Matin Dai. She belongs to Adi Tribe of Arunachal Pradesh. She went to Pine Mount School at Shillong, Meghalaya, and graduated in English from Gauhati University, Assam. She qualified for the Indian Administrative Services which she left soon to pursue her literary passion. She worked as a journalist for The Telegraph and The Hindustan Times. In 2003, she received the Verrier Elwin Award from the Government of Arunachal Pradesh for Arunachal Pradesh: The Hidden Land (2003). In 2011, she was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India for her contribution to the field of literature and education. Her novels include The Legends of Pensam (2006), Stupid Cupid (2008), and The Black Hill (2014), which won her the Sahitya Akademi Award  in 2017. She has also published three poetry collections: River Poems (2004), The Balm of Time (2008), and Midsummer Survival Lyrics (2014); two illustrated collections of folktales, The Sky Queen and Once upon a Moontime; and two nonfictional works: Arunachal Pradesh: The Hidden Land (2003) and Dairy Farming: The Food of Arunachal (2004). In another book titled Hambreelmai’s Loom, Dai has retold the Northeastern folktale of the first weaver who was taught by goddess Matai. Her works encompass a variety of themes, which include gender and identity, religion and nature, cultural conflict and historical change. Dai’s first novel, The Legends of Pensam, divided into four parts namely, “Diary of the World,” “Songs of the Rhapsodist,” “Daughters of the Village,” and  “Matter of Time,” presents the world of forests and folk tales through its unnamed narrator who has returned to her village with her friends Mona and Hoxa. The novel relates the stories of the community, kinship bonds (of Migu and Sirum clans), imperial expeditions and the colonization of the jungle, the tree spirits of the village, and intermeshed lives of its characters in local legends and stories. Dai posits that Pensam, the land of the Adis in the mountains of Arunachal Pradesh, is an in-between place that oscillates between the old and the new, the oral and the written, and tradition and modernity. Her next novel, Stupid Cupid, recounts the story of Anda, who moves to Delhi from the hills of the Arunachal in search of love. She defies patriarchal repression, starts a guest house in Delhi for lovers, and falls in love with a married man, only to face disillusionment. Well-written and beautifully narrated, the novel brings to the fore the complexities of human relationships. Her third novel, The Black Hill (2014), is set in the 19th century at a critical moment of history when the British Empire has just begun to make inroads into the lives of the Abor and Mishmee tribes. It is the story of a French priest, Nicholas Krick, who dreams of establishing a church in south Tibet and suddenly disappears in the 1850s. It is also about Kajinsha, the Mishmee man, who is executed for the murder of the priest, and Gimur, a girl from the Abor tribe, who elopes with Kajinsha. The novel reconstructs the history of the region, foregrounding the early encounter of the two tribes with Christianity and the Empire and the unprecedented resistance of the communities against the “migluns” or the British. 80

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The poetry of Dai centers around the mystique and magnificence of mountains, clouds, rivers, and hills. Dai has keen eyes and ears for the objects of nature: birds, animals, and the sounds of winds and waters. In her poem “Small Town and the River,” she writes: “The river has a soul/In the summer it cuts through the land/like a torrent of grief” (River Poems). The mountain and foothills too are the sources of perpetual joy, a sacred landscape imbued with spiritual powers. Everything in nature, both animate and inanimate, is sacred: it is the physical manifestation of Donyi-Polo (word spirit). Dai’s poetry is ecology sensitive. She very well understands the imminent environmental crisis and opposes the crushing of the mountains and culling of the green for human progress. Dai also writes about the traditional beliefs of the Adi community: their creation myths, customs, beliefs, rituals, and other cultural practices find expression in her poetry. She celebrates the distinct ethnic culture, the sacred geography of her community and homeland. Her poems are romantic, lyrical, and deeply evocative, with a powerful attachment of the poet with her landscape, using indigenous metaphors deeply embedded in the ecology of the Himalayan mountains. Keki N. Daruwalla contends that her poetry is concerned with “landscape and nature, through a half-animist, half-pantheistic outlook.” Dai looks back to her cultural roots to reinvent the disappearing oral traditions of her mysterious landscape. It is remarkable that like many other contemporaries of her region, Dai’s poetic and fictional universe straddles the oral and written worlds, wherein the written is an addition to and an extension of the oral tradition. Her poems and novels are recreative records of folk songs, myths, and folk tales of her own oral society, which relies more on the memory to communicate with the past and connect it to its present. However, memory, attached to oral history and storytelling traditions of her oral community, is fundamentally collective rather than individual.

Further Reading Baishya, Amit. Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival. Routledge, 2020. Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva, and Jeetumoni Basumatary. “Community Fiction: Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam and Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone.” Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories. Routledge, 2019. Daruwala, Keki. “Poetry and the Northeast: Foraging for a Destiny.” Literary Review, 7 Nov. 2004, https://jiban1.wordpress.com/2007/05/01/book-review-by-keki-n-daruwalla/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Misra, Tilottoma. The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India. Oxford UP, 2011. Swami, Indu. Exploring Untouched Shades of North-East Indian Literature in English: A Critical Understanding. VDM Verl. Dr. Müller, 2010. Zama, Margaret Ch. Emerging Literatures from Northeast India: The Dynamics of Culture, Society and Identity. SAGE Publications, 2013.

RAHUL CHATURVEDI

DARUWALLA, KEKI N. (1937–) Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla was born to N.C. Daruwalla in Lahore, on January 24, 1937. His family moved to Rampur in 1948. He studied at Baqar High School and then at Raza Inter College and obtained his master’s degree in English literature from Government College, Ludhiana, University of Punjab. He joined the Indian Police Service in 1958 and worked as Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on International Affairs in 1979. He also worked as Special Secretary in Research and Analysis Wing, a primary foreign intelligence agency of India (RAW), till he was promoted as Secretary and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. 81

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His traveling made him see wide swathes of subcontinental life from close quarters. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984 for his poetry anthology The Keeper of the Dead (1982). He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2014, but returned it in October 2015, as a protest against the killing of Indian writers. “To Writers Abroad” (1964) is a poem that deals with the stereotypical images of Indians found in international writing. The tone of mockery flows through the poem where the poet points out how international writers indulge in detailing India as a poverty-stricken, mystical land. Daruwalla’s first collection, Under Orion (1970), is a rumination on myth, literature and the human condition. Poems such as “Curfew in a Riot-torn city” and “The Revolt of the Salt Slaves” are recollections centered around the theme of violence and strife respectively. The poet adopts the perspective of a khaki-clad man in “Curfew” where the details of violence are interspersed within an action sequence of mobilization. “The Revolt” is about a human ordeal witnessed from a personal standpoint. His next collection, Apparition in April (1971), deals with a larger canvas of subjects. “Routine” is a meditation on the life of a soldier, which is a perspective Daruwalla adopts in several poems. The world he represents is a sterile and abusive world that is flooded with curses and blood. Violence has an immediate effect on the people initiating it. It is portrayed through the images of an autopsy room and body bags. Winter Poems (1980) is a collection of gestures made toward the oneness between humans and nature. Daruwalla draws upon imagery that likens the natural environment to a human form. His imagery connects natural elements to human emotions and behavior. This juxtaposition allows him to take on themes alluding to state machinery as well in poems like “Curfew 2” where he reconstructs the image of hunger, hate and pain akin to that of a cityscape. “Variations” is an introspection on the ways in which state machinery is utilized to instate order, which is itself a form of chaos. The poem shows how the state robs individuals of their liberty by parading itself as a righteous institution. Daruwalla’s The Keeper of the Dead (1982) is like an intricate labyrinth constructed of word and image, which comes across as a dark and brooding study of life and death. “Mehar Ali, the keeper of the dead,” steeped in mythical imagery, is replete with lucid language. It describes a Tartar cemetery and its only living occupant, Mehar Ali, who is likened to one who has stumbled out of an ancient, unknown text with a voice like a cartwheel running over gravel. “The Mistress” details the poet’s understanding of language, which is compared to a mistress to bring out the peculiarities that one may find in the study of language. Indian English is the chosen language in this case, and he makes his statement with examples of syncretism available only in the subcontinent. Among his new poems, “Gujarat 2002” and “Yahudi” deal with the State and the consequences of being different. Human strife and suffering are some of the key elements in these poems in “Sappho Poems.” Daruwalla also turned to prose late in his career and wrote short stories and novels. His collection, Sword and Abyss (2011), deals with human lives and dwells on how relationships between individuals and things are built. Love Across the Salt Desert (2011) is a tale of love that is shared between two individuals, set against the backdrop of the India–Pakistan border on the Rann of Kutch. Other stories like The Tree, Sword and Abyss and How the Quit India Movement came to Alipur are inspired by myth, memory and the positioning of individuality. His two novels, Ancestral Affairs (2015) and Swerving to Solitude: Letters to Mama (2018), are poignant pieces on the opposition created by idealism and reality and what it means when one attaches significance and emotion to an ideology. Ancestral Affairs is a narrative resting on history but detailed with a sense of humor serving as an escape from the tension-filled narratives that one usually gets to read about of partition literature. 82

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Daruwalla deals with themes like love, solitude, violence, individualism, freedom, metaphysics and identity. He is one of the few writers to acknowledge that there is patriarchy present in the language. S.C. Narula writes that he is able to posit individual images and build them to add intensity to the poem. His not identifying with a class or cult led K. Godavari Sarma to claim that his is a poetry that is aloof on account of his own attitude of individuality and objectivity. F.A. Inamdar states that Daruwalla has the ability to blend different lifestyles and adopt a syncretic approach toward his writing, which does not come from a specific religion or philosophy. Bruce E. King has written that Daruwalla is a cynical skeptic who also happens to be a poet. His take on satire is not restricted to the short story but expands to the poem as well. Most of Daruwalla’s work is inspired by the need to show society its own problems, which allows a reader to grasp at a human complexity that is not falling in line with a moralist and centrist worldview but is fleeting between extremes of emotions and positions.

Further Reading Inamdar, F. A. Critical Spectrum: Poetry of Keki N. Daruwalla. Mittal Publications, 1991. King, Bruce. Modern Indian English Poetry. Oxford UP, 1987. Narula, S. C. “Images of Reality: An Exposition of Keki N. Daruwalla’s Poetry.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 22, no. 2, Summer/Fall 1987, pp. 161–171. Ramakrishnan, E. V. “Parsi Hell and South Indian Aunts – The Keeper of the Dead.” Indian Express, 10 July 1983. Sarma, Godavari K. “ ‘Trained for Havoc’: A Note on K. N. Daruwalla’s Poetry.” Critical Spectrum: The Poetry of Keki N. Daruwalla, edited by F. A. Inamdar. Mittal Publications, 1991, pp. 44–48.

RITI SHARMA

DAS, GURCHARAN (1943–) Born in Lyallpur in British India (now Faisalabad in Pakistan), Gurcharan Das spent his early childhood in Shimla where his family moved after the partition of India. They relocated to Delhi in 1953 and moved to Washington DC in 1955. After completing high school in 1959, he won a scholarship to Harvard University, where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics. He also studied Sanskrit with Daniel Ingalls and wrote his senior thesis under John Rawls, the political philosopher who had an abiding influence on his life. After a career spanning thirty years in multinational companies in six countries, he took early retirement in 1994 to devote all his time to writing. Gurcharan Das is recognized as an author, commentator, management guru, thought leader, and public intellectual. Among his most popular works is a critically acclaimed trilogy on the three purusharthas (life goals identified in classical Indian philosophy): India Unbound on artha (material wealth), The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma on dharma (moral goodness), and Kama: The Riddle of Desire on Kama (desire). India Unbound, an account of India’s economic rise in the last quarter of the 20th century, has been translated into eighteen languages and has also been filmed by the BBC. The Difficulty of Being Good is a rumination on the everyday moral conundrums one is faced with, through a prolonged meditation on the epic Mahabharata, further illuminated with examples from contemporary politics, business, economy, and society. The third book of the trilogy, Kama, foregrounds the significance of nurturing desire in order to live a fulfilling life. He is currently writing a book on the fourth goal, moksha (liberation from the cycle of births and deaths). He is also a regular columnist for Times of India, five dailies in Indian languages, and contributes occasionally to Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Times. He is the editor 83

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of a fifteen-volume series on the history of the Indian economy “The Story of Indian Business” by Penguin. Das began writing in his twenties on weekends. He wrote three plays, published together as Three English Plays in 2001 by Oxford University Press, republished by Penguin India in 2011. His prize-winning first play, Larins Sahib, is based on the Britishers’ arrival in Punjab in the uncertain period following the death of Ranjit Singh. Mira, the second play, explores sainthood through the life of the 16th-century Rajput princess and mystic poet Mirabai. Set in 1962 in Shimla, the third play, 9 Jakhoo Hill, is a nostalgic play on the complex web of love and human relationships against the backdrop of a changing social order. In 1992, he published a semiautobiographical novel, A Fine Family, about the partition and its impact on several generations of a Punjabi family. Das turned to nonfiction only after 1995. He traveled widely and witnessed, hands-on, the economic and the resultant social transformation of the country. Out of these travels was born an essay titled “A Million Reformers” in 1995, and India Unbound in 2000. In the latter, he wrote about the economic rise of India since independence through the global age of information to the ushering of a new India after the economic liberalization of 1991. In 2002, Das wrote a book of essays, The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change and in 2013 India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong State, in which he suggested some path-breaking governance reforms to ensure the continued growth of India. Both fictional and nonfictional works of Das have received wide critical acclaim. All his plays have been staged in Bombay, New York, and other Indian cities and appreciated by the audience and critics alike. India Unbound, rated highly by Amartya Sen and many others, has been translated into nineteen languages and filmed by the BBC. On the Subtle Art of Dharma is regarded as one of the finest works on ethical thought by scholars, philosophers, commentators, and businessmen alike. India Grows at Night was adjudged one of the best books of 2013 by the Financial Times. The wide range of Das’s writings includes areas as diverse as creative writing, economy, politics, and philosophy. The central appeal of his works lies in his masterful intermingling of insights from the past with observations from the contemporary, ushering in a future of promises and hope.

Further Reading Babushahi Bureau. “Making a Life and Not Living Should Be the Purpose, Says Gurcharan Das.” Babushahi.com, 18 Dec. 2022, www.babushahi.com/books-literature.php?id=157042. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Das, Gurcharan. Gurcharan Das, https://gurcharandas.org. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Karambir. “Gurcharan Das: Rewriting Indian History in His Works of Fiction and Dramas.” Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education, vol. 16, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1374–1377. Ignited Minds Journals, www.ignited.in/I/a/210966. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Valiyamattam, Rositta Joseph. Personal and National Destinies in Independent India: A Study of Selected Indian English Novels. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.

KOMAL AGARWAL

DAS, KAMALA (1934–2009) Kamala Das was born into an illustrious family of Malayalam writers; her mother Balamani Amma was a renowned Malayalam poet and her maternal uncle Nalapat Narayana Menon, a known writer. At sixteen, she married Madhava Das, a banking executive, and lived in Bombay (now Mumbai) and Delhi. Kamala Das has said that she began writing to cope with her roles as 84

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a wife and mother to three sons. Ever an iconoclast, she later converted to Islam and adopted the name of Kamala Surayya. Kamala Das is considered to be one of the most important poets of Indian English in the 20th century, who has won several honors and awards: PEN Asian Poetry Prize (1963), short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature (1984), Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award (1985), Asian Poetry Prize (1998), and honorary DLitt from the University of Calicut (2006). Born in Malabar District, now part of Kerala, in 1934 to an illustrious aristocratic Nair family, her childhood was spent in other colonial locales, such as Calcutta, where her father sold luxury automobiles to the wealthy, in her maternal grandmother’s house (Nalapat) and a Catholic boarding school. Not surprisingly, the reception of Das’s work focuses more on her personal life rather than her literary creations for she was always an engaging and enigmatic public figure. Das engaged with her audience through numerous interviews and offered her own explanations and interpretations of her writings. Her early collections of poetry include The Siren (1964), Summer in Calcutta (1965), and The Descendants (1967), which confirmed that English was no longer the colonizer’s tongue but the appropriated language of new young poets like Das, Arun Kolatkar, A.K. Ramanujan, Eunice de Souza, Melanie Silgardo, and Dilip Chitre. Among these stalwarts of Indo-English poetry, she won critical acclaim for inventing a new idiom for a strong feminine voice. K.R.S. Iyengar opines that Das’s writing “dares without inhibitions to articulate the hurts it has received in an insensitive largely man-made world” (Iyengar). Das also gained recognition for moving away from themes of nationalism and patriotism with a distinct disinterest in the socio-historical changes of the times. Having lived through the British colonial rule and independence, she documents her experiences in her works, which include twelve poetry collections in English. She wrote in Malayalam using the pseudonym “Madhavikutty,” to be free of gendered expectations of their readers and also to allude to a marked ambivalence of gender and identity – using a derivation of her husband’s name while simultaneously critiquing the violence of patriarchy in the institution of marriage. Das’s poem “My Grandmother’s House” states that it was a way to protect her maternal grandmother from discovering her true identity. “I who have lost My way and beg now at strangers’ doors to/Receive love, at least in small change?” The poem expresses the maternal home as a space of comfort, love, and intimacy that is unavailable and missing from her marriage. Kamala Das’s writings bilingualism (not unusual for an Indian English writer) in English and Malayalam includes poetry, an autobiography, a novel, short stories, memoirs, and serialized columns. Her poetry and autobiography in English have received the most critical recognition. She used both mediums to break silence on many issues of gender, women’s sexuality and desire, marital rape, and motherhood. Her works perfectly capture women’s personal and private lives in India, transitioning from colonialism toward freedom. Eschewing these historical markers, Das focuses on the individual milestones, such as a confusing childhood, living between multiple languages and cultures of Malayalam and English, the violent nature of arranged marriages, motherhood, and a discovery of her own sexuality. Das’s writings are marked by frank admissions of desire and sexuality, unlike other poets of her generation who also wrote in English in the 1960s. Her first autobiography, My Story or Ente Katha, first published in Malayalam in 1973 and then again in English in 1976, marked a shift in Indian English writing, opening up new avenues for women’s writing, exploring the inner trauma of women in a patriarchal society. My Story is a provocative journey through a unique lens, articulating an interiority of women’s lives often overlooked by other Indian English writers. The narrative presented in a linear trajectory focuses on the quotidian activities and events of every woman’s life. Events are presented through a personalized pronoun of ‘I.’ 85

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As Udaya Kumar notes, “it is an assertion of the self in Das’s English writings that is not as apparent and noticeable in her Malayalam writings.” Kamala Das’s most anthologized poem, “An Introduction,” expresses this bilingual nature and multicultural experience of being a woman, Indian, and between colonialism-independence succinctly – “speaking three languages, writing in two, dreaming in one.” The choice of English is obviously a political one but one that is less radical than it was for the early Indian English writers of the 1920s. The newer generation of writers Das belongs to could move easily between languages. Therefore, her use of English is significant in its Indianized form. Unlike her contemporaries, she could express the need for intimacy, sexuality, and desire as a feminine experience in English. The emotional quality of her poetry makes it difficult to categorize Das in any one slot. Similarly, her writing also resists being read as the nonfictional truth. She has asserted personally that even her autobiography is largely fictionalized. Yet, the particularities of her writing suggest a deeper connection with her own life that may or may not be imaginary. Das’s critical legacy in English is divided between critics dismissing her writings as superficial and melodramatic. And yet, for feminist and postcolonial critics such as Iqbal Kaur and Rosemary Marangoly George, she represents an assertive and significant voice negotiating between coloniality and independence through My Story and “An Introduction.” While the autobiography marks the colonial upbringing of the privileged English-educated class that Das is associated with in a linear fashion, as a woman writer, her autobiography becomes the first of its kind to delve into mental health issues, the subjugation of women in marriage, and the difficulties of motherhood not dealt with in such a manner before Das. Das’s poems define and assert selfhood in a register of Indian English that is of her very own making, “The language I speak, Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses All mine, mine alone . . .” (“An Introduction”).

Further Reading Das, Kamala. “Of Masks and Memories: An Interview with Kamala Das.” Conducted by P. P. Raveendran, Indian Literature, vol. 36, no. 3, 1993, pp. 144–161. George, Rosemary Marangoly. “Calling Kamala Das Queer: Rereading ‘My Story.’ ” Feminist Studies, vol. 26, no. 3, 2000, pp. 731–763. Iyengar, Kodaganallur Ramaswami Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English. Sterling Publishers, 1996. Kaur, Iqbal. Perspectives on Kamala Das’s Poetry. Intellectual Publishing House, 1995. King, Bruce. “Women’s Voices: Kamala Das, De Souza and Silgardo.” Modern Indian Poetry in English. Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 147–166. Kumar, Udaya. “Choosing a Tongue, Choosing a Form: Kamala Das’s Bilingual Algorithms.” Indian Literature and the World Multilingualism, Translation, and the Public Sphere, edited by Rossella Ciocca, and Neelam Srivastava. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 87–102.

NITYA DATTA

DAS, MANOJ (1934–2021) In its citation honoring Manoj Das, the Sahitya Akademi states that “he is probably the foremost successful bilingual writer in the country.” Das primarily is an Odia writer who was motivated to write in English as he found the portrayal of India by fiction writers in English inaccurate: A piece of writing in that language by a veteran Indian author living abroad, that claimed to be an authentic picture of rural India but what in fact was its unkind caricature. . . . [I] decided to write in English. I knew my rural India and I knew my people. (The Bridge)

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Das was born in Balasore, on the northern coast of Odisha, to an influential family. As an Odia writer, he is known for works like Amruta Phala, Tandralokora Prahari, Aranayak, Sesha Basantara Chithi, Dhumrabha Diganta, etc. His works in English include three novels – Cyclones (1987), The Tiger at Twilight (1991), and The Escapist (2001) – and more than a dozen collections of short stories such as The Crocodile’s Lady (1975), The Submerged Valley (1986), Mystery of the Missing Cap (1989), and The Bridge in the Moonlit Night (2015). His nonfictional works include Myths, Legends, Concepts and Literary Antiquities of India (2009), Chasing the Rainbow (2004), and My Little India (2014). Many of his English works were first published in Odia, which then Das “transcreated” into English. For his contribution to literature, he was awarded Padma Bhushan (2020), Padma Shri (2001), Saraswati Samman (2000), and a Fellowship of the Sahitya Akademi. He was also the founder-editor of Diganta, an Odia magazine, and an editor for The Heritage. Graham Greene compares Das’ world to R.K Narayan’s “with perhaps an added mystery.” The mystery lies in the various forms of interaction between the human and the non-human, the real and the non-real, spirituality and mysticism. Many critics believe that the spiritual and mystical are the result of his association with the Aurobindo Ashram. Because of this exposure, the characters in his fiction are drawn from wider walks of life and their representation is unlike that of the conventional realistic sociological one. In the titular story “The Crocodile’s Lady,” the narrator takes Dr. Batstone, a sociologist from the West, on a tour of his village where they meet the Crocodile’s Lady, who the villagers believe was taken away by a crocodile while bathing in the river. She then married and stayed with the crocodile for a decade. Overwhelmed by the memory of her parents, one day, the girl comes back to meet her parents only to find out that her father had died. So she decides to stay for a while with her mother. The crocodile, unable to bear the separation, comes out of the river in search of the lady, but he is killed by the villagers. After that, the Crocodile’s Lady lives in a quiet corner of the village. However, as a matter of respect for the women who deigned to marry one of their own, the crocodiles do not harm the villagers, even though they had killed one of them. Such admixture of fantasy, mystery, and the real allows Das to portray the limitation of human knowledge and underscores the nuances of the human psyche. It also takes the reader on a sojourn to experience the world beneath and beyond the real. Though written in realistic prose, the world of his novels and stories moves swiftly between the empirical and the unexplainable. This “mystery,” as Greene terms it, constitutes a range of emotions and effects that cannot be conveniently and reductively defined through categories like magic realism, fantasy, irony, satire, mysticism, etc. Das’ works are open-ended, compelling readers to ponder and reflect. As P. Raja observes: The short stories of Manoj Das, mostly in humorous frames, comment on varied aspects of life. He has stories with hardcore realism, stories of psychological import, satires in the garb of folktales as well as man’s encounter with supra or infra human elements. This amalgamation Das found lacking in the writings of others and sought to include them in his writings. In his nonfictional works he educates his readers about India’s myths, legends, and folktales. The content page of Temples of India, a book written for children, creates a sort of spiritual cartography of “India” where he deliberately blurs the categories of myth, legend, history, and

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present-day existence. In My Little India he acquaints his readers with various little-known histories and stories of India. One such story of an Indian childhood finds its way in a different idiom in his memoir Chasing the Rainbow. Through these works, Das presents the vagaries of the changing world order in its encounter with forces of modernity.

Further Reading Das, Manoj. “Your Writer Speaking.” The Bridge in the Moonlit Night and Other Stories. National Book Trust, 2015, pp. vii–xv. Haldar, Santwana, editor. “Manoj Das Special Issue.” Special issue of the Journal of the Odisha Association for English Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2022. Jena, Sangram, editor. Manoj Das Bisesh Sankhya, vol. 203. Special issue of Konark, 2021. Pandab, Shatrughna. Katha Shilpee Manoj Das. Friends’ Publishers, 1994. Raja, P. Many Worlds of Manoj Das. B. R Publishing Corporation, 1993.

UMASANKAR PATRA

DASGUPTA, RANA (1971–) Rana Dasgupta was born in Canterbury, England, on November  5, 1971.  He spent his formative years in a private boy’s school in Cambridge, England, and pursued higher education in Balliol College,  Oxford, the Conservatoire  Darius Milhaud  in  Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a Fulbright Scholar. He graduated in French literature and acquired a postgraduate degree in communication arts after which he started his career in a management consultancy company in 1994. From 1997 to 2000, he worked as a marketing consultant for a firm in London. Then he moved to Delhi and worked full-time as a writer for seventeen years, after which he relocated to England. In October  2012, Dasgupta was appointed Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton University and was Distinguished Visiting Lecturer and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in 2014. His work reveals an enduring and critical engagement with the exclusivist and exploitive nature of capitalist societies which consistently privilege the affluent class. In a world that celebrates spectacular opulence, Dasgupta trains his lens on the shadows inhabited by the ordinary citizen. Dasgupta’s oeuvre consists of novels, essays, and nonfiction. His debut novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), in its structure, has been compared to The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights. However, in sharp contrast to them, Tokyo Cancelled is cosmopolitan in scope as it captures the voices of a broad social spectrum of characters, ranging from celebrities and billionaires to migrant laborers and illegal migrants, and has a geographically expansive representative sweep. The modern-day setting of thirteen stranded passengers who were bound for Tokyo but are constrained to spend the night at an airport allows for a confluence of multiple national identities. Common to all but one story is a magical and surreal lyricism that reinvents the modern setting with a splash of the fairy tale. The overwhelmingly bizarre and mythic stories that the passengers recount in order to pass the night bring to mind the magic realism of Rushdie and Márquez. Tokyo Cancelled was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Vodafone Crossword Award. Dasgupta’s second novel, Solo (2009), is a narrative that spans two centuries, in which Ulrich, the one hundred-year-old unheroic protagonist, experiences and opening up of an inner world of imaginative fantasy. He reminisces about his far from spectacular life in the 20th century and has prophetic insights of the succeeding century. In the two parts of the novel, “Life” and “Daydream,” he experiences life under the Ottoman Empire and the transition to the Soviet 88

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era, and also witnesses firsthand the brutality and then the demise of Communism as well as the effects of privatization and the free market that replaced the old order in Eastern Europe. Solo won Dasgupta the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the best book in 2010. In 2014 Dasgupta published his third book,  Capital: A  Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi, a nonfiction account of the stupendous changes engulfing the city of Delhi as a result of globalization. Not only does it cover the vast social-economic spectrum of its inhabitants, it also traces the history of water sources down till the imminent water crisis in India’s capital city. The book engages with Delhi’s displaced refugees who settled there after the partition, the evolving role of middle-class women, and the disappearance of linguistic plurality. Capital won the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for literary reportage and the Émile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature. The book was also short-listed for the Orwell Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. Dasgupta’s articles and essays have appeared in New Statesman, Granta, The Paris Review, The Guardian, Prospect, and The New York Times. Some of his notable essays are “Maximum Cities” (New Statesman, March  27, 2006), “Capital Gains” (Granta  107, Summer 2009), “The Demise of the Nation State” (The Guardian, The Long Read, April 5, 2018), and “The Silenced Majority: Can America Still Afford Democracy?” (Harper’s Magazine 341, no. 2,047 December 2020, pages 47–56). In 2018 Dasgupta was instrumental in establishing the JCB Prize for Literature and served as its founding literary director for two years. It recognizes the need to foster literary talent in India’s regional languages and promote translations of novels written in regional languages to showcase contemporary Indian literary talent to the rest of the world. The winning entry receives prize money of twenty-five lakhs, and if it is a translated work, the translator is awarded an additional ten lakhs. Dasgupta’s books have been translated into twenty-one languages. In 2014 Le Monde named him one of the top seventy people who are making the world of tomorrow. Dasgupta was awarded the prestigious Rabindranath Tagore Literary Award in 2019 for his novel Solo. In 2010, he made it to the list of leading British novelists under forty in The Daily Telegraph.

Further Reading De Loughry, Treasa. The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis: Contemporary Literary Narratives. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Mendes, Ana Cristina. “The Eruption and Ruination of ‘Rising India’: Rana Dasgupta’s Capital and the Temporalities of Delhi in the 2010s.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 53, no. 4, 2018, pp. 1–25. Cambridge Core, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X17000464. Mendes, Ana Cristina, and Lisa Lau. “The Conjunctural Spaces of ‘New India’: Imagined Geographies of 2010s India in Representations by Returnee Migrants.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018, pp. 57–72. Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474018786033.

AATEKA KHAN

DASGUPTA, SANJUKTA (1952–) Sanjukta Dasgupta was born on August 27, 1952, in Calcutta to Santiranjan and Suprabha Sengupta. Educated at Auxilum Convent School, she studied English literature at Presidency College and Calcutta University where she received her doctoral degree in 1985. A Fulbright scholar, she taught at Acharya Jagdish Chandra Bose College for over a decade before joining the Postgraduate Department of English at Calcutta University in 1994. She retired as Head and Dean, Faculty of Arts, CU in 2017. Currently, she lives in Kolkata, is the president of the 89

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Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library (IPPL) and the convenor of the English Language Board of the Sahitya Akademi. A feminist scholar, critic and translator, Dasgupta is the author of seven poetry collections and two volumes of short stories. Her poetry comprises Snapshots (1996), Dilemma (2002), First Language (2005), More Light (2008), Lakshmi Unbound (2017), Sita’s Sisters (2019), and Unbound: New and Selected Poems (2021). Her two collections of short stories are Abuse and Other Short Stories (2013) and It Begins at Home and Other Short Stories (2021). Dasgupta’s work evinces a deep engagement with marginality and postcolonial issues, raising significant questions of power, rights and social justice. Dasgupta’s first four poetry collections establish a firm voice questioning the world’s errors. Not to be separated from her socio-cultural milieu, she interrogates the injustices inherent in ideologies, representations and relationships. Memory, domesticity, love, compromise, and poetry as an alternative to life’s dissonances emerge as dominant themes here with the kitchen being projected as a potent space of both empowerment and victimization. Irony, sarcasm, satire, and humor surface from time to time, but it is only in her later work that these transform themselves into weapons of dissent in the poet’s arsenal. In her later collections, Lakshmi Unbound and Sita’s Sisters, Dasgupta’s satire attempts a strategic feminist attack on mainstream mythology through radical mythical revision. Dasgupta’s Lakshmi, reluctant to be bound to the hearth, domesticity and prosperity, is restless to exchange her goddess-hood for the ordinary but rare human privilege of freedom. To the idea of patriarchal complacence that Lakshmi, the angel in the house stands for, Dasgupta posits the idea of Alakshmi – the rogue and truant who finds it hard to muster obedience or stay still. Her Sita, too, is far from being the submissive and devout wifely ideal that she is supposed to embody. Determined to offer more empowered myths for womanhood, Dasgupta rewrites mythological postures inserting greater choices and agency for women everywhere. Unbound: New and Selected Poems (2021), edited by Jaydeep Sarangi and Sanghita Sanyal, is Dasgupta’s latest poetry collection offering a careful selection of her best work from her active engagement with poetry. Showcasing her lyricism, her control over language, her metaphors, and her empathetic socialist spirit, this collection draws attention to the thematic concerns and theoretical vitality of Dasgupta’s feminist poetry. In her two books of short fiction, Dasgupta’s intersectional feminism finds a wider base and interrogates more complex social positions. Set in the familiar space of Kolkata, these stories configure the humdrum lives of ordinary women who in their negotiations between workplace, domesticity and social obligations must traverse multiple role-relations, defy gender reductionism, and sift through traditions to discover themselves and their place in society. Dasgupta’s plots are realistic, precise, and vitally pivoted on emotional conflicts. Her theater of action is psycho-sociological as her characters remain in situ, offering extended resonances on social malpractices and hypocrisies. The language is sharp, the dialogues crisp, and the irony pointed. The narratorial stance is intimate and estranged by turns, enabling these stories to register empathy while strictly avoiding over-sentimentalism.

Further Reading Dasgupta, Sanjukta. “In Conversation with Sanjukta Dasgupta.” Interview by Jaydeep Sarangi, and Antara Ghatak. Writers in Conversation, vol. 6, no. 1, Feb. 2019. Jaidka, Manju. “Indo-American Connections: The Impact of American Poetry on Indian Women Poets.” Aspects of Modernism: American Women’s Poetry, edited by Sukanya Dasgupta. Jadavpur UP, 2014, pp. 116–130.

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Encyclopedia Entries Mallick, Saptarshi. “Debriefing the Satanic Gyres of Patriarchy: A  Bengali Gynocritic and Her Daughters.” Meridian Critic, vol. 33, no. 2, 2019, pp. 49–63. Meridian Critic, http://meridiancritic.usv.ro/ uploads/mc_2_2019/05.%20Mallick%20Saptarshi.pdf. Mandal, Somdatta. “Refusing to Be Pigeonholed.” The Statesman, 11 Nov. 2021, p. 11. Mohanty, Sachidananda. “Sounds of Silence.” The Statesman, 16 Apr. 2017, p. 11. Sarangi, Jaydeep, and Sanghita Sanyal. “Introduction.” Unbound: New and Selected Poems (1996–2021), edited by Sanjukta Dasgupta. Authorspress, 2021, pp. 15–23.

BASUDHARA ROY

DATTA, RABINDRANATH (1883–1917) Rabindranath Datta was an Indian poet and teacher who lived a short but productive life as a man of letters. Born in Calcutta, Datta belonged to a well-known upper-caste Hindu family that had the resources to send their sons to England for a liberal education. At Oxford University, Datta received his bachelor’s degree in 1906 and subsequently completed his master’s degree in 1910. Although he trained in law, he never practiced the legal profession. His interest lay elsewhere, and he was to become a teacher of comparative philology and English literature at the University of Calcutta. It was this twin preoccupation with the complexities of language and literature which propelled Roby Datta, as he was known, toward a kind of experimental poetry to which his book Echoes from East and West stands testimony. Echoes from East and West: To Which Are Added Stray Notes of Mine Own was published in 1909. Its preface outlines Datta’s resolve to make it a pioneering contribution to the genre of comparative poetry. He collated specific sections from literary masterpieces written in sixteen Indo-European languages and rendered them in his own poetic voice. In this endeavor the English language became a vehicle for translation, or a metaphorical gramophone which, in the poet’s words, would elicit a fine record of existing songs written in other languages. He further describes the unifying agenda of this philological exercise as an effort to revive the music at its very source in Mid-Asia from which it branched off and spawned or adopted the Indic, Italic, Hellenic, Teutonic, and Romance forms of poetic language. By combining the aesthetics of East and West, Datta hoped to reach an audience unencumbered by racial, temporal, and geographical divisions. As both a poet and a comparatist Datta’s work follows an exact methodology of dividing the book into poems which retain a sense of the original in his own voice and poems which are more directly translated, in that they follow the order of words and meter as found in the original piece. However, he is particular about elevating the English language which he recognizes as a vital medium with a rich literary history, while tempering it with the inspired voice of the original poet. Beyond the linguistic, metrical, and content-specific interest of the book, Datta foregrounds his philosophy of art, which involves a triadic notion of life where the insular aspects are balanced by the universal and transcendental goals of humanity. Rendering an extract from Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s epic Meghnad Badh Kavya (“The Slaughter of Meghnad”) in his own distinctive poetic voice, Datta concludes with a short note on the unifying theme of fate and his metrical choice for the piece. This format is then followed throughout the book. Echoes carries intertextual references to Datta’s other work, Sakuntala and Her Keepsake, from the Sanskrit play of Kalidasa. Using poetic prose and verse, he invigorates Kalidasa’s work both in this book and in Echoes. Several of his writings which had earlier appeared in periodicals were published as Poems, Pictures and Songs to which is Prefixed The Philosophy of Art. Here too Datta’s preoccupation with the question of artistic inspiration assumes significance. Another publication titled Stories in Blank Verse to which is added An Epic Fragment continues with the

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play of form and content. Although secondary material on the life and works of the poet is difficult to find, Echoes in particular provides an entry point into the ambitions of the man and the cultural significance of his work.

Further Reading Devy, G. N. “Indian Literature in English Translation: An Introduction.” Indian Literature in English Translation, vol. 28, no. 1, 1993, pp. 123–138. Mukherjee, Sujit. Translation as Discovery and Other Essays on Indian Literature in English Translation. Allied Publishers Private Limited, 1981. Munday, Jeremy. Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications. Routledge, 2016. Naik, M. K. A History of Indian English Literature. Sahitya Akademi, 1982.

SHAYEARI DUTTA

DATTANI, MAHESH (1958–) Born on August 7, 1958 in Bengaluru to a Gujarati family, Mahesh Dattani received his early education in Baldwin’s Boys High School and then went on to pursue history, economics, and political science at St. Joseph’s College. He studied marketing and advertising management in his postgraduate program, worked briefly as a copywriter in an advertising firm and subsequently with his father in the family business. Dattani was introduced to the world of theater early in his childhood as his family would regularly take him to watch performances of Gujarati and Kannada plays. He was twelve when his parents took him to watch a Gujarati play at Bengaluru’s Ravindra Kalakshetra. The surreal world he witnessed there, with its dynamic movements between the external and internal, realism and illusion, influenced his theatrical aesthetics irrevocably. During college, Dattani joined Bangalore Little Theatre (BLT) and participated in various workshops, acting and directing plays. His first acting role was in a production of Utpal Dutt’s Surya Shikar. He also acquired Western ballet training under Molly Andre at Alliance Française de Bangalore (1984–1987) and Bharatanatyam training under Chandrabhaga Devi and Krishna Rao (1986–1990). In 1984, Dattani founded his theater group, Playpen, and in 1986, he wrote his first full-length play, Where There is a Will, which was performed at the Deccan Herald Theatre Festival. In 1998, he set up his own theater studio in Bengaluru dedicated to training new talent in the field of acting and play writing, the first in India to focus particularly on new works. Presently, Dattani apportions his time between writing, acting, directing, and conducting workshops at his theater studio in Bengaluru and elsewhere. When Dattani started writing in the 1980s, India was still reeling under the influence of vexing conversations on patriarchy, gender identity and alternate sexualities, class and caste, communal tensions, disability, incest and child abuse. The individual in Dattani’s plays, therefore, largely suffers as a consequence of an oppressive ideology with all its prejudice and duplicity. His adept use of English as a hybrid form is also a conscious tool in revealing the conditions of marginality and class identity. Dattani’s first play, Where’s There’s a Will (1986), is a “powerful exorcism of the patriarchal code.” The plot deals with fissures in the interpersonal relationships in the Hasmukh Mehta family with close focus on the dominance of the father figure. Dance Like a Man (1989) incorporates dance and music as integral to the conventional storyline and is one of his most critically acclaimed and performed plays. Presenting dance as a creative space that enables the creation of more equitable ways of being in the world, it is a radical critique of normative heterosexuality. Tara (1990) introduces the theme of gender discrimination through another under-discussed issue – disability. The play dramatizes the lives of Tara and Chandan Patel, born as conjoined twins, and bares “how the cultural construct of gender favors the male.” 92

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Bravely Fought the Queen (1991), Night Queen (1996), Do the Needful (1997), and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998) mirror regressive attitudes toward non-normative sexualities in a period when India continued to cling to its heterosexual views. Bravely Fought the Queen is about disciplining women’s sexuality and using violence as a tool to force women to conform to social dictates of a dominant heterosexual ideology. This play reveals that even in homosexual relationships, patriarchal subjugation is alive and pressing. If Do the Needful indicts the absurdity of arranged marriages and reiterates frustrations surfacing from conflicting gender identity and suppressed needs, Night Queen exposes anxieties associated with expressing homosexual desire in largely heterosexual spaces due to cultural pressures. The themes of love, trust, and betrayal within a group of homosexuals, some of whom have left their families while others are living a double life with theirs, occur in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai. In Final Solutions (1993) Dattani focuses on another pressing issue – the politics of communal hatred in India from the pre-partition and partition era to the present time. Through its critical scrutiny of conflicting religious identities, the play interrogates whether there are truly any “final solutions” to the problem of religious intolerance in India. Thirty Days in September (2001) documents another radical issue: the silence surrounding child sexual abuse and incest. Even after three decades of writing, Dattani’s plays continue to question traditional roles and underscore the oppression of a community or an individual by the majority. Brief Candle: A Dance between Love and Death (2009), Where Did I Leave My Purdah? (2013), Big Fat City (2014), and Snapshots of a Fervid Sunrise (2017) have received critical acclaim due to their focus on relevant marginalized issues. Dance Me to the End of Love (2019) is an experiment in co-writing with Avantika Shankar and features three stories of love (Shankar’s “The Date” and “The Dated”; Dattani’s “The Reading”). Dattani continues to believe that art needs to adapt itself to newer performance and production modes in order to reach out to a larger audience. He chose the digital platform of Zee Theatre to direct his first Hindi teleplay Hasmukh Saab ki Wasihat (2015), translated from  Where There’s a Will. Untouchable was performed at the Boat Theater Online Festival in April 2020. It negotiates the tenacious legacy of untouchability prevailing in the aftermath of the pandemic by linking it to the issue of class and caste-based discrimination prevalent in society. Dattani has played a vital role in popularizing English radio plays in India. In 1996, BBC Radio 4 commissioned his first radio play. Do the Needful was broadcast in August 1997 followed by Seven Circles Around the Fire in 1999. Three of his radio plays – Seven Circles around the fire, Swami and Winston (2000), and Uma and the Fairy Queen (2003) – are detective plays in a whodunnit fashion that have Uma Rao as the sleuth investigating murder cases. The Tale of a Mother Feeding Her Child (2000) is a short radio play written in response to an invitation by BBC Radio Drama to commemorate the six-hundredth death anniversary of Geoffrey Chaucer. Dattani was reengaged by BBC World Service to commemorate the victims of the earthquake which devastated Gujarat on January 26, 2001, and wrote Clearing the Rubble. The Girl Who Touched the Stars (2008) handles the sensitive conflict between a woman’s desire to achieve success and the stifling weight of misogyny. In 2021, he wrote a short audio play A Little Drape of Heaven. Similar to his stage plays, Dattani’s radio plays confront issues involving the plight of invisible minorities such as the hijras, Dalits, Muslims, and women. Dattani has received much success and critical acclaim experimenting with the celluloid world as well. His debut feature film, Mango Souffle, was adapted from On a Muggy Night in Mumbai in 2002. He is also the director and screenwriter of the critically acclaimed movie, Morning Raga. Dance Like a Man and Ek Alag Mausam are his other directorial ventures as a film director. In his passionate staging of marginalized discourses, Dattani has successfully managed to garner a very supportive audience worldwide, among the Indian diasporas, especially among 93

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the fringe audiences who seem to find a voice through his plays. Alyque Padamsee has credited him for giving “sixty million English-speaking Indians an identity.” In 1998, Dattani became the first playwright in English to be awarded India’s most prestigious literary prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award for his book of plays Final Solution and Other Plays, published by East-West Books, Chennai. The citation described his work as “a brilliant contribution to Indian drama in English.” The film adaptation of Dance Like a Man won the Best Picture in English presented by the National Panorama at the India International Film Festival in 1998. The Sahitya Kala Parishad selected Final Solutions, Tara, and Thirty Days in September, directed by Arvind Gaur, as the best productions of the year. Dattani was one of the two Indians asked to contribute to 2000 Tales, a landmark drama series marking Chaucer’s six-hundredth anniversary in 2000. Mango Souffle won the Best Motion Picture Award at the Barcelona Film Festival in 2002, and Morning Raga, which premiered at the Cairo Film Festival in 2004, was a winner of the award for Best Artistic Contribution.

Further Reading Banerjee, Samipendra. “Gender, Identity and Contemporary India: A View Through Two Plays by Mahesh Dattani.” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 229–241. Chaudhari, Kuthari Asha. Mahesh Dattani: An Introduction. CUP India Pvt. Ltd, 2005. Dattani, Mahesh. “Interview with Mahesh Dattani.” Conducted by Kuhu Chanana. Indian Literature, vol. 55, no. 6 (266), 2011, pp. 126–129. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23348708. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Mee, Erin B. “Mahesh Dattani: Invisible Issues.” Performing Arts Journal, vol. 19, no. 1, 1997, pp. 19–26. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3245741. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Sengupta, Ashis. “Mahesh Dattani and the Indian (Hindu) Family Experience.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), vol. 11, no. 2, 2005, pp. 149–167. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/41274325. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

NATASHA W. VASHISHT

DAVID, ESTHER (1945–) Born in March 1945 into the Bene Israel Jewish community in Gujarat, Esther David is a writer, columnist, critic, illustrator, and sculptor. She has authored more than six books that elucidate the Jewish Indian experience, which include, The Walled City (1997), The Book of Esther (2002), My Father’s Zoo (2006), The Book of Rachel (2006), By the Sabarmati (1999), Ahmedabad: City with a Past (2016), and Bombay Brides (2018). She won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2010 for The Book of Rachel. Owing to her versatility in handling varied art forms, Esther David often illustrates her novels and stories. She has also produced a cookbook Bene Appétit: The Cuisine of Indian Jews (2021). Rituals and religion become the twin tropes around which the conflicts of her characters take shape. The novels emphatically refer to icons, lifestyles, habits, mannerisms, and practices that are of ritualistic significance to the Bene Israelis. The patriarchal undertones overlooked by favored narratives are critiqued in her novels. The characters of her stories are often found struggling to preserve the last remnants of their community’s relics in a rapidly urbanizing world. Synagogues are posited as spaces where the Jewish Indians are bestowed with the duty of preserving the collective identity. David’s novels often foreground a “conflict of longing and rootedness” – a need to revisit the ancestral homelands from which the Jewish community migrated, while also displaying a simultaneous need to blend into the Indian landscape that they now call home. Often, these conflicts are best emblematized by the female characters, who invariably become the primary protagonists of her works. The narrative space 94

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within these novels is often replete with their daily routines, the myriad observations on the world that they inhabit, the memories of their loved ones, and the stories that they have left behind. David’s The Walled City navigates through terrains of conflict – between the narrator’s Indian origins and her search for a Jewish homeland. The titular ‘walled city’ may be a dual referent – one that hints at Ahmedabad, the city she was born in, and Jerusalem, the city of her ancestral origin. The first-person narrator presents a panoramic view of India, placing Ahmedabad as an apt cultural representative. As is characteristic of all her works of fiction, The Walled City comprises several women characters Naomi, Mani, Subhadra, Jerusha, and Pratibha, among others. Placed across the trials and tribulations of several generations of Jewish women in India, Walled City is a semi-autobiographical narrative that explores Jewish Indian women’s conflicts with the orthodoxies of culture and religion. The novel can be read alongside her nonfictional work, Ahmedabad: A City with a Past, and her collection of short stories By the Sabarmati, both of which shed light on the history, inhabitants, the changing landscape, and cultural environment of Ahmedabad. David’s Book of Esther details the author’s family history. Weaving select autobiographical details into the texture of fiction, Book of Esther serves as a dense archive comprising lesserknown details of the rituals, festivities, customs, and culinary practices of the Bene Israel community. The novel begins with Bathsheba’s domestic life in the 19th century and concludes with the author’s own experiences of love, loss, and rebellion in the 21st century. It is a blend of stories, tales, myths, fables, and superstitions passed on to her by her ancestors across generations. Divided into four parts after the name of its four characters – Bathsheba, David, Joshua, and Esther – each part details the travails of negotiating with the religious constraints of an ethnic minority in a nation that has its own restrictions to contend with. This makes the multiple marginalization faced by the characters at the domestic and communal levels the primary theme of the novel. Book of Rachel aptly portrays the solitude faced by some among the last of Jewish Indian individuals who, unlike their relatives, chose not to migrate and stayed back in India to keep alive the memories of this ethnic minority. Bombay Brides is a collection of fictional narratives on the inhabitants of Shalom India Housing Society. In eighteen chapters, it deals with the lives of the many women who occupy this residence. Though with a sizable presence of men, the stories, for the most part, visualize the romantic adventures, moral indignation, domestic travails, and matrimonial compulsions of the women characters. Esther David’s works have received critical acclaim owing to the hard-hitting narratives that draw upon the unique cultural customs, lifestyle, morality codes, and the multifarious norms of the Bene Israel community, located in the familiar landscapes of India. Through her stories, which are intensely poetic and replete with vivid images, she also maps her own personal journey while being careful to lend her voice to record the tacit, gradually disappearing traditions of an ethnic minority.

Further Reading Katz, Nathan. Studies of Indian Jewish Identity. Manohar Publishers and Distributers, 1995. ———. Who are the Jews of India? U of California P, 2000. Rastogi, Pallavi. “In-Between Histories and Stories: Jewish Indian Identities in the Fiction of Esther David.” South Asian Review, vol. 34, no. 2, 2013, pp. 27–48. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi. org/10.1080/02759527.2013.11932927. Roland, Joan G. The Jewish Communities of India: Identity in a Colonial Era. Transaction Publishers, 1998.

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MAALAVIKA AJAYAKUMAR

DAVIDAR, DAVID (1958–) David Davidar was born on September 25, 1958, in Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu, India. He grew up in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. In 1979, he graduated from Madras Christian College and then went on to get a diploma in publishing from Harvard University in 1985. He has been married to Rachna Singh since 1997. Davidar began his career as a journalist writing in small magazines like Himmat, Keynote, Gentleman, and the Hindu newspaper. At the young age of tenty-six, he became one of the founder members of Penguin India rising from the ranks of editor to publisher and CEO. In 2004, he moved to Toronto to head Penguin Canada. He moved back to India and set up his own publishing house, Aleph Book Company, in partnership with Rupa Publications in 2010–2011. Davidar has written three books, The House of Blue Mangoes (2002), The Solitude of Emperors (2007), and Ithaca (2011). The House of Blue Mangoes has been published in sixteen countries and translated into many languages. The novel charts the life of three generations of the Dorai family from the year 1899 to 1947 in a small village located on the southern tip of preindependence India. If R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi is the quintessential Indian town, Chavathar is the quintessential Indian village with its caste and communal tensions. The novel portrays the tension between personal ambition and communal responsibilities as members of the Dorai family fashion their struggles and channel their ambitions for the larger good of the village community. Solomon Dorai dies fighting in a caste war, sacrificing his life for the prestige of the family. Daniel, his son, dies a sour man, having dedicated his life to the development of a colony, aptly named Doraipuram. The grandson, Thirumoolar alias Kannan, works on the tea estates till Chavathar calls him back to work for its future in a post-independent India. The Solitude of Emperors was short-listed for the regional Commonwealth Writers Prize. Written in the first person, it tracks the life experiences of a young South Indian journalist, Vijay, during the riots sparked off in Bombay and Meham in the Nilgiri Tea estates after the demolition of the disputed Babri Masjid structure. The book gets its title from a manuscript written by Vijay’s employer, editor, and mentor, Rustom Sorabjee, who considers the values of renunciation, faith, and truth as intrinsic to the Indian civilization and under severe attack by the forces of religious fundamentalism. The narrator sees hope in Noah, the unsung hero, who sacrifices his life and saves the town of Meham from descending into chaos. The protagonist of Ithaca, Zachariah Thomas, is an editor and later publisher of a mid-level publishing company Litmus in London. He achieves his greatest success when he gets the rights to a quartet of novels written by Massimo Seppi which have a religious theme. While Zach is enjoying his success, Seppi dies suddenly. Seppi’s translator, Caryn Bianchi, sells Zach a fifth sequel, but this is a disaster as a blogger discovers that the novel is highly plagiarized. Bianchi commits suicide, and Zach loses his job. At the end of the novel, Zach returns to his native town in South India where he seeks to reinvent himself. The novel portrays the change in the publishing industry where events, film rights, and custom merchandising bring in more money than the actual book sales. Besides the novels and many articles as a freelancer, Davidar has also edited a collection of short stories, A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces, which has thirty-nine stories that include not only 96

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classics from Khushwant Singh, Anita Desai, Munshi Premchand, R.K. Narayan, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chugtai, Gopinath Mohanty, Amrita Pritam, but also Githa Hariharan, Vikram Chandra, Shashi Tharoor, and his son, Kanishk Tharoor. The collection is unique in presenting short stories translated from Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Odia, Urdu, Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada alongside stories written in English. David Davidar’s writing is rich in both historical and contemporary details that define the present phase in the Indian tradition of English writing.

Further Reading Adami, Esterino. “Plants Have a Will of Their Own: The Construction of Botanical Metaphors and Symbols in the Literary Garden of (Postcolonial) India.” Kervan – International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies, vol. 20, 2016, pp. 95–106. Irmscher, Christoph. “Skunk Nights.” Canadian Literature, vol. 216, 2013, pp. 158–160. Valiyamattam, Rositta Joseph. “The Urban Dilemma: Religion and Politics in the 1990s (Meher Pestonji’s Pervez – A Novel and David Davidar’s the Solitude of Emperors).” Personal and National Destinies in Independent India: A Study of Selected Indian English Novels. Cambridge Scholars, 2016, pp. 108–149.

NIVEDITA MISRA

DAWESAR, ABHA (1974–) Abha Dawesar is a writer, artist, and international speaker who is currently working as an executive in communication and financial services at Vanguard. She was born to Bhushan K. and Shakuntala Dawesar on January 1, 1974, in New Delhi and moved to the United States at the age of seventeen. A graduate of Harvard University, she has been honored with titles and awards nationally and internationally. These include American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award, Lambda Literary Award for lesbian fiction for Babyji (2005), and fiction fellow, New York Foundation for the Arts, 2000. Babyji and Family Values were also short-listed for France’s important literary awards. In 2007, India Today named her one of the twenty-five path-breaking Indians, and Femina named her one of the twelve remarkable women of India. Dawesar started writing at the age of seven and published her first book when she was sixteen. She has authored six books: Miniplanner/Three of Us (2000), Babyji, That Summer in Paris (2006), Family Values (2009), Sensoriun (2012), Madison Square Park (2016), and several short stories. The stories include “Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana” (2012), “Crime and Punishment” (2008), “007 Woman in Dernièresnouvelles du 87” (2008), “Rendezvous” (2006), and many more. Dawesar’s first novel, Miniplanner/Three of us, is set in the United States and focuses on Andre, who uses sex to climb up the corporate ladder. He sleeps with his boss Nathan and his wife Sybil, and to ensure that the husband and wife do not bump into each other, he uses a miniplanner. Her second novel, which gave her fame and recognition, is set against the backdrop of the Mandal Commission in the city of Delhi, which triggered several chaotic acts of self-immolation. The novel is about a sixteen-year-old bright schoolgirl who aspires to go to the United States for further studies but also worries about her contribution to the ongoing trend of brain drain. In the course of the novel, she shares physical pleasures with three women who make her aware of her personality and sexuality. The novel has a strong lesbian core and paints Delhi as a city of dirt, domestic violence, and backwardness. Dawesar’s third novel, That Summer in Paris, is centered around a Nobel-winning, Indian writer Prem Rustom, who likes to lead the life of a recluse. Overburdened by seventy-five years of writing, he decides to unwind and live a little bit of life. As a consequence of this, he 97

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ends up meeting Maya in an online chat room. Maya is an undergraduate student and aspiring novelist who admires Rustom’s writings. Smitten by Maya’s charm and beauty, Rustom ends up meeting her in Paris the following summer. Her affectionate entry into his world gives him a fresh perspective on life and helps him make peace with the unsettled emotions from past relationships. Dawesar’s fourth novel, Family Values, is narrated from the point of view of a five-year-old boy, who lives in a joint family that consists of a grandfather and his eight children. The behavior of his elders enables him to understand the social and cultural norms of a typical Indian society that works differently for the rich and the poor. Her sixth novel, Madison Square Park, is set in the United States and deals with the clash of cultures and generations and issues related to the identity crisis of the main character and her family. Its protagonist Uma, a thirty-yearold daughter of emigrants, works for a financial firm. Her parents want her to live life as they have known it and marry an Indian, but she chooses to live her own life with her American boyfriend, Thomas, which puts Uma in a tough situation. Dawesar has readers and critics from around the world as her works have been translated into many languages, especially French. She says that writing in the city of Paris gives her a different perspective on the English language. Critics say that a strong essence of human sexuality underlies all her works, but she also deals with social and cultural issues.

Further Reading Minj, Pankaj. “Study the Abha Dawesar’s Novels: Social Values, Sexuality and Interpersonal Relationship.” Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education, vol. 16, no. 1, 2019, pp. 2710–2715. Ignited Minds Journals, http://ignited.in/I/a/303443. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

KRITIKA VARMA

DE SOUZA, EUNICE (1940–2017) Eunice de Souza was born on August 1, 1940, in Pune. Her Goan Catholic background coupled with her growing up in Pune after losing her father at an early age influenced her creative sensibility. She graduated in English literature from Sophia College, Mumbai, in 1960 and did her masters from Marquette University, Wisconsin, in 1963 and PhD from the University of Bombay in 1988. In 1969, de Souza joined St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, as a lecturer in English and retired from there in 2000. Besides, she also held the posts of Arts Columnist, Economic Times, Mumbai, from 1973–1984 and Literary Editor, Indian Post, Mumbai, in 1987. She was also actively involved in theater and organized several stage plays for the annual theater festival “Ithaka” hosted by St. Xavier’s College. After leading a prolific life as a teacher, poet, novelist and critic, de Souza breathed her last on July 29, 2017, in Mumbai. She has authored six collections of Poetry: Fix (1979), Women in Dutch Painting (1988), Ways of Belonging (1990), Selected and New Poems (1994), A Necklace of Skulls (2009), and Learn from the Almond Leaf (2016). Her poetry is not only personal, based on her lived experience as a Catholic woman in a patriarchal society, but it is also political in critiquing the forces of the family and the church that oppressed her within her cultural milieu. Her poems established her as an irreverent, aloof, and starkly ironic poet. Her keen sense of observation and absolute precision in recording characters as well as events led to her unique style of writing. Her poems explore the feelings of alienation, isolation, and ultimate loss that usually accompany womanhood, capturing rebellion and agony in short utterances. Indeed, her feminism is wide-ranging, from the ironic to the ferocious.

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De Souza also enriched Indian English fiction by writing two novels, Dangerlok (2001) and Dev & Simran (2003). Dangerlok is a semi-autobiographical novella presenting vignettes from the life of Rina Ferreira, a middle-aged single woman, lecturer by profession, living alone in a flat with her two pet parrots in Mumbai. The plot revolves around her neighbors, colleagues, lovers, friends, and pets that are full of eccentricities and oddities. The novel is also epistolary in nature as Ferreira’s character and life emerge through the letters she writes to a man she once loved. The poet comes alive in the novel too through color imagery and ample metaphors. Nonetheless, the novel carries the flavor of a Life Magazine series that tracked the lives of common people. The second novel, Dev & Simran, narrates the tale of a couple residing in the heart of Bombay and dealing with everyday problems of married life, especially the loss of their only child. After Dev’s sudden death, Simran survives the ordeal with the help of her diverse group of friends. Eunice de Souza paid tribute to life through this witty and moving novel. De Souza has also edited a number of books like Statements: An Anthology of Indian Prose in English (1976), Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets (1999), Nine Indian Women Poets (2001), Women’s Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English (2004), Purdah: An Anthology (2004), 101 Folktales from India (2004), Early Indian Poetry in English (2005), The Satthianandhan Family Album (2005), Both Sides of the Sky: Post Independence Poetry in English (2008), and These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (2012). She has also enriched children’s literature through four books, the most notable being Puffin Book of Poetry for Children (2005). Eunice de Souza holds a unique place in post-independence Indian writing in English. A poet of challenging verse, she holds the privilege of being the only Indian woman to be included in the Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992). Most of her works have been regarded as autobiographical. Her novels were not as well received by her readers and critics as her poems and other anthologies. Nevertheless, she leaves behind a brilliant and acerbic reputation for the literati to emulate.

Further Reading Brady, Veronica. “One Long Cry in the Dark: The Poetry of Eunice de Souza.” Literature and Theology, vol. 5, no. 1, 1991, pp. 101–123. Chavan, Sunanda P. “Modern Indian English Women Poets: An Overview.” Perspective on Indian Poetry in English, edited by M. K. Naik. Abhinav Publications, 1984. King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English. Oxford UP, 1987. Mehrotra, Arvind K., editor. The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. Oxford UP, 1992. Narlekar, Anjali. “Indian Doesn’t Exclude Me.” An Interview with Eunice de Souza. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 53, no. 1–2, 2017, pp. 247–254.

NAMRATA PATHANIA

DELHI: A NOVEL by Khushwant Singh Delhi: A Novel (1990) by Khushwant Singh is a historical saga, set against the backdrop of the Indian capital city, Delhi. It travels through time and space in its historical journey, covering several centuries of dynasties. It is a first-person account of a Sikh freelance writer and his attachment with a hijra prostitute named Bhagmati. The novel begins with the return of the narrator from England to Delhi, which he loves as much as he loves Bhagmati. The narrative takes the readers through the courts of Tuglaq, Janhangir, Aurangzeb, the Delhi Durbar, the 1984 violence against the Sikhs after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, and the present.

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The narrator had rescued the injured Bhagmati while returning from office to home. The Chowkidar Budh Singh, who keeps the account of his visitors, shows disapproval, saying, “take a woman, take a boy . . . but a hijra?” Their relationship lasts decades, with frequent visits, affection, and acts of kindness through the years. As a connoisseur of monuments and archaeological sites, the narrator shows Lady Hoity Toity around Delhi hoping to eventually sleep with her. It brings to life the narratives of its kings, rulers, poets, and freedom fighters including Aurangzeb, Mir Taqi Mir, Bahadur Shah Zafar, and Mahatma Gandhi. Chapter by chapter, post-independence and postcolonial India is presented in the narrative that span from Delhi Sultanate to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. It also takes into account the history of two major villains and invaders, Timur and Nadir Shah. The chapter “The Untouchable” presents Jaita Rangreta, an untouchable who has witnessed Rikabganj change to Paharganj. It shows how he also witnessed the transition between its rulers Jahangir and Shah Jahan. Shah Jahan was not considered as zalim, as his father. Delhi, called Dilli, began to rise with its new buildings and minarets. It also presents a first-person account of Sikh history and the anti-Sikh 1984 riots. Nihal Singh, a Sikh money-oriented man who aids the British in crushing the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and resolving his historical score with the Mughals, is one of several real and imagined characters who appear in the narratives. In 1857, he avenged the execution of Guru Teg Bahadur by Aurangzeb and joined the British army. In the end, the terrified narrator watches Sikhs cruelly being burned alive in masses by people who were enraged at the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh guards. It is in this process that the narrator goes beyond the binary and redefines Delhi’s past, and at the same time finds a voice for many people. The novel can be summed up with these lines from Baghchi, “the narrator’s love for the hijra, fleshy and physical as it is in its depiction, is perhaps a metaphor for the human being’s love of that which lies beyond the self and the other, for our collective yearning for an end to the hatred.” In the foreword, Singh mentions that his only aim in writing the novel “was to get [my readers] to know Delhi and love it as much as I do.” The novel was called a “coming-out-ofillusion” novel. Many reviewers considered it a significant work of historical fiction, as it reflects the history of Delhi which stirs love, affection, and kindness rather than other distinct degraded emotions. Similarities between Delhi and Bhagmati are often traced by many critics: both are considered crude, damaged, and tainted. The narrator is attracted to the queerness of both; he knows them intimately, revealing their charms and delights as their stories unfold. Amitabh Bagchi in his article “The Ghosts of Khushwant Singh’s Delhi” says: An out-and-out bestseller in India when it was first published, Delhi has rarely been acknowledged as an ambitious and powerful literary work.” However, this work has been translated into several Indian languages. Ranjana Sengupta comments on Singh’s “cynical gaze for a knowledge of Delhi’s past and present which made him possibly the best known and perhaps greatest of Delhi’s raconteurs.

Further Reading Baghchi, Amitabh. “The Ghosts of Khushwant Singh’s Delhi.” Outlook India, 4 Feb. 2022, www.outlookindia.com/website/story/the-ghosts-of-khushwant-singhs-delhi/291064. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Marlewicz, Halina. “Heterotopian City: Khushwant Singh and His Delhi: A Novel.” Politeja, vol. 40, no. 11, 2016, pp.  159–175. POLITEJA, https://doi.org/10.12797/Politeja.13.2016.40.11. Accessed 21 Jul. 2022.

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Encyclopedia Entries Sengupta, Ranjana. “How Delhi Has Been Written Over the Years in Novels and in Stories (and Essays)”, Scroll.in., 21 Feb. 2021, https://scroll.in/article/987332/how-delhi-has-been-written-over-theyears-in-novels-and-in-stories-and-essays. Accessed 4 Jan. 2023.

TANUPRIYA

DEROZIO, HENRY LOUIS VIVIAN (1809–1831) Henry Louis Vivian Derozio was a charismatic educator, philosopher, diehard rationalist, and man of letters who initiated the Bengal Renaissance and reformed conservative Hindu society. He founded the Derozians or Young Bengal, a group of enlightened, free-thinking students at Hindu College, who were instrumental in introducing Western modernity to Bengal. As an original voice of revolt, determined to free the country of its shackles even before it could grip the soul of the nation, he influenced Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda. He spearheaded the Eurasian movement of 1829–1830, demanding rights for Eurasians as British subjects. Scottish educators David Hare and David Drummond fostered in Derozio a questioning mind suspicious of Kantian aesthetics and British phrenology. Derozio joined Hindu College Calcutta as a teacher in 1826 and became an assistant headmaster of the College. At an early age in his academic career, he gathered around him youth who followed his rational temper and broke many traditional norms of Hindu society. He initiated the idea of a proud free-loving nation in his Petrarchan sonnet “My Native Land” (1928). In his prose writings, Derozio developed a new aesthetic of poetry meant to delight the readers. He delved into the past to recreate the lost glory of a “fallen” nation. Though he found it hard to reconcile Western notions of democracy and freedom with imperialist ideas and colonial projects, he never gave up on the concept of modernity. Derozio’s aesthetics was driven by a social purpose meant to eradicate social ills and bring about amelioration. In his poetry, he moved from the enunciation of emotional intensity to a didactic performance of the social relevance of literature. In his long poem, “The Fakeer of Jungheera” he expresses his angst at the painful institution of sati. The poem narrates the story of a Brahmin widow Nuleeni who falls in love with a fakir. Her father wants her to commit sati but when she refuses, he convinces the Nawab to capture her. The fakir has a retinue of brigands who put up a brave fight with the army of the Nawab but are defeated. Both the widow and the fakir die in the battle. Nuleeni cradles him in her arms and dies with him – her “eloquence had all burned out.” “The Faqeer of Jungheera” was published in 1928, the same year Raja Ram Mohan Roy founded the Brahmo Sabha, later known as Brahmo Samaj, that introduced modern ideas to reform Hindu thought and practice. In his effort to give a social purpose to literary writing and harness the emotional resources of literature to the process of nation-building, Derozio has no equal. Through the brave rebellion of women, the poem draws attention to the inequality of the sexes, the social malaise of sati rampant in the 19th century, and the thread of a syncretistic tradition that could stitch a society torn by prejudice and blind belief. A literary critic and writer, Derozio developed a moral aesthetic that he felt should be emulated by Indian writers in English and that would give hope and happiness to the readers,  a radical departure from the melancholic writings of the late Elizabethans and early Romantics. His manifesto “On the Influence of Poetry” was published in the India Gazette on January 22, 1830, where he argued that a poet must elevate and improve the human mind and morals. He was against poetry written by Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Campbell, for their works generated a feeling of despondency when life itself was buoyant and elastic. Derozio 101

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wanted to divert the flow of the poetic impulse from “poisonous channels” into the bubbling springs of “discovery” and “happiness.” He wanted poets to shed their misanthropy and instead focus on improvement, delight, and the advancement of society. Derozio’s poems carried an other-worldly charm but moved within the dual paradigm of romanticism and didacticism. His “Ode from the Persian of Hafiz” carries a romantic longing for reunion with the blameless, unspoiled and unnamed. A mysterious transcendence from the physical to the spiritual pervades Derozio’s love poetry. Two years before his death, Derozio saw the practice of sati declared illegal in India through the Bengal Sati Regulation, 1929, by Governor General Sir Lord William Bentinck. He Derozio died of cholera when he was just twenty-two years old. His sentiments are infused with love and compassion but tempered with truth and reason. He loved mankind dearly, especially his students, for whom he wrote a poem just before his death. He stands before them as a gentle presence, guiding them to unfold their true potential. He believes that it is destined that their circumstances, knowledge, perceptions, and influence will guide them to realize truth and fame. Recent scholarship has resituated Derozio in the canon of Indian writing in English and has brought to light his almost forgotten role as a pioneer of Indian aesthetics in English. His poetry and prose reveal a syncretic culture within early colonialism that continued to flourish in the 20th century.

Further Reading Edwards, Thomas. Henry Derozio. Rupa and Company, 2002. Mukhopadhyay, Abirlal, et al., editors. Song of the Stormy Petrel: Complete Works of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. Progressive Publishers, 2001.

MUKESH WILLIAMS

DESAI, ANITA (1937–) Anita Mazumdar Desai, a writer of novels and short stories, is known for her sensitive depiction of the feelings of female characters and the ethical amalgam between Eastern and Western cultures. She was born in Mussoorie, India, the daughter of Dhiren N. Mazumdar, an Indian businessman of Bengali origin, and Antoinette Nime, a German immigrant, who moved to Delhi soon after her birth. Desai grew up in an environment where she learned the diversity of her own home and surroundings. Mixing Indian language and culture with German observance at an early age taught her to be multilingual. She spoke Hindi with her neighbors, Bengali with her father, German at home, and English at school; she published her first stories in English when she was nine. She studied at Queen Mary’s Higher Secondary School and Delhi University, where she graduated in English literature in 1957. The following year she married Ashvin Desai, a businessman with whom she had two daughters and two sons, and lived in New Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, and other Indian cities. She was a member of the Advisory Board for English of the Sahitya Akademi, the National Academy of Letters, in Delhi and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has taught at Cambridge, Oxford Smith, Mount Holyoke, and MIT. Desai made her literary debut in 1963 with Cry, the Peacock. In 1965, she followed it up with Voices of the City, a story about three siblings Amla, Nirode, and Monisha and their different lifestyles in Calcutta. Amla sees the city as a monster, Nirode sacrifices everything for his career, and Monisha cannot stand her stifling existence in the home of an old, wealthy Calcutta family.

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Fire on the Mountain, published in 1977 and set in Kasauli, describes the life experiences of three women. It won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. In 1980, Clear Light of Day was published, in which Desai weaves the story of Delhi around a middle-class Hindu family. The main character is Bim Das, an independent woman who is a history teacher. Bim’s memories of her family are dominated by failure, and she feels betrayed by her sister Tara. Tara does not understand why Bim does not want to change anything when she dislikes the desperate atmosphere of the house. The novel also describes the events of 1947 from the point of view of Tara and Bim. Many of Desai’s characters in her novels are descended from the Anglo-Indian bourgeoisie and deal with marital problems. They often choose forms of escapism to cope with their dull lives or the supposedly more pleasant life of the outside world. Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975) describes the story of Sita who is pregnant with her fifth child. She wants to leave the toxic environment of the city and give her children a simple and natural environment to grow up in. She goes to her late father’s magical estate where she had spent her childhood. In The Zigzag Way (2004), Desai breaks away from her familiar territories and focuses on identity and self-discovery in Mexico. Since the mid-1980s she has focused on the underprivileged. In Custody (1984) is an ironic story about literary tradition and academic illusion, realized through Nur and Deven. Nur is an Urdu poet who finds himself in hard times, and Deven is a Hindi professor who realizes that the poet he loves is not the genius he had imagined. The book was made into a film by Ivory-Merchant. In Baumgartner’s Bombay (1987) a retired Jewish businessman flees Nazi Germany to live in India in poverty. A German hippie shows up and shatters Baumgartner’s reclusive existence. In her books, Desai responds to Western critics who object to her occasional passivity and the romanticization of history. In The Journey to Ithaca (1995), Desai describes a pilgrimage to India of the two characters, Matthew and Sophie, who find their temporal destiny in the mysterious “Mother.” Although they are Europeans, the story of the “Mother” (loosely based on the life of Mirra Alfassa, Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual companion), who once sought fulfillment in India, is basically an earlier version of the couple’s story. The vision of India here is more European than in Desai’s earlier works. Fasting, Feasting (1999) shows the contrasting roles between American and Indian cultures, as well as the contrasting roles between the two sexes. Arun studies in Massachusetts, and his sister Uma lives in a small provincial town in India. Uma’s attempts to leave home and get married end in disaster. Desai confesses that although she feels India like an Indian, she thinks as a foreigner. This view probably comes from her German mother. It has allowed her to take a more critical approach to Indian reality. Her work has explored the life of outsiders in Indian society and, more recently, in the West as well. Her fiction has dealt with themes such as the oppression of women and the search for identity, family relationship and conflicts, the breakdown of traditions, and anti-Semitism. Thus, the Eurocentric and social biases sometimes detected in her fiction can be read more productively as a result of her focus on rootless and marginalized identities. Desai’s literary world is not neatly divided between West and East, but are mirror images of each other. In Desai’s novels, individuals tell their stories, which makes them more responsible for themselves and less for the plot that binds them. To achieve this, the density of characters in her works is small; they are not crowded, and they give way to each other. For many, the settings, open and uncluttered, sometimes seem European, closer to an English countryside than to a jungle or a millenary river. Her novels have not dealt with heroic characters. The protagonists are marked by a certain passivity and are dragged along by historical and social forces that they

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cannot control. In spite of this, the characters show a kind of heroism that concludes with a tragic ending. Anita Desai manages to make her characters speak of history from their own perspective and not from an abstraction or a theory. They do so without losing their essence, without submitting to the tyranny of facts. She manages to make them symbols that do not depend on an interpretation in order to be inhabited. On the other hand, in Desai’s fictional world, history is a juggernaut that completely overwhelms the characters. Most of her works are set in India, but they extend in some way into a foreign land. The writer, on the other hand, never lets her maternal origins go unnoticed in the way she lives her life. Her fiction has focused on themes such as the oppression of women and the search for a full identity, family relationships, differences, and the crumbling of traditions and culture. Her extraordinary literary vision concentrates on offering a truthful vision to her readers and many have found similarities with the modernist sensibility of T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, or Virginia Woolf. Desai has received innumerable prizes and awards such as the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Guardian Prize for Children’s Fiction, the National Academy of Letters Award, and Padma Bhushan award. Her books are lucid, unabashed, and a treasure trove of good stories and impeccable writing. She has demonstrated a capacity for psychological depth in female characters. Her intention is to show and delve deeper into the secret places of her characters and present them as they are. They are characters who take refuge in their inner worlds, and Anita Desai reveals them to us. On the other hand, her works document radical female resistance to a patriarchally defined concept of normality. The female protagonists of her works point out the farce of marriage and male–female relationships. There is no unconditional acceptance of the traditional role of women, but a deeply felt rebellion against the whole system of social relations. It is precisely for this reason that she poses in her works the challenge of revising the historical development of their cultures, of promoting changes toward the future. Her thematic exploration of the social and cultural aspects of life creates awareness and assertiveness. It is a message especially addressed to women in today’s society. For Desai, culture and psychology in literature are fundamental elements for change and clear proposals for the future.

Further Reading Choudhury, Bidulata. Women and Society in the Novels of Anita Desai. Creative Books, 1995. Dash, Sandhyarani. Form and Vision in the Novels of Anita Desai. Prestige Books, 1996. Dodiya, Jaydipsinh. Critical Essays on Anita Desai’s Fiction. Sarup and Sons, 2000. Tandon, Neeru. Anita Desai and Her Fictional World. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2008. Thakkar, K. M. Anita Desai: A Critical Biography. Raj Publication, 2014.

JOSE-CARLOS REDONDO-OLMEDILLA

DESAI, KIRAN (1971–) Kiran Desai was born in Delhi on September 3, 1971, to author Anita and Ashvin Desai. She spent her formative years in the Punjab and in Mumbai, was educated at Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, and migrated with her mother to England. At the age of fourteen, she moved to the United States where, she studied creative writing at Bennington College, Hollins University, and Columbia University. Desai’s first novel, the Betty Trask Award-winning Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998, followed by the critically acclaimed

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The Inheritance of Loss in 2006 for which she was awarded the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. At the age of thirty-five, Desai was the youngest female author to win the Booker Prize. In 2013, she was awarded a Berlin Prize Fellowship by the American Academy in Berlin. At present, Kiran Desai lives in New York. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard follows the story of Sampath Chawla, a youth who gives up the mundane career of a postal clerk and recasts his life as a man with oracular powers residing on a guava tree. Hailed as a prophet by hoodwinked men and women, Sampath becomes famous for making prophecies, for which he uses foreknowledge of his clients received through their correspondence with him. As his reputation grows, there is a considerable increase in his income and followers. Desai draws critically on the subcontinental phenomenon of mystics, superstition, and their cult followings and on the economics of cult-mysticism which open up a host of business opportunities in the periphery. While Sampath’s father promotes the son’s psychic powers as an opportunity, Sampath is challenged by a member of the Atheist Society, who is determined to unveil his fraudulent ways. However, despite growing misgivings among his devotees, Sampath manages to hold his act together, until disturbances caused by monkeys attracted to the orchard threaten the continuation of the site. The novel ends with Sampath desiring once again to retreat to nature, leaving behind the cult status he has acquired over time – a glory that he never expected to have in the first place. Set in Shahkot in Punjab, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is considered by some observers to draw influence from the life story of Kapila Pradhan, a man who lived on a tree for fifteen years and led a life that in places closely resembled changes in Sampath Chawala’s career. In places, the novel has an unmistakable resonance with Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul’s debut novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957), which also centers the narrative on a mystic and builds a life on the superstitions and ignorance of Trinidad’s Indian community. Desai’s more ambitious second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, is set in the Himalayan border town of Kalimpong, at the time of nationalist resurgence in the area led by the Gurkha Nationalist Liberation Front in the mid-1980s. It incorporates overlapping storylines which include the domestic story of the local aristocratic family whose gradual decline over time is embodied in the person of a retired judge, Jemubhai Patel, an Anglicized man who has forsaken his cultural roots to immerse himself in the Western tradition. The Patel-residence, Mon Ami, is the formidable house of a patrician way of life in fast decline amidst postcolonial pressures in remote India. The novel presents a case study of the ambivalences that overshadow community and interclass relationships in transition. While nationalist insurgents trigger a wave of social upheaval and unrest, Judge Patel’s granddaughter Sai is entangled in a romance with a young student, Gyan, who is alienated from the girl he loves both because of class and political ideology shaped by Nepali nationalism. In a parallel storyline set in New York, the son of Judge Patel’s cook, Biju, attempts to negotiate with his own alienation in the metropolis where, as an illegal immigrant, he struggles to build a life. When Biju returns to his Indian home carrying the meager pittance he had saved, he is overtaken by the violence on the street, utterly humiliated by the mob, and barely escapes with his dignity when finally he reunites with his father. Between the publication of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss, Desai shows signs of having developed as a writer with a nuanced global consciousness that is equipped with the ability to tackle serious contemporary themes such as changing class politics in post-independence India, minority nationalism, migrant angst and displacement, and complex implications of globalization and colonialism in their numerous recycled forms. While Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard at times echoes impressions and plot situations mildly reminiscent

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of the early-Narayan and a young V.S. Naipaul, The Inheritance of Loss demonstrates a fully developed writer with imagination. The novel has also been noted for its evocation of suppressed memory and as mediating between human loss and environmental degradation. The novel has been noted as demonstrating a strong ecological consciousness and for presenting a green postcolonial aesthetic.

Further Reading Abraham, A. P. “Postcolonial Dilemmas in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.” International Journal Online of Humanities, vol. 3, no. 5, Oct. 2017, pp. 15–31. Escobedo de Tapia, Carmen. “Searching for an Environmental Identity: Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1996) by Kiran Desai.” ES Review: Spanish Journal of English Studies, vol. 39, 2018, pp. 173–192. Fehskens, Erin M. “Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard as Global Literature.” CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 15, no. 6, 2013, pp. 1–10. Kondali, Ksenija. “Migration, Globalization, and Divided Identity in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.” Umjetnost riječi, vol. 62, Jan. –Jun. 2018, pp. 101–116. Monaco, Angelo. “The Aesthetics of the Green Postcolonial Novel in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.” Le Simplegadi, vol. 15, no. 17, Nov. 2017, pp. 314–324. Vishwamohan, Aysha. “Home, Immigration, and Fractured Identities in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.” South Asian Review, vol. 32, no. 2, 2017, pp. 259–273.

VIHANGA PERERA

DESANI, G. V. (1909–2000) From early life, Govindas Vishnoodas Desani led a checkered life imbibing the traditions of India, Africa, Europe, and America. He was born in Nairobi Kenya on July 8, 1909, to a Sindhi merchant from Shikarpur, who owned a store with a hundred employees. Desani traveled to England and in adult life returned to India. He ran away from home thrice. At the age of sixteen when his father wanted him to marry a girl of six to get her dowry, he ran away. At the age of nineteen, he became a correspondent for the Times of India newspaper, The Statesman, Reuters, and the Associated Press. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was a broadcaster for the BBC during the war. When Dom Moraes met him in Bombay during the early 1950s, he found Desani carried an “upper class English ascent” and a low opinion of Indians. In 1970 he traveled to the United States and became a professor of philosophy at Boston University and later joined the University of Texas at Austin as a professor of religion and philosophy. Desani takes the Indian novel in English to the highest level of creativity, producing a mosaic organon of Indo-British relations. A  master of literary fusion, he combines the best literary traditions of the East and West in an inimitable style that has influenced writers for decades. He brings together Rabelaisian humor, Dickensian satire, Joycean semantics, Shandean plots, and expatriate allegories to create a uniquely Indian novel titled All About H. Hatterr (1948). Anthony Burgess called this novel a “modern classic” that has no parallels. It satirizes the Anglo-American culture, multicultural relations, frontier spirit, genteel tradition, traditional Indian family, Western modernity, Eastern metaphysics, and the Indian diaspora in quaint pidgin English. Desani uses the colonial legacy of the English language against itself to lampoon high English culture and decolonize the subject. Set against the backdrop of the Second World War, the novel reveals strategies employed by a war generation to escape the psychological and existential trauma of war. Hatterr is lazy, lying, profligate, decadent, and secretive. He believes that: “All improbables are probables in India.” With all his shortcomings, he is an endearing literary

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character. Desani argues that even though the language in the novel possesses an “arbitrary choice of words and constructions” it is meant to be like this, as it suits the personality of the protagonist – the language comes “natural to H. Hatterr.” The reader must plow through a medley of words to find meaning in the story. Desani’s story races through events and subverts the greatness of Western modernity and Indian classicism. Hatterr is an improbable protagonist in modern India – an orphan representative of the marginalized Christian community. He has a Bengali friend named Banerrji. Through him, Hatterr meets an extreme-wing-Indian, Mr. Chari-Charier, who runs a daily newspaper Bazaar, and gets employed as a news reporter. Possessing a self-effacing and antiheroic attitude, he wriggles out of impossible situations. In the seven chapters of the novel, the protagonist meets seven sages who teach him ways to survive. At last, he evolves a philosophy of contrasts without a comfortable answer. Even if the immigrant experience is both painful and disenchanting in the country of adoption, living a life well is the best revenge for an émigré. Desani’s style and sensibility anticipate a postmodern ethos of deracination, dispossession, and deterritorialization. Some novelists like Salman Rushdie and I. Allan Sealy have used his mock-heroic style and technique of fusing fantasy with history to create their own style of representation. The novel was almost forgotten by readers and publishers and now is considered a classic. Salman Rushdie called the novel “the first great stroke of the decolonized pen” and concluded that it went “beyond the Englishness of the English language.” Desani has earned the title of the Laurence Sterne of India. Desani’s political views are interesting. He was opposed to Mahatma Gandhi’s noncooperation policy during World War II but espoused Eastern values and ideas. However, he was rather critical of Hindu religious outmoded practices. Apart from Hatterr, he wrote a mystical epic, Hali: A Play (1950), and a collection of poetic stories Hali and Collected Stories (1991). The play was much appreciated by T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster. The prose poem carries an apocalyptic vision similar to a passion play with a philosophy that love overcomes the anxiety of death and emptiness. Its strong imagery and symbolism enforce the emotional and spiritual tribulations of the protagonist, especially his confrontation with love and death. Again, Desani combines the humanistic Christian and ascetic Hindu practices to create a spiritual awakening in his character. The poem is tightly knit but at times it begins to meander. The last section titled “A Rose and Lilac Light” is spread over four pages. Overall, the play is a triumph of love and endorsement of human values. Toward the end of his life, Desani became a social recluse cut off from friends and family. The only connection with the outside world was with his student, friend, and lawyer, Stephen Greenberg. Desani died in Dallas, Texas, on November  15, 2000, at the age of ninety-one. Apparently, Desani was working on a second novel just before his death, The Rissala, but the manuscript is inaccessible. Desani’s multicultural and multiracial experiences in Africa, England, and the United States provided him with the diasporic knowledge to write a truly expatriate novel. Though a single novel writer with a poetic play and short stories added to his oeuvres, Desani remains a literary force to reckon with. His impact on the literary tradition in India and abroad is significant.

Further Reading Desani, G. V. Hali and Collected Stories. McPherson and Co. Publishers, 1998. McCutchion, David. Indian Writing in English. Writers Workshop, 1969.

MUKESH WILLIAMS

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DESHPANDE, GAURI (1942–2003) Gauri Deshpande was born on February 11, 1942, in Pune to the social anthropologist Irati Karve, and writer Dinkarrao Karve. She created a rich legacy of feminist poetry, essays, and short stories in English and Marathi in the late 20th century. Her fluency and literary expertise in both languages made her a favorite translator of the masses. She translated the sixteen volumes of The Arabian Nights by Sir Richard Burton, which won her a lot of accolade and admiration across the country. Gauri Deshpande wrote fearlessly and unapologetically about societal hypocrisies and the subjugation of women in patriarchal Indian households in the 20th century. She created vivid, layered, modern women characters who resisted being passive, quiet members of patriarchal societies. Through the perspective of women in different social positions, like mothers, wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law, Gauri Deshpande raised critical questions about women’s financial, political, and social liberation. Right on Sister! is a short story originally written in Marathi and then translated into English by Gauri Deshpande and Vidyut Aklujkar. It is a first-person stream of consciousness narrative of an Indian woman as a housewife in a middle-class, patriarchal family in Mumbai, which dissects the socialized role of a woman, mother, wife and daughter-in-law in the confines of androcentric social situations. The story is sited in the woman’s dining room, where her brother-in-law from the United States appears, uninvited, and playfully subjects her to sexist remarks. He asks her when she would give the family a son and shapes misogynistic binaries between Indian women and American women, portraying Indian women as submissive and dependent on their husbands. These conversations provoke the speaker’s feminist critique of a typical Indian household. She explores her anger and disappointment with the disproportionate expectations held from women – being a natural mother, an incubator for baby boys, looking after the family at the expense of herself, sacrificing her higher education dreams to “secure” a good partner. Deshpande’s writing style here illuminates the immensity of unpaid labor taken from women to develop homes and families. Her tone drips with desire for reparations for this labor: “Want a chapati to eat? Pay up. Want a woman to bed? Pay up. Want a son to carry your name? Pay up.” The story further interrogates heteronormative ideas of gender and sexuality and advocates for liberation from such norms. “The Female of the Species” is one of Deshpande’s most celebrated poems, a feminist revision of Rudyard Kipling’s poem of the same title. Kipling’s poem travels through the mountains and forests of colonial India and uses oriental imagery of the Indian wildlife to talk about “the essential fierceness of women” in all the species. While Kipling’s colonial gaze narrates the poem and promotes gender essentialist thinking to depict women as morally superior and protectors of the family, Deshpande’s second-person narrative is an intimate confession of women’s complex lives. The title and confessional writing style distill the quiet, unspoken experiences of women in the gendered environment of Indian households and public spaces. “A  man is no use” is expressed as a community’s feelings when a woman feels lonely and unheard in the patriarchal machinery of the traditional family systems where her husband is unable to provide her emotional support. Her tone tenderly gathers women’s troubles and soothes them by voicing their shared struggles. Sapphic feelings lilt in her free verse as she remembers the closest woman in her life “your first love, and her first child.” She invites the reader to peek into the tender manner in which women communicate with each other. Gauri Deshpande’s writing style flows with a velocity like that of Virginia Woolf. Both are intrigued by the socialized condition of being a woman. Her writing style has often been perceived to be like a man’s. In her statements she

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clarifies that although she is a woman, she does not believe that literature can be restricted and categorized according to gender. She would like to challenge the expectations of modesty, chastity, and quietness that society expects from women and thus she writes even more about divorce, sexual promiscuity, bold and unapologetic women.

Further Reading Chandorkar, Leena. “The ‘Woman Question’ in Gauri Deshpande’s Fiction.” Indian Literature, vol. 61, no. 2, 2017, pp. 148–155. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26791337. Deshpande, G. P. “Marathi Literature since Independence: Some Pleasures and Displeasures.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 32, no. 44/45, 1997, pp. 2885–2892. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4406042. King, Bruce. Rewriting India: Eight Writers. Oxford UP, 2014. Rao, Susheela N. World Literature Today, vol. 73, no. 1, 1999, p. 214. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/ 40154662.

PRISHANTI PATHAK

DESHPANDE, SHASHI (1938–) Shashi Deshpande was born on August 19, 1938, in Dharwad, Karnataka, to Adya Rangacharya, a Sanskrit scholar and Kannada writer, and Sharada Adya, a housewife. She was raised in Dharwad and Bangalore and later moved to Bombay with her sister for education, where she studied economics, law, and journalism at the Vidya Bhawan. She began her career as a journalist with the Onlooker and became, what she calls, a true Mumbaikar. In the 1970s, she moved to Bangalore with her husband, who joined as Professor of Neuropathology in National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences. Despite her Bombay connection, culturally, she remains a Dharwadian, recreating the town with different names in her novels. Deshpande’s occasional visits as a child to her maternal grandparents in Pune developed in her a love for reading, particularly of English literature, which is reflected in her writing. Incisively exploring domesticity and its limits on women’s lives provide for the main themes of her books, which include the “minefields” they have to negotiate to become “visible” enough to tell their stories. Though she refuses to be categorized as a woman writer, her concentrated focus is on challenging the stereotyping of woman. This is in evidence in her short stories, of which the first collection appeared in 1978, and her novels, of which the first one was published in 1980. Deshpande has authored thirteen novels, four children’s books, several short stories, a few essays, and a memoir telling the story of her life and the making of a writer. She has also translated works from Kannada and Marathi into English. Her novel That Long Silence won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990, and she was awarded the Padma Shri in 2009. That Long Silence, which is named after a phrase from a speech by Elizabeth Robbins, has been acclaimed by critics as a life-changing book. The name of the protagonist Jaya, who is renamed by her husband Suhasini, means victory and is also one of the names of goddess Durga. She struggles to find her real self, which evades her treacherously like so many mirror images. Since the novelist believes that it is essential for all human beings – whether a saint, painter, or a writer –to acquire the right perspective to achieve anything in life, Jaya and her husband, Mohan, have to confront each other in nothingness. Mohan’s wrongdoing and forced leave as punishment, banishment in a dingy flat in Dadar, Bombay, opens up an arena of corruption amid the illusion of dignity. Woven with ingenuity, the novel provides vital details related

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to the introspection and musings of Jaya, which makes it a poignant human story, a novel for life – because life has to be made possible. The Binding Vine (1992) speaks of women’s bonding, about the childhood friendship of Urmi and Vanaa, about mother and daughter relationships, of loss and grief, and the redemptive power of understanding between women and their silencing. The novel also deals with the question of sati and rape victims. There is also the unforgettable character Mira, Urmi’s long dead mother-in-law, who wrote poems to assuage her suffering. The novel is about women’s struggle for survival in this uneven world, in which love eventually becomes the source of life, of human grace. Moving On (2004) elegantly maps the male mind, by focusing on the life of a father who not only carries the burden of being the eldest in the family but is very different from his siblings. This novel is kind of inversion of The Binding Vine, the confession of a man coping with loneliness and impending death. The narrator is his daughter Manjari who discovers her father’s diaries. Initially, she resists reading them, but later she reads them to see the unfolding of the labyrinthine family relationships and tragedy that strikes time and again, resulting in the death of many family members. The novel is a musing on death, on coming to terms with mortality, on women dying young, and other such losses. It also deals with caste bias, injustice, and Gandhian idealism. In the Country of Deceit (2008) begins with a statement of J. Krishnamurti that love is “a state of intense vulnerability” – and therein lies deception, betrayal, and ensuing suffering. Devyani’s parents’ house in Rujnur is demolished and built again with the hope that it would prove a happy house, for Devyani and her sisters want to put a closure to the pain and loss caused by the passing away of their parents. The novel turns into a narrative of family, friends, relatives, and domestic women. People’s lives are suspended between birth and death and then life starts again. Devyani, the youngest in the family, is a witness to her parents’ ailments, tragedy and death, making her wait for something to happen. What follows is a heady passionate love for a married man Ashok, Deputy Superintendent of Police, newly posted in Rujnur, which turns into one of deception and betrayal. Shadow Play (2013) is a narrative about coming to terms with many selves of one’s own. It is partly inspired by the Ramayana, in which King Janak offers his daughter Sita to Shri Ram in marriage to walk the path of Dharma with him. But because the time and the context have changed, the novel begins with the wedding of Aru and Rohit. There is sadness amid wedding, caused by the grief for the dead mother and the dying grandmother of the three sisters, Aru, Charu, and Seema. The novel is dexterously woven around the life of working women and their bonding, and of diverse other people who are affected by the cultural mores of the time. The present comes shockingly alive because of senseless violence and terrorism.

Further Reading Deshpande, Shashi. Listen to Me. Context, 2018. Glage, Liselotte. “ ‘What Does Your Jane Austen Say?’ Shashi Deshpande’s in the Country of Deceit.” Muse India, 24, 2009. Lahiri, Jhumpa. In Other Words. Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna, editor. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. Permanent Black, 2003. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark. Pan Books, 1993. Saharan, Asha. “Female Bonding to Combat Sexual Violence. A Reading of Shashi Deshpande’s The Binding Vine.” Indian Journal of World Literature and Culture, vol. 9, no. 10, Jul. 2013, pp. 34–53.

SUSHILA SINGH

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DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS by Bharati Mukherjee Bharati Mukherjee is one of the many “transplanted authors” who “captured the diasporic, hybridized state of migrant communities” (Nayar), particularly women, in her novels, short stories and nonfiction. Though she resists being called a “hyphenated author,” yet she is called the “grande dame of diasporic Indian literature” (Edwards). Desirable Daughters (2002) is the first of a group of three novels that include two more: The Tree Bride (2004) and Miss New India (2011). It is a story of three sisters, Padma, Parvati, and Tara, who are bound together by their familial, cultural, and patriarchal upbringing in an elite Brahmanical, Bengali family of Calcutta (Kolkata). These bonds, however, survive only as long as they are unmarried. After their marriage, the eldest, Padma, and the youngest, Tara, move to America and the middle one, Parvati, to Bombay (Mumbai). The novel traces their journey, caught in a flux of tradition and modernity, their rebelliousness to the patriarchal system in varying degrees, and the consequent shaping of their respective identities, consistent with their immigrant experiences and the choices they make. The novel opens with the story of Tara, the Tree Bride of Mishtigunj, one of the ancestors of Tara, the narrator and protagonist. Married to a tree by her father, to save her from a doomed afterlife due to the untimely death of her prospective groom, the five-year-old Tara is confined to a life of imprisonment at home. The other Tara, who is the narrator of the story, is likewise married according to her father’s wishes to Bishwapriya Chatterjee (Bish), whom she divorces after a decade of dissatisfied confined life in Atherton, California, failing to find “the promise of life as an American wife.” She moves out with her teenage gay son, Rabi, to live with her Hungarian boyfriend, Andy, in San Francisco. Considerably changed by her American experience, she sheds her traditional notions of marriage and divorce but is still staunchly bound to her Bengali cultural roots. The appearance of Chris Dey, who claims to be the illegitimate son of her eldest sister Padma, however, raises questions about her traditional upbringing. Disillusioned by the sin committed by her beloved blemish-less Didi, she sets out to find the truth about Chris Dey and also to search for her own shattered identity. Woven into this main story are the stories of Padma and Parvati, and the plot of cyber-terrorism, which binds Tara once again to her divorced husband, though at a different level. She then leaves for India with her son for a “root search,” to reclaim her identity and walks down the road, traversed by the Tree Bride in 1879, at the end of the novel. Mukherjee, in an interview, admitted to using “the width of the field __ of history, geography, diaspora, gender, ethnicity, language” as the “aesthetic strategy” for Desirable Daughters which she had not used in any of her earlier works. This novel is, in fact, a departure of sorts from her previous works that depict cultural clashes along with “the diasporic violence,” which is missing from this novel because Mukherjee no longer found it necessary “to portray the angst of transplanted individual” (Bhadrunisha and Mohanty). Another difference is noticed by Katherine Miller between Mukherjee’s earlier works, where “characters redefined themselves with each new spatial pattern,” and this novel where “a gendered identity” after complete destruction, reconstructs itself “firmly constrained within the ideological determinants of home and community.” The novel has been criticized for its ending for failing to tie the story together. However, reviewers of Mukherjee’s work have recommended reading Desirable Daughters and The Tree Bride in succession to better understand “Tara’s rich experience of revelation.”

Further Reading Bhadrunisha, Sheikh, and Dhirendra Kumar Mohanty. “Clashes of Culture in the Novel of Bharati Mukherjee.” JETIR, vol. 5, no. 1, Jan. 2018, pp. 658–662.

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Encyclopedia Entries Edwards, Bradley C., editor. Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee. UP of Mississippi, 2009. Miller, K. “Mobility and Identity Construction in Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters ‘The Tree Wife and Her Rootless Namesake.’ ” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 29, no. 1, Jan. 2004. SCL/ÉLC, https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/12761. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Nayar, Pramod K. Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction. Pearson, 2008. Sharma, Ambika, and Tanu Gupta. “Search for Identity in Bharati Mukherjee’s Triology.” International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities, vol. 3, no. 3, Summer 2015, pp.  44–49, www.researchgate.net/publication/281491772_Search_For_Identity_in_Bharati_Mukherjee's_Trilogy. Accessed 30 Jan. 2023.

RENUKA DHYANI

DEVA, MUKUL (1961–) Raised in Lucknow along with two siblings, by a widowed mother who was a medical doctor, Mukul Deva is an alumnus of La Martinière College, Lucknow; the National Defence Academy, Pune; and the Indian Military Academy, Dehradun. He was commissioned in December 1981 into the Sikh Light Infantry of the Indian Army but took early retirement from the army as a major after fifteen-plus years of service, including a decade of combat operations in India and overseas. Settled in Singapore since 2009, Mukul, a renowned polymath, has authored books in several genres. These are now being made into films. He is also a successful entrepreneur, globally renowned keynote speaker, highly sought-after executive coach, motivational speaker, and professional mentor. Mukul Deva’s writing owes much to his stint as an infantry officer in the Indian Army for sixteen years and his involvement in active combat and counter-terrorism operations in India and abroad. He is a recognized expert on terrorism, especially that caused by Islamic fundamentalism. After retiring from the army, Deva established a security company that helps protect private organizations and individual in sixty Indian cities. Deva is perhaps one of the most popular action writers of today. He began his writing career in 2000 with Time After Time . . . It All Happened, and he impressed the readers with his racy, raunchy, deliciously witty, and strikingly original take on life – men and women, war and peace, writers and counselors, God and religion, menopause, etc. This was followed a few years later by other action novels that established him as a writer of note. Deva uses his stint in the army to fire his imagination, resulting in racy, action-packed novels that make an exciting read. In addition to his popular Lashkar and Ravinder Gill series, he has also penned stand-alone novels that are no less popular. The Lashkar series comprises four novels till date: Lashkar, Saleem Must Die, Blowback, and Tanzeem between 2009 and 2011. In Lashkar, Iqbal, a small-town boy from Lucknow, is lured across the Indian border into Pakistan for training as a jihadi by one of the most dreaded terrorist organizations in the world. This is a riveting action thriller that moves from Delhi to the rugged mountains of the LOC in Kashmir, to Lahore, Karachi, and Multan. Close on the heels of this novel, Salim Must Die established Mukul Deva as the leading writer of this genre in India. Deva’s predictions of where Osama was hidden by the Pakistanis and how the Americans take him down come true with startling clarity one year after the release of this book, right down to the helicopters used by the Americans for the raid to kill Osama. In Blowback, the action shifts to Pakistan where a warlord in the rugged tribal areas of Pakistan pushes his way to the crest of the jihadi wave, seeking to forge an alliance of terror groups to take on the American surge. In the fourth of the series, Tanzeem, deep in Waziristan, a powerful warlord, embarks on a deadly mission. With a deadly group called the Tanzeem at his disposal, he plans alter the face of the globe as we know it. 112

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In the Ravinder Gill series (2014–2016), the main protagonist is Inspector General of Police Ravinder Singh Gill. The series comprises three novels so far: Weapon of Vengeance, Assassins, and Pound of Flesh. Each has a different story that revolves around terrorism, intrigue, and violence. Deva writes with the assurance of an insider who knows the rules of the game. In R.I.P. (2012) the nation’s security is at stake but along with defense issues Deva brings in human emotions, loss, and betrayal. In And Death Came Calling (2014) the focus is on technology: from his state-of-the-art control room, in the service of providing the security of ‘smart homes’ to India’s rich, ex-army man Ashwin can see and hear pretty much everything happening in and around his clients’ homes. Mukul Deva has also tried his hand at writing a historical novel, on business management and corporate subjects, on the popular Bollywood industry, as well as self-help and motivational books. Critics have been unanimous in their praise of Mukul Deva’s writing. He is often compared with the likes of Robert Ludlum and Sidney Sheldon in his deft handling of his stories and in the smoothness of his prose. His novels succeed in keeping the reader hooked to the end. Former US Secretary of Defense, William S. Cohen, is deeply impressed with Deva’s characters who are “so vivid and authentic that we are magically intertwined with their actions and emotions, their heroics and failures, their loves and losses.” Juggling his many roles with aplomb, Mukul Deva manages to fulfill the readers’ expectations with his witty, racy, action-packed novels.

Further Reading “Mukul Deva.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukul_Deva. Accessed 19 Sept. 2022. Website www.mukuldeva.com. Accessed 19 Sept. 2022. “Who is Mukul Deva?” www.biographies.net/biography/mukul-deva/m/0gx_03g. Accessed 19 Sept. 2022.

MANJU JAIDKA

DEVADOSS, MANOHAR (1936–2022) Manohar Devadoss was born on September 10, 1936, in Madurai. He studied at Sethupathi High School and at the American College in Madurai, obtaining his BSc degree in chemistry in 1957. His father suddenly died of a heart attack, and Devadoss went to work in Madras in Oldham’s, a battery manufacturing company (renamed Standard Batteries in 1971) to support his family. He worked with them for four decades, developing expertise in battery technology and product design. He went to Oberlin College (United States) for his master’s degree (1969–1971). A gifted artist, he was 32 years old when diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease. In 1972, his wife Mahema met with a road accident that paralyzed her from the neck down. The way the couple battled adversity is inspiring – in spite of deteriorating vision Manohar continued to draw with the help of special glasses, while Mahema learned to write with the aid of a splint controlled by her shoulder muscles. They designed greeting cards and donated the proceeds to charity. Devadoss was honored with the Padma Shri in 2020. Manohar Devadoss is the author of two novels and five nonfictional works. His first novel, Green Well Years (1997), portrays the happy adolescent life of Sundar in Madurai in the years immediately after Indian independence. We get a thoroughly entertaining picture of the little joys and sorrows of the schoolboys, and their naughty pranks, such as convincing people that the Green Well is haunted (so that they could play there undisturbed). The novel reminds us 113

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of R.K. Narayan’s classic Swami and Friends (1935), but it is more complex, a bildungsroman. Sundar’s awakening sexuality is presented in a sensitive, understated manner. Sundar’s “gang” of school friends includes boys of different communities, such as Gabriel and Raju Demonte who are Christians; Hameed, a Muslim; Bhiman, a non-Brahmin; and Sreeni, an orthodox Brahmin. Every character is delineated with loving attention to detail. The novel clearly shows changes in society, such as the loosening of caste restrictions. Devadoss’s language is generally simple but rises to lyrical intensity when describing natural beauty. He uses Tamil words like kolam or arunakayar only if there are no equivalents in English. The book is a visual treat. The twenty line drawings by the novelist depict scenes from school life and the landmarks of Madurai such as the Meenakshi Amman temple and American College. The artistic aspirations of the women of the time could find expression only through the intricate kolams they drew in front of their houses; Devadoss provides sketches of sixty-four kolams. Green Well Years has a strong autobiographical element. Sundar’s life parallels Devadoss’s own, both in his happy marriage and in his wife’s road accident. His second novel, A Poem to Courage (2002), a sequel to Green Well Years, is very different in tone and execution. There are no illustrations. It is a factual account of 25 years of Kavitha’s survival as a paraplegic, and Sundar’s struggle with fading eyesight. His love for Kavitha (Mahema) and her faith in him help them overcome all odds. Kavitha’s cheerfulness attracts many friends, and they resume a social life, attending music concerts. Devadoss does not gloss over the problems they faced. Running through the narrative is an emotional poem about Kavitha, to which Sundar adds stanzas over time. A Poem to Courage has many references to the drawings which Sundar sends to Kavitha; Dreams, Seasons and Promises (2002) is a portfolio with the actual drawings and poems. The brief narrative woven around the pictures begins with Devadoss’s first meeting with Mahema and ends about two years after the accident which made her a paraplegic. Mahe & Mano (2021) is an autobiographical account of the years described in his second novel, including the years they spent in the United States; it also covers subsequent events like the publication of his books, and Manohar’s life after the death of Mahema in 2008. Multiple Facets of My Madurai (2007) contains sixty-six meticulously executed line drawings of rural scenes as well as prominent landmarks of the city. The text provides a comprehensive introduction to Madurai’s history and cultural ethos. Madras Inked (2021) has sixty line drawings done over six decades: heritage buildings, temples, mosques, churches, and streetscapes. It presents two perspectives of the city; Sujatha Shankar, an architect, comments on the historical background and architectural features of the buildings, while Devadoss provides emotional inputs, explaining how and why he did these sketches.

Further Reading Basu, Soma. “Manohar Devadoss Says He Owes his Padmashri Award to Madurai.” The Hindu, 28 Feb. 2020, www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/artist-manohar-devadoss-who-won-a-padmashri-this-yearreminisces-the-good-old-times-spent-in-madurai-the-city-of-his-birth-and-inspirations/article309436 60.ece. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Narayan, Shyamala A. “Two Novels: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Green Well Years by Manohar Devadoss, A Study in Contrast.” Critical Spectrum, edited by Satish C. Aikant. Pencraft International, 2004, pp. 209–219. Raja, Vidya. “Manohar Devadoss, the Padma-Winning Legend Who Lost His Eye-Sight But Not the Art Within Him.” Better India, www.thebetterindia.com/211795.

SHYAMALA A. NARAYAN

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DEVIL’S WIND, THE, by Manohar Malgonkar The Devil’s Wind, a historical novel about Nana Saheb Peshwa’s role in India’s First War of Independence, was published in 1972. It is an effort to correct the picture of Nana Saheb who was condemned by the British as the villain of the 1857 “mutiny.” Deeply saddened by the British tendency to distort Indian history and present a maligned picture of Indian heroes and leaders, Malgonkar portrays the authentic history of Nana Saheb’s role in it. In his “Author’s Note,” Malgonkar writes “Every book is written in anger and in everyone the principal villain is the same: Nana Saheb – infamous, dastardly, despicable, crafty demon, barbarous butcher, and arch assassin, Nana.” Hence, for The Devil’s Wind, he consulted documents in archives and read almost 150 books in libraries in addition to gathering traces from oral sources. The novel blends fact and fiction, art, and history to create a character who is generous, noble, understanding and affectionate but weak, and unwilling to shed blood. The novel is divided into three parts: “Bithoor,” “Kanpur,” and “Gone Away.” Part I  is set in Bithoor, where Dhondu Pant, alias Nana Saheb Peshwa, enjoyed a happy childhood as the adopted son of Bajirao Peshwa II. His childhood companion was Mani, the brave Rani of Jhansi, whom he would have married but for a snag in his horoscope. This section builds up Nana’s life, his love affairs, his concubines, and his relations with his wife for whom he feels guilty all through his life. Nana’s exposure to corroding external influences like the corrupt East India Company officers, the ever-seething anger against the British, Bajirao’s lecherous life, and his disgraceful behavior are narrativized here. Further, his contempt for his foster father stands reflected in these words: “My world has been debased and defiled by his misdeeds.” After Bajirao II’s death, the East India Company stopped his pension, snatched away whatever fragment of territory remained with the family, and divested him of his titles. This angst somehow propelled the feeling of nationalism in Nana’s mind. He defiantly states, “The Devil’s Wind would rise and unshackle mother India.” Part II shifts to Kanpur and portrays human courage and endurance in the face of calamity. The fury and retaliation of people gives rise to a lot of brutality which has to be controlled. Hillersdon, his collector friend, gives the responsibility to Nana but he acts contrarily. He too joins the revolt “to be the voice of reason” and go down in history as “the man who had tempered a revolt, who had helped his own people to achieve freedom from foreign conquerors with only the minimum bloodshed.” Unfortunately, Nana is destined to become the “monster” of the massacre, the villain of Bibighar atrocities and the Satichaura slaughter. He feels guilty when he recounts his inability to control the rebels: “It hurts because it is not true,” says Nana at the end of the novel when he sees a plaque figuring his name in the said atrocities. Part III traces Nana Saheb’s life after his defeat in Kanpur up to his escape and asylum in Nepal. Here, the events turn fast – Kanpur defeat, the fall of Delhi, Nana’s escape, British atrocities in Lucknow, the second fall of Kanpur, and destruction of Bithoor by Hope Grant to obliterate all traces of the Peshwa. Finally, Nana escapes into Nepal but his travails do not end. Pondering over his predicament, Nana accentuates, “My loyalties were hopelessly intermixed, and my hatred far from pure.” This dilemma is the devil’s wind that explains the title. In conclusion, Malgonkar has not portrayed Nana Saheb as the daredevil superman of the rebellion but as an ordinary man who had to wear the mantle of the Peshwa and bear the burden of Peshwai. According to Usha Bande, Malgonkar “successfully fuses art and history and achieves cohesion of documentation and fictional technique with the result that the work becomes historical documents put consciously in the garb of literary art.” Eventually, Nana Saheb remains the leader, if not the hero, of our First War of Independence – a man of learning, a noble friend, a refined gentleman, and one who believed in justice and fairness. 115

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Further Reading Bande, Usha. Makers of Indian Literature: Manohar Malgonkar. Sahitya Akademi, 2016, https://sahityaakademi.gov.in/pdf/Manohar-Malgaonkar.pdf. Accessed 4 Jan. 2023. Mohan Rao, C. M. Manohar Malgonkar and Portrait of the Hero in His Novels. Reliance Publishing House, 1993. Rajagopalchari, M. The Novels of Manohar Malgonkar. Prestige Books, 1989.

KHEM RAJ SHARMA

TEJ N. DHAR (1944–) Tej Nath Dhar, academician, educationist, professor, writer, novelist, and editor, was born in Kashmir in 1944. He pursued a master’s in economics and English and post doctorate in English, in addition to a post-doc fellowship from the University of South California, Los Angeles. He is a recipient of awards and honors from prestigious universities in India and abroad including the American Studies Research Center, Hyderabad; Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; Ministry of Culture, Government of India; and College of Arts and Social Sciences, Adi Keih, Eritrea, to name a few. Dhar worked as a professor of English in the Department of English, University of Kashmir. He then moved to the University of Asmara, Eritrea where he was appointed as the dean, Faculty of Arts. His publications include History-Fiction Interface in Indian English Novel, Under the Shadow of Militancy: The Diary of an Unknown Kashmiri, and The Tale of a Beleaguered Soldier. Dhar has also published creative pieces and book reviews. Moreover, he has twelve book editions to his name. His writings have also found a place in The Cultural Heritage of Kashmiri Pandits, Barbed Wire: Borders and Partitions in South Asia, From Home to House, A Long Dream of Hope, and Once We Had Everything. Feelings of rootlessness, alienation, and detachment that are quintessential to exile reverberate beautifully through his writings. His language gives individuals substantial space in the face of widespread angst and turmoil that penetrates art and culture. This lends credence to his writings that are incongruent with the system consequently allowing it to stand as a critique of the human predicament that resulted in dispersion. His literary creations represent the sociological microcosm of marginalized communities infused with humanistic concerns, voicing the tragedies of individuals in their existence, dreams, and subsistence in the wake of insurgency and political upheaval. His writings depict the existential dilemma of the submerged populace who are grappling for mere survival. Dhar’s History-Fiction Interface in Indian English Novel explores Indian English novelist’s engagement with history. This work stresses that history–fiction co-relation is intriguing as well as culturally compelling. The introductory chapters elucidate theoretical, methodological and historical perspectives related to the history–fiction interface. The rest of the work deals with the profound analysis of the novels of some prominent contemporary Indian novelists to explore the nuanced expressions in novelists’ use of history. Dhar’s first novel, Under the Shadow of Militancy: The Diary of an Unknown Kashmiri, sketches the era of insecurity and ambiguity faced by Kashmiri Pandits during the height of the 1990 uproar in the Valley. Albeit the book, which claims to be the diary kept by a Kashmiri Pandit, discovered by the author from the debris, is an attempt to metamorphose a real-life experience into a work of fiction. The diary is a harrowing documentation of the political developments in the valley pertaining to the period of turmoil and disorder and its ensuing brunt on the lives of the Pandits who lived under the constant shadow of death and suspicion. Through the voice of an unfortunate individual, the author is communicating the tragedy of the whole 116

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community. Sensitive and thoughtful, the novel, unlike many other novels about the incidents in the Valley, is nuanced in its attempt at understanding the complexity of the situation. The author sheds light on the fact that the socio-political fabric of Kashmir is intricate and diverse as opposed to just black and white. The Tale of a Beleaguered Soldier is a multifaceted novel that spins around the protagonist Manav whose direct and indirect affiliations with individuals and circumstances unveil Kashmir’s convoluted past to display how after the long period of Hindu rule, its original dwellers, the Kashmiri Pandits, had to face ill treatment. This work, apart from unfolding the fable of exile, succeeds in laying emphasis on some distinct aspects of Kashmir’s Hindu past including contributions from poets and philosophers that remain untouched most of the time. The novelist succeeds in aptly putting across the narrative of exile, exodus, and predicament.

Further Reading Bana, Sarosh. “The Cult of Terror.” Business India, 13–26 May 2002, pp. 144–146. Bhattacharya, Arnab. “To Recapture the Past.” The Telegraph, 5 Jul. 2002. John, Wilson. “Ä Voice from the Other Side of the Valley.” The Pioneer, 8 Jun. 2002. Kaul, Ravinder. “True Chronicle of the Dark Times.” Daily Excelsior, 10 Jun. 2003. Narayan, Shyamala. Indian English Literature, 2001–2015: A  Critical Survey. Pencraft International, 2020, pp. 28–30. Sebastian, Jose. “Lines from a Nightmare.” The Shillong Times, 7 Jul. 2002.

TASMIYA BASHIR

DHARKER, IMTIAZ (1954–) Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, filmmaker, and artist. She was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and then shifted to Glasgow with her parents when she was barely a year old. She grew up in Scotland, worked for many years in Mumbai, and calls herself “Welsh by marriage” to the late Simon Powell. She describes herself as a “Scottish Muslim Calvinist.” She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014 and appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University in 2020. Her collections include  Purdah  (1988),  Postcards from God (1997), I Speak for the Devil  (2001),  The Terrorist at My Table  (2006),  Leaving Fingerprints (2009), Over the Moon (2014), and Luck is the Hook (2018). She has held eleven exhibitions of her drawings and sketches in India, London, New York, and Hong Kong. Since 1980 she has directed or written screenplays for over 300 films and audio-visuals on various themes such as cancer prevention, disability, women’s reproductive rights, children in need of special care, and street children, among other topics of social interest. Dharker uses poetry to offer a stinging critique of the imbrication of gender, politics, religion, and the state by unsettling hierarchies that seek to contain and define belonging. In I Speak for the Devil, Dharker uses an old (but refashioned) trope of the devil to comment on issues of freedom and agency, to critique the way histories of subversive women and their acts have been condemned, and to plot for herself – and the women embodied in the poems – new selves which are expressive and resistant. In doing this she shows how patriarchal ideas and formations are internalized by women which make them victims and agents of patriarchy at the same time. In Terrorist at my Table Dharker questions and complicates the figure of the “terrorist,” especially when compared to the flat and one-sided images that are circulated in the media. In a poem like “The Right Word,” she piercingly allows plurality to inform the subjectivity of the “terrorist.” The reality of torture by the state is evinced in “Still.” In the triptych “These 117

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are the times we live in,” she demonstrates the reality of an airport post-9/11 and 7/7 where the subject is read from the outside by the state which does not have the resources or interest to know who the person really is, and thus everybody is deemed a suspect. Dharker’s ironic humor undercuts the commonplace and ordinary and often casts a new light through which we can glimpse marginalized subjectivities and hear silenced voices. Social, political, and cultural orthodoxies sway when confronted by her poetic verve. Leaving Fingerprints is one of her most audacious collections. She takes the evanescent and ephemeral nature of the fingerprint and recodes it as “a poetic resistance against the politics of identity produced by technologies of recognition” (Menozzi). In a poem like “The room with two doors,” Dharker clearly spells out the gap between intention and action that is evident in the West’s way of dealing with migrants. Poems like “The Mark of a Wife” showcase her satirical undercutting of patriarchal structures. Her sketches, when read alongside the written page, complement, extend, and deepen the formation of her multilayered textuality. Over the Moon is dedicated to Simon Powell, her husband. It works with memories of Bombay, which is a cultural melting pot for Dharker, but also with a longing that is etched in London/Glasgow. Grief, death, and sorrow are evocatively rendered through deep personal emotions interlaced with subtle political overtones which cannot be missed. In Luck is the Hook, Dharker adds an introspective tinge about loves – lost and won, hidden and declared. This is worked through forms of desire which are experienced in unexpected places, events, people, objects, and recollections. The answer to the question how is one free – which permeates her poetic oeuvre – lies in the paradoxical ability and willingness to transgress. Technology too features prominently as a motif that can reshape and redefine our relationship with time and ourselves. Dharker’s poetic ingenuity is suffused by the haunting presence of nostalgia which leaves an indelible mark on the way we experience time in the face of personal, social and collective loss.

Further Reading Basu, Lopamudra. “The Languages of Diaspora: Meena Alexander, Sujata Bhatt, Imtiaz Dharker.” A History of Indian Poetry in English, edited by Rosinka Chaudhuri. Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 389–406. Dix, Hywel. “Transnational Imagery in the Poetry of Imtiaz Dharker.” Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 2015, pp. 55–67. Menozzi, Filippo. “Fingerprinting: Imtiaz Dharker and the Antinomies of Migrant Subjectivity.” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, 2019, pp. 151–178. Parel, Vaibhav Iype. “Framing Selves: Home, Gender and Politics in the Poetry of Imtiaz Dharker.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 53, no. 4, Oct. 2022, pp. 151–176.

VAIBHAV IYPE PAREL

DHONDY, FARRUKH (1944–) Farrukh Dhondy was born in Poona to a Parsi Zoroastrian family. In Poona, living at his maternal grandparents’ house with his aunts, he attended Bishop’s School and got a BSc degree from Nowrosjee Wadia College affiliated to the University of Poona. He won a Tata Endowment for the Higher Education of Indians scholarship to study natural sciences at Pembroke College, Cambridge. His writing career, both as a fiction writer and public intellectual, evolved during this time. In 1978 he published Come to Mecca and Other Stories and followed it by Poona Company in 1980 and the science fiction novel Trip Trap in 1982. He also wrote for children and young adults and episodes for television series, such as Empire Road. With distinctly 118

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Asian characters and themes, he wrote the No Problem series, Tandoori Nights, and King of the Ghetto, which were aired on the BBC’s Channel Four. Dhondy also wrote scripts, often anonymously or pseudonymously, for Hindi films, such as Mangal Pandey, Split Wide Open, Bandit Queen (adapted from Mala Sen’s book), Train to Pakistan (adapted from Khushwant Singh’s novel), and Kisna, among others. He wrote plays, short films and a biography of C.L.R. James who was like a political mentor to him. Poona Company, through its interconnected stories, serves as a witty as well as sentimental memorial to Dhondy’s childhood in Poona, living in a Parsi neighborhood on the fringes of the city, attending the elite Bishop’s School. The book serves equally as a historical document attesting to the origins of the British military station on the outskirts of Poona. Reminiscent of V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street, Poona Company deals with life on the streets, its everyday violence, moments of camaraderie, and the protagonist’s slightly distanced negotiation with the place where he spent his youthful days. The Bikini Murders, a work of fiction written in 2008, attempts to tell the story of a serial killer, conman, and arms dealer, Johnson Thhat. Despite Dhondy’s insistence on the fictiveness of the story, it is to a large extent based on the life of the notorious “bikini killer” Charles Sobhraj, who was known to the author. In the novel, a retired police inspector arrests Thhat in Nepal after chasing the man for a murder case. What follows is the inspector’s efforts at tracing Thhat’s backstory and deconstructing a criminal mind which is just as sharp as it is perverted. The novel questions Thhat’s success at escaping the law despite his high-profile crimes. The making of criminality is traced to a disturbed childhood in a French suburb where the young Thhat struggled to come to grips with questions of morality. The search for an absent father becomes a parallel narrative and a possible psychological motive for the succession of brutal murders of young women that he commits. Dhondy’s trajectory, as outlined in his 2021 autobiography, Fragments Against my Ruin: A Life, might be divided into roughly two parts, although each informs the other – his leftwing activism and his career as a writer and commissioning editor at Channel Four. Realizing the importance of addressing the needs of the newly independent immigrant communities from Asia, Africa, and the West Indies, Dhondy became a core committee member of the British Black Panther Movement. At the same time, his experience as a schoolteacher alerted him to the systemic issues of race and class within the education system. However, the overarching theme of his book is the fragility of memory, the maturing of the mind, and the richness of experience. Dhondy’s extensive oeuvre also attests to its dynamism. He straddles multiple genres and responds to the evolving material culture of the times like a true zeitgeist of the 1950s and 1960s Britain. Critics have often stated that his public intellectual persona exceeds the limits of his books or articles. They have attributed the variety of social classes in his works to his community-building work among the marginalized immigrant communities of Britain. His activism has also been considered a source of his sharp critical lens.

Further Reading Jansen, Bettina. “The Emergence of a Black British Community: Farrukh Dhondy.” Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Mehrotra, Neha. “What Reading Farrukh Dhondy’s Poona Company Means Today to a Pune Resident.” Scroll.in, 8 Aug. 2021, scroll.in/article/1002276/what-reading-farrukh-dhondys-poona-companymeans-today-to-a-pune-resident. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Ranasinha, Ruvani. “Writing Back, Re-Writing Britain: Farrukh Dhondy and Salman Rushdie.” South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain. Oxford UP, 2011.

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Encyclopedia Entries Subramanian, Nirupama. “Thhat Which is Not Sobhraj’s Biography.” The Book Review Literary Trust, vol. 33, no. 3, Mar. 2009, www.thebookreviewindia.org/thhat-which-is-not-sobhrajs-biography/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Whitcombe, Bobby. “East-West: The Divided Worlds of Farrukh Dhondy.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 14, 1983, pp. 35–43.

SHAYEARI DUTTA

DIFFICULT DAUGHTERS by Manju Kapur Published in 1998, Difficult Daughters won the Commonwealth Prize for the First Book and marked Manju Kapur’s arrival as a notable voice in Indian Anglophone writing. Set against the backdrop of the nationalist movement and the partition, Difficult Daughters traces the stories of three generations of women, mothers and daughters, each of whom, to different degrees, and with varying levels of success, struggle for self-determination against the weight of familial and gendered expectations. The three women are Kasturi, the perpetually pregnant mother of eleven children, Virmati, the eldest difficult daughter who sees education as an escape from the claustrophobia of an arranged marriage, and Ida, Virmati’s daughter, and narrator of the book, who in turn defies both her mother and societal injunctions against divorce and abortion. The granddaughter of the prominent Arya Samajist family of Lala Diwan Chand, Virmati’s determination to pursue higher education lands her in the arms of Harish, a professor of English and married man with children. Harish preys upon young Virmati’s inchoate desires for education and freedom, eventually seducing and impregnating her. Forced by circumstances to marry the professor, Virmati ironically ends up becoming a co-wife, reduced to an unsavory domestic life she had sought to escape in the first place. However, not all women are presented as victims lacking agency. Shakuntala and Swarnalata, Virmati’s cousin and friend respectively, are strong, progressive women. While Shakuntala is a science lecturer, Swarnalata is actively engaged in the anti-colonial movement and the movement for women’s rights. As Ida uncovers the unfortunate story of Virmati, she comes to understand the contradictions that vitiated their mother-daughter relationship. In many ways, Ida is the quintessentially strong woman, the difficult daughter who can break out of the chokehold of societal conventions and gender expectations by refusing to stay in an unhappy marriage, choosing abortion and divorce over an unhappy marriage. The narrative shifts from the past to the present and is structured by the memories of Virmati’s siblings as they attempt to help Ida reconstruct her mother’s past. Ida’s quest to reimagine her mother’s life and understand the choices she made takes her from Amritsar to Lahore. In plotting the lives of its characters across towns big and small across Punjab, Difficult Daughters presents not just a cartography of a once proud Punjab, the expansive kingdom of the mighty Ranjit Singh who defied British rule, but also the psychobiography of a whole generation of Punjabi Hindus through the travails of the men and women of Virmati’s extended family. Invoking Ranjit Singh and the storied Sikh empire consolidated by him, the novel gestures to a syncretic history that has been progressively erased once the British annexed it in 1849. The horrific violence that Punjab suffered in the aftermath of the partition is gestured to in the death of Suraj Prakah, Virmati’s father during an outbreak of violence. Dislocated by the partition, the novel captures well the poignant longing and nostalgia for the loss of a composite Punjab, and Punjabi culture signified in the once symbiotic relationship between the twin cities of Lahore and Amritsar that now lie divided on either side of the border between Pakistan and India. Although Difficult Daughters may be a study of conflicted mother-daughter relationships, and the quest for female autonomy, it is also a powerful critique 120

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of the masculinist project of nation-making and its disastrous consequences, as the legacy of nation-states formed on religious lines continues to fester in the present in the form of violent breakouts between different religious communities in post-independence India.

Further Reading Deakins, Alice, et  al., editors. Mother and Daughter: Complicated Connections Across Cultures. UP of America, 2012. Kabir, Ananya. “Abuses of Authority: English Literature, Colonial Pedagogy, and Shakespeare in Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters.” The Upstart Crow, vol. 21, 2001, pp. 127–137. Kaur, Rajender. “Lamenting a Lost Cultural Imaginary: Lahore and Amritsar in Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters.” Postcolonial Text, vol. 10, no. 3 & 4, 2015, pp. 1–21.

RAJENDER KAUR

DIFFICULTY OF BEING GOOD, THE, by Gurcharan Das Published in 2009, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma is Gurcharan Das’ take on the philosophy of dharma (moral well-being), one of the four purusharthas (goals of human life according to classical Indian philosophy). For the unversed, he provides a concise summary of the Mahabharata, the “dramatis personae,” a genealogical table of the epical story and a brief chronology of Indian history beginning from the Indus Valley Civilization. The book comprises ten chapters, nine of which are in-depth studies of different characters from the epic faced with unique moral dilemmas. His reflection on the genesis of the book is recounted in the “Prelude.” The book ends with a “Conclusion,” which is followed by a brief section titled “Dharma – The Story of a Word,” in which he traces the historical development and semantic evolution of the subtle, complex and “untranslatable” concept of dharma. In the retelling of the Mahabharata story, Das grapples with the various meanings of dharma – goodness, virtue, morality, duty, ethics, law, justice, and righteousness – eventually systemizing them into a detailed philosophical study answering larger, universal questions on the applicability of dharma to contemporary times. In the first chapter, the author interrogates Duryodhana’s envy as his primary flaw, and in the next chapter titled “Draupadi’s Courage,” he expresses his dismay over the silence of most men at Draupadi’s public disgrace by Duryodhana and attempted disrobing by Duhshasana in Hastinapur’s assembly hall and interprets Draupadi’s question – to Yudhishthira about the game in which he lost himself and Draupadi to Duryodhana – as both a legal and moral one, a genuine moral dilemma that is left “dangling and unresolved” until the end of the epic. In the third chapter on “Yudhishthira’s Duty,” he traces Yudhishthira’s evolution from an “ ‘intention’ based moral position” and “ethical idealism” during and after the dicing game to that of “reciprocal altruism” in the fratricidal war. Chapter four is a rumination on “Arjuna’s Despair” at the prospect of killing his kinsmen and the “just-ness” of a war, Chapter five is a reflection on the limitations of “Bhisma’s Selflessness” that led to the war of succession, owing to his vow of celibacy and abnegation of the throne, and Chapter six an excogitation on “Karna’s Status Anxiety,” on how he was “more wronged and more heroic than any other wronged heroes.” The seventh chapter is on “Krishna’s Guile,” the eighth on “Ashwatthama’s Revenge” and the penultimate one on “Yudhishthira’s Remorse.” The last chapter is titled “Mahabharata’s Dharma.” Instead of projecting Yudhishthira as the ideal hero, Das sees him as someone “so fraught with frailties to be almost an ‘un-hero’,” though his redemption lies in the fact that he “persists in his Faustian search for dharma until the end.” He makes Yudhishthira his mouthpiece to 121

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deduce the final argument of the book: despite the “ironic reminders about how difficult it is to be good . . . an act of goodness might be one of the very few things of genuine worth in this world.” The book was welcomed by people and experts from different walks of life – scholars, commentators, public intellectuals, columnists and businessmen. Reputed scholars of Indic studies, namely David Shulman, Patrick Olivelle, Sheldon Pollock, Wendy Doniger, Richard W. Lariviere, and Martha Nussbaum appreciated the unique philosophical voice and democratic appeal of the book. Meghnad Desai’s claim that the author “has given us a cosmopolitan study of a quintessentially Indian text” ties up with another critic’s assertion that the book will certainly make the epic “accessible to a whole new generation.” The book has also been translated into Hindi as Acchai Ki Kathinai and published by Penguin Random House.

Further Reading Desai, Meghnad. “The Winner Takes It All. Review of The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma, by Gurcharan Das.” The Indian Express, 12 Sep. 2009, http://archive.indianexpress.com/ news/the-winner-takes-it-all/516109/. Accessed 26 Feb. 2022. Hinzen, Parul Kapur. “Review and Author Talk: Gurcharan Das on India, America and the Difficulty of Being Good.” Arts Atl, 5 Nov. 2010, www.artsatl.org/book-review-and-author-talk-gurcharan-dason-india-america-and-the-difficulty-of-being-good/. Accessed 28 Feb. 2022. Matilal, Bimal Krishna. “Moral Dilemmas: Insights from Indian Epics.” Moral Dilemmas in the Mahabharata, edited by Bimal Krishna Matilal. Motilal Banarsidass, 1989, pp. 1–19. Mohan, N. Chandra. “Welcome to Hastinapur. Review of The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma, by Gurcharan Das.” Hindustan Times, 11 Sep. 2009, www.hindustantimes.com/books/ welcometohastinapur/storyukouf484Hp2niiwJpPNioN.html. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023.

KOMAL AGARWAL

DISORDERLY WOMEN by Malathi Rao Disorderly Women (2005) is an intergenerational study of four Kannada Brahmin women during the first half of the 20th century. In a 2020 article for the Deccan Herald, Rao characterized the novel as “Uppittu-Kaapi Kannada novel written in English.” Translated literally, it means – an “Upma-Coffee” novel, indicating the local flavor of the text, bringing out the very distinctiveness of culture, rituals, and interpersonal dynamics that is tied to the place on which Rao writes about. It captures the transformation of prejudices, notions, and anxieties around the female body at a time when much of the rhetoric of modernity and progress of colonized India was mediated through the status of women in the private and public domains of society. Rao weaves the novel by squarely centering the tensions of a patriarchal nation as it simultaneously seeks to deify as well as chastise women, thus betraying the innate insecurity of masculinity. The novel takes up the “burden of remembering” the systemic violence on generations of Indian women that has gone unnoticed and undocumented. Social codes and gendered values inform the lives of women in Disorderly Women even before they are born and linger on until their death. The suffocation of rituals is personified in the barrenness of the house named Himalaya where much of the narrative develops. The house becomes a metaphor for the nation at large as Rao describes its halls that are forbidding, the gardens that were initially uncared for, and a tree with blue flowers that stands as an isolated beacon of hope. Women have to live in this toxic atmosphere, loyally tending to the men of the household, perpetuating the prejudices onto the next generation and ensuring their servitude. The institution of marriage is the nucleus around which the lives of these women revolve. In the novel, parents arrange the marriages for their prepubescent daughters, who are trained to 122

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do housework and serve their husbands unquestioningly and embody an intense form of purity by practicing timidity and faithfulness. Disorderliness is celebrated through Kamala, the sister of the narrator’s father. Kamala is not exactly like a revolutionary figure who actively seeks to break the chains of bondage. Rao lends her much complexity and the many layers of her actions gradually unfold across the text. Married off at a young age, Kamala becomes the victim of domestic abuse because of her failure to bear children and returns to her father’s house (Himalaya) in the face of mortal danger. Though the act of returning is an instance of resistance of unprecedented proportions, Kamala questions her decision throughout her life. Conditioned by the stringent codes of conservative family values, she vacillates between desire and giving in to a dominant culture of subjugation. The novel is an exploration of this contestation of personal choice and societal bonds, differently calibrated across generations. Venku Bai, Kamala’s mother, wholeheartedly sacrifices herself to the wishes of her husband; Rukmini – the narrator’s mother and Kamala’s sister-in-law – manages to carve out partial freedom in her limited journeys back to her ancestral home. Kamala, on the other hand, represents the 20th-century educated women who introspect and respond to their feelings. She follows her heart to Bombay, to return dejected but with an agency that was mostly absent in her community. Ila, the narrator, receives this sense of strength from her aunt and continues her fight to reclaim the spaces – textual and literal – for her women ancestors and herself. Rao uncovers the evils of patriarchy by demonstrating how it governs the actions of the men in the novel. Challenging the men/women binaries, the novel becomes a testimony to the conditions of life in pre-independent India, caught in the struggle between tradition and modernity. Disorderly Women won the Central Sahitya Akademi Award in 2007. In an interview, Rao said – “I would have been unknown without this recognition; now I feel that I am not speaking in the dark, that there are indeed people listening . . . . For those writing in English, there is not that much visibility.”

Further Reading Bageshree, S. “Telling a Local Tale in a Global Tongue.” The Hindu, 8 Jan. 2008, https://web.archive. org/web/20110606112006/www.hinduonnet.com/2008/01/08/stories/2008010858350200. htm. Accessed 24 Jul. 2022. Krishnan Ramesh, Kala. “There Are People Listening.” The Hindu, 9 Mar. 2008, https://web.archive. org/web/20080314003434/www.hindu.com/mag/2008/03/09/stories/2008030950070500. htm. Accessed 24 Jul. 2022.

TITAS DE SARKAR

DIVAKARUNI, CHITRA BANERJEE (1956–) Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was born on July  29, 1956, in Kolkata, India, to Rajendra Kumar Banerjee and Tatini Banerjee. She did her graduation from Calcutta University in 1976 and her postgraduation from Wright State University, Ohio, in 1978. In 1985, Divakaruni completed her doctoral research in English at the University of California, Berkley, and is currently working as a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston. Divakaruni is a diasporic poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is the recipient of several awards including the American Book Award, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize for Fiction, Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize, and Pushcart Prize, and a number of her novels have been adapted into films. 123

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Divakaruni started her writing career as a poet. The Reason for Nasturtiums (1990) and Black Candle: Poems About Women from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (1991) are two of her early volumes of poetry wherein she gives expression to her varied experiences as a woman and as diasporic writer. In 1995, Divakaruni published her collection of short stories titled Arranged Marriage, which focused on the immigrant experiences of people who find it difficult to connect to and merge into a new socio-cultural setup. The book received many awards including the American Book Award and the PEN Josephine Miles Award. Divakaruni’s first novel, The Mistress of Spices (1997), was short-listed for the Orange Prize and was adapted into a film by Gurinder Chadha and Paul Berges in 2005. Written in the magic realist mode, the novel follows the mysterious character of Tilo, a grocery shop owner in the city of Oakland, who dangles indefinitely between the poles of profession and passion. Tilo has secret knowledge of the spices which she uses to help her customers. But when she falls in love with an American man, Raven, she starts neglecting her gift. Resultantly, the spices become averse to Tilo, and she loses her mastery and control over them. The novel ends with Tilo finally reclaiming her duties, and in this, she gets help from Raven. Divakaruni’s second novel, Sister of My Heart (1999), was a bestseller translated into twenty different languages across the world. The novel follows the lives of two cousins, Anju and Sudha, who are bound to each other not merely by blood ties but also by a series of familial and personal tragedies. Divided into two books, “Princess in the Palace of Snakes” and “The Queen of Swords,” the novel traces how Anju and Sudha grow up, get married, discover dangerous truths, and finally learn to survive every onslaught of time and memory. The story of Anju and Sudha is told further in Divakaruni’s 2002 novel The Vine of Desire. Set in California, in the United States, the novel traces the married lives of the cousins as Anju tries to survive a traumatic miscarriage and Sudha leaves her husband who pressurized her to abort her female fetus. It is during this time that the cousins try to reconnect with each other for help and understanding only to realize that Anju’s husband has fallen for Sudha. The novel ultimately shows how these two women learn to deal with their lives and how they strike a balance between what they desire and what that desire entails for them. In 2002, Divakaruni published another novel titled Neela: Victory Song. Set in a village of pre-independence Bengal, the novel tells the story of the twelve-year-old eponymous protagonist who sets out to find her missing father. As Neela’s search takes her to the city of Calcutta and she hazards every danger to find out what really happened to her father, her journey becomes a metaphor for India’s struggle for independence. Divakaruni’s next novel, Queen of Dreams (2004), is another tale of magic realism that traces the struggles of Rakhi both as an artist and as a single mother to establish herself in society. Rakhi’s life is further complicated by the presence of her mother who has a unique capacity to decipher dreams. When she ultimately passes away, Rakhi finds her dream journal which opens up multiple possibilities for her to find out her real identity. At this point, the 9/11 attacks further alienate her from the social surroundings of Berkley. To discover and understand who she really is and to find an anchor for herself, Rakhi has to navigate through a complex web of fear, guilt, love and betrayal. The novel charts this personal journey of Rakhi and ends with her ability to accept and acknowledge the reality of her own self. In 2008, Divakaruni published The Palace of Illusions, which is a retelling of a section of the Mahabharata from the perspective of Draupadi, the wife of the five Pandavas. The novel follows the life of Draupadi from her birth as the daughter of the Panchal King through her marriage to the Pandavas and her utter humiliation at the court of Hastinapur, to the Kurukshetra War wherein she finally avenges herself. The Palace of Illusions offers a rare insight into 124

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the patriarchal structure of our society and successfully vocalizes the thousand muted cries of women who dare or desire. In 2009 Divakaruni published her next novel One Amazing Thing. Closely modeled on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the novel records the narratives of a group of individuals who get entrapped in an Indian consulate after a massive earthquake. As they await external help, they agree to tell each other one amazing story from their lives, and it is through these stories that they survive the horrors of a social and a geographical catastrophe. Divakaruni’s 2010 novel, Oleander Girl, won the American Book Award. Set against the backdrops of 9/11 and the Godhra Riot, the novel tells the story of Korobi Roy as she tries desperately to find her missing father. As a novelist, Divakaruni is deeply interested in understanding human relationships. Most of her novels explore the theme of intra-familial bonding and how these social, cultural and political pressures impact these ties. Divakruni’s next novel, Before We Visit the Goddess (2016), is the story of three generations – Sabitri, Bela, and Tara. The novel opens with the tale of the village girl Sabitri who desperately seeks to be educated. Then it traces the journey of Bela, Sabitri’s daughter, from India to America where she hopes to find the life of her dreams but ultimately is highly disappointed. Before We Visit the Goddess closes with the story of Tara, Bela’s daughter, with whom Divakaruni’s charters a sea of love and hatred, loyalties and heartbreaks. Divakaruni’s 2019 novel, The Forest of Enchantments, is a reworking of the Ramayana from the perspective of Sita, the wife of Rama. The novel is an attempt to look beyond what the maledominated culture either unwittingly fails to record or conveniently tries to hide under the grand narrative of the epic. Divakaruni here gives voice to the meek and obliging Sita not only to let her narrate her own story but also to vocalize many other women who have been silenced and forgotten like her. The novel opens with the picture of Sita skipping through the pages of the Ramayana in search of her story. When the sage Valmiki informs her that Ramayana only contains what he was made to visualize by the divine scheme, Sita decides to write her own story “Sitayana” in order to come out from the “corners” – that marginalized space – to which women have traditionally been pushed by patriarchy. Divakaruni’s 2021 novel, The Last Queen, retells the story of Rani Jindan Kaur of Punjab who was married to Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Though Jindan Kaur was Ranjit Singh’s favorite, she had to struggle after her husband’s death. Divakaruni traces how she fought against the aristocracy to secure the throne for her son Dalip Singh. When Dalip was only six years old, Jindan Kaur declared him to be the king. As a novelist, Divakaruni is interested in recording the struggles of individuals against their society. Her novels trace the development of strong characters who do not give up under any circumstances and fight for their rights till the end. This undying spirit makes her novels stand out.

Further Reading Bala, Suman, editor. Fiction of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Critical Response. Prestige, 2016. Dixit, Pushpa D. Indian Culture and Feminine Sensibility in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Novels. Aadi Publications, 2020. Kumar, Manoj. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: A Critical Spectrum. Yking Books, 2017. Mishra, Parmendra Kumar, and Veerendra Kumar Mishra. Novels of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Diasporic Consciousness. Sarup and Sons, 2021. Ramamoorthy, A. R. Uma. Existentialism in the Novels of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Walnut Publication, 2021. Singh, Amritjit, Robin E. Field, and Samina Najmi. Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Feminism and Diaspora. Lexington Books, 2022.

MAMATA SENGUPTA

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DOSHI, TISHANI (1975–) Tishani Doshi was born in Chennai to a Welsh mother, Eira Roberts, and a Gujarati father, Vinod Doshi. She later moved to the United States for her studies. At Queens College, North Carolina, she studied business administration and communications, receiving a Bachelor of Arts. She gained her Master of Arts degree from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. In 1999, Doshi moved to London where she worked in the advertising department for the renowned fashion magazine, Harper’s and Queen, now known as Harper’s Bazaar. At the age of 26 in 2001, she received the Eric Gregory Award, which recognized young poets under the age of 30. Spanning from 2006 to 2021, Doshi has published eleven books. Her first book, Countries of the Body (published by Aark Arts) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006 and was launched at the prestigious Hay Festival in the same year, where she read beside authors such as Margaret Atwood and Seamus Heaney. The opening poem, “The Day We Went to Sea,” won the All India Poetry competition, which was supported by the British Council. Her most recent book of poems, A God at the Door, was short-listed for the 2021 Forward Prize for Poetry. It was published by Bloodaxe Books, which also released Doshi’s previous books of poetry, Everything Begins Elsewhere (2012) and Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (2018), which was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and was short-listed for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. In an interview with the Guardian, Doshi summarized her feminist themes: “The idea of the body, usually the female body, has always been central to my work.” In addition to being an accomplished poet, Doshi is a dancer, a journey which began in 2001 when she returned to India and met the dance choreographer Chandralekha, who died in 2006. She was the lead dancer in the Chandralekha Troupe and performed across the world in Sharira, Chandralekha’s final choreography about the fierce power and sensuality of the female body. Doshi is also an acclaimed novelist and journalist. Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers (Bloomsbury, 2010), is a family saga that draws on the story of her parents’ marriage, particularly the disapproval and opposition they faced from their families. In the novel, the couple meets in London, but Doshi’s parents met in 1967 in Canada and continued a long-distance relationship. The Pleasure Seekers was short-listed for the Hindu Best Fiction Award in 2010 and long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Award (now known as the Dublin Literary Award) and the Orange Prize (now known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction) in 2011. Salman Rushdie said he was captivated by The Pleasure Seekers: “This is a captivating, delightful novel. I was totally engaged by Tishani Doshi’s people and by their world, and the language often rises – when speaking of the great matters, life, death, and above all love – to powerful metaphorical heights.” Her second novel, Small Days and Nights (Bloomsbury, 2019), follows a woman who returns to Pondicherry to cremate her mother. There she receives the inheritance of a beach house and finds out about an older sister, who has Down syndrome. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, Small Days and Nights was short-listed for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize in 2020 and the Tata Best Fiction Award in 2019. Doshi lives in Tamil Nadu, India, and is a visiting associate professor of practice, literature and creative writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi.

Further Reading Doshi, Tishani. “Tishani Doshi on Knowing Loneliness to Be a Strength.” The Hindu, 30 Dec. 2017, www.thehindu.com/entertainment/art/remembering-chandralekha-being-a-dancer-on-lonelinessand-a-cockroach-wing/article22326530.ece. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

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Encyclopedia Entries Foundation, Poetry. “Tishani Doshi.” Poetry Foundation, 1 May  2022, www.poetryfoundation.org/ poets/tishani-doshi. Accessed 24 Jul. 2022. “#POETIPS 2019: TISHANI DOSHI.” The Poetry Book Society, www.poetrybooks.co.uk/blogs/news/ poetips-2019-tishani-doshi. Accessed 1 May 2022. Sriram, Aditi. “In South India, a Fragmented Family Turns into an Overflowing One.” The New York Times, 22 Jan. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/books/review/small-days-and-nights-tishanidoshi.html. Accessed 24 Jul. 2022. “Tishani Doshi.” Forward Arts Foundation, www.forwardartsfoundation.org/forward-prizes-for-poetry-2/ tishani-doshi/. Accessed 1 May 2022. Wroe, Nicholas. “Tishani Doshi: ‘I Can Go Out Alone at Night – but the Dangers Don’t Go Away.’ ” The Guardian, 27 Jul. 2019, www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/27/tishani-doshi-interview. Accessed 24 Jul. 2022.

SHAZIA HAFIZ RAMJI

D’SILVA, NEIL (1975–) Originally hailing from a small town, Kallianpur, near Mangalore in Karnataka, Neil D’Silva was born on October  31, 1975, and educated at schools and colleges in Mumbai. After his postgraduation in organic chemistry from Mumbai University, he pursued a career in coaching for eighteen years. But, in 2015, he gave up this ingenuity-stifling career and took seriously his calling as a writer with support from his wife, Anita. He had already gathered the nuances of story-writing from his father, Philip Neri D’Silva, who was a freelance sub-titlist for Hindi movies. Owing to his “headstrong” mother, Leena D’Silva, he was inspired to write about “strong women characters” and “give expression to female point of view” (Maniar). His acclaim as a writer of horror in his forties, however, is substantially the result of reading Dracula, Frankenstein, and Edgar Allan Poe in his early teens and, in college, the horror authors of the West – Stephen King, Richard Matheson, Ira Levin, Anne Rice, Ray Bradbury, Richard Laymon, et al. In a brief period of six years of his vocation as a writer, Neil has garnered for himself a reputable place among the contemporary Indian writers of horror by contributing to the genre more than a dozen non-formulaic fiction and nonfiction works. Offering bone-chilling and nervecringing experience, he switches meticulously between writing hard copy and e-versions of horror works. Attentive to the Indian occult practices, he draws heavily from “Indian mythology and cultural context” (Maniar). His debut novel, Maya’s New Husband (2015), a tale of psychological horror that earned him the title of Entertainer of the Year at the Literary Awards 2015, is based on the themes of cannibalism and Indian Aghori ritualism. The sequel to it, The Birth of the Death (2021), is available in e-book format on Amazon. His second novel, Pishacha (2017), “the Indian version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast” (Leung), is a supernatural love story, again steeped in Indian mythology. Yakshini (2019), prompted by the Nirbhaya incident and written in a dream-like trance, tells the story of the birth of a demi-goddess in the form of a girl, Meenakshi. Inspired by an Assamese local legend, Baak: A Desi Horror Story (2021), is the story of a merciless ghoul and an unforgiving river. Neil has also offered a full-length novel, What the Eyes Don’t See (2020) on Wattpad. Neil is aware of the “therapeutic nature” of horror stories, which he reflects as “stories of triumph” (Sharing Stories). He has written five collections of short stories – The Evil Eye and the Charm (2015), Bound in Love (2015), Right Behind You (2018), and Ringa Ringa Roses (2020) in hard book format, and Desi Horror Stories, which is free to read on Wattpad. He has co-authored two nonfictional works with ace Indian paranormal investigators – Haunted: Reallife Encounters with Ghosts and Spirits (2019) with Jay Alani, and The Spirits Talk to Me (2020) with Sarbajeet Mohanty, the co-founder of Parapsychology and Investigations Research Society (PAIRS). Both books communicate real-life experiences in haunted places of India. Acting as a 127

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mentor, Neil has curated stories of fifteen budding writers for India’s first urban horror anthology, City of Screams (2019). His official site offers two volumes of Micro Horror Tales, a form of micro-fiction, and Horrors D’oeuvres, bite-sized horror stories as well. Instantaneous acceptance of his works, some of them self-published first on Kindle, by reputed publishing houses and screen adaptations of four of his works – Maya’s New Husband, Yakshini, the story “The Clay Mother” from Ringa Ringa Roses, and Haunted, by major production houses have fortified his indisputable place in the horror genre fold. With mentions in prominent lists of horror writers, Neil is keen to promote Indian horror literature internationally.

Further Reading “In Conversation with Author Neil D’silva.” Sharing Stories, 26 Jun. 2021, https://sharingstories.in/ interviews/in-conversation-with-author-neil-dsilva/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Leung, Scarlett. “Top Indian Horror Authors to Be Read.” Desiblitz, 9 Jul. 2017, www.desiblitz.com/ content/top-7-indian-horror-authors. Accessed 26 Jul. 2022. Maniar, Prakruti. Neil D’Silva: On Championing Indian Horror, 27 Oct. 2018, www.purplepencilproject. com/neil-dsilva-author/. Accessed 26 Jul. 2022.

RENUKA DHYANI

DUTT, MICHAEL MADHUSUDAN (1824–1873) Michael Madhusudhan Dutt was a poet and playwright from the 19th century Bengal Renaissance. Dutt was born on January 25, 1824, to a court pleader, Rajnarayan Dutt, and his wife, Jahnavi Devi, in Sagardari, a village in Bengal’s Jessore district (present-day Bangladesh). Dutt began his education at the village primary school in Keshabpur Upazila where he studied until the age of fifteen. Later, he enrolled as a university student at the Hindu College in Calcutta when his father shifted to the city for work. Hindu College introduced Dutt to a Western academic curriculum where he studied English literature and gained proficiency in various languages like Bengali, Sanskrit, and Persian. The college pushed for the anglicization of their students as middle-class Indians who might later serve as officials in the colonial administration. Dutt was one of the many students in the college who was quick to learn the European way of living. He was extremely inspired by the works of English poets like Lord Byron and John Milton. His aversion toward the Indian culture became the premise for one of his earliest poems written in the English language. Published in The Literary Gleaner, a magazine in colonial Calcutta, an eighteen-year-old Dutt wrote about being inspired by the sight of ships leaving the Bengal coast for “the glorious shores of England.” This inspiration served as a driving force behind Dutt’s early works, which were exclusively authored in English. Apart from The Literary Gleaner, as a university student Dutt published his works in Jvananvesan, Literary Blossom, Bengal Spectator, Comet, and Calcutta Library Gazette. On February 9, 1843, Madhusudhan Dutt converted to Christianity and became “Michael” Madhusudhan Dutt. He was forced to leave the Hindu College on account of being a Catholic convert and resumed his education at Bishop’s College, Calcutta, until 1847. Soon after that Dutt sailed to Madras where he worked as a teacher. It was during this period that he published some of his famous works of poetry under the pseudonym “Timothy Penpoem.” These included two books of poetry, The Captive Ladie (1849) and Visions of the Past, as well as an essay titled “The Anglo-Saxon and The Hindu” (1854). In Madras, Dutt also worked as an editor for periodicals like the Hindoo Chronicle, Eurasian, Athenaeum, Spectator, Madras Circular, and General Chronicle. This was a period when he struggled to be recognized as an author. 128

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At this time, Dutt became the first Bengali to marry a woman of European origin. Rebecca Thompson McTavish married him in Madras, and the two had four children together. After being informed of his parents’ demise in February 1856, Dutt moved back to Calcutta with a woman named Henrietta White. Although there are no official records of the two being married, Henrietta and Dutt had two children – a son, Napolean and a daughter, Sharmishtha. The shift to Calcutta marked a change in Dutt’s position as an author. He moved away from writing in the English language and returned to writing in his mother tongue, Bengali. In June 1873, Dutt breathed his last and his life as a poet and playwright came to an untimely halt. Dutt continues to be venerated as Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal published Betrayed by Hope (2021) on letters written by him to friends and other authors.

Further Reading Bhowmik, D.  Dutt, “Michael Madhusudan.” Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh, 2nd ed. Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 2012. Bose, Amalendu. Makers of Indian Literature: Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Sahitya Akademi, 1979. Gokhale, N., and Malashri Lal. Betrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Harper Collins Publishers, 2021. Murshid, G. Lured by Hope: A Biography of Michael Madhusudan Dutta. Oxford UP, 2003. Roy, P. “Extravagant Genius: Michael Madhusudan Dutta and His Oeuvre.” Indian Poetry in English: Critical Essays, edited by Zinia Mitra. PHI Learning, 2016, pp. 17–32. Seely, C. B. The Slaying of Meghanada: A Ramayana from Colonial Bengal. Oxford UP, 2004.

NISHA GHATAK

DUTT, TORU (1856–1877) Toru Dutt was the first British Indian woman poet and translator to write in English and French. Hailing from a Bengali Christian family, Dutt easily belongs to the ranks of the founders of Indo-Anglian literature along with the likes of Henry Derozio, Manmohan Ghose, and Sarojini Naidu. She received an informal education at home from her father who was also a poet and from her Bengali Christian tutor Babu Shib Chunder Banarjee, taking lessons from them in French, English, and Bengali. Eventual training in Sanskrit by her father and her exposure to ancient and mythical stories and ballads narrated to her by her mother fueled her later attempts to translate ancient Sanskrit ballads and songs to English. Dutt’s inclination toward a life of thought and feeling might also have been on account of traumatic personal tragedies that disturbed her otherwise felicitous childhood. She lost her eldest sibling at the age of nine. Her brother Abju succumbed to consumption when he was barely fifteen. Three years earlier she had witnessed her mother resist her father’s conversion to Christianity and the ensuing confusion and familial tensions affected her deeply. In 1869 the Dutts embarked upon what would have been in those days, an arduous journey by sea to Europe, to spend the next four years in France and England. Having lived briefly in Paris and the South of France, Toru Dutt spent time in Nice furthering her French studies till 1870 when the family moved to London. In London, Toru studied music till 1871 before the family moved to Cambridge and stayed there until April 1873. While at Cambridge Toru had access to a lively social life and some very rewarding intellectual, political, and academic discussions with the likes of the philosopher Henry Sidgwick and the suffragist Millicent Garret Fawcett. Back home in India by December 1873, Toru was left lonely and shattered trying to recover from yet another family tragedy – her elder sister Aru’s death, also from tuberculosis. She found solace by immersing herself once again in studying Sanskrit and 129

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writing prolifically in all the languages known to her right till her death in August 1877 at the young age of 21, ailing as she was from the same malady that had claimed the lives of her siblings. Bianca or The Young Spanish Maiden remained unfinished as Dutt died before she could complete it. The protagonist of this English novel is based primarily on her own experiences and impressions gained during her European sojourn. It recounts the tragic story of Bianca, a young Spanish girl, who mourns the death of her beloved elder sister Inez, much like Dutt had herself grieved the sad and untimely demise of her young sister Aru in England. The novel explores the familiar themes of family ties and faith in a poignantly tragic romance. A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields is an assortment of French poems translated by Dutt into English, besides an original French poem entitled “A Mon Pere” composed and translated by Dutt herself. Published in 1876 with a total of one hundred and sixty five poems and without a preface or an introduction, this collection also features eight French poems translated into English by her elder sister Aru Dutt. Le Journal de Mademoiselle D’Arvers or The Journal of Madame D’Arvers is set in the later half of 19th-century France and recounts the joy and difficulties of growing up of a rather devout and sheltered Marguerite, the teenage protagonist of the novel just returned to her family from a convent. The novel, written in secret, was discovered and published posthumously in 1879 by Dutt’s father. Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan too was published posthumously in 1882, with a dedicatory introduction by Edmund Gosse. In her translations, Dutt strives to preserve the moral and traditional frameworks of the original Sanskrit works even as she tried to situate their lasting relevance for later times. “Our Casuarina Tree,” arguably her best-known poem, belongs to this collection as do “The Lotus” and “Sita.” Unfortunately, Toru Dutt’s work did not receive much critical attention during her lifetime. Edmund Gosse was perhaps the first European to notice and appreciate her work in 1877, almost a year after her death. A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields received a very favorable review from Gosse in the Examiner. A second Indian edition of Sheaf with a preface by Dutt’s father, with forty-four additional poems and a portrait of the author and her sister appeared in 1878. A third edition was published by Kegan Paul of London in 1880. Various other critics commented on Toru Dutt’s writing in notable journals like The Pall Mall Gazette, The Friend of India, and La Revue des deux mondes criticizing her “overwrought style” even when they did find some merits in her work. Her French novella, Le Journal de Mademoiselle D’Arvers, and some of her original English verses drew harsh reviews attacking their “sentimentality.” But French critics James Darmesteter and Andre Theuriet were moved by the “lyrical quality of her work and her precocious knowledge of French and English literature.” Poems like “Sita” make subtle inroads into the impregnable fortress of patriarchy. It would be a mistake to reach any conclusions about the merit of Dutt’s work without considering the milieu she was writing from. She has perhaps very aptly been referred to by Padmini Sen Gupta, one of her biographers, as “a child of the international world.”

Further Reading Das, Harihar. Life and Letters of Toru Dutt. Oxford UP, 1921. Dunn, T. D., editor. Bengali Book of English Verse. Forgotten Books, 2018. Dutt, Govin Chunder, editor. The Dutt Family Album. Longmans, 1870. Gupta, Padmini Sen. Toru Dutt. Sahitya Akademi, 1968.

HEMANT KUMAR SHARMA

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DYSON, KETAKI KUSHARI (1940–) Ketaki Kushari Dyson is a poet, novelist, critic, researcher, translator, diasporic writer, playwright, and scholar, who writes in English and Bengali. She was born on 26 June 1940 in Calcutta to Abanimohan Kushari and Anita Dasgupta, studied at St. John’s Diocesan Girls’ High School, Lady Brabourne College, Presidency College in Calcutta, and at Oxford University, and taught briefly at Jadavpur University and Burdwan University. She is married to Richard Dyson, a physicist, whom she met at Oxford, and with whom she shares her love for music. She took lessons in Hindustani music when she was a child and had a liking for singing but had to give it up after she had her tonsils removed due to frequent colds. She has two sons, Virgil and Igor. The works of Rabindranath Tagore and Buddhadeb Bosu greatly influenced Dyson’s career. Her literary corpus includes several volumes of poetry, novels, essays, translations, editorials, articles, book reviews, and plays. She writes on a wide range of subjects, including women’s issues, gastronomy, multiculturalism, and many other social and political issues. Her first Bengali novel is Noton Noton Pairaguli which is in the form of letters and diary entries written by a Bengali woman named Noton Das living in a fictional English location named Norton Hill. She lives with her husband and two sons. The novel has multiple characters from different backgrounds. It includes a woman’s perspective on strikes in Britain, Mountbatten’s assassination, Mrs. Thatcher’s election victory, floods in India, and the Pope’s visit to Mexico. Dyson’s most remarkable work is the book based on her doctoral thesis, A Various Universe: The Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian subcontinent, 1765–1856, which focuses on the accounts of various British men and women who wrote on a diverse range of topics relating to India and its people, covering the period from 1765 to 1856. It is based on diaries, books, and journals written during that period by British army men and civil servants, their wives, and the accounts of tourists about their experiences in India and their views about its people and their cultural beliefs. Dyson’s book of poems, Spaces I Inhabit, deals with social and political issues, women issues, gastronomy, spiritual observations, and relationships refined through a woman’s eye view. This is her third collection of poetry in English. Her earlier volumes of poetry are Sap-Wood (1978) and Hibiscus in the North (1979). Bokol, Shobij Prithibi, Joler koridor Dhorey, and Katha Boltey Dao are her collection of Bengali poems. In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo is about Tagore’s controversial friendship with Victoria Ocampo. Visva-Bharati commissioned Dyson to edit the Tagore–Ocampo correspondence, and she became so immersed in the study that it soon took the shape of a book. Influenced by their friendship, she wrote a novel in Bengali called Rabindra o Victoria Ocampo Sondhane. She has written various essays and biographical works. Night’s Sunlight is a translation of her play Raata Rode. She has also translated poems of Rabindranath Tagore and Buddhadeva Bose. There are few Indian writers who write fluently in two languages and Ketaki Kushari Dyson is one of those few writers who have written in two languages, Bengali and English languages. She has explored different genres of writing like poetry, novels, and translation, written her works in Bengali and translated them into English herself.

Further Reading Marshall, P. J. “Review of A Various Universe: A Study of the Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian Subcontinent, 1765–1856, by Ketaki Kushari Dyson.” The English Historical

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Encyclopedia Entries Review, vol. 96, no. 379, 1981, pp.  454–454. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/568355. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Powers, Janet M. “Ketaki Kushari Dyson: At Home in Multiple Worlds: A  Review Article.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 21, no. 2, 1986, pp. 230–234. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40874104. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Radice, William. “In Your Blossoming Flower-Garden: Rabindranath Tagore and Victoria Ocampo by Ketaki Kushari Dyson.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 52, no. 3, 1989, pp. 581–583. Cambridge Core, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X00034960. Subramanyam, Lakshmi. “Review: A Various Universe.” India International Centre Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 2, Monsoon 2002, pp. 155–158.

TANZIN CHOEDON

EAST INTO UPPER EAST: PLAIN TALES FROM NEW YORK AND DELHI by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Published in 1998, East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and Delhi is an anthology of stories written by Jhabvala over a period of twenty years. Divided into two parts, the stories are set mainly in Delhi and New York, besides Haryana, Ludhiana, and Ahmedabad. In the anthology, the “East” refers to India, and “Upper East” refers to Manhattan, New York. Jhabvala paints the world of middle-class and upper-class families in these stories as the world she was personally familiar with. There are rich Indians who imitate the British ways in India: “Some of them even speak Hindi with an English accent, like foreigners – like sahibs.” With subtle humor, she shows the habits and lifestyle of such people who have acquired wealth but lack class. Into her characters’ domestic world and interiors of human relationships she weaves the political scandals and corruption of the business world. Characters are stuck in complicated relationships and suffer psychological pain. The opening story, “Expiation,” is about a man who feels guilty about his brother’s execution for murder. As Jhabvala is critical of Indian spirituality in her novels, she is critical of Indian spirituality in these stories as well. In “Farid and Farida,” she looks at Indian spirituality with cynicism. Her tone while describing Farida, who has become a holy woman and is surrounded by “four-or five handmaidens” is derisive. Deconstructing the aura of holiness, Jhabvala describes Farida’s voluptuous body behind her holy robes, and her holy gatherings are equated with her talent to host parties. Farida is portrayed as a fine actor who can arrange a show with enticing spectacles. “A New Delhi Romance” is about a complicated relationship and political scandals in India. Indu is too conscious of her father’s status. She married someone below her class. Her son, Arun, a college student, has an affair with Dipti, the daughter of a politician. Along with a love affair between two young lovers, there is an estranged relationship between Indu and her husband. Amidst this, a scandal erupts in which Dipti’s father is involved. Jhabvala links the love affair with the political scandal suggesting moral debasement in Indian society. The theme of Indian joint families, marriage, and sex figures in “Husband and Son.” The husband is conscious of his family in a large house while being intimate with his wife. “Husband and Son” is reminiscent of Jhabvala’s early novels in which family, politics, and business intertwine. After she shifted to New York, Jhabvala’s life was divided between New Delhi and New York. The second part of the book titled “Upper East” contains eight stories. The Western characters in these stories are rootless and alienated and have the urge to find their roots, to know themselves as they are living in a world bereft of all spiritual and social moorings. New Yorkers in these stories must contend with problems of Western modernity in which the family as a unit is crumbling and individuals have lost their connection with themselves. “The

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Temptress” establishes a connection between the West and the East. Minnie becomes a follower of a woman in Delhi called Ma, who is believed to have spiritual powers. The title of “Great Expectations” reminds one of Charles Dickens’s novels. Pauline in the story is a lonely real estate agent; Sophie in “Fidelity” spends her time in a dark apartment. Her husband has left her to live with his girlfriend. Unlike Ma in “The Temptress,” Sophie cannot transform her dark apartment into a warm, cozy home. “A Summer by the Sea” is about sexuality and marital relationships. All the stories, set in New Delhi and New York, are emblematic of Jhabvala’s life in different places and cultures. As an uprooted child, she constantly searches for something beyond her material needs. Characters in these stories also live with the same anxiety. They are dislocated, dispossessed, more spiritually than physically. They are at odds with themselves and struggle to give meaning to their lives. Jhabvala situates her characters in circumstances that in themselves provide a comment on society, though some of these stories lack engrossing plots and conventional resolution at the end. At times, Jhabvala appears to be a writer in search of herself.

Further Reading Crane, Ralph J. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Twayne’s English Authors Series, general editor Kinley E. Roby. Twayne Publishers, 1992. Gooneratne, Yasmine. Silence, Exile and Cunning: The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 2nd ed. Orient Longman, 1990. Jasanoff, Maya. “Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the Art of Ambivalence.” The New Yorker, 31 Dec. 2018, www. newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/ruth-prawer-jhabvala-and-the-art-of-ambivalence. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023. Jhabvala, Ruth P. An Experience of India. John Murray, 1971. ———. How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories. Harper and Row, 1976. ———. East Into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi. Counterpoint, 1998.

VIVEK SACHDEVA

ELEPHANT BATHING by Anand Thakore Anand Thakore was born in Mumbai in 1971 and is a poet, Hindustani classical vocalist, and the co-founder of the publishing collective Harbour Line. His collection of poems, Elephant Bathing, was composed between 2001 to 2011 and published in 2012. The book is divided into five parts. The first part, eponymously titled “Elephant Bathing” consists of ten poems. Thakore weaves the everyday rituals seamlessly with universal emotions of separation, anxiety, and anger. To conjure such images, water in its myriad forms holds the poems together. Thus “A great lone tusker taking the plunge” into the chaos of civilization in “Elephant Bathing” merges with the hopes of “Rain beguiles us with its cryptic promise of renewal” in “My Father’s Old Man” to a sense of helplessness in “A shudder in the brooding loins of the sea,/That set me moving to no visible end,” in “Tidal wave.” The poet also connects his other identity as a classical musician with that of the memories and unkept promises of the nation in poems such as “Nineteen Forty-two.” The personal also revels in “Ghazal,” when Thakore embraces his other identity of a classical singer to provide an act of healing. The second section in the collection is titled “Glacier” where Thakore merges the personal with his attention to detail toward “Creepers, clouds, moonlight, rugs,/A porcelain vase, a candlestand, an antique clock.” Finding and losing himself in the vastness of nature to the ephemeral steam in the shower, the eight poems of this section traverse universes of thought and feeling whereby the banal is sensualized and the Self is put under intense scrutiny.

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Thakore weaves his next set of poems – clubbed under “Make me a Symbol if you Must” – around hanging objects, such as a punching bag, wind chime, or a hangman’s rope. Through a deliberation on the minute details of every object, the poet not only gives life and meaning to his surroundings, memories, and unsaid musings. Lamentations are at the core of the fourth section titled “The Sun Made Flesh” which consists of the three poems of the Mahabharata sequence. Textures intermingle with one another as light meets the flesh to give birth to a lifelong agony of separation in “Kunti Reminisces.” An image of the merciless divine continues with a rumination on the death of a son in “Dhritarashtra Laments.” The poems, however, effuse strength against all odds as a mother reclaims her courage and a son revels in his generosity in the face of mortality. Sensuality and the body feature prominently in the last section of the book titled “Out, Voice.” There is a formal playfulness with which the poet makes the refrain work to project his vulnerability in “Lament of an Onanist Bemused by the Void.” The unabashed negotiation with the Self continues in “Ablutions” when Thakore says – “How comfortable I now am/With my own nakedness.” The section – and the book – ends with liberation and an eye toward the future; an indication of the willingness of the poet to share his desires and fears with the world. Elephant Bathing received critical praise from several quarters. Gopikrishnan Kottoor states that – “Anand shows his ability to turn the familiar into the novel . . . Anand’s successful poems, with their devotion to the senses and reach for feeling, give the impression of a calm glide.” Khushwant Singh writes that – “Here is a gifted poet . . . who paints landscapes and seascapes with their flora and fauna in memorable lines while strictly observing rules of meter and rhyme which most modern poets tend to ignore.” Putting the collection in his top reads of 2012, Amit Chaudhuri observes “Elephant Bathing is hugely pleasurable for its formal accomplishment, its wry cosmopolitanism, and for the poised way it carries, and is animated by, the painful stamp of human personality.”

Further Reading Thakore, Anand. Official Website, www.anandthakore.com/. Accessed 25 Jan. 2023. Thayil, Jeet. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. Bloodaxe, 2008.

TITAS DE SARKAR

EM AND THE BIG HOOM by Jerry Pinto Jerry Pinto’s first novel, Em and The Big Hoom, published in 2012, is a renowned work and was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award (2016). It received many other awards: The Hindu Literary Prize (2012), Crossword Book Award – fiction (2013), and Windham Campbell Literature Prizes – fiction (2016). The novel is a deeply engrossing narrative about affection and love in an unusual familial set up in Bombay. The Mendes family’s story, set in the last decade of the 20th century, is told from the perspective of the son, the unnamed narrator, who delves into life with his family members; Imelda, the hyperactive mother; Augustine or Angel Ears, the father; and his sister Susan. Em is depressed and is often driven to the hospital due to her heightened depressive state and her repeated suicide attempts. The father often referred to as “the Big Hoom” is Angel Ears who is a silent but dependable father who holds the family together and stays calm in adverse situations. The mother is referred to as Em, and the “father sometimes, was the Big Hoom. (Em must mean M for Mother and maybe it’s because he made ‘hoom’ sounds when we asked him

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something).” The chemistry between Em and the Big Hoom is described as moving, with humorous elements where they call each other hilarious nicknames. Em used to call Big Hoom by names such as Mambo, Augie March, and rarely by his given name Augustine. As Em suffers from her mental illness, she has her phases of paranoia and manic depression, which are presented brilliantly in the novel through conversations. They live in a tiny flat with their children and are presented as the most extraordinary family. The novel is presented in the form of conversations with anecdotes, humor, and the nostalgia of reminiscing good times; Em tells stories of her early years. She smokes beedi and she calls it an addiction; Big Hoom never forgets to bring bundles of Ganesh Chaap beedi for her. The novel also presents extremely moving elements when Em tries to kill herself and is found in the bathroom drenched in blood by Susan. It is a poignant story of love, affection, and tragedy. The narrator describes instances of how their house was full of notebooks, stacks of them, and books were often annotated. The clothbound copy of The Collected Works of Lewis Carroll, with illustrations by John Tenniel, was filled with scribbles. Chapter Three of Through the Looking Glass – “Looking-Glass Insects” has “To be or not to be, that is the question” scribbled over the title. Em is an effortless writer who often wrote letters to the Big Hoom, as the narrator says, “flaunting her ability to write.” The narrator thinks of his mother as a writer because of her brilliance in telling and writing stories and letters. Em reads out her diaries and letters for Susan and the narrator, a few of which were notes about the first time she went out on a date with the Big Hoom and when she saw him for the first time in the office. “On certain days, she would rummage around in the bags and pull out a note, a fragment, a whole letter. She would glance at some, read some in full, and dream.” The narrator describes Em’s depression as “suddenly your mother steps into the quicksand. . . . She makes it worse by smiling bravely by telling you to go and leave her there,” which is moving and sorrowful. It is worse when she says while sobbing “let me die.” Her depression is described as something that is engrossing and engulfing her and taking every inch of her each day. The novel is a well-told tale that gives a glimpse of an extraordinary family and of children who find and read copies of their parents’ annotated books with a suicidal parent. Reviewers believe that the work should have been presented as a “memoir” rather than a fiction and call it a “kaleidoscopic narrative.” “It’s a little like reading The Bell Jar, as written from the point of view of Sylvia Plath’s bewildered, adolescent son,” as mentioned by a Anwar Alikhan in India Today.

Further Reading Alikhan, Anwar. “Review of Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto.” India Today, 4 Jun. 2012, www. indiatoday.in/magazine/leisure/story/20120604-em-and-the-big-hoom-by-jerry-pinto-book-review758556-2012-05-26. Accessed 3 Jan. 2023. Paul, David, and G. Alan. “Problematizing the Postmodern Condition in Em and the Big Hoom.” Theory and Practice in Language Studies, vol. 12, no. 6, 2022, pp. 1114–1118. Sundaram, Neeraja. “Human Rights and the Medical Care Narrative.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 11, no. 1, 2019, pp. 81–89. Vinai, Maya. “We Live and Love on a Fissure: An Interview with Jerry Pinto.” Writers in Conversation, vol. 6, no. 1, 2019. Writers in Conversation, Open Journal Systems, https://doi.org/10.22356/wic. v6i1.38. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

TANUPRIYA

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ENGLISH, AUGUST: AN INDIAN STORY by Upamanyu Chatterjee English, August: An Indian Story (1988) is Upamanyu Chatterjee’s first novel. Its plot revolves around the experiences of a young, urban, upper-middle-class bureaucrat named Agastya Sen who has been freshly recruited into the Indian Administrative Service and posted as a trainee administrator in a small town called Madna. The novel largely deals with his training during which he meets and works with a host of civil servants and allied services personnel, who include R.N. Srivastav (District Collector of Madna), Kumar (Superintendent of Police, Madna), Menon (IAS, his senior), Bajaj (District Development Officer), Shanker (Revenue Department, Training), Mahendra Bhatia (Forest Service Officer and fellow college alumnus), Mohandas Gandhi (Assistant Conservator of Forests), Gopalan (Divisional Forest Officer), and Dubey (Assistant Conservator of Forests). He is also surrounded by a host of other low-level administrators, office peons and staff. The novel’s action can be broken down into two parts. The first part concerns his arrival and subsequent training in administration where he has to adopt a watch-and-learn attitude. The second part involves his practical training as a block development officer (BDO) in a remote tribal subdivision called Jompanna where he learns that tribals have chopped off a colleague’s (Mohan) arms because he had taken sexual advantage of his female tribal cook. This incident marks a shift in Agastya’s disinterested attitude to his job as an administrator, and he gradually accepts the working of the bureaucracy, the inexplicable nature of human closeness, and the fragile nature of human relationships. The novel can be approached as the portrait of a civil servant as a young man, in which the focus is on Agastya’s bewilderment at the continuance of colonial heritage in the civil service both in terms of the power wielded by officials and the feeling of class entitlement that is demonstrated through petty privileges. Agastya is frequently assailed by the absurdity of official procedure: for example, the Health Ministry’s pamphlet issued for use by midwives in districts is written in English when very few in the population are barely literate, let alone fluent in English. A sense of “anchorlessness,” a sense that “he was living someone else’s life” is the dominant mood during his training period when non-meaningful experiences, such as his forced sociality with the collector’s wife at the Madna Club dominates his social life. Part of his disenchantment with the service, which he communicates in letters to this father and uncle, arises from the mismatch between the lofty goals of public service and the desultory practices of officialdom. Part of his alienation/disillusionment also arises from the physical ugliness of his surroundings and the apathetic approach of bureaucracy in ameliorating the bleakness of the district, town, and village. His growth as a civil servant and his gradual acceptance of the power of his position also allow him to act, this time meaningfully, during his practical training as the BDO of Jompanna, where he forces an apathetic officialdom to clean a dirty well in the tribal village of Chipanthi and where he experiences firsthand the pathos of tribal degradation. The novel has been placed in the tradition of a new Indian writing that aspires to a global reach and where the author does not have to apologize for an “exclusive upbringing.” This is also echoed by critics who have claimed the novel belongs to the elite St. Stephanian (a reference to St. Stephens College, Delhi) “school” of writing. This is matched by critical readings of the novels’ narrative semantic complexities: One scholar shows how the novel’s “proairetic code” mimics the “bureaucratic process” of intellectual boredom (Scott). Part of continuing interest in the novel also stems from the film version in 1994 which marked the directorial debut of Dev Benegal and launched the film career of actor Rahul Bose.

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Further Reading Chatterjee, Upamanyu. English, August: An Indian Story. Faber and Faber, 2018. Gandhi, Leela. “Some Notes on the Rise of the St. Stephanian Novel.” The Fiction of St. Stephen’s, edited by Aditya Bhattacharjea and Lola Chatterji. Ravi Dayal Publisher, 2000, pp. 151–158. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “The Anxiety of Indianness: Our Novels in English.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 28, no. 48, 1993, pp. 2607–2611. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4400456. Scott, Bede. “Reading the Uninteresting: Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August: An Indian Story.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 53, no. 3, 2012, pp. 493–516. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41819520.

NILAK DATTA

EXQUISITE CADAVERS by Meena Kandasamy Meena Kandasamy is an anti-caste activist, poet and writer with a rich history of translating revolutionary anti-caste thinkers like Periyar. Exquisite Cadavers is a thrilling fusion of fiction and personal essay writing and also a work of auto-fiction. Her history and stories are deeply embedded in her fictional characters. Encased in a novella form, Kandasamy’s poetic ferocity and nuanced commentary on India’s political history and responsibilities emerge in a new experimental genre. The textual structure is inspired by the surrealist French game cadavre exquis, the game of consequences, where one person writes a line, folds the paper, and passes it on, this continues with all players and when unfolded, it reveals one beautifully woven together piece. This form helps each character “veer the narrative along a path of their defense.” Meena Kandasamy’s slim, inventive book plays on this technique. A fictional story about a young London couple and their delicate marriage runs on the right while the margins on the left pour in Kandasamy’s interiority into the novella structure: from her creative struggles, her activism, the trauma of an abusive marriage, and the pain of losing beautiful friendships that emerged in violent nationalist political times. This writing structure is a map of her creative processes and a patchwork of her creative literary experiments. Maya is a mixed-race British woman who works with newspapers and falls in love with Karim, a Tunisian filmmaker. Their interfaith, multicultural marriage is steeped in tension and individual insecurities. Each chapter is from the point of view of either one of them. Karim’s perspective tenderly observes Maya through the lens of his filmmaking camera, his eyes quietly sit on her like a camera studying her movements and gestures, he observes her watching television shows and realizes she always connects with the wronged, traumatized character – “the jilted lover” or “abused girlfriend” or “bullied school kid” for instance. As he struggles with creative blocs and is trying to make the right political film for his project, Karim is observing Maya latch onto different plot lines. She uses any one as a “template” she can “customize into her own story.” This reflects her processing of personal traumas and also influences their relationship. They both bond over fathers who had abused and disappointed them, the story flits between waves of love for each other and their own art of distilling their most personal insecurities and fears. Kandasamy sometimes finds it hard to empathize with Maya. She confesses: “In the short term, my concerns become her concerns.” Kandasamy pours bits of her history into her fictional characters and at the same time discusses the histories of multiple other women in the South Asian political landscape; Tamil Eelam tigresses and the systemic rape they suffered at the hands of Sri Lankan army personnel, the murder of India’s leading journalist Gauri Lankesh who dared to challenge the far right in her fierce writings, and she discusses systemic violence against women in the country. Maya and Karim’s life is also inflicted with systemic violence,

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from being racialized in London to facing an oppressive government in Tunisia. He dreams of an Arab revolution like multiple others to liberate his people. While Maya is pregnant, an urgent situation comes up in Tunisia; his brother is missing, and Karim goes looking for him. Maya is still in London wondering if she should follow him or if this is where their relationship will end because she does not know his whereabouts. Kandasamy presents a potent literary experiment to enjoy the freedom of creating new stories while also informing the reader of her experiences of India’s caste and communal history. The novel is protest art, polemical, sharp, tender to victims of oppressive regimes, and a powerful attempt to bring together our multiple shared realities together. Her specific writing style, structure, and form challenge the voyeuristic gaze of those critics who define her as the “raped Indian woman” who writes about her history of domestic violence instead of acknowledging and seeing her creative prowess and technique (Preface to Exquisite Cadavers). Kandasamy points out “No one discusses process with us. . . . No one treats us as writers, only as diarists who survived.”

Further Reading Ahmad, Omair, “Interview: Meena Kandasamy on Writing About Marital Violence.”  South Asia Journal,  31 May  2017, http://southasiajournal.net/interview-meena-kandasamy-on-writing-about-mari tal-violence/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Lone, Javaid Ahmad. “Meena Kandasamy: The Angry Dalit Voice.” Socio-Political Concerns in Dalit Literature a Critical Survey, edited by Satendra Kumar. Yking Books, 2011, pp. 317–326. Subramaniam, Arundhathi. “Introduction: Beyond the Hashtag: Exploring Contemporary Indian Poetry in English.” Indian Literature, vol. 61, no. 1 (297), 2017, pp. 33–39. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/ 26791073. Thomas, A. J. “Impressions, Expressions . . .” Indian Literature, vol. 56, no. 1 (267), 2012, pp. 7–14. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23348771.

PRISHANTI PATHAK

EZEKIEL, NISSIM (1924–2004) Nissim Ezekiel was born on December 16, 1924, in Bombay, in a Marathi-speaking Jewish community known as the Bene Israel. His parents were educationists, his father was a professor of botany at Wilson College, Bombay, and his mother was the principal of a school. In 1947, Ezekiel graduated from Wilson College, Bombay. From 1948 to 1952 he lived in England, where he studied philosophy. Ezekiel’s journey to England, his time there, and other parts of his life are evocatively narrated in his poem “Background, Casually.” He married Daisy Jacob in 1952 with whom he had two daughters and one son. On January 9, 2004, at the age of seventynine, Nissim Ezekiel passed away having suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. In 1954 he became the editor of the magazine Quest, and he also served as an associate editor for Imprint from 1961 to 1967. He reviewed over three-hundred books for the Imprint, broadcast some on All India Radio, and published some in Times of India, The Statesman, The Hindu, and The Illustrated Weekly of India. Ezekiel also worked at Times of India, Bombay, between 1964 to 1967, and as a lecturer at Khalsa College, Bombay, from 1947 to 1948. Between 1961 to 1981 he worked at Mithibai College, Bombay, as a reader, professor of English, and as vice-principal. From 1981 to 1985 he worked as a professor of American literature at the University of Bombay. In 1964 he was a visiting professor at the University of Leeds and in 1967 at the University of Chicago. From 1988 to 1989 he was a writer-in-residence at the National University of Singapore. He

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played a leading role at the Indian PEN Centre for a few decades. The “presence of Nissim Ezekiel – helped transform the PEN All India Centre from a formal institution which functioned primarily as a mediator, into a more flexible meeting place for new and established poets” (Bird). In 1957 he received the Farfield Foundation travel grant, and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1983 for his collection of poetry Latter-Day Psalms and then in 1988 he received the Padma Shri. Ezekiel’s first book of poems, A Time to Change and Other Poems, was published in London by Fortune Press in 1952. It covers a wide range of thematic concerns ranging from desire, morals, God, love, women, youth, art, writing, etc. Formally, they range from free verse to rhyming verses and the collection ends with a series of five prose poems. His second collection, Sixty Poems, was published in Bombay by Strand Bookshop in 1953. The figure of women and sexuality and a concern with the quotidian, the spiritual and the religious is evident in this collection of poems. “Sotto Voce” pre-figures Ezekiel’s thematic obsession with the duality of infinitude of the cosmos and the finitude of human lives. In 1959 Ezekiel published his third book of poems, The Third, which was also published by the Strand Bookshop in Bombay. The collection too focuses on women, religiosity, spirituality and nature. Ezekiel’s fourth and fifth books of poems were published by Writers Workshop in Calcutta in 1960 and 1965: The Unfinished Man: Poems Written in 1959 and The Exact Name: Poems 1960–1964 respectively. The poems in these collections continue Ezekiel’s thematic exploration of women, women’s bodies, love, conjugality, urbanity, rurality, peculiarity of Indian experience, and middle-class lives. In 1970 a selection of Ezekiel’s poetry appeared in an edited volume by Howard Sergeant Pergamon Poets IX: Poetry from India published by Pergamon Press. Hymns in Darkness, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1976, repeats Ezekiel’s favorite themes. The volume includes the poem “Background, Casually,” Ezekiel’s autobiographical poem. In poems such as “The Railway Clerk” and “Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S.” Ezekiel explores the quirkiness and peculiarity of Indian English, a concern that stays with Ezekiel in his latter works. Latter-Day Psalms, Ezekiel’s final volume of poetry, was published by the Oxford University Press in 1982. His exploration of Indian English continues in “Very Indian Poems in Indian English,” of women in “Postcard Poems” and of spirituality and religiosity in “Latter-Day Psalms.” In 1989 Oxford University Press published a collected volume of Ezekiel’s poetry as Collected Poems 1952–1988. Oxford University Press also published a collection of Ezekiel’s prose writings in 1992 as Selected Prose. The book is divided into four sections and includes several texts, On Books, On Art and Culture, On Life and Thought and an interview with Ezekiel. The collection provides a firsthand insight into Ezekiel’s life and writing and his musings on various topics. It remains a rare insight into Ezekiel’s explorations of the essay form and his prose which has a “distinctive style . . . simple and clear” (Narayan). Three Plays by Ezekiel was published by Writers Workshop in 1969. One reviewer described it as “an important contribution to the meager Indo-Anglian dramatic output in English” (Verghese). The plays are concerned with metropolitan characters and situations which allow them to maintain a naturalistic tone despite the usage of English. “Nalini” deals with executives, layered with an exploration of gendered relations and class relations of creative labor. “Marriage Poem” is a tragi-comedy that explores the dissatisfied and frustrated conjugal life of a couple. “The Sleepwalkers” is a comedy that explores the comedic lives of Americans in India. Another play by Ezekiel, “Don’t Call it Suicide,” was published in 1993.

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In 1974, Ezekiel’s The Actor: A Sad and Funny Story for Children of Most Ages was published by India Book House, Bombay. In 1982 a lecture by Ezekiel which he delivered was published by Gujarat University as Our Cultural Dilemmas: Tagore Memorial Lectures 1981–82. As an editor, Ezekiel edited An Emerson Reader (1965) and A Martin Luther King Reader (1969) for Popular Prakashan, Bombay. He also edited a student’s edition of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons for Oxford University Press. With Ursula Bickelmann, Ezekiel edited Artists Today/East-West Visual Arts Encounter published in 1987 by Marg Publications, Bombay. With Meenakshi Mukherjee, he also edited Another India: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Fiction and Poetry published in 1990 by Penguin. Ezekiel also edited a range of volumes by International Cultural Centre, Bombay, and PEN All India Writers Conferences. Ezekiel’s poetry has been canonized and included in various anthologies, and his poems are taught across universities and schools in India. In particular, two poems by Ezekiel, “Night of the Scorpion” and “Goodbye Party for Miss  Pushpa T.S.” have found their way into school textbooks introducing his poetry to a diverse range of readers across India.

Further Reading Bird, Emma. “A Platform for Poetry: The PEN All-India Centre and a Bombay Poetry Scene.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 53, no. 1–2, 2017, pp. 207–220. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/17449855.2017.1282927. Daruwalla, K. N. “Nissim Ezekiel: A Personal Memoir (1924–2004).” Indian Literature, vol. 48, no. 1, 2004, pp. 20–23. Karnani, C. Nissim Ezekiel. Arnold Heinemann Publishers, 2004. Krätli, G. “Crossing Points and Connecting Lines: Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes in Bombay and Beyond.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 53, no. (1–2), 2017, pp. 176–189. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2017.1283746. Narayan, S. A. “Ezekiel as Book Reviewer.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 11, no. (3/4), 1976, pp. 273–282. Rao, R. R. Nissim Ezekiel – The Authorized Biography. Vishwakarma Publications, 2016. Verghese, C. P. “Review of Three Plays.” Indian Literature, vol. 14, no. 2, 1971, pp. 92–94.  https:// www.jstor.org/stable/23329837. Accessed 17 May 2023.

DEBARUN SARKAR

FEMINIST FABLES by Suniti Namjoshi Suniti Namjoshi’s first book, Feminist Fables, was published in 1981. Namjoshi came into prominence through this book, an account of folktales inspired by Indian and Greek mythological stories such as Panchatantra and Metamorphoses from a feminist and queer perspective. Namjoshi draws her subversive inspirations from feminist undertones of social realities instead of theoretical hypotheses. In Feminist Fables, Namjoshi picks up the case of feminist writers by retelling popular fairy tales and classical and mythological tales, in which the women are shown as liberated in contrast to their traditional predisposition in the story of a patriarchal society. “The Blue Donkey Fables,” “Feminist Fables,” and “The Solidarity Fables,” “Saint Suniti and the Dragon,” and other fables adopt the folklore form as an appropriate medium to put forth the writer’s assertions effectively and in a meticulous manner. “The Hare and the Turtle” is analogous to the prominent Aesop’s fable of the same title. Namjoshi asserts the idea of disparity of gender order by assigning the turtle the male gender. At the same time, the hare is depicted as a female. In the race that ensues the hare is placed fifty 140

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yards away from the stretch, and the turtle finds himself close to the finishing line. Naturally, the turtle wins the race and ridicules the other and upbraids her for being a woman and thus inferior to him. The original fable had the moral that the slow and steady turtle wins the race. Nevertheless, Namjoshi provides us with the gender identity of the turtle and hare to showcase societal discrimination in society. “The Doll” is a story of two girls who make a doll out of sticks and call it “The Brittle Boy.” A boy confronts the girls for naming the doll in such a fashion and, in a fit of rage, smashes the “The Brittle Boy.” While the girls are unhappy with the boy’s action, they do not react but simply start making another doll out of sticks. “The Badge Wearing Dyke and Her Two Maiden Aunts” deals with the question of samesex relations. It provides a rationale and respect for women’s adoration of each other. A lesbian couple of twenty-five years is visited by their niece, Friday, who is a university graduate. She sports badges with slogans such as Gay Liberation is Our Liberation. She opposes prejudice and sermonizes on the topic of lesbianism. Namjoshi’s book was received positively by feminist writers for evaluating the issues of women from an ancient form of storytelling of fables right across the civilizations of Greece and India. Namjoshi highlights women’s experiences often omitted from the patriarchal account. She questions patriarchal folklore by documenting how they eradicate certain truths and present an inaccurate view of female understanding. Namjoshi, through the revisionist fables, attempts to offer an alternative paradigm of discourse.

Further Reading Goel, Savita. “Suniti Namjoshi’s Feminist Fables: A Minor Feminist Classic.” Indian Women Writers: Critical Perspectives, 1999, p. 177. Manggong, Lestari. “Subaltern Voice and Marginal Moral Lessons in Suniti Namjoshi’s Feminist Fables.” Fabula, vol. 60, no. 1–2, 2019, pp. 132–144. Mann, Harveen S. “Suniti Namjoshi: Diasporic, Lesbian Feminism and the Textual Politics of Transnationality.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 30, no. ½, 1997, pp. 97–113. Osborn, Jennifer. “The Fabulous Feminist: A Suniti Namjoshi Reader.” Transnational Literature, vol. 10, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1–5. Ross, Oliver. “Other Creatures That Have Their Own Identities: Strategic Essentialism in Suniti Namjoshi’s Fables.” South Asian Review, vol. 37, no. 1, 2016, pp. 179–195. Steinisch, Sabine. “Subversive Fabulations: The Twofold Pull in Suniti Namjoshi’s Feminist Fables.” Engendering Realism and Postmodernism. Brill, 2001, pp. 265–277.

VISHWAJEET DESHMUKH

FINAL SOLUTIONS AND OTHER PLAYS by Mahesh Dattani Final Solutions and Other Plays by Mahesh Dattani is a collection of four plays (“Where There’s a Will,” “Dance Like a Man,” “Bravely Fought the Queen,” and “Final Solutions”) published in 1998 but scripted and staged separately between 1986 and 1993. “Where’s There a Will” reveals the stressful lives of the Mehta family and the extent to which patriarchal control, disrespect for women, greed, and consumption distorts individual personalities. On his demise, his entire wealth is bequeathed to a trust controlled by Hasmukh Mehta’s mistress, Kiran Jhaveri, till Ajit turns forty-five. While initially, Kiran appears to be the “other” woman to Sonal, and a bounty hunter to Ajit and Preeti, her entry into their lives is the much-required catalyst to liberate them from the control of their patriarch. Kiran is Dattani’s resistance to masculine control and embodies qualities that he “staunchly holds as positive and strong, and necessary for a woman.” Their mutual bonding is a deliberate subversion of the heteronormative patriarchal 141

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structures of power that victimize and marginalize women. The title, “Where There’s a Will,” could be interpreted in various ways. From Hasmukh’s point of view, as long as “There’s a Will,” – his will to dominate and his legal Will after his death, his family would be constricted to a life of pain and indignity. Alternately, Dattani’s choice of title could signify resistance to any kind of oppression – Where there’s will, there’s always a way out! Dattani’s own training as a Bharatanatyam dancer is a vital influence on the next play “Dance Like a Man.” It critiques both elitist and gender prejudices against traditional dance forms, its erotic elements, its history of devadasis or temple dancers who traditionally performed it, and its association of effeminateness with male classical dance performance. The play opens with Jairaj and Ratna (both professional dancers) meeting their daughter Lata’s fiancé Vishwas. In the conversations that ensue, fissures in the relationship between Jairaj and Ratna are exposed to reveal a turbulent past. Bharatanatyam inevitably functions as a liberating outlet for Jairaj and Ratna to embrace more emancipatory gender and sexual roles than those permitted by conventional expectations. The next play, “Bravely Fought the Queen,” is about marriages of convenience and their deleterious impact on the lives of couples living together in forced harmony. Interestingly, the first two acts are titled “Women” and “Men” respectively, and Dattani unflinchingly contrasts the oppressed world of the women and the unfettered world of the men. Act One reveals Dolly and Alka as victims of their husband’s indifference and their routine of organizing parties, socializing, and drinking is a veneer covering a deviously normal world. In contrast, Act Two, shows Jiten and Nitin striking business deals, drinking, smoking, and womanizing. In such a deceived and deceiving world, Dattani highlights the homosexual relationship between Nitin and Praful. It is ironic how homosexuals, themselves a minority, dominate heterosexual women. The third act goes beyond sexist roles to foreground women’s resistance to male control symbolized by the title “Bravely fought the Queen.” “Final Solutions” was to be performed at the Deccan Herald Theatre Festival in Bangalore in December 1992. Because the Babri Masjid was demolished in Ayodhya a week before that, the festival organizers, fearing the impact of dramatizing the sensitive issue of communal tension on the audience, canceled the event. It was staged the following year in Mumbai and Bangalore. The play is about stereotyping and homogenization where an entire community is held responsible for the acts of some. The enormity of the religious conflict gives historical and moral weight to the play. In 1998, Dattani was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for Final Solutions and Other Plays. The citation praised him for his brilliant contribution to Indian drama in English, and for probing tangled attitudes in contemporary India toward communal differences, consumerism, and gender. In being unnervingly self-reflexive, the collection is an abiding illustration of cultural intervention and social awareness that is relevant even today.

Further Reading Kuthari, Asha. Mahesh Dattani: An Introduction. Foundation Books, 2005. Sen, Asha. “Looking Back, Looking Forward: Examining Pre-Colonial Identities in Mahesh Dattani’s Dance Like a Man.” ARIEL: A  Review of International English Literature, vol. 42, no. 2, 2012, pp. 129–147. Sengupta, Ashis. “Of Race/Religion, Nation and Violence: Incident at Vichy and Final Solutions.” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, vol. 8, no. 3, 2010, pp. 149–167. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1179/147757010X12773889525786. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

NATASHA W VASHISHT

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FINE BALANCE, A, by Rohinton Mistry Rohinton Mistry was born to a Parsi family in Bombay and migrated to Canada in 1975, just after the declaration of the state of emergency in India. Mistry began writing fiction after some years in Toronto. A Fine Balance (1995), Mistry’s second novel, focuses on the marginalized and the dispossessed in India through the lives of four main characters. Two of them are Dalit men, Ishvar and Omprakash Darji, of the caste of tanners and leatherworkers, who have trained as tailors and left their hometown to find work in an unnamed city by the sea (Bombay). Omprakash and Ishvar are nephew and uncle, whose families have been killed in castemotivated violence. They are hired to sew dresses for an export company by a middle-aged Parsi widow Dina Dalal, who is fighting for her independence by living on her own and trying to make ends meet. A Parsi student, Maneck Kohlah, who rents a room from Dina, completes the unlikely family. They offer each other company and consolation until their group is broken up by various government policies and initiatives. A Fine Balance is set during the time of the Emergency (1975–1977), an authoritarian period described by Mistry as a “watershed in Indian political history and in the future of Indian democracy,” with the ending set in 1984 communal violence brought on by the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. At the core of the narrative is the helplessness of the city’s poor people against the government’s increasingly harsh measures. The slum residence of the two tailors is bulldozed in a “city beautification” effort. Indira Gandhi, corruption and the caste system emerge as the biggest villains in the story. So does the oppression of the Dalit characters who have to suffer various forms of oppression. Attempts by the marginalized to assert their independence prove futile in the face of strong communal tentacles. As slum and pavement dwellers, Ishvar and Om are easy prey to the police who pick them up first for a government rally and then to be sent to an irrigation project as forced labor along with members of the city’s beggar community. The stories of the beggars add to the many tragedies in the novel which ends with the forcible sterilization of the two tailors, who are rounded up when they visit their old hometown. The young and unmarried Om is not only sterilized but also castrated. Unfortunately, poor hygiene at Ishvar’s sterilization leads to infection and the loss of his legs. Back in the city, the tailors have no choice but to join the beggars’ community to earn a living. Consequently, Dina has to move to her patronizing brother’s house, while Maneck, unable to strike the fine balance between hope and despair, eventually commits suicide. Mistry employs the 19th-century realist fiction form in the novel, and many have detected in it echoes of writers such as Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, and Honoré de Balzac. Overall, the critical response to the novel has been positive, even though some critics have remarked on the main characters’ lack of agency and resistance. Mistry has been praised for mixing universalist themes with particular individual lives. A Fine Balance was short-listed for the Booker Prize, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and has been ranked as one of the ten all-time greatest Asian novels by The Telegraph in 2014. An acclaimed stage adaptation of the novel was produced in 2006, and a TV series is being planned by HBO.

Further Reading Almond, Ian. “On Re-Orientalizing the Indian Novel: A Case Study of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance.” Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, 2004, pp. 204–217. Bhat, Shilpa Daithota. “ ‘Aamchi Mumbai’ in Rohinton Mistry’s Fiction: Urban Ecology, Filth and Foliage.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, vol. 24, no. 2, 2020, pp. 140–154.

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RAITA MERIVIRTA

FOREST OF ENCHANTMENTS, THE, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Published in 2019, The Forest of Enchantments is Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s feminist retelling of the Ramayana from Sita’s perspective. While retellings of the epic are numerous, including several of Sita’s stories, this novel makes Sita the narrator and presents her as a feminist. Divakaruni also foregrounds the stories of women who have been overlooked in the classic retellings of the Ramayana, including Urmila (Lakshman’s wife), Sunaina (Janak’s wife and Sita’s mother), Surpanakha (Ravana’s sister), and Mandodari (Ravana’s wife). Divakaruni’s novel begins with Valmiki asking Sita to read his story of Rama’s life and to provide her version of the events. Sita begins her story with her childhood in the kingdom of Mithila. We learn of how she was found by her father, Janaka, reared carefully by her mother Sunaina, trained in martial arts, how she was told that her suitor must string the bow to gain her hand in marriage, and how she was close to Urmila, her sister. Sita dwells extensively on her attraction to Rama that seems preordained although she is unaware of her own divine origins. Divakaruni’s Sita candidly discusses the erotic and sexual nature of her relationship with Rama. Following her arrival in Ayodhya, we get insights into Dasharath’s relationships with his three wives, the sorrows of the neglected Kaushalya, and Sita’s role as a healer of people and relationships. When Kaikeyi makes her demands of Dashrath just before the coronation of Rama as heir apparent, the novelist builds up the issue as being rooted in domestic dysfunction in a polygamous marriage. Upon the couple’s exile to the forest, Sita’s eco-feminist narrative shows her alignment with nature. Sita’s telling of the encounter with Surpanakha is compassionate and she sees her as a victim of patriarchy. When Sita arrives in Lanka after Ravana abducts her, the narrative focuses on Mandodari’s goodness and on Ravana as an honorable man who would not have sex with a woman unless he had her consent. Sita’s narrative touches on all the familiar episodes of the Ramayana from the arrival of Hanuman to the battle scenes and the eventual defeat of Ravana. The return to Ayodhya carries an element of fantasy as the depiction of Pushpak carries overtones of magic and romance that occur in other novels by Divakaruni. Upon their return to Ayodhya, Sita tells of a kingdom in shambles, and Urmila in suspended animation as she grieves her exiled husband. Sita and Rama restore the kingdom through hard work and good governance, Kaikeyi is forgiven, and the ethically rigid Rama exiles a pregnant Sita once more because his citizens doubt her chastity. Sita completes her narrative with the story of her twin sons discovering their father and singing her version of the narrative at a royal ceremony. The narrative ends with Sita’s rage and forgiveness of Rama as she returns to the otherworld. Divakaruni’s retelling of the Ramayana combines elements from previous versions including those by Valmiki, Kamban, and Krittibas. She also uses Adbhuta Ramayana and Jaina Ramayanas, which present Sita as a child of Ravana and Mandodari who is raised by Janaka, thus hinting at incest in the abduction narrative. While her parentage remains Mandodari’s speculation in this novel, this strand of the narrative allows Divakaruni to foreground Mandodari’s devotion as a wife and mother. 144

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Because this novel is relatively new, scholarship specific to this novel is limited. Shreya Bera’s article provides a brief reading of the novel’s themes of diaspora. Feminist readings of this narrative presented mostly in book reviews are mixed; Sukanya Saha notes that the novel offers many feminist insights but leaves many questions about Sita’s life in the mortal world unanswered because the narrative sticks closely to the Ramayana’s focus on filial duty. Paula Richman’s books offer a broader framework to examine retellings.

Further Reading Bera, S. “Surviving the Diasporic Home: Renegotiating Homeland and Hostland in 20th-Century IndoAmerican Literature.” Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, vol. 15, no. 1, 2019. Americana, http://americanaejournal.hu/vol15no1/bera. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Richman, Paula, editor. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. U of California P, 1991. ———. Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition. Oxford UP, 2000. Saha, Sukanya. “Review Article: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Forest of Enchantments: A  Saga of Duty, Betrayal, Integrity and Honour.” Rupkatha, vol. 11, no. 2, Jul.–Sept. 2019, https://dx.doi. org/10.21659/rupkatha.v11n2.13. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Singh, Amritjit, et al., editors. Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Feminism and Diaspora. Lexington Books, 2022.

NALINI IYER

FRASER, BASHABI (1954–) Bashabi Fraser is an award-winning trans-continental poet, children’s writer, editor, translator, and academic. She is the chief editor of the peer-reviewed international e-journal Gitanjali and Beyond and is on the editorial board of RLF Writers Mosaic. In 2021, she received the prestigious CBE for Education, Culture and Integration and has been made an honorary fellow by the Association of Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS). She was chosen “Outstanding Woman of Scotland” by Saltire Society in 2015. Her other awards  include Kavi Salam (2019) from Poetry Paradigm and Voice of the Republic in India, the Word Masala Foundation Award for Excellence in Poetry (2017), Special Felicitation as a Poet on International Women’s Day by Public Relations Society of India (2017), Rabindra Bharati Society Honour (2014), Women Empowered: Arts and Culture Award (2010), and the AIO Prize for Literary Services in Scotland (2009). Fraser is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing, Edinburgh Napier University. She has held a number of important positions including that of Director, Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs), and Honorary Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh. She is also Professor Emerita and Advisory Board Member, Bankura University, India, and a trustee on the Board of Scottish PEN, the executive committees of Writers at Risk, Writers for Peace, Poetry Association of Scotland. Fraser received a British Academy Research Grant for Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter (2006), where she attempted a postcolonial analysis of the stories concerned, illustrating how the Bengal partition was qualitatively different from that of its counterpart in Western India. Rainbow World: Poems from Many Cultures (2003), co-edited with Debjani Chatterjee was the runner up for EMMA Best Book Award in 2003–2004. It is a multicultural anthology of more than eighty poets, highlighting both similarities and differences that exist among people. Confluence of Minds: The Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes Reader on Education and Environment (2017), is a collaborative project that dwells on ideational epistolary exchanges between 1918 to 1930 among the two great minds, on aspects ranging from education to the 145

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environment. Scottish Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Continuum of Ideas (2017) was a collaborative project with Visva-Bharati University, exploring the works of Scottish missionaries in India. Letters to My Mother and Other Mothers (2015) is a candid sequence of poems where public concerns viz. climate change, genocides, war crimes, and violence against women collate with personal agendas like motherhood, romantic escapades, and bereavement. Ragas and Reels: Visual and Poetic Stories of Migration and Diaspora, co-edited with Hermann Rodrigues, exemplifies poetry as a medium to suggest how Scots and South Asians not only have a long-shared history but also that the Scots brought back home a cultural slice of whichever clime they visited (such as India). In From the Ganga to the Tay: A Poetic Conversation Between the Ganges and the Tay, we find an epic poem using the modality of geographical storytelling to show that in postcolonial nations rivers have a speaking voice of their own. In Tartan and Turban (2004), Fraser’s bi-nationality is commented upon, as the links between Scotland and India emerge in a myriad of ways. In The Homing Bird (2017), Frazer shows the ease with which she endorses a simultaneous belonging to both Scotland and India. Her dual identity is equally distilled in Thali Katori: An Anthology of Scottish/South Asian Poetry, co-edited with Alan Riach, that becomes a fictive interstice for both Scots and Indians, in terms of a seventy-year-old historic association that marked 2017, the United Kingdom–India Year of Culture in which the anthology was published. Fraser does not exemplify the stereotypical nostalgic diasporic angst evident in many Indian expatriate writers. Rather she is celebratory of her twin identity, which she considers intimate to her professional and personal worlds. She consolidates, through her creative output, that longing and belonging need not be restrictive in terms of a monogamous spatiality. Works like Edinburgh: An Intimate City (2000), and Life (1997) show how Fraser discovers a multicultural ethos in both Edinburgh and Calcutta, establishing a unique cultural correspondence between the two realms.

Further Reading Chakrabarti, Debanjan. “Rewriting Colonial Past Through Culture.” The Telegraph, 21 Feb. 2021, www.telegraphindia.com/my-kolkata/people/rewriting-colonial-past-through-culture/cid/1807353. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Fraser, Bashabi. Bashabi Fraser, http://bashabifraser.co.uk/index.php. “Professor Bashabi Fraser: Director of The Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies.” The Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies, https://scotstagore.org/professor-bashabi-fraser-director-of-the-scottish-centre-of-ta gore-studies/. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

SUBHADEEP PAUL

FROM THE RUINS OF EMPIRE: THE REVOLT AGAINST THE WEST AND THE REMAKING OF ASIA by Pankaj Mishra Pankaj Mishra’s creative nonfiction From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia (2012) begins where most of the colonial and nationalist narratives end, the Battle of Tsushima in May 2015, and provides the intellectual history of the origin and development of “the rise of Asia” from the ruins of empire. The defeat of the Czarist Russia at the hands of Japan in the Tsushima Strait was in a way seen as the defeat of the white, oppressive, machinic, imperial Europe at the hands of the non-white, non-Western, spiritual, oppressed Asia. The reverberations were felt across the continent from Istanbul to Tokyo and ignited many young minds from Kemal Atatürk, who was then only a soldier in Damascus to Mahatma Gandhi, 146

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a lawyer in South Africa; from Jawaharlal Nehru, who was only a schoolboy then, to scholars like Okakura Tenshin; and to future leaders like Sun Yat-Sen, Mao Tse-tung, Hồ Chí Minh, and others who have decisively shaped the history and politics of the continent in the 20th century. The book introduces not only some of the well-known but also comparatively unknown characters to the common readers and how they have contributed to the re/making of Asia. Mishra’s story of Asia centers around three, not so much discussed but very important protagonists: the Islamic reformer Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–1897), the Chinese political thinker Liang Qichao (1873–1929), and the Indian poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Across various sections in the book, Mishra has elaborately discussed the individual responses of these figures to different epochs of the nineteenth and 20th-century world history and also how those responses contributed to the evolution of different non-Western paradigms. Notwithstanding their contribution to shaping up contemporary Asia and Asia imaginings, he also traces al-Afghani’s growth as an apologist of pan-Islamism and Islam as a mode of political solidarity, and Liang’s growth as an apologist of authoritarianism and his influence on Mao Tse-tung. Taking a cue from Tagore, Mishra diagnoses several ambiguities within imperialism of the West and mimics imperialism of the East, nationalism of the West, nationalism of the East, and concludes with the idea that decolonization is an unfinished project. The book is as critical of European imperialist expansion as it is of Japanese imperialism and Japan-centric Asianism, as envisaged by thinkers like Okakura Tenshin in The Ideals of the East. The latter catapulted the idea of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and led to devastating results like that of the formation of Manchukuo in China. Mishra’s critical insights, thus, apart from pointing out the catastrophic effects of Rudyard Kipling’s model of “benevolence” – of the white man’s burden, also discuss the pitfalls of anti-colonial nationalism and reverse imperialism. Different from the triumphalist gaze of either colonialism or nationalism, and away from the usual jargon of postcolonial discourse, From the Ruins of Empire provides a fresh perspective on the contentious center/empire debate. The work is alternate historiography and an important contribution to understanding how some of the major countries in Asia have navigated through modernity toward a new century. Mishra’s book, as a reviewer in The Guardian points out, “gives a voice to characters often ignored by Western historians and makes an eloquent contribution to the ‘west versus the rest’ debate.” Another reviewer in Independent notes “this penetrating and disquieting book should be on the reading list of anybody who wants to understand where we are today.” Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire is as much about the past as it is about the future.

Further Reading Acharya, Amitav. “Asia is not One.” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 69, no. 4, 2010, pp. 1001–1013. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Duke UP, 2010. Guha, Ramachandra, editor. Makers of Modern Asia. Harvard UP, 2014. Okakura, Kakuzo. The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan. Tuttle Publishing, 2012. Tankha, Brij, and Madhavi Thampi. Narratives of Asia: From India, Japan and China. Sampark, 2005.

JAYJIT SARKAR

FURTADO, JOSEPH (1872–1947) Joseph Furtado was born at Furtadovaddo, Pilerne, Bardez, Goa, on April  7, 1872. Goa used to be a Portuguese colony in those days. He was the son of Vicente Cesar Furtado and Maria Conceicao de Rocha. Joseph was primarily taught at home, though he had a brief stint at 147

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St Francis de Sales School at Nagpur and later at the Sir J. J. Art School at Bombay. He worked for railway companies in different capacities; constantly shuttling between Goa, Bombay, Calcutta, and Pune. He was a voracious reader who devoured Milton, Homer, Dante, Tasso, and Virgil in his formative years. It was a natural transition for him to start writing poetry, but his early work received scant attention. In 1895, he published his first collection of poems titled The Poems of Joseph Furtado, but it failed to create any impact. In 1901, he published Poems, but it went unnoticed. In 1910, he brought out Lays of Goa and Other Verses on Goan Themes. The turning point came in 1922 with the publication of Lays of Goa and Lyrics of a Goan – A Souvenir of the Exposition of St Francis Xavier. The book received considerable attention in England and America. In 1922, he also wrote A Guide to the Convents and Churches in Old Goa. While in Goa, he published a volume of poems in 1926 titled A Goan Fiddler. The book came out in England in the subsequent year with a preface by Sir Edmund Gosse. It got favorable reviews in India as well as in England. In January 1929, he published another collection of poems in England titled The Desterrado. The book received admiration in the Times Literary Supplement. Another work came out in 1938 whose genesis lay in great personal tragedy. In 1937, he had lost his youngest son, and this experience crushed him. A collection of eighty poems was published titled Songs in Exile. In the same year (1938), he published a historical romance Golden Goa, a depiction of life of famous and notorious people of Goa under the Portuguese rule. Joseph Furtado’s last work was Selected Poems that came out in 1942. Furtado died in 1947 in Bombay. Some of Furtado’s poems are characterized by a melancholic tone and take as their theme regret and shame for past choices. Other poems express an adoration for the humble. He also describes the innocence of pristine childhood and the painful realization that childhood is lost forever. He uses the persona of a child to express fascination for the objects of nature. While presenting an adult’s perspective on the harshness of the world, he expresses an irrepressible longing to be a child again. Furtado talks to natural objects like trees, birds etc. in his poems. He yearns for the country and feels forlorn in the city. A number of his poems are about birds; he addresses the dhyal, munias, tailor bird, bulbuls, and crow. The poems are also replete with a passionate love for the motherland. Several poems are about the poet’s anguish on fleeing his motherland. They are pervaded by the sad feeling that the dear things of his village are no longer his. Furtado has been considered as one of Goa’s best poets. He is an early example of an Indian poet who used dialect and pidgin in his poems. His poems on childhood capture the sights and sounds of his beloved Goa. Most poems have an autobiographical touch. He also made skillful use of dramatic monologue. His poems often resonate with social themes; he provides a panoramic view of the Portuguese India of those times. He also points out the patriarchal straitjacketing that confines women though his style is far from didactic. It is only in Golden Goa that he talks about the injustice of Portuguese invasion and cruelty to natives. He is primarily known as a poet who wrote in English; but he wrote in Portuguese too. Furtado’s mother tongue was Konkani; but he wrote in Portuguese and later in English. Unfortunately, none of his books are in print, though his poems can be found in the rare books section of Goa’s Central Library.

Further Reading Furtado, Philip. “Poet Joseph Furtado.”  Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 18, no. 1, 1983, pp. 68–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40872511. Nazareth, Peter. “Alienation, Nostalgia, and Homecoming: Editing an Anthology of Goan Literature.” World Literature Today, vol. 59, no. 3, 1985, pp. 374–382. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/40140844.

NAMRATA NISTANDRA

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GANESAN, INDIRA (1960–) Indira Ganesan was born in Srirangam, Tamil Nadu, India, but her family moved to the United States in 1965. As an immigrant, she faced multiple dislocations (St. Louis to Spring Valley to Nanuet) and racial bullying at school. Her temporary return for one year at Stella Maris College, the University of Madras, in 1978, provided the autobiographical basis for her three novels – The Journey (1990), Inheritance (1998), and As Sweet as Honey (2013). Ganesan earned her BA at Vassar College and MFA at the University of Iowa. She is a regular contributor to the Phi Beta Kappa society’s online quarterly, The Key Review. She has received fellowships from the W.K. Rose Foundation, the North Country Paden Institute, and the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown. Currently, she resides in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Early on, Ganesan began publishing excerpts that later went into her future novels, which explains the episodic quality of her writing. In terms of literary influences, she has acknowledged diverse sources like Indian epics, Greek Classics, Indian English, and vernacular authors, English canonical works, and contemporary women novelists. Her bicultural identity as a South Asian American and the resulting clash of cultures is also identifiable in her writing. A critical aspect of her work is the creation of the fictional town of Madhupur (“Land of Honey”) on the island of Pi. Pi is a diminutive of “Prospero’s Island” and is situated north of Sri Lanka. It is often described as an “imaginary homeland” (Ganesan) that is “not quite India” (George). The fictional space allows her to maintain a creative and critical distance and is a tribute to her mathematician father. The movement toward or away from Pi is another outstanding feature of her work and is instrumental in the quests for identity that her strong female characters are engaged in, torn between tradition or duty versus personal choice. The Journey details the story of Renu Krishnan, who returns to Pi with her sister Meenakshi (Manx) and widowed mother, Rukmani, to attend the funeral of her “twin cousin,” Rajesh. Rajesh dies by drowning, and due to the superstitious belief that twins die by water and fire, Renu becomes obsessed with her own death. Her grief and depression debilitate her, but her survival and return to America mark the culmination of her “journey.” Inheritance describes Sonil’s obsession with her emotionally aloof mother, Lakshmi, and her desire to coax a reaction out of her. Lakshmi is seen as an immoral woman who has fathered three daughters by three different men. The complex mother-daughter relationship thrives only after the death of Sonil’s maternal grandmother. Further, Sonil realizes that she is an individual in her own right and will not necessarily “inherit” the shortcomings of her parents. As Sweet as Honey is again a foray into the multigenerational family in Madhupur, Pi, but the narrative focuses on Aunt Meterling, the favorite aunt of Rasi, Sanjay, and Mina. Meterling grows from being a misfit on the island as an unusually tall woman and later a pregnant widow to a confident and assertive woman. She marries Simon, her deceased husband’s cousin, who moves to London, and gives birth to a son. Her unconventionality inspires her nieces and nephew to move out of Pi and experience life in America. Most critics have appreciated the lush, exotic, and timeless description of a multiracial island society in flux. Some have even likened the writer to Arundhati Roy and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Mediratta). However, others have called her an unconvincing diasporic storyteller, unable to shirk her class privilege (George) and limited in her political vision (Nair). While it is true that Ganesan’s work can benefit from tight plot structures and balanced use of long descriptive passages, it is not entirely “uncritical” of class and social structures. The use of the fictional island of Pi serves to critique the same while also allowing for a liberated play of imagination and socio-cultural customs. 149

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Further Reading Ganesan, Indira. “Pi: An Imaginary Homeland.” Interview by Sima Mishra. Indira Ganesan, 2016, https://indiraganesan.com/biography/interview/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. George, Rosemary Marangoly. “Of Fictional Cities and ‘Diasporic’ Aesthetics.” Antipode, vol. 35, no. 3, 2003, pp. 559–579. Maxey, Ruth. South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970–2010. Edinburgh UP, 2012. Mediratta, Sangeeta. “Indira Ganesan (1960–).” South Asian Novelists in English: An A-to-Z Guide, edited by Jaina C. Sanga. Greenwood Press, 2003, pp. 69–71. Munos, Delphine. “A  Place Within: Rediscovering India.”  South Asian Diaspora, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010, pp. 139–141. Nair, Sridevi K. Writing the Lesbian: Literary Culture in Global India. University of Michigan, 2009.

SAKSHI SUNDARAM

GARDEN OF SOLITUDE, THE, by Siddhartha Gigoo Siddhartha Gigoo’s debut novel, The Garden of Solitude, published in 2011, is a saga of the exiled Kashmiri Hindus strewn in different parts of India. It encompasses an agonizing account of a Kashmiri Pandit family who unwillingly had to leave their motherland in the wake of armed insurgency and political turmoil. In terms of technique, the book is a blend of fiction, letters, memoir, and autobiography. It is in keeping with the general discourse on Kashmiri migrants under the slogan of a demand for a separate home for Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley proper, called Panun Kashmir (Our Own Kashmir). The protagonist of the novel, Sridar, bears a striking resemblance to the author. The Garden of Solitude is a work of fiction constructed on convoluted human relations. The novel progresses through different methods: description, narration, dialogue, rumination, and soliloquy. It begins with an emphasis on recording the cultural traits of the community. At the very outset, the reader finds himself implanted in the thick of the cultural harmony that is plagued with conflict in later years. The mention of the year 1981 is deliberate and conscious, for it connotes the beginning of the era of insecurity that led to the cultural dissolution in the last years of the eighties. The real action of the novel spins around the main protagonist, Sridar, who “In his boyhood . . . feared three things__the dogs in the street, India losing to Pakistan in a cricket match, and circumcision performed on the Muslim boys of the locality” (p. 4). Having spent his childhood and youth in a composite culture with inherent contradictions is presented as a displaced Pandit with a strong feeling of nostalgia. He has grown to maturity in a culture of communal harmony, but the seeds of hatred and discord were already present, though not on the surface. Cynicism was present in the minds of Hindu and Muslim communities since 1947. The disillusionment of both communities resulted in polarization. The fear-stricken members of the Pandit community in Kashmir were compelled to leave the Valley en masse, and Gigoo has captured the events through dramatic incidents without indulging in political statements. Sridar, unlike the other migrants, has a meditative temperament that helps him forget the pangs of displacement. Living in a migrant camp, he thinks of the absurdity of life in exile. Trying to ward off his depression, he decides to impart meaning to his life by reading and writing. Toward the end of the novel, Sridar is presented as a full-time writer. He chooses to write a book titled The Book of Ancestors, which makes him look deeper into the lives of various people he meets in the migrant camp. To write the last chapter of his book, he visits Kashmir to see with his own eyes the reality of the war-torn state. The Garden of Solitude concludes with the launch of the protagonist’s book, The Book of Ancestors.

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The novel, written in displaced circumstances, appropriately depicts literature in exile. Dislocation and uprootedness act as a catalyst for the writer, impinging on his psyche so much that his work reflects the myriad shades of a traumatic existence. The Garden of Solitude is an apt representation of the sense of belongingness, displacement, and pain. This novel received wide acclaim from global academia and has been celebrated for its brilliant portrayal of conflict and subsequent displacement. As per Los Angeles Review of Books, “The Garden of Solitude illustrates poignantly the anguish experienced as both communities suffered unfathomable losses.” Some other reviewers suggest that after all everyone’s destiny, whether Muslim or Pandit, is the longing for a “garden of eternal solitude.” It is a narrative of a Kashmiri Pandit longing for his homeland.

Further Reading Fatma, Elham, and Rashmi Gaur. “(Enforced) Migration, (Up) rootedness, (In)separability, and (Post) memory in The Garden of Solitude and The Infidel Next Door.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, 5 Dec. 2021, pp. 490–506. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.10 80/00856401.2022.1992710. Gangahar, Manisha. “Kashmir Comes to the Reader as a Series of Perceptions of Reality in Siddhartha Gigoo’s New Novel.” Scroll.in, 16 Feb. 2020, https://scroll.in/article/953093/kashmir-comes-tothe-reader-as-a-series-of-perceptions-of-reality-in-siddhartha-gigoos-new-novel. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023. Gigoo, Siddhartha. “Author in Focus: An Interview with Gigoo, Siddhartha.” Conducted by Amrita Gosh and Athar Zia. Inside Kashmir, special issue of Cerebration, no. 2, 2012, http://cerebration.org/sid dharthgigoo.html. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023. Sinha, Upasana. “Through an Observer’s Eyes: A Conversation with Author Siddhartha Gigoo.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 57, no. 4, 2021, pp. 552–565. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi. org/10.1080/17449855.2021.1899037. Sinha, Upasana, and Nirban Manna. “From Home to House: Mediation of Memory and Desire Configuring Kashmiri Pandits’ Identity.” Clio: A Journal of Literature History and the Philosophy of History, vol. 48, no. 1, Jan. 2020, pp. 53–75. ResearchGate, www.researchgate.net/publication/358638715_ Clio_A_Journal_of_Literature_History_and_the_Philosophy_of_History. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

TASMIYA BHATT

GHOSH, AMITAV (1956–) Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta to Shailendra Chandra Ghosh and Anjali Ghosh. Ghosh attended Doon School, St  Stephen’s College, Delhi, and finally, St  Edmund’s Hall, Oxford University, for his postgraduation. He was awarded a Dphil in anthropology at Oxford. He was a visiting fellow for the Centre of Developmental Studies, Trivandrum, and later, a research associate at Delhi University. In 1987, he was appointed a lecturer. From 1988 onwards, Ghosh was awarded visiting professorships in various universities, including Columbia, Upenn, and Harvard University. Gradually, Ghosh began to be recognized as an international writer of repute and received several awards. Aside from the awards with specific reference to each book, he also won several honors for lifetime achievement. He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India and the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Turin, Italy. Ghosh received several honorary doctorates, lifetime achievement awards, the Jnanpith, and others. He is married to Deborah Baker, a senior editor at Little, Brown, and Company. They have two children. Ghosh resides in New York. Ghosh is the author of ten monographs, some fiction, some nonfiction, and some defying such generic categorizations. He has also published several other prose writings such as essays, newspaper and journal articles, and commentaries. Ghosh’s extraordinary insights into

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the human condition and the thoughtful ways he connects them with global predicaments have marked him out as a writer of great talent. Katherine Sale writes in the Financial Times that Ghosh has “established himself as one of the finest prose writers of his generation of Indians writing in English.” Ghosh uses global historical events as backdrops while creating nuanced characters with intimate histories without compromising the verisimilitude of either. Major international events are counterpoised with the minutiae of individual human lives. Ghosh’s first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), directly attests to this. It is a suspense drama about Alu, a Bengali weaver, who is on the run since he is falsely accused of terrorism. Alu flees through Bombay to the Persian Gulf and thence to North Africa with a police officer in pursuit. The narrative technique here foreshadows the use of fabulist and fantasy elements, more prominent in his later novels. For this first novel, Ghosh received The New York Times Notable Book Award and the Prix Medicis Étrangèr Award for the French edition. The Shadow Lines (1988) is set in Calcutta of the 1960s. It traces the trials and tribulations of a Bengali family during the partition of India in 1947 and later during the 1971 establishment of Bangladesh. The narrative moves across a large canvas from Calcutta and Dhaka to London and gently mocks the ambivalence that surrounds all cartographic delineations, exposing them to mere ‘shadow lines’ from the perspective of individual experiences and human realities. This book won the Ananda Puraskar Award and the Annual Prize of the Sahitya Akademi. In an Antique Land (1992), sometimes described as “creative non-fiction,” has two distinct narrative strands. One appears to be autobiographical, describing the travels of a “Ghoshpersona” pursuing fieldwork in an Egyptian village. This closely resembles Ghosh’s doctoral pursuits while at Oxford University. The other narrative strand follows the life of a 12th-century fugitive slave called Bomma. It follows him through Egypt, India, Great Britain, and finally, to the United States and his Jewish master, Abraham Ben Yiju. This strand adopts an anthropological investigative modality. This unusual book received The New York Times Notable Book Award. Ghosh’s next novel is his first attempt at science fiction. The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) ingeniously uses science fiction devices to create a solid postcolonial narrative. Loosely innovating from the journals of Ronald Ross – who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the link between malaria and the Anopheles mosquito – the narrative churns up many postcolonial themes such as the importance of acknowledging the native informant; establishing the status of the subdominant citizenry and subalterns; and interrogating the quality of the white, middleclass colonizer. Furthermore, the novel challenges the clear lines that Western science deploys to demarcate ‘science’ from ‘mysticism.’ It is a bold novel, and Ghosh’s intrepid narrative was awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the Best Science Fiction in 1997. Ghosh’s ensuing novel, The Glass Palace (2000), set in Burma, India, Malaysia, and Singapore, is also epic in its linear range, beginning with the 1885 British invasion of Burma and the deposition of the Burmese monarchy to World War II. The novel, strongly influenced by history, as are many of his other works, traces the falling fortunes of the Burmese Royalty and their relocation to India even as it parallelly registers the impact of World War II on Southeast Asia. The novel became the focus of scholarly and international interest when Ghosh withdrew it from the Commonwealth Prize shortlist, causing a huge furor. Its status, however, was firmly established as it went on to win the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt eBook Awards and was voted The New York Times Notable Book of 2001, the Los Angeles Times Notable Book of 2001, and Chicago Tribune Favorite Book of 2001. The Burmese translation of The Glass Palace won Ghosh the Myanmar National Literature Award in 2012. The Hungry Tide (2005) switches course when it comes to central thematic concerns. It exchanges the enormous global scope of his previous works for a more limited but equally 152

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passionate exploration of another topical theme that in recent years has emerged as very important to Ghosh: “human connection to non-human nature.” Set in the Sundarbans in the Bay of Bengal, its protagonist, Piyali Roy, a marine biologist of Bengali descent, arrives from the United States to study Irrawaddy dolphins. Kanai Dutt, a professional translator, comes to the Sunderbans at his aunt’s behest to examine his uncle’s ties with the refugees there. Another character who is deeply etched and very moving is Fokir, an illiterate fisherman. Piya and Fokir forge a deep connection despite their lack of a common language based purely on their love of dolphins. Another important and problematic issue that the novel excavates is the competing rights of the tigers and human refugees, a highly evocative subject that often preoccupies human and animal rights activists. The Hungry Tide won Ghosh the Hutch Crossword Book Prize in 2006. The Sea of Poppies (2008), the first in the Ibis trilogy, explores the opium trade in the IndoGangetic plain and its export to China, which sets the scene for the Opium Wars that were to follow. The novel has a vast array of characters, from Deeti, the upper-caste wife of an opium addict, to Kalua, a ‘low-caste’ ox-cart driver, from the Bengali aristocrat, Neel, to a half-Parsi, half-Chinese opium addict, Ah Fatt. They all end up on board the Ibis as they journey from Calcutta to Mauritius. The book was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award, the Indiaplaza Golden Quill Popular Vote, and the Indiaplaza Golden Quill Award for best novel. In 2010, for his literary achievements, Ghosh was declared co-winner along with Margaret Atwood of the highly regarded Dan David Prize from Tel Aviv University, Israel. River of Smoke (2011) is the second volume of the Ibis trilogy. It continues to track the destinies of those aboard the ship. However, some of the passengers disappear from the ship following a mutiny and end up in the busy harbors of Canton, China, where a brisk trade in opium is being carried on between the Western powers, colonized India, and China, in exchange for silk, porcelain, silver, and tea. We follow the lives of Bahram Modi, a Parsi opium merchant, his estranged half-Chinese son, Ah Fatt, the orphaned British subject, Paulette, and an array of other characters. As they interact, the historical backdrop of 19th century Canton, the scene of the Opium Wars, is refined. Ghosh won the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix award in 2011. River of Smoke was short-listed for the Man Booker Asian Prize. It also won the Tagore Literature Award and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2012. The third and final book in the Ibis trilogy, Flood of Fire (2015), pursues a host of characters through the outbreak of the First Opium War and China’s devastating defeat to the British seizure of Hong Kong. Thus, the readers follow in the footsteps of Kesri Singh, a havildar in the East India Company, leading a platoon of Indian sepoys. We encounter Zachary Reid, a Baltimore seaman, and we get introduced to Shireen Modi, a widow. She sets out from India to China to reclaim her opium-trader husband’s wealth and reputation. The Flood of Fire received excellent reviews. The Guardian reviewer asserts that “an exuberantly ingenious hotchpotch of different languages and registers, Ghosh’s story roars along, constantly flipping between high seriousness and low humor. It is simultaneously wrong-footing and delightful, riveting and diverting.” Ghosh’s increasing concern and engagement with the climate crisis is reflected in the next nonfiction book, The Great Derangement (2016), where he raises some unpalatable but critical questions regarding the climate crisis and its literary representation. It examines why there is a reluctance by writers of serious realist fiction to discuss what is patently the most acute crisis that confronts humanity. Ghosh traces the development of the novel form and how it gradually eschewed anything that was construed as high drama. Since all events associated with the climate crisis are inevitably dramatic, be they the devastations caused by typhoons or earthquakes or tsunamis, it becomes difficult to include these in ‘serious’ realist fiction as opposed to genre 153

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fiction, such as science fiction that thrives on such representations. He also explores other factors such as the epic timespan and the global theater in which the climate crisis is played out and deliberates how within the limited scope of the novel it becomes impossible to capture the diverse dimensions of the crisis as it gets played out across different timespans and geographical locations. This is a deeply thoughtful analysis that not only highlights our current natural crisis but also a concomitant cultural crisis. As if to contend with this literary limitation, Ghosh’s next novel, The Gun Island (2019), straddles the line between impossibility and evidence. It deals with implausible coincidences and concrete settings. Myth and folklore mix with heroic adventures and history in a world disrupted by the migrations of humans and animals. This was named Best Book of Fall by Vulture, the Chicago Review of Books, and Amazon. Finally, in The Nutmeg Curse (2021), the follow-up to The Great Derangement, Ghosh traces the origins of our contemporary climate crisis to the Western colonial enterprise and its exploitation of both subdominant humans and non-human nature. Aside from his monographs, Amitav Ghosh is also a consummate writer of essays and other nonfiction, which received global recognition. His essays, “The Ghost of Mrs  Gandhi” and “The March of the Novel,” were awarded the Best American Essay and the Pushcart Prize, respectively. Countdown, a travelogue, was on the final shortlist for the American Society of Magazine Editors Award for Reporting. In 2007, he received the Asian American Literary Award for nonfiction for Incendiary Circumstances, a collection of acclaimed essays.

Further Reading Arac, Jonathan. “Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy in American World Literature.” American Literature as World Literature, edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp. 149–165. Moitra, Swati. “The Return of the Goddess: Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and the Manasamangal.” Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature, edited by Sk Sagir Ali, et al. Routledge, 2021, pp. 47–59. Mondal, Anshuman A. Amitav Ghosh: Contemporary World Writers. Manchester UP, 2007. Sankaran, Chitra, editor. History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction. SUNY Press, 2012. Yesapogu, Venkateswarlu. “The New Historical Dimensions of Discursive Historicism in the Fiction of Amitav Ghosh –A Critical Perspective.” American Research Journal of English Literature, 2016, pp. 1–8. ARJ, www.arjonline.org/papers/arjel/v2-i1/2.pdf. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

CHITRA SANKARAN

GHOSE, SUDHIN N. (1899–1965) Sudhin N. Ghose was born on July 30, 1899, in Bardhaman in Bengal. After completing his bachelor’s degree in science from the University of Calcutta in 1920, he went to Europe to study at the University of Strasbourg where he completed his PhD on D.G. Rossetti and eventually earned a DLitt. He became a journalist, working as the foreign correspondent for The Hindu, a Madras newspaper, from 1924–1932 and as associate editor of World’s Youth from 1929–1931. Later, he joined the staff of the Information Section of the League of Nations Secretariat in Geneva. In 1940, he moved to England, where he took several offices as a lecturer, librarian, reporter, proof-reader, ARP warden, and BBC broadcaster. He continued to stay in England after the Second World War and continued to lecture on Eastern and Western art, architecture, philosophy, and literature. He breathed his last in London in 1965. Ghose has authored four novels, a quartet of bildungsromans, based on his childhood experiences in Bengal. His first novel, And Gazelles Leaping (1949), is a fable describing the pleasures

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of childhood through the story of an unnamed orphan boy, his pet elephant, and his friends in an idyllic setting in rural Calcutta. They live in an estate that harbors a kindergarten run by Sister Svenska. It also records their revolt against the tyrannical forces that threaten the existence of their school and innocent world. The second novel in the series, Cradle of the Clouds (1951), follows the life of the young man introduced as an orphan in the first novel. It shows his journey from Penhari Parganas to Calcutta in search of higher education and a promising profession. The novel, drawing upon mythological legends, is brilliant in its rich characterization and the depiction of the growth of a child. The third novel, The Vermillion Boat (1953), follows the life and career of the same young man who had arrived in Calcutta in the second novel. His hopes of attending university as a scholar are dashed to pieces by the relentless city. He is rendered homeless and destitute, suffering betrayal at the hands of his guardian. Finally, he is lucky enough to find a mentor and goes to the university, exploring the city’s glorious past. An abundant and sprawling narrative adds to the worth of the novel. The concluding novel of the quartet, The Flame of the Forest (1955), captures the disillusionment of the young scholar in post-independence Calcutta as he cannot secure a job worth suiting his academic brilliance. His frustrations at work and personal front force him to join Myna, a priestess of sorts, and her group of ascetics. An exciting mix of history, myth, and legend, this novel is about tradition versus modernity in a lucid and convincing style. The tetralogy of novels has been his best contribution to Indian English literature assimilating varied elements from Sanskrit verse to musical transcriptions. Ghose has also penned three anthologies of short stories. The first, Folk Tales and Fairy Stories from India (1961), contains sixteen tales about East India’s rich and traditional folk culture. The second, Folk Tales and Fairy Stories from Farther India (1966), has stories from Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand, full of wit and humor. The third, Tibetan Folk Tales and Fairy Stories (1986), contains folk tales of Tibet in matchless prose. The anthologies may broadly be classified as children’s literature depicting the author’s rare gift of retelling old stories in a fresh and magical style. Besides, Ghose had enriched drama much earlier in 1924 through The Colours of a Great City, a collection of two plays, The Defaulters and And Pippa Dances. In nonfiction, Rosetti and Contemporary Criticism (1928) and Post War Europe (1939) are his significant contributions. Ghose was a writer once glorified and then forgotten. Even his well-received novels engendered controversy as some critics found them not realistic enough while others considered them entirely factual. Some have outright rejected them as autobiographies and not fiction. However, a few believe him to be one of the earliest experimentalists in Indian fiction, a precursor of the new generation of Indian English novelists. Of late, he has been the focus of several research articles and book chapters, establishing his undeniable place in Indian writing in English.

Further Reading Abraham, T. J. A Critical Study of Novels of Arun Joshi, Raja Rao and Sudhin N. Ghose. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 1999. Gandhi, Leela. “Novelists of the 1930s and 1940s.” A History of Indian Literature in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Columbia UP, 2003, pp. 168–192. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “The Tractor and the Plough.” Considerations, edited by Meenakshi Mukherjee. South Asia Books, 1977, pp. 111–121. Narayan, Shyamala A. Sudhin N. Ghose. Arnold-Heinemann, 1973.

NAMRATA PATHANIA

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GIDWANI, BHAGWAN S. (1923–2020) Bhagwan S. Gidwani was born in Sindh to Shamdas Partabrai Gidwani and Dhamibai Shamdas Sadarangini. His father was the president of the Hindu Maha Sabha, and his uncle Choithram Gidwani was the President of the Sindh Congress. He studied at D.J. Sindh College, University of Bombay, and S.C.S. Law College. He held the post of additional director general of tourism and director general of civil aviation till 1978. He also served on India’s council at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, as a representative of India on the Council of International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), and as an adviser to foreign governments until 1985. He was instrumental in writing the guidelines for international air law experts. He passed away on August 22, 2020, in New York. Gidwani has written books that embrace a wide range of genres like history, fiction, films, drama, air transport, and aviation. He has nearly fifteen works in four languages. These include The Sword of Tipu Sultan, Omar Khayyam & I – a Poetic Rejoinder, Return of the Aryans, and March of the Aryans, screenplays, scripts, and dialogues for the historical drama The Sword of Tipu Sultan, based on his novel. He has also helped write scripts for Hindi films, including that of Sultanat, a complex multigenerational narrative of desert barons and robbers. Gidwani’s The Sword of Tipu Sultan is a well-researched historical novel that became a bestseller of its time. It revolves round its central figure, Tipu Sultan, his love life, marriage, children, political strategies, wars, enmity with the British, and his heroic death. He is shown as a loving son, affectionate husband, and compassionate Sultan who is farsighted, courageous, a staunch nationalist, and generous to captured enemies and their womenfolk. The novel has been translated into many languages and serialized on Indian TV and in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and West Asia. The Return of the Aryans deals with the migration of the Aryans from Bharat Varsha (India) in 5000 BC to various parts of the world, their struggle in alien lands, and their eventual return to Bharat Varsha (India). A well-researched novel with a large cast of characters, chief among them being Sindhu Putra, Kashi, and Nila, it is narrated like an epic adventure that makes the Aryans come alive magnificently. Sindhu Putra, a gentle god, spreads the message of love, and Nila gives his name to the river Nile. It is a highly successful novel, and his book March of the Aryans is adapted from it. The novel March of the Aryans goes back to the dawn of civilization in 8000 BCE and recreates the story of the Aryans. Blending research and imagination, it tells how the Aryans left Bharat Varsha (India) after the assassination of their spiritual leader Sindhu Putra who is considered a god by them and went in search of pure land in various parts of the world, facing decadence, injustice, barbarity, and servitude wherever they went, and eventually returned to Bharat Varsh. It has a variety of characters like hermit Bharat, Kashi, sage Dhanawantra, his wife Dhanawantari, and the god Sindhu Putra. Hermit Bharat works for unity and equality among his people, Kashi is a peace-loving man, after which the city of Varanasi is named, and Sindhu Putra wants people to live with love. It is a tale of gods, seers, poets, kings, and the rise and fall of civilizations. Bhagwan S. Gidwani’s contribution to the genre of the historical novel lies in blending history and fiction to create powerful narratives. Although based in Montreal, he combined his professional work in the field of air transport with historical research and writing.

Further Reading Anandan, P. “The Rehabilitation of Tipu Sultan by Bhagwan S. Gidwani’s the Sword of Tipu Sultan.” Research Journal of English (RJOE), vol. 6, no. 3, 2021, pp. 350–354. Accessed 12 Jul. 2022. IJSMA, www.ijsma.com/Files/v6i3/10/49.RJOE-Dr.P.%20Anandan(350-354).pdf. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

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Encyclopedia Entries Chibber, V. N. “Review of The Sword of Tipu Sultan, by Bhagwan S. Gidwani.” Indian Literature: Trends in the Indian Short Story, vol. 6, no. 3, Jan.–Feb. 1978, pp. 126–131. Sahitya Akademi. Khosla, G. D. “Review of The Sword of Tipu Sultan, by Bhagwan S. Gidwani.” Indian International Centre Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 2, 1977, pp. 214–216. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23001501. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Nandakumar, Prema. “Indian Writing in English.” Indian Literature, vol. 21, no. 6, 1978, pp. 134–153. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23330104. Accessed 25 Jan. 2023.

TANZIN CHOEDON

GIGOO, SIDDHARTHA (1974–) Siddhartha Gigoo, a Kashmiri Pandit, novelist, short story writer, poet, anthologist, and filmmaker whose short story “The Umbrella Man” was awarded the Commonwealth Prize (Asia) in 2015, is famous for his ingenious and versatile literary creations. Most of his writings are autobiographical with allusions to exile and his identity as a Kashmiri. His writings interfuse the sense of belongingness with assorted sentiments of displacement, forced migration, loss, and dislocation. While navigating through the complex terrain of his writings, one may sense Gigoo’s erudition in language and thought and his knack of focusing on emotions, giving his writings an embellished quality. Siddhartha Gigoo was born in Srinagar in 1974 in a reputed and educated Pandit family. His father, Arvind Gigoo, is a known literary figure and educationist. Gigoo received his early education from National School, Karan Nagar, Srinagar. Being a victim of forced exile, Gigoo and his family had to leave their homeland on account of armed insurgency and political upheavals. Abandoning their ancestral legacy and comfort, Gigoo studied as a private student in Udhampur. He then shifted to Delhi to pursue his master’s degree in literature and semiotics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He started his career as an editor with Tata Consultancy Services in Delhi. Gigoo is an experience design and communication strategist with TCS Life Sciences Digital. He is currently settled in New Delhi. Gigoo, just fifteen at the time of migration, bore the brunt of the political turmoil that left an indelible imprint on his psyche. The trauma of forced exile and the aftermath of dislocation and displacement morphed his creative sensibility to the extent that his writings are accurate reflections of his real-life experiences and the predicament of the Pandit community. His critical works can be viewed as lamentations for a lost past, a sense of belonging and yearning. In his literary career, spanning over a decade, he has authored a couple of novels, poems, and an anthology of short stories. He has also composed and directed two short films. Gigoo’s debut novel, The Garden of Solitude, published in 2011, is a disturbing tale of the exodus and banishment of Kashmiri Hindus scattered through different parts of India. It incorporates an excruciating and harrowing account of a Kashmiri Pundit family that, under duress, had to leave their motherland in the wake of turmoil. It comprises the expressions of postmemory of the protagonist shedding light on the relationship that a generation has with its antecedents who have witnessed cultural trauma. The novel begins with a vibrant picture of age-old communal harmony, mutuality, compassion, and a sense of belonging to the same cultural substratum. Eventually, it culminates into a dramatic representation of discord, skepticism, suspicion, and terrorism that originates as a result of decades-long turmoil, politics of hatred, leading to the subsequent exodus of the Pandit community. A Fistful of Earth and Other Stories depicts a strange world where people are trapped in circumstances over which they have no power. This anthology showcases Gigoo’s sharpened sensibility and imagination. This work paints a picture of shared history which was violent but 157

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most importantly displaced and dispossessed the whole community and changed their idea of identity following an exodus. “The Umbrella Man” presents a surreal meditation on mental health and the environment through its ghostly voice, abstract and philosophical themes, and telescopic structure. The story highlights the intricate relationship between human beings, and a hope for survival in the face of calamity. “Mehr: A Love Story” spun with monologues and dialogues incorporates multiple expressions embarking on a journey ridden with multilayered complex characters. The novel with love and liminality as its rudimentary themes also explores ideas of religion and patriotism trying to find peace amidst chaos and desolation. “The Lion of Kashmir,” an intriguing tale interwoven with a non-linear narrative, takes its readers into multitude perspectives that differentiate between dream and reality and life and death. It unravels a story talking about a place where people in general and the protagonist Zooni in particular, due to multiple occurrences of untoward incidents, have been subjected to psychosomatic illnesses in addition to post traumatic stress disorder. Gigoo has also written and directed two short films. The Last Day, set against the backdrop of the exodus and exile of Kashmiri Pandits from their homeland in the 1990s. Good-Bye, Mayfly, a short film about Kashmir oscillating between peace and violence, won the best film award (Indian Competition) at the 5th Bangalore International Short Film festival, India, in August 2015. Most of his works are about Kashmir, where he was born and spent memorable growing years. The place now is just a faded image that he reminisces in his work.

Further Reading Evans, Alexander. “A Departure from History: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990–2001.” Contemporary South Asia, vol. 11, no. 1, 2002, pp. 19–37. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/0958493022 000000341. Gigoo, Siddhartha. “Author in Focus: An Interview with Gigoo, Siddhartha.” Conducted by Amrita Gosh, and Athar Zia. Inside Kashmir, special issue of Cerebration, no. 2, 2012, http://cerebration.org/sidd harthgigoo.html. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023. Sinha, Upasana. “Through an Observer’s Eyes: A Conversation with Author Siddhartha Gigoo.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 57, no. 4, 2021, pp. 552–565. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi. org/10.1080/17449855.2021.1899037. Sinha, Upasana, and Nirban Manna. “From Home to House: Mediation of Memory and Desire Configuring Kashmiri Pandits’ Identity.” Clio: A Journal of Literature History and the Philosophy of History, vol. 48, no. 1, Jan. 2020, pp. 53–75. ResearchGate, www.researchgate.net/publication/358638715_ Clio_A_Journal_of_Literature_History_and_the_Philosophy_of_History. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

TASMIYA BHATT

GITANJALI by Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali: Song Offerings, a collection of one hundred and three exquisite poems by Rabindranath Tagore, won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. The original Bengali edition was published in 1910, and during a period of convalescence, Tagore decided to translate his poems into English but brought several changes to the Bengali text. He included only fifty poems from the original Gitanjali and selected others from various volumes and, in some cases, transposed and combined different poems. Creative and experimental as Tagore was, the Gitanjali in English is a sequence of prose poetry that is unique. According to the Nobel Prize citation, Tagore was awarded “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English 158

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words, a part of the literature of the West.” In the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Tagore emphasized his desire to bridge disparate cultures: I am glad that I belong to this great time, this great age, and I am glad that I have done some work to give expression to this great age when the East and the West are coming together. . . . They have got their invitation to meet each other and join hands in building up a new civilization and the great culture of the future. Gitanjali was dedicated to William Rothenstein, an English painter who introduced Tagore to W.B. Yeats, who helped finalize the manuscript and wrote an astute introduction. Emphasizing the universal appeal of Gitanjali, Yeats praises it, saying: “A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination, yet we are not moved by its strangeness . . . because we have met our own image.” The opening lines of the poem bear witness to Tagore’s philosophy of universalism and the oneness of all humankind, “Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure/This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again,/and fillest it ever with fresh life.” (p. 1). Tagore’s spirituality was located in a transcendent idea of divinity, irrespective of religion. Born and raised in a family that was among the leaders of the Bengal Renaissance in the mid-19th century, Rabindranath had a broad vision of humanism gathered from eclectic sources. This vast pool is discernable in the themes in Gitanjali. The best-known poem in the collection “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;” is usually read as a patriotic dream for India, but it conveys a much better idea of intellectual freedom as the ultimate goal. The French writer Andre Gide admiringly said, “Gitanjali .  .  . is uncluttered with mythologies.” Diverse themes are presented innovatively, such as devotion, nature, mysticism, love, and death. In other words, Tagore covers a life cycle of experiential encounters yet presents a meditative message. Poem 17 has the refrain, “I am only waiting for love to give myself up and last/into his hands,” but what does the business of living entail? Childhood reveals its magic – “The sleep that flits on baby’s eyes” (61), romantic and domestic scenes play themselves out through metaphors of deep relationships – “Words have wooed but failed to win her;” (66), nature’s bounty weaves ever-changing colors and textures into the seasons – “Light, my light, the world-filling light” (57). The poet feels deeply connected to the pleasures of the earth, “no, I will never shut the doors of my senses” (73). Yet, he looks fondly toward the closure of life, ending the last poem in Gitanjali with the words, “Let all my life take its voyage to its eternal home in one salutation to thee” (103). Tagore’s lyricism in Bengali may not have transited altogether to the Gitanjali in English. Nevertheless, it is a poem that is anchored in reality as well as spirituality. Written during India’s colonial period, it had the power of imagining a free nation; composed when religion was often a divisive force, it charted a path toward universal humanism; expressed in an English marked with Indianism, it still won the heart of global intellectuals and was translated into every primary language in the world.

Further Reading Dasgupta, Uma. Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography. Oxford UP, 2004. Fraser, Bashabi. Rabindranath Tagore. Reaktion Books, 2019. Lal, Malashri. Tagore and the Feminine: A Journey in Translations. Sage, 2015. Som, Reba. Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and His Song. Penguin, 2009. Tagore, Rabindranath. Gitanjali: Song Offerings. UBS Publishers/Visva-Bharati, 2003.

MALASHRI LAL

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GLASSBLOWER’S BREATH, THE, by Sunetra Gupta The Glassblower’s Breath is a novel written by Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. Gupta regularly writes articles on topics in epidemiology, focused on transmission of infectious diseases like malaria, HIV, influenza, meningitis, and, most recently, COVID-19. Gupta has published five novels, written several essays, and translated many poetic works of Rabindranath Tagore into English – which are referenced explicitly on several occasions throughout The Glassblower’s Breath. The Glassblower’s Breath is Gupta’s sophomore follow-up to her Sahitya Akademi Awardwinning, debut, Memories of Rain (1992). Published by London-based Orion Books Ltd in 1993, presented in ten parts, the novel opens with twelve lines penned in the 13th century by Jalaluddin Rumi. The title of the novel is derived from these lines. The opening lines are revisited several times throughout the work: “Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street./I took it as a sign to start singing/falling up into the bowl of the sky./The bowl breaks. Everything is falling everywhere./Nothing else to do./Here’s the new rule: Break the wineglass,/and fall toward the glassblower’s breath.” The glassblower’s breath beckons the broken glass to become something wholly new again. The Glassblower’s Breath is about how lives intertwine and separate. Layered storytelling focuses on one woman (‘you’) and four men (Alexander, Avishek, Daniel, and Jon Sparrow). After many cerebral twists and turns, the woman (‘you’) remains with only one man after he has effectively disposed of the others. It is interesting to note that The Glassblower’s Breath is dedicated to the author’s then-almost-husband/now-ex-husband, Irish vaccinologist Adrian VS Hill. The other three lovers are characterized as a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker, a grouping of occupations that can be used to refer to various trades collectively or to denote everyone else. Some characters are anonymous, while others play lifelong roles. Right away, one reacts to the unusual second-person point of view employed by Gupta, which effectively draws the readers in. It is as though the readers are meeting themselves as yetunknown characters in Gupta’s work; ‘you’ are the main character, so ‘you’ are invested. Told through recollections of individual memories, reminiscences, and anecdotes, The Glassblower’s Breath explores how cultures and perceptions meet in ‘your’ mind and how they can be everpresent, even in their physical absence. The Glassblower’s Breath is a cat-and-mouse story about love and loss, coping with grief, and moving forward once a decision is made. Gupta’s poetic and figurative language in The Glassblower’s Breath is easily compared to Virginia Woolf’s into To the Lighthouse. Stream of consciousness figures prominently, especially represented in Gupta’s consistent construction of long, clause-abundant sentences and paragraphs. Dialogue is set apart within the paragraph by commas – as are the many clauses in each sentence – not by quotation marks or paragraph spacing, as one might expect. There are a couple of examples where Gupta uses more standard dialogue-spacing conventions in instances where there are multiple participants, for example, in the “how is this night going to end?” sequence that closes the novel where ‘you’ and all four men are engaged in communication leading up to dinner. The city is noted by Gupta as a significant influence on her work. Gupta was born in Calcutta, but her father’s work led the family to Ethiopia, Zambia, and England before they returned to Calcutta when she was eleven. Stories within the story spatially relate to the city, mainly London and Calcutta, but also New York and Paris. Gupta was also educated in India, North America, and England, which contributes to thematic experiences against the backdrop of the city. Glass and mirrors are other prominent images in The Glassblower’s Breath, that reflect variable 160

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versions of all love stories while different relationships are compared back and forth temporally by Gupta. Interpretations and misinterpretations of events are fractured and repaired. Multiple emotions are attached to glass, whether whole or in pieces. Gupta’s reflective surfaces keep retelling your stories and following you, revealing things until one player shatters all the rest. That’s where The Glassblower’s Breath abruptly ends.

Further Reading “Great Barrington Declaration.” Great Barrington Declaration and Petition, https://gbdeclaration.org. Gupta, Sunetra. The Glassblower’s Breath. Orion Books, 1993. ———. Sunetra Gupta, www.sunetragupta.com/index.dwt.asp.

STEPHANIE LAINE HAMILTON

GOD OF SMALL THINGS, THE, by Arundhati Roy Arundhati Roy’s debut novel, The God of Small Things, about the Ipe family and their many tragedies, was published in 1997 and won the Booker Prize that year. An omniscient narrator narrates the novel. However, Roy’s skillful, cerebral narrative, which expresses the characters’ thoughts rather than describing events, often seems to unfold mostly through the eyes of Rahel and sometimes Estha – the fraternal twins. Their lives form a significant part of the narrative. The language of the novel, which begins at the end and ends in the middle, has been the subject of much discussion. Some have pointed out that Roy’s unique way of twisting and breaking down the English language displaces the native speakers from their mother tongue to enter a new textual order. However, it has also been criticized for its excesses and purple prose style. The other important characters of the novel and the Ipe family include Ammu, the twins’ mother, Baby Kochamma or Navomi Ipe, the children’s grandaunt, and Chacko, their uncle. At the margins of the story and the social fabric it seeks to represent is another family – Velutha, his bedridden brother, and Vellya Appen – their father. Flitting in and out of the non-linear narrative are Pappachi and Mammachi – the parents of Ammu and Chacko, Chacko’s estranged wife Margaret, and their daughter Sophie, and Comrade Pillai, among others. One of the critical points in the plot is the arrival of Margaret and Sophie. It is Sophie Mol who hatches the plan that leads to the tragedies at the heart of the novel. It is Sophie who tells the twins that they should row across the river on the boat – that, unknown to them, their mother and Velutha also used for their secret rendezvous – and make their way to the mysterious History House, where, away from the eyes of the world, Ammu and Velutha used to meet by night. While on the river, the boat capsizes, and Sophie drowns. Seeing this as an opportunity to punish Velutha for loving an upper-caste, upper-class woman, a plan is hatched by Baby Kochamma and Comrade Pillai to blame Velutha for Sophie’s murder. The twins, who know the truth, are scared into silence by Baby Kochamma, who tells them that the police will charge them with Sophie’s murder if they dare to speak. Velutha eventually dies from the injuries he sustains while in police custody. It is too late by the time Ammu goes to the police station to reveal the truth. Baby Kochamma also convinces Chacko that Ammu and the twins are responsible for Sophie’s death, and he throws them out of the house. Estha is “returned” to their father, never to see Ammu again and not to meet Rahel until adulthood. 161

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On the one hand, Roy’s portrayal of the Ipe family with a microscopic lens is a critical representation of patriarchal social structures. On the other, the relationship between Ammu and Velutha provides her with the ground to explore and expose the devastating effects of the caste system. Upon publication, the novel courted some controversy because of its portrayal of an intercaste relationship and a case was filed against her on charges of obscenity. It was also criticized for harboring anti-Communist sentiments. The novel, however, was generally well-received, and the Booker Prize catapulted the text and the author into overnight international fame. Critics pointed out that the book came at a time when India was a product in demand in the global market, and one critic has pointed out the “discovery” myth that surrounds the novel and the author was a successful marketing strategy.

Further Reading Ahmad, Aijaz. “Reading Arundhati Roy Politically.” Frontline, 8 Aug. 1997, pp. 103–108. Bose, Brinda. “In Desire and in Death: Eroticism as Politics.” ARIEL: A  Review of International English Literature, vol. 29, no. 2, 1998, pp.  59–72. Academia, www.academia.edu/1585912/ In_Desire_and_in_Death_Eroticism_as_Politics_in_Arundhati_Roys_The_God_of_Small_Things. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Routledge, 2001. Mongia, Padmini. “The Making and Marketing of Arundhati Roy.” Arundhati Roy’s  the God of Small Things, edited by Alex Tickell. Routledge, 2007, pp. 103–109. Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney. “The Small Voice of History in Arundhati Roy’s the God of Small Things.” Interventions, vol. 7, no. 3, 2005, pp. 369–391. Snell-Hornby, Mary. “Re-creating the Hybrid Text: Postcolonial Indian Writings and the European Scene.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, vol. 2, 2003, pp. 173–189.

SARBAJAYA BHATTACHARYA

GOKHALE, NAMITA (1956–) Namita Gokhale was born in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, and was raised in Nainital. She studied English literature at Jesus and Mary College of Delhi University. Gokhale is a writer, publisher, and festival director. She is the author of twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her work spans novels, short stories, Himalayan studies, several anthologies, books for young readers, retellings, and examinations of Indian mythology. Her debut novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, a cult classic published in 1984, is a social comedy that rose to notoriety and brought the author critical acclaim. Gods, Graves, and Grandmother, 1994, is a searching scan of life in the downwardly mobile class of the Indian metropolis’s migrants. A Himalayan Love Story, 1996, narrates the story of Parvati and Mukul Nainwal. The tale of these two exiles is one of unrequited love with its terrible irony and tragic urgency. The Book of Shadows, 1999, is part ghost story and part erotic romance that investigates the nature of reality, love, and faith. In Shakuntala: The Play of Memory, 2005, Gokhale plays with memory and desire, invoking the name of Shakuntala. On the ghats of Kashi, a sightless priest directs a young woman to come to terms with an earlier life that binds her in an eternal cycle of death and rebirth. In this life, she recalls, she was Shakuntala – spirited, imaginative, and adventurous, but destined, like her legendary namesake, to suffer “the samskaras of abandonment.” Priya: In Incredible Indyaa, 2011, resurrects some unforgettable characters from Gokhale’s 1984 cult bestseller Paro and plunges them neck-deep into Delhi’s toxic waste of power, money, and greed. The Habit of Love, 2012, is a collection of stories about the inner lives of women.

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Some of these women inhabit the ancient past, some the present day, but they share the whimsical humor with which they speak of themselves. Things to Leave Behind, 2016, is the final one in the Himalayan trilogy after The Himalayan Love Story and The Book of Shadows. The novel chronicles the mixed legacy of the British Indian past and the emergence of fragile modernity. The book is set in the year 1856 in the Kumaon region and relates to the life of six native women. Lost in Time: Ghatotkacha and the Game of Illusions, 2017, tells the story of a young Gurgaon boy, Ghintamani Dev Gupta, who gets inexplicably transported to the days of the Mahabharata and meets Ghatotkacha and his mother, the demoness Hidimba. Betrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (co-authored with Malashri Lal), 2020, is a play-script based on the letters of Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Gokhale and Lal pay tribute to his extraordinary life in a story that lays bare the deep-set contradictions between art and life. The Blind Matriarch, 2021,  sketches a vivid portrait of an Indian joint family against the backdrop of the first and second waves of the pandemic. Jaipur Journals, 2020, is partly a satire on the glittering set of writers that throng the festival grounds of the Jaipur Literary Festival, partly an ode to the pathos and broken aspirations of writers. It showcases the pretensions and the pathos of the loneliest of tribes, the writers. Gokhale, in her novels, attempts to explore the emotional world stirring within a woman’s heart and her dilemmas. The characters of her novels and their eternal conflicts highlight their alienation. All women characters like Paro, Priya, Gudiya, Parvati, Rachita, and Shakuntala, show a distinct agony and anguish under the circumstances they are placed in. In the world of Gokhale’s writing, the misty mountains forever remain an external backdrop. Among her nonfiction: Mountain Echoes – Reminiscences of Kumaoni Women, 1994, is a book of oral biography profiling the life and times of four extraordinary Kumaoni women. The Book of Shiva, 2000, is an introduction to Shaivite philosophy and mythology. In The Puffin Mahabharata, 2009, like a modern-day storyteller, Gokhale brings alive India’s greatest epic for today’s young readers in a clear, contemporary style. Gokhale has co-edited two books with Lal, namely, In Search of Sita, 2009, which presents essays, conversations, and commentaries that explore different aspects of Sita and Finding Radha: The Quest for Love, 2018, is a collection of poetry, prose, and translation that deal with the historical as well as the artistic dimensions of the eternal romance of Radha and Krishna. Traveling In, Travelling Out (edited), 2014, focuses on the Indian experience and captures a country of shifting landscapes, physical, cultural, and psychological. Gokhale was conferred the First Centenary National Award for Literature by the Assam Sahitya Sabha in Guwahati in 2017. She won the first Sushila Devi Literature Award for her novel Things to Leave Behind, which also received the Best Fiction Jury Award at the Valley of Words Literature Festival and was on the longlist for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award. She is the recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award in English for 2022 for Things to Leave Behind. Gokhale is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival and its international editions. She was also an adviser to Mountain Echoes, the Bhutan Literature Festival. She is the director of Yatra Books, a publishing house specializing in translation. Gokhale has conceived and curated over a hundred episodes of Kitaabnama: Books and Beyond, a bookshow broadcast on Doordarshan.

Further Reading Bhagdikar, Vandana. Fiction of Namita Gokhale: A Critical Study. Prestige Books, 2015.

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Encyclopedia Entries Ghanashyam, G. A., and Manishrai L. Mukta. Women Relationships and Rebellion: A  Study of Namita Gokhale’s Fiction. Book Enclave, 2013. Srivastava, Sharad. The New Woman in Indian English Fiction: A Study of Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai, Namita Gokhale & Shobha De. Creative Books, 1996.

SANGEETA SINGH

GOLDEN GATE, THE, by Vikram Seth The Golden Gate is Vikram Seth’s first novel, published in 1986. This novel was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1988. It is written in verse, inspired by Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Seth transports the characters from Pushkin’s verses into the modern-day Californian valleys. The novel is written in 590 stanzas with the verses structured in complex meter and rhyme schemes. Seth uses the Onegin stanzas with iambic tetrameter. It is pertinent to note that he has maintained the stanza form even in the “Acknowledgments,” “Contents,” “Dedication,” and “About the Author” sections of the novel. The novel is based in 1980 and follows the everyday lives of a group of successful young professionals living in San Franciso. It starts with the 26-year-old John Brown, who works as a computer engineer and is professionally successful. However, he realizes that he needs to be in a relationship to cope with loneliness and discusses his problem with Janet Hayakawa, his current friend, and former love interest. Janet is a sculptor, and drummer for a band called Liquid Sheep. Janet suggests that John should advertise in the classified section and in fact does it without his permission. Following the advertisement in the newspaper, John receives several responses from women in San Franciso. One answer that stands out prominently is from a Stanford graduate trial lawyer, Liz Dorati. The two meet and fall in love, with a few disagreements stemming from Liz’s cat Charlemagne. Soon, Liz and John move into an apartment together. The story then focuses on Liz’s brother Edward, a closeted gay man strict about his Catholic faith. These two conflicting identities are presented as Edward’s existential crisis. Edward engages with his lover but feels guilty for having sinned. Another character in the novel is Phil, a divorced father raising a son, Paul. John and Phil are friends. Phil quits his well-paying job to join a movement against nuclear weapons and spends his time in rallies, an activity that John does not appreciate. At Liz’s and John’s engagement party, Phil meets Edward, an encounter that leads to a relationship. Liz and John get married while Phil and Edward are together. The couples discuss their philosophies and life purposes. Soon, they face issues and difficulties in their respective relationships. Phil realizes that Edward will not be able to commit to the relationship because of his faith. At the same time, John and Liz have conflicting political views leading to differences in their relationship. John quits his job as an engineer to work for a defense contractor, while Liz, who disapproves of John working for the government, aligns with Phil’s anti-nuclear movement. Their marriage is dissolved. Liz and Phil get deeper into their activism and eventually fall in love. All these characters find new relationships more suitable for long-term success. John confides his failure in marriage to Janet; Janet and John fall in love again. The newfound stability in these relationships is good until Janet is killed in a car accident. Liz and Phil invite John to be their newborn’s godfather. Vikram Seth wrote the novel as a graduate student at Stanford University in California. The novel provides arguments through characters in favor of and against homosexuality, religion, feminism, nuclear policies, and tolerance. Seth provides anti-intellectual arguments through the

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characters’ lives and paths. The novel was well-received and made him a household name in the United States and India.

Further Reading Curlin, Jay. “ ‘The World Goes On’: Narrative Structure and the Sonnet in Vikram Seth’s ‘the Golden Gate’.” Scholarly Commons, 1996, scholarlycommons.obu.edu/articles/244/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Dulai, Surjit S. “Two Faces of Indo-American Fiction: Vikram Seth’s the Golden Gate.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 36, no. 2, 1997, pp.  47–55. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/17449859708589274. Jayabharathi, N. B. “Quest for Self-Fulfilment in Vikram Seth’s Novels the Golden Gate and A Suitable Boy.” Language in India, vol. 13, no. 12, 2013, pp. 142–146. Language in India, www.languagein india.com/dec2013/nbjayabharathigoldengate.pdf. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023. Ponomareva, Anna. “Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate as a Transcreation of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.” Rereading Schleiermacher: Translation, Cognition and Culture. Springer, 2016, pp. 219–232.

VISHWAJEET DESHMUKH

GOLDEN HONEYCOMB, THE, by Kamala Markandaya Chatto and Windus published British Indian writer Kamala Markandaya’s ninth novel The Golden Honeycomb, in 1977. It was received enthusiastically by the American readership and was nominated for the Book of the Month Club. In this historical novel, Markandaya explores the courtly life of a Princely State in British India in the decades before India’s independence. This novel is seminal in redressing revisionist readings of colonial “benefits” by showing the ideological struggle between the elites of society and the working-class peasants in seeking policy change. The novel follows three generations of the Maharajahs (Kings) of Devapur, a semiautonomous princely state under British rule. Although giving the illusion of freedom, the Maharajah’s powers are limited, as he is answerable to the British Viceroy of India. The novel begins with the appointment of a commoner (from the Kshatriya caste) to the throne of Devapur, who is malleable and prone to heed the orders of the Resident (British) and the Dewan (Brahmin). His son Bawajiraj grows up under the tutelage of Englishmen and develops a pro-imperial outlook. The new Maharajah Bawajiraj struggles to ameliorate the differences of opinion between the Resident, who advises him to raise the Salt Tax, and the Dewan, who expresses concern over antagonizing the “king’s subjects.” The Maharajah’s allegiance to the Crown costs him the support of his kingdom, which rises in protest and demonstrates on the streets. In the end, he must call off the increment in taxes to maintain peace. Through Bawajiraj’s character, Markandaya highlights the complexity of Indo-British relations, which threaten to undo familial ties within the court. The Maharajah’s illegitimate son and future heir to the throne, Rabindranath (Rabi), manages to escape the indoctrination his father has received and grows up attuned to the hierarchies of race class, gender, and caste. He is grounded by his association with Janaki, a servant girl whose friendship in his childhood teaches him about poverty and starvation. His father, whom he idolized as a child because of his Godlike stature, falls from grace in Rabi’s eyes when he witnesses him bowing down to the viceroy during the regal celebration of the Delhi Durbar in 1903. In his teenage years, he joins the people’s movement against taxation and becomes a beacon of hope for those who denigrate the Maharajah and support the Maharajkumar (Prince). Rabi proves his mettle to them by undertaking a dam-building project that alleviates the farmer’s woes caused by the famine; the dam provides water supply

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to the people and strengthens their belief in Rabi’s leadership capabilities and concern for Indians. Although the novel’s protagonists are the father-son duo, the women in their lives are the unsung heroes. Bawajiraj’s partner (and Rabi’s mother), Mohini, is a tour de force who refuses to bow down to Bawajiraj’s demands and rejects domestication. She keeps him in check by reminding him of his responsibilities toward his own people, not the British. She is pivotal in shaping Rabi’s personality; she inculcates in him the qualities of inquisitiveness and critical thinking. While the men in Rabi’s life coerce him to assimilate with the imperial forces, Rabi’s mother, grandmother, childhood friend Janaki, the Dewan’s daughters Vatsala and Usha, and even the Resident’s daughter Sophie, all teach Rabi to rebel against injustice. The women from the fringes help shape the country’s future as a socialist republic. The Golden Honeycomb, in exploring the inner workings of princely states, is, as Markandaya admitted, “critical of the Raj.” It has since been read as “manifest[ing] the contradictory interplay of the reconfiguration and reaffirmation of monolithic notions of the imperial ‘motherland’ ” by postcolonial critics who have read Markandaya as emblematic of Orientalist exoticization of India (Ranasinha). Markandaya defended the ambivalent stance toward colonialism by arguing that there can be no straightforward opposition between the center and the margin; her novels reside in-between.

Further Reading Afzal-Khan, Fawzia. “Kamala Markandaya: Myth Versus Realism or East Versus West.” Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel. Pennsylvania State UP, 1993, pp. 97–142. Misra, Pravati. Class Consciousness in the Novels of Kamala Markandaya. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2001. Pereira-Ares, Noemí. “The Sartorially Undesirable ‘Other’ in Post-War South Asian Diaspora Narratives: Kamala Markandaya’s the Nowhere Man.” Fashion, Dress, and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives from the Eighteenth Century to Monica Ali. Springer, 2018, pp. 23–57. Ranasinha, Ruvani. “Assimilation and Resistance: Kamala Markandaya and A. Sivanandan.” South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford UP, 2007, pp. 145–185.

SHEELALIPI SAHANA

GOUR, NEELUM SARAN (1955–) Born in Allahabad, Neelum Saran Gour is the child of a Bengali mother and a trained amateur-musician father. During her childhood days, Gour was exposed to quite a few languages and cultural influences. She was educated at St. Mary’s Convent Inter College, a school run by Roman Catholic nuns. In the early 1970s, she studied history, philosophy, and English literature at the University of Allahabad. In 1977, Gour joined the Department of English, Allahabad University, as lecturer and with time moved on to the position of professor in English literature. Gour’s debut collection, Grey Pigeon and Other Stories, was released in 1993. Her next book, a novel, titled Speaking of ’62 was published in 1995. This novel was followed by Winter Companions and Other Stories (1997). In 2002, Virtual Realities was released. Two of her novels were published in 2005, Sikandar Chowk Park and Messres Dickens, Doyle and Wodehouse Pvt. Ltd. The pictorial volume Allahabad Where the Rivers Meet, which was edited by Gour, was published in 2009. Gour’s Song Without End and Other Stories was launched in 2011. In 2015, Three Rivers and A Tree – The Story of Allahabad University was published. This work of nonfiction was followed by Allahabad Aria (2015) and Invisible Ink (2015). Gour’s latest novel is Requiem In Raga Janki. It was published in 2018.

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Gour focuses primarily on North India’s small towns and their cultural histories. Her collection of short stories titled Winter Companions and Other Stories is set in her native Uttar Pradesh. Everyday colloquialisms and details of small-town life figure prominently in this book. Allahabad Aria, which is a collection of eight short stories, records the intriguing escapades of diplomats, jurists, bureaucrats, and captains of industry during their student days in Allahabad. Likewise, Three Rivers and A Tree presents a literary history of Allahabad University. Sikandar Chowk Park also has a lot to do with Gour’s beloved city, Allahabad. Situated in Allahabad, Sikandar Chowk Park is shaken by a bomb blast which claims fifty-seven lives. While probing the lives of eleven of the dead, a journalist tries to place history in perspective based on the life of the individual. Drawn into the lives of the victims, the reader gets an insight into the mind of the Islamic fundamentalist responsible for planting the bomb. In Invisible Ink, which is an interesting tale of two friends, Gour writes about the city of Allahabad in two different time periods, making contrasts between them. After many years, Amina and Suvarnarekha meet to strengthen the ties of friendship between them. They soon realize that the ease that once attended their relationship is gone, replaced by religious prejudices. The Allahabad of their childhood was marked by communal harmony, while the Allahabad of the present showed disturbing signs of communal intolerance. In this book, we see Gour focusing on the effect of political events on the lives of ordinary people. Requiem In Raga Janki takes early-20th-century Allahabad into account. It is a fictionalized biography of the Hindustani singer Janki Bai Ilahabadi (1880–1934). The novel looks at a golden era of music through the eyes of the protagonist – Janki Bai Ilahabadi, one of the maestros of music of the early 1900s. Gour won The Hindu Prize 2018 in the fiction category for this book. Gour’s Messres Dickens, Doyle & Wodehouse Pvt. Ltd. stands in stark contrast to her Allahabadcentric works. This postcolonial parody mimics the authorial voices of writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and P.G. Wodehouse; Gour does it with an Indian twist to the theme. In this book, she dives into the exciting fictional worlds of Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and P.G. Wodehouse and mixes the worlds together to produce a marvelous concoction. The story is set in the 19th century – in a fog-bound London of horse-drawn carriages and gas lamps. However, Jeeves belongs to the early 20th century, with its electric lights and motor cars. In the novel, David Copperfield, Estella of Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist arrive in turn at 221B Baker Street – Sherlock Holmes’ unforgettable address – looking for professional help.

Further Reading Bhasin, Simar. “Singing Up a Storm: Neelum Saran Gour Speaks About Her New Book, Requiem in Raga Janki.” The New Indian Express, 28 Jun. 2018, www.indulgexpress.com/culture/books/2018/ jun/28/singing-up-a-storm-neelum-saran-gour-speaks-about-her-new-book-requiem-in-raga-janki8444.html. Accessed 1 Feb. 2023. Das, Chhandita, and Priyanka Tripathi. “Silhouetting the Self and Society: An Interview with Neelum Saran Gour.”  English: Journal of the English Association, vol. 69, no. 265, Summer 2020, pp.  178– 188, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/efaa005. ———. “Exploring the Margins of Kotha Culture: Reconstructing a Courtesan’s life in Neelum Saran Gour’s Requiem in Raga Janki.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 23, no. 4, 2021, https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3669. ———. “Poetics and Politics of Literary Cartography: Secular Allahabad in Neelum Saran Gour’s Invisible Ink and Requiem in Raga Janki.” GeoHumanities, vol. 8, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1–16.

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Encyclopedia Entries “Writers Neelum Saran Gour and Manoranjan Byapari Win the Hindu Prize 2018.” Scroll.in, 13 Jan. 2019, https://scroll.in/latest/909302/writers-neelum-saran-gour-and-manoranjan-byapari-win-thehindu-prize-2018. Accessed 1 Feb. 2023.

RAJESH WILLIAMS

GREAT INDIAN NOVEL, THE, by Shashi Tharoor Shashi Tharoor (1956–) is a Sahitya Akademi Award-winning author, columnist, member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha, and a former diplomat. The Great Indian Novel is Tharoor’s work of fiction published in 1989 by Viking Press for which he won the Federation of Indian Publishers’ Hindustan Times Literary Award for the Best Book in 1990 and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Best Book of the Year in the Eurasian Region in 1991. The title is a literal translation of Maha (Great) and Bharata (India) and takes its inspiration from the epic to simultaneously narrate the course of modern Indian history. Consequently, it becomes a parody of both the Mahabharata and events in colonial and postcolonial South Asia, as Tharoor employs humor, caricature, and double entendres to attend to the ambitious project. Vyasa, the narrator of the epic, becomes V.V-ji in the modern rendering, a progeny of a traveling salesman, and Ganesh turns into Ganapathi, his faithful employee. The novel is divided into eighteen ‘books,’ keeping it consistent with the Mahabharata. It also references other renowned texts from the subcontinent, and thus, some of the chapters are named “The Rigged Veda,” “Passages Through India,” and “Midnight’s Parents.” It starts with the exploits of Ganga-ji – an evident play on Gandhi-ji – who is also Bhishma in the parallel plotline. This figure of the celibate sage, otherwise open to experimentation, becomes the anchor around which most of the events of the first third of the book occur. Jallianwala Bagh becomes Bibighar Gardens Massacre, and the Salt Satyagraha turns into the Great Mango March as Tharoor recounts the anti-colonial struggle without disrupting the overarching dynamic between the characters in the epic. Nevertheless, neither is the retelling wholly accurate historically nor has there been a perfect harmony with the epic, which makes it an interactive reading experience as the readers actively attempt to recognize the events and the characters. In a striking act of creative liberty, Tharoor makes Dhritarashtra, a stand-in for Jawaharlal Nehru, who, instead of a hundred sons, conceives only one daughter – Priya Duryodhana. Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose becomes Pandu as the two brothers seek freedom from British rule, with Mohammad Ali Karna seeking to carve out a new nation for his community named Karnistan. Tharoor employs multiple writing devices to make the novel an engaging read. Netaji’s career as party president, military commander, and a subsequent plane crash on the one hand, and the Gita on the other gets extensively narrated in verses. The text is also interspersed throughout with banter between Vyasa and Ganapathi. The final section of the book describes the Emergency period with Yudhisthir becoming the leader of the opposition, Bhim the army, Arjun the voice of the people, and Draupadi – democracy itself. Tharoor deliberately makes the novel erotic and sensual; its playfulness shares resonances with Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The Great Indian Novel was named as one of the twelve best Indian novels by The Independent in March 2021. Terming it both as a parody and a homage to the great epic, The New York Times, in its 1991 review, observes that the prolonged narrative – in trying to cater to the epic and history – often “cramps” the writing style of the author. In an interview with the BBC in 2014, Tharoor feared that the book could have been banned if it had been published then, although he believed that the theme holds “great relevance in contemporary India.” This sentiment was echoed as early as 1989 by Madhu Jain from India Today who, after the publication 168

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of the novel, said – “Had this book not been so funny, it’s delicious irreverence so unpartisan in its sweep of the pantheon of Indian politicians, it would have sent its author down the Rushdie path.”

Further Reading Chowdhury, Kanishka. “Revisioning History: Shashi Tharoor’s Great Indian Novel.” World Literature Today, vol. 69, no. 1, 1995, pp. 41–48. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/40150855. Gorra, Michael. “Lesser Gods and Tiny Heroes.” The New York Times, 24 Mar. 1991. Ingle, Schuyler. “An Intimate Look at an India in Decay: The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor.” Los Angeles Times, 25 Jul. 1991. Jain, Madhu. “The Great Indian Novel: A Send-up of Modern History.” India Today, 15 Dec. 1989. Pandey, Geeta. “Why Shashi Tharoor’s Great Indian Novel Still Appeals.” BBC, 16 Oct. 2014.

TITAS DE SARKAR

GUHA, RAMACHANDRA (1958–) Ramachandra Guha was born in Dehradun on April  29, 1958. His father was an official at the Forest Research Institute, and his mother taught at a high school. Guha was educated at The Doon School in Dehradun and went on to graduate in economics from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, following which he obtained a master’s degree in economics from the Delhi School of Economics. Guha’s interest in environmental and social movements took him to Calcutta, where he completed his PhD at the Indian Institute of Management where he further honed his skills as a sociologist and historian. Guha’s prolific writing career is a testament to a comprehensive set of interests spanning the disciplines of environmental history, the modern history of India, sports, and cricket, among others. His notable work, The Unquiet Woods, published in 1989, traces the social history of the Chipko movement in the forests of Uttarakhand. His sustained ecological concerns have been registered in other works such as Environmentalism (1999), This Fissured Land (1992), and Ecology and Equity (1995). His several books and biographies on Gandhi have analyzed the latter’s place within the discourses of modern India and among other public personas of that period, as evident in India After Gandhi (2007), Makers of Modern India (2010), Gandhi Before India (2013), and Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World (2018). His interest in cricket led to the publication of the highly acclaimed work, A Corner of a Foreign Field, in 2002. More generally, he has written on issues of liberalism, Marxism, and other ideological positions vis-à-vis Indian subcontinental politics. Apart from authoring books and contributing to journals and newspapers, Guha has been a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Science, Korea; Yale; Stanford; University of California; and the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, to mention a few. In Environmentalism: A  Global History (1999), Guha attempts to contextualize the phenomena of environmental activism in their local and global manifestations and the shifts palpable within the discipline and practices of environmentalism from his vantage point as a scholar at the University of Yale in the mid-1980s. What intrigues the author during his time in the United States is the heterogeneous nature of such movements, where specificities of cultures and national traditions play a significant role in determining the course and tenor of this activism. However, Guha’s primary objective in this book is to dismantle the assumption that an Indian environmentalist can only write about ecological concerns particular to India. Instead, he appears to initiate a conversation across cultures whereby a robust program of social action and political reform might be conceived. Additionally, the book’s thrust is toward 169

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a transnational orientation covering six continents. Guha posits the first and second waves of environmentalism by tracing the histories of European industrialization and colonialism and simultaneous programs of conservation beginning in the late 18th century. He focuses on varieties of environmentalism emerging in Europe and spreading in the United States by studying trends in moral criticism, scientific conservation, and artistic expressions, followed by the popular movements of the 1960s. An Anthropologist among the Marxists and Other Essays, appearing in 2001, collates and expands Guha’s earlier published pieces. His central thesis concerns the intersections of Marxist and Gandhian thought in the mind of what he calls a thinking Indian. Drawing from his own experiences at the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta, starting in the 1980s, Guha, in this collection, attempts to present a more accessible and personal work delineating the impact of figures in history who have both influenced him as well as become the subject of his criticism. Using examples such as the rise of Jayaprakash Narayan as a Gandhian-Marxist leader and the creation of a socialist faction within the Congress in 1936, Guha focuses on the tension between two contradictory ideologies. He contends that there are significant historical and sociological impulses for the appeal of both among Indian intellectuals. Here Guha highlights the tension between Indian scholars, majorly from the middle class and propelled by guilt at their relative privileges, who embraced Communism between 1917 and 1989, and those who were more critical of Communist regimes abroad and Communism’s neglect of questions of caste, creed, and gender. According to the author, the latter often turned to Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophies. Significantly, Guha’s lessons in Indian anthropology alert him to competing ideologies and subjectivities to which he is introduced during fieldwork and which he must learn to decode on returning to academia. Thus, he writes about a host of personalities spanning the Indian ideological spectrum and their continuing dialogues and debates. India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (2007) begins by articulating a crisis peculiar to the Indian historian’s vocation. If history is a study of the past and the general propensity among historians has been toward cordoning off the past as something which happened before August 15, 1947, what becomes of that which follows independence? In this, the assassination of Gandhi in 1948 appears to have further instigated the demise of history. Guha posits India as a laboratory of social conflicts. Several fault lines emerge in his study, such as those of caste, language, religion, class, and gender, all of which challenge and co-opt a more homogeneous notion of post-independence India. Guha emphasizes the twin effects of industrialization and the creation of the modern nation-state as central to social upheavals, which define the explosive national terrain of the period from 1947 to the present. The book not only traces the history of popular movements and national crises but also reflects on the impact of contending ideologies on the nation’s politics. It offers fresh insights as a comprehensive history of the evolution of the national question. Ramachandra Guha’s works have received critical acclaim for the breadth of research and the author’s sustained interest in his subjects. He has also been praised for the originality and clarity of his prose. He has been given the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award, and the Leopold-Hidy Prize for environmental history, among others, for his books on cricket and his journalistic acumen.

Further Reading Durrans, P. J. “Review of Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, his Tribals, and India, by Ramachandra Guha.” The English Historical Review, vol. 116, no. 465, Feb. 2001, pp. 273–274. Raghavan, Srinath, and Nandini Sundar, editors. A Functioning Anarchy? Essays for Ramachandra Guha. Penguin Random House India, 2021.

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Encyclopedia Entries Redclift, Michael. “Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South: Carol Briggs-Erickson, Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier Earthscan.” Land Use Policy, vol. 15, no. 2, 1998, pp. 173–174. Roy, Nabarun. “Review of India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, by Ramachandra Guha.” International Affairs, vol. 84, no. 2, Mar. 2008, pp. 399–400. Sutter, P. S. “When Environmental Traditions Collide: Ramachandra Guha’s the Unquiet Woods and U.S. Environmental History.” Environmental History, vol. 14, no. 3, Jul. 2009, pp. 543–550.

SHAYEARI DUTTA

GUIDE, THE, by R. K. Narayan The Guide (1958) is considered by many to be R.K. Narayan’s best novel and the work most representative of his writing skills. The book won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1960. In it, Raju, a tour guide, has an affair with Rosie, the unhappy wife of Marco, an archaeologist. Marco and Rosie had arrived as tourists in Malgudi, a fictional city in South India. Marco does not take kindly to his wife Rosie’s passion for dance. On the contrary, Raju encourages her, and she decides to follow her dreams and start a career in dance. This is how the rapprochement between Raju and Rosie ends in a relationship. Upon finding out, Marco leaves Rosie and goes back to Madras, and Rosie begins a new life with Raju. The relationship, however, is not approved of by Raju’s mother who leaves them. Professionally Raju becomes Rosie’s stage manager, and thanks to Raju’s vision and tactics, Rosie becomes a successful dancer. Over time Raju develops a certain vanity and wants to accumulate wealth. He gets implicated in the crime of forging Rosie’s signature and ends up in jail for two years. After serving his sentence and getting out of jail one day, he passes through the village of Mangal. There he is mistaken for a sadhu, a spiritual guide. This opportunity and his desire not to return to Malgudi in disgrace make him stay in a temple near the village of Mangal. He assumes the role of a sadhu, to the point of giving speeches and sermons to the villagers, advising them, and mediating in their problems and disputes. His reputation is good to the extent that when there is a famine in the village, the villagers believe that Raju will fast for rain. Raju confesses the whole truth to Velan, who had initially discovered him in the temple. Velan had complete faith in him, as did the villagers. Despite this confession made to Velan, things do not change, and Raju decides to continue with the fast. Hence there is a crowd and also the media gathered around Raju. On his eleventh day of fasting, Raju approaches the river as part of his daily ritual. He senses that rain is falling in the hills in the distance and decides to sink into the water. The end of the novel leaves the reader wondering whether or not Raju dies and whether or not it was raining. The central theme of the novel is Raju’s transformation from a tour guide to a spiritual guide. The work contains two stories, one featuring Raju’s life as a tour guide and his relationship with Rosie, and the second featuring his relationship as a spiritual guide with the villagers. Both stories run together and ultimately show the evolution of the protagonist and his transformation from sinner to saint. There are also collateral themes such as female sensitivity and Rosie’s passion for dancing, the marital relationship between Marco and Rosie, fidelity not only in marriage sphere but also as loyalty in actions. All these present a realistic image of society. Narayan focused on ordinary people and was able to write about the complexities of the Indian society without modifying his characteristic simplicity to conform to the trends and fashions of fiction writing. Critics and authors like Graham Greene have considered Narayan the Indian Chekhov because of the similarities in his essay, the simplicity, the beauty, and humor in tragic situations. Jhumpa Lahiri has included him among the great short story creators like O. Henry, Frank O’Connor, and Flannery O’Connor. 171

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Further Reading Jussawalla, Feroza, and Geralyn Strecker. “R. K. Narayan.” Critical Survey of Long Fiction, vol. 5, edited by Carl Rollyson. Salem Press, 2000. Kain, Geoffrey, editor. R. K. Narayan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Michigan State UP, 1993. Naik, M. K. “Two Uses of Irony: V. S. Naipaul’s the Mystic Masseur and R. K. Narayan’s the Guide.” World Literature Written in English, vol. 17, no. 2, 1978, pp. 646–655. Taylor and Francis Online, https:// doi.org/10.1080/17449857808588570. Paranjape, Makarand. “ ‘The Reluctant Guru’: R. K. Narayan and The Guide.” South Asian Review, vol. 24, no. 2, 2003, pp. 170–186. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.200 3.11932307. Rana, Amandeep. A Critical Study of the Fictional World of R. K. Narayan. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2013.

JOSE-CARLOS REDONDO-OLMEDILLA

GUPTA, SUNETRA (1965–) Sunetra Gupta was born on March 15, 1965, in Calcutta, India. To the age of eleven, Sunetra and her family would follow her father’s work to Ethiopia, Zambia, and England before returning to Calcutta – having also lived in North America. The city has a profound influence on her work. Gupta received her BSc from Princeton University in 1987 and her PhD from the University of London in 1992; she is currently a professor of theoretical epidemiology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. A supernumerary fellow of Merton College, Oxford, she sits on the European Advisory Board of Princeton University Press. Since 1992 Sunetra Gupta, the author, has published novels, written essays, and translated many poetic works of Rabindranath Tagore into English. Gupta wrote her first works of fiction in Bengali but transitioned to English with her first novel, Memories of Rain (1992). Sunetra Gupta won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1996 for her debut work, Memories of Rain (1992). Critics consistently note the reflexive style and the intelligent sensibility of her work. Her poetic and figurative language can easily be compared to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as it springs abundantly from free association and spatial time-play. Stream of consciousness figures prominently in Gupta’s work and is often exemplified by the consistent construction of long, clause-abundant sentences and paragraphs. Language and word-play are themes that consistently appear in Gupta’s creative writing, which contribute to the depth and complexity of the author’s prose. Through the 1990s, Gupta wrote and published The Glassblower’s Breath (1993), Moonlight into Marzipan (1995), and A Sin of Color (1999). Her novel, So Good in Black (2009), was long-listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2013. Gupta is rumored to be working on a book under the auspices of the Arts Council England that seeks to examine and contrast the uses of narrative in her specialties, the variable disciplines of science and literature. Language and word-play are prominent themes in Gupta’s creative work, and so too is food, as demonstrated by the alphabetical dinner in The Glassblower’s Breath and the dinner of only black food enjoyed in Moonlight into Marzipan. Literary themes and specific references abound in Gupta’s challenging work and include William Blake, Rabindranath Tagore, and Jalaluddin Rumi, among many others. Some of the less literary themes contained in Gupta’s work are often related to her scientific work. Gupta regularly writes academic articles on epidemiology topics, which often focus on the viral transmission of infectious diseases like malaria, HIV, influenza, meningitis, and COVID-19. Through our current pandemic, Gupta has been a very vocal participant in global actions relating to the pandemic and worked on early modeling teams. She was one of the three primary architects of the controversial open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration (October 4, 172

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2020), which proposed an alternative to COVID-19 lockdown strategies in favor of population-focused methods that encouraged herd immunity in healthy populations over total isolation. Semi-biographical allusions related to epidemiology appear in several of Gupta’s creative literary works, for example, meeting an attractive man while attending a Royal Society lecture in The Glassblower’s Breath. Sunetra Gupta is an accomplished scientist who received the Scientific Medal in 2007 from the Zoological Society of London and the Rosalind Franklin Award in 2009. Beyond her scientific awards, Gupta has also been nominated for several literary awards, including the Crossword Prize (1999), the Orange Prize (2000), and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature (2012). She won the Southern Arts Literary Prize in 2000 and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1997.

Further Reading Gupta, Sunetra. The Glassblower’s Breath. Orion Books, 1993. ———. Moonlight into Marzipan. Orion Books, 1995. Lourenco, José, et al. “The Impact of Host Resistance in Cumulative Mortality and the Threshold of Herd Immunity for SARS-CoV-2.” medRxiv, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory/BMJ Yale, https://doi.org/ 10.1101/2020.07.15.20154294. Recker, Mario, et al. “Transient Cross-Reactive Immune Responses Can Orchestrate Antigenic Variation in Malaria.” Nature, vol. 429, 2004, pp. 555–558. Nature, www.nature.com/articles/nature02486. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

STEPHANIE LAINE HAMILTON

HARIHARAN, GITHA (1954–) Githa Hariharan was born on September 24, 1954, in Coimbatore. She grew up in Bombay and Manila and was educated in these cities and later in the United States. She has worked with renowned publishing and media houses as a freelance professional editor and with various institutions and foundations. She has been a writer-in-residence at several universities abroad and within India. Hariharan is one of the founders of the Indian Writers’ Forum, a platform for cultural politics, and a consulting editor for the Forum’s journal of culture, Guftugu. In 1995, she successfully challenged the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act for being discriminatory against women. The case led to a landmark Supreme Court judgment in 1999. Hariharan is a social and cultural activist based in New Delhi. A staunch nurturer of citizens’ personal space, she repeatedly critiques the dynamics of social inequalities, always yearning for the society to move beyond the boundaries of caste and gender. Her writings are hauntingly lyrical yet seem to be the work of a scholar steeped in history, anthropology, politics, and cultural studies. A prominent presence among Indian writers today, her work includes six novels, several short story collections (including for children), essay collections, newspaper/journal articles, and columns. Highly acclaimed, her writings have been translated into multiple languages, including French, Italian, Urdu, Vietnamese, etc. Her essays and fiction are included in numerous anthologies; Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West included her work in their Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947–1997. Hariharan achieved critical acclaim when her first novel, The Thousand Faces of Night (1992), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1993. In this understated, tender tale, Hariharan fuses the mythical, fictional, and accurate to reveal the intricacies of Indian women’s lives. The novel, through a portrayal of three women from different generations, explores the age-old question: what makes a good woman, a dutiful daughter, wife, and mother? All three lead lives determined by the choices available to them while also nursing dreams of their own. Hariharan 173

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eloquently captures how myths, tales, music, and memories of the past are always present with us, continuously shaping/reshaping the self, helping us make sense of all that is happening around us, and constantly throwing up ideas, values, and lessons which one may accept, reject, refashion, or reinvent. Devi, the protagonist, rescues herself when she realizes that she does not have to conform to any pre-given role and can find “a story of my own.” The mythological and cultural images of the past, far from being repressive or constraining forces, become a power source offering liberation and indicating numerous possibilities of different ways of living and being. In her next book, Hariharan continues to explore the past, this time presenting storytelling as enabling a process of self-discovery. The Ghosts of Vasu Master (1994) is a layered narrative of multiple fables featuring several mysterious characters. Vasu, a teacher who recently retired after putting in forty years of service, transports Mani, a mentally challenged boy who cannot speak, to the world of fables from the Mahabharata and other folklore. The task before Vasu is to help Mani open up and begin to express himself. In retelling the old stories and events, Vasu discovers that he is relieving himself as much as his student. The sharing of stories launches him on a journey toward self-evaluation and discovery. Vasu’s efforts have a positive effect, and Mani at least partially improves. In helping his student get better, Vasu grows more at ease with the world around him. Hariharan thus demonstrates the potential of the ancient gurukul storytelling system for creating harmonious selves. With When Dreams Travel (1999), Hariharan guides her readers deep into the world of fairy tales. In this retelling of the Arabian Nights, Hariharan focuses on the women’s world where a slave girl, Dilshad, is seeking “a way out of the old story.” As Dunyazad and Dilshad narrate the stories, they rightfully claim a speaking role for all women. Their quest for identity is individual yet encompasses that of all the women struggling against subordination, gender bias, and silencing. Hariharan presents their telling of stories as embodying a strategy of survival, a vehicle to escape from the clutches of all-pervasive patriarchy. Simultaneously, the novel demonstrates how there are invariably many versions to a single story, thus emphasizing the diversity of narratives and selves. In a feminist intervention, Hariharan showcases images of sisterhood, thereby revising and reconstructing the ancient myths. In the first three novels, Hariharan celebrates India’s multicultural past, its expression in literature and the arts, and how it exists as a constant in our daily lives. The past is accessed not to perpetuate images of cultural supremacy but to better understand the self and the others. In her subsequent novels, while exploring multiple perspectives rooted in cultural heritage, Hariharan focuses openly on the contemporary communal and caste-based turmoil in India. In Times of Siege (2003), Hariharan expresses alarm at the growing influence of Hindu fundamentalism in recent times. The novel chronicles the rising cases of religious-political interference in academia, with many writers, artists, and intellectuals facing attacks by the fundamentalists they write against. The story is about Meena, a sociology student writing a thesis on survival stories of women post-1984 anti-Sikh riots. With Meena, Hariharan portrays today’s youth who believe in “doing” and putting their academic competence into action to fight injustice. So, when her mentor, Professor Shiv Murthy, is under attack by the right-wing activists for his progressive history lessons, Meena guides him on how to stage his battle against it. Her fractured leg and confinement in bed cannot stop her from adopting the cause, mustering support, drafting posters, leaflets, banners, and arranging rallies. Through Meena, Hariharan demonstrates the possibility of living with optimism and confidence while resisting all kinds of repression. In her subsequent writings, it has been impossible for her to write without being political and critical about the emerging social scenario.

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Fugitive Histories (2009), her next counter narrative, registers another courageous resistance to the suppression of secular thinking and practice. The 2002 Gujarat communal violence story features several characters in interfaith relationships. Mala lives with memories of her late husband, Asad, an artist and humanist, whom she had married in defiance of her family. Their daughter Sara is in a relationship with Rajat, the son of a Christian father and a Hindu mother. Sara meets Yasmin, a Muslim girl victim of communal atrocities. Through this framework of intermingled relations of characters with multiple identities, Hariharan recreates an identifiable image of Indian society. The riots indicate how communalism, intolerance, patriarchy, social rigidity, and prejudice threaten India’s pluralism. The violence inflicted once cannot stay buried in the past; it continues to haunt victims, survivors, and even those not directly affected long after it occurs. Hariharan effectively captures the consequences of living amidst social prejudice. She, however, continues to express faith in the possibility of a just society. This is true of her most recent offering as well. In I Have Become the Tide (2019), Hariharan portrays how caste permeates every aspect of life in India. In the acknowledgment section, Hariharan asserts that the novel is “borne out of the conviction that no writer can engage with life in India today without taking a stand, in some modest way, on the terrible inequalities that continue to ravage the lives of so many of our fellow citizens.” She weaves her story across three levels to demonstrate the broad reach of caste-based discrimination. First, it is about a professor being attacked for theorizing that a little-known but revered poet-saint from the Bhakti movement may have come from a lower caste. Secondly, it is the story of Dalit students, Satya, Asha, and Ravi, receiving education in contemporary times and facing “normal” discrimination in everyday life. The third strand, set sometime in the past, is about a lower caste couple who escape from the village to raise their son far away so that he does not have to face the confines of caste. The novel exquisitely combines the poetic and the political to leave a relevant message for the readers. Hariharan indeed is one of the finest writers today in terms of her command of the language, her poetic sensibility, her sensitivity to the world around, her remarkable talent to express emotion, her ability to paint vivid pictures with words, and above all, her passionate and steadfast commitment to values and ideals dear to her. She writes about things, at times, as they happen, asking pertinent questions without mincing words. Her works provide a rare critique of contemporary social structures, discourses, and philosophies.

Further Reading Hariharan, Githa. Githa Hariharan, https://githahariharan.com. ———. “In Search of Our Other Selves: Literature as Resistance.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 125–132. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449850701430432. Navarro-Tejero, Antonia. Gender and Caste in the Anglophone Novels of Arundhati Roy and Githa Hariharan: Feminist Issues in Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Edwin Mellen Press, 2005.

JAPPREET KAUR BHANGU

HEAT AND DUST by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust won the Booker Prize in 1975. It was her eighth novel and the last set in India. Straddling the late colonial and post-independence eras, the plot develops the parallel stories of two Englishwomen in India – the anonymous narrator and her grandfather’s first wife, Olivia. In 1923, Olivia arrives in Satipur to join her civil servant husband, Douglas. Young and vivacious, she is bored with the small British community until, at a

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dinner party, she meets a charismatic Indian prince, the Nawab of Khatm, who captivates her. Their romance leads to her pregnancy, which Olivia terminates. Subsequently, she elopes with the Nawab and spends the rest of her life in an unnamed town, X. Fifty years later, the narrator, hoping to piece together Olivia’s life (and on a journey of self-discovery), comes to Satipur. There she rents a room from Inder Lal and with him visits places mentioned in Olivia’s letters – the Palace in Khatm, the shrine of Baba Firdaus. At Baba Firdaus’ grove, the narrator and Lal, like Olivia and the Nawab before them, engage in intimacy which leads to her pregnancy. But unlike Olivia, the narrator keeps the baby. Eventually, she too relocates to X. The interleaving of the two plotlines contrasts two Indias – colonial and postcolonial. Operating as a metaphor for the shift in Indo-British relations between the two historical periods are the two women’s pregnancies – Olivia aborts her baby while the narrator keeps hers. The novel thus seems to suggest that colonial arrogance and racism rendered abortive any meaningful social relations – friendship, romance – between the colonizers and the colonized: Dr. Saunders considers Olivia “weak and rotten” for being intimate with the Nawab, and Satipur’s British community dismisses the romance as no more than a ploy by the Nawab to humiliate them. Conversely, decolonization allows fruitful relationships to occur. Thus, unlike Olivia (or Adela Quested in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India), the narrator, arriving in India in the 1970s, can immerse herself in Indian society noting, “what must also be strange is the way we are living among them – no longer apart, but eating, their food and often wearing Indian clothes.” What is more, the novel inverts colonialist views. Contrary to the stereotype of the colonized man’s desire for the memsahib communicated to Olivia by Mrs. Saunders – “they’ve got only one thought in their heads, and that’s to you-know-what with a white woman” – the novel presents the Englishwomen as the seducers. Both initiate intimacy: Olivia, alone with the Nawab, lays her hand on his chest “as if to soothe him.” Similarly, the narrator confesses that “I did have a desire, and a strong one: to get close to [Inder Lal] . . . I laid my hand on his.” Further, the narration mocks the missionary who in the 1970s expressed a colonialist disdain for Indian society, saying, “She’s wearing a white nightgown that encases her from head to foot. . . . She is paper-white, vaporous – yes, a ghost.” Shrouded in “white” colonialist ideologies, the missionary is a vestige of the past, a ghost. That said, India of Heat and Dust is the exotic Orient with despotic Nawabs, opulent palaces, women in purdah, sati, enlightenment-seeking hippies, poverty, and the sweltering heat. The novel’s depiction of Indian society offended some Indian critics. Nissim Ezekiel complained that the novel was “viciously prejudiced in its vision of the Indian scene” (“Two Readers and Their Texts” in Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities). On the other hand, a reviewer for The Washington Post remarked of Heat and Dust that “this delicately written novel is, because of its setting and theme of Anglo-Indian relationships, reminiscent of E.M. Forster’s great novel, A Passage to India. It does not suffer by comparison.” That Heat and Dust has remained in print for the past (almost) fifty years is testimony to its continuing popularity among readers.

Further Reading Agarwal, Ramlal. Outsiders and Insiders: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Indian Writing in English. Partridge Publishing, 2021. Crane, Ralph J. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Twayne’s English Authors Series, general editor Kinley E. Roby. Twayne Publishers, 1992. Gooneratne, Yasmin. Silence, Exile, and Cunning: Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 2nd ed. Orient Longman, 1983.

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DEBALI MOOKERJEA-LEONARD

HOSAIN, ATTIA (1913–1998) Novelist, short story writer, and broadcaster Attia Hosain was born in a wealthy landowning family in Lucknow in the province of Uttar Pradesh in British India. She was the daughter of Shahid Hosain Kidwai, Taluqdar of Gadia, a progressive intellectual of his time. His advocacy of women’s education, love of culture, and interest in politics had a remarkable influence on his daughter. Hosain was privileged to receive both Oriental and Western education. Her early schooling at the La Martinière School for Girls, Lucknow, helped her learn Western liberal values. In contrast, lessons in Arabic and Persian at home kept her connected to her traditional roots. The first woman to graduate from a Taluqdar family, she attended Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow. In 1933, she married Ali Bahadur Habibullah, a distinguished government official. Though never actively involved in politics, Hosain was inclined toward socialism all her life. Her family’s involvement in politics largely shaped her political consciousness. Encouraged by Sarojini Naidu, she attended the 1933 All India Women’s Conference in Calcutta. She also reported on it for several Lucknow and Calcutta newspapers. Her involvement with the Progressive Writers’ Association inspired her to write and publish short stories in the 1930s and the 1940s in many newspapers and magazines, including The Statesman and The Pioneer. In 1947, Hosain moved to England with her family a few months before India’s independence. She remained there for the rest of her life, choosing not to return to India or Pakistan. She died on January 23, 1998, in London. Attia Hosain wrote and published her prose works in English. Her fame as a writer is based chiefly on two works, Phoenix Fled (1953), a collection of short stories and Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), an autobiographical novel. After Sunlight on a Broken Column, Hosain did not publish again during her lifetime save a culinary essay, “Of Meals and Memories,” in Antonia Till-edited Loaves and Wishes: Writers Writing on Food (1992). A posthumously published miscellaneous collection, Distant Traveller: New and Selected Fiction (2013), added a further dimension to her literary legacy. As for her other activities, Hosain worked for the Eastern Service of the BBC. She did a voice-over in the Urdu versions of radio plays like Hamlet, Othello, and plays by Harold Pinter and J.M. Synge. She also presented talks for the BBC Third Programme in English. In 1961, she acted in Peter Mayne’s play The Bird of Time on the West End Stage. Throughout her long life, she remained a public figure, remarkable for her wit, elegance, and cosmopolitan humanism. Stories in the collection Phoenix Fled are realistic, compassionate, and insightful. The fragments of life portrayed through these stories are eloquent with the contrast between the high and low-born, past and present, tradition and modernity, as well as the East and the West. Out of the twelve tales of the collection, the title story “Phoenix Fled” is remarkable for its oblique reference to the horrors of the partition and for introducing an ancient narrator rooted in the tradition. “After the Storm” evokes a sense of loss caused by the partition through its portrayal of pallid childhood. Though written by an upper-class writer, these stories portray the poor and the powerless with an impressive familiarity. 177

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For critics and readers alike, Hosain’s most acclaimed work is Sunlight on a Broken Column. The novel is about the disintegration of the feudal system, India’s freedom struggle, and the human cost of the partition. Laila, the protagonist-narrator, takes the reader inside a conservative feudal household. Hosain’s compassionate narrative style blends human reality with the historical and leaves a poignant image of a bygone era and forgotten values. In the novel, people like Abida and Hakiman Bua cling to the grandeur of the past, while Hamid emulates the colonial masters. Asad and Laila, in their different ways, incline toward nationalist politics. What makes this novel a modern Indian classic is Hosain’s courage to depict the Indian and the British characters with equal objectivity and sympathy. Published in her centenary year, Distant Traveller contains some of her previously unpublished works, including an unfinished novel titled “No New Lands, No New Seas.” This unfinished piece is a pessimistic narrative that goes back and forth in time and describes the life of the protagonist, Murad. He is constantly irked by the dark skin that otherizes him from the crowd of Londoners. In fact, to Murad, London never becomes a home of choice but remains a refuge of convenience. Strong ties with his cultural roots gradually make Murad contemptuous of the capitalistic ways of the metropolis. This collection also features Attia Hosain’s last piece, “Deep Roots.” Written in 1997, this piece is about ‘culture,’ ‘language,’ and ‘belonging.’ While many stories in this collection were published earlier, stories like “The Storm” and “The Leader of Women” were its exclusive additions. A dignified yet persistent female voice marks Attia Hosain’s works, often oscillating between an imperial past and a decolonized present. Though Hosain was a diasporic writer, her works reveal a solid affiliation to her homeland and traditional roots. Critical interest in Hosain’s works has been at once solid and sustained. While K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar and William Walsh have found fault with her lack of structural cohesiveness, Mulk Raj Anand, Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, and Ritu Menon have all praised her for a sensitive engagement with the subaltern voices and a bold reappraisal of India’s nationalist historiography.

Further Reading Brians, Paul. Modern South Asian Literature in English. Greenwood Press, 2003, pp. 75–85. Burton, Antoinette. Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India. Oxford UP, 2003, pp. 101–135. Jain, Jasbir. “Purdah, Patriarchy, and the Tropical Sun: Womanhood in India.” The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics. California UP, 2008, pp. 231–247. Joannou, Mary. Women’s Writing, Englishness and National and Cultural Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 153–160.

AMIT BHATTACHARYA

HOSKOTE, RANJIT (1969–) Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, art critic, and cultural theorist. Born in Mumbai, he finished high school at the Bombay Scottish School. At Elphinstone College, he studied politics, sociology, and economics and earned a postgraduate degree in English literature and aesthetics from the University of Bombay. Hoskote has authored several collections of poetry: Zones of Assault (1991), The Sleepwalker’s Archive, Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems 1985–2005, I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (2013), Central Time (2014), Pale Ancestors (poems by Ranjit Hoskote and paintings by

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Atul Dodiya, 2008), Jonahwhale (2018), The Atlas of Lost Beliefs (2020), and Hunchprose (2021). He has extended the literary tradition of Indian Anglophone poets like Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, and Arun Kolatkar. There is a strong sense of belonging as well as isolation in his poems. He is the only poet of his generation who was consciously indebted to the poets before him in terms of literary conventions and styles. One of the anthologies he edited of fourteen Indian poets is Reasons for Belonging (2002). The phrase indicates his position in the literary tradition. Regarding Ezekiel, he talks about the poet’s “sustained meditation on the act of poetry, its ability to testify to experience, but much more vitally, to act as a mode of knowledge”; in Arun Kolatkar, he treasures “nourished . . . by his private engagements with literature, painting, design, and society. . . . Unlike many other poets, who struggle to sustain their sensibilities against the grain of their day-jobs, Mr. Kolatkar profited from his involvement in visualization and design.” In his collection of poetry, Central Time, the poems concurrently move on different paths. He borrows from several literary conventions and incorporates references that remind the readers of Sanskrit poets, ghazals of Ghalib, Don Quixote, and the Persian miniature master Kamāl ud-Din Behzād. While reading Hoskote’s poems, it is impossible to miss the daily and mundane scenes filled with symbolic metaphors. “A caravan of domes/hangs in the scored air. . . .” [“Desert”], “It’s raining daggers. I’ll wake up drenched, skin bruised, eyes stung by the flute. . . .” [“Rain”], “rust” peels from trees [“Portrait of an Unknown Master”], a “singing breath” is “anchored by ledgers.” [“Rehearsal for Departure”]. His use of contrasts draws the reader to interpret and reexperience reality as a common modernist’s use of metaphors would, but often contorts it. One of Hoskote’s significant projects is a translation of vakhs by the medieval Kashmiri poet Lal Ded, titled I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded. The introduction states, I will refer to this mystic-poet by her most celebrated and non-sectarian appellation, “Lal Ded.” In the colloquial, this means “Grandmother Lal”; more literally, it means “Lal the Womb,” a designation that connects her to the mother goddesses whose cults of fecundity and abundance form the deep substratum of Indic religious life. This translation is not merely a modern poet trying to interpret a medieval poet’s words but also trying to invoke a different history, a history not found in the metanarratives. Lal Ded’s histories are trials of the self. The poet’s intimacy with the material is reflected in the extensive introduction, a background for understanding Lalla and her times, her placement within the spiritual histories and currents of Kashmir up to the present, and finally, his approach to translating this material. Hoskote’s poems in his new collection, Hunchprose, place him as someone who deserves to be read alongside those poets for whom language is a matter of fidelity. He is forever looking to find, to belong, yet elusive about his center of being. He is ready to lose his center because he is drawn to the periphery. Hoskote’s work has been published in Poetry Review  (London),  Wasafiri,  The Iowa Review,  Green Integer Review,  Fulcrum (annual),  Lyric Poetry Review,  West Coast Line,  Kavya Bharati,  Prairie Schooner, The Four-Quarters Magazine, and  Indian Literature. He has edited an anthology of contemporary Indian verse, has been a co-translator of the German novelist and essayist Ilija Trojanow, and translator of the Marathi poet Vasant Abaji Dahake. He has been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award by the Sahitya Akademi.

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Further Reading Hoskote, Ranjit, editor. Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets. Viking, 2002. ———. I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Dĕd. Penguin Random House India, 2013. ———. Central Time. Penguin Random House India, 2014.

SUCHETANA BANERJEE

HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS, A, by V.S. Naipaul A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) is V.S. Naipaul’s best-known novel and the one that launched him to fame. The work is based on the life of Naipaul’s father and essentially narrates the life of Mohun Biswas, born in rural Trinidad and Tobago to Indian parents. It is his longest novel, and it can be said that there is no plot as the reader knows what will happen, and the prologue gives advance information about his death and the fate of his house. The narrator himself refers to him as born “in the wrong way” and with an extra finger. A scholar predicts that the newborn will be a lecher and a spendthrift, never amount to anything and be a drain on his family. His life is nothing but the life of an average man, but it is also a series of misunderstandings. Things always seem to go wrong for him. He lives in many houses and is always trying to have his own home, which can give him the independence and identity he aspires for. This is the central theme of the work. Mr. Biswas grows up in his father’s home, but when his father dies, his mother sells the house. Circumstances mean that he, though high caste, is poor and has to marry into the Tulsi family. This means that he does not follow the usual Indian tradition but rather the opposite. Consequently, he goes to live with his in-laws in Hanuman House, where he feels displaced. The Tulsi family finds him work, first in a store and then as a foreman on a sugar cane farm, but he fails hopelessly. The same happens when he tries to build his own house and fails twice. In the end, when he finally gets his own home, he is overwhelmed because the house is built on swampy ground. On top of that, he loses his job, and it is then that he dies at the age of forty-six. The work belongs to the Dickensian tradition, despite being set in Trinidad. The novel presents the life of Mr. Biswas as he struggles for self-determination and a modern idea of success in trying to secure a home of his own. It is also the story of an odd one out or a man who does not fit into the world. He is both a doer and a receiver. He suffers minor tragedies, but he also causes them. It is a sad yet comic story that is not a scurrilous indictment of wrongdoing but the tragic and comic description of a man whose ambition was more significant than he could achieve. This refers to all the roles he assumes: son, son-in-law, father, husband, and employee. His life is an actual failure, yet Naipaul manages to make this story one of the greatest works of literature, a work praised by readers and critics simultaneously. The work does not cease to be a narrated expression of the ideals of freedom, responsibility, and respect for individuality. Biswas pursues a simple dream; he wants a home for his family; in the journey toward that goal, he will understand that “home” also means a functional culture of sustainable values. He believes there is an order and a destiny in the role of civilization within the ultimate purpose of existence. Along with this, Naipaul shows the search for a settled, civilized existence, something consubstantial to the human race. Compared in life with Conrad, Dickens, and Tolstoy, he also had a special gift for criticism and exonerated neither colonizer nor colonized from his scrutiny. Although he was a complex man to know, among other skills, he had a mutated Hindu view that all the world was an illusion and that only the self was authentic. His writing shows him as an observer who narrated the outside world accurately. 180

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Further Reading Hayward, Helen. The Enigma of V S Naipaul: Sources and Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pal, Ghanshyam. “Nostalgia Though Diasporic Perception in V. S. Naipaul’s a House for Mr. Biswas.” International Journal of Advanced Research (IJAR), vol. 4, Jun. 2016, pp. 2133–2137. IJAR, http:// doi.org/10.21474/IJAR01/872. Radman, Arsalan. “The Reciprocity of Home and Identity in V. S. Naipaul’s A  House for Mr. Biswas: Postcolonial Dilemma of Deracination.” International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, vol. 8, no. 3, 2018, pp. 72–76. IJSRP, https://doi.org/10.29322/IJSRP.8.3.2018.p7512. Tewarie, Bhoendradatt. “A House for Mr. Biswas Revisted: Ethnicity, Culture, Geography, and Beyond.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 2–3, 2002, pp. 7–29. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40654256. Verma, K. D. “V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas: Poetics of History, Biography, Modernity and Culture.” South Asian Review, vol. 26, no. 1, 2005, pp. 19–39.

JOSE-CARLOS REDONDO-OLMEDILLA

HOUSE OF BLUE MANGOES, THE, by David Davidar The House of Blue Mangoes is David Davidar’s first novel, published in 2002. It is a neatly written novel about three generations of the Dorai family living in a small coastal village, Chevathar, in Southern India. The novel weaves a tale of caste, class, and religious tensions in a society under colonial rule. On the one hand, it is the story of a small village as it struggles against colonial depravities. On the other hand, it is the story of the male heads of the family of the Dorai clan as they try to find a balance between personal ambition and communal aspirations. Set in the pre-independence era from 1899 to 1947, the novel recounts the story of Solomon, his son Daniel, and his grandson Kannan. Each protagonist is a reluctant hero when confronted with life-defining choices. In the first part, “Chavathar,” we are introduced to the village and its headman, Solomon Dorai. At forty, Solomon is already tired of keeping warring castes at bay, negotiating developmental projects such as roads from the colonial authorities, and keeping colonial taxes down during times of famine. He is the wealthiest landowner in the village but is not immune to famines. When the novel opens, the rains have failed for three years. Added to this are the growing powers of Vedhars who wish to settle down in the village permanently. When a poor thirteen-year-old Andavar girl is raped, the Vedhars try to take over the village, claiming that Solomon had failed to keep the peace. The conflict is resolved only through a one-on-one caste war in which Solomon takes on the Vedhars. Solomon wins the battle but dies on the field, and his family is displaced. In the second part, “Doraipuram,” Daniel, the elder son, gets an education in the Government Medical College and learns the traditional Siddha medicine at his maternal grandfather’s house in Nagercoil. He achieves excellent success due to his medical practice and becomes a business tycoon by developing a skin whitening cream. Over the years, against the background of the Freedom Movement, Daniel steadily builds his business. He begins to acquire land in Chavathar, where he sets up a modern colony, Doraipuram, inviting all of his one hundred and twenty-three relatives to come and settle down. The colony is a success for some time, but because of the parasitic nature of the relatives, he dies a sour man, having lost much of his acquisitions. In the third part, “Pulimed,” the narrative shifts to Daniel’s son, Thirumoolar, or Kannan as he is lovingly called. Kannan plays the rebel choosing to marry Helen, an Anglo-Indian girl from Madras, and taking up a job in the Nilgiri tea estates, rejecting his legacy. He tries to integrate into a highly colonial society of white elites. However, set against the Second World War and the British obsession with the empire, Kannan feels slighted and fails to make 181

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a mark among the Whites. Helen leaves him, and Kannan returns to Chavathar to begin his life anew. The book ends with hope as the country is set to gain freedom from the British in 1947. It is noteworthy for many of its well-rounded minor characters, such as Charity Dorai, Lily Dorai, Father Ashworth, Vakeel Perumal, Muthu Vedhar, Aaron, Freddie, and Harrison. The crossreferencing of Jim Corbett’s Man-eaters of Kumaon in the latter part of the novel gives it an aura of historical authenticity.

Further Reading Iyer, Sharada, N. “Caste and the Casteless Outcaste: A Study of Subaltern Literature.” The Indian English Literature, vol. 6, edited by Basavaraj Naikar. Atlantic, 2007, pp. 71–80. Joshi, Rita. “Seeds of Communal Violence: A Note on David Davidar’s the House of Blue Mangoes.” Contemporary Indian Writing in English: Critical Perceptions, vol. 2, edited by N. D. R. Chandra. Sarup and Sons, 2005, pp. 231–237. Singh, Anita. “Novel as Imagined History: David Davidar’s the House of Blue Mangoes.” Studies in Literature in English, vol. 9, edited by Mohit Kumar Ray. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2004, pp. 204–215.

NIVEDITA MISRA

I DREAMT A HORSE FELL FROM THE SKY by Adil Jussawalla Adil Jussawalla’s I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky: Poems, Fiction and Non-fiction (1962– 2015) published in 2015 chooses to voice the poetic concern over confusion in language of expression and endangers the excepted ways of communication. Writing poetry, newspaper columns, reviews, and critical essays, Jussawalla finally publishes a compilation of his works – poems, fiction, and nonfiction – spanning his entire career from 1962 till 2015. He sets himself free of norms and forges “a new strain of the English language, a new tonality” (Jussawalla, 2015: xxiii) as stated by Vivek Narayanan in the introduction of the book. Using the tone and diction that is “neither British nor American” (xxiii) Jussawalla portrays ‘misfits’ in his anthology that includes rereading of his earlier poems, an unfinished novel Strays, a television script “Chakravyula” and few prose pieces. Depictions of castaways have remained central to Jussawalla’s writings. True to the image of an Indian Parsi poet he alludes to a community of outcasts or outsiders. Jussawalla who claims to have suffered racial discrimination in the West and had rejected making London his home and takes refuge in India, his surrogate motherland. He affiliates with people of all cultures and lands – ancient and modern – who are homeless, misfits, powerless – and attempts to become their messiah. Strays, the unfinished novel, embraces such characters across the world along with few other prose topics such as “Naipaul Clarifies,” “Eliot and his Women,” “Nadine Gordimer: Hope for a Beloved Country” where the ‘misunderstood poets’ are allowed to speak and give a clarification to the charges levied against them. In “Beowulf Refuses to Die” taking reference from the very early hero ‘Beowulf’ in English literature the question of national and lingual identity is raised only to introduce the gap in the construction of culture: “Beowulf is an English poem without an English hero. . . . Yet it’s an English poem, though written in an English we don’t recognize” (Jussawalla, 2015: 270). Both the fiction and the nonfiction sections are experimental writings that are a pleasure to read as they make the readers open to the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the creation of language, culture, and nation. The book also has selected poems from Jussawalla’s early publications such as The Land’s End (1962), Missing Person (1976), Trying to Say Goodbye (2011), and The Right Kind of Dog (2013). Speaking of his youthful solitary life and his political ideals, the poems metaphorically 182

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speak of life’s journey of all those who are left with no joys in life. Universalizing unhappiness and homelessness a common desire is threaded for identification and union, “ ‘We’re all castaways/here,’ and offer me water” (“Castaway City,” 2015: 6). Water becomes a metaphor of desire and an alliance that can bring together the underdogs of society who live “on dust, on soot, and on the dirt on their surfaces, on what falls from dog’s teeth . . .” (2015: 111) and bring them together for a liberated existence. Finally hope is installed in the poem “So this curse be lightly lifted-/Or to make us believe it will be-/so our days get no heavier,/it’ll soon be sunrise” (2015, 10). Bearing witness to the plights of “missing men,” the book with its collection of poems, stories, and essays voices Jussawalla’s efforts in presenting a morally compromised world with all its absurdities. In the eponymous prose “I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky” the human brain as the “maker of dreams and unmaker of lives” (2015, 304) provides a sense of wonder at life’s surprises and the poetic vision through a dream sequence that replicates it for a better understanding. Mimicking Freud’s dream interpretations that could not assist in reading the poetic psyche in Jussawalla, the sensual desire becomes the flying horse of the poetic dream that has no limitation and glides over mountains and streams only to fall off from the sky like a kite and becomes a fox preying on his friend, chicken, who is being roasted. Following the practice of metaphysical poets Jussawalla yokes images of horse/kite, fox/chicken with violence only to shake the readers from their comfort zone and force them to empathize with the suffering lot. Invoking eroticism with the sensuality of bilingual terms for ‘rain’ such as the energetic Hindi word barsat, and Marathi word paos sounding close to the English word ‘piss’ the writings as in “Dilip Chitre: Way ahead” (275) attempts to reach out to the international readers who remain outside the pleasure boundaries for depending upon the translated versions of the Indian texts. Jussawalla makes his writings a means rather than an end, a means to be united with the minority populace across the world. In his endeavor to tempt the readers across national boundaries to read Indian works in original or in Indian English is his desire to entice the native English-speaking population that once rejected Jussawalla as the ‘other’ to come out of their lingual pride and learn language of the colonized world to seek ultimate pleasure from the literary pieces. I Dreamt a Horse fell from the Sky: Poems, Fiction and Non-fiction (1962–2015) is yet another thoughtful contribution of Jussawalla to the world of Indian English writing. It would be a great source of learning for the readers, especially in terms of understanding the nature of one’s nationalism, language, and cultural contrasts.

Further Reading Jussawalla, Adil. Maps for a Mortal Moon: Essays and Entertainments, edited by Jerry Pinto. Aleph Book Company, 2014. Zecchini, Laetitia. “Adil Jussawalla and the Double Edge of Poetry.” A History of Indian Poetry in English, edited by Rosinka Chaudhuri. Cambridge UP, 2016.

RASHEDA PARVEEN

IMAGINARY HOMELANDS: ESSAYS AND CRITICISM 1981–1991 by Salman Rushdie Imaginary Homelands is Rushdie’s first collection of nonfiction, published in 1991, two years after he had gone into hiding due to the fatwa (legal opinion) issued against The Satanic Verses. It opens with a brief introduction by Rushdie himself and is divided into thirteen sections, containing seventy essays. 183

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The first section contains essays focusing on Midnight’s Children and Rushdie’s position as a diasporic Indian living in Britain. He explores both the fecundity and the imprecision of his memories of the Bombay of his childhood, asserting that because he writes outside of India, he “is obliged to deal with broken mirrors.” Although this makes the character Saleem Sinai an unreliable narrator, it also enables him to explore the plurality of India. The second section explores some of the political crises of the subcontinent in the 1980s. It includes essays on the assassination of Indira Gandhi and Zia Ul-Haq’s “Islamization” program in Pakistan, which Rushdie argues enabled “the ugliest possible face of the faith.” Section three focuses on how literature is defined. In “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist,” Rushdie declares that this label stifles new branching of the English language being written by Britain’s former colonies and goes against the complexity of history. He proposes the idea of authenticity be replaced by an embrace of eclecticism. Sections four, five, and six delve into the nature of recent immigrants to Britain from former colonies, which has led to a resurgence of nostalgia about the Raj and aggressive policing of black and brown neighborhoods. Section six ends with Rushdie’s interview of Edward Said, where they discuss his trilogy of Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and After the Last Sky. Rushdie’s book reviews make up the bulk of sections seven through eleven and demonstrate the global nature of his reading habits and literary affiliations. There are discussions of writers from Britain (Graham Greene), Africa (Nadine Gordimer), Italy (Italo Calvino), Germany (Gunter Grass), Russia (Andrei Sakharov), Columbia (Gabriel García Márquez), and America (Kurt Vonnegut). The volume’s final section is focused on the place of religion in the modern world and The Satanic Verses controversy. It begins with Rushdie’s 1981 review of V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers, where he critiques Naipaul for oversimplifying the role of Islam in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. “ ‘In God We Trust’ ” was written in 1985 and revised in 1990. Rushdie discusses his largely secular upbringing and personal relationship with Islam, as well as the role religion has begun to play more forcefully in politics around the world. “In Good Faith” directly addresses the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses and includes some of Rushdie’s most passionate defenses of the novel. He insists that the book was written as “a love-song to our mongrel selves” and defends the sections which have been denounced as insulting to Islam and the Prophet. “Is Nothing Sacred?” was originally published in The Independent on February 4, 1990. This essay begins with Rushdie sharing that he grew up in a household where books were kissed if they were dropped on the floor, then makes an argument that literature, as “the frontier between the self and the world,” should be a privileged “arena of discourse.” “One Thousand Days in a Balloon” is the final essay (replacing “Why I  Have Embraced Islam” in the first hardcover edition), where Rushdie uses the metaphor of an impaired hot air balloon which can only carry one passenger to safety. Having spent more than two-and-a-half years metaphorically living in that balloon, he feels “simultaneously exposed and sealed off,” worried that he might end up in “the dustbin of history.” He asserts his 1990 embrace of Islam was misguided, as he had thought it would enable a wide-ranging conversation about the religion, which he argues was blocked by “Actually Existing Islam.” Some reviews of Imaginary Homelands, pointing to the slight nature of some of work included, questioned whether the collection would have been published without the infamy surrounding The Satanic Verses. Other reviews noted the eloquent defense of literature in several selections as well as the vibrancy of Rushdie’s discussions of the immigrant experience.

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Further Reading Dhar, Subir. “Salman Rushdie: On Homelands and the Imaginary.” Mapping out the Rushdie Republic: Some Recent Surveys, edited by Tapan Kumar Ghosh and Prasanta Bhattacharyya. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, pp. 332–342. Sabin, Margery. “Review: Purists and Hybrids: The Progeny of Empire.” College English, vol. 54, no. 4, Apr. 1992, pp. 462–468.

PENNIE TICEN

IMAM AND THE INDIAN, THE, by Amitav Ghosh Amitav Ghosh is an award-winning Indian author who writes on communal violence and the environment. The Imam and the Indian is a compilation of essays, book reviews, research papers, a translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s short story “Kshudhita Pashan,” and biographical and personal writings. The essays span 1986–2002. In the acknowledgments, Ghosh admits the subjects are “heterogeneous,” therefore a matrix of imagination rather than a simple categorization is helpful. What began as “notes and jottings” later became literary pieces that shed light on cultural barriers, shared history, memories, linguistic diversity, endangered cultures, uprootedness, war, communal violence, economy and literature, local culture, diaspora, fundamentalism, and the relationship between translation and culture. Ghosh’s travel experiences and the book’s cartography make it nonfictional. The first autobiographical narrative bearing the same title as the book focuses on the downright ignorance of Khamees and the Imam about the Indian culture and tradition. It focuses on preconceived notions that lead to chaos in the society. In the “Tibetan Dinner” and the “Four Corners,” Ghosh ruminates on the relationship between borders and cultural identity. “An Egyptian in Baghdad” deals with the narrator’s friendship with Nabeel and his cousin Ismail with whom he had developed a strong bonding during his research trip to Egypt. The story highlights the psychological transformation of a person who has been uprooted from his native land. In “The Ghost of Mrs. Gandhi” Ghosh probes the role of writers in the society and their literary responses to violence. “The Human Comedy in Cairo” is a biography of the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner, Naguib Mahfouz. Ghosh draws attention to the rich literature of the non-English world, fundamentalist repression of creative freedoms and the significance of translation in crossing language frontiers. “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel” and “Empire and Soul: A Review of the Baburnama” are book reviews that illustrate religious, social, historical, and economic themes. The collection includes three pieces that Ghosh sought to publish in a scientific publication. He explores historical occurrences in these compositions. For instance, “The Slave of MS. H.6” focuses on the historical connection between Egypt and India in the 12th century; it centers around a letter written by Khalaf ibn Iṣḥaq, who lived in Aden, to Abraham ibn Yijū, his friend in Mangalore. The twelfth chapter, “The Diaspora in Indian Culture,” highlights the culture of the diaspora and its impact on world culture and the native country of the diasporic population. It also shows the influence of the native land on the creative imagination of the Indian diasporic writers and their take on the historical, cultural, social, and political aspects of their homeland. The remaining chapters deal with the United Nations peacekeeping force, cultural diversity, fundamentalism, Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja, the narrator’s childhood memories of the books in his grandfather’s bookcase, and the impact of world events on Ghosh’s different novels, to mention a few.

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Ghosh translates Tagore’s short story “Khshudita Pashan” as “The Hunger of Stones.” It portrays Ghosh’s persona, albeit differently (as a translator in this case). The colonial setting of the story relates to culture, history, and civilization. The concluding chapter, “The Ghat of the Only World: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn,” is Ghosh’s description of his meeting with Ali. Ghosh and his writings have received outstanding critical acclaim. Bhaskar Ghose proclaims that “if anyone comes close to a modern renaissance man, it has to be him [Ghosh],” while Shobhana Bhattacharji argues that though Ghosh himself is “wary of labels,” “[th]ere is enough evidence . . . to consider Ghosh as chiefly a travel writer” (Bhattacharji). Writing about The Imam and the Indian, Clifford observes that “in Ghosh’s account . . . [e]veryone’s on the move, and has been for centuries: dwelling-in-travel, while Chambers notes that the “collection . . . underscore[s] . . . [Ghosh’s] commitment to ‘only connect’ ” (Clifford).

Further Reading Bhattacharji, Shobhana. “Amitav Ghosh’s Travel Writing: ‘In an Antique Land,’ ‘Dancing in Cambodia’ and ‘The Imam and the Indian’.” Indian Literature, vol. 47, no. 6 (218), 2003, pp. 197–213. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23341083. Accessed 1 Jul. 2022. Chambers, Claire. “Review of Amitav Ghosh’s The Imam and the Indian.” Moving Worlds, vol. 2, no. 2, 2003. Academia, www.academia.edu/7538983/Review_of_Amitav_Ghosh_s_The_Imam_and_the_Indian. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Harvard UP, 1997. Ghose, Bhaskar. “Book Review: Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Imam and the Indian’.” India Today, 19 Aug. 2002, www.indiatoday.in/magazine/society-the-arts/books/story/20020819-book-review-the-imam-and-theindian-author-amitav-ghosh-794567-2002-08-19. Accessed 22 Jan. 2022. Ghosh, Amitav. The Imam and the Indian. Penguin, 2002.

PAWAN KUMAR

IN THE CONVENT OF LITTLE FLOWERS by Indu Sundaresan Indu Sundaresan’s fourth work, In the Convent of Little Flowers (2008), is a collection of nine poignant short stories. The first story, “Shelter of Rain,” was published in The Vincent Brothers Review (2000). The protagonist, Padmini, is a young woman adopted as a little girl by an American couple, Diana and Tom, from a convent orphanage in India. After twenty-three years, Padmini receives a letter from India that her biological mother, who is on her deathbed, wishes to see her. The protagonist’s journey to meet her birth mother parallels her memory excursion into the past. The second story, “Three and a Half Seconds,” narrates the tragic tale of a couple, Meha and Chandar, who escape the drought in their village and come to Mumbai for livelihood. They work very hard, Meha as maid and Chandar as watchmen, to provide for their son. However, their son, Bikaner, turns out to be arrogant, selfish, and dangerously abusive and brutally beats his parents, eventually leading to their suicide. The following story, “The Faithful Wife,” first published in The Pen and the Key: 50th Anniversary Anthology of Pacific Northwest Writers (2005), depicts a young journalist, Ram, arriving in his village at his grandmother’s request as there is to be a sati of a twelve-year-old child widow. The fourth story, “Fire,” shows Payal, the narrator returning from America to confront her grandmother for the murder of her younger sister, Kamala, and her Muslim lover, Aziz. The grandmother instigated others in lapidation of the young couple, fearing the disgrace their marriage would bring to the family. “The Most Unwanted” is the fifth story about an unwed young mother, Parvati, and her father, Nathan. Nathan cannot accept his illegitimate grandson, Krishna, and resents the child. Raja, who fathered the child, gets on with his life, and only Parvati bears the brunt of the society. 186

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The sixth story, “The Key Club,” exhibits the hollowness of the upper-class life. The story whirls around a wealthy couple who form a crucial club with seven other married couples to switch their sexual partners for a night. They all assume imaginary names, like the protagonist Ram and his wife Sita, to separate themselves from their dreary real lives. “Bedside Dreams,” published in India Currents (November 2004) and Verve magazine (India, July–August 2005), is about an elderly bedridden couple who have lived twenty-three years of their lives in a retirement home, abandoned by their twelve children. The narrator is the wife of the eighty-threeyear-old Kamal, who is in a month-long coma after a heart attack while she has been paralyzed for the last four months. “The Chosen One” is the eighth story about a mysterious character claiming to be the chosen one. The mysterious narrator travels across time and lives, and in the story, he is reincarnated in 1652 in a small Indian kingdom where he comes across an enchantress. In “Hunger,” the ninth and final story of the collection, a middle-aged woman named Nitu suffers an unhappy marriage with her husband, Prakrit. However, Nitu’s life changes when she encounters Sheela, a young woman living in her building, whose husband Jai, is also Prakrit’s colleague. Nitu rediscovers her hidden self and arrives at the crossroads when she decides to leave her husband. In the author’s note, Sundaresan explains that most of the stories are inspired by actual events, like “Shelter of Rain,” based on someone her friend knew, “Three and Half a Seconds,” and “The Faithful Wife,” based on newspaper articles. The stories are surcharged with pathos as the author uses stark and unsettling images of violence, burning alive, stoning, and suicide. The collection deals with human relationships, synthesis of East and West, patriarchy, social pathologies, abandonment, and rapidly changing times. In the author’s own words, all stories deal with ‘an intense moment’ and the narrators’ or the protagonists’ response to it. These are revelatory, revealing social deformities and how society takes precedence over individual lives.

Further Reading “Review of In the Convent of Little Flowers by Indu Sundaresan.” Publishers Weekly, 20 Oct. 2008, www. publishersweekly.com/9781416586098. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023. Thomas, Lee. “Review of In the Convent of Little Flowers, by Indu Sundaresan.” Fiction Writers Review, 4 Mar. 2009, https://fictionwritersreview.com/review/in-the-convent-of-little-flowers-by-indu-sunda resan/. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

M. ANJUM KHAN

IN THE COUNTRY OF DECEIT by Shashi Deshpande Published in 2008, In the Country of Deceit is a widely acclaimed novel. Probing the nature of love and the man-woman relationship in a traditional society, Deshpande tells the story from the woman’s point of view to raise the question of hierarchical freedoms, right and wrong, ethics, and morality. The novel is about an unmarried woman, Devayani, who has spent her early youth nursing her sick mother, Pushpa, and who, after her death, chooses to live independently in her newly renovated parental home. Her elder sister, Savi, and brother-in-law, Shree, friends, and family cannot dissuade her from this decision. Tutoring children, translating a book on the history of Rajnur, and living life on her own terms is what she wishes for. Enjoying the company of her newly-made actress friend, Rani, and rejecting a compromise marriage proposal sent by Aunt Sindhu, Devayani prefers to live alone as she does not wish her marriage to be like that of her parents, an anguished relationship based on conciliation that ended with her father taking his 187

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own life. She falls in love with a married man named Ashok Chinappa, who reciprocates her feelings. Ignoring societal norms and unmindful of the future of this relationship, Devayani chooses to seek pleasure and gratification, to compromise her dignity every time she goes to meet Ashok clandestinely. In the process, she deceives and alienates herself from her loved ones by dreaming of and experiencing intimacy with her lover, by being enchanted by ecstatic passion, and even by longing for marriage with him. The love affair frees her from the traumatic memories of her mother’s final days and the grief of her passing, as well as from being burdened by living up to society’s expectations. However, Devayani realizes that while the love affair has liberated her, she is still unable to find legitimacy and acceptance for what she wants, and that lying has become a way of life for her, so she decides to end the adulterous relationship. Deception and subterfuge become a way of life for Devayani, and she questions the patriarchal norm of having two standards – one for men and the other for women. Deshpande explores what love is. In the Country of Deceit, sexual gratification, transgression, spiritual fulfillment, and psychological compulsions are examined from a female perspective and with passion. The conclusion of the novel is weak and unresolved because Devayani ultimately decides to end her relationship with Ashok for the very conventional and tradition-bound reasons that she had earlier defied in the narrative. While she questions and challenges, she ultimately comes to a compromise. In the novel, Devayani narrates the legend of King Yayati-Devayani-Sharmishtha from the Mahabharata to Rani. In this tale, Sharmishtha, the daughter of king of demons Vrishparva, wins the love of King Yayati while Devayani, the pampered daughter of Shukracharya, the mentor of demons and the wife of King Yayati, has to face embarrassment as her friend, whom she wanted to humiliate, becomes the beloved mistress of her husband. In the Country of Deceit, however, Deshpande shifts the focus of the narrative to the other woman, the mistress, in order to produce a sensitive and perceptive depiction of the mistresses’ predicament, as well as the position of the lonely wife who lives as the neglected spouse while the adulterous husband pursues Devayani. Critics refer to the revisionist myth-making technique that Deshpande has used in the novel to rewrite the legend from the Mahabharata from a feminist and the “other woman’s” lens, thereby shifting the narrative from a patriarchal perspective to a woman’s point of view. Critics also draw a comparison between Devayani and a heroine (Nayika) of Natya Shastra as Devayani exhibits similar behavioral traits as one of the heroines in Natya Shastra: when smitten with love, she’s ready to forsake social and familial decorum, modesty, respectability, and dignity. Critics, however, find that the vague subplot of the novel, dealing with the grabbing of land that belonged to Devayani’s dead mother, weakens the narrative.

Further Reading Deshpande, Shahi. “The Dilemma of the Woman Writer.” The Literary Criterion, vol. 20, no. 4, 1985, pp. 31–34. ———. “Why I am a Feminist.” Writing from the Margin. Penguin, 1988. Jain, Jasbir. Gendered Realities, Human Spaces: The Writings of Shashi Deshpande. Rawat Publications, 2003. Sahi, Rashmi. “Human Relationships in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande.” Indian Literature, vol. 42, no. 4, Jul.–Aug. 1998, pp. 167–170. Sharma, Alpana. “The Modernism of Shashi Deshpande.” South Asian Review, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 207– 222. Core Scholars, https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/english/231.

PRATIBHA NAGPAL

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INDIAN MYTHOLOGY: TALES, SYMBOLS, AND RITUALS FROM THE HEART OF THE SUBCONTINENT by Devdutt Pattanaik Indian Mythology: Tales, Symbols, and Rituals from the Heart of the Subcontinent by Devdutt Pattanaik (2003) is one of Pattanaik’s earlier publications on Indian mythology and exhibits over forty-eight artistic renderings of mythological figures from the Hindu religious pantheon. The text explores ninety-nine classical myths from the Hindu spiritual landscape. It juxtaposes mythological tales with scientific knowledge and mythical Western counterparts. Narrated over 200 odd pages, Pattanaik’s text is structured through four significant chapters: “Mythology” (studying myth), “Mythosphere” (comparing myth), “Mythopoesis” (transforming myth), and “Mythography” (interpreting myth). There is very little continuity between each of the significant chapters. Each chapter can be read as a stand-alone text attempting to unravel the mysteries of the Hindu pantheon. “Mythology” briefly introduces Pattanaik’s approach to understanding myths. “Mythosphere” contains crucial comparisons between Hindu mythology and its Western counterparts. “Mythopoesis” and “Mythography” explore the intricacies of Hindu traditions and rituals. The text studies the evolution of Hindu mythologies and their various interpretations over the centuries. Each chapter in the text includes a short mythological story from the Ramayana or the Puranas as an example elucidating the concept addressed. The text begins with the intricacies of studying “myth.” It elaborates on the origin of myth, juxtaposes this against the role of logic and rationale, and also addresses the clash between myth, religious belief, and science. It studies the role of “logos” in replacing old pagan beliefs of plural worship for one true god and elaborates on Vaishnavite mythologies and the root of Vaishnavite vegetarianism and cow worship while addressing the taboo against beef consumption. The writing connects this argument with a historical study of how legend replaced belief. It establishes Greek thinkers as the first ones to question everything that could not be supported by logic and rationale. The author claims this to be the beginning of mythology. The initiation of postmodernism and Western science, followed by the many facets of colonial discourse, pushed this narrative forward. The author recognizes three avenues of communication: narratives, symbols, and rituals. This becomes the premise for the chapter titled “Mythology: Studying Myth,” where the author provides detailed visual representations of each of the three avenues. This chapter is also instrumental in giving abridged stories from the Ramayana, alongside the author’s interpretation of mythical functionality. The author argues that myth provides an insight into how different cultures understand life and its various paradigms. In each chapter, Pattanaik studies the rationale behind the creation of Hindu mythologies. For example, he elaborates on the role of women in Hindu myths and how they become crucial figures that inform the social constructs in today’s Hindu society. He also discusses topics like Dhruva, the pole star, in Hinduism, or the role of the “phallus” in Shivlings. Pattanaik claims that an exploration of myth does not “satisfy the demands of rationality or science” (Pattanaik, 160). His investigations often return to the polytheistic complexities within the Hindu spiritual landscape, delving into the binaries within this landscape without going too deep into any single concept. He juxtaposes Western monotheism against images of cyclical times like samsara, exemplifying the element of the mysterious in Hinduism. Pattanaik treats mythologies as an extension of religious wisdom received through centuries of oral histories. The most significant distinction in the text is in understanding myth as a subjective “cultural truth” that transcends religious specificity. Pattanaik uses this argument to showcase how myths will be interpreted differently by a believer and a non-believer who seeks knowledge through scientific logic. The text, therefore, uses this argument to build on its focus on science (or “doubt”) versus myth (or “faith”). 189

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Indian Mythology precedes Pattanaik’s latest bestsellers on the subject, some of which include, Myth=Mithya: A  Handbook of Hindu Mythology (2006), Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata (2009), and the more recent Faith: 40 Insights into Hinduism (2019).

Further Reading Krishnamachari, Suganthy. “Demystifying Mythology: Devdutt Pattanaik.” The Hindu, 24 Apr. 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20090429012100/www.hindu.com/fr/2009/04/24/stories/200904 2451310400.htm. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Pattanaik, Devdutt. Myth = Mithya: A Handbook of Hindu Mythology. Penguin India, 2006. ———. “Implementing Indian Culture.” NHRD Network Journal, vol. 14, no. 4, 2021, pp. 375–387, https://doi.org/10.1177/26314541211026401. Sudevan, Praveen. “Science and Mythology are Apples and Oranges: Devdutt Pattanaik.” The Hindu, 29 Aug. 2019, www.thehindu.com/books/books-authors/science-and-mythology-are-apples-andoranges-devdutt-pattanaik/article29289913.ece. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Tripathi, Sneha, and Tejal Jani. “Devdutt Pattanaik’s Exploration of Myth.” International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR), vol. 7, no. 1, 2020, pp. 262–266. IJRAR, www.ijrar.org/ papers/IJRAR2001888.pdf.

NISHA GHATAK

INHERITANCE OF LOSS, THE, by Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss is Kiran Desai’s second novel, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction award in 2006. Set in 1986 with parallel narratives taking place in Kalimpong, a town in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, and in Queens, New York, the story largely focuses on a retired judge, Jemubhai Patel, his orphaned Anglicized granddaughter Sai, their cook, and the cook’s son, Biju. Living at Cho Oyu, a house once built by a Scotsman, the relationship of the cook, Sai, and the ill-tempered judge exposes India’s class disparity, while Biju – an undocumented immigrant in Queens – highlights the plights of poor migrants who struggle with the hope of financial stability in America. Narrated in the third person, the plot mainly highlights a failed justice system that perpetuates discriminations against minorities (Nepalese in India and undocumented immigrants in the United States) that is also responsible for furthering the inhumane treatment often meted out to poor and helpless migrants. The novel commences with a raid at Cho Oyu by a group of young Nepalese boys demanding a separate state Gorkhaland, thereby setting the tone for social and political tension that escalates as the story progresses. Tracing Biju’s journey to America, the novel unpacks the problem of the US immigration system that mostly affects people from underdeveloped countries. Jemubhai Patel, too, benefits from a structure of systemic racism and social hierarchy. As a Cambridge-returned Indian civil servant from the British era, Jemubhai Patel disguises his “inexpertness” and “crudity” through his arrogance and disdain for all, including his wife Nimi, whom he humiliates and assaults for failing to meet his expectations. By simultaneously oscillating between Kalimpong and Queens, the plot presents two worlds that are more united through class divide than geographical distance. The sisters Lola, Noni, the judge, and Sai’s Western lifestyle stand in sharp contrast to Gyan’s (Sai’s Nepalese tutor) whose family struggles to meet daily needs. Biju too, living in a rat-infested basement in Queens, parallels Gyan’s life in Kalimpong as his landlord Harish-Harry amasses wealth by exploiting undocumented immigrants. Despite their similarities and differences, both sides feel trapped in their respective worlds. At a time when riot and curfew escalate fear in the community, leading relationships to crumble, the novel’s portrayal of father/cook-son/Biju’s concern for each other also shows the strength in familial bonds during times of crisis. As the novel develops, 190

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it is the father-son relationship alone that survives the test of the political unrest that impacts every character in the novel, including the blossoming romance between Sai and Gyan. Fearful of losing his father to the riots in the region and exhausted from the drudgery of life in Queens, Biju leaves America only to be robbed by the Gorkha men of everything that he earned from his years of hard labor in America. The novel ends with the joyous reunion of father and son while the judge and Sai respectively mourn the loss of their loved ones; Judge for his canine companion Mutt and Sai for Gyan. Transnational in scope and execution, the novel examines the impact of colonialism and globalization on individuals and communities. Several critics have engaged in postcolonial and psychoanalytic interpretations of the characters in the novel, throwing light on how denial of indigenous culture and aspiration for Western culture could result in mental and emotional distress, thereby becoming detrimental to self- and cultural identity. It also speaks of cultural and identity tensions in the post-9/11 landscape, using the 1980s as a lens through which to view current socio-political landscapes. In the words of a New York Times (2006) reviewer, Desai’s “extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism, and terrorist violence. Despite being set in the mid-1980s, it seems the best kind of post-9/11 novel.”

Further Reading Deng, Chiou-Rung. “Negotiating Cultural Identity in The Inheritance of Loss.” IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship, vol. 10, no. 2, 2021, pp. 60–74. Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. Grove Press, 2006. Jackson, Elizabeth. “Globalization, Diaspora, and Cosmopolitanism in Kiran Desai’s the Inheritance of Loss.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 47, no. 4, 2016, pp. 25–43. Mukherjee, Soumen. “The Inaudible Skirmish of the Undocumented Expatriates and Kiran Desai’s the Inheritance of Loss.” Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2021, pp. 147–163. Suganya, M. “Indian Class System in Kiran Desai’s Novel the Inheritance of Loss.” Language in India, vol. 18, no. 2, 2018, pp. 425–429. Yerima, Dina, and Damian U. Opata. “Psychosis in Hybridity: Locating the Identity of the Postcolonial Subject in Kiran Desai’s the Inheritance of Loss.” Forum for World Literature Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, 2018, pp. 449–462.

TULI CHATTERJI

INSCRUTABLE AMERICANS, THE, by Anurag Mathur Gopal Kumar, the son of a hair oil tycoon in Madhya Pradesh, arrives in upstate New York, America to study chemical engineering in a university in Eversville. Anurag Mathur’s bewildered émigré to the United States encounters the new world with curiosity and much hesitation in the immensely popular book, The Inscrutable Americans, published in 1991. Anurag Mathur has written three other novels and is also an essayist. In the novel, Gopal is often overwhelmed by the emotional toll in the struggle to balance both the worlds, the one he knows and that forbids him three sins (wine, women, and meat), the other being the beguiling, confusing America with the promise of a sexual awakening, and Americans who remain inscrutable. A good student from a family that has been in the hair oil business for generations, he comes from the “Paris of Madhya Pradesh.” Gopal navigates America with naivete and a fascination toward most things making for comical situations as he struggles to understand Americanisms. He is fixated on wanting to have a sexual encounter and fails at it; he feels he can only truly experience America if he gets an entry into the “sexually liberated” world. A small portion of 191

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the novel is in epistolary form, allowing Mathur to present chunks of Gopal’s own voice in an English that is directly translated from his vernacular. In contrast, Mathur also presents American English to present Gopal’s confundity: “it is not English, it is American. I am facing so many embarrassings on this reason.” Gopal learns to adapt, to present himself and a version of his world, his country India, to the Americans. He begins to like the place, almost idolizing it for the industrial advancements, but soon encounters America’s racial problem, inequality, and poverty. His friend, the star football player who is African American, shows him his neighborhood serving as an eye-opener for Gopal who learns to view America not simply with rose tinted glasses. Then are moments when he feels homesick and lonely, especially around Thanksgiving and Christmas. The novel ends with him finishing the one-year sojourn and returning to his father’s hair oil factory, mindful of the differences and distances between these two worlds; America now a distant but beautiful memory. The novel was immensely popular, many celebrating the accurate and hilarious depictions of Gopal’s awkward journey as a country bumpkin. There was some criticism around the over emphasis on Gopal’s persistent and singular agonizing over sex, some also termed it as a hypertextualization of American culture. On the other hand, the trope of sexual liberation as the only window to modernity begets critique not only of the hypertextualization of American culture but also of what it may elide, as this as the singular point of difference. The novel ends on a note that retains the distinction between India, a developing country, and America, the pinnacle of industrialization and mechanical advancement. In depicting how a foreigner sees the United States, the novel lays out the tensions and mutual fascination between the two. The novel uncritically depicts the tensions between the feudal prosperity of a trading class in India and the supposed egalitarian prosperity of the United States where there are no housemaids, no bathroom cleaners to make life easy for a person of Gopal’s privileged background. There is more than one way in which these two worlds will not meet for Gopal.

Further Reading Gupta, R. K. “Trends in Modern Indian Fiction.” World Literature Today, vol. 68, no. 2, 1994, pp. 299– 307. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/40150154. Gupta, Suman. “Indian ‘Commercial Fiction’ in English, the Publishing Industry and Youth Culture.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 47, no. 5, 2012, pp. 46–53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41419848.

SHAMBHAWI VIKRAM

INSIDE THE HAVELI by Rama Mehta Rama Mehta’s novel Inside the Haveli (1977) won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Indian Writing in English in 1979. Divided into three sections, the novel foregrounds the clash between tradition and modernity as it captures the journey of Bombay-bred college graduate Geeta to Jeewan Niwaas, a haveli in Udaipur, where she is forced to maintain purdah. Geeta’s marriage to royalty comes with a price. Simultaneously, she loses her spontaneity; she also gains maturity and a deeper appreciation for traditions that have stood the test for over three hundred years. The novel commences with the simultaneous birth of two girls – Sita to the servant Lakshmi and Vijay to the mistress of the haveli, Geeta. In a world driven by strict gender codes where men are treated as gods and women keep purdah, class segregation and gender hierarchies have been religiously maintained for generations. Men stay busy in their offices and with outdoor responsibilities; women tend to the needs of their families and domestic matters. Quite 192

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naturally, when Geeta arrives as a newly-wed bride to the haveli, the stringent rules – and the fact that none of the women have any education – suffocate her. Yet, paying little heed to the criticism of the servants and her in-laws, she fulfills her thirst for books through her husband, Ajay, a professor at the University of Udaipur. He is deeply appreciative of Geeta’s interests and empathizes with her situation. The novel shifts in tone in the second section when Geeta expresses her interest in sending Lakshmi’s daughter Sita to school, thereby violating a three-hundred-year-old code that bars women, especially servants, from education. Sita’s mother, Lakshmi, has since left the haveli, compelled to leave after being wrongfully accused by her husband of securing favors from the haveli driver. Raised by the servants alongside Sita and oblivious to the life beyond that, Vijay’s question, “If I can go to school, why can’t Sita?” (95), unsettles the haveli. Determined to send Sita to school yet apprehensive of challenging tradition, Geeta finally succeeds in her mission. However, she has to later yield to the haveli’s practice of “child” marriage for Sita. Interestingly, while Geeta faces the most criticism for her decisions from the women of the haveli, both her father-in-law Bhagwat Singhji and Ajay continue to support her choices of empowering women through education. Geeta’s home-schooling is a testimony to Geeta’s journey to adopt and adapt to the haveli traditions and yet transform them in ways that only her Bombay college education would have made possible. The third and the final section further foregrounds Geeta’s transformation as she starts to appreciate the solidarity of the haveli while remaining critically distant from its oppressive customs such as child marriage and gender inequity. The novel ends with the demise of Bhagwat Singhji, and Geeta becomes the mistress of the haveli. The novel has been studied in conversation with both feminist and postcolonial discourses. Critics have drawn on the work of feminist literary theorists such as Gilbert, Gubar, and Showalter to highlight the novel’s engagement with women’s quest for identity. But more specifically, Mehta’s novel reflects the particular gender oppression that existed in traditional Udaipur culture as it began to meet modernity. A reviewer in India Today wrote that the novel “succeed[s] in conveying the essence and feel of a world which is fast disappearing.” Indeed, though haveli culture in the novel had diminished in glory compared to the times when kings of Udaipur ruled Rajasthan, the solidarity of fifteen servants tending to four generations speaks volumes of a grandeur that might be faded but not yet lost. Mehta’s portrayal of a Bombay-bred girl’s journey to becoming a haveli mistress exposes both the oppressiveness and the glory of the feudal structure that Geeta and Lakshmi dared to challenge in their ways.

Further Reading Aarthi, M. J. “Cultural Identity Amidst Modernity in Rama Mehta’s Inside the Haveli.”  Language in India, vol. 16, no. 7, 2016. Bhat, Kamalakar. “Employment of Aristocratic Nation in Rama Mehta’s Inside the Haveli.” South Asian Review, vol. 30, no. 1, 2009, pp. 286–301. Grace, Daphne. “Women’s Space ‘Inside the Haveli’: Incarceration or Insurrection?” Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2003. Khatib, Anis, and T. N. Kolekar. “The Reflection of Indian Society in Rama Mehta’s Inside the Haveli.” Indian Streams Research Journal, vol. 4, no. 12, Jan. 2015. Figshare, https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.1362202.v1. Niraja, Saraswat. “Female Space, Subjugation, and Identity Crisis in Rama Mehta’s Inside the Haveli and Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters.” ICFAI Journal of English Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2020, pp. 75–83. Parashar, Archana. “A  Harmonious Blend of Tradition and Modernity in Rama Mehta’s Inside the Haveli.” ASEBL Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, 2012.

TULI CHATTERJI

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IRANI, ANOSH (1974–) Anosh Irani was born on October 23, 1974, in Bombay/Mumbai, India. He grew up in Byculla, a Parsi colony. In 1995, He obtained his BCom from the University of Bombay. After that, he took up copywriting as his career and worked in an advertising agency. However, later, he decided to become a professional writer. To study creative writing, he migrated to Canada in 1998. In Vancouver, he studied creative writing and literature at Capilano College for one year, then transferred to the department of creative writing at the University of British Columbia, where he obtained his BFA (2002) and MFA (2004) in creative writing. He taught creative writing at Simon Fraser University and McGill University. Further, he acquired the writer-inresidence at Simon Fraser University in the World Literature Department in 2014, where he teaches a course on short fiction. Irani has written novels, plays, short stories, and nonfiction. His debut work, The Matka King, is a play depicting eunuch subculture, set in the red-light district of Bombay, India. One of the brothel owners, Top Rani, runs an illegal lottery and eventually gets entangled in rather unforeseen danger. In the next play, Bombay Black, spins a powerful narrative around the character, Apsara, who lives in Bombay with her mother. She makes her living by selling erotic dances to wealthy men. The play reaches its climax when Kamal, a blind man, becomes her client. My Granny the Goldfish, his third play, is about Nico, a young Indian student in Vancouver who is hospitalized, and his grandmother from Mumbai arrives to help him. His fourth play, The Men in White: A Tale of Love, Brotherhood, and Cricket, follows Abdul’s cricket team as its members decide to recruit Abdul’s brother from India. Irani’s first novel, The Cripple and His Talismans, deals with human suffering. The story centers on an unnamed protagonist (the narrator), who is on a quest for his lost arm. It is through his journey that Irani illustrates human miseries. During his journey, he comes across different social sections, like lepers, transgender individuals, and people with a disability. Irani’s next novel is The Song of Kahunsha, which focuses on Bombay’s downtrodden and the underprivileged community. The novel opens in 1993 in an orphanage home, where Chamdi, a ten-year-old orphan boy, seeks freedom by escaping into the darkness of night. His struggle to survive Bombay’s unfamiliar and dangerous terrain showcases the city’s dark side. Chamdi’s new friends, Sumdi and Guddi, reveal the inner workings of the begging industry. The novel ends with Hindu–Muslim sectarian violence. His subsequent work, Dahanu Road, is a novel set in the town of Dahanu, right outside Bombay, about a landowning Iranian clan and the Warlis, a local tribe. The protagonist, Zairos, is a young landowner who is troubled when he comes across Ganpat’s suicide on his grandfather Shapur’s farm. Ganpat is a Warli tribal, and Zairos’ love for his daughter Kusum heightens the conflict. His grandfather Shapur then reveals to his grandson the secret past of their family. In the novel The Parcel, Irani portrays the predicament of transgender individuals and their struggle to survive in society. The novel focuses on the place called Kamathipura, the hub of prostitution and the flesh trade. The narrative whirls around Madhu, whose life story divulges the ups and downs in the life of a transgender individual. The novel’s title refers to a young girl treated as a package or parcel to be traded. Further, Irani has created Buffoon, a one-person performance, and published a book, Translated from the Gibberish: Seven Stories and One-Half Truth, which contains short stories. Irani focuses on the city of Bombay, emphasizing human suffering and social injustice. His characters often depict the complex and nightmarish existence in society. His works have been long-listed and short-listed for CBC Radio’s Canada Reads, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Man Asian Literary Prize, Governor General’s Literary Award, Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction 194

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Prize, DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, Dublin Literary Award, and Jessie Award. His fiction has been celebrated by the Globe and Mail, National Post, the CBC, The Walrus, and the Quill & Quire. Irani’s short stories have appeared in Granta and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and his nonfiction has been published in The New York Times.

Further Reading Banumathi, J., and M. Anjum Khan. Narrating Bodies: Reading Anosh Irani. Archers and Elevators, 2019. Keren, Michael. “Fiction and the Study of Slums: Anosh Irani’s the Cripple and His Talismans.” Journal of Poverty, vol. 12, no. 2, Jun. 2008, pp. 251–261. Morgan, Holly, and Melanie R. Wattenbarger. “Land, Nation, Water, Body: Reading Gender in Anosh Irani’s Dahanu Road.” South Asian Review, vol. 35, no. 3, Dec. 2014, pp. 61–78.

ANJUM KHAN

ISLAND OF LOST GIRLS, THE, by Manjula Padmanabhan Manjula Padmanabhan wrote The Island of Lost Girls (2015) as a sequel to her earlier novel Escape (2008). While The Island of Lost Girls continues to address some of the core concerns of Escape, the world has changed dramatically in the twenty or so fictitious years since the events of the first novel. Escape was set in an unnamed country whose anonymity gave it a global identification as a country where women, or “vermin,” had no place. The Island of Lost Girls follows Youngest to the “Island” where he manages to transport Meiji whom he saves in the previous book Escape. This new island caters to the safety of people who are not accepted into the ‘normal’ world such as transgender individuals or women who have been disfigured or damaged. But “The Island” is not free of its own complicated power structures and hidden secrets. There have been nuclear attacks leading to the poisoning of the Suez Canal and the Red Sea carried out by eco-anarchists who want to bring down the petroleum industry. The world is now known as the Whole World Union (WWU), a highly misleading nomenclature because in truth it is now divided into four regions. One of these regions is governed by “The Zone,” a “huge arena for a continual violent and enormously popular cycle of war games.” The story follows Meiji, a little girl, and her guardian, Youngest, who are fleeing following a planned massacre of all the female population of the area. Meiji is having trouble adjusting to her new life on the Island of Lost Girls, as she struggles to understand what it means to be a woman after being reared in a world where women no longer exist, and her guardians are unintended gatekeepers to this knowledge. The Island is the only location where Meiji can be safe. With the help of a transgender person, Aila, Youngest moves her to a refuge while traveling across a strange area. Girls arrive on the island after being subjected to heinous acts of cruelty and brutality. The location is entirely for females and provides them with security. The Island is a far cry from the Forbidden Lands. This is a women-only society, which many critics regard as a feminist utopia. It allows for the examination of female autonomy and liberation from patriarchy. The new recruits to the Island are required to remove all their clothing during their first session. Ostensibly on a mission to uncover and destroy the Island as the General’s chosen one, Youngest is on his own secret mission – reclaiming Meiji and recovering his own sexual identity. Youngest as well as the other characters of the novel experience numerous obstacles and mishaps during their attempts to escape. Since the island appears to be the ideal place from the outside, its residents are shocked as the reality hits them gradually. Confronted by the opposite 195

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of their beliefs, the girls rebel against the stifling conditions of the island. Meiji finds out that the island provides safety only to those who abide by its rules and decrees, prohibiting personal freedom and making the survival of its residents restrictive and conditional. Girls must undergo “training” where they are subjected to memory erasure and being spied upon during their private moments. The “mentors” have access to their minds and any kind of attempt by an individual to practice self-choice or opposition is severely and ruthlessly punished. The “mentors” do not restrict themselves to the use of brute force and absolute control of the girls but also reward them if they follow the laid down rules. Such rewards are given in the form of restoration of erased memories. Women are treated as vermin and killed in this dystopian world which includes hyenas, vultures, crab-powered transit tubes, and bloodthirsty hybrid lizards. The novel contrasts two extremes: one is a realm of utter violence, while the other is a land of terrifying discipline and homogeneity. In this world of vengeance and sexual depravity, the protagonists’ love for one other – Meiji and her uncle Youngest – is the only thing that makes sense. The author bends gender and social norms in a fanciful realm to address real-world issues. The gloomy fictionscape and edgy narrative of Manjula Padmanabhan highlight the limits of oppression, totalitarianism, and the difficulty of erasing the past.

Further Reading Ara, Azmat. “Gender Studies in Works of Manjula Padmanabhan.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 13, no. I, 2022, pp. 167–175, www.the-criterion.com/V13/n1/IN17.pdf. Accessed 25 Jan. 2023. Nabar, Vrinda. “Book Review: Of Totalitarianism and Obliterating the Past.” Hindustan Times, 21 Nov. 2015, www.hindustantimes.com/books/book-review-of-totalitarianism-and-obliterating-the-past/storyh2j4rVg0MD5evswbrSsyuJ.html. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Nath, J. Parshathy. “I Create Mental Films of the Story: Manjula Padmanabhan.” The Hindu, 16 Dec. 2016,  www.thehindu.com/books/books-authors/I-create-mental-films-of-the-story-Manjula-Padma nabhan/article16755122.ece. Accessed 25 Jan. 2023.

NAVREET SAHI

ISVARAN, MANJERI SUNDARAMAN (1910–1966) Manjeri Sundaraman Isvaran was an influential Indian poet, critic, short story writer, and translator born on June  16, 1910, in Tanjore, Tamil Nadu. He went to Madras for higher studies and took his BA degree in history and economics from Madras University. He started his career as a freelance journalist; got associated with the literary and cultural journals: Short Story Swatantra (1953–1958) and Triveni (1928–1966); translated several literary masterpieces from Malayalam into English; and finally worked as the secretary of the National Book Trust, New Delhi in 1959. His creative endeavors cover every genre of literature: ten volumes of poetry; nine books of short stories; two dramatic narratives: Song of the Gypsymaiden (1945) and Yama and Yami (1948); Hira Bai, or the Romance of Aurangzeb; the monograph Venkataramani: Writer and Thinker (1932); and a large number of critical writings and translations, including a book of criticism. His long short story, “Immersion,” is considered his magnum opus and the most artistic of all his fictional writings. It was made into a film titled Nimajjanam in Telugu in 1979 by B.S Narayana, which won the President’s Award. “Immersion,” a novella with Freudian insights, is an imaginative exploration of the psyches of a rape victim (a culturally conditioned, puritanical woman), her victimizer, and her orthodox but innocent husband. 196

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Isvaran was a transitional figure who linked the Indian Renaissance and post-independence periods and thus reflected the prevailing poetic trends in language and style. His works show the influence of the rich Hindu cultural traditions of ritual, legend, local folklore, and festival celebrations. He wrote ten volumes of poetry consisting of around 250 poems. Saffron and Gold and Other Poems (1932) celebrates the traditional ideal of wifehood in the title poem. Altar of Flowers (1934) comprises twenty-seven lyrics on South Indian themes. Catguts (1940) is famous for its vitriolic attack on ‘para-critics.’ Brief Orisons (1941) defines poetry as ‘an utterance of the whole blood’ in the impersonal tone of a detached poet. Penumbra (1942) reveals the poet’s increasing preoccupation with contemporary socio-political issues. The Fourth Avatar: Poems (1946), an ironic allusion to the Avatar of Nara-Simha (the “Man-Lion”), is comparable to W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” Oblivion (1950) reveals Isvaran’s more mature style and philosophical vision, in contrast to the anguish and angst of the early poems. Rhapsody in Red (1954) indicates a variety of moods and a consummate virtuosity of technique. His greatest poetic treatment of the theme of innocence is in his poetry collection The Neem Is a Lady and Other Poems (1957). The poem “The Neem is a Lady” shows a neem tree’s sad story, projected as a lady and a phoenix, which withstands all the seasons and natural calamities for years. Isvaran’s collection of short stories, Naked Shingles (1941), uses ornate words and phrases as prevalent during the Indian Renaissance. Siva Ratri (1943) offers a reminder of the creative usability of India’s mythological past. Angry Dust (1944) demonstrates his sophisticated technique in experimenting with a narrative point of view. Rickshawallah (1946) contains stories with a proletarian bias that Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Gorky inspire. Isvaran’s other volumes of stories include Fancy Tales (1947), No Anklet Bells for Her (1949), Immersion (1951), Painted Tigers (1956), and A Madras Admiral (1959).

Further Reading Abraham, John E. Manjeri S. Isvaran: Man and Art: A Comprehensive Study. Mahatma Gandhi U, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 1995, hdl.handle.net/10603/405. Anjaneyulu, D. “Manjeri Isvaran: A Tribute.” Sahitya Akademi, vol. 4, no. 3, Jul.–Sept. 1967, pp. 57–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23329165. Benson, Eugene, and L. W. Conolly, editors. Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2005. Nair, N. Gopalakrishnan. The Short Stories of Manjeri S Isvaran: A Study in Themes and Techniques. Sri Krishnadevaraya U, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 1994, hdl.handle.net/10603/85855.

SONIKA THAKUR

IYENGAR, K.R. SRINIVASA (1908–1999) Kodaganallur Ramaswami Srinivasa Iyengar was born on 17 April  1908 and died on 15 April 1999 in Tamil Nadu, India. He is a widely acclaimed poet, critic, and learned scholar who successfully straddled the worlds of English and Indian literature. He is a pioneer in the research exploration of Indian writing in English. Indian Writing in English is a 1962 publication of his 1959 lectures as a visiting professor of Indo-Anglian literature at the University of Leeds. This massive study of India’s contribution to English literature was not only groundbreaking, but it also remains a standard reference work that successive literary historians have depended upon in their academic writing. His work encompasses English, Indian, and Commonwealth literature and that of the United States and Africa, resulting in a harmonious synthesis of East and West critical concepts. His literary output spans various fields, including lyrical compositions and translations, academic history, and literary criticism. 197

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In his writings, he exhibited a wide range of expertise and a profound level of scholarship. Iyengar was a seer, educator, literary connoisseur, and observant literary critic. As a leading literary critic of Indian writing in English, he contributed significantly to the area of literary criticism in India. Throughout his forty-year teaching career, he delivered countless talks on various topics at numerous universities and institutes. He published extensively on Thoreau, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neil, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner during a period when the study of American literature was not so popular. He was an elected member of the Modern Language Association of the United States and a fellow of the Sahitya Akademi. Since 1938, he maintained a close relationship with the P.E.N. and attended the 1957 P.E.N. Congress and UNESCO Symposium in Tokyo. As a teacher, he became a legend, gradually acquiring the stature of an icon, admired for his tremendous knowledge and profound humility. His works include the standard biography of Sri Aurobindo and On the Mother: The Chronicle of a Manifestation and Ministry (1978), which earned him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1981, as well as the biographical studies of Swami Vivekanand and S. Srinivasa Iyengar, and the critical analyses of significant literary figures such as William Shakespeare, Lytton Strachey, Gerard Manley Hopkins, François Mauriac, and Rabindranath Tagore. In The Story of a Decade of Indian Politics (1939), S. Srinivasa Iyengar’s participation in the nationalist movement from 1920 to 1930 is discussed. It is an engaging examination of Indian politics from Gandhi to Subhash Chandra, with equal emphasis on S.S. Iyengar’s role as the Congress president in 1927. This compelling narrative of the biography of a person and a nation at a pivotal point in history is a testament to Iyengar’s perceptiveness as a political analyst of the highest caliber. Iyengar authored numerous articles and reviews. Several are compiled in The Adventure of Criticism (1962), Mainly Academic (1969), Two Cheers for the Commonwealth, and A Big Change (1969). He is essentially a combination of a poet and a critic, and contrary to the commonly held belief that critics do not make excellent poets, he emerged as a poet, the trans-creator of old epics. His poetry volumes include Tryst with the Divine (1974), Microcosmographia Poetica (1978), Leaves from a Log (1979), and Aurtralia Helix (1981). He has translated into English verse the Sundara Kanda of Valmiki’s Ramayana as The Epic Beautiful (1983), Devi Mahatmyam (1977), and Atma Bodha (1966), as well as the Kural of Tiruvalluvar and portions of Tirumandiram. He has written numerous books, some of which are masterpieces. His essay on Lytton Strachey was deemed a highly perceptive critical analysis, establishing him as a distinguished critic of life and literature. He has made substantial contributions to Aurobindo studies as a devoted Aurobindoite. As a visiting scholar at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Simla (now Shimla) during the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Celebrations in October  1972, Iyengar delivered six lectures which were subsequently published as Dawn to Greater Dawn (1975). His writings testify to his broad knowledge of various topics and exceptional scholarship.

Further Reading Anand, Mulk Raj. K. R. S. Iyengar: A Memoir. Sastry, 4–6. Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa. A New Deal for Our Universities. Orient Longman, 1951. Narasimhaiah, C. D. “Professor K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar: A  Tribute.” Indian Literature, vol. 43, no. 3 (191), 1999, pp. 174–176. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23342611. Sarma, S. Krishna. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar as a Critic. Sastry, 58–61. Sastry, K. Srinivasa, editor. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar and Indian English Literature. Yugadi Publishers, 2000.

PURNIMA BALI

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JAIDKA, MANJU (1953–) A versatile author and decorated academician, Manju Jaidka was born in Hathwala, a small village in Haryana, to Bhim Sain and Padma Tyagi. She graduated from Government College for Women, Chandigarh, and her postgraduation and doctoral degrees were obtained from the Department of English, Panjab University, Chandigarh. She retired as a professor at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India, where she served for more than four decades. Currently, she heads the Liberal Arts Faculty at Shoolini University in Solan. The Rockefeller Foundation awarded Jaidka fellowships to Bellagio and then to Iowa; the Fulbright Postdoctoral Research (1991–1992) grant enabled her to complete her postdoctoral research at Harvard and Yale. Jaidka’s contribution to academics and literature has earned her many prestigious positions, such as the chairperson of Sahitya Akademi, visiting professorships at NYU and the University of Illinois (Urbana Champaign), the Lillian Robinson Fellowship by Simone de Beauvoir Institute for Feminist Studies (Concordia University, Montreal), visiting academic at Rothermere American Institute (Oxford University, UK), residencies at Bellagio and Salzburg, and many more. Additionally, and importantly, Jaidka established an academic organization in 1997 that later expanded into MELOW, the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the World and is one of the leading academic associations with international linkages actively operating in India. Jaidka has approximately twenty-five published books to her credit – academic and creative writing.  In the first of her novels, Spots of Time (2007),  the reader finds two women standing center stage throughout the metafictional narrative. The innermost emotions of these two women are presented in absolute raw form. Episodes within the narrative focus on their daily struggles, coping with work-life balance, raising a special child (autobiographical overtones), and continuously dealing with corrupt academics. Scandal Point (2011) delves deep into a woman’s psyche through the character of Betty, penning all her emotional turmoil, like the one she faces before and after her marriage to a Maharaja. This historical fiction is based on a legendary love story and is a fascinating read. In Amaltas Avenue (2014), we find the author expanding her horizons from autobiographical and women-centric themes to building a narrative situated in contemporary and part heterodiegetic reality, narrated from an external point of view. This is a campus novel, woven around human imperfections, their struggles, and undying hopes. The play The Seduction and Betrayal of Cat Whiskers (2007, 2012)  is an academic satire exposing duplicity and misconduct within educational institutions. Jaidka’s ability to comically reveal the underbelly of an institution’s corridors of power is exemplary. The narrative is again drawn from the author’s experiences and observations while working as a university professor. Jaidka forms a meaningful relationship with her reader in her memoir, The Next Milestone: A Mother’s Journal, which accounts for her long years as a caregiver to a child who suffered from a hundred percent disability. It is noted for its veracity, truthfulness, emotional vulnerability, and credibility as she chooses to be open and honest about something intensely personal and someone so dear. For Reasons Unknown (2013) and Saudade (2019) are poetry anthologies. The latter is an award-winning collection of poems focusing on sadness, nostalgia and grief, commemorating the loss of her child. Gumshoe Mania (2021) is a novel about a woman whose unfulfilled ambition was once to become a gumshoe – a sleuth in common parlance – snoop after suspects, nab culprits, and live a life of endless excitement. Fortuitously, in her middle years, she finds herself in a situation that prompts her to pursue the vocation of her dreams. The story cuts across geographical boundaries, presenting different facets of human relationships and individual choices. It deals 199

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with issues of parenting and also brings in LGBTQ issues. The novel bagged the best book in English award from the Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi. In 2022 Jaidka published When Cato Played Cupid and Other Stories, a collection of short racy-paced stories that keep the reader spell-bound with an undertone of wit and compassion. Manju Jaidka has earned her place as a leading educationist who promotes the love of literature through regularly organized festivals and events that bring together a wide cross-section of people online and in real time.

Further Reading Jaidka, Manju. Spots of Time, https://manjujaidka.blogspot.com/. “Manju Jaidka.” Alchetron, 8 Sept. 2022, https://alchetron.com/Manju-Jaidka. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Mona. “Between the Lines.” Tribune India, 6 May  2013, www.tribuneindia.com/2013/20130506/ ttlife1.htm#2. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023.

MANPREET KAUR KANG

JAIN, JASBIR (1937–) Jasbir Jain was born in 1937 in West Punjab, assimilated into Pakistan during the partition of 1947. Jain’s father, a government servant, was posted in Kalyan, Maharashtra, at the time; the remaining members of the family migrated to India soon afterwards. Born in a multilingual family, Jain grew up speaking Punjabi, Hindustani, and English. Since her father was often transferred, the family moved all over the country with Jain attending a variety of municipal and missionary schools. As an adult, she settled in Jaipur when she joined the University of Rajasthan, moving from an assistant professor to the head of the English Department to eventually Professor Emeritus. A  distinguished figure within the gender activism and humanities academia, Jain has been the recipient of numerous accolades; these include a Fulbright fellowship (1982–1983), K.K. Birla fellowship (1998–2000), Emeritus fellowship (2002–2004), UGC fellowship (2005–2007), and Sahitya Akademi fellowship (2009). She was elected Life Member at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and has been a visiting professor at several institutions, including Indian Institute of Advanced Study (Himachal Pradesh), Santiniketan (West Bengal), Central University of Hyderabad (Telangana), University of Tampere (Finland), and University of Copenhagen (Denmark). In 2008, she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the South Asia Literary Association (SALA) in recognition of her outstanding contribution to Feminist and South Asian studies. Jain currently serves as the director of the Institute for Research in Interdisciplinary Studies (IRIS), Jaipur, an organization she founded in 1995 as a forum for young scholars across a multitude of disciplines to engage in rigorous collaborative research. Jain’s extremely prolific output exhibits the breadth of her academic interests; she has published translations, anthologies, as well as critical studies on film, drama, gender, and literature. She has authored early studies on Indian writers working within English (IWE), including Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, and Shashi Deshpande. Her enduring interest in gender and feminism resulted in numerous multidisciplinary explorations, Feminising Political Discourse: Women and the Novel in India 1857–1905 (1997), analyses the centrality of women within the emergent novel form in the early phases of the struggle for independence, arguing for a connection between the patriarchal subjugation of women and colonization. Writing Women Across Culture (2002) addresses the textualization of women through mythical, cultural, and literary narratives. Indigenous Roots of Feminism: Culture, Subjectivity and Agency (2011) seeks to redress the feminist movement’s Western bias by excavating foundational texts – literary,

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historical, and social – within the syncretic Indian culture for influences that have shaped the female self. Forgiveness: Between Memory and History (2016) seeks to examine the political dimensions of forgiveness in a country as riven by difference as India, particularly in the contemporary context. In her book, Jain turns to the cultural and philosophical formulations of forgiveness in Western cultures – where she finds it limited in its role as a political gesture of reconciliation – to launch a wider inquiry on what forgiveness might mean for a muti-lingual, multi-religious national entity like India with its historical wounds and current conflicts. Other significant works include writings on diaspora, American drama, the partition of 1947, cinema, and literatures of resistance. Jain’s body of work, particularly in her capacity as a scholar of literature and gender, has been heavily reviewed and cited and is considered among the foundational contributions to the decolonization of literary criticism within Indian academia.

Further Reading “2008 Sala Achievement Award.” South Asian Review, vol. 30, no. 4, 2009, pp. 75–90, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/02759527.2009.11932723. Bagchi, Josodhara. “Gendering of the Novel.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 36, no. 22, 2001, pp. 1965–1966, www.jstor.org/stable/4410692. Narayan, Shyamala A. “Worthy of Being a Textbook on Indian Feminism.” Indian Literature, vol. 56, no. 1 (267), 2012, pp. 266–270, www.jstor.org/stable/23348843. Rai, S. “Interview.” Language and Language Teaching, vol. 7, no. 1 (13), 2013, pp. 52–57, http://publi cations.azimpremjifoundation.org/1897/1/11_LLT_Jan_2018-58-63.pdf.

NEHA YADAV

JAIN, SUNITA (1941–2017) As she maintained the exquisite balance between writing in Hindi and English, Sunita Jain accomplished the roles of a poet, researcher, and professor. Jain’s educational accomplishments include undergraduate study from the University of Delhi and a doctorate from the Department of English, University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Upon her return to India, she was engaged in university teaching, eventually joining the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi, from where she retired in 2002. She had an honorary DLitt from the University of Burdwan. In 2015, she was awarded the Vyas Samman by the K.K. Birla Foundation. In 2004, she was conferred the Padma Shri by the president of India. As a bilingual writer, Jain’s work spans genres and themes. The distinctive quality of her work comes from her commitment to express only the reality she deeply felt and lived. Language is never a barrier in Jain’s expressive economy, and both Hindi and English lucidly reveal the nuances of her literary sensibility. Focusing on her writings in English, her early works comprise two short story collections: A Woman is Dead (1980) and Eunuch of Time (1982). A Woman is Dead, published in the Arizona Quarterly, is a poignant take on death and the remarriage between a young girl in her teens and a widower in his forties with six children. Eunuch of Time and Other Stories depicts what Raji Narasimhan calls “the vulnerable and maimed woman,” troubled by the deceit and hypocrisy of men in everyday life. Her collection of poems, Silences (1983), addresses questions of self, experience, identity, relationships, death, and forgiveness. Sensum: Collected Poems 1965–2000, published in 2000, and American Desi and Other Poems, published in 2007, consolidate Jain’s poems across four decades and establish her as a prolific and compassionate poet.

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Coming to the novel, A Girl of Her Age (2000), both intensely and with care, narrates the dilemmas the protagonist Mukta undergoes as she unravels her love for an upper-caste boy. Despite all the affection and affirmation, Mukta refuses to marry Chander Mohan, for she arrives at a belief that social norms exist for a reason. In 2002, Sunita Jain also authored an English reader for children aged 5 to 7, titled The Mango Tree, a lively story about coexistence, sharing, and friendships. International anthologies have also acknowledged the literary contribution of Sunita Jain by the inclusion of her short story “Fly the Friendly Skies” in Short Short Stories Universal (1993) and Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Voices in English (1995). It is essential to mention that Sunita Jain has an equally immense repertoire of writings in Hindi and works translated from Hindi to English. This comprises five novellas, five short story collections, and about fifty volumes of poetry. Her memoir was also published in Hindi. In 2012, during a Skype session with young budding writers in America, Sunita Jain mentioned that she recognizes the loss entailed in the processes of translation since language and culture are intertwined. She has also translated works of other writers from Hindi to English. Sunita Jain’s writings are seen as representations of an experiment done with the use of English in poetry by an Indian writer. The use of “compounds” marks her poetry, combined to form a neologism, a new word that connotes the poet’s effect and meaning: word salve, man bite, soulchime, cloudlust, to name a few. This bridging of two words to create a new sentiment gives a peculiar flavor to Jain’s poems, which often dwell on longing, loss, and being. Sunita Jain is a widely recognized writer whose strength is her bilingual forays in creative writing. Her work often portrays the centrality of deep affective response to the world around us. In her study of evolving womanhood, the critique of marriage and social hypocrisy has been noted. In articulating the changing dynamics of what it means to be a woman in the 20th century, Sunita Jain’s writings are an experiment not only with words but also with how society reads and perceives them.

Further Reading Dhawan, R. K., editor. Indian Women Novelists, Set III. Prestige Books, 1995. Gaur, Rashmi. Women’s Writing. Sarup Book Publishers, 2003. Narasimhan, Raji. “Indo-English: Poetry, Not Prose.” Indian Literature, vol. 26, no. 6, 1983, pp. 80–97. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24158411. Prasad, Amar Nath, and Kanupriya. Indian Writing in English: Tradition and Modernity. Sarup and Sons, 2006. Singh, Kanwar Dinesh. Feminism and Postfeminism: The Context of Modern Indian Women Poets Writing in English. Sarup and Sons, 2004.

DISHA POKHRIYAL

JHABVALA, RUTH PRAWER (1927–2013) Ruth Prawer Jhabvala enjoys an ambivalent relationship with India. She was born in Cologne, Germany, to Jewish parents on May 7, 1927. Her father, Marcus Prawer, was a Polish-Jewish lawyer. During the Second World War her father moved to Germany, trying to avoid compulsory enlistment in the military. Later, in 1939, he migrated to England to escape Nazi Germany when Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was a twelve-year-old girl. During her stay in England, she witnessed World War II and experienced the Blitz, the German bombing campaign against Britain. She was gradually weaned away from German and initiated into English. She received an MA in English from Queen Mary College in 1951. She wrote a thesis on “The Short Story in England, 1700–1750.” After having written stories in German in her initial years, she chose 202

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to express herself in English. During her stay in England, she wrote a report titled “A Birthday in London,” and she read European classics which contributed toward shaping her sensibility and also her perception of India. Hayden Moore Williams opines that Jhabvala stands closer to Indian novelists than European novelists who were writing in India. He places Jhabvala along with P. Meadows Taylor, Rudyard Kipling, and John Masters. However, Khushwant Singh opines that Jhabvala stands closer to R.K. Narayan for her understanding and interpretation of Indian society. She has been compared to Jane Austen for her propensity to portray middle-class characters and for being overly concerned with social status, customs, and traditions. Jhabvala married an Indian Parsi and lived in India with him before moving to New York in 1975, where she breathed her last in 2013. During her stay in India, she wrote novels about India. Somdatta Mandal problematizes her position vis-à-vis India as an “outsider-insider” and “insider-outsider.” Despite her problematized role and complex identity, she is a novelist whose writings have enriched Indian novels in English or English ones in India. In both capacities, it is challenging to overlook Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s contribution as a writer. Jhabvala’s relationship with India goes through different phases. Gooneratne quotes Jhabvala, There is a cycle that Europeans – by Europeans, I  mean all Westerners, including Americans – tend to pass through. It goes like this: first stage, tremendous enthusiasm – everything Indian is marvelous; second stage, everything Indian not so marvelous; everything India abominable. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s literary career exhibits a similar trajectory. She describes the first stage of her experience of India in terms of “excitement,” “rapture,” and “love.” In her first four novels, To Whom She Will (1955), The Nature of Passion (1956), Esmond in India (1957), and The Householder (1960), she portrays the customs and lifestyle of Indian society. Owing to her husband’s background, she had a good opportunity to observe Punjabi middle-class society closely. She notices their habits and mannerism and brings to the surface the inherent comedy that lies in their customs. Jhabvala narrates the importance of food and the rituals of its preparation and consumption in the lives of Indian families. With a touch of an underlying sense of comedy, Jhabvala describes the scene in To Whom She Will, as Pandit Ram Bahadur Saxena’s family sits in the well-ornate dining room to have elaborate Indian meals. Sometimes, Jhabvala uses Hindu philosophy to give a cultural frame to her novels, such as The Householder, A Backward Place, and Get Ready for Battle. The theme of displacement transmutes India into a fictional land where her characters undergo a journey to find themselves. In the next phase of her career, she wished to escape this “abominable” land. Such feelings are reflected in her longing for Europe that dominates her last three novels, A Backward Place (1965), A New Dominion (1972), and Heat and Dust (1975), for which she received the Booker Prize. After spending twenty-four years of her life in India, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala started living in New York in 1975. She would visit India sometimes. In the last phase of her life, she wrote her American novels during her stay in America until her death. During this phase, Jhabvala seemed to be bending toward her cultural roots and Jewish identity, which appeared in her American novels. In 1963, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory approached Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to write the screenplay of her novel, The Householder. Thus, began a long association of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala with Merchant-Ivory Productions. Some of the famous scripts she wrote for MerchantIvory Productions include Shakespeare Wallah (1965), Roseland (1977), The Europeans (1979), Heat and Dust (1983), The Bostonians (1984), A Room With a View (1985), Howards End (1992), Surviving Picasso (1996), and The Golden Bowl (2000). That similar characters and 203

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subjects recur in her fiction indicates what occupied her imagination as a novelist and as a screenplay writer. A Western writer in an eternal state of exile searched for self-fulfillment and home, which appears in Lucia Lane in Bombay Talkie, Jenny in The Guru, and Lee, Margret, and Evie in A New Dominion. In 1975, Jhabvala won the Booker Prize for Heat and Dust; in 1979, the Neil Gunn Prize; in 1984, the London Critics Circle Film Award. She is perhaps the only writer to have won the Booker Prize and the most coveted Academy Award. She was awarded the Academy Awards in Best Adapted Screenplay for A Room with a View in 1986 and Howards End, and she was nominated for an Academy Award for The Remains of the Day in 1993. She also won the British Academy Film Award for writing the screenplay of Heat and Dust. In 1987, she was awarded the Neil Gunn International Fellowship; in 2002, she won the BAFTA fellowship jointly with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant.

Further Reading Agarwal, Ramlal. Outsiders and Insiders: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Indian Writing in English. Partridge Publishing, 2021. Crane, Ralph J. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Twayne’s English Authors Series, general editor Kinley E. Roby. Twayne Publishers, 1992. Gooneratne, Yasmin. Silence, Exile, and Cunning: Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 2nd ed. Orient Longman, 1983. H-Shishan, I. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s “Heat, and Dust.” Atlantic, 2006. Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories. Harper and Row, 1976. Mandal, Somdatta. “Indian Writing in English: The Problematics of Definitions.” Modern Indian English Fiction, edited by T. S. Anand. Creative Books, 2002, pp. 37–46.

VIVEK SACHDEVA

JOSEPH, MANU (1974–) Manu Joseph was born in Kerala and grew up in Chennai. He is a former editor of the OPEN magazine and columnist for international and national publications. He is also the writer for the Netflix series Decoupled (2021), a dark and comic take on conjugal relationships in contemporary India. While many screenplays written by him have not been made into films yet, he wrote the script for Love Khichdi (2009), which Srinivas Bhashyam directed. His novels Serious Men and Miss Laila Armed and Dangerous have been adapted for the stage by The Madras Players in 2013 and 2019, respectively. Serious Men (2010) was Joseph’s first novel. It won the Hindu Literary Award in 2010 and the PEN/Open book award in 2011 and was short-listed for many other awards. The depiction of Ayyan Mani as a Dalit character in the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai has courted controversy. Mani is secretary to a brilliant Brahmin scientist, Arvind Acharya, a fierce opponent of the Big Bang Theory, and has been in the running for the Nobel Prize. Ayyan’s wiliness allows him access to Acharya’s conversations and documents, and he plans an elaborate charade that involves his ten-year-old son, Adi. Adi is tutored by Ayan to ask eccentric questions and pose as a raw genius. He gains the attention of his peers, teachers, and scientists at the Institute. Acharya’s autocratic style of functioning creates a silent and growing opposition against him. Acharya’s affair with Oparna Ghoshmaulik does not go unnoticed. When Acharya spurns Oparna, she joins his colleagues to unseat him from power, but he is later reinstated through a Faustian exchange with Mani.

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The novel can be read as a story of revenge where Mani exacts revenge on the Brahmins, but what remains central is the subaltern gaze that Joseph deploys through which we get to see the world upside-down through Mani’s eyes. From his perspective, privilege, prestige, and power are not always achieved by intrinsic merit but are forms of social control that caste, class, and gender bestow on a few. The vast majority, like Mani, are far removed from this world of expensive cars, good food, and big houses. The Illicit Happiness of Other People (2012), Joseph’s second novel, deals with Ousep’s search for the reasons that tragically force seventeen-year-old Unni, his son, to commit suicide. As the story unfolds, we get a reasonably accurate glimpse of the Chennai of the 1980s and 90s and of the crushing pressure on a boy to get on the preordained trajectory of life: qualify for IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), become an engineer, get a job, and settle in the United States. As a cartoonist, Unni was not interested in this path. His dysfunctional family, where his father (Ousep) was an alcoholic and unemployed journalist, his mother (Mariamma) a victim of sexual abuse in her adolescence, and Thoma, his younger brother, grappling with many contradictions, was consumed by poverty. Through many characters – friends, former classmates, neighbors – we can slowly piece together a narrative about Unni as a person. The mental health question is flagged through Unni’s deep interest in philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry. Miss Laila Armed and Dangerous (2017) is a bold and crisp political satire executed with wry panache. The novel uses the frame of a thriller to allow the memories of Mukundan (trapped in the debris of a building that has collapsed) to emerge. The many interconnected strands of the narrative are presented mainly through characters like Akhila Iyer, Mukundan, and Aisha (Laila’s sister). Mukundan’s memories, Iyer’s films, and Aisha’s narrative of her family’s life are the narratorial basis on which Joseph builds his intricate satire. Representing barely-concealed political figures, like Damodarbhai in Gujarat, the novel spares no one. Activists, nationalists, and politicians on both ends of the political spectrum – right and left – are mercilessly lampooned. The ideologies governing their actions, behavior, and lives are subjected to irreverent mockery. Anger, frustration, and helplessness surface alongside human tragedies in the novel, and the matter-of-fact tone that Joseph adopts leaves the reader shaken and seething. The novel highlights the role of political memory, which is often weaponized for political advantage. Doing so, it makes unmistakable metatextual references to the power and function of fiction to represent reality.

Further Reading Saxena, Akshya. “Purchasing Power, Stolen Power, and the Limits of Capitalist Form: Dalit Capitalists and the Caste Question in the Indian English Novel.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 52, no. 1, Jan. 2021, pp. 61–90. Yadav, Kanak. “ ‘Another High-Caste Woman Beyond His Reach’: Cast(e)Ing the Sexual Politics of Manu Joseph’s Serious Men.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 57, no. 2, Jun. 2022, pp. 304–318.

VAIBHAV IYPE PAREL

JOSEPH, ZILKA (1963–) Zilka Joseph was born in Mumbai to a Bene Israel community. She then shifted to Calcutta to pursue her education. After completing her bachelor’s degree in English and BEd from the University of Calcutta, India, she did a master’s degree in comparative literature from Jadavpur University. She then moved to the United States and got her master’s degree in fine

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arts in poetry from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Presently, she conducts workshops in creative writing in Ann Arbor and Detroit. She provides a workshop for the Department of Psychology and Barger Leadership Institute at the University of Michigan annually. She is also a manuscript coach, freelance editor, and a mentor to the writers of Ann Arbor community. Zilka Joseph was awarded the Elsie Choy Lee Scholarship and was honored with a Zell Fellowship and the Michael S. Gutterman prize in poetry from the University of Michigan. She has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice. Zilka Joseph is a contemporary author whose work has appeared in various literary journals like POETRY, Poetry Daily, and Michigan Quarterly Review Cheers to Muses: An Anthology of Contemporary Works by Asian American Women, The Kali Project, and many more. She has participated in numerous literary festivals, collaborated with artists on interdisciplinary projects that have later culminated in exhibitions readings in the University of Michigan and in art galleries and cultural centers in the United States. Collaborating with pianist Veena Kulkarni-Rankin, she has performed her poem “City of Hibiscus Eyes” at the Rasa Festival of Arts. Zilka Joseph’s debut book Lands I Live In (2007) embraces the memories of her childhood home and her education in Calcutta. Through the poems she conveys the difficulties, complexities, and the fears that she battled with during her stay in the West. The poems capture the struggles faced by new immigrants, and the perplexity of adapting to a distinct culture. The book What Dread (2011) explores the condition of the world and the supremacy of fear. The poems in Zilka’s book, Sharp Blue Search of Flame (2016), are an exploration of the journey to the variety of worlds. The poems shift scenes to the imaginary landscapes that gives her peace amidst the chaos of the human condition. The subject matter of her poems are ghastly and very unfortunate. Through her poems she has dealt with quite a varied range of themes like pain of alienation, violence against women, reinvention of the Jewish, and Hindu myths and culture, which strikes a contrast with the contemporary American setting. Zilka Joseph’s chapbook, Sparrows and Dust (2021), draws parallel between human lives and the pattern of birds. She describes how creatures like birds become constant in her life. The poems in this book are mainly focused on Zilka’s parents, hometown, alienation, and a search for home. The poet tried to bring the memories back to life and recreate them in words to avoid disorientation. Zilka’s latest book, In Our Beautiful Bones (2021), traces the stages in the poet’s life as an Indian immigrant who makes a new life in the United States and her encounters with otherness. The poems explore her ancestors, the Bene Israel roots, life and education in Kolkata, and the impact of British rule. The book has certain autobiographical elements where the poet is found creating collages from folklore and mythology, the representation of the Indian culture in an unknown world, the aftermath of colonialism, music, food, and language. It is a book critiquing the pathos of the world and celebrating the triumph of the human spirit. Zilka Joseph’s writing is alluring as it captures the stories of immigration, making an identity, and hoping to find more compassion in the world.

Further Reading Joseph, Zilka. Lands I Live In: Poems. Mayapple Press, 2007. ———. Sharp Blue Search of Flame. Wayne State UP, 2016. ———. In Our Beautiful Bones: Poems. Mayapple Press, 2021. ———. Zilka Joseph, www.zilkajoseph.com/.

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JOSHI, ARUN (1939–1993) Arun Joshi was born in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh to Mrs. Sumitra Joshi and Dr. A.C. Joshi, a botanist and an eminent educationist who served as the vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University as well as of Panjab University. He obtained his engineering degree from Kansas University, US, and an MS degree in industrial management from MIT, US. Joshi returned to India in 1961 and joined Delhi Cloth & General Mills, North India’s first textile factory as chief of its Recruitment and Training Department. Later, he also headed Shri Ram Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources in Delhi. Although an engineer and industrial manager by profession, he wrote five novels, mostly in the 1970s, about urban, English-speaking characters mired in some existential uncertainty. He is arguably the most vitally relevant and contemporary of early Indian English novelists in terms of his craft and thought. His first novel, The Foreigner (1968), is the story of a vagrant, cynical, and lonely Sindi Oberoi who sees himself as an outlander wherever he lives or goes – in Kenya where he is born and orphaned, in England and the United States where he works odd jobs and pursues higher studies, or India where he feels alone. His notions about detachment drive him from one relationship to the next, from one predicament to the other, drawing several other people into the vortex of crises as he drifts along, struggling with the meaninglessness of the human condition. However, his connection with June Blyth exposes his fear of commitment. In the end, he realizes that real detachment comes from getting involved and redemption may be obtained not through inaction but through rightful action with detachment. Like Sindi Oberoi, Billy Biswas, in the novel The Strange Case of Billy Biswas, is alienated from his Indian roots and is a misfit in the modern technological jungle. Restless and agonized, he seeks refuge from the emptiness and artificiality of the upper-class society he comes from. He abandons his luxurious life, his family, and his friends and escapes to the forests of Maikala hills of Chhattisgarh. Living in close connection with nature among the tribal Bhils, he experiences his primordial self being regenerated. He marries a tribal beauty, Bilasia, and is almost completely tribalized until he is hunted down and killed by his powerful father’s goons. Rattan Rathore in The Apprentice, in a rather confessional tone narrates how he was caught up in the corruption and moral anarchism of the modern civilized world. In his pursuit of a profitable career and materialistic advancement, he succumbed to the temptation of taking a bribe to clear up a large lot of defective weapons. Consequently, he was imprisoned and lost his brigadier friend to suicide. Upon release, he reflects upon his spiritual bankruptcy and the uselessness of his life. He begins cleaning the shoes of devotees at a temple as reparation for his sins. Joshi’s penultimate novel, The Last Labyrinth, won him the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 1982. Rich, successful, and married to a woman of his choice, Som Bhaskar is restlessly driven in search of something indeterminate and undefined. His restless search drives him from the business world of Bombay to the unfathomable and mystic Benaras. His desperate pursuit of Anuradha reflects his deep existential anxiety. Caught up in the labyrinth of life and truth, of uncertainty and belief, of Darwin and Krishna, Som attains some understanding of human predicament only after having gone through much suffering and humiliation. In his last novel, The River and the City, Joshi shifts his concern away from the individual and toward the fate of the masses. Instead of focusing on the tumultuous inner world of an individual, he presents the socio-political and existentialist crisis of the “city” in this political fable. The City is not Bombay or Delhi as in his previous novels, but an imaginary locale situated by the River (mother of all cities) and ruled by the Grand Master. The palace astrologer’s prediction about the crowning of a new king sets the stage for a renewed upheaval in the power dynamics between the ruling elite who live atop Seven Hills, people living in brick colonies, the 207

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mud people and the rebellious boat people who bow only to the River. Ultimately the book is about the conflict between the good and the evil, between the powerful and the weak, between corrupt rulers and victimized citizens, between the city and the river, between the human beings and the divine. Joshi also wrote a collection of short stories titled, The Survivor (1975). He led a mostly reclusive life and published all his work locally, only with Orient, even though many international publishers had come into the fray when he was writing. While Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, and R.K Narayan focus on the outer social reality, Joshi explores the tumultuous inner world of his protagonists. His probe into the psychological depths of his characters and their self-introspection added a new dimension to character portrayal in post-independence, IndoAnglian literature. Primarily known as the philosopher-novelist, the keynote of Joshi’s work is an acknowledgment of modern man’s isolation and angst in the world. All his heroes desperately grope through the darkness of life and reality, anxiously trying to connect with the world. Their quest for fulfillment is a path full of self-doubt and problems of identity. Though influenced by Western Existentialists, Joshi offers resolutions to inner conflicts from his own native Indian culture. None of his novels end on a note of despair, they rather offer hope of recovery and reclamation.

Further Reading Abraham, T. J. A Critical Study of the Novels of Arun Joshi, Raja Rao and Sudhin N. Ghose. Atlantic, 1999. Chauhan, Abnish Singh. The Fictional World of Arun Joshi: Paradigm Shift in Values. Authorspress, 2016. Dhawan, R. K. The Fictional World of Arun Joshi. Classical Publishing, 1986. Indiramma, K. N. “The Novels of Arun Joshi: A Study.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention (IJHSSI), vol. 6, no. 9, 2017, pp. 52–53. Kumar, Shankar. The Novels of Arun Joshi: A Critical Study. Atlantic, 2003. Prasad, Madhusudan. “Arun Joshi.” Indian English Novelists: An Anthology of Critical Essays, edited by Madhusudan Prasad. Sterling, 1982, pp. 51–52.

GEETANJALI MAHAJAN

JUNG, NIZAMAT (1871–1955) Nizamat Jung, a notable lawyer, was a scion of the extended Hyderabad royal family, statesman and poet who earned degrees in arts and law from Trinity College, Cambridge. He who took a semi-conservative early education at the madrassa-i-aizza, a school founded on Islamic principles by his father Nawab Rafath Yaar Jung Bahadur, went on to become the first Hyderabadi to earn two prestigious Cambridge degrees in 1891. His proficiency in Arabic, Urdu, and English makes his literary legacy a rich one, despite the fact that he was not a very prolific writer. Also known as Niamath and Nizamuddin, he served in various positions of eminence in the government of the Nizam of Hyderabad. Jung published several poems in English at different times during his career as a barrister and later judge and chief justice. Most of his sonnets were written in different phases of his life and in different locations across the world, primarily in Britain and India. His most successful international poem – also in many ways his magnum opus – was “India to England,” published in dozens of newspapers and journals across the globe and included in several anthologies of war poetry. The London Times published it in 1914 on the day the Indian troops landed in Marseilles. Sonnets was first published in 1917 with a foreword by Richard Charles Fraser. The volume, which Jung had initially intended for very limited private circulation, comprises twenty-four sonnets on spiritual longing and platonic love, a prologue, and an epilogue. The 208

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theme of mystical and sentimental love recurs more powerfully in his 1926 epic poem “Rudel of Blaye,” celebrating the immortal medieval amor de lonh of the gallant troubadour Prince Rudel and the enchanting Hodierna, Countess of Tripoli. Occasional Poems: Pro Rege et Patria was first published in English in 1945. This very short collection consists of poems dedicated to the “King” and the “homeland” and includes the much praised “Coronation Ode” which celebrated the ascension of the last Nizam of Hyderabad Mir Osman Ali Khan to the throne in 1911. As in the Islamic Poems, edited and published by Zaheer Ahmed in 1935, the spiritual and philosophical passions of the poet come to the fore in Sonnets of Mystic Love and Beauty. The latter bears a foreword written by Lord Hailey and was first published in 1952. Jung’s translation of an entire episode – running to over five hundred lines – relating to the battle of Cadesia from Firdausi’s Shah-Nama was published in the journal Islamic Culture in 1937. Most of Nizamat Jung’s prose work is religious, didactic in nature, and meager in comparison with his poetic output. An Approach to the Study of the Quran is by far Nizamat Jung’s most widely published book-length prose work with over twenty-one editions appearing between 1939 and 2001. The Right Path, 1947, another prose Islamic text, was well received by readers in India. According to its compiler Habeeb Ahmed Faruqi, Hints to the Younger Generation offers a “moral reconstruction” program for youth enamored by Western ideas. Morning Thought is a collection of concise essays published in 1920 by the Government Central Press, Hyderabad. Jung’s English friends held his writing in high esteem and persuaded him to get Sonnets published by Erskine Mac Donald Ltd., London. Louise Imogen Guiney, an American essayist likening Jung’s sonnets to those of Michelangelo, exclaims – “Few are the native English poets who can breathe that air or have such a complete mastery of form, as also of the music of words.” Arthur S. Way (translator of Homer, Aeschylus and Euripides) comparing Jung to poets like Milton, Swinburne and Dante, writes – “they seem to me a marvellous performance for one to whom the vehicle of expression is a foreign language.” The Times Literary Supplement of 1918 applauded the “twenty six love sonnets . . . of singular excellence as exercises in that form, revealing a graceful fancy and true literary taste.” The Poetry Review claimed that there was “a blaze of beauty in all his sonnets, and not a little noble wisdom.” Sarojini Naidu lavished praises on Nizamat Jung’s poetic art, admitting that she had come “into contact with a spirit . . . delicately and sensitively responsive to the tenderest chord of Beauty; a mind so attuned to fine ideals and lofty moods .  .  . inseparable from those spiritual and mental gifts I find in your verse.”

Further Reading Ahmed, Zahir. Life’s Yesterdays: Glimpses of Sir Nizamat Jung and His Times. Thacker, 1945. ———. Poems by Sir Nizamat Jung. Narayanguda Publishers, 1954. Iyer, N. V. Sir Nizamat Jung: A Short Study. Nizam Silver Jubilee Press, 1947.

HEMANT KUMAR SHARMA

JUSSAWALLA, ADIL JEHANGIR (1940–) Adil Jehangir Jussawalla was born on April  8, 1940, in Bombay to Jehangir and Mehera Jussawalla. His birth could not keep his parents together, and Adil had to survive in a broken family since his childhood. He was sent to the Cathedral and John Connon School in the city for his primary education at the age of seven. Once his primary education was complete, he moved to London to study architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture 209

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in 1957. His inclination toward literature further led him to study English and he graduated with a master’s degree in English from the University College, Oxford in 1964. Jussawalla went to London with the expectation of being embraced by the colonial rulers and to accept the land as his home. Not feeling at home in London, he returned to India in 1970 and continued teaching English in various colleges in Bombay till he joined as a lecturer of English language and literature in St Xavier’s College in 1972. In 1976, he was an honorary fellow of the International Writing Program, Iowa. In his journalistic career he served as the book review editor of the Indian Express, Bombay, from 1980–1981 and as the literary editor of Express Magazine till 1982, Science Age from 1983–1987, and Debonair 1987–1989. As an Indian English writer, Jussawalla’s celebrated works include Land’s End (1962), Missing Person (1976). Trying to Say Goodbye (2011), The Right Kind of Dog (2013), Maps for a Mortal Moon: Essays and Entertainments (2014), and I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky: Poems, Fiction and Non-fiction (1962–2015) (2015). He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2014 for his poetry collection Trying to Say Goodbye. He edited seminal anthology New Writing from India (1974) and in 1976 co-edited Statements: An Anthology of Indian Prose in English (1976) along with Eunice de Souza. Jussawalla’s poetic voice was heard for the first time at the age of twenty-two with the publication of his collection of poems Land’s End (1962) by Writers Workshop, Calcutta. Autobiographical in nature, the poems trace the growth and development of a young boy, Adil, into a poet of repute. The poems vividly present situations he experienced and his commentary on them, with existential questions in relation to society, culture, and self. Land’s End opens with the poem “Seventeen” presenting an impatient and arrogant adolescent who evolved with age. Later, in the poem “The Waiter” he becomes politically conscious, learns to be calm and reconciles with the past. Finally, in the titular poem “Land’s End” the poet conforms to the inevitable and expresses his faith in immortality and in the ancient belief in resurrection or re-creation. Jussawalla’s second book of poems, Missing Person (1976), includes his poems of exile that speak of the clash between cultures. The distress is probably at being left alone by the father, the probable missing person in his life. Hence in search of father figure Jussawalla goes to the colonial father, the English people, and seeks their acceptance. Turned down by the colonial rulers, his world gets shattered. The disconnected images in the poems are his own fragmentary world – his broken family and disjointed life – leading to multiple displacements throughout his life. Tragedy and the horror of failure loom large in the poetic psyche, and Jussawalla detests the hostility of mankind which has neither embraced nor understood minority poets. For Jussawalla, the missing person becomes silent and mute at the thought of being unwanted. Like a dejected lover, the missing person in the poet himself makes him speechless and quiet for about three and a half decades. He stopped writing and publishing. However, he soon realizes that his silence does not change the situation and in turn assists his haters in deleting his existence, history, language and culture. As Laetitia Zecchini in her article “Adil Jussawalla and the Double Edge of Poetry” claims “Poetry is about salvaging what has been damaged, ignored, or bleached out, about resurrecting lives presumed lost” (2015: 255). Jussawalla’s poetry collections Trying to Say Goodbye and The Right Kind of Dog were published in quick succession. He infuses personal and collective memory against death and destruction. The dead poet does not allow himself or other deviant poets such as Agha Shahid Ali to say goodbye forever and be forgotten; rather, he becomes a ghost in the poem “Artist” dedicated to the non-conformist painter Mehlli Gobhai. Referring to other minority artists Jussawalla ends with a wish in the poem “Snakeskin”: “May be another’s skin,/remembered and shed,/finally makes the note come right.”

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Similar desires in multiple artistic characters in the poems work as a means of not only renewing the protest against majoritarianism but also universalizing it. The textual universe of Jussawalla’s poetry collection The Right Kind of Dog is a literary space where he does not remain a wrong breed of the canine species. The title of the collection refers to the photographer Don McCullin who had felt “cast out, unchosen, rather as though I was the wrong breed of dog” in his autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour (1990). The metaphor of home is significant of both desire and disgust and Jussawalla transfigures the underdogs of society into the “right kind of dog” in his poetic world.

Further Reading de Souza, Eunice. “Interviews with Four Indian English Poets.” The Bombay Review, vol. 1, 1989, p. 75. Jussawalla, Adil. Land’s End. Writers Workshop, 1962. ———. Trying to Say Goodbye: Poems. Almost Island Books, 2011. ———. The Right Kind of Dog. Duckbill Books, 2013. ———. I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky: Poems, Fiction and Non-fiction (1962–2015). Hachette Book, 2015.

RASHEDA PARVEEN

KALA GHODA POEMS by Arun Kolatkar Kala Ghoda Poems is the second book of English poetry (Jejuri being the first published in 1976) by Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004), the bilingual poet from Kolhapur, Maharashtra. Pras Prakashan published it in 2004, shortly before the poet’s death. The collection takes its name from the place Kala Ghoda, a prominent place in the city of Mumbai and a hub of cultural activities. Kala Ghoda, which means black horse, actually harks back to a colonial past when there was an equestrian statue of King Edward VII at the center of Kala Ghoda. Though the figure was removed in 1965, the place name persists. All the twenty-eight poems in the collection revolve around the lives lived on the streets of Kala Ghoda. These include the lives of people like pavement dweller women, the leper/beggar, animals like a stray dog, crow, things like an old bicycle tire, rubbish, shit, etc. The book offers an alternative picture of the city of Mumbai, focusing on life at the peripheries and renewing the readers’ experience of their familiar world. The book opens early in the morning, and the city is seen/shown through the eyes of a pidog who claims, “This is the time of the city I like best” because it ultimately belongs to him; undisturbed by the city’s “so-called masters.” The sympathy for the homeless of Mumbai and their voiceless lives marks Kolatkar’s portrayal of lives at the crossroads of Kala Ghoda. In the poem “Meera,” Kolatkar calls the sad-eyed sweeper lady of the municipal street-cleaning team “Our lady of dead flowers.” The poem “The Ogress” talks about the one-eyed, acid-burned woman living on Rope Walk Lane. He, despite all her physical “ugliness,” is the only humane face to the children born on the street (“a kind of an auxiliary mother, semi-official nanny, and baby-bather-in-chief”). The use of humor, laconic irony and wit in his treatment of subjects like rubbish, lice, or shit is typically Kolatkarean. He sounds radically subversive when he finds similarities between the heap of garbage in front of the Jehangir Art Gallery, which is cleared from time to time, and any piece of art exhibited in the elite art gallery for “half an hour every morning”; for both “celebrate the inessential impermanence of all art.” Kolatkar has an observing eye that records minute details. “Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda,” the book’s longest poem consisting of thirty-one sections, enumerates different food items served at various eateries, which suggests the diverse nature of life in the city of Mumbai, a

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melting pot comprising people from other communities and cultures. Kolatkar primarily draws attention to the “Lady of Idlis,” who sells idli on the street. The poet deifies her and calls her “Annapoorna” (the Hindu Goddess of food and nutrition) because she feeds “every hungry and homeless soul” living humble life on the pavement of Kala Ghoda. Kolatkar does not shy away from expressing his disgust for the heartless city when he calls Mumbai “a city without a soul” (“The Boomtown Lepers’ Band”). His sense of humor and playful irreverence is given free rein in poems like “The Shit Sermon,” where a drunkard vents out his frustration in the following lines: “Shit city, he thunders; . . . I shit on you.” The book concludes with the poem “Traffic Lights,” which signals the approaching night. Thus the reader completes the material description of a whole day’s happenings in the lives of the downtrodden, homeless lot living on the fringes of society. In fine, Kolatkar presents himself as a poet-flâneur who observes the daily lives of the ordinary, downtrodden street dwellers and valorizes them. He places the so-called outcasts of society at the center of his poetry and transforms “the politics of eviction and exclusion into a poetics of hospitality” (Zecchini 64). His poems in Kala Ghoda Poems are wrapped with a touch of compassion for all forms of life and even things in and around the vicinity of Kala Ghoda. His experimentalism in verse (often using the colloquial Bombaiya Hindi), his unique treatment of the ordinary things, his sense of humor, use of irony, and playful irreverence – all make him one of the avant-garde poets in the literary landscape of post-independent India.

Further Reading Kolatkar, Arun, and Anjali Nerlekar. “Kala Ghoda Poems.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, Spring 2005, pp. 94–98. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30039815. Zecchini, Laetitia. Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines. Bloomsbury, 2014.

SHILPI BASAK

KALA, ADVAITA (1976–) Advaita Kala did her schooling at Welham’s Girls’ School, Dehradun, and studied liberal arts at Berry College, Georgia, United States. Her father was a bureaucrat, and she spent most of her childhood in central Delhi. After dabbling in varying jobs, a brief stint in the hotel industry, and living in different cities and countries, she published her first novel, Almost Single, in 2007. The book struck a chord with the young Indian readers and became an instant runaway bestseller, selling over 150,000 copies in India. The book developed from her observations about fast-changing and continuously evolving concepts about love and marriage in modern India and how the “hunt” for a partner was no longer only a male prerogative. The novel humorously and unapologetically recounts the travails of carefree, saucy, and “large framed” Aisha Bhatia. As a relations manager of an upscale hotel in Delhi, Aisha is busy enjoying the fast-paced city life filled with good friends, first class travel activities, chic soirees, wine, and cheese. However, she is constantly reminded that she is almost thirty and “still unmarried” by her nagging mother. The latter believe that Aisha’s socially active life and independence will only perpetuate her singlehood. Aisha amusedly watches single women around her frantically try everything from online dating, numerologists, and shastrijis to tarot card reading to find a perfect man (which she knows probably does not exist). She is neither lonely nor needs a man to pay her bills, yet she is aware that she has “only a job” and cannot hide the excuse of being wholly focused on her career. She is also intelligent and honest enough to know that wanting a wedding does not necessarily mean being ready for marriage. Aisha and her group of friends – a single woman, an

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about-to-be divorced woman, and a gay couple – are all hip and urban. Yet, they are never far from Indian realities of a jugaadu job, Hinglish babas, “two taus from his pind,” peacock fantouting, Mitsubishi-owner Roshni Ma, etc. They freely have tequila shots and sexual encounters and play truth and dare in front of a havankund. Aisha’s love interest, Karan, is an essential character in the novel but not the only well-defined one. The novel is about modern Indian women and their inner predicaments as they find themselves caught up in traditional customs and new rules of love, life, and relationships. The book was recognized as part of an “internationally trendy fiction genre . . . popularized by Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sex and the City” by The Washington Post and was called “Bridget Jones in a saree” by the UK’s The Independent. It has been translated into French, Marathi, and Hindi and was selected by Bantam Discovery Program as a promising new voice. Kala’s second novel, Almost There!, published in 2011, was a sequel to Almost Single, which continued the escapades and struggles of Aisha and her friends. Besides her two novels, Kala is an award-winning screenplay writer of successful films. Anjaana Anjaani (2010) is the romantic drama of two suicidal strangers who fall in love. Kahaani (2012) garnered both critical and commercial success. Kala based this “woman-driven story in a male genre” on her personal experience of having lived in Kolkata. Kala’s fascination for the busy and complicated city is apparent as it emerges as an essential character in the film. Vidya Bagchi, a pregnant software engineer from London, navigates her way around this oftenunfriendly city as she looks for her husband, who had come there on a work assignment. Apart from writing for films and novels, Kala has also written the television serial Airplane, which aired on Star Plus, and a web series Illegal Season 2 (2021). Her stories have well-etched female protagonists – Aisha, Vidya, and Niharika (Illegal Season 2) – all show both vulnerability and strength, all are trying to carve a place for themselves in the world of men, and all attempt to represent the complexities of lives of modern Indian women. Kala’s hospitality column, Epicuriosity for the Financial Express, and her regular columns for Financial Chronicle, Dainik Jagran, and Dhaka Tribune are proof of her versatility as a writer. She appears regularly on several television news channels while using her YouTube channel to discuss and debate wide-ranging political and social issues. She is also known for her crucial philanthropic work during the COVID-19 period.

Further Reading Kala, Advaita. “Something to Chew On.” The Indian Express, 6 Oct. 2013, http://archive.indianexpress. com/news/something-to-chew-on/1178841/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2022. ———. “When Food Speaks.” The Indian Express, 20 Oct. 2013, http://archive.indianexpress.com/ news/when-food-speaks/1184663/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2022. ——— [@AdvaitaKalaNow]. YouTube, www.youtube.com/channel/UCsu4YmPw7E9PyGrWQG6fT9g. Lakshmi, Rama. “Sassy Chick Lit Finds New Fans Among India’s Young Women.” Los Angeles Times, 30 Nov. 2007, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-nov-30-et-chicklit30-story.html. Accessed 31 Mar. 2022. Mitra, Ipshita. “Vidya’s Journey Was My Own: Advaita Kala.” The Times of India, 16 Mar. 2012, https:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/books/features/vidyas-journey-was-my-own-advaita-kala/ articleshow/12208225.cms. Accessed 20 Mar. 2022. Ravi, S. “Words That Bind.” The Hindu, 23 Nov. 2017, www.thehindu.com/books/words-that-bind/ article20689308.ece. Accessed 31 Mar. 2022. Sangeetha. “Advaita Scripts a New Chapter.” The Hindu, 28 Sept. 2010, www.thehindu.com/todayspaper/tp-features/tp-metroplus/Advaita-scripts-a-new-chapter/article16049867.ece. Accessed 31 Mar. 2022.

GEETANJALI MAHAJAN

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KANDAN THE PATRIOT by K.S. Venkataramani Kandan the Patriot was one of the first novels to have a protagonist who followed the example of Gandhi. It was published in the middle of the Civil Disobedience Movement, first in a serial form in 1931 and then as a book in 1932. The novel is set in the village of Akkur and the nearby town of Tranquebar (now Tharangambadi) in Tamil Nadu. The events of the novel’s first half take place over twenty-four hours, and parallel narratives represent layers of Indian village society during the British rule. The novel opens with a train leaving the station, which is a sign for men who have finished work in the fields to go to the toddy shop. The train’s number (9) may allude to the ninth chapter of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, which criticized the railways as imported British mechanization. Kandan, who, like Gandhi, lived in Natal, has returned to his rural area to work for social reform. His year-long attempts to persuade toddy-drinkers to abstain from alcohol, which causes them to steal, beat their wives and leave their children hungry, would have resonated with contemporary readers because the picketing of alcohol shops was part of the Civil Disobedience Movement. Kandan’s actions threaten the trade of Mr. Mudaliar, the local landowner who also owns the toddy shop. Mr. Mudaliar has been too distracted by the pleasure of driving his car to pay his five hundred laborers and the “2,000 stomachs” that rely on him for food. Meanwhile, Rangaswami and Rajeswari, old friends of Kandan from Oxford University, catch a train toward Akkur and debate current nationalist issues. Rangaswami is an assistant collector in the Indian Civil Service and sees the role as a bit of kingship that can help millions. Rajeswari tries to persuade him to resign and join the Indian National Congress, arguing that the poor cannot be served until “the whole vicious system is changed.” On the train they meet Padma, a young schoolboy who has given an anti-government speech and run away from home. The novel’s first climax is a train crash, caused by Mr. Mudaliar, who is driving the train on a whim, and a drunk points man who does not change the points. No one is hurt, but the symbolism of toddy and trains derailing villagers from their duties is clear. The peasants loot Mr. Mudaliar’s grain store and set fire to the hay ricks and the toddy shop. Their spontaneous rebellion is disastrous: when the police arrive, they hide the evidence by throwing the grain into the lake. This episode acts as a foil to the patient, non-violent work of Kandan. The train crash brings all the protagonists together. The novel’s second half sees Padma, Rangaswami, the station master and his wife, and even Mr. Mudaliar convert to Kandan’s Gandhian outlook. Rangaswami calls a public meeting put down brutally by the Malabar reserves, and Kandan is shot dead. The epilogue records the prison sentences given to the remaining characters for their part in what the British authorities term a riot. Despite the ending, the novel is not pessimistic because Kandan’s influence spreads. This is partly conveyed through the pervasive metaphor of water. While the only British character, Mr. Lance, is said to have a “fondness for straight irrigation channels” to control moisture as he controls men, Kandan, when asked about Swaraj, says, “A nation’s freedom is like the swell of the sea – once it rises, no bunds on the shore, no land-marks, or sand-dunes of repression, can limit its flow.” The 1932 edition of Kandan includes reviews: The Hindu describes the author as an “observant and loving delineator of the Indian scene. . . . Despite the tragic close, the general impression that the book leaves is one of quiet exultation.” Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya (president of Congress in 1932) praised the “lofty patriotic sentiment which breathes through the book.” 214

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Further Reading Jackson, William J. “Introduction.” Kandan, the Patriot, edited by K. S. Venkataramani. Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/1410927/Kandan_the_Patriot_by_K_S_Venkataramani_introduction_by_William_ J_Jackson. Jagadisan, S., and M. S. Nagarajan. “Venkataramani, K. S. (1891–1952).” Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literature in English, edited by Eugene Benson and L. W. Conolly. Routledge, 2005. Ramaswami, N. S. Makers of Indian Literature: K. S. Venkatarakmani. Sahitya Akademi, 1988. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.5412/page/3/mode/2up. Sharma, Sudarshan. “Gandhian Ideology and Some Novelists.” Indian Literature in English, Critical Views, edited by Satish Barbuddhe. Sarup and Sons, 2007.

ANGELA EYRE

KANDASAMY, MEENA (1984–) Iḷavēṉil Kandasamy is a Dalit feminist author, translator, and political activist from Tamil Nadu, India. “Meena” is her nom de plume. As “Meena Kandasamy” she is known for her emotionally charged style of writing that upholds the beacon of human rights and social justice. Her writing surprises, shocks, delights, informs, and creates a literary mirror for the readers. In her hands, the history of caste atrocities, Brahminical double-standards, hypocrisy of casteapologists, and patriarchal doublespeak lie exposed and cut down to sizes. Kandasamy was born in 1984 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, to academician parents, Drs. W. B. Vasantha and K. Kandasamy. Currently, she is living in the United Kingdom with her two sons and her partner. She also has a sister, Dr. Ilanthenral Kandasamy. She did her graduation in English from University of Madras in 2004; postgraduation in English language and literature in 2006; and PhD in socio-linguistics from Anna University, Chennai, in 2010. She acted as an editor of The Dalit, a bimonthly English magazine of the Dalit Media Network from 2001–2002. Kandasamy has held prestigious fellowships like International Writing Program in University of Iowa (2009), Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship (2011), and the Junge Akademie Fellowship, Berlin. In 2022, she received the PEN Germany’s Hermann Kesten Award, and became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, UK. She started writing poems at the age of seventeen and at the age of twenty-two published her first collection of poems, Touch, in 2006. It carries a foreword by Kamala Das and includes eighty-four poems that are further divided into seven sections. Some of them had already appeared as stand-alone poems earlier. Two poems, “Mascara” and “My Lover Speaks of Rape,” have also won pan-India poetry prizes. Her second poetry book, Ms Militancy (2010), lent her the epithet of an “angry young (woman) poet.” In this volume, she refashioned and retold the dominant Hindu and Tamil myths from feminist and anti-caste lens. The title poem is based on Kannagi of Cilappatikaram, whose wrath burned down the city of Madurai to ashes. The poems thus tend to be provocative and critical of conservative beliefs and attitudes. In 2014, she published a forty-page poetry chapbook titled, #ThisPoemWillProvokeYou, which dealt with themes like love, freedom, state oppression, and resistance. Another chapbook of fifty-three poems was published in 2018 and titled, We Are Not the Citizens. In 2014, Kandasamy published her first novel, The Gypsy Goddess. It was based on the 1968 Kilvenmani massacre, where forty-four Dalit landless laborers on strike were killed and later charred to death by the hired goons of their upper-caste landlord in Kilvenmani, Tanjore, Tamil Nadu. The book was listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and the Tata Literature Live First Book Award. 215

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Kandasamy’s next book, When I  Hit You: Or, A  Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017), was a work of auto-fiction. She drew on her personal experiences to build upon and explore the ills of marital rape and domestic violence. It was again short-listed for the Women’s Prize in 2018. The strength of the narrative lies in the way the narrator-survivor controls the telling of “herstory” and at her own pace. Her tormentor is a captivating and sadist university professor who spews communist ideas but expects wifely subservience from the unnamed narrator. The latter he exhorts at the cost of her mental, psychological, and physical well-being. The third novel, Exquisite Cadavers (2019), was written in response to the reception of its predecessor, which was falsely perceived as the author’s memoir. The title refers to the Surrealist creative game where artists would draw body parts on folded paper, without knowing what had gone before (The Guardian). Here too, Kandasamy uses the technique of “split-screen,” where the page is divided into two halves – the right side delineates the story of Maya and Karim, and the left delves into the creative process. Living in Britain, Maya (an English woman) works for a newspaper, and Karim (an African filmmaker), is enrolled in a film course. However, their relationship must contend with the larger socio-political forces where State repression, and other atrocities exist in conjunction. Kandasamy has translated the works of prominent Dalit icons and authors like Thol Thirumavalavan, Kasi Anandan, Thanthai Periyar, Salma, Malathi Maithri, Kutti Revathi, and Sukirtharani. Her translation of Salma’s novel, Manamiyangal (Women, Dreaming), was long-listed for the Dublin Literary Award in 2022. Critical appraisal of her works has largely been positive, both internationally and nationally (Gowrinathan, Herrero, It.Pearson, The Guardian). In totality, in Meena Kandasamy’s writing, the personal and the political are truly conjoined.

Further Reading Gowrinathan, Nimmi. “Resisting Misogyny and Caste: The Writings of Meena Kandasamy.” Antyajaa: Indian Journal of Women and Social Change, vol. 1, no. 1, 2016, pp. 110–113. Herrero, Dolores. “Postmodernism and Politics in Meena Kandasamy’s the Gypsy Goddess.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 54, no. 1, 2019, pp. 70–83. Kandasamy, Meena. Meena Kandasamy, www.kandasamy.co.uk/about. Accessed 7 Jan. 2023. Mazzau, Silvia. “Meena Kandasamy.” Pearson, it.pearson.com/aree-disciplinari/english/literature/ meena-kandasamy.html#. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. “Meena Kandasamy.” The Guardian, www.google.co.uk/search?as_q=meena+kandasamy&as_epq=&as_ oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=www.theguardian.com&as_ occt=any&safe=images&as_filetype=&tbs=. Accessed 4 Jan. 2023.

SAKSHI SUNDARAM

KANGA, FIRDAUS (1960–) Born in Mumbai to an upper-middle-class Parsi family, Firdaus Kanga was diagnosed at birth with osteogenesis imperfecta. This rare disorder stunted Kanga’s physical growth, made using his legs impossible, and resulted in fractures at the slightest tumble. He was homeschooled by parents, Homi and Tehmi Kanga, until he joined the fourth grade at Campion School, an elite private Catholic establishment for boys. He dallied briefly with the law before moving on to journalism and history, securing a BA in the latter from the University of Mumbai. Kanga, devoid of wheelchair access until he was nineteen, was necessarily restricted to the seclusion of his household, isolated from the physically demanding world of his peers. To compensate, he immersed himself in the cultural zeitgeist, voraciously consuming books and music, attending concerts and films aided by well-wishers. 216

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A turning point came when he was awarded a prize in a short story competition judged by, among others, Amitav Ghosh, which clinched Kanga’s interest in becoming a writer. His first novel, Trying to Grow (1990), is a bildungsroman drawn heavily from the details of his own life. It tells the story of Brit Kotwal (nicknamed so for his brittle bones), who, like Kanga, is a disabled, gay man born into a Parsi family in Bombay. The book narrates Brit’s journey transforming from a fragile child cocooned by his loving mother and anxious father to an angsty teenager wrestling with his feelings for Cyrus, a neighborhood friend. His physical perfection inspires tremendous lust and provokes an inferiority complex. Brit’s family, relatives, and neighbors provide fodder to poke gentle fun at the foibles and quirks of the Parsi community and its complicated relationship with independent India, which Kanga does with wit and warmth. Kanga, who immigrated to London shortly after his literary debut, next wrote Heaven on Wheels (1991). It is a travelogue that describes his wheelchair-enabled tour of England, Wales, and Scotland. The Parsi Anglophilia Kanga identified and described in his first book is in full effect here as he visits places of great literary and cultural import, including Margaret Thatcher’s home and Stephen Hawking’s Cambridge residence. Via rail and in a wheelchair, Kanga traverses Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle, Durham, Bradford, and Leicester, producing a mixture of vivid images (“she gathered her indignation like skirts about her”) and more generic, often excessively sentimental, observations. In 1997, Kanga ventured into filmmaking by adapting Trying to Grow into an award-winning film called Sixth Happiness, in which he also starred as the lead. Since then, he has contributed to a few documentaries and TV programs on the LGBTQ+ and disabled communities. In 1992, he narrated Pratibha Parmar’s TV program on differently abled gays and lesbians called “Double the Trouble, Twice the Fun.” He collaborated with Parmar again in 1993 on her documentary “Taboo,” an exploration of Hinduism’s attitude toward disability. Kanga’s work, especially his first novel, has received wide critical acclaim and established him as an important early voice within queer fiction in India.

Further Reading Anand, S. “Rethinking Monsters: Teaching Disability Studies Through History and the Humanities.” Disability Studies in India: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Springer, 2020. Dodiya, J. Parsi English Novel. Sarup Book Publishers, 2006. Hawley, John C. “The Bombay Boys of Mira Nair, Firdaus Kanga, and Ardashir Vakil.” South Asian Review, vol. 22, no. 1, 2001, pp. 40–56. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/0275 9527.2001.11932213. Paranjape, Makarand. “An ‘Artist Novel’.” Social Scientist, vol. 19, no. 1/2, 1991, p. 111. JSTOR, https:// doi.org/10.2307/3517734.

NEHA YADAV

KANNAN, LAKSHMI (1947–) Lakshmi Kannan was born on August 13, 1947, in Mysore. Her initial schooling was from Mount Carmel and Mahila Seva Samaja, Bengaluru, Karnataka. She did her B. A (Hons) in English from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi; MA in English from Delhi University; and completed her PhD from Jadavpur University, Calcutta. She taught in the faculty of English for several years in colleges in Delhi, Calcutta, and in the department of HASS, IIT – Delhi before quitting teaching to join the MNC Hindustan Thompson Associates as a senior writer and language coordinator. Kannan was a resident writer for the International Writing Program, Iowa, USA; Charles Wallace Writer, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK; Sahitya Akademi Writer attached with Jamia Millia Islamia University; Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; and 217

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Visitor, University of Cambridge. She is a bilingual writer who has published long and short fiction in both English and Tamil. Her fiction in Tamil is under the penname of “Kaaveri.” Lakshmi Kannan’s twenty-five books – poems, novels, short stories, and translations – include the Wooden Cow, a translation (2021), and The Glass Bead Curtain, a novel (2020, c2016). She has published five poetry collections in English, the most recent being Sipping the Jasmine Moon (2019). The Glass Bead Curtain is a historical novel based on the last phase of British rule in the Madras Presidency. It takes up legal, social, and cultural reforms and specific controversial court verdicts that shook the nation’s conscience. Interestingly, it was an era when educated men were liberal and supportive of women. They spoke against child marriage, crusaded for literacy for girls, social status for widows, and other related issues. Wooden Cow is a translation of the iconic writer T. Janakiraman’s novel in Tamil, published in time for his birth centenary. Lakshmi’s self-translated works in English include a novel titled Going Home and collections of short fiction titled Nandanvan & Other Stories, Genesis, India Gate and Other Stories and Parijata. Lakshmi Kannan is mainly celebrated for her sharp, short verses on woman’s search for identity, the place of nature in human experience, and cultural identity. Her poetry, marked by South Indian cultural rhythms that merge with her cosmopolitan ethos, has a feminist tone that examines how women are viewed in Indian society. They address women’s quest for fulfillment and bonding with nature and the environment. She uses rivers as metaphors for women’s lives. Her short stories are her translations of their Tamil originals. They are explorations of lived experience that create an apocalyptic dimension. They pitch the reader between the luminal space of the living and the dead.

Further Reading Datta, Ranjeeta. “Review of Nandanvan & Other Stories by Lakshmi Kannan.” IIAS Review, vol. 8, no. 1, Summer 2012. Gupta, Santosh. “A Million Mutinies Behind the Glass Curtain.” Indian Literature, Mar.–Apr. 2017. Indra, C. T. “The Later Poetry of Lakshmi Kannan: Remaking Woman’s Language.” Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 10, no. 1–2, Jan.–Dec. 2010. “The ‘I’ of the Storm: Self in Literature – Form and Trans-Form.” Literary Constructs of the Self: SocioCultural Contexts, edited by Santosh Gupta and Mini Nanda. Rawat Publications, 2010. Kannan, Lakshmi, “To Grow or Not to Grow: That’s the Question.” Growing Up as a Woman Writer, edited by Jasbir Jain. Sahitya Akademi, 2007. Narayan, Shyamala A. “From the Pen of an Iconoclast.” The Book Review, vol. 46, no. 2, 2 Feb. 2022.

SANGEETA SINGH

KARNAD, GIRISH (1938–2019) Girish Karnad was born in Matheran on May  19, 1938, to Dr  Raghunath Karnad and Krishnabai Mankeekara. A critically acclaimed playwright, author, actor, director and television presenter, most of Karnad’s work was initially written in Kannada. However, he has himself translated many of his works into English. After schooling at Basel Mission High School, he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and statistics from Karnatak Arts College, Dharwad, in 1958. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue a Master of Arts in philosophy, politics, and economics at Magdalen College, University of Oxford (1960–1963). He was elected the president of the Oxford Union in 1962. On his return to India, he began working with the Oxford University Press (OUP), Chennai. He began his long-time association with the theater group, The Madras Players, in 1965. 218

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He resigned from his job in 1970 to become a full-time writer. He was a visiting professor and Fulbright playwright-in-residence at the University of Chicago from 1987 to 1988. He was appointed Director of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in 1974 and Chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi in 1988. From 2000 to 2003, he served as the Nehru Centre’s Director and Minister of Culture in the Indian High Commission, London. Karnad wrote his first play, Yayati, in 1961 while a student at Oxford. This marked the beginning of his tryst with historical and mythological themes that would figure prominently in his future works. The play was translated into English by the author in 2007. Centered on the character of King Yayati from the Mahabharata, the space focalizes the many issues of modern life, such as the obsession with material pleasures and the precarity of interpersonal relationships. Devayani, the wife of the lustful king and Sharmishtha, her maid, were once best friends. They are at loggerheads because of Yayati’s sexual desire for Sharmishta. As a punishment for his transgressions, Devayani’s father, Sukracharya, curses Yayati with old age and decrepitude. His son Puru is then called upon to accept the curse on his father’s behalf. The play explores existentialist dilemmas using the complex underpinnings of familial ties, moral responsibilities and gender issues. It won the Mysore State Award in 1962. Next came Tughlaq in 1964, which is arguably his most famous work. The play was initially written in Kannada, and Alyque Padamsee persuaded Karnad to translate it into English. Padamsee produced the English translation for the Theatre Group, and it was first staged at the Bhulabhai Auditorium in Mumbai in August 1970. OUP published the translation in 1971. In thirteen scenes, the play tells the story of Muḥammad Bin Tughluq, who was the Sultan of Delhi from 1325 to 1361. Using historical events such as Tughlaq’s infamous decision to shift his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad and the removal of the jizya tax paid by the Hindus as the backdrop, Karnad uses striking symbolism to offer a powerful allegory of contemporary Indian politics. Primary themes include humanism, political idealism versus reality, and strategic manipulations of secularism. Hayavadana, originally published in Kannada in 1971, was translated by Karnad in 1975. The play was inspired by The Transposed Heads (1940), a novella by Thomas Mann. Mann’s work was based on a story from the 11th-century Sanskrit text Kathasaritsagara. It tells the story of Hayavadana, the son of a princess and a celestial creature in the form of a horse. He has a horse’s head and has tried everything possible to become a complete being. Bhagavata, the play’s narrator, suggests that he seeks help from Goddess Kali. The space also tells the story of friends Devadatta, a gifted poet, and an athletic Kapila, who are both in love with Padmini. Although she finds elements of Kapila’s personality appealing, Devadatta and Padmini marry. During a pilgrimage, when Devadatta sees that Padmini is physically attracted to Kapila, he cuts off his head. Unable to bear the grief of his friend’s loss, Kapila decapitates himself too. Kali permits Padmini to replace their heads and bring them back to life, but in her confusion, Padmini transposes the two leaders. Although it seems as though Padmini has created the perfect husband, things turn for the worse between husband and wife as Devadatta loses both his strength and the inclination to write poetry while Kapila’s new body grows strong. Finally, the two friends decide to fight a duel for Padmini, but both die. A distraught Padmini commits sati. The play ends with Hayavadana returning from his pilgrimage, meeting Padmini’s son and finding happiness and contentment in being a complete horse. The performative elements of the play show Karnad’s deep affinity for the theatrical tradition of the folk theater form of Yakshagana. Using mythology and folklore, he once again explores the quest for self-identity and complex interpersonal relationships. Naga-Mandala (1988) is a two-act play based on a folk tale narrated to Karnad by A.K. Ramanujam. The play won the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award for the Most Creative Work 219

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of 1989. Karnad’s English translations of the Kannada original were published in 1990. Once again, blending history with fantastical elements, the author employs the aesthetics of the Yakshagana tradition. The story revolves around Rani, a woman stuck in a loveless and abusive marriage with the adulterous, Appanna. The play has an innovative and open-ended format as it offers multiple endings. Naga-Mandala calls out the effect of patriarchy and chauvinism on marital relationships. During his tenure in Chicago, Naga-Mandala had its world premiere at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. The Dreams of Tipu Sultan was originally written in English on the invitation of the BBC in 1997 on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee year of Indian independence and the two-hundredth death anniversary of Tipu Sultan. Karnad masterfully rewrites the historical discourse on Tipu Sultan, effectively narrating the treacherous circumstances that led to his downfall. The Fire and the Rain (originally Agni Muttu Male in Kannada), published in 1998, is based on the myth of Raivya, Paravasu, Arvasu and Yavakri, from the Mahabharata, narrated by the sage Lomash. The play highlights issues such as women’s rights and casteism. It follows his signature style of using myth and legend to explore themes of contemporary significance such as the greed for power, betrayal, self-sacrifice, quest for identity and spirituality, familial ties, etc. Bali: The Sacrifice (1998) (Hittina Hunja in Kannada explores similar themes using characters from an ancient Kannada epic, Yashodhara Charite. One of Karnad’s landmark works was Tale-Danda, published in English in 1993. The play comprises three acts; the first is based on the central character, Basavanna, accused of theft, and his confrontation with Prince Sovideva, the second son of King Bijjala. The second act tells the story of Kalavati, a Brahmin girl in love with Sheelavanta, the son of Haralaya, a cobbler. The third act presents the imprisonment of King Bijjala’s by his son, Jagdeva. In a tragic ending, Jagdeva assassinates the king and commits suicide. Written in the background of the MandirMandal conflict, the relationships between the characters in the play are mired in casteist politics. Much like in The Fire and the Rain, anti-casteism is one of the central themes in the play. In 2004, Karnad engaged with the monologue genre through his works Flowers and Broken Images. In Flowers, the story revolves around Subbanna, a married priest who falls in love with a courtesan. The meditative monologue reflects the protagonist’s conflicts and explores the philosophy of religion, spirituality, morality, gender issues, etc. His other monologue, Broken Images, is intensely self-reflexive and relays the problems of using the English language as the medium of expression in Indian writing. Using the protagonist, novelist Manjula Nayak, the play foregrounds the marginalization of vernacular literature and the social and economic implications of using the “coloniser’s language.” In 2008 Karnad wrote Wedding Album, which adopts a humorous and satirical tone to shed light on modern India’s anxieties and notions of propriety and well-being. Using a wedding in the Nadkarni household as the backdrop, the play presents the dilemmas, complexities, and hypocrisies arising from negotiating tradition and modernity in contemporary India. Much on the same lines, Boiled Beans on Toast (2012) also explores the conundrums of modern life in Bangalore’s fast-paced, bustling city. Drawing on the founding lore of Bangalore, in which an 11th-century king was saved by an older woman who offered him boiled beans, Karnad masterfully interconnects characters from different walks of life, social classes and motivations, pivoting around the central character Anjana Padabidri. Along with the complications of urban migration, the play highlights the issues of economic disparity and consumerism through the cross-section of characters presented. For his outstanding contribution to the fields of literature, theater, and film, Karnad has won numerous awards and accolades. He won the Rejyotsava Award in 1970 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi and Vartur Navya Awards in 1972. He was awarded the prestigious Padma Shri in 220

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1974 and the Padma Bhushan in 1992. In 1998, he won the Jnanpith Award and Kalidas Samman. Besides literary awards, he has won over twenty Karnataka State and National awards and Filmfare awards for his contribution to various aspects of filmmaking. Following the prolonged illness and multiple organ failure, Karnad died on June 10, 2019 in Bengaluru, leaving a void in the world of arts and letters.

Further Reading Dhanavel, P. The Indian Imagination of Girish Karnad. Prestige Books, 2000. Dodiya, Jaydipsinh, editor. The Plays of Girish Karnad: Critical Perspectives. Prestige Books, 1999. Kulkarni, Prafull D. The Dramatic World of Girish Karnad. Creative Books, 2010. Leslie, Julia. “Nailed to the Past: Girish Karnad’s Plays.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 31, no. 2, 1999, pp. 50–84. Mitra, Zinia. “A Tale of Subversion with a Conundrum of Mask: A Reading into Girish Karnad’s NagaMandala.” Indian Drama in English, edited by K. Chakraborty. PHI, 2011.

GAYATRI THANU PILLAI

KATYAL, AKHIL (1985–) Akhil Katyal was born in Lucknow where he attended La Martinière College for boys. He is a bilingual poet who writes in Hindi and English. In 2003, he moved from Lucknow to Delhi to study English literature at the University of Delhi, where he got his BA and MA degrees. He got his PhD in Hindi and Urdu literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He returned to Delhi in 2011 to begin his teaching career. He has taught in S.G.T.B. Khalsa college, St. Stephen’s college, Ramjas College and Shiv Nadar University. At present, he is an assistant professor in the School of Culture and Creative Expressions in Ambedkar University, New Delhi. In addition to being an academician, Katyal is a prolific writer having published several books of poetry along with translations, academic monographs, and co-edited anthologies on American literature and queer poetry from South Asia. Akhil Katyal’s poetry finds its inspiration in the works of the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, Meena Kandasamy, Amrita Pritam, and the Hindi poet Manglesh Dabral. Poets such as Dorothy Parker, W.H. Auden, and Mark Doty have also shaped Katyal’s creative vision. Katyal’s poetry deals with the issue of Kashmir, experiences in big cities like Delhi, and issues of the Dalit and LGBTQ+ community. Katyal’s first book of poems, Night Charge Extra, which was published in 2015 by the Writers Workshop, consists of sixty-four poems which were written over a period of ten years, and was nominated for Muse India Satish Verma Young Writer Award. In “Moments before she died/Delhi 29.12.12,” Katyal addresses the death of Nirbhaya after her rape. Delhi (the city where the rape took place) acquires human characteristics and is shellshocked and waiting for an absolution which might never come. In How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross? Katyal brings together the forgotten days of the Indian subcontinent and the present lives of its inhabitants. For Katyal, the countries through which the Indus flows have witnessed some form of unrest and suffering, be it political or physical. Katyal does not shy away from sensitive themes such as nationalism and patriotism. In the poem, “To the Soldier of Siachen,” Katyal assumes the voice of the common people who not only become political instruments but also suffer the consequences of the war. He also comments on the Kashmir conflict by writing about the representation of Kashmir in Bollywood films. In “When Shammi Kapoor Slides Down the Snow,” Katyal shows how the film industry deceives both the viewers and Kashmiris through the false and misguided representation of Kashmir. 221

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The Doubleness of Sexuality: Idioms of Same-Sex Desire in Modern India is Katyal’s nonfiction work published in 2016. The book carefully traces how the word “homosexuality” found its way into the language through the fields of medicine and legal system in pre-independent and post-independent India. He argues that the term cannot capture the many “intersecting idioms of same-sex desire in India.” He suggests that sexuality is marked by a “doubleness,” which embodies tension between the way homosexuality is “conceptualised” and the way “it is lived” out. The book addresses this doubleness through “sexual idioms,” “legal idioms,” and “virtual idioms.” He uses examples from the autobiography of Ismat Chugtai, dating apps used by the LGBTQ+ community, and other narratives to show how queer, homosexuality and LGBTQ+ are not interchangeable but overlapping and intersectional. Katyal suggests that “doubleness” is a crucial element for being political, which means that it is important to note the process of doubleness. He uses the model of “theory vs praxis” to show how “queer activists” bridge the gap between “theoretical ideals” and ground reality. This book helps the reader to understand queerness in India in the light of section 377 of the Indian penal code.

Further Reading Angiras, Aditi, and Akhil Katyal. The World That Belongs to US: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia. HarperCollins Publishers India, 2020. Baas, Michiel. “Gender, Sexuality, and Society in Indonesia: A  Review Essay of Three Recent Publications.” Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde, vol. 174, no. 4, 2018, pp. 481–490. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27011505. Katyal, Akhil. Night Charge Extra. Writers Workshop, 2015. ———. The Doubleness of Sexuality: Idioms of Same-Sex Desire in Modern India. New Text, 2016. ———. How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross? Poems. The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, 2019. Subramaniam, Arundhathi. “Introduction: Beyond the Hashtag: Exploring Contemporary Indian Poetry in English.” Indian Literature, vol. 61, no. 1 (297), 2017, pp. 33–39. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/ 26791073.

SAMRAT SHARMA

KESAVAN, MUKUL (1957–) Mukul Kesavan is a historian, novelist and essayist. He studied history at St. Stephen’s College and at the University of Delhi. He then gained an MLitt degree at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, England. Kesavan teaches history at Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi. Kesavan’s first and only novel to date, Looking Through Glass, was published in 1995. The novel reexamines the official history of the period from the 1942 Quit India movement to independence and partition, posing questions about nationalist agency. It focuses especially on the history of the Muslim population and their participation in – and absence from – the nationalist struggle. Most notably, the role and place of Muslim Congress supporters is foregrounded in the face of Gandhi’s major civil disobedience campaign before the resolution of the Hindu– Muslim conflict. Kesavan makes use of magic realist devices for making some major points in the novel. One of them is the literal disappearance of Indian Muslims who opposed partition on the morning the Quit India program was announced. Magic realism also frames the narrative of Looking Through Glass; to examine and narrate history is always “looking through glass,” a mediated view with possible distortions. While taking his grandmother’s ashes to Banaras, the photographer protagonist-narrator is transported back in history to August 1942 when he falls from a railway bridge near Lucknow into the river below while trying to take a photograph. To cope with the time-travel and his new circumstances, he pretends to develop amnesia and finds a place to stay at the home of Masroor, who 222

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saves him from drowning, and his family, Ammi and Ashrafi. After Masroor, who is against the Quit India movement, disappears, the nameless narrator takes part in the rebellion and the raid on a police station. In another narrative strand of the novel, the nameless narrator is seen recuperating in a wrestling academy in Banaras from a head wound he sustained in the attack. In Banaras, he becomes involved in performances of gendered myths of the nation, including the masculine bodybuilding Akhara culture, the Kama Sutra, the Ramlila and especially the role of Sita, which the narrator is supposed to play, and (a cinematic rendition of) sati. The narrator rescues the actress Parwana, who is raped on the set of a film version of Kama Sutra. He mistakenly believes that Parwana, who is unable to speak, is a widow and the scars on her back are from her husband’s funeral pyre. Although he later finds out the truth – Parwana has been injured on the sati set of a previous film – the narrator takes her to his social-worker grandmother, still alive and living in Delhi in 1942. Parwana has been muted by these versions of male nationalist myths, sati and Kama Sutra, and finds her voice only once in the old zenana of Ammi and Ashrafi. Looking Through Glass received favorable reviews but not quite the attention and publicity as some other Indian English novels of the 1990s. In his collection of essays, Secular Common Sense (2001), published as the first book in the series Interrogating India by Penguin, Kesavan argues that “secularism is not a radical cause,” it has been “the political common sense of the Republic” and should remain as such. Kesavan traces the history of the Congress policy of secularism, understood in India as “an equal pandering to all religions” rather than the Western meaning of being unrelated or neutral in regard to religion, and discusses the adoption of the idea and practice of the new republic. Most of the book focuses on Hindu chauvinism and the Hindu Right’s attempt to replace State secularism with Hinduism, which in his view should be opposed. Kesavan writes frequently about cricket and a collection of his essays, infused with history and memories, Men in White: A Book of Cricket, was published in 2007. He has also published two other edited collections of his essays on political and cultural subjects and travel, The Ugliness of the Indian Male and Other Propositions (2008) and Homeless on Google Earth (2013).

Further Reading Challakere, Padmaja. “Witnessing ‘History’ Otherwise: Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 30, no. 4, 1998, pp. 574–593. Gidley, Mick. “Looking Through Glass: Reflections on Photography and Mukul Kesavan.” Kunapipi, vol. 25, no. 1, 2003, pp. 93–101. Kunapipi, https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol25/iss1/16. Khair, Tabish. “The Rape of Parwana: Mukul Kesavan’s Inscription of History and Agency.” Kunapipi, vol. 22, no. 2, 2000, pp. 1–5. Kunapipi, https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol22/iss2/3/. Mee, Jon. “ ‘Itihasa: Thus It Was’: Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass and the Rewriting of History.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 29, no. 1, 1998, pp. 145–161. Sati, Someshwar. “Lineages of the Present: Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass and India’s Embattled Secularism.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, vol. 58, no. 2, 2010, pp. 159–172.

RAITA MERIVIRTA

KHAIR, TABISH (1966–) Tabish Khair, one of the most prolific Indians writing in English, was born in 1966 in a genteel Muslim family which had had three generations of medical doctors, descending from the lineage of landed aristocracy that had been affluent till the middle of the 19th century. He spent almost all his life till his postgraduate degree in Gaya, a small town in Bihar that enjoys 223

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a significant place in history as the place where Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment. He started working for Times of India (Patna edition) while still in college. After working for four years as a staff reporter for Times of India, he left for Denmark. His PhD thesis at Copenhagen University was published as Babu Fictions by Oxford in 2001. Khair saw his first publication at the age of twenty-five in the form of My World, a prizewinning collection of his poems, in 1991. It was followed by yet another collection of poems, Where Parallel Lines Meet, in the year 2000. Two other books of poems are Man of Glass (2020) and Quarantined Sonnets (2020). Khair’s academic writing Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels attempts to “examine alienation in contemporary Indian English fiction.” It underlines the separation of the society into two near compartments comprising of the Babus and the Coolies, the privileged and the non/underprivileged respectively. The demarcation is clear on the lines of socio-economic reality, education, and, above all their proximity to the English language. Khair has penned six novels to date. His first novel, The Bus Stopped, published in 2004, was short-listed for the Encore award (UK). The Thing About Thugs (2010) narrates the fascinating tale of one Amir Ali who had been proudly initiated by his father into the family profession of Thugee. Set in London, the novel revolves around Captain William Meadows who has Ali travel with him all the way to Victorian England from a village in Bihar, “the deluded lands of Hindoostan.” Khair arranges this novel among a group of narratives that jostle against one another to occupy its two hundred and fourty-odd pages. The novel was short-listed for a number of prizes including the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Man Asian Literary Prize. Addressing a contemporary theme through fiction, Khair published How to Fight Islamist Terrorism from the Missionary Position in 2012. This novel is loaded with contradictory feelings of sadness and humor, bitterness and sweetness. The three main characters are a Pakistani narrator who has not been named, Ravi who falls in love with a beautiful woman, and Karim, a believer who follows his faith steadfastly and drives his taxi. Just Another Jihadi Lane came out in 2016. It is a tale of two similarly placed but differentlyoriented Muslim girls of Asian descent in England. Jamilla and Ameena end up traveling to Islamist Syria to join the cause of militant Islam, inspired by the new sense of belonging, hoping to establish a new spiritual order. It is only later that the former Yorkshire girls realize the narrowness of their new path. Night of Happiness, a novel about the strange friendship and unusual professional relationship of Anil Mehrotra and his Man Friday, Ahmed, was published in 2018. The novel acquaints us with socially privileged Mehrotra who is highly educated as he has degrees from IIT and Columbia, and the middle-class Ahmed who speaks thirteen languages. The readers find themselves in uncertain waters when the employer Mehrotra hires Devi Prasad, a private detective, to investigate the past life of Ahmed. Khair is rare among novelists since he is also a prolific academic writer. Other than Babu Fictions he has written The Gothic Post Colonialism & Otherness (2009). The New Xenophobia (Oxford, 2016), written “in the hope (Utopian as it is) that my children do not need to read it when they grow up,” tries to put in the right perspective – just resistance – xenophobia – misoxenia (outright hostility toward and hatred of foreigners) through historical examples of “slave revolts in the Caribbean to the Ghaddar of 1857 and the struggle for independence in India to the Algerian war of Independence.” The book underlines the new fear of the stranger or the “other” that has gripped the world, including the Western world in the present century, taking into account the limitations of the usual attempts to curtail xenophobia through methods such as preaching sensitization, mutual cooperation and coexistence.

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Khair’s latest novel, The Body by the Shore (2022), is set on an oil rig in the North Sea, in the post pandemic world of 2030. The novel, as the name suggests, lives up to its reputation of suspense, speculation and intrigue. The story has at its center a murderer, Harris Maloub, whose official past does not exist anymore, along with Michelle, a young woman from the Caribbean, and Jens Erik, a police officer who remembers rather vividly the black man whose body was recovered from the sea – which is “the body by the shore.” In an interview with the literary e-magazine The Wise Owl, Tabish Khair admits that writing is 99% perspiration and one percent inspiration. The one percent role of the “Muse” he says is played by – the people who made him write (even if they did not read him) and the small town, which, even though he has been too happy to have left behind him, does drive, prod, and stab him into writing, admitting that, it, in its almost generic “small townness” informs his reading and criticism of literature. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and lives in a small village near Aarhus.

Further Reading Dwivedi, Om Prakash, editor. Tabish Khair: A Critical Companion. Roman Books, 2013. Dwivedi, Om Prakash, and Cristina M. Gamez-Fernandez, editors. Tabish Khair: Critical Perspectives. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.

HARSH VARDHAN KHIMTA

KHARE, RANDHIR (1951–) Randhir Khare, born on July  25, 1951, in Kanpur, India, is a renowned poet, artist, writer, teacher, and folklorist who has about thirty-five books of poetry, fiction, translations, educational handbooks, essays, and seven solo exhibitions of art to his credit. He is the recipient of the Sanskriti National Award, the Residency Award of the National Academy of Letters, the Dronacharya Award, the Winter Cultural Festival Poetry Prize, Pegasus – the Union of Bulgarian Writers’ Gold Medal for Poetry, the Human Rights Award, and the Rehabilitation Award. He is also an executive editor of an international heritage magazine, Heritage India, and the director of Kahani India (an organization supporting folkloric storytelling traditions) and the Rewachand Bhojwani Academy in Pune. Khare has been a professor of literature at Wadia College, Pune, and Visiting Professor at Poona College. As a creative educator, he has been associated with mentoring young brains to enhance their creativity. As an artist, he has performed his poetry with Western classical jazz bands, folk musicians, a tabla player, and an Iranian santoor player. Khare has founded the poetry-music band “Mystic,” which has performed several concerts of his poetry and vocals. His poetry has been translated into French, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Bulgarian, and A.R. Rahman has set his poetry to music. As a folklorist, Khare has been collecting stories and songs from the remote parts of India and has documented, translated, and promoted the folkloric traditions of various traditional communities. He also founded the Living Heritage Movement, which supports performers and practitioners of lore. His traditional storytelling sessions are very popular and have attracted large audiences at Open Space in Pune. Khare’s books run on three parallel texts: history, geography, and psychology. The main underlying themes or concerns, in the words of Khare himself, are the struggles of marginal people or communities to survive and hold on to who they are in a world that has no place for them anymore, the experience of change, the trauma of transformation – whether human or

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natural – and the celebration of the natural world. He displays an acute awareness of the interconnectedness of all animate and inanimate beings. Incredibly prolific, Khare’s first published work Hunger (1976) established him as a writer of great promise. His Kutch: Triumph of the Spirit published in 2004 is a travel narrative based on the true-life stories of Kutchis people who have lived a fraught history of disastrous earthquakes, wars, famines, floods, invasions of locusts, rats, etc. It is a story of the buoyant spirit of patience, inventiveness, and courageous acceptance of life of the people of Kutch in a region of perpetual flux and crisis, who have not learned to give up and audaciously face the trial of time and circumstances. Walking Through Fire, published in 2012, focuses on how the harsh circumstances faced in childhood and youth germinate a powerful feeling of violence, a sort of inner rebellion in the mind of Sean Varma, and how with time his life journey leads to the apocalyptic moment in which his hidden inner violence bursts out and ultimately liberates him. Strangers on the Shore, published in 2015, is a compelling fictional narrative woven around the emotional and psychological dilemmas of people who find and lose themselves in an effort to discover who they really are. The story explores the scrupulously avoided dark realities of sacrosanct relationships and filial ties. A well-crafted collection of poems, Memory Land: Poems & Drawings, published in 2018, explores and celebrates the cultural geography and the primeval glory of the Dang jungles of South Gujarat. Through the evocative words and expressive line drawings, the primordial relationship between the traditional communities and nature is vibrantly revealed. Khare’s latest work Travelling Light, published in 2021, contains poems that revolve around the lives of traditional and marginal communities, and celebrate the power of poetry to transform, touch, and enter the heart. Khare has also written and illustrated two novels for children – The Last Jungle on Earth (2000) and The Legend of Creaky (2015) which have been used as rapid and supplementary readers in schools in Pune.

Further Reading Ghosh, Bishwanath. “I’m a Jack-in-the-Box.” The Hindu, 5 Jan. 2013, www.thehindu.com/features/ magazine/%E2%80%9CI%E2%80%99m-a-Jack-in-the-box%E2%80%9D/article12057479.ece. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Khare, Randhir. Interview with Mark Ulyseas. Live Encounters, Sept. 2012, https://liveencounters.net/ wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Live-Encounters-Magazine-September-2012d.pdf. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Vasudev, Shefalee. “Author Randhir Khare Talks About His Novel ‘Kutch – the Triumph of Spirit’.” India Today, 15 Mar. 2004, www.indiatoday.in/magazine/society-the-arts/books/story/20040315-ran dhir-khare-talks-about-his-novel-kutch-the-triumph-of-spirit-790330-2004-03-15. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023.

KUMUD SINGHAL

KIRE, EASTERINE (1959–) Easterine Kire, who currently lives in Norway, was born in Kohima, Nagaland, a state struggling with militancy and factional violence, located in Northeastern India. She completed her schooling in a Baptist English School, graduated from the North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong, and was awarded a doctoral degree in English literature from Savitribai Phule Pune University, formerly the University of Poona. Kire’s oeuvre consists of poetry, novels, children’s books, and short stories. She is a member of the band “Jazzpoesi,” which performs jazz music. The band topped the Norwegian jazz charts with their 2013 digital release. She also conducts workshops and delivers lectures in schools and colleges on culture and literature. 226

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Kire’s first collection of poems, Kelhoukevira, was published in 1982 and was the first book of Naga poetry in English. The title, “Kelhoukevira” is an Angami (Naga) word from one of the indigenous languages spoken in Nagaland which roughly translates as a place where life is good. “Kelhoukevira” the eponymous poem from the collection is invoked as a foil to the volatile present. It laments the loss of the bygone days when the beautiful landscape of Nagaland had not been ravaged by violence. Kire is the first Naga writer to publish a novel in English, A Naga Village Remembered, in 2003. It narrates the conflict between a Naga village and the British forces. It was republished in 2018 as Sky is My Father. Her second novel A Terrible Matriarchy (2007) depicts the turbulent relationship between Nagaland and the Indian State. Mari (2010) is based on the Japanese invasion of India through Nagaland in 1944 which the Nagas successfully fought off. It is a celebration of the resolve of a young mother who embraces life after losing her fiancé in the war. The novel brings into focus the everyday rhythms of Naga life by fictionalizing the true events that Kire’s own aunt, Khrielieviü Mari O’Leary, experienced as a result of the Japanese aggression. Her novel Bitter Wormwood (2011) was short-listed for the Hindu Prize. In 2015 her novel When the River Sleeps won the Hindu Prize. Her fifth novel, Don’t Run, My Love, came out in 2017. Her most recent novel, Spirit Nights, is inspired by the story of darkness narrated by some Naga tribes. Like her other novels, it draws on the rich tribal traditions that have stood the test of time and survived the onslaught of modernity. Her most recent book, Walking the Roadless Road: Exploring the Tribes of Nagaland, was published in 2019. This nonfictional work takes a long view of the Naga question. Living away from home has enabled her to understand the political world of her homeland better. Walking the Roadless Road maps the cultural and political history of the Naga people whose roots, though indeterminate, are ancient. The fiercely independent Naga tribes were vanquished by the British in the 19th century and became part of independent India by default. Nagas, however, had always maintained a separate identity and a national consciousness which has resulted in a relationship with India that is fraught with violence. Kire has also written children’s books, articles, and essays. Her first children’s book in English was published in 2011. Son of the Thundercloud won her the Tata Literature Live Book of the Year award in 2017 as well as the Bal Sahitya Puraskar in 2018. Kire has also translated over two hundred oral poems from her native language Angami into English. The major chunk of Kire’s oeuvre is reflective of her Naga identity and a desire to preserve the oral literature of the tribal communities. She is a founding member of Barkweaver Publications, which is dedicated to preserving folk tales and people’s histories. As a diasporic writer, she has also embraced her adopted home and written books in Norwegian too. Kire’s books have been translated into many languages including German, Croatian, Uzbek, Norwegian, and Nepali. She was awarded the Governor’s Medal for Excellence in Naga Literature in 2011, and in 2013 she bagged the Catalan PEN, Barcelona Free Voice award. According to Vivek Menezes, Kire’s work “outline(s) how the Nagas navigate fearlessly between ostensibly contradictory worlds: tribal traditions and contemporary rationalism, patriarchal customs and female emancipation, age-old animism and televangelical Christianity.”

Further Reading Dasgupta, Sidharth. “Tola Defeats the Tiger.” Frontline, 27 Jul. 2022, https://frontline.thehindu.com/ books/tola-defeats-the-tiger-easterine-kire-on-her-latest-novel-spirit-nights/article65602657.ece. Accessed 29 Jul. 2022. Kire, Easterine. “In Conversation With: Easterine Kire.” Interview by Prakruti Maniar. Purple Pencil Project, 1 Oct. 2022, www.purplepencilproject.com/interview-easterine-kire/. Accessed 29 Jul. 2022.

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Encyclopedia Entries Menezes, Vivek. “Naga Writer Easterine Kire’s Clear Bright Sound Over a Sleeping World.” Scroll.in, 20 May  2021, https://scroll.in/article/995300/naga-writer-easterine-kires-clear-bright-sound-over-asleeping-world. Accessed 29 Jul. 2022.

AATEKA KHAN

KISHORE, USHA (1962–) Usha Kishore is an India-born, British writer, teacher, and translator. She was educated in the University of Kerala in India and then in Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Canterbury in the United Kingdom. Kishore now lives on the Isle of Man, where she teaches high school English and engages in individual and collaborative poetry projects. She is currently a PhD candidate in postcolonial poetry at Edinburgh Napier University. A contemporary poet of the Indian diaspora, Kishore writes about multiple facets of the postcolonial experience. In a 2018 interview, she says that poetry creates “a cross-cultural bridge . . . [while] coming to terms with postcolonial exile status.” Her first collection of poetry, On Manannan’s Isle (2014), examines diasporic discrepancies and shows how one navigates the often-complex interplay and Derridean slippage between where one came from and where one currently finds oneself, which reflexively addresses conflicts of the clashes between ones competing self-identities and broader cultural ties in real time. Kishore is not alone in experiencing these tensions and her work and tone are very relatable to current 21st century sensibilities. The poetry in Night Sky Between the Stars (2015) focuses on feminism, Indian womanhood, marginalized gender identity, and feminist discourse. Kishore expounds on gender identity and feminist discourse further in On Translating the Divine Woman (2014) by weaving her words into and alongside Indian myths and Sanskrit verse. Postcolonial themes are further explored in Kishore’s third collection, Immigrant (2018), and are largely considered in terms of the postmodern anxieties that tend to accompany the push and pull between “there” and “here” identities. Postcolonial perspectives and the harsh realities of discrimination and racism are prominent discursive themes in her poems. Critical reception to Kishore’s poetry is consistently positive and her poetry has been published internationally in several languages, including German, Gujarati, Spanish, Turkish, and Manx Gaelic. Kishore is also a translator who adapts works from Sanskrit and Hindi into English. Not only is translation a form of creative writing in its own right, but it also increases broader global access to traditional Indian poetry and verse. Often mixing the visions from her past in India and her present on the Isle of Man in her poetry, Kishore says that intertextuality “is natural” when one writes and teaches postcolonial literature. Kishore plays with many universal themes and multivalent concepts in her individual poetry and through her collaborative work. For example, Kishore has collaborated on various ekphrastic projects focused on specific artistic or poetic representations with a wide range of visual and textual artists. Kishore is the recipient of several Arts Council and Manx Heritage Foundation awards. She has also won a number of poetry prizes in the United Kingdom. She has read her work at many literary festivals, as well as at the Nehru Centre (Indian High Commission) and at the House of Lords (Parliament of the United Kingdom). Her work is anthologized by Macmillan, Oxford University Press, and Harper Collins India, and it has also been featured in primary school, middle school, and undergraduate syllabi in both Britain and India.

Further Reading Kishore, Usha. “On Translating the Divine Woman.” Poetry at Sangam, 2014, https://poetry.sangamhouse.org/2014/01/on-translating-the-divine-woman-by-usha-kishore/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023.

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Encyclopedia Entries ———. “Usha Kishore.” Mediterranean Poetry: An Odyssey Trough the Mediterranean World, edited by Anders Dahlgren, 2 Jan. 2014, www.odyssey.pm/contributors/usha-kishore/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. ———. “A Postcolonial Feminist Sensibility: Usha Kishore in Conversation with Goutam Karmakar.” Setu Magazine, Aug. 2018, www.setumag.com/2018/08/Usha-Kishore-Interview.html?m=1. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. ———. Usha Kishore, https://ushakishore.co.uk. Accessed 4 Jan. 2023.

STEPHANIE LAINE HAMILTON

KOLATKAR, ARUN (1931–2004) Arun Kolatkar, a bilingual poet in Marathi and English and leader of the avant-garde poets in the 1970s India, hails from Kohlapur, a town in south Maharastra. He was born in a traditional Hindu Brahmin family. Though he was brought up in a Marathi-speaking culture, he was introduced to Western art and culture from his early age through his father who was an educationist. After matriculation in 1947, Kolatkar joined J.J. School of Arts in Mumbai, gave up the course midway in 1951, and eventually completed it in 1957. Together with Dilip Chitre, he was “part of the whole little magazine bohemia and artistic fraternity who gathered around the Jehangir Art Gallery, in the south Bombay [modern Mumbai] area of Colaba” (Zecchini). Though he was a prolific writer of poetry (more in Marathi than in English), only three books of poetry in English came out during his lifetime. Jejuri, the first collection, published in 1976 earned him the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1976. The other two books, Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra, were published shortly before his death in 2004. Later, a posthumous collection titled The Boatride and Other Poems (edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra) was published in 2008, which comprises the poet’s previously unpublished poems along with some translations of his Marathi poems. As a poet, Kolatkar was influenced by European modernist and avant-garde poetry, American pop music, and the international counterculture of the times. At the same time, his poetry was informed by a quintessential ethos of Mumbai. Jejuri (1976) was occasioned by his visit to the religious town Jejuri, situated in Pune district of Maharastra, and a pilgrimage for the followers of Khandoba, a folk deity worshipped as a form of Lord Shiva. The book comprises thirty-one poems – all revolve around the activities observed by the poet-narrator in a single day in and around the temple town (Jejuri) and narrated in a very informal tone and style. The introductory poem “The Bus,” hints at the poet’s alienated stance which is in sharp contrast with the other passengers of the bus who seem to be devoted pilgrims. His skeptical attitude is evident in his playful irreverence and use of irony, as in the “The Priest” which showcases a greedy priest who has a grin on the face and a “ready to eat pilgrim/held between its teeth.” The poet highlights the commercialization of religion in “A Scratch” where God is the only “crop” “harvested” around the year. In fact, he finds the dividing line between “what is god and what is stone” very thin (“if it exists”) at Jejuri. Thus Jejuri is quite subversive in its treatment of religion. Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems also revolves around a place called Kala Ghoda near the Gateway of India, Mumbai. “Kala Ghoda,” or black horse in English, is a reference to the black equestrian statue of King Edward VII. Though it was later removed to erase the colonial vestiges, the name stuck to the place. The book takes a close look at people living on the fringes of society. In “Pi-dog,” the city (Mumbai) and its history is reviewed from the perspective of a pi-dog who sat where once the equestrian statue of King Edward VII was stationed. By situating a stray dog at the center of the crossroads of Kala Ghoda and showing the city through its eyes, Kolatkar brings an alternative narrative of the cityscape of the subalterns. Kolatkar’s love and sympathy for the social outcast figures in many poems in this book. His portrayal of 229

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the one-eyed “ugly” woman in “The Ogress” reveals the humane face (“a kind of an auxiliary mother, a semi-official nanny and a baby-bather-in-chief to a whole chain of children born to this street”) in the otherwise cruel world of pavement dwellers of Kala Ghoda. The longest poem of the book, “Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda,” presents the heterogeneous picture of Mumbai at breakfast time. The list of the food items served at different restaurants and on streets points to the multifarious community of people living in the city. Sarpa Satra, also published in 2004, interweaves myth, history and allegory. The long narrative poem is divided into three sections – “Janmejaya,” “Jaratkaru Speaks to Her Son Aastika” and “The Ritual Bath.” The poem is based on an episode from the Mahabharata. When King Parikshit dies of snakebite (by the snake-king Takshaka), his son Janmejaya takes revenge by preparing a snake sacrifice to annihilate the snakes (sarpas) from the earth. The poem retells the story from the perspective of a snake (Jaratkaru), championing the cause of the peripheries who are always unheard. In fact, the poem is an allegory in which the “festival of hatred” threatens the extinction of the human race in actual world as it once attempted the extinction of snakes in the mythical world. Kolatkar’s poems present an inclusive picture of society. His worldview, as the critic Arundhathi Subramaniam aptly observes, is “arrestingly quirky but unfailingly hospitable and inclusive” (Subramaniam). Kolatkar’s experiments, his hybrid use of language (using both global and local idioms), his humor, and laconic irony – all these – mark him as one of the leading avant-garde poets of modern India.

Further Reading Nerlekar, Anjali. Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture. Northwestern UP, 2016. Souza, Eunice De. Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets. Oxford UP, 1999. Subramaniam, Arundhathi. “Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004).” Indian Literature, vol. 48, no. 5, Sept.–Oct. 2004, pp. 19–25. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23346463. Zecchini, Laetitia. Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India: Moving Lines. Bloomsbury, 2014.

SHILPI BASAK

KRISHNAMURTI, JIDDU (1895–1986) Jiddu Krishanmurti was born in Madanpalle, India on May 12, 1895, to Jiddu Narayaniah, a civil servant, and his wife Sanjeevamma. He was born into the Brahmin caste and was a native speaker of Telugu. Krishnamurti suffered from ill health during much of his childhood and had limited educational opportunities because the Jiddu family moved frequently due to Narayaniah’s job. Among his many siblings, Krishnamurti became closest with his brother Nityananda (1898–1925). The death of his mother when he was only ten years old had a devastating influence on his life. His father was a negligent parent and the children largely fended for themselves and each other after their mother’s death. When Narayaniah retired from the civil service in 1908, he appealed to Annie Besant (1847– 1933), leader of the Theosophical Society, for employment and living quarters at their compound in Adyar. At first, Besant rejected Narayaniah’s requests, but eventually offered him a secretarial position and provided him with dilapidated quarters outside the compound, where Narayaniah moved with his four sons in 1908. Krishnamurti and Nityananda were inseparable and often played in the compound. One day, they caught the eye of Charles Webster Leadbeater (of the Theosophical Society) as he was bathing in the river. Overawed by Krishnamurti’s aura, he took him under his wing. 230

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Over the next several months, Leadbeater claimed to have conducted an analysis of Krishnamurti’s past lives and reached the conclusion that he was highly spiritually advanced and had a special role to play for humanity. Leadbeater gave him a new name, Alcyone, the brightest star in the Pleiades cluster, wrote on Krishnamurti, and authored a series of articles on him, which were compiled into a two-volume book called The Lives of Alcyone. Since Annie Besant paid special attention to the boys and provided for their education, Krishnamurti’s father made her their legal guardian. She then moved them to an apartment adjacent to her own. Both Besant and Leadbeater believed that Krishnamurti was the vector for the return of the Lord Maitreya, a supreme spiritual entity in Theosophical belief that would occasionally manifest itself in bodily form on earth, such as in the body of the Buddha or Jesus Christ. They believed Krishnamurti would be the next embodiment of Maitreya and take on the role of a World Teacher. In 1911, Besant brought both boys to England, where they were paraded before Theosophical Society meetings and continued to be privately tutored in preparation for the entry examinations at Oxford. That same year, Besant and Leadbeater formed the International Order of the Star in the East (OSE) with the purpose of preparing for the eminent arrival of the World Teacher. Krishnamurti, still a teenager, was made head of the organization. Narayaniah became disenchanted with Besant and the Society and filed a legal suit in 1912 to regain custody of his two sons. He won in an initial court hearing and the first appeal, but Besant won a subsequent appeal, and by the time the court proceedings ended, Krishnamurti turned 18, was entitled to decide things on his own, and chose to stay with Besant. Though efforts were made to tutor Krishnamurti, he hated studies and had little aptitude for academic life. He failed the university entrance exams numerous times and could not be admitted to Oxford or any other college, except for a short stint at the Sorbonne in France. The first book attributed to Krishnamurti, under the pseudonym Alcyone, was a short work entitled At the Feet of the Master, published when he was only fourteen. Whether or not Krishnamurti wrote the book is still disputed; many suspect that it was written by Leadbeater. Krishnamurti had not yet learned English very well, as is clearly borne by the letters that he wrote around that time. One of Krishnamurti’s tutors has claimed that he admitted to him that he had not written the book. Whatever the truth about its authorship, the book was heavily influenced by Theosophy, and it was claimed to have been revealed to Krishnamurti by “the Master,” whom Krishnamurti was said to have met in a nocturnal voyage to the astral plane during his sleep. The contents of the book revolved around the Four Qualifications of the spiritual path: discrimination, desirelessness, good conduct, and love, as well as Six Points of Conduct: self-control of the mind, selfcontrol of action, tolerance, cheerfulness, one-pointedness, confidence. After breaking off from theosophy and renouncing his role as a World Teacher, Krishnamurti’s teaching diverged sharply from what is contained in At the Feet of the Master and his earlier religious philosophy. He dispensed with the idea of the Master, God, and all other forms of supreme agency from his teachings and instead stressed individual enlightenment through direct observation of oneself and the world. The world was to be understood, and true enlightenment obtained at the individual level. Krishnamurti now said: “Truth is a pathless land” (1996). He also stressed the identical nature of the observer and observed, maintaining the fundamental Theosophical idea of universal unity. Individual enlightenment therefore has an impact far beyond the individual. According to Krishnamurti, everyone is responsible for everything that happens in the world. For many, enlightenment is the attainment of knowledge. But for Krishnamurti, knowledge only feeds our illusions. He says that he did not read the work of other philosophers, made 231

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no attempt to acquire academic knowledge, and insisted that true understanding comes from oneself. One of the primary methods of attaining individual enlightenment is through meditation. This practice, done correctly, quietens the mind and allows one to go beyond one’s mental preconditioning. Krishnamurti asserts that memories and other forms of mental conditioning distort our understanding of the world and result in the loss of our freedom. Since they control our view of reality, he ends his short essay entitled “The Core of the Teachings” by asserting that “Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence.” Krishnamurti is most commonly categorized as a New Age thinker, and his work has little influence among academic philosophers outside of that niche area. He received a more positive response from the literary world, from writers such as Aldous Huxley and George Bernard Shaw. Nobel Laureate in physics David Bohm was a follower of Krishnamurti for many years and they co-authored several books, though Bohm later split with him because of intellectual differences. Krishnamurti’s most lasting influence is his religious following. His voluminous writings are archived, and his teachings are still promoted by various branches of the Krishnamurti Foundation.

Further Reading Gardner, M. “David Bohm and Jiddo Krishnamurti.” Skeptical Inquirer, July/Aug. 2000, pp. 20–23. Krishnamurti, J. The Krishnamurti Reader. Shambhala, 2011. Lutyens, M. Krishnamurti: His Life and Death. St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Vernon, R. Star in the East: Krishnamurti, the Invention of a Messiah. Palgrave, 2001.

WILLIAM R. PATTERSON

KUMAR, AMITAVA (1963–) Amitava Kumar, writer and journalist, was born in Ara, Bihar, India, on March 17, 1963, and grew up in Patna, where he had his early education at St. Michael’s High School. He got his BA in political science from Hindu College, Delhi University, in 1984, his M.A in linguistics and literature also from Delhi University (1986), and another MA from Syracuse University (1988). He received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota on “The Politics of Culture and Protest” in 1993. He has taught at the University of Florida, Penn State, and currently teaches at Vassar College, where he is Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English. He is the author of three novels, a collection of poems, and several books of nonfiction. No Tears for the N.R.I is Kumar’s first book of poems (1966). This collection, like his Passport Photos, 2000, is a sensitive exploration of what it means to be a migrant. In the preface to Bombay London New York (2002) Kumar states that the book is a record of his “reading practice” and “how and why we read.” But the book is also about the Indian diaspora that prefers three centers of migration: Bombay, London, and New York. Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate, published in 2005, is a journey of self-discovery. It deals with his marriage with a Muslim from Pakistan, his journey to that country and South Africa, his homecoming to Patna and the reaction of people, which makes him “the husband of a fanatic,” and creates space for an “eloquent rumination” on how Hindu–Muslim social divide can be seen from a different perspective. Home Products (2007), “a tragedy of small-time ambition,” with the alternative title, Nobody does the Right Thing, takes its epigraph from Mark Twain. The novel is about the murder of 232

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Mala Shrivastava, a young poet from Bihar, who has an affair with Surajdeo Tripathy, a politician. When Binod, a journalist investigating the case, comes to Bihar, the novel opens space for commenting on the cultural milieu of a small place, the impact of Bollywood films on its people, and cybercrime. A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb (2010), is an analysis of the global war on terror and its impact on the people and nations that changed the world after the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001. A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna (2014) is Kumar’s reflections on the city where he was nurtured in his early years. It is part autobiography and part travelogue, which focuses on the rapid urbanization of Patna, the types of people who live in it, its educational institutions, and how it is represented in literature. Three Patnas figure in it: one is created by those who are born and brought up there but move out of it; the second is made by those who live in it; the third comes into existence because of the people who come to the place to earn their livelihood. Lunch with a Bigot (2015), a collection of more than a dozen essays, has four parts: Reading, Writing, Places, and People. Kumar calls them “memorial acts,” which he dedicates to “examining the borders of the self” in relation to the world. The essays are a record of his development as a writer inspired by Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie, the childhood impressions of the places where he was born and brought up, and the cross-cultural influences that shaped his personality as a writer and a global citizen. Kumar’s second novel, Immigrant, Montana (2018), was first published in India with another title The Lovers. Kailash, the protagonist, nicknamed Ak or AK 47, born and raised in Ara, a small town in the state of Bihar, India, arrives in the United States as a graduate student. He gets involved with several women, marries an American woman, which makes him an American citizen. However, he is plagued by guilt that he has betrayed his Indian heritage. Every Day I Write the Book: Notes on Style (2020) is Kumar’s slender but a very practical guide to form and style. Published in 2021, A Time Outside This Time is his third novel. Satya, the protagonist, the novelist-narrator, is a seeker of truth in the time of falsehood and fake news in both India and America. Dissolving the line between truth and fiction, the events encompass 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Corona virus pandemic, and the other contemporary events. Kumar’s latest book The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal (2022) is a highly experimental work, a combination of diary writing and painting. Kumar uninterruptedly moves between the two worlds of home and exile throughout his diasporic journey. Involved in the academic and the mundane worlds, as a global citizen, culturally and politically, his interest in the post-truth goads him to investigate fake news and, in the process, he dissolves the line between subjectivity and the fictive discourse. Like the character, Ehsaan Ali, in his novel Immigrant, Montana, he seems like “a man . . . without a nation.” Kumar’s many honors and awards include fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony, the Wesleyan Writers Conference, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Yale University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Dartmouth, and the University of California-Riverside.

Further Reading Kumar, Ashwani. “Politics and Art Come Together in a Literary Delight That Is an Elegiac Montage of Memories.” What News, 6 Mar. 2022, https://whatnews.in/a-writers-diary-book-review-the-bluebook-by-amitava-kumar/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Tan, Kathy-Ann. “Citizenship Unhinged: Securitization, Identity Management, and the Migrant in Amitava Kumar’s Passport Photos.” Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in North American Literary Imagination. Wayne State UP, 2015, pp. 108–281. William, Jeffrey. J. “Writing In-between: An Interview with Amitava Kumar.” Symploke, vol. 27, no. 1–2, 2019, pp. 487–504.

ANIL K. PRASAD

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KUMAR, SHIV K. (1921–2017) Novelist, poet, playwright, short story writer, translator and critic, Shiv K. Kumar was born at Lahore, British India. He came from a family of educationists. His father Bishan Das Kumar was the headmaster of a school. Kumar had his early education at the D.A.V. High School in 1934 and studied for his BA at Govt. College Lahore and MA at Forman Christian College, Lahore. The experience of the partition, of displacement and the attendant sense of love and loss, strengthened Kumar’s faith in composite culture and the syncretic traditions of the subcontinent. Kumar taught briefly at the DAV College, Lahore, and then moved to India and joined Hansraj College, Delhi, as a lecturer. He served the All India Radio as a program officer and subsequently left for Cambridge in 1950 to pursue a PhD in English literature. He wrote a dissertation on “Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel.” Returning to India, Kumar served the Osmania University and the University of Hyderabad in the 1970s and 1980s. During 1972–1974, Shiv K. Kumar was a University Grants Commission National Lecturer in English. He also served as a visiting professor at several leading universities abroad. His stories and poems were broadcast over the BBC and later appeared in journals and magazines in India and abroad. He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature [FRSL], London, and received the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 1987 for his poetry collection Trapfalls in the Sky. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan for his contribution to the field of literature and made a mark in the field of literary journalism. He wrote newspaper columns regularly for many years that enjoyed a wide readership. Although Kumar had proficiency in many Indian languages like Hindi, Panjabi and Urdu, he wrote and expressed himself essentially in English. He was a significant voice in the field of Indian English poetry/literature of his generation. His poetry collections appeared under prestigious publication banners, beginning with Articulate Silences, Cobwebs in the Sun, Woodpeckers, Trapfalls in the Sky, Wool Gathering and Voices of Buddha (a poetic translation). Trapfalls in the Sky was translated into Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada and Tamil. He wrote plays as well: The Last Wedding Anniversary was produced in Hyderabad in 1974. Kumar’s poetry displays a deft handling of the English idiom in capturing emotions and sentiments of the poetic personae. The poems are often marked by sensuousness in imagery and metaphors. They appeared widely in anthologies edited by influential critics such as R. Parthasarathy and others. The most notable aspect of his poetry is his creative genius and observant vision, which give his poems credibility and depth. Kumar’s success as a postcolonial Indian English poet can be related to his role in the creation of new Indian English idioms. Like many other poets of the postcolonial age, he attempts to write realistically about the traditions and superstitions that persist in contemporary Indian society. He criticizes the casual approach with which some people indulge in ritualistic practices. However, he supports rituals and customs as long as they are not hypocritical. Religion that calms the heart and soul and instills a sense of morality is what he considers to be genuine and authentic. Kumar’s partition novel, A River with Three Banks, 1998 offers a novelistic understanding of interreligious experience, viewed through the prism of love. Deeply influenced by the British novelist D.H. Lawrence and the French philosopher Bergson, Kumar’s approach to poetry and creative writing is characterized by a sense of empathy for the dispossessed and the forsaken. Characters and protagonists of his stories and novels depart from the conventional social order and often seek redemption through forbidden love and longings. Here, as in the fictional world of Graham Greene and D.H. Lawrence, (both of whom appear to be major influences), it is the world of passion that often acts as a gateway to salvation and redemption. In the process, Kumar 234

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upholds the power of a life-affirming spirituality in shaping human life and destiny. Professor Shiv K. Kumar was also a charismatic teacher, a fine poet, and a writer who continued to write and publish till the end of his life.

Further Reading Das, Bijay K. Shiv K. Kumar as a Post-Colonial Poet. Atlantic, 2001. Dulai, Surjit S. “Shiv K. Kumar’s Writing.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 25, no. 2, 1990, pp. 9–45. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40873128. Mohanty, Sachidananda. Literature and Culture. Prestige Books, 2001. Singh, Prabhat K. A Passage to Shiv K. Kumar. Swaroop and Sons, 2001.

SACHIDANANDA MOHANTY

KUMAR, SUKRITA PAUL (1949–) Sukrita Paul Kumar was born in Nairobi, Kenya, to Joginder Paul, a renowned Urdu writer, and Krishna Paul, a professor of English. She spent the early years of her life in Nairobi and studied at the Duchess of Gloucester School and Highbridge Secondary School. She wrote her first poem in Hindi at the age of eight, which was published in the children’s magazine Parag. Kumar emigrated to India with her parents in 1964 after Kenya became independent of the British. In India, she continued her education at Aurangabad and Delhi, later taught literature at Zakir Hussain College and held the Aruna Asaf Ali Chair at the Cluster Innovation Centre, University of Delhi. Kumar has received many international fellowships and residencies, including fellowships of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa (USA), Cambridge Seminars, and Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. She has also received grants from the International Center for Writing and Translation, University of California at Irvine; Rockefeller University, British Council; and Shastri Indo-Canadian Research Fellowship. She has lectured on Indian literature at Cambridge University, SOAS University of London, South Asia Institute at Heidelberg, Germany, and several Canadian and American universities. Kumar’s poetic vision is shaped by her extensive travels and her deep engagement with people and places. Her first three collections: Oscillations, Folds of Silence, and Apurna are exploratory, as the poet delves inwards from the vantage point of the “here and the now.” She finds poetry in nature and human life which underline her understanding of the oneness of all things. The poems in her next collection, Without Margins, present intense life experiences with spaces for reflection. Concrete images are juxtaposed with the surreal and the dream-like. She conjures the always present but illusive reality through an interplay of the tangible and the suggestive. The poems in this collection strive to be free of all kinds of frames in inter- and intrapersonal relationships. Untitled contains poems that are self-reflexive and exploratory. The act of creation is approached through multiple viewpoints where words are comforting and meaningful but also deficient and menacing. Life and death, reality and myth are plumbed in this collection. Kumar is influenced by Samuel Beckett and her verse increasingly veers toward the terse. Untitled also includes a few haikus. Kumar’s collection Poems Come Home was published with Hindustani translations by the eminent lyricist Gulzar, who identifies the “Hindustaniyat” of Kumar’s verse, which speaks of fleeting memory, travails of everyday life, aging, and deeply felt emotion. Saath Chalte Hué: Rowing Together  is a collaborative collection of bilingual poems and mutual translations by Kumar and Savita Singh. 235

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Dream Catcher brings together poems born of her travels to China and Minnesota and her wandering around the Jahanpanah forest and the recesses of her mind. The volume also contains poems of devastation and pain, particularly of the tsunami that hit South India in 2004 and the homeless people living in winter shelters in Delhi. Dream Catcher was published with a companion Behind the Poems: Dream Catcher in which the poet self-consciously speaks about her creative process and the struggles of “birthing a poem” through memory, longing and the desire to be free. The pain and the labor become worthwhile when she allows that creative force to take over which “promises the unraveling of life-secrets totally invisible otherwise.” Country Drive is written dialogically with Yasmin Ladha. It explores the female voice in a vigorous exchange of ideas between the poets across space and time. Kumar is a self-avowed feminist and her ideal of androgyny is clearly articulated in this collection. Vanishing Words meditates on the tension between words, absences, and silences in poetry. Published during the COVID-19 pandemic, the poems ruminate on death and the meaning of and engagement with life. A painter and artist, Kumar illustrates many of her books, which creates a synergy between the word and the image and adds another layer to the experience of the poem. Dance performances have been set to readings of her poems, which have also been translated into many languages, including Chinese, Italian, Swahili, and Slovakian. Kumar has also authored, translated, and co-edited more than twenty-five critical and creative texts. Kumar is widely recognized as a sensitive, empathic, yet fearless voice in Indian poetry.

Further Reading Parameswaran, Uma. “Review of Folds of Silence by Sukrita Paul Kumar.” World Literature Today, vol. 71, no. 4, 1997, pp. 880–880. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/40153514. Rajan, Kalyanee. “Exploratory Poetry. Review of Untitled, by Sukrita Paul Kumar.” Muse India, no. 64, Nov.–Dec. 2015. ResearchGate, https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.31982.56642.

MEENAKSHI F. PAUL

LAHIRI, JHUMPHA (1967–) Jhumpha Lahiri was born in  London, England, on July  11, 1967, to Indian immigrants from West Bengal. Three years later, her family left for Kingston, Rhode Island, United States, where her father Amar Lahiri worked as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island and her mother Tapati Lahiri became a schoolteacher. On January 15, 2001, Lahiri married journalist Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush. In 2002, they had a son named Octavio, and in 2005 a daughter named Noor. Lahiri went on to earn a BA in English literature from Barnard College, in 1989. She later received numerous credentials from Boston University, including MA English, MFA in creative writing and MA in comparative literature. In 1997, Lahiri got her PhD from Boston University in Renaissance studies entitled  “Accursed Palace: The Italian palazzo on the Jacobean stage (1603–1625).” Lahiri published her first book – a collection of nine short stories, Interpreter of Maladies in 1997. Although the stories are stand-alones, they share a common thematic rationale: an investigation of the immigrant experience as well as the ways in which it changes or estranges people from their tradition. Six stories center on first- or second-generation Indian newcomers residing in the United States, and their divergence is repeatedly driven by their dissimilarity or complexity of adjusting to life in a new country. Three stories are located in India, in which two

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pertain to women living in poverty and their position in the community. The New York Times positively reviewed the collection stating Lahiri breathes unpredictable life into the page, and the reader finishes each story reseduced, wishing he could spend a whole novel with its characters. There is nothing accidental about her success; her plots are as elegantly constructed as a fine proof in mathematics. The collection won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the O. Henry Award for the title story “Interpreter of Maladies” among others. In 2003, Lahiri released her first novel The Namesake. The text covers more than thirty years of the Ganguli family. The native Calcutta parents immigrate to the United States where their son and daughter, Gogol and Sonia, grow up under the steady generational and cultural fissure with their parents. Once again reviewers praised Lahiri’s work. The Guardian’s Julie Myerson raved Lahiri “has a talent – magical, sly, and cumulative,” and the novel won The New Yorker Debut of the Year award as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2013, Lahiri released her second novel The Lowland. It narrates the story of Udayan and Subhash two brothers from Tollygunge South Kolkata, in West Bengal, India, who go aboard on two diverse roads. The story is set in the 1960s. Udayan is amiable, gregarious but caught up in the political turmoil of the Naxalite movement. Subhash is older as well as the more retained and compliant of the two brothers. When Udayan becomes implicated in the Naxalite movement, Subhash opts to pursue his education in the United States. Udayan later meets a girl named Gauri, and the two fall in love. Unfortunately, enemy soldiers murder Udayan before either knows about Gauri’s pregnancy. Subhash returns to India as soon as notice of Udayan’s death arrives. There he discovers his parents crippled by the slaying. Upon hearing that Gauri is with child, he offers to bring her to the United States where she delivers Bela; at the same time, Subhash saves Gauri from in-laws who have no need for her. McLean’s gave The Lowland a mixed review, but it was named finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction, and it won The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Nearly a decade later, in 2021, Lahiri released Whereabouts which celebrates commonplace life and society while exploring existential subject matters of attendance and nonexistence. Lahiri’s unnamed narrator, a woman mulling her position in the world, vacillates between stasis and movement, flanked by the passion to belong and a refusal to shape lasting ties. The undisclosed city she calls home acts as cohort and petitioner. The reader follows her to the pool she goes to, as well as to the train station where she finds her mother hiding in seclusion after her husband’s premature death. On her walks through streets close to her home, Lahiri’s narrator encounters coworkers with whom she feels awkward, casual connections and a shadow who soothes and at the same time disconcerts her. One day while at the sea, both besieged and refilled by the sun’s essential heat, her viewpoint immediately changes. Critics as Heller McAlpin praised the novel advocating that its “[s]hifts between shadow and light, emptiness and fulfillment, irritation and enjoyment, and stasis and change carry us along as this hampered woman gradually resolves to ‘push past the barrier’ that has long impeded her way in the world.” Whereabouts was originally written in Italian and translated into English by Lahiri herself. The Italian edition is titled Dove Mi Trovo (2018). In general, the critical establishment praises Lahiri. She has garnered acclaim by elites including Barak Obama, who presented her with the 2014 National Medal of Arts and Humanities. The Antioch Review is of the opinion that, “Lahiri’s delicate details and soft rhetorical touch create an absorbing reading experience in which characters become friends in the sense that we

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can rely on them for wit, insight, and affirmation” (Peaco). Doing so, Lahiri engages her audience by creating an interplay between the reader and the work to create a bond that works in unison, illustrating how the written word improves the human condition. However, some reviewers have charged Lahiri with traditionalism, believing that her writing is overpoweringly reliant on Western venues and promotion and has suffered from demands to kowtow the capricious comedy of gathered exotica and grand scale literature on India. Other detractors, like Anya Yurchyshyn, consider Lahiri overrated, boring, and unremarkable; her depictions of Boston emotionally empty; and her representation of immigrant experience specifically American suburban. Jhumpa Lahiri is presently a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. She also published a second volume of short fiction, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), as well as two volumes of nonfiction in Italian that were rendered into English.

Further Reading Crain, Caleb. “Subcontinental Drift.” The New York Times, 11 Jul. 1999, https://archive.nytimes.com/ www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/11/reviews/990711.11craint.html. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. McAlpin, Heller. “Jhumpra Lahiri’s New ‘Whereabouts’ Is About Places Both Geographical and Emotional.” NPR, 29 Apr. 2021, www.npr.org/2021/04/29/991671844/jhumpa-lahiris-new-where abouts-is-about-places-both-geographical-and-emotional. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Peaco, Ed. “Review of the Namesake.” Antioch Review, Summer 2004, p. 581. Warnica, Richard. “Book Review: The Lowland.” Maclean’s, 20 Sept. 2013, www.macleans.ca/culture/ books/the-lowland/. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

GERARDO DEL GUERCIO

LAL, MALASHRI (1949–) Malashri Lal was born in Lucknow on January 1, 1949, to Mohan Mukerji, who was in the Indian Administrative Service in Rajasthan, and Reena Mukerji, a social worker for women’s sports. She was raised in Jaipur where she attended Maharani Gayatri Devi Girls’ Public School and the Rajasthan University. She received academic distinctions and gold medals in school and university. Her teaching career began at Kanoria College, Jaipur, in 1970, from where she moved to Jesus and Mary College, Delhi, in 1972. In 1984, Lal joined the postgraduate Department of English, University of Delhi, and continued there until her retirement in 2016. Lal held important administrative positions as Director, Women’s Studies, Dean Academic Activities, and Dean of Colleges. She received fellowships to conduct research in Harvard University, US; Bellagio, Italy; Newcastle; and Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. With her specialization and commitment to women, literature, and gender, Lal spearheaded numerous programs for the empowerment of women from the grassroots to higher education. She received the Women Achiever’s Award in 2016 from the UNIC and India Eye International. She has served on the jury of Commonwealth Writers Prize, London, and has also been a convener and member of the English Advisory Board, Sahitya Akademi. Lal has authored, edited and co-edited sixteen books. A feminist by training, her first book of literary criticism, The Law of the Threshold: Women Writers in Indian English, signposts writers such as Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Anita Desai, and Bharati Mukherjee. She argues that the threshold is a real and metaphorical marker of social barriers to writing women. This was followed by further explorations of women’s self-actualization by correlating literature and gender. Women’s Studies in India: Contours of Change, co-edited with Sukrita Paul Kumar, mapped the prescriptive and operational implications of the Government of India’s National Policy on the Empowerment of Women (2001). Lal and Kumar also co-edited a micro-cultural study 238

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Chamba-Achamba: Women’s Oral Narrative, which examines the oral knowledge and beliefs of women through folklore, songs, and cultural practices. Lal’s book, Tagore and the Feminine: A Journey through Translations, came out of a senior consultancy to the Ministry of Culture. It is the only compendium which contextualizes Tagore’s literary works within feminism in India, which Lal believes has a trajectory different from the West. Another set of collaborative interrelated books by Lal are Signifying the Self: Women and Literature, The Indian Family in Transition: Reading Literary and Cultural Texts and Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature, all of which present research from a feminist perspective. They highlight transitions in family structures to the evolving notions of “home” as personalized territory to the woman’s search for selfhood. Lal’s investigations into Indian mythology, along with co-author and editor Namita Gokhale, led to the publication of two books: In Search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology, portraying Sita as a strong and resourceful individual based on different versions of the Ramayana. Finding Radha: The Quest for Love is a collection of poetry, prose and translation that presents less known classical sources and offers a section called “Songs of Radha,” which tracks compositions from 7 CE to contemporary times. Lal’s and Gokhale’s third book, Betrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, won the Kalinga Literature Award in 2021. The audio version of the play has been performed by actor Victor Banerjee. The play is an interrogation of Dutt’s life and works including the narrative poem “Meghnadbodh Kabya.”

Further Reading Dasgupta, Sayantan. “Review of Tagore and the Feminine: A Journey in Translations, by Malashri Lal.” Indian Literature, vol. 59, no. 6 (290), 2015, pp. 171–176. Sahitya Akademi, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/44478650. Gokhale, Namita, and Malashri Lal. Betrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt. HarperCollins, 2020. Nagpal, Payal. “Michael Madhusudan Dutt: ‘Prodigal Son’ or ‘Promethean Poet’?” The Book Review, vol. 45, no. 7, Jul. 2021, www.thebookreviewindia.org/michael-madhusudan-dutt-prodigal-son-orpromethean-poet/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023.

MEENAKSHI F. PAUL

LAL, PURUSHOTAM (1929–2010) P. Lal, as he has always been known, was born in Kapurthala, Punjab. His parents migrated to Calcutta in 1933 where he attended the Loretto School and St. Xavier’s School and studied English, Sanskrit, and Hindi at St. Xavier’s College affiliated to the University of Calcutta. After graduating in 1953 he taught English literature in its English department till his retirement in 1993 as Honorary Professor. Lal married in 1955 and had a son and a daughter. In 1958, with seven colleagues, he founded Writers Workshop located at the family’s home in 162/92 Lake Gardens as well as the bimonthly miscellany: both the publishing house and journal were meant to promote Indian creative writing in English. For twenty years this address also served as the weekly meeting point of writers and literary critics from India and abroad. As Visiting Professor or Lecturer he taught Indian literature at American universities between 1962 and 1989 and commented, “WW [was] not a professional publishing house [. . . but survived] by the skin of our teeth (1958–1964) [. . . and] my visits to hard currency lands on lecture assignments and visiting professorships on two dozen or so occasions,” helped finance it (Mukherjee). After Lal had fallen extremely ill in Toronto in 1989 and had spent months in a clinic in the United States, he retired from traveling. For his work he was honored by a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship 239

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in 1969, Padma Shri in 1970 and DLitt of Westminster College, Salt Lake City, in 1977. Lal died on November 3, 2010, in a Kolkata nursing home. As the poet Keki Daruwalla once put it, “[i]n half a century no one has done more for Indian poetry in English than P. Lal.” Apart from his writing poetry in English himself – Writers Workshop published eight volumes between 1960 and 1978 – he transcreated Sanskrit poetry, epics, and plays, Hindi medieval poetry as well as Hindi and Bengali fiction into English and published more than a dozen essays on literature. Moreover, he was the first – and remained the most successful – Indian publisher to promote Indian poets using English, many of whom were included in two anthologies: Modern Indo-Anglian Poetry (co-edited with Raghavendra Rao in 1958) and, notably, Modern Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and a Credo (1969). This six hundredpage volume contains poems composed after 1947 by one hundred and thirty-two authors as well as their replies to Lal’s questionnaire about the place of creative Indian writing in English. In his “Introduction” Lal reflects upon the place of the English language in India and its creative use by Indian writers and refutes views of those like the Bengali poet Bhuddadeva Bose who believes that “ ‘Indo-Anglian’ poetry is a blind alley, lined with curio shops, leading nowhere.” Writers Workshop brought out more than thirty-five hundred books during Lal’s lifetime, each of them beautifully “[h]and set in Alexander type-face and printed on an Indian-make hand-operated machine [. . . and] [h]and-bound [. . .] with cotton handloom sari cloth woven in India.” They include poetry and short story collections, plays, critical studies on Indian writing in English and the publisher’s own transcreations. Among them Vyasa’s epic Mahabharata deserves special mention as a line-by-line transcreation from Sanskrit into straightforward English begun by Lal in 1968 and continued for more than forty years with seventeen of its eighteen volumes finished by the end of his life. It is a highly praised English text from which he would read every Sunday for an hour at a library in Kolkata between 1999 and 2009. Lal’s own poems closely relate to his ideas of modern Indian poetry in English which “must satisfy me as poetry,” “deal in concrete terms with concrete experience,” “be free from propaganda,” be experimental without leading to “excessive obscurity” and reflect the age in which it was written. Named “a romantic” by K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, yet one who combined romantic effusiveness with classical restraint. S.J. Sebastian called the growth of Lal’s poetry one “from pure poetry of beauty to deeper spiritual awareness of the divine beauty in nature.”

Further Reading Daruwalla, Keki. “A  True Pioneer.” The Hindu, 4 Dec. 2010, www.thehindu.com/books/A-true-pio neer/article15580349.ece. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Majumdar, Saikat. “Another Look at India’s Book: P. Lal’s Calcutta: A Long Poem.” LARB: Los Angeles Review of Books, 7 Oct. 2020, lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/another-look-indias-books-p-lal-cal cutta-long-poem/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Sebastian, A. J. “Poet P. Lal: His Mind and Art.” Contemporary Indian Writing in English: Critical Perspectives, vol. 2, edited by N. D. R. Chandra. Sarup and Sons, 2005, pp. 331–340.

DIETER RIEMENSCHNEIDER

LALWANI, NIKITA (1973–) Nikita Lalwani is a British Indian novelist and screenwriter who was born in Kota, Rajasthan, India. When she was one, her father accepted an academic post at Cardiff University where she grew up. She read English literature at Bristol University and completed her master’s degree and PhD in creative writing at Bath Spa University. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked for the BBC, producing television programs and documentaries. An acclaimed author 240

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of three novels so far, Lalwani was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018 and awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship by Royal Holloway, London University, in 2020. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages, and she has served as a judge for the Rathbones Folio Prize, the RSL Encore Second Novel Prize, and The Orwell Prize. She is associated with script development projects with Ray Pictures, Warp Films, and Little Door productions. Besides contributing to The Guardian (UK), the New Statesman, and The Observer (UK), she is also a trustee of the UK human rights advocacy group “Liberty.” Lalwani’s debut novel, Gifted (2007), was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award, and won the inaugural Desmond Elliot Prize for Fiction which she donated to “Liberty.” Gifted highlights the tragedy of child prodigies and the plight of the immigrant-descendants, as the novel’s young protagonist, a mathematics prodigy, Rumi Vasi, who, similar to Lalwani, grows up in Wales to Indian parents and is unduly pressurized to realize her parent’s expectations of being the youngest ever to attend Oxford University. While Rumi could eventually become an Oxford student at the age of fifteen, she struggles to deal with her newly-found freedom and the stress to accomplish her parents’ expectations. As she eventually escapes from Oxford, the novel raises questions on how much parental control and pressure to achieve their own dreams and aspirations through the lives of their children in their adopted countries could be justified in the name of love. Lalwani’s next novel, The Village (2012), won a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. Set in a fictional village, named Ashwer, which is an experimental open prison of convicted murderers and their families, the novel is modeled on a real-life prison-village in northern India. Lalwani evokes different perspectives and visions in the novel as the protagonist, the British Asian filmmaker Ray Bhullar, along with her producer and presenter, arrive at the village to shoot a BBC documentary on prisons and the story of their inmates. As the personal sense of moral obligations and professional demands of commercial expectations collide, the novel highlights the conflicting issues of justice and power, privacy, and freedom. You People (2020) is Lalwani’s latest novel which has been optioned for television by the British television production company, World Productions with Lalwani as a screenwriter. The story revolves around three main characters. Nia is a young Indian Welsh woman, who has escaped an abusive life at home. Shan is a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee, who, after being tortured by the government forces following the murder of his parents, pays human traffickers to flee his homeland. And there is Tuli, an enigmatic altruist, who tries to be of help and assistance to whoever is in need. Set against the backdrop of Sri Lankan civil war and British immigration policies, in a London pizzeria mostly staffed by undocumented migrants, the novel draws attention not only to the pressing issues of the refugees and asylum-seekers worldwide, but also hints at the ethical decisions one has to make within such a precarious predicament. Lalwani’s writings thus explore the choices we make and the journeys we undertake, both within and without, through our external and internal pathways.

Further Reading Mills, Kevin. “Indian Defences: Mobile Identities in Nikita Lalwani’s Gifted.” Ex-Sistere: Women’s Mobility in Contemporary Irish, Welsh and Galician Literatures, edited by María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, pp. 190–205. Rahbek, Ulla. “The Multicultural Novel, Part 2: Bordered Britain.” British Multicultural Literature and Superdiversity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 131–171. Ruvani, Ranasinha. “Redefining Britishness: British Asian Women’s Fiction.” The History of British Women’s Writing, edited by Emma Parker and Mary Eagleton. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 229–244.

SANGHAMITRA DALAL

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LANGUAGES OF TRUTH by Salman Rushdie Salman Rushdie’s nonfiction Languages of Truth: Essays 2003–2020 (2021) is a collection of forty-three essays reflecting upon various issues pertaining to art, society, politics, literary criticism, and even author’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The anthology, like the previous two, Imaginary Homelands (1991) and Step Across This Line (2002), mimics the “polyglot hubbub” of Rushdie’s fictional narratives, but the overarching theme which cuts across all the essays in the book is the argument in defense of stories and storytelling in the age of post-truth and rampant lies. The anthology is divided into four parts: Part One contains four, Part Two contains thirteen, Part Three contains fifteen, and Part Four contains eleven essays, articles, lectures, and interviews reflecting upon different interpretations and ramifications of the most contentious idea, “truth.” In some of the initial essays, like “Wonder Tales” and “Proteus,” Rushdie goes back to his usual theme of the fantastical storytelling tradition of both the East and the West but primarily of the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East. He invokes Scheherazade as an archetypal storyteller repeatedly to highlight the relationship of stories with life and death. He writes about the importance and influence of works like Kathasaritsagar, Panchatantra, Amar Chitra Katha, The Thousand Nights, and One Night and the epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata, Iliad, and Odyssey in shaping not only his personal art but also the long tradition of non-realist works or what he, taking a cue from Milan Kundera, calls “weirder books”: “the antic, ludic, comic, eccentric.” The tradition which includes Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Gunter Grass, Lewis Caroll, Ursula Le Guin, the Latin American “magic realism,” Rushdie himself, and many others continues to be a major force in world literature. Rushdie’s deep admiration for, and at times indebtedness to, other writers is visible in essays on Shakespeare and Cervantes, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel García Márquez, Hans Christian Anderson, Leo Tolstoy, and Samuel Beckett. His long-standing friendship with Christopher Hitchens and Harold Pinter is reflected in two personal essays titled “Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011)” and “Harold Pinter (1930–2008)” in the volume. Rushdie’s love for liberty and freedom of expression has grown since the days of fatwa and over the period he has emerged as a voice for the outsiders and the misfits. The insightful essays on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and the hijra community of Bombay manifest those values. He is as comfortable writing about canonical writers as he is with popular figures like Carrie Fisher and Muhammad Ali. He is also comfortable with writing on Satyajit Ray as he is with Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. We also get a glimpse of Rushdie the art critic in some interesting essays on painters like Amrita Sher-Gil, Bhupen Khakhar, silhouettist Kara Walker, and on Mughal era Hamzanama, a series of cloth paintings commissioned by Emperor Akbar in mid-16th century. In the essay on the pandemic, Rushdie not only writes about various cultural and literary representations of pandemics but also his personal engagement with various illnesses since 1949, including the most recent COVID-19. The Times considers Salman Rushdie “one of the greats of his generation” and his Languages of Truth reveals the mind behind some of the greatest works of fiction in English language. “Ranging from the slight to the serious, the idiosyncratic to the polemical often in Rushdie’s characteristic vein of self-deprecating irony” as one commentator in The Telegraph writes “the pieces are a pleasure to read for their variety, sharpness, and literary brio.” Languages of Truth is also a celebration of the manifold expressions of truth expressed in varied ways. This collection is about a leading literary voice’s different experiments with truth, and doing so Rushdie seems to rescue literary imagination from the deluge of fake news and loud views. It is, as a critic in Financial Express points out “a literary pilgrimage.” 242

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Further Reading Bharadwaj, Ashutosh. “The Story Behind a Story.” Financial Express, 6 Jun. 2021, www.financial express.com/lifestyle/the-story-behind-a-story-book-review-languages-of-truth-by-salman-rush die/2265730/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Chakraborty, Abhrajyoti. “Languages of Truth by Salman Rushdie Review – Profound Insights and Platitudes.” The Guardian, 29 May  2021, www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/29/languages-oftruth-by-salman-rushdie-review-profound-insights-and-platitudes. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Chaudhuri, Supriya. “Proteus in the Study.” The Telegraph Online, 10 Sept. 2021, www.telegraphindia. com/culture/books/review-languages-of-truth-essays-2003–2020-by-salman-rushdie/cid/1830117. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Dwight, Garner. “In Languages of Truth, Salman Rushdie Defends the Extraordinary.” The New York Times, 24 May  2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/books/review-languages-of-truth-salmanrushdie-essays.html. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Rushdie, Salman. Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction, 1992–2002. Penguin Random House, 2008. ———. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991. Penguin Random House, 2012.

JAYJIT SARKAR

LIDDLE, MADHULIKA (1973–) Madhulika Liddle was born on January 8, 1973, in Haflong, Assam, to Andrew Verity Liddle and Muriel Liddle. Her father, an IPS officer, had a transferable job and hence her childhood was spent in different parts of India. Liddle finished her schooling in New Delhi and studied at the  Institute of Hotel Management, Catering and Nutrition. Beginning her career as an assistant manager in Food & Beverage Controls at Habitat World, Delhi, Liddle shifted to an advertising agency and later joined a travel portal, journeymart.com, as an assistant editor. She joined NIIT in 2003 as an instructional designer, and in 2008 she resigned to concentrate on her writing career. Liddle’s first published short story “Silent Fear,” won the Femina Thriller Contest in June 2001. Her short stories reflect a wide spectrum of themes – humor, black humor, crime and detection, and social awareness. In 2003, her story “A Morning Swim” won the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Award. Her first collection of stories, My Lawfully Wedded Husband and Other Stories, appeared in 2012. All the twelve stories of the collection have an interesting twist in the tale. Published in 2017, Woman to Woman: Stories, a collection of twelve delightfully crafted short stories, explores the hidden secrets and dark corners in the ordinary lives of women coming from different age groups, social milieus, and regions. Her nonfiction writing includes travel reviews written under the pseudonym Phileas Fogg; humorous articles on the eccentricities of contemporary Indian society for broadcast on All India Radio’s “In a Lighter Vein” program; and a blog – “Dusted Off ” on classic cinema, history, travel, and other intrigues. Liddle is known for her historical murder mysteries, “Muzaffar Jang series.” Muzaffar Jang, a young nobleman living in Moghul Emperor Shahjahan’s Dilli,  first appeared in 2007 in a short story, “Murk of Art,” in the anthology 21 Under 40. The Englishman’s Cameo (2009), the first novel in the series, became a bestseller in India, and was published in French by Editions Philippe Picquier, as Le Camée Anglais. As Muzaffar investigates a murder mystery to save his friend Faisal, the prime accused, he exposes a menacing conspiracy. The Eighth Guest & Other Muzaffar Jang Mysteries (2011) is a collection of ten short stories set in 1656 historical locations, the backgrounds including a traditional Mughal garden, the Imperial Atelier, and the sarai built by the Princess Jahanara in Delhi. Engraved in Stone (2012), the third book, is set in Agra. When Mumtaz Hassan, a rich and influential merchant, is murdered, the Diwan-e-Kul, 243

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Mir Jumla asks Muzaffar to unmask the murderer. As he begins his investigations, he learns about a woman who had disappeared mysteriously one evening. Crimson City (2015),  the fourth in the series, is set in Delhi in 1657. As the Mughal armies cordon Bidar in the Deccan, Muzaffar investigates a series of murders and other unconnected crimes: the abduction of a moneylender’s infant son and the death of a rich merchant. In her tales of crime and detection, Liddle seamlessly transports the readers to the 17th century Mughal era. The detailed portrayal of folklore, food, and culture makes the reading of her work a pleasant experience. Her recent publication is The Garden of Heaven (2021), the first novel of Delhi Quartet, a series of four novels covering eight-hundred years of Delhi’s history.

Further Reading Sathiavel, J. Stories Uncovered: Approaches to the Study of Select Indian English Crime and Detective Fiction. Pondicherry U, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 2016, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/225934.

AALEYA GIRI

LIKE BLOOD ON THE BITTEN TONGUE: DELHI POEMS by Akhil Katyal Published in 2020, Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems, is a collection of poems by Akhil Katyal. Born in Lucknow, Katyal is an assistant professor in Delhi who received his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 2011. Katyal has been inspired by Agha Shahid Ali, Dorothy Parker, Meena Kandasamy, Manglesh Dabral, and many more. His interests include poetry, Kashmiri writing in English, queer literature, and activism. Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue has ninety-three poems in one hundred and sixty-four pages and reads like an exploration of the city Delhi, seen through the eyes of a common man. The first poem in the book titled, “He was as arrogant as a Chhatarpur Farmhouse,” has an interesting take on relationships and Delhi. The narrator (whose gender is not known) is in a relationship with a man whose attributes are told to the reader through different parts of Delhi. Chhatarpur Farms is an area in Delhi with huge houses and grand gardens, which reflect the arrogance of the elites of South Delhi. However, they are “cluttered” like “Adhchini” with narrow lanes and small apartments. The poem also uses places like “Najafgarh” and “Shalimar Bagh” to describe intimacy and closeness in relationships. The emotional distance between the narrator and the man is represented by comparing it to Greater Noida which is a suburb of Delhi. Any individual who lives in or has traveled to Delhi can appreciate the use of different places in the city to describe the ups and downs of a relationship. In some poems – “This Evening in Delhi” and “Outer Ring Road” – Katyal writes about a narrator who is traveling in an autorickshaw, though the reader is often left wondering whether it is the same narrator or a different one. If one conflates the persona of the poet and the narrator, one can say that it might be Akhil himself writing about the city and his experience. However, the subject of the two poems is very different. The former brings together three religious structures which exist in close proximity of each other: the Methodist Church, Shiv temple, and Khilji Mosque in Nizamuddin. The poem covers a time period of a few seconds which the poet/narrator relates to the history of the Nizamuddin area and the vast distance between the earth and the moon. Katyal comments on the diversity of Delhi where all religions coexist peacefully. The second half of the poem compares the dome of the mosque to the moon. In just a few lines, Katyal shows how Delhi has the power to fuel the imagination through its history and diversity. 244

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“Outer Ring Road” is about an unidentified narrator whose desire is fueled when he sees a man on the street while traveling. A bus becomes an obstacle which prevents any interaction between the narrator and man on the roadside. The auto simply moves forward with the narrator who is left with a glimpse and desire. The poem suggests that desire is not only felt but sometimes denied as well. Another poem titled, “Bangla Sahib,” is about a Sikh religious structure (Gurudwara) and deals with religion or politics. Located in central Delhi, Bangla Sahib is a massive structure with huge white walls and a dome which is yellowish gold. The poem simply describes the experience of walking in Delhi in the evening where one can only see the golden dome of the gurudwara which almost challenges the sky. “Like Blood on a Bitten Tongue” is like a map that traces the geographical location as well as emotional experiences of those who have either lived or traveled in Delhi. Every poem ties together geography, history, emotions, diversity, and desire which makes it a unique book.

Further Reading Angiras, Aditi, and Akhil Katyal. The World That Belongs to US: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia. HarperCollins Publishers India, 2020. Katyal, Akhil. Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems, illustrated by Vishwajyoti Ghosh. Context, 2020.

SAMRAT SHARMA

LIVES OF OTHERS, THE, by Neel Mukherjee Neel Mukherjee (1970–) is a novelist and reviewer who was born and educated in Kolkata and thereafter in the United Kingdom. The Lives of Others is his second novel in which he takes a searing look at the Bengali middle-class family values in post-independent India, with all its warts and blisters. Although the novel focuses on the turbulent decade of the 1960s to delve into the lives of the Ghosh family, it travels back and forth in time to present a narrative that covers at least three generations, spread over the long 20th century. Mukherjee holds onto the Bengaliness of his milieu catering to the specificity of everyday conversations, local food, and life in the city of Calcutta. Parallel but interconnected – formally demarcated in the division of the chapters – plotlines run throughout the novel and converge in the last act. One half of the storyline centers around members of the Ghosh family, whose house in South Calcutta is symbolic of the various hierarchies within it. Mukherjee’s in-depth study of the egos and anxieties pertaining to kinship implodes the notion of a harmonious joint family as he bares the manipulations, one-upmanship, and intense conflicts between direct siblings, in-laws, and cousins. The other half of the novel is written in the form of a letter by one of the younger members of the family who has left home to join radical left politics. This section is a stark account of the harsh conditions of the peasants in India, oppressed by moneylenders, landholders, the state alike, and the emerging Naxalite movement whereby a section of the urban youth collaborate with the villagers in the hope of toppling the government. The two strands of the novel pit the privileges of the urban, upper-caste populace against the dehumanized workers of the land and bring these otherwise distant worlds into dangerous proximity. Mukherjee connects the story of the Bengali family not only with broader considerations of rights and injustice in postcolonial India but also with universal themes of relationality, networks of discrimination, and the political which unites the home and the world. The title of the novel encapsulates the question of who the readers (and the characters in the story) consider as the “other.” To the peasants, it is the urban youth with semi-formed ideologies of activism who are the outsiders whereas to the individuals in the Ghosh resident it is the factory workers, the 245

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domestic help, and even the wayward son, who are outside the purview of their comprehension. Mukherjee explores these worlds in remarkable detail – he is at ease explaining the intricacies of mathematical conjectures as well as the manufacturing process in a paper producing factory – and invites the readers to introspect on the implications of their indifference to the communities that have been made invisible by their prejudices but have immediate influence on their destinies. Consequently, Mukherjee defamiliarizes the status quo by journeying into the deepest corners of psychology and desire. The Lives of Others was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2014 and was the winner of the Encore Award in the same year. It received overwhelmingly positive reviews from leading newspapers and journals across the world, with The Independent listing it among the twelve must-read Indian novels on March 11, 2021. Amitav Ghosh describes it as – “an impassioned, dystopic, despairing book . . . Neel’s achievement in this passionate, angry book . . . is successful precisely when it forces its readers to engage with its themes, ideas and its characters.” A.S. Byatt cites it as an instance of the power of the novel, an artform that “can juxtapose incompatible ideas, beliefs and human beings, showing us impossibilities and disorder with the wonderful order of adequate language and vision.”

Further Reading Byatt, A. S. “The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee Review – Marxism and Tradition in 1960s India.” The Guardian, 14 May  2014, www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/14/lives-of-others-neelmukherjee-review. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Desai, Anita. “The Real India.” The New York Review, 22 Oct. 2015, www.nybooks.com/articles/ 2015/10/22/real-india/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Ghosh, Amitav. “Neel Mukherjee’s the Lives of Others: A review.” amitavghosh.com, 3 May 2014, http:// amitavghosh.com/blog/?p=6400. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Mukherjee, Ankhi. “The Great Bengali Novel in English.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 57, no. 3, Fall 2016, pp. 462–470. Sarkar, Debjani, and Nirban Manna. “Hues of Red: The Facades of Leftist Insurgency and Crisis in India in Select Fiction.” Comparative Literature Studies, special issue of Global Crises and Twenty-FirstCentury World Literature, vol. 55, no. 2, 2018, pp. 379–394.

TITAS DE SARKAR

MADHAVIAH, A. (1872–1925) Social reformer, humanist, and bilingual writer, Ananthanarayanan Madhaviah wrote thirteen short and long works in English, and sixteen in Tamil. He was born in Perunkulam village, about forty kilometers from the medieval temple town of Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu. He went to a local Tamil primary school and learned English when he attended high school at Palayamkottai. After obtaining his BA from Madras Christian College, he joined the Madras Government Service, in the Salt and Abkari Department, and rose to become Assistant Commissioner of Salt and Excise. He took voluntary retirement at the age of fifty to devote himself full time to writing and social reform. Madhaviah wrote about Tamil Brahmins, the section of society he knew best. He was very conscious of evil practices in Hindu society, such as child marriage, dowry, the ill treatment of widows, and caste oppression. He put his beliefs of social reform into practice, at the cost of social ostracism: he taught English and Tamil languages to his daughters and wife and also employed a non-Brahmin cook. Madhaviah was a prolific Tamil writer, publishing novels, short stories, plays, poems, articles, and songs about patriotism, marriage reform, and industrial development. He

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translated English poems into Tamil, and the Tamil classic Manimekalai into English. He retold stories from Indian mythology for children: Ramayana (1915), Markandeya (1922), and Nanda (1923). Madhaviah’s first published work was an English poem that appeared in the Madras Christian College Magazine in March 1892. Most of his poems appeared in this journal; some were revised and published in Poems (1903). He had a good command of rhyme and meter. “The Rani of Jhansi” is a narrative poem in rhymed couplets in hexameter. “The Ballad of the Penniless Bride” (1915) is perfectly structured in six-line stanzas, with a sonorous rhyme scheme. The poem is inspired by an actual incident of a young girl in Calcutta committing suicide to save her ancestral house, which her father was going to sell to fund her dowry. “The Dying Wife to Her Husband,” in blank verse, is about the deep intellectual chasm between an idealistic husband and his young bride. The narrator of Madhaviah’s first English novel, Thillai Govindan: A Posthumous Autobiography (1903), is a young man like himself, caught between the orthodoxy of his parents and the liberalism of his Western education. Brahmin parents do not want educated girls as daughters-in-laws; they are interested primarily in recovering the money they have spent on their son’s education by demanding an exorbitant dowry. The ill treatment of women, especially widows, is central to Madhaviah’s short stories, published in The Hindu, and collected in two volumes with the title Kusika’s Short Stories on Marriage Reform and Allied Topics (1916). “The Golden Cross” (Kusika’s Short Stories Vol. II, 9–25) shows the dilemma of a college graduate who loves his wife but succumbs to orthodoxy; Madhaviah skilfully employs four distinct narrative voices and captures the cadence of Tamil speech in the words spoken by the orthodox mother-in-law. In “Droupadi’s Dream,” a child widow has a vision of a “Land of Ladies” where widows can marry again and again; it is widowers who are considered inauspicious and deliberately kept unkempt, “so that no lady will ever deign to look at them with the eyes of love.” A woman takes a new husband because the first one “gave her no female child;” only girls can inherit property. Madhaviah was attracted to Christianity because of its humane treatment of widows. His second novel, Satyananda (1909), takes up the issue of conversion through the story of an orphan brought up by the church. The protagonist is the illegitimate child of the beautiful and educated Andal, married to a fifty-six-year-old widower, who died soon after, leaving her open to sexual exploitation. Father Marks is the embodiment of Christian values like honesty, compassion and charity. However, the other missionaries are shown as hypocritical and almost blind in their zeal, like the “Bible-woman” who “felt an insatiable longing to convert as many highcaste Hindu women as possible, and in pursuing this noble mission, no means were considered by her to be too vile or dishonest.” His third novel, Clarinda (1915), presents the intersection of gender, race, religion, and culture through the life of a real woman of 18th century Tanjore. She was a Brahmin widow who lived with, and later married, the English soldier who saved her from the funeral pyre when she was being forced to commit sati. She began to believe deeply in Christianity and built a church in Palayamcottai which was consecrated in 1785. Lieut. Panju: A  Modern Indian (1915) is the first Indian English novel to show Indians fighting in Europe. Panju’s father, a corrupt Tehsildar, is the protagonist of the first part of the novel. A subplot deals with a mysterious merchant whose infant son is entrusted to him. Panju is an idealist; he becomes a doctor and serves the common people. Madhaviah makes extensive use of diary entries to reveal Panju’s thoughts. When the First World War breaks out, he volunteers, and is accepted as a “Lieutenant” in the Field Medical Service.

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Further Reading Baskaran, S. Theodore. “A. Madhaviah: A Forgotten Iconoclast.” Madras Musings, vol. 20, no. 1, 16–30 Apr. 2010, https://madrasmusings.com/Vol%2020%20No%201/otherstories.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2023. Narayan, Shyamala A. “The English Poetry of A. Madhaviah.” The Journal of Indian Writing in English, vol. 39, no. 1, 2011, pp. 25–40. Parameswaran, Uma. “A. Madhaviah: An Assessment.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, 1986, pp. 222–239. Raman, Sita Anantha. Madhaviah: A Biography and a Novella Translated from Tamil by Vasantha Surya. Oxford UP, 2005. Venkataraman, S. A. Madhaviah. Sahitya Akademi, 1999. Waha, Kristen Bergman. “Synthesizing Hindu and Christian Ethics in A. Madhaviah’s Indian English novel Clarinda (1915).” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, no. 1, 2018, pp. 237–255. Cambridge UP, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150317000419.

SHYAMALA A. NARAYAN

MADRAS TO MANHATTAN by Prema Sastri Prema Sastri began writing in English at an early age, starting with poetry as a child and later shifting primarily to short fiction. She also wrote plays, one of which was performed in New York. She was among the top 100 Indian writers in English in 1960s. During the 2000s, she founded Songbyrde Publications, which published her Madras to Manhattan in 2017 and also the work of other Indian writers. Sastri’s purpose in writing Madras to Manhattan was to provide a sense of what it was like for early Indian students in America because social, cultural, and moral differences complicated the experience for many. Instead of writing a memoir of her experiences, she chose to capture them in a fictionalized form, detailing the story of a young Indian Ramu from a conventional South Indian family. Just when Ramu’s parents had chosen a bride for him, he was awarded a scholarship to study at Columbia University in New York. The book covers a range of themes as it details Ramu’s ocean voyage to America and the challenges he faces while adjusting to a new culture and educational standards. Loneliness, isolation, and cultural dislocation are major themes of the book. At first, Ramu meets few Americans and spends most of his time with other Indians, many of whom live with him in his dormitory. Sastri also makes the point, however, that loneliness and homesickness are not necessarily ameliorated by one’s association with countrymen. During his voyage to America, for example, Ramu interacts frequently with another Indian named Srinivasan whom he finds annoying. As time goes on, Ramu’s network of American friends expands and enriches his relationships and experiences in America. Sastri also explores the differences between Indian and US educational systems. In India, degrees were awarded primarily based on standard examinations given at the end of two years. The questions were always the same and students generally studied only during the final two months leading up to the exams, memorizing the answers. In contrast, education in American universities was a continual process that demanded constant study and concentration on academics. Even registering for classes is a different experience; it exhausts Ramu during his first weeks at Columbia and presages the difficulties that lay ahead for him. As Ramu begins to explore his surroundings and American culture, many of his experiences come as a shock, particularly those involving sexual ethics and the norms of dating, which were very different from those in India at the time. Ramu maintains consistent communication with his family through letters, who remind him not to succumb to the “many pleasures” of 248

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American culture. He is worried lest he should not do something that would bring shame upon himself and his family, even though it may be considered normal in America. Another theme dealt with in the novel is that foreign travel can provide insight into one’s own country by broadening one’s perspective. At one point, Ramu is refused service at an establishment due to his ethnicity and unjust segregation laws. Though upset by the experience, he compares it to the caste system in India and the maltreatment of “untouchables,” observing that “I suppose there is prejudice in every country, which we accept as just, until we are its victims.” Ramu achieves new understanding about the injustices of his own social system when he finds himself subjected to injustices abroad. In Madras to Manhattan, Prema Sastri conveys what it is like to be dislocated from one’s culture and thrust into a vastly different cultural environment. It explores the experience of alienation and culture shock that typically come with traveling to a new country for any lengthy period. It also shows that such travels can provide learning opportunities by broadening the limits of our understanding.

Further Reading Sastri, Prema. Gandhi: Man of the Millions, A Play in Three Acts. Writers Workshop, 1987. ———. A Fine Gift from Lakshmi. Songbryde Publications, 2007.

WILLIAM R. PATTERSON

MAHAPATRA, JAYANTA (1928–) Jayanta Mahapatra was born to an Odia Christian couple Lemuel Mohapatra, and Sudhansubala Dash on 22 October 22, 1928, at Cuttack (Odisha). Mahapatra is the first Indian poet to win a Sahitya Akademi Award for English poetry. He is the author of poems such as “Indian Summer” and “Hunger” which are regarded as classics in modern Indian English literature. He was awarded a Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian honor in India in 2009. However, he returned the award in 2015 to protest against rising intolerance in India. He taught physics at various colleges of Odisha including Gangadhar Meher College, Sambalpur; B.J.B. College Bhubaneswar; Fakir Mohan College, Balasore; and Ravenshaw College, Cuttack. One of the most widely known and published Indian English poets of our time, Mahapatra was one of the trio of poets who laid the foundations of Indian English poetry, which also included A.K. Ramanujan and R. Parthasarathy. Like Nissim Ezekiel and A.K. Ramanujan, he is widely read and discussed both at home and abroad. But unlike them, Mahapatra’s poetry is marked with obscurity, complexity and allusiveness that puts him in the line of poets such as Shiv K. Kumar and Keki N. Daruwalla. His wordy lyricism combined with authentic Indian themes put him in a league of his own. Contrived images and learned vocabulary set him a class apart from most of his contemporaries. At the same time, in his desire to acclimatize an indigenous tradition to English language, and create a new Indian English idiom, he shares some of the concerns of the well-known Indian English poets of our time. He has influenced a number of contemporary Indian English poets and his Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection, Relationship, in 1981, brought recognition to this new poetry. He has authored twenty-seven volumes of poems, of which seven are in Odiya and the rest in English. Some of his significant collections are Close the Sky by Ten (1971), A Rain of Rites (1976), Waiting (1979), The False Start (1980), Relationship (1980), Life Signs (1983), Selected Poems (1987), Burden of Waves & Fruit (1988), A Whiteness of Bone (1992), Shadow Space (1997), Bare Face (2000), Random Descent (2006), The Lie of Dawns: 249

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Poems 1974–2008 (2009), and Land (2013). His poetry has also been anthologized in the celebrated volumes of Indian poetry edited by R. Parthasarathy and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Mahapatra is a recipient of Glatstein Award conferred by Poetry magazine, Chicago. He was also awarded the Allan Tate Poetry Prize for 2009 from The Sewanee Review. Besides poetry, he has experimented widely with myriad forms of prose. His published works of prose contain The Green Gardener and Other Stories (1997), an anthology of short stories on subjects ranging from a scandal in a small town and a boy’s arranged marriage, to the evening of Gandhi’s death presented with a new significance and intensity through the acute vision and magical art of Mahapatra. He also wrote nonfiction including The Paper Door: Essay and Memoir (2006) and Bhor (2011). Mahapatra is also a distinguished editor and has been bringing out, for many years, a literary magazine, Chandrabhaga, named after a prominent river in Odisha. Jayanta Mahapatra’s Relationship is set in Odisha, a land of “forbidding myth.” Mahapatra is “caught in the currents of time” and in his attempt to “go into the unknown in me” tries “to speak of the myth of sleep and action” in order to soothe himself and others who suffer a similar fate. It is a long poem in continuation of his relationship with Odisha and the Odia space, culture, history, myth, tradition, and mysticism where he grapples with the topography and cartography telling of his connection with the land of his birth, rearing, education, and growing up. His use of language is interwoven with his growth as a poet through successive books of verse. Poetry for him is “a craft that needs to be chiselled” as he uses the language with a passionate precision and experiments with it in poem after poem in his attempt to “acquire inwardness with it.” Jayanta Mahapatra’s latest two volumes of poems, Bare Face (2000) and Random Descent (2005) mark the culmination of his poetic career. There is both continuity as well as break with the earlier books of verse, with contemporary reality which is the hallmark of his poetry and that continues to preoccupy the mind of the poet. But the break is seen in terms of creating myths out of the living personalities of the past. Nostalgia, nevertheless, remains a chief feature of Mahapatra’s earlier as well as later poetry. Random Descent is one of the latest volumes of the poet wherein he takes up bare realism, feminism, gender bias, prejudice, social discrimination, economic disparity, poverty, underdevelopment, and communal fundamentalism apart from being imagistic, photographic, linguistic, and mythic. His style remains the same as it was when he started writing decades ago. This volume shows Mahapatra as a poet so Wordsworthian, Keatsian, Lawrentian, as well as Yeatsian. His book, Shadow Space, portrays him as a poet who has taught physics in the classrooms but rather than being scientific, his works are at times nihilistic, existential, and absurd, and there is much word-play in them. As a poet of Odisha, he writes with the Odiyas in his mind, but is uniquely national and international beyond doubt. His relationship with Odisha is unbreakable as the mention of Puri, Bhubaneswar, Cuttack comes naturally in his works. The volume contains poems such as “Scream,” “Mask of Longing,” and “The Portrait” that emphasize different issues pertaining women, particularly in Indian context.

Further Reading Das, Bijay Kumar. The Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra. Atlantic, 1998. Khan, A. A., and Rahul Mene. Jayanta Mahapatra. Adhyayan Publishers and Distributors, 2011. Mahapatra, Jayanta, and P. P. Raveendran, editors. The Best of Jayanta Mahapatra. Bodhi Books, 1995. Mahapatra, Jayanta, and Nandini Sahu, editors. Re-Reading Jayanta Mahapatra: Selected Poems. Black Eagle Books, 2022.

PARMINDER SINGH

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MAHOMET, DEAN (1759–1851) Dean Mahomet (later variously self-styled Sake [Shaykh], Dean, or Deen Mahomed), was born in 1759 at Patna, Bihar. After joining the East India Company’s Bengal Army at age eleven as a camp follower, he rose during fourteen years of marching and fighting across north India to the rank of subedar (Indian Captain, the highest rank then available to Indians). In 1784, he followed his sponsor, Godfrey Evan Baker (d. 1786), to Cork, Ireland. Under the Baker family’s patronage, Mahomet studied to perfect his English. In 1786, he married an Anglo-Irish gentlewoman, Jane Daly (d. 1844), with whom he had several children. In 1794, he published his two-volume autobiographical travel narrative, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, a native of Patna in Bengal, through several parts of India, while in the service of the Honourable the East India Company, written by himself in a series of letters to a friend (Cork, 1794). This was the first book ever written and published in English by an Indian. Through this innovative work, Mahomet sympathetically presented himself and India to the Anglophone community. Prior to publication, he arranged for three hundred and twenty Irish and English subscribers, who trusted in him as an author by depositing advance payment. He deployed the popular epistolary style which creates a more personal relationship between reader and author, beginning each of the thirty-eight letters of his book with “Dear Sir.” While he occasionally responded to the expectations he imputed to his readers, he never pretended to dialogue with his fictional correspondent. Each letter recounts a phase of the author’s life, an aspect of his religion or culture, or the battles by the British against Indian Hindu rulers or forest-dwelling insurgents. Several letters detail Muslim rituals which the author himself attended (e.g., circumcisions, marriages, funerals, and Muharram commemorations). He also describes Hindu beliefs, diet, and cremations. He included three original etchings: the frontispiece shows him wearing European-style clothing, captioned “Dean Mahomet, an East Indian”; the other plates show an Indian Muslim ruler’s procession, and an Indian soldier (“sepoy”) saluting an Indian officer (like himself). To assist readers unfamiliar with India, Mahomet includes a glossary of “Persian and Indian terms.” However, in this and some other sections (e.g., his descriptions of Surat and Bombay, which he never visited), he copied without attribution from John Henry Grose, Voyage to the East Indies (London, 1766). Mahomet also lifted sections about the Prophet Muhammad, betel-nut (pan) chewing, and “dancing girls,” although he knew about these from personal experience. He copied short passages from Jemima Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe . . . and the East Indies (London, 1777). In many instances, however, he modified the words and implications of these earlier authors considering his own sentiments. Since Cork was relatively marginal to the London-centered world of English-language literature and publishing, there is no evidence that his work received much attention beyond Ireland. Nonetheless, one set was brought to the National Library in Kolkata, perhaps by Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–1846) or another of the many early Indian visitors to Britain. Around 1800, Mahomet emigrated to London with his wife and children. There, he served for a time as the “shampooer” (derived from Indian champi, therapeutic massage). In 1806, he married a second Englishwoman, Jane Jeffreys (d. 1850), with whom he had several more children. In 1810, he opened his “Hindostanee Coffee House” near Portman Square – London’s first Indian restaurant run by an Indian. It purveyed Indian-style curries and hookahs, as well as fine wines. Despite excellent restaurant reviews, he declared bankruptcy in 1812. From 1814, he worked in the coastal resort of Brighton as a shampooer and seller of “Indian” medications. From 1815, he ran his own fashionable bathhouses, becoming famous as the Shampooing Surgeon; his elite European clientele included Kings George IV and William IV. He also published two self-promoting books: Cases cured by Sake Deen Mahomed, Shampooing Surgeon, 251

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and Inventor of the Indian Medicated Vapour and Sea-Water Bath (Brighton, 1820) and Shampooing, or Benefits Resulting from the Use of the Indian Medicated Vapour Bath (Brighton, 1820, 1822, 1826, 1838). In these, he omitted his earlier life in Cork and London and claimed 1749 as his birthdate, inserting a fictitious decade of medical training and service as surgeon in the East India Company. After bankruptcy (1841), he continued his reduced shampooing practice from his home until his death February 24, 1851.

Further Reading Fisher, Michael H. Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857. Permanent Black, 2004. Khan, Gulfishan. Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West during the Eighteenth Century. Oxford UP, 1998. Mahomet, Dean. The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth Century Journey Through India, edited by Michael H. Fisher. U of California P, 1997. Visram, Rozina. Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. Pluto Press, 2002. Yazdani, Kaveh. India, Modernity, and the Great Divergence: Mysore and Gujarat (17th to 19th C.). Brill, 2017.

MICHAEL H. FISHER

MALGONKAR, MANOHAR (1913–2010) Manohar Malgonkar holds a prominent position in Indian literature in English for his diverse body of works, consisting of eleven novels, which are a mixture of history, romance, and military life; two light romances/thrillers; a detective novel; a play; several essays/articles; two historical accounts; a travelogue; and a large number of short story anthologies. His writings are as colorful as his life, which includes service in the military and stints as a large game hunter, miner, tea garden manager, and explorer. He combines the beauty and thrills of adventure in his fiction in a manner that is British in style and syntax and historically accurate. Born in Bombay, Malgonkar was the grandson of the prime minister of the princely state of Indore. He attended Karnatak College in Dharwad and Bombay University where he earned his BA in English and Sanskrit in 1936. From 1935 to 1937, he organized tiger hunts for maharajahs as a professional big-game hunter. Five years later, he held the position of cantonment executive officer of the Indian government. He became a professional soldier in the Indian Army, serving in the Maratha light infantry and on the general staff of the British army. During World War II, he ascended to the rank of lieutenant colonel while working in counterintelligence. Malgonkar owned the Jagalbet Manganese Mining Syndicate from 1953 to 1959. After 1959, he cultivated mangoes, oranges, and coconuts on a secluded farm in Jagalbet, Belgaum District, Maharashtra. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress from this district twice. He became a passionate wildlife conservationist in his later years and continued to publish fiction. Malgonkar’s works include Distant Drum (1960), Combat of Shadows (1962), The Princes (1963), and A Bend in the Ganges (1964). The Devil’s Wind, a book about the life of Nana Saheb Peshwa and the First War of Independence, was published in 1972. After twenty years, Cactus Country was released in 1992. Before he began writing novels, he published short tales in reputable journals and magazines, which were later compiled in four volumes: A Toast in Warm Water, Rumble-Tumble, Bombay Beware, and Four Graves and Other Stories. He also authored thrillers, screenplays, and a vast number of journalistic articles. His first publications were for the Illustrated Weekly of India and All India Radio when he began his writing career in 1948. His writing is heavily influenced by the values of the upper classes, both Indian and British, which he grew up in. Since the end of the colonial rule in India, he has been criticized heavily for engaging with elites and portraying the British in a favorable light. In addition, he 252

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has authored two historical books about the lives of Indian military heroes, as well as historical works about the lives of royal families. For example, Kanhoji Angrey’s story, The Seahawk: Life and Battles of Kanhoji Angrey (1959), which is the tale of an Indian Maratha admiral who fought the Mughals in a long and terrible conflict over the Konkans. Distant Drum (1960) is primarily a romantic tale of adventure and intrigue set in India during the transition from British to Congress governance. Combat of Shadows (1962), which has achieved some appreciation, is set on an Assam tea plantation. Henry Winton, the plantation manager, is corrupted and defeated by his inner conflict between rejection and desire. Ruby Miranda, his Anglo-Indian mistress, represents Winton’s ambivalence because he refuses to marry her due to her dark color and Indian origin. Retribution is introduced as a prominent element in Malgonkar’s book through a succession of small plots that culminate in a huge act of revenge involving all the persons Winton has harmed. His third work of fiction, The Princes, has been acclaimed as an epic saga of our time. When their roots began to fade, the princes in this story were on the point of losing their identities. Malgonkar has provided an insider’s picture of princely existence. The Princes follows Maharaj Hiroji and his son, Abhayraj, as they rule Begwad. The former has ruled with authority while the latter is destined to be king for just forty-nine days after his father’s demise. Abhayraj, the protagonist, grows up and realizes the importance of human relationships. An accurate portrayal of princely India, the thickly woven fast-paced narrative traces the chaotic years of the independence movement. The novel also integrates the rise of political leaders like Kanakchand and his ilk in India’s political landscape. The theme of A Bend in the Ganges is the freedom movement, partition, and the resulting violence. It is widely regarded as an epic study of the escalation of violence, the revolutionary passion of youth, the regional divide, and the efficacy of Gandhian ideas of nonviolence. It presents a vivid picture of the decade preceding the country’s split, highlighting the realities that led to a rift in the hearts of the common man, the country’s separation, and the anarchy that followed. Violence spares no one when the crowds are in a frenzy, whether Gian, the Gandhian, or Debi Dayal, the revolutionary. It affects Sundari, Gopal, Shafi, the Tekchands, and many more. Nonviolence is more like “a religious notion, a philosophers dream.” The end lesson is clear: nonviolence is worthless without an “inner” calling. The Devil’s Wind, published in 1972, is historical fiction about Nana Saheb Peshwa’s role in the first Indian War of Independence. It is an attempt to fix the image of Nana Saheb, whom the British denounced as the “mutiny’s” villain. Written in an autobiographical style, it recounts the story of Nana Saheb in the context of events such as the Principle of Annexation, the outraged Indian rulers, the downtrodden Indian masses, and their collective response to British animosity. Cactus Country was published twenty years after The Devil’s Wind, in 1992. It is again a historical novel, the story of army life, and a novel about the formation of Bangladesh. The central awareness in the novel is that of a Pakistani army commander Aslam Chisti. Most of the action takes place in East Pakistan, which eventually becomes Bangladesh. Historical nonfiction by Malgonkar reflects his great interest in history. His greatest works, which celebrate Indian military heroes and maharajas, read like historical fiction. But unlike other Indian authors, he does not share Nehru’s commitment to the economically disadvantaged.

Further Reading Amur, G. S. Manohar Malgonkar. Humanities Press, 1973. Asnani, Shyam. “A Study of the Novels of Manohar Malgonkar.” The Literary Half-Yearly, vol. 16, no. 2, 1975, pp. 71–98. Mohan Rao, C. M. Manohar Malgonkar and Portrait of the Hero in His Novels. Advent, 1993.

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PURNIMA BALI

MAN OF GLASS by Tabish Khair Tabish Khair is a poet, novelist and academic born in 1966 in Ranchi. He is a professor in the Department of English in the University of Aarhus, Denmark. Man of Glass is his second collection of poems published in 2010. His poems are inspired by the works of three different writers from different time periods and languages The genres are divided in three sections: Kalidasa’s 5th century Sanskrit play on Abhijnana-Shakuntala, Asadullah Khan Ghalib’s 19th-century Urdu ghazals, and H.C. Andersen’s Danish fairy tales. His poems are meditations on feelings of loss, migration, divinity, war realities, and the complex questions of being. In the first section, Khair rewrites Kalidasa’s play on Shakuntala to continue her story and the cultural influence of her character in world literature. She is resurrected in the 21st century, born to a secular Muslim scholar, who names her after the beloved Hindu princess Shakuntala. Khair’s Shakuntala is brought up on Ghalib ghazals and Urdu and English poetry. She falls in love with literature and dreams of studying in Europe and dedicates herself to it; “Papers become her life .  .  . GRE, TOEFL, GMAT.” Her father supports her ambitions; she gets a scholarship to study in Europe and sets out on her journey to study. The poem “Immigration” deals with her journey in Europe and unpacks the violence of border control and systemic racism. Since the European Union has a history of treating migrants from the global South with great hostility, Shakuntala must bear with ill treatment. The immigration officer holds her passport with disgust “as if they were cut out of the belly of smelly fish.” The matron behind the counter looks at her and is subjected to the condescending colonial gaze. Just like Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, people believe that this Shakuntala, as an Indian woman, must belong to a man too Through his free verse structure Khair slowly pulls out every layer of intersectional oppression that women of color and women from the global south face in the “palace of freedom slavery built,” a metaphor for the Western European land. The second section opens with Tabish Khair’s transcreations of Asadullah Khan Ghalib’s ghazals. He was the last court poet of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor of India who was sent to exile by the British. Khair plays with the structure and arrangements of the ghazal couplets to share new interpretations of Ghalib’s 17th-century ghazals. One of his renowned Urdu ghazals is commemorated in a creative translation O Heedless Heart, Why Do You Despond? Khair maintains the same rhyme scheme, the tone full of yearning, and explores a stronger connection with the divine presence through visual imageries of surreal beauty and light. The third section departs from the history of Indian literature to H.C. Anderson’s influence on Khair’s poetic writing. He presents a delicate, haunting poem written to Anderson from his mother’s point of view. The mother peers into the poet’s life from the land of death and pens down an elegiac poem on remembering Jesus. She tells him to recognize the divinity of Jesus within him and bring it out in his writings. Tabish Khair has created a distinct space for himself in the Indian literary landscape. He spins out unique, creative protagonists, leads new critical conversations around political perceptions of Islam, different political economies, and personal identity in his creative writing. 254

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Further Reading Adami, Esterino. “Spoiling Suspense? Anticipatory Structures as Creative Narrative Devices in Tabish Khair’s Diasporic Fiction.” Transnational Literature, vol. 9, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–12. Core, https://core. ac.uk/download/pdf/81291209.pdf. Marino, Elisabetta. “An Unwilling Suspension of Misbeliefs: Acknowledging the Complexity of Reality in Night of Happiness by Tabish Khair.” Acta Neophilologica, vol. 52, no. 1–2, 2019, https://doi. org/10.4312/an.52.1-2.59-68. Zeenat, Afrin. “ ‘Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be’: Islamophobia, Neoliberalism, and Neo-Nationalism in Tabish Khair’s How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position.” South Asian Review, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 117–330, https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2014.11932990.

PRISHANTI PATHAK

MANRAL, KIRAN (1971–) Kiran Manral was born on June 22, 1971. She studied at Duruelo Convent High School in Mumbai and graduated in English from Mithibai College in 1991. Beginning her career as an advertising copywriter, she joined the news service at Mumbai’s DSJ TV and later worked as a feature writer for Times of India and Cosmopolitan India. In 2000, she became a freelance journalist and from 2005 onwards she started writing blogs “Thirty six and counting” and “Karmic kids.” She has founded “India Helps,” a volunteer network to help disaster victims post 26/11. She was associated with a group that ran Child Sexual Abuse Awareness Month and Violence Against Women Awareness Month. Manral published her first novel, The Reluctant Detective, in 2011. Set in Mumbai, the book presents Kanan Mehra or Kay, a housewife and mother of a five-year-old, who ends up investigating the murder mysteries of Mrs. Sheetal Jaiswal and Rohit Sharma, with the help of her friend Runa Bhattacharya, a private investigator. Kanan Mehra, the reluctant detective, feels obliged to find out the culprit as she is deeply moved by the dual murders in her neighborhood. Manral, shifting the focus from “whodunnit” to “whydunnit,” exposes the lurking dangers that a woman encounters within the household and the exploitation that aspiring actors face in the city of dreams. Once Upon a Crush, published in 2014, is a romantic tale of Rayna, an independent woman in her late twenties, trapped in a job with a terrible boss and bullying seniors. While her parents are pestering her to get married, she falls for Deven Ahuja, her handsome colleague. Manral’s next romance is All Aboard! (2015). Set on a Mediterranean cruise ship, it narrates the story of Rhea Khanna who, after being dumped by her boyfriend just before the wedding, finds love in Kamal Shahani, a successful entrepreneur. Karmic Kids: The Story of Parenting Nobody Told You, Manral’s first nonfiction work, is a compilation of humorous anecdotes describing her experience of bringing up her son from childbirth to the age of ten. The book is a fun read sans any advice or preaching. Manral’s fourth novel, The Face at the Window, a paranormal thriller, is set in the Himalayan foothills. Told from the point of view of Mrs. McNally, a retired schoolteacher, this dark and complex tale unravels secrets from the past that haunt the present. The eerie silence of the mountains provides an apt atmosphere to this tale of horror. Saving Maya, a novella, is a heart-warming story of Maya, a single mother in her thirties. As Maya struggles to restructure her life post-divorce, she finds love. The book was long-listed for the Saboteur Awards UK. Missing, Presumed Dead, published in 2018, explores how mental illness can disrupt families and strain relationships. Aisha is battling with depression triggered by her dark past. She finds herself on the brink of insanity as her children find her scary and her husband, Prithvi, fails to convey his concern and love for her. 255

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Manral has also co-authored 13 Steps to Bloody Good Parenting (2019) with Ashwin Sanghi. She has written the True Love Stories series and A Boy’s Guide to Growing Up for Juggernaut. Her recent publications include Raising Kids with Hope and Wonder in Times of a Pandemic and Climate Change, The Kitty Party Murder, and More Things in Heaven and Earth. The Kitty Party Murder, a humorous murder mystery, features Kanan Mehra or Kay and her detective friend Runa Bhattacharya investigating a suicide case. As they infiltrate a ladies kitty party group, they unearth their deep, dark secrets, which help them solve the puzzles. More Things in Heaven and Earth, a tale of love, loss, obsession and guilt of betrayal, explores the mysterious space between the dead and the living. Manral has published short stories in magazines and in anthologies like Have a Safe Journey, The Best Asian Speculative Fiction 2018, Magical Women, and City of Screams. Her upcoming book, Rising: 30 Women Who Changed India, explores the journey, the struggle of thirty Indian women who have redefined success. Manral deals with the contemporary urban society in her writings. Her sense of humor makes her books an interesting read, though a few have found her murder mysteries a little disappointing.

Further Reading Sathiavel, J. Stories Uncovered: Approaches to the Study of Select Indian English Crime and Detective Fiction. Pondicherry U, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 2016, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/225934.

AALEYA GIRI

MARKANDAYA, KAMALA (1924–2004) Kamala Markandaya, the pseudonym of Kamala Purnaiya, was born on January  1, 1924, in Chimakurthy, South India. She hailed from a Brahmin family and their elite, upper-class status allowed her to pursue higher education in India from the University of Madras in 1940. After India partitioned, she emigrated to England in 1948 to realize her dream of becoming a writer. She married an Englishman, Bertrand Taylor, and settled in London. Along with other Anglo-Indian writers, she kept her ties with India through broadcast journalism; Markandaya contributed to the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Eastern Service by appearing in programs such as “Through Eastern Eyes” and “Open Letters.” Markandaya published ten novels in her lifetime, and yet not a single biography exists, largely due to her reclusiveness. In one of the few personal essays that she wrote, she prefaced her literary outlook as being told through only “one pair of eyes,” highlighting the danger of universalizing and homogenizing the multifaceted and polyphonic experiences of South Asia and other former colonies of the Empire. Markandaya’s first novel, Nectar in a Sieve, was published in 1954. It was picked as the US Book of the Month Club selection for June in 1955. The American Library Association also bestowed the status of Notable Book to it, including it in their high school and university curricula for decades. Nectar follows Rukmini, the wife of a farmer in rural India, as she and her family struggle to keep up with the changing times in the colony brought on by industrialization and modernization. The novel romanticizes female endurance through Rukmini who fights at every turn to keep her family afloat, despite experiencing betrayal from her husband and sons. The family’s hardships due to drought and destroyed crop cycles are compounded by the opening of a tannery in their village, which disrupts their way of life. The novel holds up a mirror to the consequences of rapid urbanization on peasant life. In recent years, it has been criticized for furthering damaging homogenous orientalist representations of the “Third World.” 256

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Drawing from her own personal experiences, Markandaya highlights the difficulties faced by intercultural couples. Her novel Some Inner Fury (1955) deals with the relationship between an Indian woman and a British civil servant, set against the backdrop of the 1942 anti-colonial movement. Despite their love for each other, external forces and cultural differences lead to their separation as the chasm is too large to be reconciled. She explores a marital relationship again in Silence of Desire (1960), between Dandekar and Sarojini. Their ideological conflict is based on the dichotomy of Western materialism/rationalism and Eastern spiritualism. When Sarojini develops a tumor in her uterus, the couple’s conflicting approaches to medical interference divides the household; while Dandekar insists on modern allopathic treatment, Sarojini refuses to get hospitalized, preferring instead to seek spiritual healing from a swami (religious monk). Markandaya draws attention to the power imbalance that exists between the couple, which Sarojini challenges when she exercises agency in taking charge of her body. The theme of Western materialism versus Eastern mysticism finds recourse again in her next few novels. Possession (1963) follows the exploitation by an Englishwoman Caroline who lures a young shepherd Valmiki to Britain to attain stardom on “discovering” his artistic inclinations, stealing him away from his guru. The narrow representation of the West as self-fulfilling and the East as meek and vulnerable in the novel reinforces existing racial hierarchies, instead of criticizing them. After Nectar, she returns to the plight of the peasants in A Handful of Rice (1966) where the colonial authority of Caroline is replaced by the neo-colonial urbanization of Independent India. Ravi leaves his village afflicted with starvation and moves to the city to earn a living. However, he becomes dissatisfied with low earnings and resorts to criminal activities, fueled by greed. The novel is a cautionary tale on the implications of social hierarchy and a burgeoning middle-class. The Coffer Dams (1969) explores another theme, first introduced in Nectar through the opening of the tannery in the village, namely the negative impact of industrialization on peasant economy and its environmental footprint. In sharp contrast to Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Bridge-Builders” (1893), in which British engineers are commended for their fortitude in building a bridge over the Ganges, Markandaya shifts the focus from the builders of the dam over a mountainous terrain in South India to the locals who are displaced from their homes as a result. After setting her novels in India for almost two decades, Markandaya sets The Nowhere Man (1972) in Britain. It traces the disillusionment that Srinivas feels in the 1960s under Enoch Powell, a British MP’s inciting racist rhetoric. Her next novel Two Virgins (1973) scales the attention back to a New India where, despite legal advancements in gender equality, women’s mobility and freedom is restricted by patriarchy. Whereas Lalitha dreams of escaping her parents’ expectations, and seeking an independent career, her sister Saroja is cognizant of the social ostracization that such women face. Lalitha’s move to the city symbolizes one of the first instances in Markandaya’s novels of a woman serving herself, not others. In The Golden Honeycomb (1977), she moves away from contemporary life and writes her first historical novel. Set during the imperial era of the Raj, the novel chronicles three generations of the royal family of the Princely State of Devapur as they navigate the politics of Indo-British relations. In Pleasure City (1982), published under the title Shalimar in the United States, the author offers a positive outcome to the East–West encounter. When a British construction company arrives with the Shalimar project, a rapport develops between Tully, a British official and Rikki, a fisher-boy adopted by a missionary couple. Markandaya hints at the prospect of a future in which cultural and racial differences can enrich human connection. Although Pleasure City was her last publication, the completed manuscript of Bombay Tiger was posthumously published in 2008. It follows Ganguli, an ambitious industrialist and technocrat who arrives in Bombay to change his fortunes and rise through the social ranks. 257

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Despite winning the Asian Prize in 1974, Markandaya has been largely overlooked in the study of Indian writing in English and in writing by the South Asian diaspora. While Nectar in a Sieve was received with fervor during its initial release, feminist critics have pointed to its subscription of exoticized representations of brown women in need of “saving.” Markandaya’s novels were written with a Western readership in mind, which shone in her use of the English language, influenced by Victorian turns of phrase and descriptors, alien to the Indian cultural context. Nevertheless, she remains an early voice in Anglophone writing from the subcontinent, who focused on the internal lives of Indian women and narrated them on a global stage. She passed away at her London residence on May 16, 2004.

Further Reading Bhatnagar, Anil K. Kamala Markandaya: A Thematic Study. Sarup and Sons, 1995. George, Rosemary Marangoly. “Where in the World Did Kamala Markandaya Go?” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 42, no. 3, 2009, pp. 400–409. Joannou, Maroula. “ ‘Unsettled and Unsettling’ Women Migrant Voices After the War.” British Women’s Writing, 1930 to 1960: Between the Waves, edited by Sue Kennedy and Jane Thomas. Liverpool UP, 2020, pp. 54–70. Markandaya, Kamala. “One Pair of Eyes.” The Commonwealth Writer Overseas: Themes of Exile and Expatriation, edited by Niven Alastair. Editions Didier Millet, 1976, pp. 23–32.

SHEELALIPI SAHANA

MATHAI, ANNA SUJATHA (1934–) Anna Sujatha Mathai, born on May 24, 1934, in Nagpur (Maharashtra, India) belongs to the Mar Thoma community of Tiruvalla, in South Kerala. Her father, Samuel Mathai, the head of the English Department at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, and later Vice-Chancellor at Kerala