The Routledge Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English 1032245573, 9781032245577

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Encyclopedia Entries
Our Contributors

Citation preview

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

1

Our Contributors

459

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

vii

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

viii

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

7

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.”

8

Encyclopedia Entries

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

9

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

16

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

“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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

20

Encyclopedia Entries

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.”

21

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

26

Encyclopedia Entries

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

27

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

30

Encyclopedia Entries

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

31

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

34

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

44

Encyclopedia Entries

(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

45

Encyclopedia Entries

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

46

Encyclopedia Entries

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

47

Encyclopedia Entries

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

48

Encyclopedia Entries

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.”

49

Encyclopedia Entries

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

50

Encyclopedia Entries

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

51

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

58

Encyclopedia Entries

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

59

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

62

Encyclopedia Entries

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

63

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

66

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

67

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

72

Encyclopedia Entries

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.”

73

Encyclopedia Entries

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

74

Encyclopedia Entries

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

75

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

78

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

79

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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)

86

Encyclopedia Entries

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

87

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

90

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

91

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

95

Encyclopedia Entries Tom, Duna Liss. Food Metaphors and Discourse of Culture A Study of the Select Works by Esther David, Chitra B Divakaruni and Kavery Nambisan. University of Kannur, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 2017, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/239310.

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

98

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

99

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

100

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

102

Encyclopedia Entries

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

103

Encyclopedia Entries

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

104

Encyclopedia Entries

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

105

Encyclopedia Entries

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

106

Encyclopedia Entries

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

107

Encyclopedia Entries

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

108

Encyclopedia Entries

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

109

Encyclopedia Entries

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

110

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

111

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

114

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

119

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

125

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

126

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

130

Encyclopedia Entries

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

131

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

132

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

133

Encyclopedia Entries

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

134

Encyclopedia Entries

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

135

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

136

Encyclopedia Entries

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,

137

Encyclopedia Entries

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

138

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

139

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

142

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

143

Encyclopedia Entries Gabriel, Sharmani Patricia. “Diasporic Hybridities and the Patchwork Quilt: Contesting Nationalist History and Other Fictions in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2003, pp. 83–94. Merivirta, Raita. The Emergency and the Indian English Novel: Memory, Culture and Politics. Routledge, 2019. Yorke, Stephanie. “Realism and the Immaterial Disabled Body in Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance.” South Asian Review, vol. 32, no. 1, 2011, pp. 267–284.

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

148

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

150

Encyclopedia Entries

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

151

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

154

Encyclopedia Entries

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

155

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

156

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

159

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

162

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

163

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

164

Encyclopedia Entries

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

165

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

166

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

167

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

170

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

174

Encyclopedia Entries

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

175

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

176

Encyclopedia Entries Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. “Disillusionment with More than India: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust.” Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a ‘Post’-Colonial World, edited by Geoffrey Davis, et al. Rodopi, 2005, pp. 249–257. Sucher, Laurie. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion. Macmillan, 1989.

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

178

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

179

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

184

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

185

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

188

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

193

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

198

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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,

200

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

201

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

204

Encyclopedia Entries

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

205

Encyclopedia Entries

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/.

206

POULAMI BANERJEE

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.”

210

Encyclopedia Entries

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

211

Encyclopedia Entries

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

212

Encyclopedia Entries

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

213

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

224

Encyclopedia Entries

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

225

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

227

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.

228

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

233

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

236

Encyclopedia Entries

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

237

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

241

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

“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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

246

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

247

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

250

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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.

253

Encyclopedia Entries Padmanabhan, A. The Fictional World of Manohar Malgonkar. Atlantic Publishers, 2002. Parameswaran, Uma. “Manohar Malgonkar as a Historical Novelist.” World Literature Written in English, vol. 14, no. 2, 1975, pp. 327–338. Rajagopalachari, M. The Novels of Manohar Malgonkar. Prestige, 1989.

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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

Encyclopedia Entries

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 University, played a big part in developing her love for literature, poetry, and theater. Sujatha completed her English honors at Miranda House College, Delhi, and received a first class master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Delhi and a postgraduate degree in social sciences from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She won several prizes at the college and the university. In 1955, she married a surgeon and moved to Edinburgh, Scotland. Presently, she lives in New Delhi, India. Mathai has been recognized internationally for decades and has received numerous honors. The recipient of the CIP/Fulbright Scholarship, Mathai was also an associate editor of the prestigious Literary Journal, Two Plus Two, based in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2018, the Feminist Group awarded her their First Kamala Das Poetry Prize. She was extensively involved in theater for many years and was a founder member of The Abhinaya Poetry/Theatre Group in Bangalore. She has also been giving poetry-reading sessions at various places, including The House of Culture, Stockholm; the Danish Writers Union Copenhagen Lauderdale House, London; India International Centre, Delhi; The International Poetry Festival, Struga, Macedonia; and Poetry Cafe Covent Garden, London. Mathai has worked as a professional social worker in England and the United States. Translated into several Indian and European languages, she has five volumes of poetry to her credit in English and a short novel, Shueli’s Star, which is being serialized on Strands Lit Sphere. Her first volume of poetry, Crucifixions (1970), consists of thirty poems, which dig into the evanescent nature of life beset by desolation, loneliness, and suffering. The poems subjectively muse on the benevolent understanding of the spiritual value of suffering. The dominant mood

258

Encyclopedia Entries

of isolation and agony is colored by a strong Christian faith in the Crucifix and spiritual tranquility that can alleviate the darkness of desolation. The second volume of poetry, We, The Unreconciled (1972), of thirty-three poems, carries the somber mood of suffering, isolation, and death. The poet constantly tries to disentangle the enigma of living souls. The poems juxtapose the response of Nature and the mortals to ephemeral life, stressing on how the human world remains “unreconciled” to the hostile terrain of life. The poet prays for a gleam of hope for the humans who are constantly struggling in their life’s journey. The third volume of poetry, The Attic of Night (1991), consisting of thirty-nine poems, is a photographic narrative of a past that deals with a variety of life experiences of stillness, restraint, and contemplation and a steady faith in life and love. The mature poems blend the abstract with the concrete and delve into the complexities of human relationships and self-realization. Life – On My Side of the Street and Other Poems (2005) is the fourth volume with forty-three poems that reveals in the words of Mathai a “struggle to find meaning and illumination in dark and difficult years.” The protagonist struggles hard with the memories of pain and love, lying deep in the consciousness and tries to find meaning in life despite its hurdles and darkness. The book was selected in the golden jubilee year of the Sahitya Akademi to showcase and anthologize Indian poetry in English by women writers. Mathai’s Mother’s Veena and Other Poems (2013) has been praised by Gopal Gandhi who calls her “a poet of depth feeling and restraint.” The book of fifty-one confessional lyrical poems articulates emotional experiences with vehemence and subjectivism. “Experience,” dedicated to Nirbhaya (a 2012 rape victim in Delhi), opens with an evocative expression of an Indian woman longing for freedom she is denied: “When I was a child/I thought as a child/I spoke as a child/ And then my mother sought to protect me/. . . from holding up the face/to rain in ecstasy.” A chronic illness has slowed Mathai down, but she hopes to complete her sixth book sometime soon. With her poems that oscillate toward the interiors of the mind, Mathai carves out new spaces of meaning in her writing and tries to achieve completeness and harmony within her and the world outside.

Further Reading “Anna Sujatha Mathai.” The Punch Magazine, thepunchmagazine.com/author/anna-sujatha-mathai. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Mathai, Anna Sujatha. “Interview with Anna Sujatha Mathai.” Navlokam.com, 28 Sept. 2020, https:// navalokam.com/article.php?newsId=12204&edition=2010. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. ———. “Poet’s Note: ‘Snatching Poems from the Dark.’ ” The Punch Magazine, 31 Jan. 2021, thepunchmagazine.com/the-byword/poetry/anna-sujatha-mathai-hints-in-a-world-caught-betweenliving-and-dying-and-other-poems. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Nambisan, Vijay. “Walking in the Dark.” The Hindu, 4 Jan. 2014, www.thehindu.com/books/literaryreview/walking-in-the-dark/article5538146.ece. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023.

KUMUD SINGHAL

MEHROTRA, ARVIND KRISHNA (1947–) Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, poet, translator and anthologist, was born in Lahore on April 16, 1947. He received his bachelor’s degree in arts in 1966 from the University of Allahabad and Master of Arts in 1968 from the University of Bombay. Mehrotra worked at the University of Allahabad for most of his life, first as a lecturer and then as a reader of English. He was a visiting

259

Encyclopedia Entries

professor at the University of Iowa from 1971 to 1973. He worked as a lecturer in English for a year at the University of Hyderabad between 1977 to 1978. Mehrotra received the Homi Bhabha Fellowship from 1981 to 1983, and he was nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009. In his teens, Mehrotra started editing and publishing a literary magazine, Damn You: A Magazine of the Arts, in Allahabad. This was soon followed by two other magazines, Ezra and Fakir. One of Mehrotra’s first publications was Bharatmata: A  Prayer self-published in 1966 by the Ezra Fakir Publication. The poem was republished in the journal Mahfil in 1970. Dedicated to Indira Gandhi and Malay Roy Choudhury, the poem remains one of Mehrotra’s most provocative political poems, providing an insight into the influence of the Beats and the Hungryalists (the hungry generation movement, a literary movement started by Bengali writers launched in 1961) on the young poet. A collection, Woodcuts on Paper, was published by Gallery Number Ten Publications in London in 1967. Pomes/Poemes/Poemas was published as a special issue for Vrishchik, a monthly magazine published from Baroda, Gujarat by Vrishchik Press. The collection displays Mehrotra’s early provocative style. Mehrotra’s Nine Enclosures and his Distance in Statue Miles were published in 1976 and 1982 respectively by Clearing House. His collection, Middle Earth, was published in 1984 by Oxford University Press in Delhi under the imprint of Three Crown Books. The Transfiguring Places was published in 1998 by Ravi Dayal Publisher in Delhi. As a translator, Mehrotra published a collection of Prakrit poetry in The Absent Traveller: Prākrit love poetry from the Gāthāsaptaśatī of Sātavāhana Hāla (1991), the poetry of Kabir from vernacular medieval Hindustani as Songs of Kabir (2011), and stories of Vinod Kumar Shukla from Hindi with Sara Rai in Blue Is Like Blue: Stories by Vinod Kumar Shukla (2020). The translation of Gāthāsaptaśatī allows English readers to access an eclectic collection of poetry wherein the feminine speakers play a central role. Being a largely anonymous collection, the authors of the works remain unknown, yet the intricate articulations of feminine desire and the lives of women allow the reader to be transported across millennia through the verses. Kabir’s translations, on the other hand, allow an English reader to explore the writings of Kabir, a key Bhakti figure, whose poems still play a vibrant role in the contemporary imagination in South Asia. Translations of Shukla expose the readers to the magical-realist world of the Hindi writer. Mehtrora’s translations, like many other translators of poetry in India, eschew academic translation for a creative mode of translation. As an editor and anthologist, Mehrotra published a diverse range of volumes. In 1992 he anthologized The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets which remains one of the early anthologies of Indian English poetry. In 1993, with Daniel Wiessbort, Mehrotra edited an anthology titled Periplus: Poetry in Translation, published by Oxford University Press, which was not limited to any particular era, territory or language. In 2003 he edited a volume titled An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English published by Permanent Black, which has a collection of essays on the history of Indian English literature. In 2007, Mehrotra edited The Last Bungalow: Writings on Allahabad published by Penguin Books, an assorted collection of texts across genres and forms dealing with the city where he spent most of his life. Critical discussions concerning Mehrotra’s work have largely revolved around discussion on translation, his place in world literature and his role as an anthologist. As per Bruce King, Mehrotra’s early work “viewed the poem as object, as a structure of images” while the concern later shifted to “the need to bring to the poem’s surface the obsessions, memories, doubts and

260

Encyclopedia Entries

other personal experiences.” In-depth critical works dealing with his oeuvre and his larger body of work remain a glaring lack, which reflects Mehrotra’s evocative point that “the criticism of Indian poetry in English that has come out of our universities’ English Departments is both voluminous and of inferior quality, and is best left alone” (Beluau).

Further Reading Beluau, Julie. “ ‘Revising the Literary Map’: Three Anthologies of Indian Writing and Instances of Literary Commitment.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, Sept. 2015, pp. 33–43. OpenEdition Journals, https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.6129. King, Bruce. “Experimentalists II: Mehrotra and Mahapatra.” Modern Indian Poetry in English: Revised Edition. Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 183–208. Zecchini, Laetitia. “Practices, Constructions and Deconstructions of ‘World Literature’ and ‘Indian Literature’ from the PEN All-India Centre to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.” Journal of World Literature, vol. 4, no. 1, Mar. 2019, pp. 82–106. Brill, https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00401005. Zimbler, Jarad. “Working Conditions: World Literary Criticism and the Material of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.” Cultural Inquiry, vol. 19, edited by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson. ICI Berlin Press, 2021, pp. 173–207. ICI Berlin Press, https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_08.

DEBARUN SARKAR

MEHTA, GITA (1943–) The daughter of freedom fighter and Odisha Chief Minister Biju Patnaik, Gita Mehta has had the privilege of seeing the last phase of India’s freedom struggle from up close. Married to Sonny Mehta, the Chairman of Knopf. Doubleday Publishing Group, she remained close to the publishing scene in the United States. She is a well-known documentary filmmaker for international networks: her coverage of the 1971 Bangladesh war called “Dateline Bangladesh” has been screened widely abroad. All these experiences have enriched her perspective on India and her books have been translated into more than twenty international languages. Known to lovers of Indian writing in English for her five works, she has written about India’s history, politics, and culture both as an insider and outsider. Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East (1979) is Mehta’s first book, a nonfiction cultural analysis of the way India is being marketed to Western travelers who look toward Indian spirituality as a ready solution to First World anxieties and neuroses. The roots of this phenomenon lie in the Orientalist construction of India: India as a space of refuge and escape, a place of spiritual adventure played out on the individual level. Given the rise of international consumer culture, India has become the mass market for instant spiritual gratification. This mass marketing of mysticism is exacerbated by materialistic holy men, tour operators, drug racketeers, and the Westerners themselves, who make every material incident or stray word appear like a profound epiphany. Westerners who choose to stay in spiritual retreats risk dubious methods of withdrawal from the material world that often borders on the ridiculous. In Raj (1989), historical infarctions from rationality lie at the heart of the birth of a nation, India. Based on the condition of the erstwhile princely states of British India from 1897 till the start of the first general elections in independent India in 1951, Mehta’s first novel explores the pitiable condition of these states. From the perspective of Jaya Singh, daughter of the fictional princely state of Balmer in Rajasthan (and later, Maharani of Sirpur by marriage) the novel details her growth both as a royal and as an active witness to the sordid political machinations of the British Raj from the latter part of Queen Victoria’s reign to the Viceroyship of Lord Mountbatten. The novel explores the helplessness of Balmer State’s ruler (Jaya’s

261

Encyclopedia Entries

father, Maharaja Jai Singh) –and by implication, most Indian rulers in the novel – in addressing the need to modernize and yet retain the traditional frameworks of collective social consciousness that marked Indian life for centuries. As a historical novel, Raj marks a departure from the traditional representation of Indian royals in Indo-British historical discourse and in quasi-historical fiction as hedonistic, egocentric individuals unconcerned with the problems of the poor. In A River Sutra (1993) Mehta carries on her sustained engagement with the ever-changing confrontations between mythology and modernity, the sacred and the secular, that marked her oeuvre as an Indian writing in English. This is a collection of six interconnected stories with a common narrator, who in his capacity as caretaker of a government Rest House, undergoes a journey of personal discovery about the truths of the human heart and its role in the path to enlightenment. In these stories, the narratives of a Jain monk, a music teacher, a tea estate executive, a courtesan, a musician, and minstrel, collide with the narrator’s own (and that of his friend Tariq Mia). The book’s complex use of Narmada’s mythological origins and its geocultural importance to Indian history, makes it amenable to discussions about ecofeminism and postcolonialism just as it opens two questions important to major Indian writers in English: what does Mehta write? And for whom? Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India (1997) helps answer both questions. Part autobiographical revelation, part nonfictional rumination on India, the book harks back to some of Mehta’s broader concerns that have distinguished her writing since Karma Cola. The book’s overall theme concerns the possibility of India’s multiple cultural traditions being stable bedrocks for launching India on the world stage and the pathos of the nation’s failure to accomplish the lofty goals of becoming a civilization to be reckoned with. Her childhood memories of her family’s participation in the 1940s freedom struggle, her eyewitness account of the funeral of Mahatma Gandhi, the ethnic divide caused by the 1971 Bangladesh war, and protests against the 1975 Emergency remain important memory-marks in the book. They are neatly set against discussions of political nepotism, corruption in public life, lop-sided development strategies and the lack of imaginative empathy in dealing with the country’s poor and the downtrodden. Eternal Ganesha: From Birth to Rebirth (2006) is distinct from her other books about Indian cultural life because it focuses exclusively on a deity: the book traces the cultural role of Lord Ganesha in 21st century India and analyses the Lord’s presence in public life through current emblematic visual iconography. While Mumbai’s Ganesh Chaturthi festival is the most concentrated form of Ganesha’s popularity, the Lord’s presence has deep roots in the tribal culture of Indian antiquity and in the history of anti-colonial movements. Her cultural analysis references the importance of Ganesha in Indian philosophy and mythology. This allows her to explain various aspects of Indian spirituality, and ultimately, the broader connection to everyday material and social practices. Lavish illustrations make this book a genre hybrid: it is part coffee-table book and part an ethnographic study of the structure of everyday life in India. Overall, in Mehta’s work India becomes a series of vignettes for the Western reader who gets a kaleidoscopic orientation of the nation as narrated from the viewpoint of both an insider and an outsider.

Further Reading Dass, V. N., and R. K. Dhawan. Fiction of the Nineties. Prestige Books, 1998. Dhawan, R. K., editor. Indian Women Novelists, Set III, vol. 4. Prestige Books, 1995.

262

NILAK DATTA

Encyclopedia Entries

MEHTA, RAMA (1923–1978) Rama Mehta was born in 1923 to Nanalal Chamanlal Mehta and Shantaben, in Nainital, where she had her early schooling. She did her BA from Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow; MA in philosophy from St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi; and went to Columbia University, New York, to specialize in sociology and psychology. Much later, when she was already married and a mother, she enrolled in the PhD program at Delhi University but could not complete it. There she came under the influence of sociologists M.N. Srinivasan and T.N. Madan. Mehta joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1949, but left in 1951 because of her marriage with Jagan Mehta, who too was an IFS officer. As she accompanied him in his official postings, she traveled extensively, got exposed to a variety of social and political systems, and was able to make significant connections with many known politicians and social workers. Her upbringing in the nuclear family of her parental home, where she inherited her father’s love for Indian culture and civilisation; her formal education in India and abroad, which exposed her to Western modernity; and her marriage in Jagan Mehta’s traditional family in Udaipur shaped her thinking and writing. She rose to prominence as a sociologist, lecturer, and author. A special chair was established in her name by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Mehta has published several works on Indian social life, which focus on children and women. Ramu: A Story of India (1966), is a story of an aspirational son of a sweet maker who struggles to put the boy through school, and The Life of Keshav: A Family Story from India (1969) portrays the sacrifices of his entire family as a boy from a remote Indian village works his way up from abject poverty and the bondage of caste laws to the greater promise of the university. These works are pleas for giving education to boys. The Western Educated Hindu Woman (1970) and The Hindu Divorced Woman (1975) deal with different aspects of the life of Hindu women, most especially their socially disadvantaged position. Mehta also published a novel, Inside the Haveli, in 1977, which brought her immediate recognition as a fiction writer and won her the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1979. The protagonist of this novel is a young Westerneducated girl who marries into a wealthy and traditional Rajasthani family and must give in to the way of life of the haveli. Since the protagonist’s life with her husband is modeled on Mehta’s life with her husband, critics have worked on the novel’s strong autobiographical strain. Mehta has also published India; Now and Through Time (1971) in collaboration with the wife of the former American Ambassador in New Delhi, Catherine Atwater Galbraith, which gracefully describes what it means to live in India, a country which is undisciplined, has an impoverished rural society, hopelessly mired in its own backwardness and a progressive state valiantly bent on modernization in a democratic context. In 1987, Mehta published Socio-Legal Status of Women in India, which traces the idea of woman’s emancipation both in the Western critical tradition and the Indian context, where she gives the reader a brief account of the attitudes of Western philosophers toward women from Plato to John Stuart Mill and the historical and Constitutional framework of India vis-à-vis women. The book provides deep insight into the legal and social matters related to women in India, be it divorce, criminal law, or labor law. Mehta died in 1978 when she was only fifty-four due to a heart attack, but her contribution to the literature of India is significant and readers may find her work relevant even today.

Further Reading Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English. Sterling Publishers, 1984. Mehta, Rama. Socio-legal Status of Women in India. Mittal Publications, 1987.

263

Encyclopedia Entries Nanda, Deshmukh. “Gender and Culture in Rama Mehta’s Inside the Haveli.” IJRHAL, vol. 3, no. 8, 2015, pp. 67–70.

MOIN ASHRAF AKHOON

MEHTA, SUKETU (1963–) Suketu Mehta was born in Kolkata to a family of Gujarati diamond merchants. He was raised in Mumbai and then moved to New York when he was fourteen years old. He studied at New York University, attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and moved to Mumbai in 1998. He wrote the screenplay for a film in the anthology New York, I Love You (2008) and co-wrote the screenplay for Mission Kashmir (2000). Presently, he teaches literary journalism at New York University. Mehta’s best-known work, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), traces his growing up in New York and Mumbai. The novel is an example of journalistic writing which shows how a narrative can be used to view a cityscape and offers a multilayered look into several aspects of class, caste, and religion that make up Mumbai. It traces stories of people who belong to various sections of society, such as the Hindu nationalist political lords, architects, merchants, and gangsters of Dongri. He details their lives on the basis of the firsthand knowledge of such people that he acquired during his stay in Mumbai. He also weaves interesting happenings in his narrative, which include how he could not get a gas connection in his apartment, his meetings and conversations with Shiv Sena members (a Hindu right-wing outfit), interviews with policemen who arrested people in the 1993 Bombay Blasts case, and snippets of his conversations with people who knew about the blasts in advance. It not only sheds light on the ways in which people deal with violence on a day-to-day basis but also the aftermath. Maximum City is part travelogue and part historical narrative which details how living in a megacity like Mumbai can be a frustrating and daunting experience. It toes the line between storytelling and reportage by adopting the narrative mode and describing events from a subjective point of view. Personal experiences of religious hatred remind the reader how it is easier to hate and be intolerant than follow the paths of love and tolerance. He likens the city to a beast that has multiple sides to it. In addition, he also talks about the perils of being a parent and bringing up children in an urban space and handling the tussle between the political self and the social self. This is a poignant book that treats the city as a dream and a reality. Mehta’s next work, This Land is our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto (2019), begins with a meditation on the fence that was erected during the Clinton administration at the border of the United States and Mexico. Mehta interviewed many people whose lives were separated by the barbed wire of the border. Their stories show how they lost the ability to empathize with each other. Picnic spots that brimmed with life turned into harsh reminders of lives that have become distant because of the immigration policies of governments. A similar but a little less dehumanizing picture is portrayed in the section where Mehta talks about the Wagah Border of India and Pakistan and the festive display of masculinity by the armed forces of the two countries in their march at sunset. Mehta delves into the reasons that make people move across countries and how the life of an immigrant like him, who moves between New York, London, Paris, and Bombay, is like living in between places. Mehta uses his journalistic attitude and rigor to address the issues of immigration, migration, and exile. Once again, his personal and public selves merge in his narration. His other important piece, Vaishnava Jana to Kone Kahiye? Reclaiming Gujarati Identity from the Haters (2021), is an insightful look into memory and belonging. Mehta claims that there are a few Gujaratis who have spoiled the image of the Gujarati which features icons like Narsim Mehta. He writes 264

Encyclopedia Entries

painfully about people’s hatred toward the Muslims of India and how oneness and humanity, which is the foundation of Vaishnavite philosophy, has been lost. He shows zero-tolerance toward the Hindu right-wing national party, the BJP, and defends the traditions of coexistence and hospitality that have been a part of his Gujarati upbringing. The book is a skillful blending of realism and idealism.

Further Reading Bamzai, Kaveree. “Suketu Mehta’s Perfect Novella for Trump’s America.” DailyO, 7 Sept. 2016, www. dailyo.in/arts/suketu-mehta-what-is-remembered-usa-nris-donald-trump-xenophobia-immigrants/ story/1/12816.html. Heinegg, Peter. “I Have Seen the Future, and It Stinks.” CrossCurrents, vol. 55, no. 1, 2005, pp. 134– 136. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24461194. Rao, Vyjayanthi. “Embracing Urbanism: The City as Archive.” New Literary History, vol. 40, no. 2, 2009, pp. 371–383. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27760262.

RITI SHARMA

MEHTA, VED PARKASH (1934–2021) Born on March 21, 1934, into a well-to-do family in Lahore (then part of British India), Ved Parkash Mehta lived most of his life in the United States. As a long-time contributor to The New Yorker, he blended autobiography and reportage to represent India from the perspective of both a native informant and an outsider. Mehta lost his sight at age three after developing cerebrospinal meningitis. His father, the physician Amalok Ram Mehta, sent five-year-old Ved to Bombay’s Dadar School for the Blind. Rather than the enlightened, educational wellspring that his father envisioned, the school operated as something of an asylum for blind street children where Mehta contracted malaria and typhoid and got very little by way of serious instruction. After 1947, Mehta traveled alone to the United States, where he attended the Little Rock School for the Blind in Arkansas. In 1956, he received his BA from Pomona College in California, followed by a second BA from Baliol College, Oxford. Mehta earned MAs from Harvard University in 1961 and Baliol College in 1962. While completing his degrees, Mehta published his first full-length work, Face to Face (1957). A personal account of his childhood in India, education in Arkansas, and university years, the book received positive reviews that praised Mehta for both his unsentimental “detachment” and self-awareness (Johnson). Walking the Indian Streets (1960), which details Mehta’s return to India after decades abroad, juxtaposes vivid descriptions of poverty and filth with a withering analysis of independent India’s political quagmires. By relaying political and sensory disgust, the book deals in what Durba Mukherjee and Sayan Chattopadhyay call a “proprioceptive crisis,” the body’s sense of discomfiture in an unfamiliar geographical and cultural space. Daddyji and Mamaji, two early volumes from Mehta’s six-part Continents of Exile series, further disclose his fraught relationship with post-1947 India. Whereas Mehta recalls his father’s ambitions to duplicate British norms, habits, and worldviews, he writes with condescension of his mother’s passive, naive, and superstitious disposition. As thinly veiled metaphors for the “old” and “new” India of the late British period, Mehta’s portraits of his parents suggest how the author’s own allegiance to Britain’s failed colonialist project informs his sense of displacement in the postpartition era. Ambivalence and tension define Mehta’s corpus. His writing is at once intimate and detached, introspective and sociological, rooted yet placeless. As a “prime example of a writer of the Indian diaspora” (Shatzky), Mehta claimed that he belonged to five cultures – those of India, 265

Encyclopedia Entries

Britain, the United States (he acquired citizenship in the 1970s), the New Yorker, and the blind community – while not quite belonging to any of them. If V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie occupy the extreme ends of diasporic subjectivity, with Naipaul going so far as to disavow nationality altogether and the perennially irreverent Rushdie laying claim to the “comma” of East, West, his 1984 short story collection (Upstone), Mehta seems to suggest another category altogether, a self-described exile who distances himself from the subcontinent yet holds fast to his Indianness when pressed. In addition to diasporic exile, Mehta frequently engaged with sight throughout his writing. “I once described someone in this way,” Mehta explains. “A player’s cigarette hung from his lower lip and threatened to fall at any moment. I knew the brand of his cigarette from his chance remark. The hanging bit I  picked up from the way he spoke.” (Mehta qtd. in Fox). While Mehta asserted that writing enabled him to retain mastery over vision, the thing that had eluded him throughout his life, John M. Slatin suggests that Mehta’s corpus, in fact, inverts the dilemma of explaining to the blind what it is like to see. That is, Mehta’s flair for visual description might “explain to someone who can see what it is like to be blind” (Slatin). His skill with colors, objects, people, and movement upends popular assumptions about sightlessness as a perceptual lack, provoking readers instead to reckon with how the visually impaired navigate a sighted world. Mehta was careful to point out, however, that although he belonged to the world of the blind, he did not wish to claim authority over it. Additionally, none of his autobiographies mention blindness, giving readers the impression that Mehta witnessed firsthand the sights he described. Mehta long enjoyed critical respect in the West. William Shawn, the New Yorker editor who hired Mehta, proclaimed in 1981 that Mehta had “established himself as one of the magazine’s most imposing figures. He writes about serious matters without solemnity, about scholarly matters [and] . . . abstruse matters without pedantry” (Shepard). Mehta received a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1982 and earned further praise for The Ledge Between Streams (1984), SoundShadows of the New World (1986), and The Stolen Light (1989). He was not, however, without his critics. In a review of Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, Leonard A. Gordon takes Mehta to task for skimming over Gandhi’s political significance in favor of his preoccupations with sex, diet, and hygiene. Mervyn Jones condemned Mehta’s Portrait of India (1970) as “boring” and “significantly out of date.” According to Pam Jablons, Mehta’s prejudices against postcolonial India “would be more palatable were they less insidiously couched” (Jablons qtd. in Shatzky). Additionally, Mehta himself was sometimes regarded as domineering and contemptuous. According to Stephen E. Koss, he “would tell you point-blank, ‘You bore me. I never want to see you again’ ” (Koss qtd. in Smith). In 1989, Jennet Conant interviewed several of Mehta’s former assistants – a cohort of young women known colloquially as the “Vedettes” – to paint a scathing portrait of Mehta as paternalistic and patronizing. Those close to him contend, nonetheless, that he mellowed after his marriage to Linn Cary in 1983. Some commentators regard Mehta as the writer most responsible for bringing modern India to American audiences (Fox). However, he might be best remembered as a writer who negotiated a double loss – that of his sight and his homeland – by returning readers to India with fresh eyes. Mehta died in 2021 of Parkinson’s disease.

Further Reading Conant, Jennet. “Slaves of The New Yorker.” Spy, Sept. 1989, pp. 104–112. Fox, Margalit. “Ved Mehta, Writer Who Illuminated India, Is Dead at 86.” The New York Times, 10 Jan. 2021. Johnson, Gerald W. “Face to Face.” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 18 Aug. 1957.

266

Encyclopedia Entries Jones, Mervyn. “Empty Canvas.” New Statesmen, 25 Sept. 1970, p. 380. Mukherjee, Durba, and Sayan Chattopadhyay. “ ‘Walking the Indian Streets’: Analysing Ved Mehta’s Memoirs of Return.” Life Writing, vol. 19, 2020, pp. 423–440. Taylor and Francis Online, https:// doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2020.1855089. Shatzky. Joel. “Ved (Parkash) Mehta.” Writers of the Indian Diaspora: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Greenwood P, 1993, pp. 199–205. Shepard, Richard F. “Ved Mehta: His Prose is ‘Airy,’ ‘Elegant,’ ‘Clear.’ ” The New York Times, 15 Jul. 1982, www.nytimes.com/1982/07/15/arts/ved-mehta-his-prose-is-airy-elegant-clear.html. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Slatin, John M. “Blindness and Self-Perception: The Autobiographies of Ved Mehta.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol. 19, no. 4, 1986, pp. 173–193. Smith, Harrison. “Ved Mehta, Whose Monumental Autobiography Explored Life in India, Dies at 86.” The Washington Post, 11 Jan. 2021. Upstone, Sara. British Asian Fiction: Twenty-First-Century Voices. Manchester University Press, 2010.

JASON SANDHAR

MENDONCA, KAVITA EZEKIEL (1953–) Born to the postcolonial poet Nissim Ezekiel and Daisy Ezekiel, Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca is a contemporary, Canadian Indian woman poet, author, translator, and educationist who was raised in a Bene Israel Jewish family in Bombay. She was educated at Queen Mary School, Bombay, now known as Mumbai, where she received her BA in English and French at St Xavier college. She studied MA in English and American literature from the University of Bombay and pursued a master’s degree in education and PhD from Oxford Brookes University, England. Ezekiel has served as a language instructor and teacher in Indian colleges and in American International schools and has taught English, French, and Spanish in India and in transatlantic countries. For sixteen years, she taught at the prestigious Woodstock International School in Mussoorie, North India, where she disseminated creative ideas and principles through courses such as creative writing, poetry, and advanced placement English. During her teaching career, which spans over four decades, she has piloted sessions on poetry writing, mentoring the students and teachers about the tenets and principles of poetry as well as its praxis, and has ushered teaching for the Tibetan School teachers in Mussoorie, India. Her first publication, Family Sunday and Other Poems, appeared in 1989 and was reprinted in 1990. This collection of short thirty-six poems bears witness to the poet’s life lived in closed quarters, breathing in the rigmarole of everyday routine with acute emotive observations. The poems take the reader through many phases of the poet’s life, traversing nostalgically from her Jewish past to the memories of assembling and reuniting with family members as part of the Sunday ritual. The moderate irony that permeates her poems reminds the readers of their uncanny affinity with the poems of to her poet-father, with the filial affection warmly resurrected in a number of poems dedicated to him. The mild satire in the poems evinces a clairvoyant connection to her father’s iconic poetic maturity. Nissim Ezekiel’s death due to Alzheimer’s disease finds resonance in her poems on loss. The Light of Sabbath is a collection of twenty-eight poems that explore the metaphysical essence of being, traced through the poet’s Jewish heritage, reflected in poetic descriptions of places, people, and possessions. Visits to the synagogue, observing Sabbath, symbolic rituals of lighting candles, hymns, prayers and psalms, and other customs and traditions are invoked in a lyrical expression that is devoid of any artifice of language. The poems contain allusions to the Bible and New Testament, in which the substance of light becomes a central thrust around which the poet skillfully weaves the narratives of personal experience with the transcendental and philosophical one. Illumination becomes the point of revelation, an utmost divine prognostic. Enlightenment of the divine attribution leads to the 267

Encyclopedia Entries

realization of the sacred consciousness. Apart from the sacredness of light, the poems on the memories of India with multilingual tonality, enrich her community stance, dispensing a layered lingual resonance to experience life in its vagaries streaming through sparse words. Being a diasporic poet, whose longing vacillates between the home country and the new nation, digging her roots and rummaging the labels, the theme of the search for identity essentially shapes her oeuvre. Mendonca has read her poems for All India Radio in Mumbai. Her poems have been anthologized and also published on online poetry sites like Destiny Poets, UK, and Spillwords, and she was featured on the World Literature Blog by Ampat Koshy. She is a member of the Significant League of poets and currently resides in Alberta Canada, where her community is known as “Reformed Jews.”

Further Reading Mendonca, Kavita Ezekiel. “Interview with Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca.” Conducted by Basudhara Roy and Jaydeep Sarangi. Writers in Conversation, vol. 7, no. 2, Aug. 2020. Writers in Conversation, https:// doi.org/10.22356/wic.v7i2.76. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. ———. Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca Poetry, https://kavitaezekielpoetry.com/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023.

BHAWNA VIJ ARORA

MENEZES, ARMANDO (1902–1983) Armando Menezes was born on May  11, 1902, to Luis Manuel de Menezes and Mrs. Arminda Correia Lobo in San Mathias, IIhas, Goa, where he had his early education in a Portuguese Liceu and was later transferred to Arpora School where he completed his basic English studies. He passed his matriculation from the University of Bombay and earned the Sir Cowasjee Jehangir Latin scholarship. Menezes completed his university education at St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, which he joined in 1920. He scored first class first in his BA examination in 1924, which won him the Duke of Edinburg fellowship and a gold medal, and got his MA in 1928, which won him the Chancellor’s Medal for standing first in the arts. He served as a professor of English in several colleges of Bombay. In addition to being a professor, he was also a broadcaster, freedom fighter, and an official in the government of India. Menezes was also a poet and a prolific writer. His contribution to poetry consists of a mock epic The Fund (1933), a social satire in verse The Emigrant (1933), and several collections of poems: Chords and Discords (1936), Chaos and the Dancing Star (1940), The Ancestral Face (1951), Songs from the Saranas and other poems (1971), and Selected Poems (1969), consisting mostly of lyrics chosen from the earlier volumes. On the eve of India’s independence, he published the Soul of the People and other Poems (1947). According to K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, there was hardly any literary criticism in the 1940s and 1950s when Menezes and his contemporaries started writing literary pieces. The first critical writing of Menezes was his appreciation of the Indo-Portuguese and Indian English poetry in the essay “A Peep at Our Parnassus,” which was published in The Goan World. In 1929, Menezes wrote his treatise on the Goan economist, political thinker, and novelist Francisco Luis Gomes, entitled Francisco Luis Gomes: The Novelist. Here we have an exposition of the liberal viewpoint on monasticism, the liberal theory of the relations that ought to exist between the Church and State, and the liberal protest against slavery and slave trade. Menezes gave literary talks on A.I.R, Dharwad, for several years. These were compiled and published later in two volumes, Lighter than Air (1959) and Airy Nothing (1977); they deal

268

Encyclopedia Entries

with literary forms, principles of literary criticism, literary theories, and individual writers. He also wrote essays for Bombay magazines like The Goan World, The Anglo Lusitano, and The Examiner in the forties and the Goan magazine Goa Today. They deal with a variety of themes related to education, religion, current affairs, and famous people, such as Tagore, Basavanna: The Mystic Poet, Mahatma Gandhi, J.F. Kennedy, and some known Goan personalities. Menezes also wrote on several issues, such as on plagiarism, literature and psychoanalysis, literary utopias, education and democracy, the generation gap, student discipline, old age, the Second Sex, the Mother Tongue, and several other topics of vital interest. He died at the age of eighty in Mumbai, in 1983.

Further Reading Alphonso-Karkala, John B. “Indo-English Literature in the Nineteenth Century.” Literary Half-Yearly. U of Mysore, 1970. Bhasker, W. W. S. “Armando Menezes the Writer.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 18, no. 1, 1983, pp. 71–81. D’Lima, Edward Joachim. Creative and Critical Writings of Armando Menezes. Goa University, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 2003, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/35624. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Naik, Madhukar K., editor. Aspects of Indian Writing in English: Essays in Honour of Professor K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar. Macmillan, 1979. ———. A History of Indian English Literature. Sahitya Akademi, 1982. Naikar, Basavaraj. “Armando Menezes.” The Cradle of My Dreams: Selected Writings of Armando Menezes (1902–1983).” World Literature Today, vol. 77, no. 2, 2003, pp. 92–94.

MOIN ASHRAF AKHOON

MENON, RITU (1949–) Ritu Menon was born in India on December 25, 1949, into a family of public servants and teachers. She received her MA in 1969 from Vassar College, New York. A well-known figure in the academic world, Menon has been actively involved in the South Asian women’s movement for more than two decades. With Urvashi Butalia, she is a co-founder of Kali for Women, the first feminist press in India, and founder of Women Unlimited, an associate of Kali for Women. In 2011, Menon and Butalia were joint recipients of the Padma Shri award. Menon co-authored the critically acclaimed book Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. She is the editor of the book No Woman’s Land: Women from Pakistan, India & Bangladesh Write about the Partition of India. She has also co-authored two books with Zoya Hasan: Educating Muslim Girls: A Companion of Five Indian Cities and Unequal Citizens: A Study of Muslim Women in India. She is also the co-editor of In a Minority: Essays on Muslim Women in India (2005) and Just Between Us: Women Speak About their Writing and Storylines: Conversations with Women Writers. Menon’s 2007 book, From Mathura to Manorama: Resisting Violence Against Women in India, is co-authored with Kalpana Kannabiran. Menon and Butalia together produced a significant number of feminist books and provided a firm foundation for gender and women’s studies in India. These publications deeply engaged with the socio-political issues and considered critical questions that revolved around religion and ethnicity, conflict and peace. Menon is a prolific writer with a left-wing inclination, and her works focus on violence against women, examining the role of religion in the patriarchal set up and gender divide. Borders and Boundaries is a groundbreaking work on partition historiography and provides a firsthand account of women who suffered unimaginable violence during the period. In Unequal Citizens: A  Study of Muslim Women in India, Menon engages with

269

Encyclopedia Entries

discourse on gender and Islam. She dwells on issues pertaining to education, work, marriage, domestic abuse, mobility, autonomy, and political participation of women. The book highlights the disparities between Hindu and Muslim women with respect to opportunities and cases of discrimination within and between communities. No Woman’s Land brings together celebrated women writers like Ismat Chughtai to share their experiences and perspectives on the partition and how they locate the historical moment that impacted the identities and frameworks of societies even after fifty years of independence. In The Diversity of Muslim Women’s Lives in India, co-authored with Zoya Hasan, Menon examines the lives of Muslim women not only from the perspective of religious doctrine, but also “at the intersections of class, religion, and gender.” With a focus on contemporary issues like legal matters, political dynamics, and educational concerns, this book is an invaluable addition to the lives of doubly marginalized Muslim women. Menon’s latest work, “Address Book: A Publishing Memoir in the time of Covid” (2021) is a reflection on her experiences as a feminist publisher. In an interview to First Post (July 13, 2021), she asserts: “Feminist publishing is a development activity. It is not just about producing books.” Her publishing journey truly cobbles an archive of stories of courage, commitment, and long-term relationships of care and solidarity with women across borders. Committed to the cause, she brings forth the challenges of South Asian women and the cross-border relationships of empathy and mutual respect. Currently, Menon heads another publishing house, Women Unlimited, and also works as a founding member of Women’s WORLD, which is an international body dedicated to free-speech network of writers across the globe working on gender-based censorship. The persistent and path-breaking effort of feminist publishers like Menon have given voice to a host of women writers and created a necessary space for a readership that is more supportive and receptive of female writers. Such active engagement with readers, writers, and the underlying socio-cultural issues give us hope that women writers will make themselves more visible and claim their rightful share in the literary world.

Further Reading Butalia, Urvashi, and Ritu Menon, editors. In Other Words: New Writing by Indian Women. Kali for Women, 1995. Hasan, Zoya, and Ritu Menon. Unequal Citizens: A Study of Muslim Women in India. Oxford UP, 2011. Menon, Ritu, and Kamla Bhasin. Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. Women Unlimited, 2011.

PRACHI PRIYANKA

MERCHANT, HOSHANG (1947–) Hoshang Dinshaw Merchant was born on November  5, 1947, to a Zoroastrian business family in Bombay, India. He was educated at St. Xavier’s Boys’ Academy, Bombay, from where he completed his SSC in 1964. He received a BA with a major in English and a minor in the culture of India from St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, in 1968, and an MA from Occidental College, Los Angeles, US, in 1969. At Purdue University, US, he specialized in Renaissance and Modernism, and while there, his dissertation on Anaïs Nin, later published as In-discretions: Anaïs Nin (1990), earned him a PhD in 1984. From 1987, he taught at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad and superannuated as a professor. Merchant has published thirty books, including twenty-one books of poetry, starting with his first book Stone to Fruit (1989) to his latest Paradise Isn’t Artificial (2021). His poems, rich

270

Encyclopedia Entries

with literary references from both the West and the East, weave stories that not only question the status quo of sexual propriety but also celebrate the sensuality of human desires in general and queer bodies and minds in particular. He is also the editor of Yaraana: Gay Writing from India (1999) which, as the first anthology focusing on gay and queer writings from India and South Asia, has gained iconic status in queer literature and literary studies in India. Merchant’s critical research includes books such as Forbidden Sex, Forbidden Texts: New India’s Gay Poets (2008), in which he provides insightful and intimate commentaries on varied aspects and lived experiences of queerness in India, highlighting the many ways in which nonnormative sexualities in India need to be considered through a lens that is radically different from the Western constructs. The book includes translations and discussions of several queer literary texts in Indian languages, including writing by Namdeo Dhasal, Sultan Padamsee, R. Raj Rao, Vikram Seth, Suniti Namjoshi, etc. In his autobiographical text, The Man Who Would be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions (2011), Merchant depicts, through a poetic narrative, his experiences and travels between 1976 and 1982, starting from India to the West in the United States and Germany, then to the Middle East in Tehran, Palestine, Jerusalem, and back to India. It is an intimate narrative about the personal experiences of an open and proud homosexual in India and abroad. His other key publications include Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant (2016), All My Masters: An East-West Encounter – Revelations from the Queen’s Closet (2019), and Rebel Angel: Collected Prose of Hoshang Merchant. Though not without controversies, Merchant’s writings have received much attention and praise as contemporary queer literature in English from India. Specifically, in/through his poetry, Merchant showcases a “queerious” case of the spiritual gay man and how spirituality can be reclaimed to celebrate non-normative sexuality, especially making use of the Sufi tradition and style, advocating intimate connections among poetry, spirituality, and sexuality. As one of the earliest and most prominent queer writers of same-sex issues and non-normative sexuality in India, Merchant is an unmissable and important figure in Indian literature in English.

Further Reading Ansari, Mohd Sajid. “Representation of Gay Love in the Poems of Hoshang Merchant and Shaleen Rakesh.” International Journal of Society and Humanities, vol. 10, no. 1, 2017, pp. 102–111. Arora, Sudhir K. “The Poetry of Hoshang Merchant and Gopikrishnan Kottoor.” Renaissance of Nativity: Contemporary Indian Literature in English, edited by Binod Mishra and Narinder K. Sharma. Adhyayan Publishers and Distributors, 2019, pp. 75–86.

ANIL PRADHAN

MISHRA, JAISHREE (1961–) Jaishree Mishra was born in New Delhi in 1961. Her father was an officer in the Indian Air Force and her mother was a schoolteacher. Mishra’s childhood days were predominantly juggled among the cities of New Delhi, Bangalore, and Kerala. She completed her master’s degree in English literature from Kerala University. Besides possessing two graduate diplomas from the University of London on special education and broadcast journalism, Mishra was offered a scholarship by the Charles Wallace for India Trust to finish her course on Special Education. She has worked as a local radio journalist for the BBC, presented columns for radio programs and also worked as a film classifier at the British Board of Film Classification in London, England. Mishra moved to Kerala to take care of her mother and build a small house on the Veli beach in Trivandrum. Her inspiration to write comes from her uncle, Thakazhi Sivasankaran Pillai, a

271

Encyclopedia Entries

prominent Malayalam writer and Jnanpith Awardee. She has written eight novels and a nonfiction work. Mishra’s literary career began with the publication of her semi-autobiographical novel, Ancient Promises, in 2000. The narrative focuses on the life and choices of the protagonist, Janaki. Starting from Janu’s vacation in Kerala to her divorce from her husband Suresh Marrar, the novel overlaps with the life of the author. Janaki walks out of a relationship for her parents’ sake and has an arranged marriage with Suresh Marrar. Having grown up with Malayali parents in Delhi, Janaki finds it challenging to cope with her marital home’s culture and tradition. Irrespective of Janu’s efforts to bond with them, her marital family snatches her daughter, Riya, when she leaves her home for her scholarship program. Thus, the main thrust of the novel is to deal with the notions of women’s autonomy and agency. Mishra’s second novel, Accidents Like Love, is based on the comedy of manners genre, on the tales of relationships, love, and marriage. The patriarchal way of approaching marriages as a kind of business transaction is critiqued through the families of Sachdevs, Menons, and Singhs. Similarly, in Afterwards, she explores the intricacies of dysfunctional families and a woman’s quest for identity. The suspicious attitude of Govind forces his wife, Maya to walk out of their marital bond. She flees with her daughter Anjali and her neighbor Rahul to England. The murky tale of love and separation deals with bereavements in a woman’s life. In Rani, Mishra narrates a fictional biography of Rani Lakshmi Bai, alias Manikarnika. Her marriage to the king of Peshwa, Gangadhar Rao, enables her to learn about the affairs of the state. Mishra captures Rani’s dilemmas and the struggles which she faced as a queen, following the death of her husband, Gangadhar. The book raised controversies and was accused of hurting the sentiments of the people in Uttar Pradesh. It was banned by the government of the state as it referred to a fictional affair of Laxmibai with a British officer Robert Ellis. The affective quality of secrets of the past in the present is a common thread binding three of Mishra’s novels: In Secret and Lies, Secret and Sins, and A Scandalous Secret. While Secret and Lies deals with female friendship and school days’ secret, Secret and Sins explores the themes of love and adultery. A Scandalous Secret narrates a complex tale of parenthood, family, and roots. Mishra’s recent novel, A Love Story for My Sister, employs a binary narrative of contemporary and historical period and deals with the themes of violence and hope. In her autobiographical memoir, A House for Mr Mishra, she documents the two years she spent with her husband while they were building a studio in Kerala. While most of Mishra’s books have been published by Penguin and Harper Collins, her edited anthology published by Zubaan was a fundraiser campaign for Save the Children India. Mishra’s successful debut novel, Ancient Promises, is now a prescribed text in several universities.

Further Reading Anitha, Chavva S. Man-Woman Relationship in Jaishree Misra’s Novels: A Study. Jawaharlal Nehru Technological U, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/286582. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Misra, Jaishree, editor. Of Mothers and Others: Stories, Essays, Poems. Zubaan, 2013. Puree, Shalini. Social Dynamics and Emerging Trends in the Institution of Marriage: A Study of Jaishree Misra’s Select Novels. Himachal Pradesh U, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 2017, http://hdl.handle. net/10603/365277. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Rema Devi, S. Establishing Spaces the Woman Psyche in the Novels of Jaishree Misra. Manonmaniam Sundaranar U, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 2015, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/95796. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

S. KEERTHANA

272

Encyclopedia Entries

MISHRA, PANKAJ (1969–) Pankaj Mishra was born in the town of Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh. His father worked in Indian Railways. He passed his BA from Allahabad University and MA in English literature from JNU, New Delhi. Aiming to become a writer, Mishra chose a life of assiduous reading and writing from a rented cottage at Mashobra, near Shimla, where he first went in 1992. He still visits Mashobra almost yearly from his London home where he lives with his British wife and daughter. He has published two novels, four books of nonfiction, and hundreds of essays. He has also edited an anthology, India in Mind (2005), which has writings on India from writers, such as Ginsberg, Kipling, Levi-Srauss, and Paz. In 1995, Mishra published Butter Chicken in Ludhiana wherein he recounts his impressions of people and places in some twenty small towns across India. The book, inspired by an American sociologist, tries to capture churnings in small towns of the country after economic liberalisation in early nineties. The Romantics (1999), Mishra’s first novel, is about pensive, studious, and observant Samar’s coming of age in Benares. Samar lives in a rented room in the house of an elderly Brahmin, who teaches music to Western tourists with spiritual leanings, and through them Samar meets Catherine and falls in love with her, remaining ever over-conscious of the chasm in Catherine’s world and his own. The novel won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for debut fiction. An End to Suffering: Buddha in the World (2004) is a mixture of travelogue, autobiography, history, and philosophy, in which the central theme is the increasing relevance of Buddhist insights to navigate a world exploded by choices and the hope or despair of their fulfillment. Mishra’s preferred literary form of engagement with the world is a longform literary essay, which constitutes the best of his work. He began by writing book reviews and then graduated to social and literary criticism. His essays continue to appear in newspapers, journals, and magazines, such as The New York Times, Financial Times, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, New Yorker, Bloomberg, Caravan, Times of India, and The Hindu, among others. These essays usually come out of his journeys to places and meetings with people and are based on his vast and multidisciplinary readings. Some of them figure in collections, such as Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and Its Neighbours (2013), and Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire (2020). The major theme threaded through these essays is how the non-Western societies are gradually and painfully coming out of influence of their erstwhile colonial masters with a degree of self-confidence and how these processes are fraught with danger and moral chaos. From the vantage point afforded by Western media outlets, Mishra often punctures the settled attitudes of the elites of all political ideologies, who push their societies into great depredations. The still unfolding impact of Western imperialism on subjugated societies and how variedly they countered, or failed to counter, is assessed in his non-specialist, multiple award-winning history From Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and Remaking of Asia (2012). It argues through the intellectual biographies of three Asians, Jamal al-Din Al-Afghani (1838– 1897), Liang Qichao (1873–1929), and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), how empire’s long shadow explains a turn toward religion or a mistrust of West and its rhetoric. In Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017) Mishra connects inter-continental history to provide reasons for a collective outrage for existing political establishments, liberal or centrist, for paving way for extremist and conservative political parties across the world. Run and Hide (2022) is the second novel by Mishra after more than two decades. It traces the lives of three IIT graduates, who rose from very humble origins to succeed spectacularly and yet failed to achieve fulfillment because the demands of success caused irreparable damage 273

Encyclopedia Entries

to their inner beings. It is a panoramic and ruminative picture of contemporary India wherein the last resort of the successful, after success has revealed its moral seediness, is to run and hide. Though he is an elected member of the Royal Society of Literature, Mishra’s oeuvre has an uneasy relationship with literature and literary establishment, especially in India. This tangential relationship attests to Mishra’s idea of literature as something greater than, as he himself once put it, “a self-contained realm of elegant consumption.”

Further Reading Sabin, Margery. “Epilogue: Pankaj Mishra and Cosmopolitan Postcolonialism.” Dissenters and Mavericks: Writings about India in English, 1765–2000. Oxford UP, 2002, pp. 175–191.

YASH PAL

MISTRY, CYRUS (1956–) Cyrus Mistry is a journalist, playwright, and novelist. He has a deep and abiding interest in Western classical music, but as a college student, developed an interest in writing. He wrote for Debonair magazine as a part-time journalist and has been a freelance journalist for twenty-five years. His short story, “Percy” was made into a Gujarati film for which he wrote the screenplay and dialogue in 1989. It won the National Award for the Best Gujarati Film in 1989. He wrote Doongaji House, his first play, in 1978, which won the Sultan Padamsee Award in the same year. The play dramatizes the struggle of an old and lonely Parsi couple as they are pushed out of the crumbling housing block they live in while their son, who is based in Canada, refuses to help them. Parsi history – tracing the rise and apparent decline of the community – is encapsulated succinctly, while many comments on the insularity and rigidity of the community are made. The Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer (2012) is one of Mistry’s most highly regarded works. It won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2014 and the Sahitya Akademi Award for English in 2015. Mistry brings to the surface a little-known facet of the Parsi community – the Kandhias, or the corpse bearers – who are socially ostracized because of their role in dealing with the dead. The story revolves around Phiroze Elchidana whose narrative focuses on the plight of this downtrodden and outcaste community. He is the son of a priest of the fire temple – Framroze – who cannot forgive him till the end for loving and marrying Sepideh (whose mother is Phiroze’s aunt). Framroze’s attempt to sanctify his image is based on ritual purity and gradually unravels as we learn of his actions in the past and see his behavior in the present. The irreconcilable gulf between father and son remains a testimony to the harsh consequences of calibrating life, emotions, and human relationships on a scale of moral rectitude. Most stories in Passion Flower: Seven Stories of Derangement (2014) have been previously published, though there are two new stories here. In this collection, characters, emotions, feelings, and suggestions that generally lie hidden are boldly enunciated. Whether it be a mother’s disgust for her newborn, Fardoon’s loneliness, or Bokha’s self-deprecating humor, each story unravels a darker history which has affected the lives and loves of the characters in irrevocable ways. Highly-strung emotions, traumatic memories, and encounters with the spectral world of ghosts, spirits, and seances are common features. Whether it be the raid on Jacinta’s shop which pushes her into poverty, or the loss of Katie which traps Fardoon and his wife into an inexorable circle of grief, or the intense religiosity of Percy’s mother which suffocates him, characters often find themselves in circumstances for which they are not directly responsible. Regret, anger, murder, and poverty are addressed as they appear across the social spectrum. The family, 274

Encyclopedia Entries

in these stories, does not always nurture but can become toxic when arrogant self-love alone predominates. Many reviewers have seen the collection as uneven and verbose. What should be highlighted, however, is the complex web of emotions and affections and the perspicacious survey of social and mental conditions that Mistry manages to feature in this collection of stories. The Prospect of Miracles (2019) gives us the perspective of a woman in a societal setting that normalizes the exploitation of women. Mary is the wife of Pastor Pius Philipose – and it is her narratorial voice through which the action of the novel is focalized. Pastor’s death and funeral compel this narrative of memory to move forward. As Mary settles into widowhood, she reminisces about her hasty and impulsive marriage to Pius who was thirteen years older than her. The novel documents the experience of her marriage to Pius, in which she was constantly gaslighted, cheated, and made to feel inferior. The aura of holiness, magnanimity, and spirituality which Philipose assiduously cultivated for himself is shattered through his wife’s (counter) narrative of his scheming, manipulative and self-centered machinations. Their son, Mark, drops out of school and stays with his friend in Delhi. He loses his friend who is killed by the police in what appears to be a staged killing. He himself is jailed for his Naxalite sympathies, all of which are completely antithetical to Pius’s teachings. By the end of the narrative, Mary has a nervous breakdown and starts imagining that she is the “last prophet.” She ends up in a mental institution where her son visits her. The novel’s ingenuity lies in its treatment of Mary as the narrator but also in its desacralizing religion, which appears hollow in content, commercial in its aims, and utterly devoid of the prospect of miracles.

Further Reading Bharucha, Nilufer. “Forging Identities, Initiating Reforms: The Parsi Voice in Colonial India.” South Asian Review, vol. 25, no. 1, Nov. 2004, pp. 177–199. ———. “Writing from the Margins: Parsi Literature in Postcolonial India.” Parsis: The Next Hundred Years, edited by Nawaz Mody. Allied Publishers, 2005, pp. 820–833. Singh, Rashna B. “Traversing Diacritical Space: Negotiating and Narrating Parsi Nationness.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 43, no. 2, 2008, pp. 29–47.

VAIBHAV IYPE PAREL

MISTRY, ROHINTON (1952–) Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay on July 3, 1952, to a Parsi family. He attended the Jesuit-run St. Xavier High School and received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics from St. Xavier’s College, University of Bombay, in 1974. In July 1975, Mistry migrated to Toronto, where he joined his future wife, Freny Elavia, who had moved to Canada the previous year. Mistry worked as a clerk at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce but began studying English and philosophy part-time at the University of Toronto in 1978, where he completed his second bachelor’s degree in 1982. He started writing short stories after a few years in Canada. When he won two Hart House literary prizes for stories, which were published in the Hart House Review, and Canadian Fiction Magazine’s annual Contributor’s Prize in 1985, he quit his job in the bank and started writing full-time. He continues to live in Canada. Mistry has set all his stories in India, except for one short story, “Swimming Lessons,” whose narrator is based in Toronto, and the Parsi community has been central in all his writing. Mistry’s first published book was a collection of eleven short stories titled Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), published in the United States as Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag (1989). The intersecting stories focus on the lives of the residents of Firozsha Baag, an apartment building in Bombay housing mainly Parsis. 275

Encyclopedia Entries

Mistry’s first novel, Such a Long Journey (1991), is set in 1971, during the Bangladesh War of Liberation and the subsequent Indo-Pakistani War, which cast a shadow on the lives of the protagonists, even though they are not directly involved. The events mainly take place in Bombay as the story focuses on the middle-aged Parsi man, Gustad Noble, and his family – wife Dilnavaz, sons Sohrab and Darius and daughter Roshan. A central storyline of the novel is based on the infamous Nagarwala case. A Parsi man, Captain Rustom Sohrab Nagarwala, impersonating on the phone the voice of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, embezzled six million rupees from the State Bank of India in May 1971. Nagarwala was arrested and imprisoned but Indira Gandhi’s role in the events remained a mystery and cause for much speculation. This mystery and Indira Gandhi’s abuse of power are examined in Such a Long Journey. Gustad becomes involved in this scam through his friend and former neighbor Major Jimmy Bilimoria, the novel’s equivalent to Nagarwala. When Gustad visits his imprisoned friend in Delhi, the unwell and almost delirious Jimmy discloses Indira Gandhi’s involvement in the case. The Bilimoria case becomes a central metaphor for government corruption and crimes. The other narrative strands of Such a Long Journey revolve around the body, bodily functions, and (ill) health of the residents of the residential compound, the Khodadad building, especially on the mysterious illness of Gustad’s young daughter Roshan and a disabled man, Tehmul, living alone in his flat. When medicine does not seem to do the trick, Dilnavaz and her neighbor Miss Kutpitia, attempt to cure Roshan by casting spells, involving the simpleminded Tehmul as a substitute sufferer. The attempt to control the uncontrollable body ends in tragedy. Mistry’s second novel, A Fine Balance (1995), continues the examination of the political atmosphere and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s rule in India in the 1970s. A Fine Balance is for the most part set in a city by the sea (Bombay) in the time of the Emergency (1975–77). Having concentrated on the Parsi community in his previous writing, Mistry made a conscious decision to include central characters from other communities and geographical settings, wanting to capture some of the social reality of Indian villages. In addition to two Parsi characters, the middle-aged widow Dina Dalal and Maneck Kohlah, a university student, the main protagonists of A Fine Balance include two Dalit characters, Ishvar and Omprakash Narayan, who work under Dina’s supervision as tailors. After factory-made garments flood the market of the small town, Ishvar and Omprakash move to Mumbai, where they face many hardships and emergency measures targeted at the poor in the slums and streets of the city. The tailors’ final downfall is effected by a combination of caste oppression and government-imposed sterilization quotas during the Emergency. As in Such a Long Journey, bodies, bodily processes, illness, and disabilities have a central place in the narrative alongside the examination of government oppression and emergency excesses. Family Matters (2002), Mistry’s third novel, features a Parsi family living in Bombay in the mid-1990s. The seventy-nine-year-old Parsi widower, Nariman Vakeel, beset by Parkinson’s disease, breaks his ankle and needs physical care. His two middle-aged stepchildren, Coomy and Jal, with whom he has lived, are unwilling to take care of him, and Nariman is forced to move in with his daughter Roxana. Roxana shares her small apartment with her husband, Yezad, and their two young sons. Nariman’s need for more care and his taking up residence at Roxana’s changes the lives of the three generations. Family Matters, as the title implies, is a domestic drama filled with a range of emotions, from sibling rivalry and jealousy to compassion and lost love. As in Mistry’s two earlier novels, the body as well as (Mumbai) politics, especially Hindu nationalism, and Shiv Sena, are also central to the plot. Mistry’s novella, The Scream (2008), follows in the direction set by Family Matters. The Scream is narrated by an old man in a Bombay apartment, raving and ranting about the predicament of old age. 276

Encyclopedia Entries

Although some commentators have criticized Mistry’s novels for being stuck in the past as they are largely set in the Bombay of Mistry’s childhood and youth, all his works have been critically well received. All three of his novels have been short-listed for the Booker Prize. Furthermore, Such a Long Journey won the Governor General’s Award of Canada and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; A Fine Balance won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; and Family Matters won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the Canadian Authors Association Fiction Award.

Further Reading Bhautoo-Dewnarain, Nandini. Rohinton Mistry: An Introduction. Foundation Books, 2007. Ettensohn, Derek.” Rohinton Mistry’s Vulnerable Aesthetic: Health, Illness, and the Body in Such a Long Journey.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 67, no. 3, 2021, pp. 568–588. Herbert, Caroline. “ ‘Dishonourably Postnational’? The Politics of Migrancy and Cosmopolitanism in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance.” Journal of Commonwealth literature, vol. 43, no. 2, 2008, pp. 11–28. McNamara, Roger. “Developing ‘A Fine Balance’: Secularism, Religion, and Minority Politics in Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2017, pp. 54–70. Morey, Peter. Rohinton Mistry. Manchester UP, 2004.

RAITA MERIVIRTA

MOHANTY, NIRANJAN (1953–2008) Poet, critic, and academician, Niranjan Mohanty was born and brought up in Calcutta. In 1963, pecuniary troubles forced his family to move to Basudevpur, Odisha. He passed HSC from A.B. High School in 1968; graduated with honors in English from Fakir Mohan College, Balasore in 1972; did his master’s degree from Ravenshaw College, Cuttack, in 1974; and obtained his PhD from Utkal University in 1992. He taught first at St. Mary Convent School, Barbil, and then at Science College, Aska, in 1975. He moved to Berhampur University as Reader in 1988 and to Visva-Bharati as Professor in 1999. On his death, he was survived by his wife, Jayanti Mohanty, a daughter, and a son. Mohanty’s first poem, “Honey Child,” was published in the North Hostel Magazine of Fakir Mohan College. His poetic excellence is best manifested in his eight poetic volumes, namely Silencing the Words (1977), Oh, This Bloody Game! (1988), Prayers to Lord Jagannatha (1994), On Touching You and Other Poems (1999), Life Lines (1999), Krishna (2003), Tiger and Other Poems (2008), and A House of Rains (2008). A prolific translator, Mohanty’s works include an Odia translation of Jibanananda Das’s selected poems: Nirjhar (2006) and English translations of Sangram Jena’s poems: Poems of Passion (2008). Silencing the Words contains fourteen poems that are consciously literary. Important poems from this collection are “Wilderness,” a dramatic monologue; “Home,” a family poem; and “Unique Moments,” a memory poem. Oh, This Bloody Game contains fifty-two poems that testify to Mohanty’s social awareness and environmental concerns. Notable poems like “Fate,” “Tiger,” “Rains in Calcutta,” “Certain Madness,” and “Grass” are about communal clashes, natural disasters, murder, and rape. Prayers to Lord Jagannatha is a substantial poem of prayer running to 168 pages. Transcending its devotional nature, the poem encompasses myths, legends, folklore, and contemporary reality. On Touching You and Other Poems consists of forty poems that deal with both self and society with equal aplomb. Here, Mohanty utilizes the trope of “touching” to signify both physical contact and mental exercise. Poems like “Hunger II,” “Bhubaneswar,” “Pain,” and “Towards Nowhere” dwell upon issues like mortality, moral decline, disillusionment with the nation, and local customs. Life Lines comprises forty-four 277

Encyclopedia Entries

poems, eloquent with respect for some unsung commoners (“Bhowmik da,” “Bishnu Das,” “Birendra babu,” “Kurup bhai,” etc.) and little remembered relatives (“Ritual,” “An Encounter with Death,” etc.). His concern for the Bhopal gas tragedy, the rapid effects of deforestation, and drought in Kalahandi may be discerned in “When We Meet,” “A Subtle Difference” and “The World.” However, an optimistic note runs through “All That Happens in a Late November.” Another long poem in the Bhakti tradition is Krishna, in which Mohanty presents the two religio-mythical figures of Radha and Krishna as human figures. The metaphors and paradoxes and an amalgamation of myth and history lend a positive force to the poem. Tiger and Other Poems has ninety poetic pieces. Poems like “Tiger, Once Again” and “There is no Tiger” deploy the image of the tiger to metaphorize Mohanty’s responses to sex, hunger, vengeance, and power. The poet also presents a panoramic view of the Odishan landscape in “The Best Sights,” and “The Rain Falling.” The eighty-seven poems of A House of Rains are nostalgic in tone and exquisite in poetic craftsmanship. People and places, cultures, and traditions, as well as a quest for self-realization, come alive in poems like “History,” “The Unknowable,” and “Dream, once Again.” Among his admirers, R.K. Singh extols Mohanty’s religious fervor; Binod Mishra gives a synoptic view of his poetry; Himansu S. Mohapatra praises the poet’s postcolonial agency in his bold appropriation of the colonizers’ language and poetic forms; Sudhir K. Arora foregrounds Mohanty’s myriad-minded poetic range, and Jaydeep Sarangi highlights Mohanty’s rootedness in the Odishan landscape and Indian traditions. However, Niranjan Mohanty is yet to receive the critical attention that he so richly deserves.

Further Reading Arora, Sudhir K. Niranjan Mohanty: The Man and His Poetry. Prakash Book Depot, 2011. Mishra, Binod, and Sudhir K. Arora, editors. Festivals of Fire: A Study of the Poetry of Niranjan Mohanty. Adhyayan Publishers and Distributors, 2010. Sarangi, Jaydeep, editor. A Great Orissan Pilgrim: A Study of Niranjan Mohanty’s Works. Adhyayan Publishers and Distributors, 2010. Singh, R. K. “Niranjan Mohanty: A Poet of the ‘Bhakti’ Cult.” A Great Orissan Pilgrim: A Study of Niranjan Mohanty’s Works, edited by Jaydeep Sarangi. Sarup Book Publishers, 2009, pp. 107–114.

AMIT BHATTACHARYA

MORAES, DOM (1938–2004) Dom Moraes (Dominic Francis Moraes) was born on July 19, 1938, in a Goan family which had settled in Bombay. He was born to Frank Moraes, who was a prominent journalist, and Betty. He completed his schooling at St. Mary’s School, Bombay, traveled across various countries in South Asia and South-East Asia with his father, and published his first book on cricket when he was thirteen. At the age of sixteen, he was enrolled in Jesus College at Oxford and made friends with a group of painters and poets in London, including W.H. Auden and Francis Bacon (the Irish-born British painter). His literary greatness was recognized in the 1950s literary circles in London and his fame as a young writer reached its zenith in Britain when he won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize instituted for “imaginative literature.” After finishing his BA at Oxford, he decided to become a writer. He had been leading a bohemian lifestyle in the company of poets in London for a while and by the end of his studies at Oxford, he began to feel the pull of his family roots. So, he returned to India in the late 1970s and then began paying attention to poetry. 278

Encyclopedia Entries

Moraes worked as a consultant for the United Nations from 1973 to 1976. Earlier, he worked as the editor of many literary magazines and directed TV documentaries and reported news from various scenes of political conflict. He was the first to interview the Dalai Lama after he fled to India from Tibet in 1959. He also translated poems from Hebrew into English during a one-year stay in Israel. He has translated many celebrated Israeli authors including Yehuda Amichai. The anthology titled as A Chance Beyond Bombs: An Anthology of Modern Hebrew Peace Poems is an important outcome of such translation. After a series of momentous life events, he finally succumbed to cancer in 2004. Moraes has nearly thirty books to his credit, which include poetry and nonfictional writings like essays and autobiographies. Though he started writing poems at the young age of twelve, his first major collection of poems titled A Beginning was published in 1957. The innocence of a young man mingled with the “unhappiness” of a maturing adult marks the poems in the collection. The lines “I have grown up, I think, to live alone/To keep my old illusions, sometimes dream/. . . unreal to myself in the pulpy warmth of a sunbeam,” from the poem “Autobiography” show this clearly, with an underlying confessional tone. The recurring theme of death is another feature of the poems in this collection. Other major collections of Moraes are Poems (1960), John Nobody (1965), and Bedlam Etcetera (1966). The collection Serendip (1990) won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1994. The poems in this collection are a product of the inspiration derived by the poet from his stay in Sri Lanka as a child along with his father. “Serendip” is the ancient reference to the country of Sri Lanka. The way history, mythology, and the present intertwine in the poems throws light on the transition of Sri Lanka as well as India into European colonies after the British occupation of these regions. Cinnamon Shade: New and Selected Poems (2001) brought the Sahitya Akademi Award for poetry to Moraes for the second time. There are books of poetry which Moraes had published in collaboration with other significant poets writing in English. He has published a collection of poems A Brass Serpent (1965) in collaboration with T. Carmi, an Israeli poet. Moraes has also co-authored the collections Out of God’s Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land (1992) and The Long Strider (2003) with his life partner Sarayu Srivatsa. The latter work sketches the long journeys of Thomas Coryate, an eccentric writer who traveled across Europe and parts of Asia on foot. The disappointment of Coryate on being rejected by India after traversing many strange territories including the Arabian sand deserts is depicted in these poems. Other important poetry collections of Moraes include Absences (1983), Collected Poems: 1957–1987 (1987), and Selected Poems (2012), edited by the poet Ranjit Hoskote. Some critics hold the opinion that the feelings of estrangement and alienation experienced by many Indian English poets in their lifetime are reflected in the poems of Moraes. This is also because his personal crises as well as the features of Indian society that he detested were intertwined and expressed in his poetry. Most of his poems are confessional in tone. In addition to writing three autobiographies, Moraes is also an essayist and biographer. Memoirs and travelogues constitute the bulk of his writings, in addition to the newspaper articles that were published under his name until 2000. His first book of nonfiction was Green is the Grass which contains essays on cricket. Another important book titled From East and West: A  Collection of Essays was published in 1971. The first two autobiographies of Moraes Gone Away (1960), and My Son’s Father (1968) were published within a gap of eight years; the last one, Never at Home, was published much later in 1992. Gone Away, the first part of the trilogy is more like a travelogue than an autobiography. The incidents that occurred in his childhood and later in his life until the time he became a father are included in My Son’s Father. The last part of the trilogy, Never at Home, narrates the incidents starting from his mother’s death. Another important piece of Moraes’s nonfiction is the biography of Indira Gandhi: Heiress to Destiny. 279

Encyclopedia Entries

Moraes has often been identified as a writer largely holding onto an “outsider’s” sensibility in post-independence India. Nissim Ezekiel, who was his mentor during the early years of his career, has stated that the features of English prosody in Moraes’s poetry make him come off as an English poet. His poetry is impressive but does not reflect the cultural and social aspects of Indian life. Moraes is undoubtedly one among the rarest writers of his times who have contributed extensively to a variety of literary genres.

Further Reading George, K. M. Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology- Volume 1: Surveys and Poems. Sahitya Akademi, 1992. Haq, Kaiser. “Indian Poetry in English: Dom Moraes.” The Daily Star, vol. 5, no. 2, 29 May 2004. The Daily Star, http://archive.thedailystar.net/2004/05/29/d405292102104.htm. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023.

NIVEDITHA KALARIKKAL

MUKHERJEE, BHARATI (1940–2017) Bharati Mukherjee burst upon the North American literary scene by representing the lives of Indian immigrants in her fiction. As an important voice for South Asian communities and particularly for immigrant women, her work has foreshadowed that of many writers in this genre. Born on July 27, 1940, in Kolkata, Mukherjee published eight novels, two short story collections, two works of nonfiction, and several articles and interviews until her death in January 2017 in New York City. She was born to Sudhir and Bina Mukherjee and had a privileged childhood within a traditional society. Mukherjee attended Loreto House, a Catholic school run by Irish nuns and got her undergraduate degree from Kolkata in 1959 and her master’s degree in English and ancient Indian culture from Baroda in 1961 before moving to the United States to join the Creative Writing Workshop in Iowa. She taught in McGill University in Canada and earned her doctoral degree in comparative literature in 1969. After completing her MFA, she married fellow creative writer, Clark Blaise, and moved to Canada. They had a fruitful, creative partnership and collaborated on two works of nonfiction: Days and Nights in Kolkata, written while they were traveling in India in 1977, and The Sorrow and the Terror (1987), a critical account of a terrorist attack, the 1985 Air India bombing. The authors’ take on Canadian policies of multiculturalism in the book is critical and compassionate. Mukherjee has dealt with racism against visible minorities in Canada in an essay “An Invisible Woman” (1981) as well as in some of the short stories in the collection Darkness (1985). Finally, she decided to move to America. Her first novel, The Tiger’s Daughter (1972), centers around Tara – a name that Mukherjee kept returning to – who travels to Kolkata after spending seven years in America. Referring to the politically turbulent times of the early seventies, the author depicts a changing city caught between good entrepreneurs like Tara’s father and bad ones like Mr. Tuntunwala. She portrays the Bengali upper classes with irony and mild disparagement but fails to understand why the dissatisfaction stemming from poverty and unemployment causes the younger generation to rebel. At the end, Tara, who is still trying to fit in, is caught up in their violence and wonders if she will ever go home to her husband, David. Mukherjee’s second novel, Wife (1975), captures the emotions of a woman who has been uprooted and is struggling with acculturation in a new space. Mukherjee was the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics’ Award for her short story collection The Middleman and Other Stories published in 1988. The 280

Encyclopedia Entries

cross-cultural contexts dealt with in this collection are further intensified in Jasmine (1989), where she focuses on the intense experience of deracination and re-rooting. Like most of Mukherjee’s protagonists, Jasmine, or Jyoti, as she was known in her village, stands apart from other women because of her fluent English. She marries Prakash, who is a supportive husband to her, but while they are planning to move to Florida and go to school there, he is killed in a bomb explosion. Jasmine comes to America and reinvents herself. Her expulsion from her home country is the consequence of terrorist violence; America, where she is raped by Half Face, whom she kills in revenge, is no utopia either. In the vein of a picaresque, Jasmine moves from one place to another, and during her journey, she goes from being Jasmine to Jane. Her quest ends when Jyoti-Jasmine-Jane leaves Bud Ripplemayer and moves to California to be with Taylor, where she meets Bud’s adopted son, Du. She is pregnant with Bud’s child and carries Taylor’s adopted daughter with her. Mukherjee, thus, revises radically the contours of the Indian extended family and the American nuclear family. The narrative of The Holder of the World (1993) also traverses large distances, is hyperconnective and ambitious, with clear echoes of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter retold from the perspective of an immigrant. The plot is framed by a search for the perfect diamond, which Beigh Masters, an antique researcher, is trying to pursue with the help of her Indian boyfriend, a computer wizard. What Masters uncovers during her research is the life of Hannah Easton, who grew up in Salem, Massachusetts in the 17th century. Referring to both the Salem witch trials and the Mughal empire in India, Mukherjee draws attention to the contemporary political conflicts that rocked the world. This book was followed by Leave it To Me (1997), a thriller that mines her standard tropes, the young, beautiful, female protagonist, adoption, and violence. Devi/Debbie who has grown up in India but is of mixed European and Asian descent, travels to America in search of her biological parents. The expanded sense of diaspora only adds to her confusion and leads to a violent confrontation in the dénouement. In her last three novels Mukherjee explores her Indian past in great detail. Desirable Daughters (2002) is a compelling story of three sisters, with clear autobiographical elements. The plot uses the sudden appearance of a young man claiming to be a legitimate heir to write a story about caste, greed, feminine agency, and becoming American. Along with nuanced portraits of Indian immigrants, the book reads like a morality tale that explores the lives of the sisters. The last few chapters are imaginative and creative, tracing the protagonist Tara’s return to her hometown. The somewhat enigmatic prologue of Desirable Daughters provides clues that form the connection to her next book, The Tree Bride (2004). It traces the journey of Tara Lata in the context of colonial India and the partition. The over determined plot of Miss New India (2011) enables Anjali/Angie’s giddy transformation from small town Gauripur in Bihar to Bangalore, the vibrant, sprawling, cyber city which has benefited from globalization. The transformation of young, urban Indians who have American names and accents and work in call centers is at the heart of the novel; at this point in her career, Mukherjee’s women characters are less enticed by traditional choices and India is throbbing with new possibilities. Mukherjee’s reception has been warm, and she has been widely read in college curricula. Her impact on immigrant fiction has been substantial. Her fiction was the first to point out that just as immigrants change to be able to fit into American culture, they also shape American society in small but significant ways. The most consistent critique of her work has been that she dismisses the nuances of Indian history and politics. Her representation of historically and ideologically charged moments focuses more on violence than context and the complex history of the Indian subcontinent. However, her later works depict a more vibrant and energetic India, and her interviews articulate her astute thoughts on identity and immigration. Mukherjee’s women 281

Encyclopedia Entries

protagonists can also be seen as making difficult choices along the line of intersectionality; they often choose a new culture over ethnic loyalties. Moving away from fixed, monolithic identities or linear success stories, F. Timothy Ruppel has convincingly read Jasmine as a counter narrative where the character reinvents herself. Mukherjee’s women characters are in continual transformation and work on a “reflexive, historically situated strategy for negotiating power.” Clearly, her women characters are flexible and more successful in juggling new identities; they do this to overcome the challenges of male-dominated societies, whether in India or America. Mukherjee often uses the religious trope of reincarnation to explain this flexibility. Her representation of India’s political contexts, notwithstanding, Mukherjee remains an important literary figure in American and diasporic fiction. She inspired a younger generation of writers, and Ruth Maxey has argued that Mukherjee’s fiction “paved the way for the success experienced by later South Asian American writers, such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who have spoken about her importance and especially the role of Jasmine (Maxey).” In representing the struggles of minority communities, Bharati Mukherjee was a pioneer in her field, and her choice to write about little-known immigrant group remains a distinctly courageous literary move.

Further Reading Banerjee, Debjani. “In The Presence of History: The Representation of Past and Present Indias in Bharati Mukherjee’s Fiction.” Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives, edited by Emmanuel Nelson. Routledge, 2017, pp. 161–180. Maxey, Ruth. “Novels for the Twenty-First Century: Desirable Daughters, The Tree Bride, and Miss New India.” Understanding Bharati Mukherjee, U of South Carolina P, 2019, pp. 97–108. JSTOR, https:// doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvgs0bhh.10. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Ruppel, F. Timothy. “ ‘Re-Inventing Ourselves a Million Times’: Narrative, Desire, Identity, and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine.” College Literature, vol. 22, no. 1, 1995, pp. 181–191. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/25112173. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023.

DEBJANI BANERJEE

MUKHERJEE, MEENAKSHI (1937–2009) Meenakshi Mukherjee, a well-known academician and critic, was born on August 3, 1937, in Bihar. She received a BA in English literature from Patna College, where she was taught by her future husband, scholar-publisher Sujit Mukherjee. Mukherjee subsequently received a postgraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Upon returning to India, she enrolled at the University of Poona for a PhD; her doctoral thesis, The Twice-Born Fiction – a pioneering and exhaustive historical survey of Indian writing in English between 1930–1964 – was published in 1971 and established her as a trailblazer. Mukherjee spent a long career teaching at prestigious institutions, such as Ferguson College in Pune, Lady Sri Ram College in Delhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, and visiting faculty at universities in Chicago, California, Texas, Sydney, and Adelaide. She also served as the chairperson of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) between 2001–2004 and its Indian chapter (IACLALS) between 1993–2005 and founded Vagartha (1973–1979), a journal that published English translations of Indian literature. Mukherjee was a prolific writer who wrote several books that have become seminal texts in literary criticism and postcolonial studies. Her second book, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (1985), like its predecessor, explores the history of literary production in India and interrogates the relationship between novelistic enterprise and its supposedly British

282

Encyclopedia Entries

roots. The analyzed and opened up the field for future scholarship on novels in Indian languages; these include Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Pather Panchali (Bengali), Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s Umrao Jaan Ada (Urdu), Munshi Premchand’s Godan (Hindi), and O.C. Menon’s Indulekha (Malayalam). Her next book, The Perishable Empire, for which she won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2003, is a collection of essays that rehabilitate forgotten 19th century texts, like the first Indian novel in English: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Rajmohan’s Wife (1864). She also coedited several anthologies, including Interrogating Postcolonialism (1996) and Midnight’s Children: A Book of Readings (1999). Mukherjee also made a foray into a new field by writing a biography of civil servant and writer R.C. Dutt (An Indian for All Seasons, 2009). Mukherjee’s work, heavily reviewed and cited by peers, has been duly critiqued by field specialists for being too theoretically or structurally diffuse and necessarily limited in its assessment of bhasha literature, due to reliance on translations. There is, nonetheless, unanimous agreement that her scholarship established Indian literature as worthy of serious academic examination.

Further Reading Couto, Maria. “Cultural Interaction.” India International Centre Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 2, 1986, pp. 267–271. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23001481. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Dhar, T. N. “The Historical Method and the Indian English Critics.” LittCrit, vol. 43, no. 22, 1996. ———. “Meenakshi Mukherjee: The Growth of a Critic’s Mind.” The Journal of Indian Writing in English, vol. 38, no. 1, Jan. 2010. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Indo-Anglian Curiosities.” NOVEL: A  Forum on Fiction, vol. 7, no. 1, 1973, pp. 91–93. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1345062. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Trivedi, Harish. “The Complete Scholar.” The Hindu, 26 Sept. 2009, www.thehindu.com/features/mag azine/The-complete-scholar/article16883569.ece. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023.

NEHA YADAV

MUKHERJEE, NEEL (1970–) Neel Mukherjee was born in Kolkata, India and read English literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, University College, Oxford; and completed a PhD at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He also graduated with a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. As an acclaimed author of three novels, he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. He is a fiction reviewer for several major newspapers in the United Kingdom and the United States, including The Times and TIME Magazine Asia. Currently appointed as a part-time Briggs-Copeland lecturer at the Department of English, Harvard University, Mukherjee divides his time between London and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mukherjee’s first novel, Past Continuous, was published in India in 2008 and republished in the United Kingdom as A Life Apart in 2010. The novel won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award (2008), the GQ India Writer of the Year Award (2009) and was short-listed for the 2011 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. A Life Apart weaves two parallel stories together – one set in the contemporary times and the other in the historical past. The protagonist, the recently orphaned Ritwik Ghosh, who suffered an abusive childhood at the hands of his mother, leaves India for England to study at Oxford and to start his life anew in the 1990s. However, he drops out of the university and gradually descends into the murky world of illegal immigrants, gay sex, and black economy. The secondary plot of the novel traces the story of an alternative life of Miss Gilby, a minor character who first appeared in Rabindranath Tagore’s seminal novel, Ghare-Baire (“The Home and the World”). She is appointed as an English teacher to Bimala in

283

Encyclopedia Entries

a rich landowner’s household in Bengal province during the early 20th century of the British Raj and the rising violence of the Swadeshi movement, boycotting foreign goods and products. As both Ritwik and Miss Gilby continue to remain outsiders in their respective societies the novel explores what it takes to survive on the fringes in precarious circumstances. Mukherjee’s next novel, The Lives of Others (2014), won the Encore Award for the Best Second Novel (2015) and was short-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, the Costa Prize for Best Novel, and DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Set against the Naxalite insurgency in West Bengal, India, which started in 1967, Mukherjee’s novel focuses on the family dynamics of the large and wealthy Ghosh household. While the patriarch, Prafullanath, owns various paper mills and confronts the angry workers in a dispassionate way, the eldest grandson, Supratik, leaves home to embrace the violent agrarian movement in the Bengali hinterland. The novel contains two intertwining stories: an epistolary account from Supratik’s point of view, and a third-person account of the family drama in a wealthy family. Both stories show how complicated class differences and conflicts between generations can be. Mukherjee’s latest work, A State of Freedom (2017), which was long-listed for the 2018 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, is a novel developed through five interconnected narratives, set in contemporary India. Through the exploration of the lives of five completely different, yet interrelated characters, ranging from the cosmopolitan diasporic Indians visiting India in search of their roots, the poor cooks and maids toiling for the middle-class Indian households, to impoverished construction workers and street performers and their dancing bears, the novel is a brutal study of asymmetrical power structures and exploitative class and caste divisions in contemporary India. Evoking the unique narrative structure of V.S. Naipaul’s seminal novel, In a Free State (1971), Mukherjee’s novel further explores the predicament of dislocation and displacement and people in search of a better life through the lived experiences of people inhabiting widely different social strata. However, the novel’s grim reality eventually questions the elusive nature of freedom and its limits.

Further Reading Beretta, Carlotta. “Past Continuous/A Life Apart or a (Dis)integration: Alienation, Transgression, and a Grotesque Body in Neel Mukherjee’s Novel.” Altre Modernità, no. 17, May 2017, pp. 30–47. Gorman-DaRif, Meghan. “A Dialectics of Violence: Making Sense of Neel Mukhejee’s Naxalite Narrative in the ‘Age of Terror’.” South Asian Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2017, pp. 115–126. ———. “Post-Magic: The Female Naxalite at 50 in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom.” South Asian Review, vol. 39, no. 3–4, 2018, pp. 298–310. Ross, Oliver. Communal Tensions: Homosexuality in Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend and Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart. Same-Sex Desire in Indian Culture: Representations in Literature and Film, 1970–2015. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 107–132. Vescovi, Alessandro. “Poetics of the Teenager in Indian Millennial Fiction: Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart, Anjali Joseph’s Saraswati Park, and Arvind Adiga’s Selection Day.” Textus: English Studies in Italy, no. 3, 2020, pp. 161–182.

SANGHAMITRA DALAL

MUKHERJEE, SIDDHARTHA (1970–) Siddhartha Mukherjee is an Indian-born American physician, scientist, and writer who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. The Indian government conferred Padma Shri to him in 2014. He is a Rhodes scholar, member of the renowned Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society, and has graduated from Stanford

284

Encyclopedia Entries

University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. Presently, he is an oncologist teaching medicine at Columbia University. Mukherjee belongs to a niche group of doctor-writers, sharing the space with the likes of Atul Gawande, Abraham Verghese, Oliver Sacks, etc., who have made the nuances of medicine more accessible to a lay person. In popular terms, such an approach to medicine is studied under the framework of medical humanities, which is aimed at bridging the gap between natural sciences, humanities, arts, and social sciences. According to Ron Mackovich-Rodriguez, Mukherjee “has redefined the public discourse on human health” and “has enabled the development of new treatments that reach beyond the pharmaceutical model toward a diverse array of key biological and environmental therapies.” Apart from several scientific papers in journals and other medicine-related platforms, Mukherjee has published three nonfiction books on medicine. The Pulitzer Prize citation described The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010) as “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.” Evidently, this book is not just meant for medical students, but for anyone interested in reading medical literature that is written from the perspective of a physician. This can also be a significant manual for health policy makers. Here is a sample from the book: Cancer is an expansionist disease; it invades through tissues, sets up colonies in hostile landscapes, seeking “sanctuary” in one organ and then immigrating to another. It lives desperately, inventively, fiercely, territorially, cannily, and defensively – at times, as if teaching us how to survive. To confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than even we are. Mukherjee has employed the metaphors of war, colonialism, migration, citizenship, survival, etc., to narrate the history of cancer. The prose of The Emperor of All Maladies is lucid, empirical, and historical, and it covers an entire spectrum of tales from the first documented case of cancer, which is a hieroglyphic record of an unproven case of breast cancer, to select contemporary case studies of cancer, which were explored by Mukherjee when he was doing his advanced research in cancer medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in the summer of 2003. In the book The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science (2015), Mukherjee acknowledges that medicine is undergoing tremendous revamping from multiple methodological, ontological, and epistemological tangents, which require a major overhaul of the available information. He argues that the fundamental principles of this discipline are undergoing a reorganization that questions our contemporary understanding of medicine. He reminds the readers that every perfect medical experiment is the product of a perfect human bias and new frontiers can be reached only if one can go beyond algorithms and trust the biases of experienced doctors. The Gene: An Intimate History (2016) traces a historical documentation of the discovery of genes and how genes have been defined over the centuries. He argues that this personal identifier, something unique to oneself, is not just an intimate trait of an individual but also one among the most powerful, dangerous, and manipulative ideas in the history of the world. The growth of eugenics and ethnic cleansing highlight the dangerous possibilities of furthering research in genetics. Mukherjee has been contributing articles to newspapers and giving lectures on non-medical platforms as well. Some of his recent newspaper articles are on how coronavirus performs inside

285

Encyclopedia Entries

the human body and on a bold analysis of public health indices and global health within the context of this alarming pandemic.

Further Reading “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner).” The Pulitzer Prizes, 2011, www.pulitzer.org/winners/siddhartha-mukherjee. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Klein, Julia. “Review: The Emperor of all Maladies.” The Columbia Magazine, 2011. Lehman, Richard. “Siddharta Mukherjee’s Three Laws of Medicine.” BMJ, 2015, p. 351:h6708. The BMJ, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h6708. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Ludmerer, Kenneth M. “The Lawlessness of Medicine.” LARB: Los Angeles Review of Books, 14 Feb. 2016, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-lawlessness-of-medicine/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Mackovich-Rodriguez, Ron. “Renowned Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee Named USC’s 2018 Commencement Speaker.” USC News, 8 Mar. 2018, https://news.usc.edu/138101/renowned-oncologistsiddhartha-mukherjee-announced-as-uscs-2018-commencement-speaker/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023.

ELWIN SUSAN JOHN

MURTY, SUDHA (1950–) Sudha Murty (née Kulkarni) was born into a Brahmin family on August 19, 1950, to Dr. R.H. Kulkarni and his wife Vimala in Shiggaon, Karnataka. She completed BE in electrical and electronics engineering from the B.V.B. College of Engineering and Technology, and ME in computer science from the Indian Institute of Science, standing first in her class. She was the first woman to be placed as an engineer at the auto manufacturer, TELCO. She has worked at various firms and is also a visiting professor in various universities. In 1978, she married N.R. Narayana Murty and assisted her husband in founding the IT company Infosys at Pune in 1981. Besides being a prolific writer in both Kannada and English, Murty is also known for philanthropic works. She is a recipient of various awards and honors, the most prestigious of them being a Padma Shri in 2006. Murty has written numerous books, around fifty as of 2021, which include novels, short stories, travelogues, etc. Her first book, Mahashweta, was written in Kannada and published in 2000. This book tells the story of the beautiful Anupama, whose world falls apart when she is diagnosed with leukoderma. Her condition turns her husband and in-laws against her, and Anupama is ostracized by society at large. Refusing to bow down to stigma, she travels to Bombay in search of success. An inspiring story of resilience, Mahashweta is a critique of the stereotypes faced by people suffering from such skin conditions. In 2002, Wise and Otherwise: A Salute to Life was published. This book is a collection of fifty anecdotes picked out from her own life. These stories portray the nature of human beings as she encountered them in her daily life. From extreme generosity to meanness of character, Murty recounts the full range of what it means to be human. She also grabs the opportunity to point out that social evils are at the root of all human vices: dowry system, female infanticide, etc., all are talked about in this collection. How I Taught My Grandmother to Read and Other Stories is a collection of twenty-five short stories published in 2004. These are again heart-warming anecdotes that Murty picks up from her own life. Ranging from tales of early childhood to her role as a mother and author, the book is full of the lessons and values that life experiences instilled in her. Something Happened on the Way to Heaven: 20 Inspiring Real-Life Stories (2014) is a collection of stories handpicked and edited by Murty from a contest conducted by Penguin Publishers. Inspiring and uplifting, these stories touch upon a range of subjects which we often take 286

Encyclopedia Entries

for granted. Some of the titles in the collection include “Acceptance” by Bhaskar Mukherjee, “Agni Pareeksha” by Supriya Unni Nair, “Acid” by Pushkar Pande, and “It Fell in a Storm” by Santanu Bhowmik. Her Three Thousand Stiches: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives (2015) is a collection of eleven stories, again snippets from her personal experiences. One of the most striking stories of the book is the titular “Three Thousand Stiches,” which narrates Murty’s attempt to liberate the devadasis in Northern Karnataka. Humiliated multiple times, yet full of determination, she eventually manages to root out a social evil. She also ensures that the devadasis are financially stable by helping them set up a bank. “Cattle Class” is another story in the collection which stands out. It describes how Murty was called a “cattle class” at Heathrow Airport owing to her simple attire. This piece instills the valuable lesson that people should not be judged based on their appearances. The Serpent’s Revenge: Unusual Tales from the Mahabharata (2016), The Man from the Egg: Unusual Tales about the Trinity (2017), The Upside-Down King: Unusual Tales about Rama and Krishna (2018), The Daughter from a Wishing Tree: Unusual Tales about Women in Mythology (2019), and The Sage with Two Horns: Unusual Tales from Mythology (2021) are all inspired by Hindu mythology and folktales. On the other hand, Grandma’s Bag of Stories (2012) and Grandparents’ Bag of Stories (2020) are targeted at children. The titular characters, Ajji and Ajja, impart in young readers values and wisdom through their charming tales in these collections. A Woman’s Ritual, published in 2017, is also based on her real-life experience. The priest had turned away Murty when she had wanted to participate in a Shraddha, a ceremony conducted to honor a dead ancestor, saying woman are not allowed to perform the ritual. She takes this opportunity to investigate into tradition and modernity and what it means to be a religious woman in India, a country still seeped in meaningless rituals, not changing with the times. Hindu Mother, Muslim Son (2017) also has an underlying theme of religion, this time religious harmony. Following the death of Fatimabai with whom she has always been discordant, Kashibai makes the choice to raise the former’s son. This is a book on redemption and a celebration of motherhood. Sudha Murty is a highly popular writer in India. Most of her books are drawn from personal experiences and touch a chord with the readers. Written in crisp, easy to understand language, her books can be read in a single sitting. The themes are many, but they aim at bringing about a positive social change or imparting a valuable moral lesson.

Further Reading Kangne, Raosaheb Vaijanathrao, and B. T. Lahane, Dr. “The Contribution of Sudha Murty in Indian English Literature.” Epitome Journal, vol. 2, no. 12, Dec. 2016, pp. 101–109. Saripalli, Dr. Durga Sasi Kiran, and Gomatam Mohana Charyulu, Dr. “The Journey to Empowerment: A Study of Sudha Murty’s Protagonists.” European Journal of Molecular and Clinical Medicine, vol. 7, no. 4, 2020, pp. 960–969. Vaswani, Nishtha. “Sudha Murty: An Eminent Contributor to Literature.” International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, vol. 6, no. 1, Jan.–Feb. 2021, pp. 109–112.

EGA PETER

NAGARKAR, KIRAN (1942–2019) Kiran Nagarkar was a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Born in a middle-class Maharashtrian family, he is considered by many a quintessential Bombay writer, writing in Marathi and English, who experimented with form and language. His books have been translated into 287

Encyclopedia Entries

German, Italian, French, and Spanish. In 2012, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. A writer of firm socio-political convictions, he proved a bulwark against authoritative and hyper-nationalist polity and censorship policies. Nagarkar believed that art should aim at the particular and the specific to be truly universal. His first Marathi novel, Saat Sakkam Treychalis, released in 1974, was published in English in 1995 as Seven Sixes Are Forty-Three. It chronicles the life of a struggling writer Kushank Purandare whose means of sustenance depend on the generosity of his lovers and friends. Its dark humor and provocative linguistic inventiveness and theme scandalized some of his critics. Bedtime Story is Nagarkar’s 1978 play which created a furor because of its revolutionary ideas. As a grandmother narrates a bedtime story (a retelling of the Mahabharata), giving twists to the age-old stories of Karna, Ekalavya, and Draupadi, readers are apprised of the subversive nature of the play in which are embedded the repressed stories of gender and class injustices. The censor board imposed twenty-four cuts to sanitize its sacrilegious portions. The play was also banned for seventeen years by Hindu right-wing parties like the Shiv Sena and the Hindu Mahasabha. Some actors withdrew from rehearsals because of due to threats from right-wing groups. In 2015, Nagarkar republished the banned play along with another screenplay Black Tulip. Nagarkar’s novel, Cuckold, for which he won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2001, is a historical fiction set in 17th century Mewar in India. The novel is a retelling of the legend of Meera Bai (whose divine paramour was Lord Krishna) through the eyes of her husband Maharaj Kumar, an often-overlooked historical figure. Nagarkar’s Meera is a strong and obdurate woman who defies royal norms. Alternating between the first-person and third person narration, Nagarkar presents Maharaj Kumar’s dilemmas and predicaments, marital discord with Meera Bai, his other love interests, political intrigues of the time, and unconventional military strategies in a colloquial and contemporary idiom. The novel subverts the normative ideas of masculinity, valor, and love. Nagarkar’s novel, Ravan and Eddie (2004), chronicles the lives of two rambunctious characters, Ravan (a Hindu) and Eddie (a Catholic), whose paths crisscross each other’s world of adventures. Set in early post-independence years in Bombay, the novel narrates the struggles of chawl life, riddled with class and caste differences, with wit and irony, dipped in humorous, prescient and irreverent prose. Ravan and Eddie was followed by two sequels: The Extras in 2012 and Rest in Peace in 2015. In The Extras, Ravan’s and Eddie’s lives intertwine as they work as extras in Bollywood movies; while in Rest in Peace, they forge friendship in Bollywood as established music directors. However, their misfortunes land them back in chawl, but because they possess the resilience of “Bombaiyya people,” they “have no choice but to reinvent themselves.” The novel God’s Little Soldier (2006) is the story of Zia Khan, a mathematician, who hails from a cultured Muslim family in Bombay, but because of his pathological religious orthodoxy, he lands in Afghanistan’s terrorist training camp. What follows is a complex tale of skepticism and questioning of righteousness of choices. The novel swarms with multitudinous characters and is marked by narrative shifts, and examines fundamental spiritual, moral, and political issues and the perils of extremism. Makarand Paranjpe, in India Today, compared the novel with “Dostoevsky’s great work” and Shashi Tharoor in his review published in Outlook called it “fascinating, complex, rewarding” and “insistently readable.” Jasoda (2017) is a realistic, dark novel that portrays the visceral and gut-wrenching harsh conditions of life of a woman, Jasoda, who is surrounded by toxic male characters in the hinterlands. The novel is divided into four parts and covers her journey from Kantagiri to Mumbai, when she is forced to leave her native place in the wake of prolonged famine and back to 288

Encyclopedia Entries

Kantagiri as her life comes a full circle. Her return is marked by material prosperity, but she essentially remains her quotidian self – with all her misgivings and devoid of any serendipitous discoveries about life. The year 2018 turned into a dark year for Nagarkar as he faced allegations of sexual misconduct by three women journalists which affected the publication and reception of his last novel The Arsonist (2019). Despite his moral failings, he is a writer who invented an unconventional idiom and volatile prose to express his ideas and themes.

Further Reading Balagi, Mahesh. Kiran Nagarkar’s Writings. Authorspress, 2019. Deodhar, Neerja. “Kiran Nagarkar on the Re-release of ‘Seven Sixes are Forty-Three’, 43 years After it was First Published.” Firstpost, 5 Aug. 2017, www.firstpost.com/living/kiran-nagarkar-on-the-re-release-ofseven-sixes-are-forty-three-43-years-after-it-was-first-published-3890291.html. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Palande, Pravin, and Anjali Thomas. “Kiran Nagarkar: I Write Because I Want to Be Read.” Forbes India, 25 Dec. 2015, www.forbesindia.com/article/think/kiran-nagarkar-i-write-because-i-want-to-be-read/ 41769/1. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Paranjpe, Makarand. “Book Review of ‘God’s Little Soldier’ by Kiran Nagarkar.” India Today, 17 Apr. 2006, www.indiatoday.in/magazine/society-and-the-arts/books/story/20060417-book-review-ofgods-little-soldier-by-kiran-nagarkar-785587-2006-04-16. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Tharoor, Shashi. “A Fancy Bird Too Heavy to Fly.” Outlook India, 5 Feb. 2022, www.outlookindia.com/ magazine/story/a-fancy-birdtoo-heavy-to-fly/231150. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

SUNAINA JAIN

NAHAL, CHAMAN (1927–2013) Chaman Nahal was born in Sialkot (now in Pakistan) in 1927 and died in New Delhi in 2013. He completed his master’s degree in English from University of Delhi in 1948 and PhD in English from University of Nottingham in 1961. He was a professor of English at the University of Delhi, a visiting Fulbright Fellow, Princeton University between 1967–1970, and a visiting professor at many universities in the United States, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, Canada, and North Korea. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1977; the Federation of Indian Publishers Award for Azadi in 1977 and The English Queens in 1979; Medal of Honour by Turin University, Italy, in 1988; and the Distinguished Service Award of the East West Center, Honolulu, in 1998–1999. He has authored twenty-two books, including nine novels. Nahal’s memoir Silent Life: Memoirs of a Writer (2005) was translated into many languages, including Russian, Hungarian, and Sinhalese. With acerbic wit, laced with humor, it encapsulates his academic and creative life. His nonfiction includes his articles on Krishnamurti and his account of the Kumbh, which were published together as A Conversation with J. Krishnamurti in 1965. D.H. Lawrence: An Eastern View, based on his doctoral thesis, was published in 1970; Drugs and the Other Self and The Narrative Pattern in Ernest Hemingway’s Fiction was published in 1971. Nahal’s steadfastness and discipline in writing during “Amritvela” or the pre-dawn hours throughout his life made him leave behind a rich legacy of creative and critical works. He considered Nirad Chaudhuri and Mulk Raj Anand as stalwart supporters of the young breed of writers and provided them advice and opportunities for publication. Nahal was known for the directness and simplicity of his prose, and he owed his writing style to Mahatma Gandhi, whose articles in Harijan – a weekly paper – were read by him. The ideological ferment caused by the Gandhian Movement had caught Nahal’s fancy so much that it led him to write four novels that constitute The Gandhi Quartet (1993). Nahal 289

Encyclopedia Entries

believed that Gandhiji “carried a vanquished and crushed nation to newer heights, where the average Indian could stand on his feet and face any adversary.” However, he represents Gandhi not as an epitome of virtuosity and righteousness, but as a human being prone to frailties, follies, doubts, and uncertainties – like any ordinary mortal. The first novel in The Gandhi Quartet is The Crown and the Loincloth (1981), which deals with the Non-Cooperation Movement during 1920–1922. This is followed by The Salt of Life (1990) which, as the blurb mentions, covers “a vast canvas of the Indian freedom movement from 1930 to 1941” dealing with the incidents from the Civil Disobedience Movement to India’s involvement in the Second World War during the 1920s and 1930s. The Triumph of the Tricolour (1993) deals with incidents from the Quit India Movement to the Cabinet Mission that visited India in 1946. The fourth novel, Azadi (1975), written first but placed last in the quartet, deals mainly with “the emotional and social trauma” that resulted in the wake of partition and chronicles the life of a Hindu merchant, Lala Kanshi Ram, and his family between June  3, 1947, and January  30, 1948. Nahal and his family, living in undivided Punjab, could not escape the ravages of partition. The family had to flee Sialkot and relocate to New Delhi; his sister Kartar Devi and her husband were brutally slaughtered. All these personal experiences are fictionalized in Azadi, which is considered to be his magnum opus. For Nahal, the veracity or authenticity of physical details in a work of art mattered the most, and his fictional or real locales like Ajitha or Sialkot were sketched out with meticulous care. Among Nahal’s other novels, My True Faces (1993), with the title derived from The Bhagavad Gita, portrayed Nahal’s perennial concern with victimization. He made use of a marital dispute to philosophize about the mysteries of life. The English Queens (1979) is a satire on Anglicized Indians. The theme of cross-cultural tensions is dealt with in Into Another Dawn (1977), which is set in America, and in Sunrise in Fiji (1988), set in the Pacific. Nahal is remembered for “dealing with the social and cultural problems of contemporary society and problems arising out of the breakdown of human values, generation gap, the loss of one’s identity and alienation” (Joseph). Roopali Sircar Gaur, at a symposium held in his remembrance had said, “His humour and quiet humanism expresses itself in a deep-felt desire for universal harmony and peace” (Bakshi). As a stellar figure in the literary world, Nahal can be placed at par with any major Indian writer writing in English.

Further Reading Bakshi, Asmita. Remembering Chaman Nahal, 15 Sept. 2014, www.pressreader.com/india/indiatoday/20140915/282995398061216. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Jha, N. K. Trauma of Independence in the Novels of Chaman Nahal. Naveen Prakashan, 2014. Joseph. S. John Peter. “Man as a Victim of Alienation and Loss of identity: A  Critical Assessment of Chaman Nahal’s the Womb.” Journal of English Language Teaching and Literary Studies (JELTS), vol. 5, no. 1, Jan.–June 2016. Google Sites, https://sites.google.com/site/jeltals/archive/3-1/1-man-asa-victim-of-alienation-and-loss-of-identity-a-critical-assessment-of-chaman-nahal-s-the-womb-s-johnpeter-joseph. Accessed 19 May 2023. Nahal, C. Silent Life: Memoirs of a Writer. Roli Books, 2005. Pasumarthy, U. R. The Novels of Chaman Nahal- A Study. Lambert Academic Publishing, 2012. Somanath, P. The Novels of Chaman Nahal: A Critical Study. Sri Krishnadevaraya U, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 1987, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/85809. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Subba, Rayudu A. V. Chaman Nahal’s the Gandhi Quartet: Gandhian Ideology and the Indian Novel. Prestige Books, 2000.

SUNAINA JAIN

290

Encyclopedia Entries

NAIDU, SAROJINI (1879–1949) Sarojini Naidu was born on February  13, 1879, to the scientist Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya and his wife Varada Sundari. Naidu’s education in English literature and mathematics was supervised by her father, and when she passed her matriculation examination in 1891, she attained celebrity status at age twelve. With no interest in further studies, she took to creative writing, composing a poem of thirteen hundred lines, writing a play of two thousand lines, and attempting a novel in her early teens. She wrote in a journal: “My joys were not what joys to childhood seem.” At fifteen, she declared her attachment to Dr. Govindarajulu Naidu, a widower ten years her senior, and addressed love lyrics to him. Though Aghorenath was a social reformer with liberal sentiments, he could not accept this romance and sent Naidu to England on the plea of her ill health and the need for higher education. Naidu was admitted to Girton College, Cambridge, in 1895, where she handed over a sheaf of poems to Edmund Gosse, an influential literary mentor. Gosse offered stark advice, “Be a genuine Indian poet of the Deccan, not a clever machine made imitator of the English classics.” She also met the poet-editor Arthur Symons who remarked on Naidu’s brooding loneliness despite her outward cheer. In 1898, Naidu returned to India and broke several conventions by marrying Dr. Naidu. Four children were born to her in the next six years, placing enormous demands on her health and energy. Nevertheless, she continued writing poetry, and The Golden Threshold was published in 1905, followed by The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing (1917). Though Mahatma Gandhi bestowed the sobriquet “Nightingale of India” upon Sarojini Naidu, she wrote no further poetry during the decades devoted to nationalist politics. Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Gandhi were her political mentors and of the view that activism should take priority. Immensely capable in whatever field she chose, Sarojini Naidu excelled in her political role, becoming the first woman president of the Indian National Congress in 1925 and Governor of Uttar Pradesh in 1947 when India attained independence. A  grand orator, Naidu’s political speeches give valuable insights into the freedom struggle. Deeply sensitive to gender differentials and aware that she had overcome hurdles in her own path to leadership, she focused often on the plight of disadvantaged women. During her last illness, she requested a nurse to gently sing to her. Poetry remained her companion till the end. The corpus of Sarojini Naidu’s poetry was published as The Sceptered Flute in 1905. Makarand Paranjape says, “Sarojini’s poetry becomes a rich and complex text which reproduces the contradictions and debates of her age.” If we take the example of “Palanquin Bearers,” the most anthologized of her lyrics from The Golden Threshold, it is a romanticized view of a sequestered woman with lines such as “she sways like a flower in the wind of her song,” whereas Naidu was in the forefront of exhorting women to be educated and enfranchised. This “conflict” between the poet and the patriot may be read creatively rather than being attributed to changing allegiances during her lifetime. Colonial education brought the influence of English Romantics into Naidu’s verse, and Gandhian politics made her witness India’s diversity at firsthand. The Golden Threshold has sympathetic poems on “Suttee” and “The Purdah Nashin.” Sarojini Naidu expressed strong views on women’s “immemorial birthright” to “life and liberty.” In her own trajectory, the enduring image of Sarojini Naidu standing by Mahatma Gandhi during the Dandi Salt March presents a confident woman in public resistance to the British government. The Bird of Time resorts to folk songs and mythological tales, evoking the passage of seasons and the beauty of Hyderabad, a city that was her beloved home from which she often departed due to political commitments. “At Twilight (on the way to Golconda)” has the lines, “Quick with the sense of joys she hath foregone/Returned my soul to beckoning joys that wait”; while

291

Encyclopedia Entries

the poem “In the Bazars of Hyderabad” portrays merchants, vendors, goldsmiths, and flowergirls in a colorful ambience. The last volume of poems The Broken Wing has an elegiac quality, almost a reluctant farewell to the Muse she had revered from a young age. The title derives from a conversation with Gokhale in which he had asked, “Why should a song bird like you have broken wings?” to which she answers in the title poem, “Behold, I rise to meet the destined spring . . .” In a narrative sequence, “The Temple: A Pilgrimage of Love,” Naidu weaves in her thoughts on female desire against a backdrop of social conventions, giving a metaphorical equivalent to the contradictions and paradoxes pervading her political experiences. In her speeches, Sarojini Naidu directly addresses the need for social change with women at the center of any nationalist agenda. Her Presidential Address at the fortieth Indian National Congress (1925) refers to women as “the guardian of the hearth fires, the altar fires and the beacon fires of her land.” At the twenty-second session of the Indian National Social Conference (1908), Naidu moved an important motion for the rehabilitation of widows. She was the founder of the All India Women’s Conference (1927) and a passionate advocate of interfaith understanding. Her terms in prison only strengthened her determination. Sarojini Naidu’s poetry and rhetoric are linked by the passion for “Swaraj” and a modernizing sensibility. Among her less known literary works is “Nilambuja,” about a “lyric soul” wanting to break loose from a “garden of fantasy.” Symbolically, this is Naidu, a writer-politician who is a guiding figure of Indian feminism.

Further Reading Hasan, Mushirul. Sarojini Naidu: Her Way with Words. Niyogi Books, 2013. Lal, Malashri. The Law of the Threshold: Indian Writers in Indian English. IIAS, Shimla, 1995. Paranjape, Makarand. Sarojini Naidu, Selected Poetry and Prose. HarperCollins, 1993. Sengupta, Padmini. Sarojini Naidu: A Biography. Asia Publishing House, 1966.

MALASHRI LAL

NAIK, M.K. (1926–2014) Madhukar Krishna Naik was born in the small town of Karad, Satara District, Maharashtra, on January 7, 1926. He attended Rajaram College, Kolhapur, and obtained his BA and MA in English from the University of Bombay. His PhD is from Karnatak University, Dharwad. He joined the Bombay educational service in 1948 and embarked upon his teaching career in Kolhapur; he moved to Karnatak University, Dharwad, in 1957. He was a senior professor and the head of the Department of English when he retired in 1985. He won a Smith-Mundt Fulbright Award and specialized in American literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He was chosen as a National Lecturer by the University Grants Commission (1978–1981). He was awarded the Senior Commonwealth Fellowship, Canada, and the British Council Visitorship, Cambridge. He is the author of sixteen books of literary criticism and has edited twelve anthologies. He was also a creative writer, with seven volumes of light verse, a novel, short stories, and Jivan-Venu (1953), a collection of poems in his mother tongue Marathi. He translated from Marathi into English and from English into Marathi. All for the Dark God: Selections from Medieval Marathi Saint Poetry (2007) carries translations of poems by twenty-five poets. As a critic and a professor of English, Naik played a big role in winning recognition for Indian writing in English. He published book-length studies of the “Big Three” – Raja Rao (1972), Mulk Raj Anand (1973), and The Ironic Vision: A Study of the Fiction of R.K. Narayan (1983). A History of Indian English Literature (Sahitya Akademi, 1982) facilitated the adoption 292

Encyclopedia Entries

of the term “Indian English literature,” first used by C.D. Narasimhaiah in The Swan and the Eagle (1969). The Historyistory and its sequel, Indian English Literature 1980–2000: A Critical Survey (2001, co-authored) are a fine blend of description and evaluation. Naik authored more than a hundred research papers, many of them collected in books like Dimensions of Indian English Literature (1984) and Studies in Indian English Literature (1987). A Critical Harvest: Essays and Studies (2005), published when Naik was in his 80th year, contains articles on contentious issues like Nativism, and the relationship between Indian English and Bhasha literature. Naik’s criticism was not restricted to Indian English literature; He wrote Somerset Maugham (1966), Mighty Voices: Studies in T.S. Eliot (1980), and two books on Anglo-Indian fiction. Naik edited ten anthologies, bringing together diverse critics. Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English (co-edited with S.K. Desai and G.S. Amur), published in 1968, was the first anthology on the subject. His series of Perspectives: Perspectives on Indian Drama in English (1977), Perspectives on Indian Prose in English (1982), Perspectives on Indian Poetry in English (1984), and Perspectives on Indian Fiction in English (1985) have essays by various critics with valuable bibliographies of primary sources. Naik published poetry and fiction late in life. He used the pseudonym “Emken” for seven collections of light verse, including Indian Clerihews (1989), Indian Limericks (1990), Beowulf and All That: An Unorthodox History of English Literature in Comic Verse (1999), and From Anne Bradstreet to “Main Street” and Beyond: An Unorthodox History of American Literature in Comic Verse (2001). Ancient World Clerihews (2002) treats literature in classical languages like Greek and Sanskrit. Corridors of Knowledge: A Novel (2008) has a strong autobiographical element in the early struggles of the protagonist to get an education. It presents delightful satire on the workings of a university, and how PhDs are awarded. A Passage to London and Other Indian Tales contains twenty short stories; “The Great Indian Critic” is the only one that reveals Naik’s natural wit. Naik’s critical practice is not based on any school of aesthetics; he attempts to integrate the best of Sanskrit and Western poetics. There are no facile generalizations. Every statement is supported by an analysis of the relevant text and meticulously documented.

Further Reading Narayan, Shyamala A. “M. K. Naik: Search for an Integrated Aesthetics.” Littcrit, vol. 41, 1995, pp. 32–40. Rajan, P. K., editor. “M. K. Naik: Search for an Integrated Aesthetics.” Indian Literary Criticism in English: Critics, Texts, Issues. Rawat Publications, 2004, pp. 133–140. Sajjan, G. B. “A Tribute to M. K. Naik.” The Journal of Indian Writing in English, vol. 44, 2016, pp. 1–5. Suneetha, P. “M. K. Naik, the Doyen of Indian English Literary Studies.” The Journal of Indian Writing in English, vol. 43, 2015, pp. 7–16.

SHYAMALA A. NARAYAN

NAIPAUL, SIR VIDIADHAR SURAJPRASAD (1932–2018) Sir V.S. Naipaul was born in Chaguanas, Colonial Trinidad, on August 17, 1932. He was the grandson of a Hindu indentured laborer from India. At that time, Indians in Trinidad were a minority group and illiteracy was rampant among them. Poverty, cultural confusion, and his father’s mental illness shaped his childhood. His early life experiences left a deep impression on him; even as an adult, he returned to those memories to build his stories and characters. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, was the son of an impoverished peasant, who self-taught himself and worked as a journalist in Trinidad Guardian. He aspired to be a writer, but the 293

Encyclopedia Entries

social environment of the place did not give him much opportunity to fulfill his dream. He, however, could successfully instill the love of English literature in Naipaul, from a young age. Seepersad’s short stories, Gurudeva and other Indian Tales, about the lives of the local Indian community, influenced his son’s writing style. Life in Trinidad did not inspire young Naipaul, and he wanted to leave the place for better opportunities in life. His dreams came true in 1950, even before turning eighteen, when he received a highly competitive colonial government scholarship to study English literature at Oxford University. Unfortunately, life in England did not give him the respite or stimulus he had expected. On several occasions, he experienced racism and felt like an outsider. Like his father, Naipaul also suffered bouts of depression. His life was riddled with financial instabilities and emotional fluctuations. Between Father and Son: Family Letters (2000) gives us a glimpse of his days at university. One person who gave him constant support was his first wife, Patricia Ann Hale, whom he met in Oxford. She helped him both financially and intellectually. Naipaul persevered to be a writer and wrote prolifically for over fifty years. Naipaul’s early works of fiction were well received by critics and are known for their comic style, in which eccentric characters living in grim circumstances are depicted humorously. They revolve around ‘displaced’ and ‘unknown’ people living in the multiracial society of 1930s Trinidad. His first novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957), is a comic story of Ganesh Ramsumair, who paved his way to politics after a lucrative career as a mystic masseur. Ganesh is a greedy and manipulative person, who wangled his way to success. The novel won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1958 and was later adapted into a film. The second novel, The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), is a social comedy set around Trinidad’s transition of political power at the end of British colonial rule. It is about a businessman, Harbans Singh, who manages to win a local election and the different ways in which the locals respond to the event. The novel depicts a society in which bribery is a norm, people are driven by material gain, and though they have voting rights, they do not know how to make sense of the political transition. The third book was Miguel Street (1959), a collection of short stories based on Naipaul’s life in Port of Spain. While reminiscing, he noted in his Nobel Prize speech, “The life of the street was open to me. It was an intense pleasure for me to observe it from the verandah.” Most of the stories unfold in public at a place that was once important for the sugar plantations but is not anymore. The characters speak creole English and despite their considerable efforts, do not have much to show. Naipaul explains, “My characters thought they were free men, in charge of their destinies; they weren’t; the colonial setting mocked the delusions of the characters, their ambitions, their belief.” The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1961. The aforementioned works received their fair share of praise, but A House for Mr  Biswas (1961) established Naipaul as a writer of great promise. It is a classic that has the comic flair of his previous works. It revolves around Mohun Biswas and his several displacements. Biswas is modeled on his father’s life and some characters are inspired by his real-life acquaintances from his early life in Trinidad. Biswas experiences mental instability, poverty, and isolation from his family. The novel unfolds the different lives of characters based in a community where people are illiterate, means are limited, and success is limited despite their dreams and endeavors. In this environment, Biswas dreams of becoming a writer in the English language. But despite his efforts, he could not attain prosperity, being a colonial subject in Trinidad. After A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul wrote travel books. The first one, The Middle Passage (1962) is based on his visit to Trinidad, British Guiana, Surinam, Martinique, and Jamaica. As a student, Naipaul worked hard so that he could leave the Caribbean for a better life, and when he returned, he was dismayed by its poor social conditions, especially the racial tension

294

Encyclopedia Entries

experienced by Indians in the West Indies. The book was not well received in the Caribbean nations, and Naipaul was criticized for not paying enough attention to the optimism produced by the political movements during the period. An Area of Darkness (1964), drawn from his visit to India, followed. Though India was the land of his ancestors, he did not have much knowledge of the local Indian languages nor of the Indian society. He was critical of the lack of hygiene, chaos, the evils of untouchability, and corruption. Indians did not like his critical observations, and the book was banned in India. His other writings on India are India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). Like Naipaul, the protagonist in The Mimic Men (1967), Ralph Singh, felt uprooted and dissatisfied with the conditions of the colonial and postcolonial world. The book won the W.H. Smith prize. While Naipaul’s sense of alienation and despair grew, his literary works continued to make an impact. During the 1970s, Naipaul created a new art form by combining fiction and autobiography. The result was Free State (1971) based on the theme of race in the era of decolonization. It won the Booker Prize. The Enigma of Arrival (1987) was hailed by the Swedish Academy as a “masterpiece” where Naipaul visits the reality of England like an anthropologist studying some hitherto unexplored native tribe deep in the jungle. With apparently short-sighted and random observations, he creates an unrelenting image of the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture and the demise of European neighborhoods. Naipaul’s collection of over thirty literary and nonfiction works has earned him many accolades and some criticism, too. He won major literary awards in his career, such as Booker Prize (1971), the Jerusalem Prize (1983), and the Nobel Prize for Literature (2001) “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” This acknowledgment received mixed reactions across the literary world and the media. While some applauded his recognition, others saw it as a validation of Naipaul’s critical judgment of postcolonial societies and Islam. In an essay “Where does he come from?” historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam denounced Naipaul for his lack of ability to see people and places as they are and for being “a prisoner of his history and heritage.” (Subrahmanyam). He points out that despite Naipaul’s minimal knowledge of the Hindi language and cultural nuances, he does not shy away from making strong critical comments about Indian society. Several scholars have taken a similar position against Naipaul for his lack of sensitivity about Islam in writings like Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted People (1998). In India: A Million Mutinies Now Naipaul condemned the Mughal rule but heralded the British for bringing modernity to India. Such a point of view was attacked both in India and outside. His portrayal of women in his writing and his relationship with women has also been condemned. For instance, his central characters are mostly men. His marriage of forty years to his first wife, Patricia, was unhappy, and he publicly admitted to having an extramarital affair while married to her. Many, however, believe that Naipaul gave visibility to postcolonial people on a world stage through his writings. His narrative art, characters, and language have provided new analytical tools for understanding postcolonial consciousness. Moreover, the central themes of his works, such as displacement, loss, and poverty, continue to be critical to the identity of postcolonial politics today.

295

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Jussawalla, Feroza, editor. Conversations with V. S. Naipaul. UP of Mississippi, 1997. King, Bruce. V. S. Naipaul, 2nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Krishnan, Sanjay. V. S. Naipaul’s Journeys: From Periphery to Center. Columbia UP, 2020. Naipaul, V. S. “ ‘Two Worlds’: VS Naipaul’s 2001 Nobel Lecture.” Scroll.in, 12 Aug. 2018, scroll.in/article/890142/two-worlds-vs-naipauls-2001-nobel-lecture. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Where Does He Come From? Review of A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, by V. S. Naipaul.” London Book of Review, vol. 29, no. 1, Nov. 2007, www.lrb.co.uk/thepaper/v29/n21/sanjay-subrahmanyam/where-does-he-come-from. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. The Swedish Academy. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001: V. S. Naipaul.” The Nobel Prize, 11 Oct. 2001, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2001/press-release/. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023.

MAUMITA BANERJEE

NAIR, ANITA (1966–) Anita Nair, a novelist and poet, was born on January 26, 1966, in Shornur, Palakkad, Kerala, and currently lives in Bengaluru, Karnataka. Educated in Chennai and Kerala, Nair published her first book, Satyr of the Subway and Eleven Other Stories in 1997, which earned her a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her debut novel, The Better Man (2000), is about a government officer, Mukundan Nair, who returns after his retirement to Kaikurussi, where he was born. Her second novel, Ladies Coupé (2001), a 21st century woman bildungsroman, has proven even more popular than the first. It tells the story of six women who meet by chance on a short train ride as it follows the journey of a forty-five-year-old single Indian woman from a Tamil Brahmin family who works as an income-tax clerk, after her father’s death in an accident. Mistress (2005), the third one, revolves around Kathakali dancer Koman, his niece Radha, and Christopher Stewart, a travel writer. Her fourth novel, Lessons in Forgetting (2010), is about Meera, a happy corporate wife and cookbook writer whose life is turned upside-down when her husband walks out on their marriage. This novel was published in the United States as The Lilac House in 2012. Cut Like Wound (2012) is a Bengaluru-based detective novel. Borei Gowda, the hero, is a police officer who investigates the death of a male prostitute named Bhuvana. With Idris: Keeper of the Light (2014), she delves deep into the genre of historical fiction, telling the story of a Somalian trader who visited Malabar in 1659 AD. Alphabet Soup for Lovers (2016), in the category of food fiction, revolves around Lena’s adulterous relationship with Shoola Pani, a famous South Indian actor. In Chain of Custody (2016) the protagonist, Inspector Gowda, returns to investigate the disappearance of 13-year-old Nandita. Eating Wasps (2018) is about Sreelakshmi, a writer, and her ambitions and contradictions. Nair has also written children’s books. Living Next Door to Alise (2006) and Adventures of Nonu, the Skating Squirrel (2006) were both acclaimed. Muezza and Baby Jaan (2016), another work of juvenile fiction, contains twenty-eight stories from the Quran, as told by Muezza, a cat, to Baby Jaan, a young camel. She has also written The Puffin Book of World Myths and Legends (2004), a children’s book about myths and legends, and Magical Indian Myths (2008). Apart from these, Nair has ventured into many other literary genres. She has published a poetry collection titled Malabar Mind (2002) and an essay collection titled Goodnight and God Bless (2008). Where the Rain is Born (2003) is her edited book on Kerala, her native state. In 2011, she translated the acclaimed Malayalam novelist Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Chemmeen from Malayalam to English. Nair’s play, A Twist of Lime, is based on three short stories: “Sushil and the Maybe Virgin,” “Half a Sin,” and “Trespass.” She has attracted a larger literary audience by adapting her own works to other genres. Nine Faces of Being is her play based on her novel, Mistress. She has also 296

Encyclopedia Entries

written the screenplay and dialogues for Unni Vijayan’s 2012 film Lessons in Forgetting, based on her own novel of the same name. Nair’s books have been translated into over thirty languages around the world. Winner of numerous awards and honors, including the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Crossword Book Award (in the jury award category), she is also the founder of Anita’s Attic, a creative writing mentorship program. As a writer, Nair holds up a mirror to society, highlighting the spaces women are forced to occupy and the extent to which they are forced to shrink. She helps her readers understand what it is like to be a woman, how she thinks, feels, and behaves in contemporary India. She delves deep into women’s psyche and reveals their struggles in their continuous quest for self-actualization.

Further Reading Mishra, Binod. Critical Responses to Feminism. Sarup and Sons, 2006. Mishra, Binod, and Sanjay Kumar. Indian Writings in English. Atlantic, 2006. Pathak, Vandana, et al., editors. Contemporary Fiction: An Anthology of Female Writers. Sarup and Sons, 2008. Prasad, Amar Nath, and Rajiv K. Malik. Indian English Poetry and Fiction: Critical Elucidations, vol. 1. Sarup and Sons, 2007. Sinha, Sunita. Post-colonial Women Writers: New Perspectives. Atlantic, 2008.

NITHIN VARGHESE

NAIR, RUKMINI BHAYA (1952–) Rukmini Bhaya Nair was born to a Bengali father and a Goan mother. She is a well-known academician, poet, writer, and postcolonial critic. Nair pursued her BA honors degree in English literature from the University of Calcutta in 1969. In 1973, she completed her MA in English from the University of Jadavpur, Calcutta, and her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1982. At Cambridge, she was engaged as a part-time tutor in the Department of Linguistics. She joined the National University of Singapore and worked for five years as lecturer in Linguistics. Afterward, she secured the position of Research Scientist by UGC positioned in Jawaharlal Nehru University Centre for Linguistic and English, School of Languages from 1988 to 1991. Nair was a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, in 1993. In 1994 and 1996, she was invited as a visiting professor to the University of Washington, Seattle, US. The same year, she won the first prize from the All India Poetry Society by British Council. In 1992, she published her first poetic collection, The Hyoid Bone. Written in free verse, The Hyoid Bone uses the anatomical metaphor of a free-floating human bone to tease out the meaning through semantic and semiotic transgressions. Nair’s second book of poetry, The Ayodhya Cantos, was published in 1992. With a postmodernist approach, The Ayodhya Cantos asserts the poet’s sensibility over the destruction of Babri Mosque, a controversial site at Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, India, using Dante’s The Divine Comedy for structural framework and poetic locution. In 1997, Nair published a research-based collection of essays titled Techno-brat: Culture in Cybernetic Classroom. This collection deals with the intrusion of technology into the current values systems and the rise of ‘techno-brat’ culture, especially in institutions like IITs. In 2002, Nair published Lying on the Post-Colonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference, in which she argues that post-coloniality is a psychic and recuperative condition which requires a cure, and the cure involves returning to the memories of the colonial trauma. The work rests on the principle that only a thorough and rigorous colonial retrospection can heal and rehabilitate the cankerous 297

Encyclopedia Entries

pain of postcolonial alienation and indifference. In the same year, Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture was published which uses the established theoretical paradigms and frameworks of narratology and cognitive science to explore the ability of the mind to produce literary narratives with finesse. In 2002, her Translation, Text and Theory: The Paradigm of India entails several essays on the precedent aspects of translation discovered through a multilingual matrix of India. In 2003, Nair published Poetry in the Times of Terror, a theoretical ingenuity which raises stirring questions on the relation of poetry to terror, counter-posing the decrees of terror with the poetic codes and principles from the postcolonial lens. In 2004, she published a collection of poems, Yellow Hibiscus, which has a mix of older poems from previous publications and a range of new ones based on Nair’s experiments with the boundaries of language. As a linguistics pedagogue and a poet, she picks on the troubling questions of the role of poetry, women poets in the poetic traditions of male poets, etc. She published her first fictional prose in 2013, Mad Girl’s Love Song, an echo of Sylvia Plath’s poem, which is based on a young girl, Parineeta, whose schizophrenic disorder makes her interact with dead poets and form imaginary relationships. In 2006, for her contribution to academia and creative writing, Nair was bestowed a second honoris causa doctoral degree from the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Nair’s poems have been widely anthologized and translated into diverse languages. She has also been a part of Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, a reference volume that anthologizes the number of wellknown poets across the globe. Her writings, both creative and critical, are taught in university departments. Her awards and fellowships include the J.N. Tata Scholarship, the Hornby Foundation Award, the Dorothy Lee Grant, and Charles Wallace CRASSH fellowship. Nair currently heads the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi, and was the chair of the department from 2006 to 2009.

Further Reading Chaoqun, Xie. “Review of Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture, by Rukmini Bhaya Nair.” Language, vol. 80, no. 2, Jun. 2004, pp. 353–354. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4489702. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. Dasgupta, Sanjukta. “Reviewed of Yellow Hibiscus, by Rukmini Bhaya Nair.” Indian Literature, vol. 49, no. 5 (229), 2005, pp. 210–214. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23346240. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. Nair, R. B. Lying on the Post-Colonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference. U of Minnesota P, 2002.

BHAWNA VIJ ARORA

NAMBISAN, KAVERY (1949–) Postcolonial novelist and doctor, Kavery Nambisan was born in Palangala village in south Kodagu, India, in a politician’s family. She became a doctor after completing her education from St. John’s Medical College, Bangalore, and the University of Liverpool, England. She has worked in various parts of rural India and currently runs a free medical center for migrant laborers. Nambisan’s medical training journey inspired her to write her first novel, The Truth (almost) About Bharat. She was interned in England and then started practicing in Mokama, Bihar, a small municipal district near Patna which is infested with dacoits. The novel she wrote is similar to her medical journey, which too focuses on dacoits, rural India, and medical training through the story of a rebellious young man who runs from his medical training and begins a cross-country journey on a motorcycle. The novel was recently re-released. Additionally, Nambisan’s first nonfiction work, A Luxury Called Health: A  Doctor’s Journey Through the Art, the Science and the Trickery of Medicine, reminds the reader of Fyodor 298

Encyclopedia Entries

Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, where Dostoevsky comments upon the poor and healthcare in the most passionate manner, raising serious ethical questions. Similarly, Nambisan’s attempt is a candid and sincere examination of healthcare for the poor in India. It exposes the functioning or rather the lack of functioning of the healthcare system while also turning the wheel toward an assembly of ideas that can help in making healthcare more effective and affordable for everyone. The novel titled The Hills of Angheri (2005) is yet another work by Nambisan which explores the life of a young female doctor and her career. Nambisan’s sensitivity and empathetic nature are reflected in her writing style. Like Arundhati Roy and Arvind Adiga, she zeros in on contemporary issues like poverty, suffering, inequality, deprivation, disillusionment, and exploitation of the innocent and the weak in society. In The Story Must Not be Told (2010), she explores the criminal psyche of the marginalized. It revolves around Simon Jesukumar, a widower, who finds himself in a complex situation, when the reality of slum life hits him hard, resulting in his involvement with slum terrorism. The book was short-listed for the Man Asian Prize in 2008 and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2012. It provided Nambisan an opportunity to share the stage with other well-known names like Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghvi, Miguel Syjuco, Alfred A. Yuson, and Yu Hua. Nambisan spent most of her early years in Madikeri, a beautiful hill town in South India. Later, she lived with her husband in Halligattu village, Kodagu district, an idyllic place full of life and greenery, which provides the environment for her novel The Scent of Pepper (1996). It is structured like a journey from colonial rule to independence and provides a vivid description of the life and culture of Kodagu people by focusing on one particular family. Nambisan was married to Dr. Bhatt for eighteen years. Her novel Mango-Coloured Fish (1998) is the sad tale of a loveless arranged marriage mirroring her own. The sense of freedom she might have felt after her divorce is reflected in On Wings of Butterflies (2002). The novel narrates a tale about a world where many women like Kripa, Rani, and Evita take charge of their lives and set out to unite the world’s minority-women. Her most recent novel, A Town Like Ours (2014), is narrated Rajakumari, a retired whore. It is characterized by magic realism, wry empathy, poetic undertones, and uncensored language. Namibian has also contributed critical pieces to various journals. The notable among them is “New Issues in Fiction,” published in The Journal of Indian Literature. Namibian has contributed to children’s literature as well. Her books, Once Upon a Forest (1986), The School Upon a Hill, Cuckoo Clock, and Kitty Kite (1987) are remarkable for their intriguing sharpness.

Further Reading Padmavathy, G. Identity Crisis in Select Novels of Kavery Nambisan a Feminist Study. Bharathiar U, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 2019, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/293290. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Prasanna Sree, S. Feminine Sensibility in the Select Novels of Kavery Nambisan. Andhra U, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 2016, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/388260. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

SRISHTI SHARMA

NAMBISAN, VIJAY (1963–2017) Vijay Nambisan, according to his friends, was bright, sensitive, and empathetic in nature; and these character traits were well reflected in his poetry. He graduated from IIT Madras and became a full-time poet. He lived in Halligattu village, Kodagu district. This idyllic place is reminiscent of the Wordsworthian lansdcape of Tintern Abbey, which continuously inspired him and his wife Kavery, who is a doctor and novelist. Nambisan is known for his translations of old 299

Encyclopedia Entries

Sanskrit and Malayalam poems, which also helped in the revival of medieval Indian literature One of his books, Two Measures of Bhakti, contains translations of the Jnanappana poem by Puntanam and the Narayaniyam poem of Melpathur, and a small poem by Mahakavi Vallathol. Nambisan won the first All India Poetry Prize in 1988 for “Madras Central,” in the competition was organized by the British Council and the poetry society of India. The poem has a sense of musicality and is rich in imagination. His two poetic works, Gemini I (1992) and First Infinities (2015) have a huge gap of twenty-three years between them. It is because Nambisan suffered from a heavy bout of skepticism, resulting in the loss of faith in the art: “One reason I’ve not published much since 1992 is that I was pretty much convinced that ‘poetry does not matter’ (Eliot). If poetry does not happen and if ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ (Auden), what is the reason for its being)?” His faith in poetry was, however, restored and First Infinities materialized. The book is a collection of some sixty poems which were written over a span of thirty years; the poems vary in mood, register, tone, form, and theme. For instance, in the poem “The Hole in the Earth,” the poet comes across as serious and mysterious and yet moderately befuddled: “hole through to the earth’s bowels, what beatitude, what hate,/what hope of sanctity,” while in the poem “Void,” we find the poet brooding over serious matters like labor and caste; and in “The Corporate Poet,” Nambisan’s wit and humor take over and he becomes the “voice” to “Solemn Moments and Centenary Celebrations.” Gemini was co-authored with Dom Moraes and Jeet Thayil. Nambisan’s poetic talent comes to surface and underpins his imaginative abilities as well as his uncanny talent to be graceful, ethereal, and lyrical. A  specimen is his metaphysical poem “Holy,” in which he endearingly showcases inanimate objects. Nambisan’s work is experimental and modernist and at the same time evinces a sense of tradition. His poetic language is Indian, unique, and full of abstractions. On Nambisan’s passing, Anjum Hasan wrote: “He was a bhasha writer – not because he wrote in this or that language, but about bhasha itself, and was deeply, even obsessively, interested in what it means to be an Indian now.” Nambisan wrote very few books in his lifetime. Bihar is in the Eye of the Beholder (2000) is a fine piece on Bihar. Language as an Ethic (2003) champions the ethical use of language and makes an appeal to readers, writers, and enthusiasts of literature.

Further Reading Dasgupta, Samik. Vijay Nambisan and The Urge to not Publish, 1st ed. of the Talk Series, The Waiting Room. Studio Safdar, JNU. 2017 = source not found – Sakshi. Lifestyle Desk. “Vijay Nambisan, Poet and Writer, Dead.” The Indian Express, 10 Aug. 2017, indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/vijay-nambisan-poet-and-writer-dead-4790233/. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. Nambisan, Vijay. Language as an Ethic. Penguin Books, 2003.

SRISHTI SHARMA

NAMJOSHI, SUNITI (1941–) Suniti Namjoshi was born in Mumbai, India, to Captain Manohar Vinayak Namjoshi and Sarojini Namjoshi (née Naik Nimbalkar). Her father was a senior test pilot at Hindustan Aircraft in Bangalore and her mother the daughter of Pratapsinha Malojiraje Naik Nimbalkar, Raja of the Princely State of Phaltan. At the age of twelve, Suniti lost her father in an air crash. Her early education took place in Woodstock School in ​​Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, and Rishi Valley School, Andhra Pradesh. She got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature from the University of Pune in 1961 and 1963 respectively and began teaching at the 300

Encyclopedia Entries

Ferguson College before qualifying for the coveted Indian Administrative Services (IAS) in 1964. In 1968, she took study leave from the civil services to pursue a master’s degree in public administration (MPA) from University of Missouri. She resigned from the Indian Administrative Services in 1969 to pursue a doctoral degree in poetry and literature at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. After getting her PhD in 1972, she taught at the University of Toronto, with stints in England at Cambridge University. She openly identifies herself as a lesbian. Namjoshi’s writings consist of fiction, fables, and poetry. She took interest in poetry and literature, even when she was a civil servant; her first book of poems, Poems, was published by Writers Workshop, Calcutta, in 1967. In 1979, Namjoshi wrote her widely acclaimed book Feminist Fables. This book can be described as one of the ways of exploring feminist notions and their implications through mainstream literary traditions. She narrates famous fairy tales and mythological tales from Greek and Indian cultures subverting them with feminist perspectives. In 1985, she published The Conversations of Cow, which describes the travels of Suniti, a lesbian woman, and Bhadravati, a Brahmini cow. Through this book, Namjoshi questions her identity and draws the intersectionality which affects identity and gender. Namjoshi’s books of verse include The Authentic Lie (1982) and From the Bedside Book of Nightmares (1984). Flesh and Paper (1986) is a set of poems in a sequential form illustrating a dialogue between Namjoshi and her partner Gillian Hanscombe, a poet. In 1996, Namjoshi published Building Babel, an account at the intersection of language and culture, with an emphasis on how cultures are built with an extended chapter available online on the internet. Namjoshi has also published a series of books for children and young readers with her niece, Aditi as the protagonist. She has published fifteen books in this genre. The first one is Aditi and the One-Eyed Monkey (1986). She then wrote Aditi and the Thames Dragon (2002) after the children of Blue Gate Fields Junior School, London, had just read Aditi and the One-Eyed Monkey as part of a storytelling session in Tower Hamlets. The subsequent books in the series include Aditi and the Marine Sage (2004), Aditi and the Techno Sage (2005), Aditi and Her Friends Take on the Vesuvian Giant (2007), and Aditi and Her Friends Meet Grendel (2007). In 2000, Namjoshi published her autobiography titled Goja: An Autobiographical Myth. It is an account that moves from narration to interrogation, description to poetry, dialogue to recollection. The book portrays Namjoshi’s journey through childhood and adult life in a conversational manner. Namjoshi’s work has been published in Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Hindi, and Turkish. She lives in Devonshire, England, with her partner Gillian Hanscombe, a writer and poet.

Further Reading Arroyo, Ana García. “Suniti Namjoshi’s Fancy and Facts: A Convergence of Indian and Western Influences.” The Expatriate Indian Writing in English, vol. 1, edited by T. Vinoda and P. Shailaja. Prestige Books, 2006, pp. 100–108. Bowers, Margaret Ann. Crossing Cultures: Self Identity in the Writing of Suniti Namjoshi. MA dissertation. U of Alberta, 1993. 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. 1/2, 1997, pp. 97–113. Rich, Susan. Reading the Self: Positioning the Reader as a Subject of Literary Analysis Through Works by Suniti Namjoshi, Michael Ondaatje, and Dave Eggers. MA dissertation. U of Manitoba, 2009. Vijayasree, C. Suniti Namjoshi: The Artful Transgressor. Rawat Publications, 2001.

VISHWAJEET DESHMUKH

301

Encyclopedia Entries

NANDANVAN AND OTHER STORIES by Lakshmi Kannan Lakshmi Kannan is an internationally known bilingual writer, who writes in Tamil and English. Nandanvan and Other Stories consists of sixteen stories and a novella, which she wrote and published originally in Tamil and then translated into English. Most of the stories are located in familiar spaces: rural and urban homes, public streets, offices, hospitals, and embrace a variety of concerns, such as women in a male-dominated society, problems of old age, bureaucratic tyranny, and fear of disease and death. The stories use varied narrative modes and give ample proof of Kannan’s understanding of the society of her day and also of its rich cultural moorings. The opening story, “Nandanvan,” combines realism with the trappings of a fable to dramatize filial ingratitude. Thatha is pushed out of his home by his children and takes shelter in his garden, where birds brighten his life. When after his death his sons fight each other and leave his body unattended, the birds lift it away from the scene. Almost in a similar vein, but in a verisimilar mode and with a different orientation, “Savvyasachi Square” centers round an old man who is treated harshly by his son and daughter-in-law in their home in London. When he sees an old talented musician playing several instruments on its streets to earn his living, he realizes that he is not the only troubled being in the world. Several women-centered stories dramatize the complicated man-woman relationship, with several edges of complexity to them. In a story named after her, Muniyakka curses her three sons, who have pushed her to live on her own, mocks women who worship snake gods for getting sons, and yet performs the shraddha of her dead husband, who had squandered all her money, with offerings of all the things he had loved. She figures also in “Because . . . ,” where as a defiant being, she shows courage to take on the devil himself. But the story also reveals the suffering of a young widow Kamala and the female oppression in fairy tales. “Simone de Beauvoir and the Manes” exposes married males who use the example of the French writer to entice women like Uma to live with them and also compel them to seek their protection. In “Ejamaanar” Gowri provides the example of a woman who takes care of the family business of her husband with efficiency and also finds ways to bypass the codes of patriarchy, without breaking the permitted boundaries, by spending her time with Sambasivam, in whose company she glows “with extraordinary radiance.” “Zeroing In” and “Maze” are about bureaucratic tyranny. In these stories, honest and hardworking people are subjected to exploitation, which causes them pain and suffering. “Please, Dear God” and “A Sky All Around” are located in hospitals. The first one dramatizes the agony of a person whose wife is in coma. The second one makes available the pain and suffering of a family through the roving spirit of a sick patient. Issues related to gender and male superiority figure in “Maria.” “Just Think About It” and in the novella “Another Hour, Another Hue.” Menfolk show their keenness to associate with women with a modern outlook but cannot put up with their independent thinking. In the novella, they are exploited in their workplaces. A powerful male harasses his female colleagues and research scholars, but when the oppressed women join together, they succeed in fighting his dictatorial ways. Kannan is a gifted artist, who builds effective locations for her stories, which show her keen eye for detail. She also creates memorable characters, who testify to her sound understanding of the complexities of human nature. The stories in the volume confirm that apart from being a skillful writer, she is also a competent translator. The language of the stories is visually rich and lyrical. Wherever necessary, Kannan also explains culture-specific Tamil words and expressions. 302

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Augustine, Seline. “Crossing Cultural Landscapes.” The Literary Review, The Hindu, 4 Dec. 2011, p. 4. Dutta, Ranjeeta. “Review of Nandanvan and Other Stories, by Lakshmi Kannan.” Summer Hill: IIAS Review, vol. 18, no. 1, Summer 2012, pp. 74–75. Indra, C. T. “Phenomenological Explorations: Introducing Lakshmi Kannan’s Short Fiction. Introduction.” Nanadanvan and Other Stories, edited by Lakshmi Kannan. Orient BlackSwann, 2011, pp. 3–20. Rai, Sudha. “A Conversation with Lakshmi Kannan.” Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 6, no. 1 & 2, Jan.–Dec. 2006, pp. 30–38. ———. “Sipping the Jasmine Moon: A Conversation with Lakshmi Kannan.” Enter Text, vol. 7, no. 3, Winter 2007–2008, pp. 110–121.

TEJ N. DHAR

NANDY, PRITISH (1951–) Born in Bhagalpur, Bihar, into a Bengali Christian family, Pritish Nandy is the son of Satish Chandra Nandy and Prafulla Nalini Nandy. His daughters Rangita Pritish-Nandy and Ishita Pritish-Nandy are film producers, creators and show runners, and his son Kushan Nandy is a film producer, writer and director. He was educated at La Martinière College and spent the first twenty-eight years of his life in Kolkata. Nandy has authored forty books of poetry in English and translated a new version of the Isha Upanishad as well as poems by other writers from Bengali and Urdu into English. He has also authored some fiction and nonfiction. His publications include Of Gods & Olives (1967), Lonesong Street (1975), A Stranger Called I (1976), Anywhere is Another Place (1979), Pritish Nandy 30 (1980), The Rainbow Last Night (1981), Again (2010), and Stuck on 1/Forty (2012). Pritish Nandy’s first book of poems Of Gods and Olives was published in 1967. Three more volumes followed in the 1960s and fourteen volumes were published in the 1970s. During the seventies, Nandy edited and published a poetry magazine called Dialogue which published many of India’s finest poets in English and other languages in translation. Dialogue also published over forty books of poems – of first-time poets as well as famous poets. It soon became an iconic platform for contemporary Indian poetry, in English and in translation. In July 1981, Nandy was nominated as a poet laureate by the World Academy of Arts and Culture at the Fifth World Congress of Poets in San Francisco. His poem “Calcutta If You Must Exile Me” is considered a pioneering classic in modern Indian literature. The Government of India conferred on him the Padma Shri in 1977 for his contribution to Indian literature. He wrote a new book of poems called Again in 2010 after a long break and then, Stuck on 1/Forty in 2012. In 2014, his version of the Isha Upanishad was published. Nandy’s early collections of poems did not win widespread acclaim. However, his Nowhere Man did receive some appreciation. The poems in this book indicate some development in the poet’s talents: they are more compact, lyrical, and mature than the ones appearing in the previous books. In the years to follow, Nandy came to be known as one of the most exciting Indian poets in English, with a growing fan base. Nandy’s early poems are mostly in short-line free verse. Some of his early poems form typographical pictures or use e.e. cummings’s style of spacing. Most of his poems are lyrical in which he plays with emotions and passions. He tries to capture the rhythms of the lives of common people. He is mainly a poet of love and romance. Love – sensual and sensuous – is the stuff of his poetry. He presents love in all its shades and colors – from love to sex and from love’s tenderness to its brutal aspect. Sensual images like the scent of the fair sex, jasmine stuck into the hair, make-up and cosmetics, etc., often adorn his poems. In his poems, we find him looking for 303

Encyclopedia Entries

his heroine – Premkumari (Miss Love) and Roopkumari (Miss Face) – who could inspire him to write poems replete with sensual love, romance, and lyricism. To express his emotions in his poetry, Nandy tried to achieve a breakthrough in poetic form and evolve a new language – Indian English. He felt that creative writing in English by Indians was by and large imitative in both form and approach. Indian poets needed a new language that was structurally powerful and had a logic of its own. Nandy was long preoccupied with the frustrations of saying anything meaningful. Perhaps that was the reason why he pressed his own images together so as to make some kind of surreal sense. However, death, loneliness, suffering, and the mitigations of love, sex, and friendship remained prominent themes of his poetry. In Masks to Be Interpreted as Messages, Nandy went for short statements in rhythmic prose; in his best-known poem, “Calcutta, If You Must Exile Me,” he stated the cruelties that revolted him in a harshly direct style. The horrors in Bangladesh in the early 1970s pushed him into sympathizing with all victims of hate, whether in Bangladesh or Colombia. Although Nandy writes for those who do not understand the language of his poetry, he regards his voice as the voice of his people; he speaks of their loves, their ambitions, and their secret shames.

Further Reading “Pritish Nandy Takes to Poetry ‘Again’ after 20 Years.” Decan Herald, 28 May 2010, www.deccanherald. com/content/72014/pritish-nandy-takes-poetry-again.html. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023.

RAJESH WILLIAMS

NARAYAN, KIRIN (1959–) Kirin Narayan was born to an Indian father and an American mother. She is a novelist, anthropologist, and folklorist who experimented with genres in terms of both ethnography and literature. She has written fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction, academic prose, and writings about writings. Her major works include Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narratives in Hindu Religious Teaching (1989), Love, Stars and All that (1994), Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012), and Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses of the Himalaya Foothills (2016). She has taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is currently working at the Australian National University. In her childhood days in India, Narayan’s family would host saints, artists, and storytellers. She has acknowledged the influence of these engagements in her book My Family and Other Saints, and her interest in the folk practices in the country is embodied as serious study in her first book titled Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narratives in Hindu Religious Teaching. In this book, which won her the 1990 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, she presents a memorable character of Swamiji, a Hindu ascetic in Maharashtra, and his engagements with a diverse set of audience including herself through entrancing folk tales. Narayan presents these tales, their alternative versions, and the responses of the audience to explain the centrality of narratives in Hindu practices and everyday lives of people in India. Love, Stars and All That was Narayan’s debut novel that tells the story of Gita Das and her entanglements with different cultures. Gita is an academic who lives in two worlds of India and the United States. A new episode in her life is triggered by her aunt’s astrologer’s prediction that she would find her Mr. Right by a particular date. Filled with humor, wit, and satire, the book is endearing because of its vivid characterization and attention to detail in explaining different cultures. Narayan has explained that she wrote this comic novel during her fieldwork in 304

Encyclopedia Entries

Himalayan foothills during 1990–1991 and that the writing process helped her stay cheerful in those times. Narayan’s interest in writing and in genre-bending practices is well exemplified in her 2012 book titled Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov. This book narrates the life, works, and writing process of the acclaimed Russian author Anton Chekov. In addition to providing a literary analysis, it offers writing guidance to aspiring and practicing writers. Although Chekhov is popular for the fiction that he wrote, Narayan draws from Chekhov’s nonfiction account of Sakhalin Islands – the Russian penal colony – in order to explain what could be studied, adopted, and used in one’s writing. She gives instructions to writers on particular topics including story, person, place, voice, and self. The book combines the practices of biography, ethnography, and literature to discuss the art of writing and how to form human connections through that art. Narayan’s return to the foothills of Himalayas as an ethnographer produced her book Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills on the centrality of creativity, particularly the practice of music, in the lives of Kangra women. This book explores larger questions of pleasure and well-being in the individual and communal lives of the people. She presents a wide range of songs on goddesses and saints and introduces female singers to unpack the everyday creativity of women within many constraints of living in a patriarchal society. Like her other books, Everyday Creativity resists simple categorization. It draws from ethnography, memoir, folklore, music, and poetry to discuss a living tradition and its contexts. Narayan’s most recent project is a collaborative one on the myths and arts of Ellora. She brings together the best of many worlds to practice “writing with rather than writing about” and to engage with the world in the most reflexive manner.

Further Reading Muthyala, John. “Review of Love, Stars and All That, by Kirin Narayan.” MELUS, vol. 23, no. 2, Jun. 1998, pp. 205–206. Oxford Academic, https://doi.org/10.2307/468021. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. Narayan, Kirin. “Ethnographic Writing with Kirin Narayan: An Interview.” Conducted by Carole McGranahan, Savage Minds, 3 Feb. 2014, savageminds.org/2014/02/03/ethnographic-writing-withkirin-narayan-an-interview/. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023.

VEENA MANI

NARAYAN, R.K. (1906–2001) The third of eight children, Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami was born in British Madras (now Tamil Nadu). At the insistence of Hamish Hamilton – his English publisher – and long-time friend and benefactor Graham Greene, he later shortened his name to R.K. Narayan. Narayan and his siblings grew up around books, as they had easy access to the school library where their father was English headmaster. Additionally, Narayan’s grandmother, who raised him, provided the children with a steady supply of Indian folktales and classical music. His uncle, meanwhile, exposed Narayan to Shakespeare and classical Tamil literature. Narayan grew up in a bilingual household, speaking Tamil and strictly enforced “correct” English at home. For all his immersion in arts and letters, however, Narayan was a mediocre student. Prone to daydreaming in class and inept at arithmetic, he twice failed his university entrance exams. Narayan eventually graduated from Maharaja’s College, Mysore, after which he spent all of four unhappy days as a teacher. Having tried his hand at writing during his college days, Narayan reports in his memoir of opening an exercise book in late September 1930, chewing at 305

Encyclopedia Entries

his pen, and awaiting inspiration. He envisioned a railway station whose name, he would later report, seemed to hurl into view. Thus was conceived Malgudi, the South Indian town that provides the backdrop for much of Narayan’s voluminous oeuvre: fourteen novels, a memoir, two travel books, two plays, innumerable essays, and over two hundred short stories. Oblique references to Mysore landmarks notwithstanding, Malgudi shares little with the big cities of post-independence India. A laid-back hinterland nestled in the Mempi hills – an imagined bioregion that figures heavily in Narayan’s narratives – Malgudi features quirky characters faced with life-changing circumstances. The Guide (1958), arguably Narayan’s most well-received work, follows Raju, a corrupt but endearing tour guide who falls in love with a courtesan, lands in prison, and turns into an ascetic. Upon his release from prison following a forgery charge, Raju takes shelter in a cave near a village. The locals mistake him for a sadhu, which Raju tries to play to his advantage. Over the course of acting the part, however, Raju shifts from posing as a holy man to actually believing he is one. Whereas the picaresque Raju shifts from small-time crook to saint, Sri K.V. Jagan, the gentle and unambitious protagonist of The Vendor of Sweets (1967), dedicates himself at the outset to a life of quiet contemplation and Gandhian nonviolence. Yet his self-perceived rectitude has its limits: Jagan enjoys financial success as a local shopkeeper and underreports his profits to avoid paying taxes. We also learn of Jagan’s strained relationship with Mali, his only son. With ambitions beyond small-town South India, Mali travels abroad, returns to Malgudi with a foreign woman, and hatches a get-rich-quick scheme involving a recursive story generator. Mali’s worldly ways are too much for the monkish Jagan; and upon learning that Mali has been arrested for driving with a bottle of alcohol, he decides once and for all to withdraw from the world, leaving his money and business for Mali to do with as he will. The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961) also centers on the travails of a meek businessman. Here, a printer named Nataraj finds his world turned upside when Vasu, a domineering taxidermist, takes up residency in Nataraj’s attic. Matters go from bad to worse as Vasu shoots a neighborhood dog, poaches wildlife from the nearby hills, and kills countless birds and other small animals for his taxidermy practice. Nataraj tries to confront Vasu upon learning of his plans to shoot an elephant, only to discover Vasu dead in the attic. An autopsy reveals that a blow to the head killed Vasu, leaving Nataraj’s reputation and business in ruins. In a playful, albeit morbid, twist on the Bhasmasura myth, we learn that Vasu died by his own hand upon trying to smash a mosquito that had alighted on his head. A Tiger for Malgudi (1983) is something of an unofficial sequel to Man-Eater. Beyond the title and setting, however, the two novels have little in common. Narrated in the first-person by an aged tiger named Raja, Tiger opens with Raja’s early days in the jungle. We learn of his capture by Captain – a cruel circus owner – and eventual escape. Following a rampage through Malgudi, Raja is once again captured, this time by an old monk known as the Master. The Master and Raja live a quiet life in the hills, but as the Master grows older, he can no longer care for Raja and donates him to a local zoo. Raja spends his final days reflecting upon his life and the experience of aging. As with many of Narayan’s other novels, The Painter of Signs (1977) trades in comic misunderstandings to ask serious questions about social progress in post-independence India. A local sign maker named Raman quibbles with Malgudi’s locals – a pompous lawyer who refuses to pay Raman for his work, a bangle-seller unhappy with Raman’s choice of colors, and a crooked street-preacher who censures Raman’s Strictly Cash sign even as he charges passersby for spiritual guidance – before meeting Daisy, a strong-willed and independent woman who works for a family planning clinic. Raman develops feelings for Daisy, but Daisy shows little interest in

306

Encyclopedia Entries

Raman. Instead, she focuses on educating rural villagers about contraception. The pair gradually develops a complicated romantic relationship, but Daisy leaves Raman at the end of the novel, citing her dedication to her work. Under the Banyan Tree (1985) compiles twenty-eight of Narayan’s two hundred-plus short stories, all set in Malgudi. As with his novels, the collection synthesizes comedy and social realism to explore the lives of everyday people in post-Independence India. In his introduction to the collection, Narayan emphasizes that he arranged the stories almost entirely at random. He adds, however, that he contrived to open the collection with a rebellious young intellectual and conclude with an old storyteller who takes a vow of silence. Narayan criticism roughly falls into three camps. As Manisha Basu notes, early readers focused on questions of authenticity to debate how Narayan balanced his “fidelity to the sights, smells, and sounds of what is allegedly an authentic India” with a Brahminical Hinduism that distilled India’s ostensibly eternal essence. Ian Almond suggests that V.S. Naipaul sheds light on Greene’s enthusiastic yet cryptic endorsement. In a discussion of his different responses to Mr. Sampath before and after traveling to India, Naipaul reports that in his youth, the novel was little more than a “comedy of small-town life and a picaresque, wandering narrative” (Almond). Critics such as Anita Desai and Harveen Mann, however, argue that Malgudi’s apparent universalism in fact represents Brahminical patriarchy and casteism. Mann notes that although novels such as Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) and The Painter of Signs make “engaged statements on modern Indian nationalism, especially as it is underwritten by patriarchal religious beliefs that marginalize women,” they nevertheless play to Narayan’s “middle-class, Hindu upper-caste, androcentric, conservative” sympathies (Mann). The very idea of an “authentic India,” these critics argue, collapses into a patriarchal, Brahminincal ethic that ignores the ruptures and discontinuities of Indian life both during and after the colonial occupation (Desai). For Basu, both the laudatory and critical responses to Narayan beg the question insofar as they demand we reduce his oeuvre to an “authentic” representation of what it means to be Indian that also, paradoxically, betrays Narayan’s failure to adequately represent Indianness. Put another way, the terms upon which critics praise and condemn Narayan require that we receive him as either/both “insufficiently Indian” and/or the “false icon” of an outdated Indian authenticity (Basu). Basu proposes that we attend instead to how Narayan’s work embodies a “heterogeneity of expressive practices” that trouble collective assumptions about Indian nationalism in the post-independence era. Other critics have revisited Narayan’s engagement with gender equity. Teresa Hubel’s sensitive reading of The Man-Eater of Malgudi, meanwhile, redirects our attention from Nataraj and Vasu to the courtesans Padma and Rangi. The locals’ contradictory attitudes toward these women, Hubel shows, raise urgent questions about devadasi dispossession and sexual propriety at the margins of Malgudi’s predominantly Brahmin society. Controversies about authenticity, caste, and gender notwithstanding, Narayan’s imprint on Indian literature in English is unmistakable. His influence has thus positioned him as one of the “Great Trinity” of Indian writers in English alongside Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao. Narayan’s penchant for humor and social realism distinguished him from his contemporaries. He consistently refused closure for the dilemmas his characters lived through, instead parodying alleged solutions by revealing the gaps, inconsistencies, and indecisions that those very solutions implied. Perhaps the greatest joke is on critics who grapple with his corpus – his selfproclaimed apoliticism reveals neither an orthodox Brahminism nor a radical politics. Rather, Narayan delights in the precipices of indecisiveness, the turbulence and rupture of modern India begging not an answer, but instead proposing unending questions.

307

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Almond, Ian. “Darker Shades of Malgudi: Solitary Figures of Modernity in the Stories of R. K. Narayan.”  Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 36, no. 2, 2001, pp.  107–116. Sage Publications, https://doi.org/10.1177/002198940103600209. Basu, Manisha. “A Matter of Light and Shade: Fiction and Criticism in R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi.” Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture, vol. 40, no. 2, 2013, pp. 215–238. Duke UP, https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2151857. Desai, Anita. “Indian Fiction Today.” Daedalus, vol. 118, no. 4, 1989, pp. 206–231. Hubel, Teresa. “Devadasi Defiance and The Man-Eater of Malgudi.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 29, no. 1, 1994, pp. 15–28. Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/002198949402900103. Mann, Harveen. “ ‘The Magic Idyll of Antiquated India’: Patriarchal Nationalism in R. K. Narayan’s Fiction.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 31, no. 4, 2000, pp. 59–75. Walsh, William. R. K. Narayan: A Critical Appreciation. Allied Publishers, 1983.

JASON SANDHAR

NARAYAN, SHYAMALA A. (1947–) Shyamala A. Narayan (née Shyamala Venkateswaran) was born in Shimla into a Tamil Brahmin family. She had her education in Shimla, with a BA degree in English, mathematics, and Sanskrit from Panjab University, Chandigarh. She finished her master’s degree in English from Mysore University in 1968 with a first class first rank. In 1971, she submitted her PhD thesis titled “Raja Rao and the Indian Novel in English” under the supervision of C.D. Narasimhaiah. In 1972, Narayan began her journey as bibliographer when she was invited to compile and introduce the India section of the “Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature” for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, work she has continued to this date. She taught at St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, and Ranchi Women’s College, Ranchi, before joining Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, where she retired in 2012 as Professor and Head of the Department of English. Narayan has written seven books of criticism and more than one hundred research papers. She has published book reviews in scholarly journals like World Literature Today, ARIEL: A  Review of International English Literature, The Wascana Review, and Indian Literature. More than 200 book reviews commissioned by The Hindu appeared in the period 1979 to 2004. Her monograph on the novelist Sudhin N. Ghose was published in 1973 in Arnold Heinemann India’s Indian Writers series. Sudhin N. Ghose (1989) in Sahitya Akademi’s “Makers of Indian Literature Series” is targeted at the general reader. Narayan locates Ghose as the first Indian English novelist within the Indian storytelling tradition; he used the technique of mixing prose and poetry in his novels, just like champu, a style popular in Sanskrit narrative. Both monographs carry a biographical note, followed by a discussion of Ghose’s four published novels. A chapter is devoted to his other works, such as folk tales, and two unpublished novels. Raja Rao: The Man and His Work (1988) devotes chapters to his short stories and to each of his novels. Rao’s The Chessmaster and His Moves, published the same year, is discussed in the appendix; Narayan is disappointed with this long novel, and agrees with M.K. Naik who considered it “a little more than a re-working of material already presented.” Non-Fictional Indian Prose in English 1960–1990 (1998) is an anthology commissioned by the Sahitya Akademi, edited with an introduction by Narayan. Indian English Literature 1980–2000: A  Critical Survey (2001), co-authored with M.K. Naik, is a sequel to Naik’s A History of Indian English Literature (Sahitya Akademi, 1982). With eleven chapters, the critical survey spans the genres of fiction, short stories, poetry, drama, and nonfiction prose. Of great value is a separate chapter on women novelists, titled “A Room of Their Own.” The book also provides a bibliography of secondary sources. Narayan combines 308

Encyclopedia Entries

her roles as critic, researcher, and bibliographer in her most recent work, Indian English Literature 2001–2015: A Critical Survey (2020). A valuable aid for the researcher of Indian English writing, the book follows the same structure as Indian English Literature 1980–2000: A Critical Survey, with chapters devoted to various genres. The chapter, “New Trends in Fiction” signposts relatively more recent categories such as popular literature, speculative fiction, “chick lit,” and novels rereading Indian mythology. Literature for children and young adults is the subject of a separate chapter. Narayan’s criticism of literary works is marked by precision and avoidance of jargon. She draws attention to works like Sudhin N. Ghose’s tetralogy which have been undeservedly neglected. The article “Two Novels:  The God of Small Things  by Arundhati Roy and  Green Well Years by Manohar Devadoss, A Study in Contrast” discusses a well-written bildungsroman published in 1997, the same year as Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize winner. Narayan’s exhaustive compilation of the annual bibliography of Indian English books along with a critical introduction is indispensable for both the reader and researcher of Indian English literature.

Further Reading Narayan, Shyamala A. Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Sage Publications, 1972–2021. ———. “Two Novels: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Green Well Years by Manohar Devadoss.” Critical Spectrum: Essays in Literary Culture, edited by Satish C. Aikant. Pencraft International, 2004. Rajalakshmi, P. K. Newspaper Book Reviews in India: A Case Study of Dr. Shyamala A. Narayan. MPhil dissertation. Madurai Kamaraj U, 2002.

PAYAL NAGPAL

NARASIMHAIAH, C.D. (1921–2005) Closepet Dasappa Narasimhaiah was born into a Backward Caste family in the small town of Closepet (now renamed Ramanagara), near Mysore. His father was a poor, semi-literate shopkeeper who wanted him to have an English education. Narasimhaiah went to a Kannada medium school. Two scholarships, a merit scholarship and a Backward Class scholarship, enabled him to attend Maharaja’s College, Mysore. He did so well in his MA that he was immediately appointed a lecturer there. He went to Cambridge on a Damodardos scholarship where he was deeply influenced by his tutor, F.R. Leavis. A Rockefeller Fellowship took him to Princeton University and facilitated his study of American literature. He was a professor and the head of the Department of English, University of Mysore, from 1950 to 1979. He was visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and various universities, including Queensland, Leeds, and Texas. In 1979, he established the “Literary Criterion Centre for English Studies and Indigenous Arts” at Mysore and named it “Dhvanyaloka” after the 9th-century scholar Anandavardhana’s great work of poetics. The Indian government honored him with the Padma Bhushan in 1990, and the Government of Karnataka with the Rajyotsava Prashasti in 1986. As a professor of English, and later as the principal of Maharajah’s College, Mysore, Narasimhaiah included Indian English literature in the syllabus in the 1950s; his ‘N’ for Nobody: Autobiography of an English Teacher (1991) recounts the opposition he faced. American literature and commonwealth literature followed in the 1960s. He attracted attention for these new areas of study with his own publications as well as by organizing seminars bringing together critics and educators. He also founded the scholarly journal, The Literary Criterion, in 1952. CDN (as he was popularly known) was the first to draw attention to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as a 309

Encyclopedia Entries

writer, publishing India Rediscovered (1954), an abridgment of The Discovery of India which won the approval of Nehru himself. Jawaharlal Nehru: A Study of His Writings and Speeches (1960) was Narasimhaiah’s first full-length book of literary criticism. Narasimhaiah wrote fifteen books of literary criticism, such as The Swan and the Eagle (1969), Moving Frontiers of English Studies in India (1977), The Function of Criticism in India (1986), Indian Critical Scene: Controversial Essays (1990), and Commonwealth Literature: Heirloom of Multiple Heritage (1995). Most of them originated as a series of lectures or an introduction to a collection of essays. He edited more than twenty-five books including An Introduction to Australian Literature (1965), Indian Literature of the Past Fifty Years 1917–1967 (1970), Awakened Conscience: Essays in Commonwealth Literature (1976), A Common Poetic for Indian Literatures (1985), Western Writers on India (1992), East West Poetics at Work (1994), and The Vitality of West Indian Literature (2000). Narasimhaiah’s critical practice involved a close reading of the text with extensive quotations to support his analysis. For him, criticism “is to analyse and evaluate a poem, a novel, a play so as to win attention to it, and in doing so create a current of fresh and vigorous ideas” (Essays in Commonwealth Literature). He wanted Indian scholars to “preserve our link with tradition and foster a sense of continuity” and also “assimilate the best elements in Western criticism” (The Function of Criticism in India). He rejected recent literary theories like structuralism. Passion is the dominant note of his criticism; he makes no secret of his likes or dislikes. Many of his essays express his reaction against popular critical opinion: he condemned Naipaul’s writings and argued that Kipling’s depiction of India is far superior to that of E.M. Forster. CDN declared categorically, “Indian Writing in English is to me primarily part of the literature of India, in the same way as literatures written in various regional languages are.” The Swan and the Eagle (1969) was the second ever book to examine Indian writing in English. He established the Indian chapter of ACLALS (Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language studies) in 1974 and was the chairperson of IACLALS till 1993. As a teacher and organizer of seminars at Mysore University and Dhvanyaloka, he shaped the course of English studies in India in the 20th century.

Further Reading Das, Bijay Kumar. A Memorial Volume in Honour of C. D. Narasimhaiah & Shiv K. Kumar. The Researchers’ Association, 2022. Hajela, Sudhir C., editor. “A Birth Centenary Commemorative Issue on Prof CD Narsimhaiah.” Special issue of Dialogue: A Journal Devoted to Literary Appreciation, vol. 17, no. 1–2, 2021. Shankar, D. A., et al., editors. Theory in Practice: Essays in Honour of C. D. Narasimhaiah. CDN Felicitation Committee, 2001. Sharma, Bandana, and L. R. Sharma. The Twain Shall Meet: Indian Criticism and C. D. Narasimhaiah. Silver Birch, 1998.

SHYAMALA A. NARAYAN

NARASIMHAN, RAJI (1930–) Born in Madras, Raji Narasimhan is a distinguished scholar in the field of Indian writing in English and translation studies. Her journey as a writer began in the arena of journalism, where she worked for leading newspapers like The Indian Express and Hindustan Times. In the early 1970s, she transitioned into creative writing, beginning with book reviews and literary or critical analyses for Sahitya Akademi’s journal, Indian Literature. Since then, she has been writing, reviewing, and contributing to contemporary literary discourses. 310

Encyclopedia Entries

Raji Narasimhan’s fiction focuses on the lived experiences of women, as they struggle, earn, and strive for an independent existence without the desire to irrationally depend on a husband or family for economic support. Forever Free (1979), as the title suggests, is a novel based on the experiences of Shree, who realizes the necessity of a room of one’s own. Even though she has always lived at home, she suffers the insulting environment of her marital home and is forced to look for work. The novel explores the dilemma of Shree seeking a space of her own, realizing the significance of stepping out and interacting with society, and crafting a new sense of self. In Drifting to a Dawn (1983), through the character of Loma, Narasimhan foregrounds a woman who is exemplary and has the energy and drive to fight for herself and establish her own place. The journey from being a daughter to a woman, from obedience to defiance, and from compromise to cooperation, Loma’s life, like Shree’s, arrives at a point where she is able to fashion her own identity as a woman living life on her own terms and in her own space. The Sky Changes (1991) is the story of Krishna, who tries to escape from her husband but is forced by her mother to remain in a miserable marital set up. The irony of her mother’s own affairs, while she forces her daughter to stick with a husband who is abusive, makes Krishna believe that she is destined to live this hapless life, dictated by her mother and subject to the whims of her husband. Atonement (2000) seeks to address the tension that arises when the parents have differing ideas about what their daughter should be doing in life. Narasimhan’s famous story, “A  Toast to Herself ” (1986), is a writer’s fight with society to make place for a working woman who prioritizes her work over her yearning for male companionship. The isolation that Priya faces as a writer who does not make much money is poignantly evoked by Narasimhan. In the face of a mother saddened by the prospect that her daughter might never marry, Priya’s struggle for autonomy is intertwined with her need for companionship. Similar themes around love, marriage, and equality are dealt with in The Marriage of Bela and Other Stories (1978). Raji Narasimhan has translated works of Krishna Sobti (To Hell with You Mitro), Rajee Sethi (Unarmed, Not Without Reason and Other Stories), and Maitreyi Pushpa (Alma Kabutri). Her own collection of essays, Translation as a Touchstone (2013) is a critical addition to the area of translation. Another work, titled Sensibility Under Stress: Aspects of lndo-English-Fiction (1976), is considered a key text in the analysis of the works under the rubric of Indian writing in English. Raji Narasimhan’s work has been perceived as insightful. Drawing from her own life experiences, each of her works is a radical testimony to her talent as a creative writer. Her longstanding presence and the range of her writing ensure that questions of womanhood, selfhood, and agency will remain pertinent to literary discourse.

Further Reading Manohar, D. Murali. Indian English Women’s Fiction: A Study of Marriage, Career and Divorce. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2007. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “Indo-English: A Natural Part.” Indian Literature, vol. 23, no. 6, 1980, pp. 102– 112. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23330264. Accessed 10 Aug. 2022. Riemenschneider, Dieter. “Indian Women Writing in English: The Short Story.” World Literature Written in English, vol. 25, no. 2, 1985, pp. 312–318. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17449858508588952. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. Satchidanandan, K. Indian Literature, vol. 52, no. 3 (245), 2008, pp. 202–205. JSTOR www.jstor.org/ stable/23340541. Accessed 10 Aug. 2022.

DISHA POKHRIYAL

311

Encyclopedia Entries

ONCE WAS BOMBAY by Pinki Virani Published in 1999, Once Was Bombay is Pinki Virani’s second book. It is divided into three novellas and four short stories. The book laments the loss of the city of Bombay that once existed and how it has been usurped by its politicians, its underworld, the dons, the mafia, gang wars, and communal divides. The book is the author’s way of seeking answers to how a beautiful city representing the rich Indian culture and heritage, the commercial capital of the country, has turned from a shahar into a shamshaan ghat (town to a cemetery). Through a medley of characters, the author gives us glimpses of the many Bombays that exist side by side. Nostalgic and thought-provoking, Once Was Bombay is a diverse picture of Bombay city. The author talks about a Bombay that once was and no longer is. The book begins with the line “Who killed Bombay?” The question is answered in the very next line before the reader gets a chance to ponder over it. The answer is we did. By we the author implies the residents of Mumbai. With the change in its name, the old city of Bombay died, and a new city called Mumbai emerged from its ruins. People’s attitude, alienation from values, isolation, lack of apathy, selfishness, and materialistic race to power and wealth lead to the moral demolition of a once beautiful and vibrant city. Virani describes the pulse of the dying city through different stories picked up from various parts of the city. Through the characters of these stories, she reveals the city’s problems. Deftly written as nonfiction, this insightful and emotional narrative can be easily read as fiction. A builder is shot dead due to mistaken identity, and his death is a message to the rest of the builder community to behave and pay up. The circumstances in the city are such that the police cannot handle the crimes and the criminals even if they want to. Oftentimes, the police are a party to the criminals and the crimes and the line between politicians and the gangsters keeps getting blurred until one cannot tell the one from the other. Babliseth, a glassware owner on a small island, is constantly harassed by the haftawalas and is forced to leave the house he has lived in all his life due to communal tension and riots. The political parties stoop down to the lowest levels to gather a vote bank. Virani gets under the belly of the city exposing the upper-class genteel society for its hypocrisy, a society that is underbred and overdressed or over-bred and underdressed. She chronicles the life of a local gangster through a series of personal interviews and suggests through him that every class of society is rotten from the inside. While some are open and unabashed about their actions, yet others shove their acts under the carpet. We get a peek into Bollywood, its lifestyle, its connection with the underworld, and much more. While the residents of Bombay can connect to the book on every level, non-residents can also feel the throbbing pulse of the city through scenes portraying violence, religious intolerance, destruction of property, and slogan shouting by vested interests playing the politics of fear. The author shows how most of the people in the city are subject to injustice, whether they are from the upper classes or the lower classes. All of them are fighting their own battles. The book serves as a cruel revelation on several levels and mourns the loss of Bombay. It can be read as the sad story of a struggling city whose own people have abandoned her. The city cries for help in vain and ultimately dies a slow and painful death of despair and disillusion. It does not die because it was attacked but because it was never defended. The proverbial city of dreams has now become synonymous with hooliganism or goondagardi in all spheres. Pinki Virani combines her writing prowess and her journalistic skills to weave out a narrative that makes the reader tremble at the fate awaiting Mumbai.

312

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Sardesai, Rajdeep. “Book Review: Pinki Virani’s ‘Once was Bombay.’ ” India Today, 1 Feb. 2013, www. indiatoday.in/magazine/society-the-arts/books/story/19990906-book-review-of-pinki-virani-once-wasbombay-824308-1999-09-06. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023.

NAVREET SAHI

OPIUM CLERK, THE, by Kunal Basu The Opium Clerk is the first novel by Kunal Basu, a writer born in Calcutta in 1956, who lived in Canada, the United States, and now in Britain. It is an extraordinary work that adds yet another dimension to the lively contemporary scene of Indian writing in English. The story of not just one opium clerk but of two, it covers the span of a century – from 1857 to 1941 – and takes the reader from Patna to Calcutta, via the peninsula of Malacca to Canton, and finally to Kuching in Sarawak. The Opium Clerk is a work of fiction, yet its narrative stance also includes that of the chronicler and historian. Of central concern is the opium trade in South-East and East Asia and the complex economic, financial, political, and personal involvement of a host of its agents: the British East India Company and its representatives in Calcutta, Chinese traders and customers, British anti-opium trade watchdogs, and shady agents with their personal, financial, and political ambitions. Besides, the reader comes to know about British policy in China at the end of the 19th century, the legal abolition of the trade by the 20th century, and trespassing of the law in the China Sea and its adjacent countries, such as Sarawak where a British subject has become the Raja of a small state and employs a diversity of people – British, Indian, and Chinese – to protect his own opium monopoly. Basu’s story meanders slowly through a multitude of events and includes a large number of people from the moment Hiran, the eponymous clerk, is born on the day his father, a Brahmin priest, is unluckily trampled to death in Patna when British soldiers storm the besieged the city of the mutineers. Mother and son move to her ancestral home in Calcutta where Hiran begins to earn a small income at the Customs House. Only slowly does he learn what his work is all about: trading opium between Britain, India, and East Asia. Work takes him to Canton where he is used as a tool in the power game between a monk community, the local viceroy, and the British. The events in Hiran’s life of which he is often a mere spectator, if not a puppet serving various economic, financial, and political interests he neither grasps nor is made to understand, make up the greater part of the novel before he is left behind, back in Calcutta, while attention is focused on his adopted son Douglas who arrives in Sarawak at the beginning of the 1930s to take up a job at the local Customs House. The story speeds up, covering events in the life of an often gloomy man who eventually falls in love with a local English woman, Ruth, who because of her past in Sarawak is referred to as a tramp. Just before the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, like other expatriates, the couple and their servants leave Kuching and thenceforth live in Canada. It is more often their general situation rather than their single fate the narrator has in mind, which however enables him to present different groups of people living in the British colonies: English traders, captains, missionaries, and teachers on the one hand and Indian and Chinese intermediaries, clerks, sailors, and soldiers on the other though it is not always easy to keep track of each character against a background of historical details the narrator/author has assembled around them.

313

Encyclopedia Entries

Nonetheless, Basu has authored a fascinating story which tells us much about the opium trade and the lives of common people whose stories do not usually figure in history books. His love for detail is matched by a language rich in texture, often poetical and visionary. The Opium Clerk looks back at a long span of the subcontinent’s history that transcends the borders of modern India and implicitly questions the idea of nation as an imagined community geographically and historically speaking.

Further Reading Basu, Kunal. “The Opium Clerk.” Kunal Basu, www.kunalbasu.com/books/english/the-opium-clerk. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023.

DIETER RIEMENSCHNEIDER

OUR MOON HAS BLOOD CLOTS: THE EXODUS OF THE KASHMIRI PANDIT by Rahul Pandita Stories about the planned genocide and forced migration of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley have not received adequate attention. In the recent past, however, several writers who had to flee from their homes in the face of unabated violence have penned their memoirs, chronicling the sufferings they underwent individually as well as collectively. Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon Has Blood Clots (2013) is a gut-wrenching account of the humiliation and indignities suffered by the religious minority in a valley that is steeped in violence and bloodshed. It strings together episodes of trauma experienced at firsthand. Memory plays an important role in recounting painful episodes from the past. A fourteen-year-old Pandita, along with his family, had escaped from Kashmir during the notorious ethnic cleansing, spent time in transit camps and other shelters, and rebuilt a new life away from his homeland. More than twenty years later, in his memoir, he takes an unflinching look at stark realities, the flight from the so-called paradise on earth, the degradation and squalor of rehab camps, mental and physical agony, the callous indifference of political leaders in power, and the total hopelessness of the situation. Gory scenes are evoked constantly. According to Pandita, it was not only the armed terrorist who took pride in such killings – the common man on the streets participated in some of these heinous murders as well. In particular, Pandita mentions the killing of B.K. Ganjoo who hid in his attic but was betrayed by his neighbours, discovered in a can of rice, and shot in the head even as he cowered helplessly. Kashmir, for the writer, is now a state of mind, a memory, an overdose of nostalgia. Memories haunt him and he lives in permanent exile. Pandita’s aim, in his book, is to “set the record straight. . . . Because the liberal discourse of this country and the media have, by and large, bypassed our story. Our story has been relegated to the margins.” The pain and agony of his community, the reality he has learned to live with, remains a festering wound that refuses to heal. Interspersed between the vignettes of pain, however, there are glimpses of an idyllic life: We also lived a very beautiful life in Kashmir, where there was a lihaaz, a consideration, between the two communities; we shared a very beautiful relationship. But .  .  . we always had this fear, this suspicion about each other, which culminated in the brutality in 1989. These occasional glimpses of beauty amidst a sordid story make the painful drama even more poignant. Our Moon Has Blood Clots is a cruel reminder of how human beings can lose their 314

Encyclopedia Entries

humanity and stoop to the lowest levels of violence and bloodshed for the sake of something abstract like religion or faith. Pandita’s style is lucid, and he refrains from making his story melodramatic. He does not spare anyone, not even the Hindu right wing. But he makes it clear that there is no going back: the displaced community has little hope of returning home. A moving episode in this memoir relates to Rahul Pandita’s mother who could never reconcile to the forced eviction from her home. She would ramble ceaselessly about the twenty-tworoom house they had left behind until she finally lost her voice and lapsed into silence. This lapsing into silence is yet another erasure, a strategy that personal narratives resort to. Memory, as the narrative illustrates, is a mischief-monger that can make you ramble ceaselessly or else silence one forever. Short-listed for the Crossword Book Award 2013 in the nonfiction category, Our Moon Has Blood Clots has been praised by readers and critics for its stark, unflinching honesty. The eminent historian, Ramachandra Guha believes that it “throws new light on one of the most tragic conflicts in the modern world. Every paragraph of this compelling memoir rings true.” It has been cited as a bold attempt at countering propaganda with truth, voicing the despair of a nation that mouths lofty platitudes but does little to protect its persecuted communities.

Further Reading Kamal. Our Moon Has Blood Clots, https://arcadelamor.org/our-moon-has-blood-clots/. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. Narayan, Manjula. “Review of Our Moon Has Blood Clots, by Rahul Pandita.” Hindustan Times, 19 Jan. 2013, www.hindustantimes.com/books/review-our-moon-has-blood-clots/story-6IDCugmB6 heFDJDJ7NN08N.html. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. Pimpale, Priyanka. “Review of Our Moon Has Blood Clots, by Rahul Pandita.” Bookish: The IndiaBookStore blog, 30 Dec. 2013, www.indiabookstore.net/bookish/review-our-moon-has-blood-clots-by-rahulpandita/. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. Reddy, Adithya. “ ‘Our Moon Has Blood Clots’ – Review.” Swarajya, 27 Feb. 2013, swarajyamag.com/ reviews/our-moon-has-blood-clots-review. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. Satish, D. P. “Book Review: Our Moon Has Blood Clots.” Gateway House, 1 Feb. 2013, www.gateway house.in/book-review-our-moon-has-blood-clots/. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023.

MANJU JAIDKA

PADHI, BIBHU (1951–) Bibhu Padhi was born in Cuttack to Nilachal Padhi and Padma Rath. Educated at Ravenshaw Collegiate School and Ranihat High School, he studied English literature at Ravenshaw College, passing out with a master’s degree in 1971. Receiving his DLitt from Utkal University in 1991, Padhi taught English across various colleges in Orissa for more than 35 years, his last teaching position being held at Dhenkanal College, Dhenkanal. He took voluntary retirement from his teaching job on September 30, 2007, and now lives in Bhubaneswar (Odisha) with his wife – academic and writer Minakshi Padhi. Padhi’s first collection of poems, Going to the Temple, was published in 1988 to considerable critical acclaim. William Stafford, James Merrill, and Jayanta Mahapatra, among others, noted the stylistic merit of the collection and the intricate thematic links of his poems with the geography and culture of Cuttack. A two-time Pushcart nominee, Padhi has, since then, gone on to feature widely in reputed literary magazines and representative anthologies from India and abroad, the most recent ones being The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (London: Bloodaxe Books), Language for a New Century (New York: Norton), and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets (New Delhi & London: Penguin Random House). 315

Encyclopedia Entries

Bibhu Padhi’s seventeen published books of poetry include, among others, Lines from A Legend (1993), Painting the House (1999), Choosing A Place (2011), Brief Seasons: 60 Love Songs, (2013), Small Wants: Selected Poems  (2018), All That Was and Is: Poems Inspired by Upanishads (2019), A Friendship with Time (2021), and Principles of Sleep (2021). A diachronic study of Padhi’s poetry unavoidably involves a careful look at its distinct topographical shift from the physical to the psychological, from the well-defined concrete to the fairly abstract, and from the different kinds of social life to the exigencies of a life lived entirely within the mind. While his early poetry showcases a dense poetics of locality bespeaking a deep engagement with the landscape, flora, fauna, and cultural traditions of his immediate physical world in Odisha, in his later work, Padhi forays more assertively into the territory of the mind. This is not to say that he loses his links with his surroundings or his rootedness in space and time. What is more integral to his later work is a conscious choice to explore subjectivity and the process of comprehension through an analytic, intellectual lens. Nature, human relationships, links with ancestors and cultural traditions, history, memory, nostalgia, love, desire, loneliness, loss, disease, death, and the unceasing urge to seek some form of unification within life’s fragmented chaos constitute the larger themes in Padhi’s poetry. His poetic universe is open and permeable to both the living and the dead, to human and non-human forms and to sentient and non-sentient beings. His diction is graceful, economic, and meticulous in both its aural and semantic resonances. His images, drawn mostly from the familiar world that surrounds him, are striking in their connotative fertility. Committed to a generous acceptance of the diversity of human experience, a profound sense of melancholy characterizes Padhi’s oeuvre, highlighting his ornate, calligraphic reflections on life. Inward, gentle, empathetic, and embracive of all that the world holds, Padhi’s poetry is an existential practice of nourishing the everyday act of living with a robust spiritual faith.

Further Reading Misra, Chittaranjan. “The Poetry of Bibhu Padhi: A Critique.” Kavya Bharati, vol. 14, 2002, pp. 132–140. Mund, Subhendu. “ ‘The Burden of Things’: A Reading of Bibhu Padhi’s Poetry.” JSL: Journal of the School of Language, Literature and Cultural Studies, Autumn 2011, https://www.academia.edu/28087742/_ the_burden_of_things_A_Reading_of_Bibhu_Padhis_Poetry. Accessed 19 May 2023. Padhi, Bibhu. “The Unbearable Loneliness of a Cluttered Mind.” The Beacon, 10 Apr. 2022. Sarangi, Jaydeep. “Interview with Bibhu Padhi.” JSL: Journal of the School of Language, Literature and Cultural Studies, Spring 2006, pp. 79–94. Webb, Jen, and Bibhu Padhi. “Between Odisha and the ACT: Poetry, Community, Connectedness.” TEXT, Special Issue of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, vol. 60, 2020, pp. 1–3.

BASUDHARA ROY

PADMANABHAN, MANJULA (1953–) Manjula Padmanabhan grew up in Europe and South Asia and lived in Delhi for a considerable period of time during her early days of writing before settling down in the United States. She writes short stories and novels for both children and adults. Padmanabhan has stamped her own mark on the canvas of Indian literature through her unconventional thematic representations. Her early writings were also a response to the challenges faced by a woman writer in India during the 1980s. Her play, Harvest (1997), won the Onassis Award for Theatre, which gave her a global footing. Harvest is a futuristic play set in Mumbai. It highlights the economic and socio-cultural inequalities between developed and developing nations. This play raises pertinent questions about

316

Encyclopedia Entries

the extent of digital surveillance, bio-precarity, gender, and commodification of the human body. Each character in this play narrates the perilous nature of humanity in contemporary times, which is quite alarming considering the fact that this play is set in a futuristic timeline. The play focuses on specific somatic and pathological concerns like surrogacy, organ donation to the West by developing nations, organ harvesting, bio capsule, and regimented growth mechanisms. According to Jodi Kim, “Harvest, through the trope of transracial whole-body transplantation rendered as a dizzying series of gender and racial crossings, generates a conceptualization of gendered racial debt as a social relation, disciplinary regime, sleight of hand, and production of subjectivity.” Another significant play penned by Padmanabhan is Lights Out (1984), which was a community’s response to a gang rape. The author has covered several concerns and issues that affect humanity in general through The Artist’s Model (1995), The Sextet (1996), and Hidden Fires (2003). In 2021, a two-volume collection of her full-length plays and shortperformance pieces were published as Blood and Laughter and Laughter and Blood. Apart from these works, she has also written a travel memoir titled Getting There (2000) and two novels titled Escape (2008) and its sequel The Island of Lost Girls (2015). Her short story collections include Hot Death, Cold Soup: Twelve Short Stories (1996), Kleptomania: Ten Stories (2004), and Three Virgins and Other Stories (2013). She has also written and illustrated books for children – books with titles like Unprincess! (2005), Mouse Attack (2003), Shrinking Vanita (2021), etc. Since the 1980s, Padmanabhan has also been contributing comic strips and editorials to several newspapers. As a cartoonist, she created the character named Suki who, with a bit of unruliness, stood for a struggling yet independent woman in India. Suki can be treated as the progeny of a new wave of feminism in India. Through the graphic medium, Suki responded to normative gender roles, climate change, existential questions, financial crisis, economic inequality, religion, spirituality, extra-terrestrial beings, racism, foreign travels, body shaming, romance, etc. Initially, Suki was part of the comic strip that was published in The Sunday Observer (1982– 1986) and The Pioneer (1991–1997). Later, Suki appeared as part of Padmanabhan’s collections titled This is Suki! (2000) and Double Talk (2005). Padmanabhan has been also contributing to The Hindu Business Line where she handles a weekly column and writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US. Several interesting titles like “Resident Alienation,” “Hair-raising Concerns,” “Lego Joy,” “Coffin Confidential,” etc., can be found in the archives of this newspaper. She also blogs at Yes. Padmanabhan has etched her presence as an artist through her paintings, digital posters, and the accessories that are available at Open Studio by Vida.

Further Reading Gilbert, Helen. “Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest: Global Technoscapes and the International Trade in Human Body Organs.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 16, no. 1, 2006, pp. 123–130. Kim, Jodi. “Debt, the Precarious Grammar of Life, and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1/2, 2014, pp. 215–232. Ngezem, Eugene. “Swimming Against Moral Currents: Gasping for Survival in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest.” Philosophy Study, vol. 11, no. 8, 2021, pp. 631–636. David Publishing Company, https:// doi.org/10.17265/2159-5313/2021.08.005. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. Padmanabhan, Manjula. Yes! http://marginalien.blogspot.com/. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. Pravinchandra, Shital. “The Third-World Body Commodified: Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest.”  Un/ Worldly Bodies, special issue of eSharp, no. 8, 2006, pp. 1–17.

ELWIN SUSAN JOHN

317

Encyclopedia Entries

PANDITA, RAHUL (1976–) Rahul Pandita is a Delhi-based journalist and writer. He has worked for the television and the print medium, served as an editor for The Hindu, and reported from war zones such as Iraq and Sri Lanka. He has also extensively studied the Maoist rebellion in India. An invited speaker at several international forums, he has held assignments at places like Carnegie Endowment Center, Stanford University, Brown University, State University of New York at Buffalo, and World Affairs Council. At University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced Study of India, he was a visiting fellow in the fall of 2014. In 2015, he was a Yale world fellow. Pandita shot into the limelight with his memoir titled Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir (2013). The book chronicles the sufferings of the Kashmiri Pandits – victims of a violent ethnic cleansing – who were forced to flee from their homeland. The chronicle has its roots in personal experience: At the age of fourteen, Pandita, along with his family, was part of the great exodus of the minority community from the Kashmir valley. The brutalities faced by his fellowmen are recorded in this memoir. Rahul Pandita has also written Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement (2011) and co-authored the critically praised The Absent State (2016) with Neelesh Misra. In The Absent State, in a series of dispatches from the country’s conflict zones, Neelesh Misra and Rahul Pandita reveal the tensions, frustrations, and challenges that are everyday realities in these troubled regions – from misappropriated development funds in tribal and remote areas to lack of education and widespread exploitation. The focus is on the common man who laments the loss of loved ones to starvation, lack of healthcare services, and militancy while demanding to be heard. Apparently, the system in place is one that is failing. The Absent State is a powerful reminder of the mistakes the Indian government cannot afford to repeat. The Lover Boy of Bahawalpur: How the Pulwama Case was Cracked came out in 2021. It focuses on the incident that took place in February 2019, when Pulwama witnessed one of India’s biggest terror strikes, killing forty Indian soldiers. Rahul Pandita brings us to the scene of one of Kashmir’s bloodiest terrorist strikes in this book, which contains exclusive details concerning the Pulwama attack, the resulting Balakot strike, and the dark world of terror groups. Hello, Bastar! explores the Naxalite–Maoist rebellion that broke out in the Bastar district in the 1980s. It features a number of interviews and first-person tales, again from the author’s personal experience. Pandita claims to have spent twelve years trying to figure out the difference between a terrorism and an insurgency, which he called naxalism. In 2020, Pandita contributed to the screenplay of a documentary, Shikara, which derives many of its ideas from the earlier Our Moon has Blood Clots. The film is again based on the Kashmiri pandit exodus of 1990. The story revolves around the love story of Shanti and Shiv Dhar, who are Kashmiri Pandits looking for a safe haven in a turbulent world. In recognition of his work in Maoist-affected areas in central and eastern India, Pandita received the International Red Cross Award for his reporting in 2010. Our Moon has Blood Clots was short-listed for the Crossword Award. Rahul Pandita is sometimes criticized for being selective in his portrayal of his subjects, and his views are condemned as one-sided. However, for him the story he narrates remains the truth, a festering wound that refuses to heal. In his words, his memoir, Our Moon has Blood Clots, attempts to “set the record straight . . . because the liberal discourse of this country and the media have, by and large, bypassed our story [and] relegated [it] to the margins.”

318

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading “Book Review: ‘Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits’ – Latest News  & Updates at Daily News & Analysis.” DNA, 10 Feb. 2013. Archived from the original on 11 May 2018. Accessed 13 Sept. 2022. Diwanji, Amberish K. “Book Review: ‘Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits.’ ” DNA, 10 Feb. 2013, web.archive.org/web/20180511085424/www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/reviewbook-review-our-moon-has-blood-clots-the-exodus-of-the-kashmiri-pandits-1797521. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Narayan, Shyamala A. “India.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 49, no. 4, 2014, pp. 535– 567. Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989414553750. Pandita, Rahul. “30  Years of Pandit Exodus: Living as a Refugee in One’s Own Country.” Hindustan Times, 17 Jan. 2020, www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/living-as-a-refugee-in-one-s-own-coun try/story-y0qXanNR4kx6RPxuczCcQP.html. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. “Rahul Pandita.” The Hindu, 28 Nov. 2013, www.thehindu.com/books/books-authors/rahul-pandita/ article5397869.ece. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Sharma, Devansh. “Shikara Movie Review: Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Account of Kashmiri Pandit Exodus Is Strikingly Poetic but Seldom Urgent.” Firstpost, 7 Feb. 2020, www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bolly wood/shikara-movie-review-vidhu-vinod-chopras-account-of-kashmiri-pandit-exodus-is-strikinglypoetic-but-seldom-urgent-8014271.html. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

MANJU JAIDKA

PANT, MEGHNA (1980–) Born in Shimla, Meghna Pant, a young and renowned journalist, writer, and eloquent orator, had her schooling in Delhi and Mumbai and completed her undergraduate in economics and statistics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Subsequently, she moved to Nanyang Business School, Singapore, on the basis of a scholarship, to pursue her MBA. Thereafter, she completed her master’s degree in international management from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. She has also worked as a TV anchor with Times Now, NDTV, Bloomsburg-UTV, SheThePeople TV in Mumbai and New York, and various women-centric platforms like FirstPost. Pant is a staunch feminist. In her path-breaking debut novel titled One and a Half Wife (2012), she focuses on the expression of identity. She has highlighted Indian social taboos like divorce and unmarried adoption through the story of an innocent girl Amara Malhotra born in an orthodox family. It reflects the journey of a girl who struggles to fight the stereotypes attached to being a divorcee and finally, setting herself free from the societal and familial pressures by adopting a child and prioritizing her career. Pant won the Muse India Young Writer Award (2014) for this novel. In addition, she has received awards like, Laadli Media Award (2018), Bharat Nirman Award (2017), and FON (Fellows of Nature) South Asia Short Story Award (2016) and was short-listed for the Cinnamon Press Novel Writing Award (2012). She is also credited to have abridged the longest epic the Mahabharata in a hundred tweets. Pant’s collection of short stories titled Happy Birthday (2013) was long-listed for the prestigious Frank O’Connor Awards (2014). As observed by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, “These are stories with a large heart and a keen eye, deeply aware of the complex, sometimes uncomfortable realities of India, its many layers. Meghna Pant knows how to create characters that will surprise and move you.” The stories highlight complicated human relationships. A dedicated friend who undertakes one last labor of love for a childless woman. Nadia – married into money – finds herself facing uncomfortable truths about her comfortably numb marriage. A Mumbai slum-girl dreams of speaking words valuable enough to be translated into English.

319

Encyclopedia Entries

An American tourist seeking nirvana sets off a sudden chain of events when his bag is stolen, and destiny intervenes. A retired civil servant of modest means struggles to support his snooty foreign-returned daughter. These stories are emotionally compelling and share a rare glimpse of the workings of the human heart. The Trouble with Women (2016) is another collection of her short stories that deal with the women-centric themes of domestic violence, abortion, molestation, and marital rape. Some of the short stories in this collection mirror the incidents that took place in Meghna Pant’s own life. In one of her TEDx talks, she conveyed a powerful message to the audience “Stop the violence, Stop the silence,” narrating her own struggle to fight domestic violence for almost eight years. Aditya Mani Jha from the Business Line states that, “Pant shows us how it’s done, how a skilled writer uses journalistic base to create a convincing, sensitive fictional scenario.” Pant has also penned nonfictional works like Feminist Rani (2018), which she co-authored with Shaili Chopra. This book includes a series of interviews with some influential modern women challenging standardized norms set against women in the modern world. She has also authored a nonfictional book titled How to Get Published in India (2019). This book focuses on various celebrated essayists and authors and their experience in writing and publishing a book in India. Pant has tried to create a guide for young aspiring authors. Pant’s novel The Terrible, Horrible Very Bad Good News (2021) discusses the theme of adoption. This book is slated be made into a motion picture “Badnam Ladoo.” Her latest novel titled Boys Don’t Cry (2022) reflects the story of Maneka Pataudi. The novel, which is based on a true incident, majorly focuses on the theme of marital abuse. As stated by Shobhaa De, “A story that screams – don’t mess with women.” Pant’s works deepen the reader’s understanding of many contemporary social problems, especially the ones related to women.

Further Reading Naz, Zeba. “Search For Identity and Cultural Confines: A  Feminist Study of Meghna Pant’s One and A Half Wife.” IJCIRAS, vol. 2, no. 6, Nov. 2019, pp. 9–14. IJCIRAS, www.ijciras.com/PublishedPaper/IJCIRAS1438.pdf. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

MALVIKA AVASTHI

PARAMESWARAN, UMA (1938–) Born in Madras, Uma Parameswaran pursued a BA degree from Jabalpur University. She received her MA degree from Nagpur University. Parameswaran immigrated to North America during the 1960s. In the United States, she was a Fulbright Scholar, earned a masters’ degree in creative writing from Indiana University, and received her doctorate from Michigan State University. In Canada, Parameswaran has been a professor of literature at University of Winnipeg. In addition to her academic activities, she is a prolific writer, writing poems, short fiction, plays, and later in life, novels. She is a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada; and as a regional representative for Manitoba and in keeping with her work in Indian literature, she was a founder of the organization called Performing Arts and Literature of India (PALI). Parameswaran’s works focus primarily on exploring the nuances of the South Asian immigrant experience in Canada. She molds a dialogue between a white Canadian audience with the cultures of the immigrant communities who have fought to become part of the social fabric of Canadian society. Additionally, her works also interrogate the conservatism and blind spots of

320

Encyclopedia Entries

her own communities, especially with regard to repressive gender roles prevalent within these groups. Parameswaran’s writing evokes nostalgic memories of the culture she left behind while reimagining how this cultural contact transformed and gave rise to the Canadian society of the 20th century. Parameswaran published her first major novel, Mangoes on the Maple Tree, in 2002. The novel, while also exploring the tensions within the immigrant community, follows the story of two Indian immigrant families as they try to carve out a life for themselves in Winnipeg in the face of the racial prejudice from white Canadians. The story is set in the historical backdrop of the devastating Winnipeg Flood of 1997 allowing Parameswaran to make her case for forging a transnational culture which could span the boundaries of the hidebound nation-state to embrace new realities of the longings and aspirations of such communities existing for long in the liminal spaces of the Western metropole. Parameswaran’s other major contribution in prose literature was her novella titled The Sweet Smell of Mother’s Milk – Wet Bodice (2001). This story offers a skillful depiction of the plight of imported brides in Canada and is an important intervention in understanding the gendered dimension of immigration. The story follows the harrowing experiences of Namita, a sheltered girl from India who was married to Tarun and immigrated to live with her in-laws in Canada. Tarun and his father-in-law both emerge as viciously abusive men, and Namita is forced to confront traumatic obstacles from domestic violence to financial exploitation. Parameswaran’s narrative forces the reader to focus on the underlying ugliness and trauma that can be inflicted on women within the immigrant community by its own members, and she opens the door to alternate possibilities of solidarity across racial lines with the character of Sandy Ketts, a white volunteer at a women’s shelter who is one of the few characters to show genuine empathy for Namita’s plight. The critic Wendy Robbins termed the text an excellent example of “activist literature,” and commended Parameswaran’s keen insight in combining her commitment to feminism while negotiating the marginalization of being a non-white immigrant in a predominantly white country. Commenting on Parameswaran’s short story collection What Was Always Hers (1999), Susheela N. Rao highlighted Parameswaran’s heterogenous cultural sensibility, which enabled her to blend her Canadian and Indian identities. John Oliver Perry, on her earlier works such as the poetry of Trishanku (1998) and Sisters at the Well (2002), identified her distinctly Canadian voice and highlighted her role as an Indian immigrant transforming the definition of what constitutes “Canadian” literature as exemplified in a poem like “On the Shores of the Irish Sea,” which memorializes the violent events of the Komagata Maru Incident of 1914 and the terrorist attack on Flight 182 as indelible memories of the immigrant Canadian experience.

Further Reading Fuller, Amy Elizabeth, editor. Contemporary Authors, vol. 259. Thomson Gale, 2008, pp. 297–300. Perry, John Oliver. “Review: Trishanku and Other Writings.” World Literature Today, vol. 63, no. 3, 1989, p. 567. ———. “Review: Sisters at the Well.” World Literature Today, vol. 77, no. 1, 2003, pp. 95–96. Rao, Susheela N. “Uma Parameswaran: What Was Always Hers.” World Literature Today, vol. 76, no. 1, Winter 2002, p. 136. Robbins, Wendy. “Review: The Sweet Smell of Mother’s Milk – Wet Bodice.” Herizons, vol. 16, no. 1, 2002, p. 36.

AMITRAJEET MUKHERJEE

321

Encyclopedia Entries

PARIAT, JANICE (1982–) Janice Pariat was born in Jorhat, Assam, and grew up in Shillong, Meghalaya. She was educated at Loreto Convent, Shillong, and The Assam Valley School, Tezpur. Thereafter, she earned a BA in English from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and an MA in history of art from School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK, in 2012. In 2014, she was the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Kent, UK, and a writer-in-residence at the TOJI Residency in South Korea in 2019. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing and history of art at Ashoka University, Sonepat. Pariat has published three books. The first one, Boats on Land (2012), won the Crossword Book Award in 2013 and introduced her as an author of great promise, especially as an emerging literary talent from Northeast India. The book was also awarded the Sahitya Akademi’s Yuva Puraskar Award in 2013. The book is a collection of fifteen short stories that provide an array of intimate and revelatory narratives set mostly in the hills of Meghalaya. While weaving the socio-cultural history and specificities of the society in that region, the stories provide insights into how the land becomes a contested space for its postcolonial inhabitants. Ranging from stories about characters from the colonial past to people of various ethnicities trying to make sense of the new realities, the book showcases how Khasi folklores and myths can still inform every aspect of modernity in Meghalaya, while also revealing how human subjects are as much entangled with the mysteries of natural realm as they are with the politics of the human society. Her second book, a novel titled Seahorse (2014), which was short-listed for The Hindu Literary Prize in 2015, is a poetically narrated tale of love, loss, and longing. In its focus on the lengths to which the human heart will travel to find solace and love, the text portrays varied journeys that the protagonist, Nehemiah, undertakes while learning about the often-overwhelming mysteries of desire and affection. Written in the first-person narrative form, the plot and the protagonist shuttle between the past and the present, located in Shillong, Delhi, and London. The narrative is unique in its portrayal of same-sex romance and relations as the protagonist is a young, bisexual man who hails from Northeast India and is multiply displaced by virtue of educational ventures, socio-cultural and linguistic identifications, and movements within and outside India. The Nine-Chambered Heart (2017), her third book, is a novella consisting of ten chapters that narrate stories of love, passion, complicated relationships, arriving and departing. Nine characters, both men and women, recall their experiences (all, except one, narrated by them in the first-person narrative form) with the same Indian woman, whom they all have admired, desired, loved, and lost at some points in their lives. The novella, set in familiar but unnamed cities and towns, moves between India, Italy, and the United Kingdom, while maintaining a linear temporal structure. Ranging from aspects of travel, exploration, adventure, art, romance, and fidelity to issues of how relationships are often random, fleeting, toxic, and even anchoring, the plot provides insights into how finding and arriving at love and home can often be similarly daunting tasks, wherein the very notions of propriety and morality get challenged and refashioned by circumstances, desires, and letting go. Pariat has also published her stories and poems in several magazines and journals. Her poetry weaves together matters of the heart and of history, bringing to the reader a poignant mesh of reconsidering memory, love, travel, nature, homeland, and belonging.

Further Reading Borah, Jayashree. “Memory as a Subversive and Recuperative Tool a Reading of Janice Pariat’s Boats on Land.” Litcri ’15 IV. Literary Criticism Conference Proceedings, edited by Barış Öztürk. Dakam Yayinlari, 2015, pp. 184–194.

322

Encyclopedia Entries Sajan, Neha. “Unravelling the Queer Space: Understanding Sexuality through the Works of Janice Pariat.” IJELLH – International Journal of English Language Literature and Humanities, vol. 9, no. 5, 2021, pp. 179–203. Vohra, Harpreet Kaur. “Experiments with Love: Janice Pariat’s Boats on Land.” The NEHU Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 2015, pp. 87–94.

ANIL PRADHAN

PARTHASARATHY, RAJAGOPAL (1934–) Rajagopal Parthasarathy is an Indian poet, translator, critic, teacher, and editor. Born on August 20, 1934, in Tirupparaiturai, Tamil Nadu, he was educated at Don Bosco High School and Siddharth College in Mumbai. He then moved to Leeds University to pursue a diploma in English studies as a British Council scholar from 1963–1964. Later, he earned a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. Having pursued a career in academics for about a decade, Parthasarathy joined Oxford University Press, Chennai as its regional editor in 1971. Seven years later, he moved to Oxford University Press’s Delhi office. He has been associated with Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, in the United States since 1986 in various capacities, including the directorship of Asian studies program, 1994–1998. He has also been a member of the creative writing program of the University of Iowa (1978–1979) and a member of the Sahitya Akademi’s advisory board for English (1978–1982). Parthasarathy’s poems have appeared in literary magazines and journals like Chicago Review, London Magazine, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Indian Literature and Poetry. His poetry is emblematic of the dilemma of the postcolonial Indian writers who are torn between the cultural and the colonial pasts of the country. His poems deal with nostalgia, loss, alienation, and a strong urge to go back to his Tamil cultural past only to find how much his “roots” have changed with time. Early in his literary career, he edited two volumes of poetry: Poetry from Leeds with John Joseph Healy (1968) and Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets (1976). The latter includes significant contemporary Indian poets writing in English, Keki N. Daruwalla, Arun Kolatkar, Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, Gieve Patel, A.K. Ramanujan, and Kamala Das, among others. The book is significant not only for the selections made by Parthasarathy but also for the sharply written short introductions of the poets that provide the readers with a context to their poetry. Parthasarathy’s most well-known work is his long poem “Rough Passage” published in 1977. It is divided into three sections “Exile,” “Trial,” and “Homecoming,” and contains thirty-nine short poems, which makes it one of the longest autobiographical poems in Indian English literature. The three sections correspond with three phases of his life – his “Exile” to England, the “Trial” of his life, and his “Homecoming” to his mother tongue Tamil. Parthasarathy is also a prolific translator. He translates from Tamil, Hindi, Punjabi, and Sanskrit to English and has two significant books of translation to his credit. The first is a 5thcentury Tamil epic Chilappatikaram, attributed to the Jain Prince Ilanko Atikal, translated as The Tale of the Anklet: An Epic of South India 1993. The epic portrays the deification of a chaste wife, Kannaki, whose husband, Kovalan, is wrongly executed for the theft of a queen’s anklet. The significance of Parthasarathy’s translation was acknowledged immediately as it was awarded the Sahitya Akademi prize for translation in 1995 and A.K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation in 1996. Parthasarathy’s other edited and translated anthology is Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit: An Anthology 2017. The work covers seventy-two poets between the fourth and the seventeenth centuries and includes seven women poets. The “Introduction” to the book states, It offers a salutary corrective to the notion, still prevalent in the West, that Indians in the past were predominantly otherworldly and spiritually minded. Nothing could 323

Encyclopedia Entries

be further from the truth. These poems reflect a culture that celebrates the pleasures of the flesh without any inhibition in a language that never gives offense, that never crosses the line but always observes the canons of good taste. His other shorter English translations include Kunwar Narain’s “Ibn Batuta” from Hindi; Amrita Pritam’s “Street Dog” from Punjabi; Ka. Naa. Subramanyam’s “Eunuchs” and T.S. Venugopalan’s “One and the Same”  from Tamil; Mirza Ghalib’s  “Twilight in Delhi” from Urdu; and “The Sheets,” an anonymous poem, from Sanskrit among several others. Parthasarathy is also a literary critic. His critical prose includes “Indian Poetry Today,” “Writing Between the Lines: The Politics and Poetics of Translation,” “How it strikes a Contemporary: The Poetry of A.K. Ramanujan,” “The Chessmaster and His Moves: The Novel as Metaphysics,” and “Tamil Literature.” His most radical critical prose, perhaps, is his essay “Whoring after English Gods.” The title has been taken from a poem that appears in “Exile,” the second section of Rough Passage. In the essay, he refers to the linguistic dichotomy of a postcolonial writer like himself: English forms a part of my intellectual, rational make-up, and Tamil, of my emotional, psychic make-up. Fortunately, the psyche has not been damaged beyond repair, and it is still possible to keep in touch with it. It is from there really all poems begin or, at least, ought to begin. Parthasarathy’s contribution to Indian poetry in general and Indian English poetry in particular is commendable, and he can be compared with the likes of Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, and Kamala Das.

Further Reading Dutta, Ujjal. “Tension into Poetry: R. Parthasarathy.” Indian Literature, vol. 26, no. 1, Jan.–Feb. 1983, pp. 88–95. Mishra, S. “R. Parthasarathy: The Language of Deracination.” A Sense of Exile: Essays in the Literature of the Asia-Pacific Region, edited by B. Bennet and S. Miller. U of Western Australia, 1988. Parthasarathy, R. “Whoring After English Gods.” Writers in East-West Encounter: New Cultural Bearings, edited by G. Amirthanayagam. Macmillan, 1982, pp. 64–84. Patke, Rajiv, “Ithacan Voyages: The Poetry of R. Parthasarathy and A. K. Ramanujan.” New Perspectives in Indian English Literature: Essays in Honour of Professor M. K. Naik, edited by C. R. Yaravintelimath, et al. Sterling Publishers, 1995. Shahane, Vasant A. “The Return of the Exile: The Poetry of R. Parthasarathy.” Indian Poetry in English: A Critical Assessment, edited by V. S. Shahane. Macmillan, 1987, pp. 125–142. Singh, Brijraj. “The Achievement of R. Parthasarathy.” Chandrabhaga, Summer 1980, pp. 49–74.

VIKRAM SINGH THAKUR

PATEL, GIEVE (1940–) Gieve Patel was born on August 18, 1940, to a Parsi family in Mumbai, which came from Nargol, a coastal village in the western state of Gujarat. He received his MBBS degree in Mumbai, was posted as a Medical Officer in Sanjan, a village in Gujarat, for two years, and then as a doctor in a private clinic in Mumbai. He started painting in college and had his first exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery in 1966 where he met his mentor Akbar Padamsee. The same year his first collection of poems, Poems was published by Nissim Ezekiel. Earlier, he had worked

324

Encyclopedia Entries

backstage in the theater production of Ebrahim Alkazi. He wrote his first play, Princes, for the Sultan Padamsee Memorial Playwriting Competition in 1968, which was performed in 1970 by Theatre Group in Bombay. He was one of the founding members of the Mumbai-based alternative publishing house for poetry, the Clearing House, which was established in 1976, along with Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Arun Kolatkar. His second volume of poetry, How Do You Withstand Body, was published there. He wrote two more plays, Savaksa in 1981, produced in 1982 by Theatre Group (published in 1989 in Bombay Literary Review), and Mister Behram produced in 1987 by Stage Two for the Bombay Arts Festival (published in 1988), before publishing his third volume of poetry, Mirrored, Mirroring, in 1991. He also translated the poems of the 17th century mystic poet Akho from Gujarati into English. Collected Poems: Gieve Patel, which included nineteen new poems, was published in 2017. He is a renowned painter and his paintings have been exhibited at major national and international venues. He received the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1984 and the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1992. He also conducted poetry workshops at Rishi Valley School, near Madanapalle, Andhra Pradesh, which resulted in a collection of poems by the students Poetry with Young People, which he edited and was published by Sahitya Akademi in 2007. He lives in Mumbai with his wife Toni Diniz whom he married in 1969. Patel’s three plays were published together in Mister Behram and Other Plays in 2007. They are centered on the Parsi community across the intersectionality of class, gender, and age. He challenges the stereotyped portrayals of the Parsi community, Adivasi community, women, and landlords, and portrays his characters with psychological complexity and depth. Most importantly, he makes use of the pliability of the English language to bring forth the idiomatic nuances of speech to reveal the conflicts and tensions within his characters. His first play, Princes, explores the growing hostility between two Parsi families in their longing for a child, a male heir, which enables him to expose the conflicts arising out of the problem of “ownership.” In the second play, Savaska, he narrates the events surrounding the intended marriage of an old landed Parsi gentleman with a poor young Parsi girl from Mumbai, to explore the different ways in which power struggles manifest themselves. His final play, Mr Behram, probes the imbalance of power in the relationship between Mr. Behram, a Parsi landowner and advocate, and his adopted son Naval, an orphaned Warli boy in the 19th century rural Gujarat. Patel is regarded as a “Bombay Poet” not only because of his affiliation with the city but also because he embodies a distinct modernist sensibility of post-independence India associated with the artists, poets, writers, and musicians of the 1960s Bombay (Mumbai). In Poems we are introduced to the unflinching gaze and sardonic tone of the poet. The subject matter of the poems is largely inspired by his medical practice and his experience of working in rural Gujarat. The fascination with the human body and the mystery of life only intensifies in How Do You Withstand Body. Mirrored and Mirroring, continuing the poet’s serious reflections on the materiality of human existence with a mix of his cynical sense of humor. His observations on social hierarchies and injustices are often framed by the poet’s acknowledgment of guilt and privilege. The final set of poems portrays diverse subjects and sensibilities, focusing on the wide social and cultural contexts surrounding the metropolis.

Further Reading King, Bruce, editor. Post-Colonial English Drama: Commonwealth Drama Since 1960. Macmillan, 1992. Patel, Gieve. “ ‘The Artist Creates the Audience’: Gieve Patel Interviewed by Meher Pestonji.” Mister Behram and Other Plays. Seagull, 2007, pp. 118–122.

325

Encyclopedia Entries ———. “Poetry as ‘an Effort to Understand’: An Interview with Gieve Patel.” Conducted by Anjali Nerlekar, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 53, no. 1–2, 2017, pp. 25–32. Subramaniam, Arundhathi. “Introduction.” Collected Poems: Gieve Patel, edited by Gieve Patel. Paperwall Media and Publishing, 2018, pp. ix–xviii.

SHIKHA SINGH

PATTANAIK, DEVDUTT (1970–) Devdutt Pattanaik is an Indian mythologist, author, speaker, and illustrator best known for his reinterpretation of Indian myths and folklore. His narratives are largely based on the classical texts of Hindu mythology, such as Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Bhagavad Gita. His fictional and nonfictional works assimilate tales from Indian mythology and validate practices considered “pagan” or “native” by the Western imagination. Pramod K. Nayar considers Pattanaik a “unique” man “connected to his past and cultural heritage” (Zeiler, Digital Hinduism). Though cautious in his approach to protect religious sensibilities, Pattanaik chooses many unrecognized characters and stories from folklore and mythology to express his opinion on socially relevant issues of contemporary India. Notably, Pattanaik has been outspoken in his support for the LGBTQ community and feminist movements in India. Of Odiya lineage, Pattanaik was educated in Chennai and lives in Mumbai, India. He is a doctor by training who graduated from Grant Medical College (Mumbai) and began his career in healthcare with Sanofi Aventis  and  Apollo Group of Hospitals. Later he pursued his interest in mythology through a course on comparative mythology at the University of Mumbai. He has conducted numerous seminars and given talks on Indian mythology and its manifestation in the modern social and business world. In his lecture “East vs. West: The Myths that Mystify” (2009), delivered at the first TED conference in India, Pattanaik discusses the differences in the myths and myth-making structures of the West and the East. He has authored many books including Shiva: An Introduction (1997), The Goddess in India: The Five Faces of the Eternal Feminine (2000), Indian Mythology: Tales, Symbols, and Rituals from the Heart of the Subcontinent (2003), Myth=Mithya: A Handbook of Hindu Mythology (2006), Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata (2010), Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana (2013), Shikhandi: And Other Tales They Don’t Tell You (2014), The Pregnant King (2008), Shiva to Shankara: Giving Form to the Formless (2017), and Eden: An Indian Exploration of Jewish, Christian and Islamic Lore (2021), as well as a textbook on Indian culture and history for civil service aspirants titled Indian Culture, Art and Heritage For Civil Services Exam (2021). He is also a columnist who regularly writes articles for newspapers as well as online publications. Pattanaik complements his columns and books with sketches and illustrations stating that he sees his illustrations as diagrams to illustrate the point he makes in his articles. The drawings add human characteristics to revered mythical characters as seen in the illustrations of Ram in Sita where Ram is portrayed as a clean-shaven youth before the exile, a bearded figure during the vanvas, and finally as a mustached king after reclaiming his throne, which is different from the usual depiction of Ram. Further, owing to his expertise in Hindu mythology, he has been a consultant for the script development of Indian television series such as Mahabharat, Siya Ke Ram, and Devon Ke Dev . . . Mahadev. He is also the storyteller of a talk show, Devlok with Devdutt Pattanaik, where he discusses the various narratives, characters, and fables from Hindu mythology, particularly, making them relatable and relevant for the contemporary audience. Pattanaik is also an expert on business management and innovatively deploys Indian mythology to promote work quality and employee efficiency in business organizations. He has worked 326

Encyclopedia Entries

as a business adviser for Ernest  & Young, Chief Belief Officer at Future Group and is now a consultant for many corporations including Reliance industries. He has written extensively on these topics, and some of his bestsellers include Business Sutra: A Very Indian Approach to Management (2013), The Success Sutra: An Indian Approach to Wealth (2015), and Leader: 50 Insights from Mythology (2017). In these works, Pattanaik explores the identity crisis and stagnation faced by individuals in their professional life as they assimilate into the global work ethic removed from their roots and cultural heritage. Doing so, Pattanaik offers a fresh perspective on Western religious and social practices interpreted through the Eastern gaze which in turn challenges the binary logic, goal orientation, and rigid work culture of the West. He uses Hindu religious ethics that promotes the importance of understanding and acknowledging the inner self as a path to self-improvement in professional and private life. In his works Pattanaik foregrounds the core of Indian identity as a unique blend of postmodern sensibility and strong religious beliefs and practices. He asserts that in a world that seeks rationality and scientific temperament, myths address the “how” and “why” of life, giving it purpose and meaning. In the article “There is No Escape from Myth,” Pattanaik states that for their “survival and sanity” human beings “need to believe in a frame of reference. They need myth. And myth needs mythology.” For the writer, mythology recognizes the behavior and ethos of people of a particular culture and change can be induced only by engaging with different interpretations of traditional myths. Pattanaik, thus, explores the celebration of equality and democracy prevalent in Hindu mythology. Also, as a vocal advocate of “liberation feminism,” Pattanaik, in his works, portrays women who are not subservient to the male authority in their life. He notes that women in Hindu mythology assert their agency and often challenge conservative religious texts such as Manusmriti. He populates his work with women like Sati who chose her husband opposing her father’s will, Satyavati who rationally negotiated terms to secure her children’s future before marrying king Shantanu, princess Usha who abducts and marries the person she loves, and the vanar-queen Tara who marries her brother-in-law Sugriva to fortify her kingdom after widowhood. Pattanaik also situates the queer community in his mythological narratives by emphasizing that gender fluidity is accepted and celebrated in Hindu myths. To validate his argument, he refers to the lore of people like Ila/Sudyumna who undergo multiple gender changes; Shikandi, who was born a woman, later becomes a man and valiantly fights in the battle of Kurukshetra, Shiva merging with his female equivalent Shakti to become Ardhanarishvara and Vishnu who often assumes his female form called Mohini. Pattanaik voices his support for LGBTQ rights in contemporary India by affirming that gender is not confined by duality even in ancient Hindu mythology. Pattanaik has established himself as a versatile and prolific writer of Hindu mythology in Indian literature. But his writing style and subject matter have often been critiqued. Urmi Chanda-Vaz observes that Pattanaik’s Sita, though “wise and exalted,” is confined by the parameters of the original patriarchal narrative of the Valmiki Ramayana. Further, Pattanaik in his exaltation of mythology has largely ignored the social construction of myths that accommodates the needs and wishes of the community that propagates them. For example, Karma as a debt accumulated over many lives validates the position of an individual (their caste, creed, or profession) demoting aspirations and reinforcing class hierarchy. M.K. Ragavendra criticizes Pattanaik’s approach to self-improvement by using mythology and ignoring its sociological impact. He regards the popularity of Pattanaik’s work as proof of “a grave self-absorption among the intelligentsia.” Lately, many of Pattanaik’s Twitter posts have come under scrutiny and criticism as well for their obtuse vision and crassness. Nonetheless, his works engender a creative and progressive interpretation of many classical Hindu myths, carving out a niche for them in contemporary Indian and global literature and society. 327

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Chanda-Vaz, Urmi. “Indian Mythology is a New Medium of Choice for Feminist Narratives (and It’s Working).” Literature and Myth, Scroll.in, 5 Feb. 2017, scroll.in/article/828515/indian-mythologyis-a-new-medium-of-choice-for-feminist-narratives-and-its-working. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Dasgupta, Koral. “Beyond the Writer: Devdutt Pattanaik.” News18 Books, News18, 7 Oct. 2015, www. news18.com/blogs/books/koral-dasgupta/beyond-the-writer-devdutt-pattanaik-14361–1147624. html. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Pattanaik, Devdutt. “There is No Escape from Myth: Applied Mythology.” Devdutt.com, 23 Sept. 2019, https://devdutt.com/articles/there-is-no-escape-from-myth/. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Raghavendra, M. K. “The Problem with Devdutt Pattanaik’s Approach to Mythology, with SelfImprovement as the Agenda.” Living News, Firstpost, 10 Mar. 2018, www.firstpost.com/living/theproblem-with-devdutt-pattanaiks-approach-to-mythology-with-self-improvement-as-the-agenda-4378 531.html. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Sen, Krishna, and Rituparna Roy, editors. Writing India Anew: Indian-English Fiction, 2000–2010. Amsterdam UP, 2013. Zeiler, Xenia, editor. Digital Hinduism. Routledge, 2020.

ASWATHI VELAYATHIKODE ANAND

PEERADINA, SALEEM (1944–) Saleem Peeradina is a poet, editor, and educator. He was born and brought up in Mumbai, got his master’s degree from the University of Mumbai in 1969 and then moved to Wake Forest University, US, to pursue further studies. After completing his education, Peeradina delivered lectures at different colleges and institutions between 1974 and 1984. Currently, he is Professor Emeritus at Siena Heights University, Adrian, Michigan. He received a Fulbright Travel Grant in 1971, the British Council Writer’s Grant in 1983, and was named outstanding teacher at Siena Heights College in 1992. He is interested in cooking, photography, and travel. Peeradina has authored several books, which include First Offence and Bombay New (1992), Meditations on Desire (2003), and Slow Dance (2010). He has also edited Contemporary Indian Poetry in English (1972), Multifold: A Book of Student Writings (1973), and Cultural Forces Shaping India (1988). In addition to poetry, he has also a prose memoir titled The Ocean in my Yard (2005). His recent works include Final Cut (2016) and Heart’s Beast: New and Selected Poems (2017). Bruce King, in a review, makes a comparison between two of Peeradina’s renowned collection of poetries, Group Portrait and First Offence, saying, “If First Offence was a product of the exuberance of the Bombay poetry and cultural scene during the late sixties and seventies it was also the expression of someone who might be described as a student.” Group Portrait, on the other hand, “is the expression of someone who is now a father . . . responsible for himself and to those with whom he is intimately related.” In his writings, Peeradina focuses on the family as a source of joy and happiness in a man’s life. Group Portrait is organized in three section – “Family Mirror,” “Transition,” and “Beginnings” – mostly concerned with the poet’s family and his own moral development. “Homecoming” is another poem which foregrounds family life and the hardships an individual must face while bringing up children. Group Portrait includes some of his famous poems: “Speculations,” “Michigan Basement I,” “Michigan Basement II,” and “Sisters.” “Sisters” focuses on sibling rivalry due to the father’s attitude toward them. He shouts unfairly at the older daughter, which helps her to learn to stand up against the unjust and unfair world. As a versatile writer, Peeradina not only discusses the pertinence of family and kinships but at the same time emphasizes the importance of staying isolated at times for introspecting on individual requirements and desires.

328

Encyclopedia Entries

Peeradina’s autobiographical musings in The Ocean in my Yard were occasioned by his father’s death in 1990, prompting him to document his life and childhood in Bombay. He authored the book using the third person narrative and in a language that would suit the sensibility of readers across the globe. At one place, Peeradina says, For me, writing poetry is like doing ethnography: as a poet and social commentator, I am always in the field. The gestures, products, and systems of culture are my raw material, the vital signs of life. I am simultaneously witness, participant, and scribe. I am never off-duty. (Venkateswaran) Final Cut is Peeradina’s collection of poems which focuses on various stages of his life and centers around people who have deeply impacted his life. He has constantly been compared to Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, and R. Parthasarathy for his expertise in weaving together separate sections of poems together as a unit. A.K. Ramanujan’s English translations inspired him to write poetry. His romantic language was a result of his keen interest in Urdu writers’ writings for the Hindi cinema. He combines poetry with ethnography and believes that observing people and their gestures helps in the writing process. Peeradina has also authored essays like “Giving,” “Withholding,” and “Meeting Midway.” His limitations have been accentuated by Jai Dev, He is essentially city poet, a Bombay poet: equally essentially, he is a middle-class poet. However, conscious as he is of his limitations, he does not work against them. Instead, he intensifies the core of his poetry to such a degree that in its implications it often frees itself from the issues of class or place.

Further Reading Dev, Jai. “The Poetry of Saleem Peeradina.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 22, no. 2, 1987, p. 185. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40872974. King, Bruce. “Review of Group Portrait, by Saleem Peeradina.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 352–353. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40873259. Krätli, Graziano. “Heart’s Beast: New and Selected Poems.” World Literature Today, vol. 91, no. 5, 2017, p. 84. Mallah, Indu K. “Imagined Home.” Indian Literature, vol. 61, no. 6 (302), 2017, p. 198. JSTOR, www. jstor.org/stable/26791753. Accessed 12 Jan. 2023. “Saleem Peeradina.” Saleem Peeradina, Siena Heights U, saleempeeradina.weebly.com. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Venkateswaran, Pramila. “A  Living Legacy: An Interview with Saleem Peeradina.” ARIEL: A  Review of International English Literature, vol. 46 no. 3, 2015, pp.  179–193. Project MUSE, https://doi. org/10.1353/ari.2015.0019. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

MALVIKA AVASTHI

PHUKAN, MITRA (1986–) Mitra Phukan was born into a family of four in which all the members were vigorous readers of different genres. Phukan’s father worked around the globe when she was young, so some of her schooling was completed outside of India. Later, she moved back with her family and finished school in the small town of Shillong. Phukan remarked that her early exposure to different

329

Encyclopedia Entries

cultures and people had a great impact on her writing and became the source of her stories. To her, writing is a way of self-expression and a way of expressing joy. Phukan says, “I love creating plot, and characters, to put across a point of view. I love creating dialogue appropriate to the characters. It’s like creating an alternate world.” Mitra Phukan is a prolific writer, translator, columnist, and trained classical vocalist. She considers that translation is her way of paying homage to her mother tongue. She has translated many old Assamese literary works into English as well as her own works into Assamese. Her published works include four children’s books, a biography, two novels, several volumes of translations of other novels, and a collection of fifty of her columns, Guwahati Gaze. Her latest works are a translation of a novel, Blossoms in the Graveyard, and a collection of her own short stories, A Full Night’s Thievery. Phukan’s first book was a children’s book, Mamani’s Adventure, which awarded her the CBT UNICEF prize in 1986. This is a story about a little girl, Mamani, whose family lives in Assam, picking tea leaves and growing sugarcane for a living. Their home is near a dense jungle in which wild animals roam; elephants love sugarcane and regularly maraud the fields leaving a path of devastation behind. Instead of killing the elephant, Mamani sings songs to send away the elephant. This amazing story dismantles the binary opposition between human beings and animals. In most places, animal corridors have been taken over by human habitation; as a result, animals often enter the farms and villages looking either for food or simply crossing over to another part of the jungle. After four children’s books and a biography, Phukan published her first novel, The Collector’s Wife (2005). The main character of the novel, Rukmini Bezobaruah, is married to the district collector of a small town in Assam. Seemingly, Rukmini’s life is safe and settled in a beautiful big bungalow. She enjoys all the privileges as the wife of the district collector. In truth, she finds her life to be dull despite her elevated position. Her passion for writing or even having a regular job has been thwarted because of the social expectations of her duties as a district collector’s wife. Finally, the great turmoil of her life terminates in a horrifying and tragic end. Phukan’s second novel, A Monsoon of Music (2011), presents an ambitious sitarist, Kaushik Kashyap, who tours the world with his beautiful Italian student, Nomita. Nomita is a shy vocalist who comes from a small town and is chosen by Kaushik’s parents. As the eventful monsoon months give way to autumn, the characters come to a deep understanding of each other even when their lives change dramatically. Phukan’s immense knowledge of Hindustani music and her profound understanding of human nature come together in the novel. Her collection of stories, A Full Night’s Thievery (2016) comprises several stories that have appeared in literary journals in India and abroad. A couple of them have won awards, and some of them have been translated into many languages. The stories cover universal themes of love, loss, aging, militancy, witchcraft, and traditional ways of life in the Assamese society. Apart from creative writing, Phukan is very active in bringing music to the poor. She is one of the members of Aradhana, an organization that takes music to underprivileged sections of society. She is currently studying music under Pandit Samaresh Choudhury of Kolkata.

Further Reading Jain, Payal. “Musical Tales of Choices and Sacrifices: A Review of Mitra Phukan’s ‘A Full Night’s Thievery.’ ” Café Dissensus, 14 Jun. 2017, cafedissensus.com/2017/06/14/musical-tales-of-choices-andsacrifices-a-review-of-mitra-phukans-a-full-nights-thievery/. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Phukan, Khammoun, “Social Realism in Mitra Phukan’s the Collector’s Wife and in Aruni Kashyap’s the House with a Thousand Stories.” The Literary Voyage, vol. 2, no. 1, 2015, Jan.–Apr. 2015. SSRN, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3683130. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

330

Encyclopedia Entries Prawal, Partha. “Static at the Threshold: Review of Mitra Phukan’s a Monsoon of Music.” Fried Eye, 2022, www.friedeye.com/bookclub/static-threshold-review-mitra-phukans-monsoon-music/. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

JUAN LIANG

PILLAI, MANU (1990–) Manu Pillai was born on February  28, 1990, in Mavelikkara, Kerala. His family moved to Pune soon after, where he spent most of his life. He completed his bachelor’s degree in economics from Fergusson College, Pune, and then went on to pursue a master’s degree in international relations from King’s College in London. He worked as the chief of staff to Shashi Tharoor’s Parliamentary Office for some time and then worked for Lord Karan Bilimoria at the House of Lords in Britain. Pillai also assisted Sunil Khilani as a researcher for the BBC Series Incantations. Currently, he is enrolled as a PhD candidate at King’s College in London. Pillai has published four books. The first one, The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore, is a nonfiction that created a sensation among the reading public and won him the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2017. The book is the splendid saga of Sethu Lakshmi Bayi’s reign in the House of Travancore, filled with political intrigue, conspiracy, and superstition. Pillai considers her an able and progressive leader. The plot thickens when Sethu Parvathi Bayi’s clan tries to usurp her regency to crown her son the ruler. The Ivory Throne, besides being a historical account of a ruler who has been neglected by history, portrays the transformation of a lethargic socio-economic society into a liberal, modern one. Pillai’s second book, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Shivaji to Khilji, was published in 2018. It deals with the rise and the fall of the empires of Vijayanagar, Bahamanis, Adil Shahis, Qutb Shahis, and Nizam Shahis, who were constantly warring with each other. A political stronghold, the kingdoms of the Deccan plateau thwarted subjugations multiple times before falling prey to the Mughals in the early 18th century. Pillai succinctly points at the perpetual discords within the kingdoms of the Deccan and the religious intolerance that led to the desecration of various places of worship. Spanning a time period of close to six centuries, Rebel Sultans is a fast-paced reading of the history of Deccan India. The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History was published in 2019. The book is a collection of sixty-one essays and stories that appeared earlier in the Mint Lounge publication. Divided into three parts – Before the Raj, Stories from the Raj, and Afterward. A collection of historical anecdotes, the book sheds light on figures like Allauddin Khilji, Swami Vivekananda, Balamani, Muddupalani, Lord Curzon, Queen Victoria, etc. The writer encourages his readers to rethink their judgments of these historical figures by digging up little-known facts and legends about them. Pillai also tries to establish that the root of the Hindu–Muslim divide does not stand on firm ground and comments upon the rise of nationalistic thought in India. As he emphasizes in the introduction, the book is an attempt to stress India’s hailed identity of “unity in diversity.” His latest book, False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma, was published in 2021. The book identifies Raja Ravi Varma’s artistic career as a common thread that binds the kingdoms of Travancore, Pudukkotai, Baroda, Mysore, and Mewar. False Allies traces the role of the princely states in the making of modern India and hence is a marked shift from the more popular narratives of British-ruled India. Throughout the book, Pillai showcases that contrary to popular misconceptions of luxury and lavishness, these maharajahs were sophisticated political masterminds. However, the main feature of the book is to give a concrete form to the history of these oft neglected and misunderstood princely states. 331

Encyclopedia Entries

Pillai is a well-established voice in historical writing on India. His success lies in presenting historical stories in an easy and engaging manner. All his works have been critically well-received and appreciated for their basis in thorough research.

Further Reading High, Zoe W. “Book Review: Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans.” Studies in History, vol. 35, no. 1, 2019, pp. 135–138. Sage Journals, doi.org/10.1177/0257643018813591. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Palamattam, Anna Mary, and Kavya Purushothaman. “ ‘Power’ and ‘Feminism’ in The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore.” Annals of R.S.C.B., vol. 25, no. 6, 2021, pp. 9028–9034. Readkong, www.readkong.com/page/power-and-feminism-in-the-ivory-throne-chronicles-of-6516989. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Pillai, Manu S. “Exclusive Interview with Manu Pillai. . . .” Conducted by Kartikeya Shankar.” Entertainment Times, The Times of India, 12 Jan. 2022, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/books/ interviews/exclusive-interview-author-historian-manu-s-pillai-on-false-allies-raja-ravi-varma-indianroyalty-during-the-british-raj-and-more/articleshow/88851613.cms. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

EGA PETER

PINTO, JERRY (1966–) Jerry Pinto is an Indian English poet, novelist, short story writer, translator, and journalist. He is a Roman Catholic of Goan origin who grew up in Mahim, Mumbai. Pinto got a liberal arts degree from Elphinstone College, University of Mumbai, and a law degree from Government Law College, Mumbai. He has had a long career as a writer and is the author of eleven books in different genres. Pinto’s first novel titled Em and the Big Hoom was published in 2012 by a small press in India. It is considered to be a modern masterpiece that has won quite a few awards. The novel revolves around the unusual relationships within the Mendes family which consists of four members: Imelda, Augustine, their daughter Susan, and their unnamed son – the young narrator who calls his unusual parents Em and the Big Hoom. It chronicles the life of the family – from the early lives of the couple to the family’s hard struggle with Em’s bipolar disorder and unnerving attempts at suicide. The reader sees Em smoking beedis, trying to sing her way through life. She is the most important member of the family but when her bipolar disorder seizes her, she turns into a monster. Pinto had already tasted success much before the arrival of his first novel. In 2007, his book titled The Life and Times of an H-Bomb won the National Film Award for Best Book on Cinema. This book is based on the Bollywood actress and dancer Helen. Brilliantly witty, the book examines middle-class Indian morality; looks at the politics of religion, gender, and sexuality in popular culture; and focuses on dance, song, and the wayward woman in Hindi cinema. Pinto’s works also include Surviving Women (2000) and Asylum and Other Poems (2003). In Surviving Women, Pinto tries to delineate the modern Indian woman and how the confused Indian man handles her. His wit and sarcasm keep the reader hooked. In Asylum and Other Poems, Pinto unveils his whimsy, his sorrows, his past, his reckoning, his urbanity, and his insight; he looks at different aspects of Mumbai, his mother, his love, and death. Pinto has also co-edited Confronting Love (2005), a book of contemporary Indian love poetry in English. In 2009, he co-authored the book titled Leela: A Portrait with Leela Naidu. It is a semi-biographical book of anecdotes and photos from Leela Naidu’s life. Magazines like Vogue continuously listed Leela as one of the most beautiful women in the world in the 1950s and 1960s. When Crows Are White, released in 2013, combines words by Pinto with

332

Encyclopedia Entries

black-and-white art by Garima Gupta. Strange as it may seem, the characters in this book are crows. The book has an interesting storyline: Saawri, a female crow, has a disturbing dream that the baby to be hatched from her egg is going to be white. Crows, being tradition-bound creatures, just cannot tolerate this kind of anomaly. An unnatural crow has to be culled. To save the life of her unborn child, Saawri seeks recourse in the myths and stories about crows, and the reader follows her through these different stories. Pinto wrote this book because he wanted to write a fable to show the way people created the other and defined themselves. This book was born when Pinto saw a murder of crows attacking an injured crow. He tried to intervene, but the injured crow viciously pecked at him as if it wanted to die at the beaks and claws of its own kind, not at the hands of a human being. In 2017, his book titled Murder in Mahim – a murder story – was released. Pinto ties several different narrative threads together to a dramatically acceptable dénouement – something that most fans of the genre may find exciting. What stands out in this book is Pinto’s description of the city: He describes it with the understatement of a poet. If this book is not quite the perfect literary crime novel, it is because Pinto handles some characters in this book rather indulgently, often at the cost of narrative pace. The Education of Yuri (2022) has been described as an ode to the Mumbai of the 1980s, focusing on friendship and sexual and political awakening. Pinto is the recipient of several awards: the National Film Award for Best Book on Cinema, The Hindu Literary Prize (2012), Crossword Book Award (2013), Windham Campbell Literature Prizes (2016), and Sahitya Akademi Award (2016). He has also translated several books from Marathi to English.

Further Reading Debnath, Sayari. “ ‘Your Dysfunctional Family is the Source of All Your Stories’: Author-Translator-Poet Jerry Pinto.” Scroll.in, 18 Dec. 2022, scroll.in/article/1039640/your-dysfunctional-family-is-thesource-of-all-your-stories-author-translator-poet-jerry-pinto. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Kaur, Amarjot. “Jerry Pinto on Education of Yuri and Art as a Weapon in Social and Cultural Struggle.” The Hindu, 6 Oct. 2022, www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/meeting-jerry-pinto-on-the-bridgebetween-intention-and-reception/article65965833.ece. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Nair, Nandini. “Jerry Pinto: Mumbai on His Mind.” Open, 16 Sept. 2022, openthemagazine.com/ lounge/books/jerry-pinto-mumbai-on-his-mind/. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Pinto, Jerry. Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai. Penguin India, 2003.

RAJESH WILLIAMS

PLANS FOR DEPARTURE by Nayantara Sahgal Set in the time of the Raj, Plans for Departure combines Sahgal’s engagement with the complexity of personal life with her serious concern with the history and politics of the era. A large part of its action is located in the remote hill station of Himapur, where Anna Hansen joins Nitin Basu, on the recommendation of his sister, to assist him with his work. Anna was already in India as a part of her plan to travel before getting married to her fiancée Nicholas so that she could “break out and be me.” Her love for freedom holds the key to her character. The novel’s action in Himapur is limited to Anna’s long solitary walks, her conversations with Nitin, and her meetings and conversations with the British Collector Henry Brewster, the priest Marlowe Croft and his wife Lucille, and the Indian shopkeeper Madhav Rao. Toward its end, the action shifts to Europe, in another time, when Anna has already married Nicholas and her granddaughter Gayatri is married to Jason. They study Anna’s correspondence with Nicholas during her last days in Himapur to uncover what had happened to her then. Their efforts are

333

Encyclopedia Entries

juxtaposed with two incidents in Anna’s life: when she receives Henry’s letter from the war front, which contains details about his complicated relationship with his wife, and his wife’s visit to her home with her second husband Robert Pryor. This puts a lid on the unresolved mysteries that figure in the first part of the novel’s action. In the first part of the novel, Nitin emerges as a typical product of British education, one who is least interested in his country’s history and culture. Anna’s conversations with Henry bring out his estranged relationship with his wife Stella, who has left him along with their daughter for England. Although he is an officer of the Raj, he is unlike what his wife wanted him to be: a diehard imperial master. He thinks and acts differently from the average colonial, which attracts him to Anna. Marlowe is disappointed with him, for not readily accepting his request for building a church there to spread Christianity among the locals. His wife is unhappy with his missionary zeal and even considers leaving him for good. When she dies reportedly in an accident, Anna suspects that he had murdered her. When she learns that Stella was in love with Robert Pryor and finds the skeleton of her dog during one of her rambles, she suspects that Henry had murdered her so that she could not join her lover. She is so sure about this that her attraction for the man she had come to admire and love ends abruptly. Within the frame of its action, Sahgal not only creates characters who are drawn as complex beings and allowed space to grow to their full potential but at the same time weaves bits and pieces of political action into an elaborate historical mosaic that illuminates significant aspects of the freedom struggles of the people of India and also of some parts of Europe. Aspects of the British oppression of Indians are reflected in the tyranny associated with indigo cultivation, the brutal hanging of freedom fighters like Khudiram Bose, the illegal arrest of leaders like Tilak, and the sordid nature of the missionary program envisioned by Marlowe. The suppression of democratic movements in Europe is made available through Anna’s correspondence with Nicholas and her firsthand experience of the situation there. In this acute mix of private and public histories, Sahgal’s novel exemplifies her open engagement with the politics of her times, which is different from the carefully contrived disguised manner of her earlier novels.

Further Reading Anklesaria, Zerin. “Narrative Technique in Nayantara Sahgal’s Plans for Departure.” The New Indian Novel in English: A Study of the 1980s, edited by Vinay Kripal. Allied Publishers, 1990, pp. 37–43. Orgun, Gun. “The Western Woman in India: Contextualizing Plans for Departure.” Nayantara Sahgal’s India: Passion, Politics, and History, edited by Ralph I. Crane. Sterling, 1998, pp. 111–124. Rao, A. V. Krishna. “Nayantara Sahgal’s Recent Fictions of History: A Study.” Essays in Criticism on Indian Literature in English, edited by M. S. Nagarajan, et al. S. Chand and Company, 1991, pp. 117–123. Scott, Julie. “Female Anatomy: Linking the Public and Private Worlds in Plans for Departure and Mistaken Identity.” Nayantara Sahgal’s India: Passion, Politics and History, edited by Ralph I. Crane. Sterling, 1998, pp. 124–140. Sinha, B. O. Social and Political Concerns in the Novels of Nayantara Sahgal. Book Enclave, 2001.

TEJ N. DHAR

PRABHU, GAYATHRI (1974–) Born on March  24, 1974, in Kundapur, Karnataka, Gayathri Prabhu traveled across the country as a young girl due to her father’s transferable job. Her early education was spread across schools in Panjim, Bangalore, Delhi, and Mysore. She pursued her BA from Maharaja’s College, Mysore, and upon its completion, joined the master’s degree program in 1994 at MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia, where she studied television and film production. Following this 334

Encyclopedia Entries

was a decade-long work experience in the media industry. Subsequently, Prabhu returned to academics and pursued her PhD in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, US. Currently, she is engaged as Associate Professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities. Gayathri Prabhu’s publications are spread across a spectrum of genres and themes. Her first book, Maya (2003), is the story of an ever-curious, ever-questioning girl Maya, and the house she lives in, both resonating the resolve to survive and exist. Her next novel, Birdswim Fishfly (2006), is an exploration of the vicissitudes of a family, where each member is living with suppressed emotions and a deeply injured sense of self. Through the perspective of Aditi, an artist, we get glimpses of how families come to be and how they are undone. The Untitled (2016) is a look at the last Anglo-Mysore war, with the coming together of an English painter and his Indian apprentice, who desire to comply with a court intrigue, the plan of ousting Tipu Sultan being crafted by the Wodeyars, the royal family of Mysore, and especially the elusive Suhasini. The novel merges history with a micro-narrative to reveal the intricacies of court politics. If I Had to Tell It Again (2017) is Gayathri Prabhu’s memoir about her father’s struggle with alcohol, its impact on the family, and Prabhu’s revisiting of memories that have been painful to her ever since. As she dwells on the growing depression, the changing bonds between the father and daughter, and her acceptance of his addiction, Prabhu walks down the road to self-healing, forgiveness, and the power of mourning. Vetaal and Vikram (2019) is a revisiting of the land of mythology and storytelling. The fascination with the character of Vetaal, whose incessant questions and quizzing is an exercise in hermeneutics for Vikram, is examined in the book. As a contemporary take on the text translated by Richard Burton, Prabhu aligns the stories toward a more nuanced and contemporary retelling. Her latest work, Love in Seven Easy Steps (2021), is described as “a novella in prose poetry,” using this dialectic between genres to talk of love, longing, and time. Working at the cusp of three literary modes of expression, the work ponders, languorously and poignantly, about the meeting of two people, to address the perennial questions about what it means to love, lose, and live. Divided into seven sections, the novella captures the fragments that make up each tenacious moment we spend with the one we wish to love. Gayathri Prabhu is deeply involved with mental health advocacy. A 2018 article in Scroll.in, titled “He tried to kill himself. She found out. They talked: A dialogue between an artist and a writer,” is a chronicle of her conversations with one of her students, Michael Varghese, “about the evening that Michael attempted to end his life.” As each reconstructs the events and acts entailed in the decision of ending one’s life, the dialogue is a tender and tough deliberation on the precariousness of our existence and the hope to continue with life. This is also reflected in her TED talk “When a Teacher Walks,” which aspires to humanize the figure of the teacher, otherwise rendered mundane in the midst of classes, syllabi, and teaching. The persona of the teacher is fractured to reveal a human being who carries not just the text to be taught but a whole range of life experiences into the classroom. Gayathri Prabhu’s writings have received attention because they are exercises in self-reflection and resilience. From history to medical humanities, Prabhu’s work is a contemporary intervention into the implications of what it means to write, read, and study literature.

Further Reading Poli, Amala. Writing the Self in Illness: Reading the Experiential Through the Medical Memoir. Manipal UP, 2019. Prabhu, Gayathri. “When a Teacher Walks | Gayathri Prabhu | TEDxManipal.” YouTube, uploaded by TEDxManipal, 16 May 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=256pxbp2kj8.

335

Encyclopedia Entries Varghese, Michael, and Gayathri Prabhu. “He Tried to Kill Himself. She found out. They Talked: A Dialogue Between an Artist and a Writer.” Interview by Gayathri Prabhu. Scroll.in, 14 Jul. 2018, scroll.in/ article/886391/he-tried-to-kill-himself-she-found-out-they-talked-a-dialogue-between-an-artist-anda-writer. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

DISHA POKHRIYAL

PRABHU, MANJIRI (1964–) Manjiri Prabhu is an accomplished figure in filmmaking, television production, and novel writing in India. Born on September 30, 1964, she is a PhD holder in communication science in addition to being an independent filmmaker for television, a writer in English, and the creator and director of a literary festival. In addition to that, she holds a PhD in this area of study. She has directed more than two hundred children’s television shows, over fifty short fiction and travel films, and has over fifteen novels published under her name. Manjiri Prabhu is acknowledged as the first woman to create mystery fiction in India and has been nicknamed the “Desi Agatha Christie” (the “Indian Agatha Christie”) by the media. Her works have been translated into dozens of languages internationally. Manjiri Atmaram Prabhu, the fourth of five children, was born in Pune to Atmaram Prabhu, a wealthy businessman, and Shobha Prabhu, a well-known astrologer. Manjiri was named after his grandfather, Manjiri Atmaram, a famous astrologer. She admits that Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie were early inspirations for her writing and that she began experimenting with book writing when she was young. After finishing her high school education at St. Joseph’s, Pune, she continued her education at Ferguson College and Pune University, where she earned a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in French, respectively. After that, Manjiri attended Sophia College in Mumbai to earn her postgraduate diploma in social communication media. Subsequently, from Pune University, she earned her doctorate degree in communication science. Manjiri accepted a position as a television producer at the State Institute of Educational Technology (Balchitravani), where she directed the production of more than two hundred educational and entertaining shows oriented toward young adults and children. During this period, the National Film Development Corporation of India adapted her unpublished work into the Hindi feature film Kuchh Dil Ne Kaha. She was the author of both the storyline and the script of the film. In addition to that, she directed travelogues and developed short dramatic films for the company Filmaka. Manjiri is the founder and director of several events, including the International Festival of Spiritual India and the Pune International Literary Festival. In addition, she is an advocate for the rights of animals and works toward the adoption and care of dogs that are homeless or have been abandoned. This “Desi Agatha Christie,” whose works have crossed international barriers, has received accolades from well-known writers. Dr. Shashi Tharoor recently claimed that Prabhu is a “match for Dan Brown,” which is very high praise for her. She has been invited to visit renowned international literature festivals, including the Agatha Christie Festival in the United Kingdom and the International Women Fiction Writers Festival in Matera, Italy. The Independent Mystery Booksellers of America recognized her book, The Cosmic Clues, as a Killer Book in their annual awards program. The literary competition known as the Kiriyama Prize recognized her book, The Astral Alibi, as a “Notable Book.” She received this honor due to her participation in the Kiriyama Prize. Well-known publishing houses have published her writings, such as Penguin, Bloomsbury, Random House USA, Jaico Books, Rupa Publications, and Times Group Books, and her books are widely distributed. Prabhu, the creator, and director of the Pune International Literary Festival is the person primarily responsible for placing the city of Pune on the map as a locale for hosting literary 336

Encyclopedia Entries

and cultural festivals on a global scale. She believes reading regularly may be therapeutic and necessary for maintaining social harmony. She was chosen as one of the 50 Inspiring Women of Maharashtra not too long ago. The ERTC Global Herald in Mumbai also gave her the “Excellence in Writing” award. She has also been given the Rex Karmaveer Gold Medal Award for her achievements.

Further Reading Arora, Kim.  “Desi Agatha Christies Mark Their Presence.”  Times of India, 28 Oct. 2012, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Desi-Agatha-Christies-mark-their-presence/articleshow/16987499.cms. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Etteth, Ravi Shankar. “Book Review: Manjiri Prabhu’s ‘The Cosmic Clues.’ ” India Today, 14 May 2012, indiatoday.in/magazine/society-and-the-arts/books/story/20041220-book-review-of-the-cosmicclues-by-manjiri-prabhu-788812-2004-12-19. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Pais, Arthur J. “Prophetess of Doom.” India Abroad, 7 Jul. 2006, p. M3.

NEERAJ PIZAR

QUIET OF THE BIRDS, THE, by Nisha Da Cunha A collection of twenty-seven short stories, Nisha Da Cunha’s The Quiet of the Birds (2005) is a sad commentary on human relations, especially men and women, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, and mothers and sons. A current of melancholy pervades the lives of the female protagonists in the anthology. These stories create a vivid spectrum of female experiences. The opening story, “The Old Cypress,” looks at Radha’s life in her fifties as she wants to move to a new, hilly place along with her husband Rohan due to the huddled-up existence in Bombay. She finds Bombay an unfit place for the old. However, a shock awaits her as her husband leaves her for another young woman after thirty years of married life. The title story in the collection “The Quiet of the Birds” questions the silence imposed on women. It is about Safia whose father exposes her to nothing else except a life of drudgery and silence as he takes her to a jungle every day to learn silence from the birds. She is married off quite young, creating an emotional void. Though Safia’s husband Anwar is sensitive, Safia finds it difficult to adjust to city life in Bombay and feels rudderless and emotionally crippled. Twenty years later, Safia’s life is narrated to her daughter Zubaida by Aaditya who hands her a letter in which Safia confesses, “I just can’t cope anymore.” In a disturbing emotional void, even motherhood becomes difficult to bear, and she takes sleeping pills and dies. The eponymous female protagonist in “Allegra” scribbles her anxiety and fear in epistolary form to her mother as she is bedridden and cannot walk due to an accident and wonders why it was she who lost her spine in the accident and not her husband who deserts her. “African Bird” shows the female narrator El’s disgust of “pleasure-destroying nuns” whose punishments at school result in the amputation of her leg. She compares her wound to that of Philoctetes whom sailors abandon due to a festering and repulsive wound and terms it as “Christian Cruelty to Children.” Apart from this, the story is an attack on the vocation of motherhood. The narrator wants the males to realize the agony of giving birth and raising babies through the pain of an African male bird that lays eggs, hatches them, and has babies. “One Summer Meeting” is about a mother who tells her son after two decades why she left her husband who would not find any joy in anything and would never appreciate her looks. She falls for a man whom she compares to a sunbird that fills her life with happiness. Comparing her state to a pair of beautiful dogs that are “hideously maimed, both hind legs broken,” the narrator dwells on her horror and shock in marriage. Ironically, even her son turns a deaf ear and follows the patriarchal path of his father. 337

Encyclopedia Entries

“Three Lives” is about Virginia who is never allowed to see anything outside the walls of her garden. Like her mother, Virginia is married off very young to a middle-aged “unsmiling man” like her father. The generational cycle of the suffering of mothers and daughters is painfully captured by the wife. Invited to the marriage of her own son, “Wedding” is a touching story about the travails of marriage. Losing life, health, figure, and mental peace, giving birth to five children by the age of twenty-three, and living with an uncaring, surly husband, she had left the house to be free “from the unpaid labor of mother and wife” (Chanana). Marriage and motherhood remain an untold tale of suffering for her as she sensitizes her son that “most deaths at least the death of marriages are from heartbreak.” The setting of most of the stories is Goa and Mumbai, the former being the author’s abode for many years. Her women protagonists lead a troubled existence in loneliness after passing through the ordeals of conjugal life.

Further Reading Almeida, Rochelle. The Politics of Mourning: Grief Management in Cross-Cultural Fiction. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2004. 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, 20 May 2013, www. indiatoday.in/magazine/society-and-the-arts/books/story/19971215-nisha-da-cunha-weaves-melan choly-tales-831082-1997-12-14. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

HEM RAJ BANSAL

RAJAN, BALACHANDRA (1920–2009) Balachandra Rajan is a multifaceted literary figure renowned for his scholarship on John Milton’s poetry, W.B. Yeats, and other aspects of literature. Rajan also made a foray into literary fiction through two novels – A Dancer in the Dark (1958) and Too Long in the West (1961). Born in Burma (now Myanmar) and educated at Madras (now Chennai), Rajan was a fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge (1944–1948). While at Cambridge, Rajan was editor of a series on literary criticism titled Focus. In 1948, he left England and returned to India exactly a year after India had gained independence and joined the Foreign Services (1948–1961), traveling the globe far and wide on diplomatic missions. He returned to India once again to take up a career as an academic as the head of the Department of English and the dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Delhi. Rajan ended his illustrious career as Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario. Rajan is an important figure in the history of Indian English writing and literary criticism as his scholarship deals exclusively with the British Canon. His years at Cambridge become relevant keeping this aspect in mind, as Britain was then reeling under the aftermath of the Second World War and the disintegration of the Empire would have hardly welcomed an Indian scholar, no matter how accomplished. Rajan reflects upon his student years in both his novels in an extended fashion. The Dancer in the Dark provides a complex representation of India, on the verge of a transformation that the protagonist V.S. Krishnan struggles to come to terms with after being a student in England. The novel begins with Krishnan’s homecoming as a Cambridge-educated, Western-oriented individual returning home after ten years. His return is to a home where he initially feels ill at ease, along with the added pressure of an arranged marriage. The India that Krishnan returns to is on the brink of great upheaval, uneasily awaiting the violence of partition.

338

Encyclopedia Entries

Krishnan is depicted as torn between tradition and modernity, East and West. He faces the life before him with uncertainty and dread, unable to grasp his role in the approaching struggle as he tries to forge an intimacy with his newly acquired wife. The inability to achieve a satisfactory relationship with his wife is further intensified by the arrival of a beautiful English girl Krishnan knew at Cambridge. The novel is one of the early explorations in Indian English fiction of the newly emerging Western-educated middle-class individual attempting to negotiate the colonial legacy with an independent India. Rajan also touches upon Gandhism and the idea of nonviolence as a way of life rather than just a political tool used for anti-colonial resistance. The novel ends on a grim note as Krishnan witnesses firsthand the chaotic violence of the partition, turning ordinary people into people lusting for bloodshed and revenge. Rajan’s second novel, Too Long in the West, attempts a more humorous approach to the experience of dislocation and diaspora. Nalini, the protagonist of Rajan’s novel, returns home to India from America, where she has been studying at Columbia for three years. Her hometown is Mudalur, a small forgotten village in South India, where her father has settled for several misplaced reasons. The father’s villa, Hillview, becomes the scene of a comedic house party involving suitors who respond to an advertisement placed by her father in the paper for Nalini’s hand in marriage. Nalini, like Krishnan from The Dancer in the Dark, struggles between tradition and modernity, being an obedient daughter to her parents and her own independence and accomplishments acquired through a Western education. The suitors themselves are presented as caricatures of different types of Indian men, the orphaned Satyamurti, the researcher of arranged marriages Kalyanasundaram, and the handsome Kubera. In an almost Wodehouse comedy of errors, Hillview at Mudalur becomes the setting for humor rather than romance even as torrential rains cut off the inhabitants from the outside world. Rajan’s literary fiction articulates the anxieties of the educated class of young Indians, perhaps drawn from his own personal experiences of being at home and abroad. Marriage becomes a site of negotiation for the individual in his novels, for Krishnan ending in tragedy and Nalini, a happy resolution to the comic tension that Rajan’s second novel explores. Thus, both his novels present Krishnan and Nalini as symbols of India’s tragicomic postcolonial situation after freeing itself from colonial rule, an apt subject to explore in Indian English fiction.

Further Reading Clark, David L. “Introduction: On the Lessons of Balachandra Rajan.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 3, 2011, pp. 619–651. Sauer, Elizabeth. “The Educated Imagination and the Extended Intelligence: Remembering Balachandra Rajan.” Milton Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 3, Oct. 2009, pp. 230–235.

NITYA DATTA

RAJENDRAN, ARJUN (1979–) Arjun Rajendran was born on June 24, 1979, in Colaba, Bombay, to Rajendran and Padma whose English poems (under the pseudonym of Padmasundari) have appeared in the Chandrabhaga and The Illustrated Weekly of India. He attended Our Lady of Salvation High School, Dadar, acquired a master’s diploma in journalism from the Xavier Institute of Communications (2002) and an MBA from Missouri State University (2007). A Charles Wallace Fellow in Writing at the University of Stirling, Scotland (2018), Rajendran teaches French, is a former editor of The Four Quarters Magazine and The Bombay Literary Magazine, and the founder of the

339

Encyclopedia Entries

writers’ collective, The Quarantine Train. Drawn to sci-fi, comics, the occult, and to antiquarian books, he currently lives in Pune with his parents and his dogs, Misha and Joan. Rajendran’s poems have been widely featured in magazines and anthologies including The  Penguin Book of Indian Poets. He is the author of a poetry chapbook titled Your Baby is Starving (Aainanagar/Vayavya 2017), and three full-length collections titled Snake Wine (Zaporogue, 2014), The Cosmonaut in Hergé’s Rocket (Paperwall, 2017), and One Man Two Executions (Westland, 2020). Rajendran’s very first book Snake Wine established him as a confident poetic voice uncomfortable with labels. Wry, vulnerable, caustic, and intensely emotional, his deftness with words and his ability to suggest more through less strikingly make their mark here. The poems in this collection document love, loss, travel, experience, memory, and nostalgia while traversing a wide range of moods – lyrical, questioning, amused, sensual, and elegiac. Its clarity of approach to poetry and its shifts of thought and perspective, along with its fresh unencumbered language, make it a notable debut collection. In his second book, The Cosmonaut in Hergé’s Rocket, Rajendran’s poetry, animated by a desire for greater architectural compression, is more dens and allusive. The structural idea of the collection was inspired by the American physicist Richard P. Feynman’s diagrams and the poems concoct a cultural cocktail in which Feynman’s quantum theory, the numbers of Ramanujan’s Taxicab, Anna Karenina, Tintin, Archie, P.C. Sorcar, Olympus Mons, and beetroots – all become intellectual conduits for the readers’ imagination to approach a wide array of emotional significations. Though the intellectual space that this collection orbits is staggering, its pop epistemological bricolage is held together by the poet’s acute consciousness of belonging to each realm of experience and his deep faith in language as resurrection. Rajendran’s chapbook, Your Baby is Starving, was part of an experimental poetry project in which five poets worked together for two years, critiquing and editing each other’s work in solidarity. The title is drawn from a ransom note written by Raghunandan Yandamuri who kidnapped and murdered a baby and her grandmother and was the first Indian to be sentenced to death in the United States. Weaving anxiety, paranoia, fear, and deep psychological friction, it makes a bold statement for stylistic condensation through a pregnant symbolic method. One Man Two Executions is Rajendran’s most ambitious poetry collection to date. Introduced by his numismatist father to the diaries of Ananda Ranga Pillai, interpreter for the French Governor General of Pondicherry, Jean François Dupleix, its first part involves a dynamic, postcolonial retelling of the 18th-century life of Pondicherry with its Carnatic wars and its manyhued politics, commerce, and conspiracies. The second part of the book contains love poems of exquisite tenderness and the third section, crisp philosophical reflections on our workaday world, what holds the book together is its feisty cosmopolitan spirit – as sharp in its irony as it is fluid in its connections – and its textured linguistic bravura. Rajendran’s work is distinctly avant-garde in its form, style, and themes. His multiple intellectual tastes and polylingualism work together to give his best poems a postmodern faithfulness and an aural sharpness that appeals equally to the eye and the ear.

Further Reading D’Costa, Michelle. “Arjun Rajendran on His Love Affair with Poetry.” Bound, 5 Mar. 2019, www.boundindia.com/arjun-rajendran-on-his-love-affair-with-poetry/. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Goyal, Shantam. “Looking Back and Forth: Arjun Rajendran’s Poems Chart. . . .” The Hindu Business Line, 11 Jan. 2018, www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/read/looking-back-and-forth/article9752292.ece. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

340

Encyclopedia Entries Katyal, Akhil. “Review: One Man Two Executions by Arjun Rajendran.” Hindustan Times, 29 Jan. 2021, www.hindustantimes.com/books/reviewone-man-two-executions-by-arjun-rajendran-101611 924261357.html. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Kejriwal, Rohini. “How Does a Poet Turn Tintin and Snowy (and Beetroot) into Clever, Searing Verse?” Scroll.in, 1 Jul. 2017, scroll.in/article/838707/how-does-a-poet-turn-tintin-and-snowy-and-beetrootinto-clever-searing-verse. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

BASUDHARA ROY

RAMA RAO, PEDAPUDI GANGA (1935–) Pedapudi Ganga Rama Rao was born in the year 1935 and spent his childhood, college, and initial teaching years in Kakinada (Andhra Pradesh). He rendered long innings as a teacher of English in degree colleges in Andhra Pradesh (1953–1962), Kendrapara College (1962–1983), and Utkal University (1983–1995). He retired from the post graduate dept. of English, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar. As a Fulbright Professor of English, he lectured and gave readings from his creative writing at several American universities. On a British Council Grant, he visited Oxford and Edinburgh Universities in 1986 and delivered a series of lectures there. Rama Rao participated in several national and international conferences. Now, in his late 80s, he is focused on writing poetry. Apart from his large body of academic writing, he has published notable creative work. His major breakthrough as a writer came with his book The Poetic Rapture, A Study in Comparative Poetics (1963) that gained limelight and popularity. It was revised and reissued as Aesthetic Ecstasy (2016). My Days in Tulasi Kshetra, A Memoir (2009), voices his conversations with his students. The portrayal of his thoughts and spirit in a chronological sequence reflects the spectrum of his reallife experiences. The account is an accurate depiction of his difficult moments, lessons learned, and overall tenacity. The memoir was revised and reissued in 2016. Rama Rao’s novel, The Ocean and the Waves (2016), gained impetus due to its metafictional element. He dramatizes the dissolution of an affluent extended family whose sole child turns into a saint and resides in a bungalow on a hill. The second part of this book accurately describes the horrific cyclone and killer wave of November 19, 1977, which claimed thousands of lives in Andhra Pradesh Narayan. A skilled yogi serves as the focal point of the book. He inspires the narrator and teaches him how to hear his inner voice and establish a regular connection with it. In the years 2017 and 2018, Rama Rao published two memoirs, On the Other Side of the Globe and Humble Beginnings and Stumbling Blocks. Rama Rao has also been appreciated for his anthologies of poetry. The renowned ones are An Enduring Picture (2014), My Divine Hippocrene (2015), Whispers of Immortality  (2016),  The Garden of Eden  (2017),  It Is a Beautiful World  (2017),  My Magic Tree (2018), Where My Father Dwells (2019), Space Divine (2020), and The Great Wall of India (2021). His poetry is both joyful and inviting as it exemplifies a creative approach that takes the reader on an imaginative journey. His writings echo the abundance of life and wellness. The Global Jury of Dr. Yayati Madan G. Gandhi International Awards conferred on Rama Rao the  Poet Laureate Award  and The Lifetime Achievement Award  in 2016. Philosophique Poetica and Grand Productions, Canada, has also honored him with the Philosophique Poetica International Master of Metaphor, Creative Genius Award and Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Poetry Conference, Bathinda (Punjab, India), in October 2019. The novels and collections of Pedapudi Rama Rao are relevant today because they are intense, ecstatic, and soulful. His profession as a teacher overshadows his undeniable creative ambition. He delves deep into the beauty maxim within himself, passing it on to his readers in leaps and bounds.

341

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Dabydeen, Leonard. “Review of The Dot and the Line by Pedapudi Rama Rao.” Guyanese Online, 10.13140/RG.2.2.25018.44480,  https://guyaneseonline.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/pg-ramarao-the-dot-on-the-line-book-review-by-leonard-dabydeen.pdf. Accessed 2 Feb. 2023. Joseph, C. J. Review of Reflections: Select Poems of Dr Pedapudi Rama Rao, www.facebook.com/groups/ authorspress/posts/2383545888444318/. Accessed 2 Feb. 2023, www.amazon.in/Ocean-Waves-DrP-G-Rama/dp/9352072960. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

JAGMEET KAUR BHATTI

RAMAKRISHNAN, E.V. (1951–) E.V. Ramakrishnan was born in Kannur district of Kerala in 1951. After schooling, he completed his higher studies in various government and government-aided colleges in Kannur and Calicut districts of Kerala. He acquired a PhD degree in English literature from Marathwada University, Maharashtra and later served as an English lecturer for almost eleven years in a college in Jalna, Maharashtra. He also served as the professor of comparative literature in South Gujarat University, Surat, from 1985 to 2010 after which he joined the Central University of Gujarat as the professor of comparative literature. He retired from the university as the dean, School of Language, Literature, and Culture Studies and is currently serving as an honorary professor in Central University of Kerala, Kasaragod. Apart from his academic career as a teacher, Prof. Ramakrishnan’s contributions to Indian literature and criticism as a bilingual poet, translator, and literary critic are also notable. He has published poetry in both Malayalam and English and translates between both these languages. He has three collections of poetry in English. The collections Being Elsewhere in Myself (1980) and  A Python in a Snake Park  (1994) depict the experiences of an urban migrant who has moved from a rural area, trying hard to grapple with the life in an Indian city. Incidents of political unrest and resistance to political oppression figure in as a few important themes in all his poems. Terms of Seeing: New and Selected Poems (2008) is another important collection of poems which mostly throw light on the relation between human beings themselves and their interaction with the non-living world. The act of communication and the complexity involved in it becomes a central theme to these poems while the realm of the political also becomes an indispensable topic of discussion for them. In addition to being a litterateur, Prof. Ramakrishnan has also brought out collections of literary works published by other notable writers of the last century. The two significant edited volumes of Indian literature published by him viz. The Tree of Tongues: An Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (2000) and Indian short stories: 1900–2000 (2009) offer an elaborate survey of works by modern writers in English and in a few major Indian languages. Making It New: Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi Poetry (1995); Locating Indian Literature: Texts, Traditions, Translations (2011); and Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Modernity, Region (2017) are his notable English works in the area of literary criticism. Another important work, Bakhtinian Explorations of Indian Culture: Pluralism, Dogma and Dialogue through History (Co-edited, 2018), which was published recently focuses in detail on the concepts like the “carnivalesque” and “intertextuality” as used by Bakhtin. Among the various contributions that he has made to the discipline of comparative literature, the work Interdisciplinary Alter-Natives in Comparative Literature (2013) which he has co-edited with Chandra Mohan and Harish Trivedi is notable. The work explores the major paradigmatic shifts that have occurred in the area of comparative literature in recent times and the way new cultural forms can act as forms of resistance. He has also translated the poetry

342

Encyclopedia Entries

of several Malayalam writers into English including the works of K. Satchidanandan and P.P. Raveendran. Prof. Ramakrishnan’s writings in the area of literary criticism are published in Malayalam too. The Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for literary criticism was conferred on him for the Malayalam book Aksharavum Adhunikatayum (Writing and Modernity) which was published in 1995. The role that the printed word has played in Kerala society which was fast modernizing and becoming a fully literate India State by the end of last century is dealt in detail in it. His important works in Malayalam criticism which examine the relations between literature, society and nationalism include Vakkile Samooham (Society in Words, 1970) and Desheeyatakalum Sahityavum (Nationalisms and Literature, 2000). His other major studies on Malayalam literature include the essay collections Anubhavangale Aarkkanu Peti (Who is Afraid of Experiences?, 2008) and Malayala Novelinte Desakalangal (The Time-Space of the Malayalam Novel, 2017). The Vaikhari Award instituted by T. Bhaskaran Memorial Trust was awarded to Prof. Ramakrishnan for the latter book. The volume Madhavikkutty: Pathanangalum Rachanakalum (Madhavikkutty: Studies and Writings, 2012) edited by Prof. Ramakrishnan is another comprehensive work that includes studies on various aspects of the bilingual litterateur Kamala Das’s writings. In addition to his identity as a comparatist, literary critic, creative writer, and translator, Prof. Ramakrishnan is also considered as an expert in the area of diaspora studies as well as in the field of literary modernism to be specific. His contributions as an academic who has contributed immensely to studies in areas like Dalit literature, tribal literature, and women’s writings in Indian languages are often highlighted. His observations about the way in which a ‘selfhood’ develops over a period of time and its representation in autobiographical writings are well acclaimed.

Further Reading Bose, Aparna Lanjewar. Writing Gender Writing Self: Memory, Memoir and Autobiography. Routledge, 2020. Thayil, Jeet, editor. The Penguin Book of Indian Poets. Penguin, 2022. Wong, Mitali Pati, and Syed Khwaja Moinul Hasan. The English Language Poetry of South Asians: A Critical Study. McFarland, 2013.

NIVEDITHA KALARIKKAL

RAMANUJAN, A.K. (1929–1993) Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan was born on March 16, 1929, to Tamil Brahmin parents. He studied English literature to earn his BA and MA from the University of Mysore. After working as a lecturer in many Indian universities, Ramanujan moved to the United States in 1959 to pursue a PhD in linguistics from Indiana University, which he earned in 1963. In 1962 Ramanujan was able to secure a job as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he eventually helped to form the South Asian Studies department, one of the strongest of its kind in the West. He was also involved in teaching at several other universities in the United States, such as Harvard University, University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, University of California at Berkeley, and Carlton College. In 1976, the Indian government awarded him the fourth highest civilian award, the Padma Shri, and in 1983, he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in the United States. He was also awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, India’s highest literary award, posthumously in 1999 for The Collected Poems.

343

Encyclopedia Entries

Ramanujam was a man of many talents and wrote on many subjects and in five languages – Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Sanskrit, and English – which led Wendy Doniger to comment: “(Ramanujan) blazed a great path through the center of Indological studies. He gave us so many new paradigms that no Indologist can now think about India without thinking through his thoughts.” Ramanujan is often credited with introducing ancient Tamil poetry to the Western world. His translations made the West realize that there was a treasury of poetry available in ancient Tamil poetic traditions. Until then Indian poetry was equated mainly with Sanskrit poetry. Ramanujan “discovered” two Tamil classical texts, Tholkappiyam and Kurunthogai, at the library of the University of Chicago in 1962. This discovery not only established him as a translator of classical Tamil poetry but also impacted his way of thinking and writing as a poet. While many Indian scholars argued for the influence of Sanskrit on the Tamil language, Ramanujan saw the Tamil Sangam poetry as unaffected by Sanskrit. The ancient Tamils divided the world into Akam (interior) and Puram (exterior). Akam focused on love and everything related to love. Puram focused on everything else, mainly war and heroism. The bards also used the concept of thinais (roughly translating to landscape) and used four thinais in their poetry: Kurinji (hill country), mullai (forest), paalai (desert), neidhal (seashore), and marudham (farmlands). The akam poetry focused on love life across these five landscapes. Ramanujan’s work, The Interior Landscape is a translation of selected poems from Kurunthogai, an anthology of Akam poems, i.e., poems about love. In Poems of Love and War, Ramanujan translated classical Tamil poetry from both Akam and Puram traditions. Translating classical Tamil Sangam poetry is no easy task. Ramanujan, however, handled it well and in the process, came up with his own views about translating, which he expressed in his essay On Translating a Tamil Poem. In translating Kurunthogai, for example (The Interior Landscape), his fidelity was to the structure of the poems, and he opted to translate the poem phrase by phrase than line by line. Hymns for the Drowning brought out another important segment of classical Tamil poetry – the Bhakti or devotional poetry. In this book, Ramanujan translated the 9th-century bard, Nammalvar, from his Tiruvāymoḻi and Tiruviruttam. Alvar were the poets who lived between the 6th and the 9th centuries who revived Hinduism against the threat of Buddhism through Bhakti poetry. In his introduction, Ramanujan explains that the title is a play on the word Alvar. The word Alvar means one who is “immersed in god” and the root word “al” means to sink, thus the title, Hymns for the Drowning. Speaking of Siva is a translation of Kannada religious poems from the 10th to the 13th century by four bards, namely Dasimayya, Basavanna, Allama, and Mahadeviyakka. This book is a translation of the vacanas (a religious poem in free verse) of the Vira-Saiva (warrior Saivism) bards of medieval Kannada literature. His translation even included modern works such as U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara, a novel published in the 1960s in the Kannada language. It is a religious tale about a disintegrating Brahmin society. In his essay “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” he borrows a concept from linguistics, namely the idea of context-free and context-sensitive grammar rules and applies it to his subject. In his essay “The Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” Ramanujan surveys different versions of the Ramayana which were in circulation and portrayed Rama and Sita (the hero and his wife in Ramayana) as siblings. This provoked criticism and controversy as the Hindus in India believe Rama to be an avatar of the god Vishnu. Folktales from India, Oral Tales from Twenty Indian Languages, and A Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales from India are Ramanujan’s contributions to folklore. The first title has

344

Encyclopedia Entries

one hundred and ten stories from twenty-two Indian languages, whereas the second title has seventy-seven folktales from the Kannada language only. Ramanujan was also a prolific poet. He published three volumes of poetry during his lifetime. A collection of his poems, which included the three already published works, and a fourth unpublished collection, was published posthumously in 1995.

Further Reading Bhatnagar, M. K., editor. The Poetry of A. K. Ramanujan. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2002. Ramanujan, A. K. The Oxford India Ramanujan, edited by Molly Daniels-Ramanujan. Oxford UP, 2004. Rodríguez, Guillermo. When Mirrors Are Windows: A View of A. K. Ramanujan’s Poetics. Oxford UP, 2016.

M. ALROY MASCRENGHE

RANCHAN, SOM P. (1932–2014) A poet, critic, writer, folklorist, thinker, scholar, and academician of repute, Som P. Ranchan was born in Lahore in undivided India. After the partition, he and his family came to Shimla where he did his school and college. After obtaining his master’s degree in English literature from Panjab University, Ranchan taught in different colleges under the erstwhile Patiala and East Punjab States Union (PEPSU) until he was awarded Fulbright Fellowship in 1960 by the United States Educational Foundation in India. Later, he obtained several fellowships such as the Smith-Mundt Fellowship (1961), the University of Wisconsin Fellowship (1962), and the Hazen Foundation Fellowship (1963). On returning to India in 1964, Ranchan taught at Punjabi University, Patiala, for two years. Then he went back to the United States and became a full Professor at California State University. In 1977, he joined Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla, as a professor of English. He remained a Fellow at the India Institute of Advanced Study at Shimla from 1995 to 1998. Ranchan’s prolificity and creative output as a poet was enormous. Besides publishing twelve collections of short lyrics, he also wrote ten books of epic poems, three mini epics in verse, eight dialogue epics on wisdom figures, (such as Krishna, Christ, Mother Sharda, Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Manjushri, J. Krishnamurti, and Baha’u’llah), and three books of poetic transcreations. In the fictional realm, he wrote three collections of short stories, and one novel along with fifteen books on varied topics concerning criticism, religion, psychology, mythology, folklore, and philosophical and political thought. Ranchan was essentially a poet who started writing poetry while still at school; however, his first poetry book, The Splintered Mirror was published in 1960 by PR Macmillan from London. It carries stray echoes of T.S. Eliot and expresses strong emotions such as love and despair. After a hiatus of nearly eight years, he wrote Me and Columbia (1968), reprinted under the title America with Love in 1987. Written in a monologic vein, this poem is epical and Whitmanesque in its sweep and expanse besides being epiphanic and prophetic at several junctures. Thereafter, he wrote dialogue epics at regular intervals such as Christ and I (1982), To Vivek then I Came (1984), To Krishna with Love (1986), Manjushri – Tibetan Buddha (1992), and Baha’u’llah – A Talkathon (2003). Another book of poetry, Loose Ends (1985) was written in the epical mode based on his personal experiences during the late 1950s. She: A Tantric Poem on the Eternal Feminine (1987) portrays woman as a wife/beloved on a realistic plane, but as a goddess/divine figure at the symbolic. In 1988, Ranchan brought out In the Labyrinth of the Self: Poems and Parables, which featured poems on varied subjects followed by Devi (1989) – a

345

Encyclopedia Entries

sequel to She. Two books that were added to his epic cycle on the eternal feminine were Nigmas for the Age (1989) and Anteros: Opus Alchymicum on Friendship (1992), an interior monologue on friendship. In his polyphonous poetic register, Ranchan relates his experience through myths and archetypes from diverse cultures of the world. His inspiration comes from the archetypal roots of his psyche. On Ranchan’s superannuation in 1992, a festschrift was published titled A Profile in Creativity: Poet, Professor, Person edited by Ved Sharma containing essays by noted scholars such as Jaidev, A.N. Dwivedi, R.S. Pathak, Anil Wilson, and others dealing with varied aspects of his poetry. Kirpal Singh’s book, Som P. Ranchan: Poet of Many Voices (1994), offers an insight into Ranchan’s poetry as a fine blend of the contemporary world and the past in all its literary, historical, and mythical aspects. Roshan Lal Sharma and Pawan Kumar in Som P. Ranchan: Dialogue Epic in Indian English (2012) have critically examined his dialogue epics to show how he treads fresh ground in Indian English poetry by inventing this genre and employing it as an effective strategy in his poetic universe to initiate much needed interreligious dialogue in the crisis of the present context. A special issue of Ken: A Journal of Literary Studies and Creative Writing on Ranchan’s poetry was brought out in 1990. Likewise, Conifers Call: Shimla Journal of Poetry and Criticism also published a special issue on his poetry in 2010.

Further Reading Sharma, Roshan Lal, and Pawan Kumar. Som P. Ranchan: Dialogue Epic in Indian English Poetry. Pencraft International, 2012. Sharma, Ved, editor. A Profile in Creativity: Poet, Professor, Person: A Festschrift on Som P. Ranchan. Konark, 1992. Singh, Kirpal. Som P. Ranchan: Poet of Many Voices. Academic Associates Trust, 1994.

ROSHAN LAL SHARMA

RAO, MALATHI P. (1930–) Malathi P. Rao was born in Bangalore in 1930 to Chennagiri Padmanabha Rao and Padmavathi. In her formative years, she grew especially fond of the writings of Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and Louisa May Alcott. She studied English literature at Bangalore and Mysore universities. She has had a rich teaching career, that started with Vijaya College, Bangalore, and continued at Miranda House, Delhi University. Apart from being a popular professor, she has given vent to her creativity too. Malathi Rao has authored three novels, three anthologies of short stories, and numerous newspaper articles. Her first novel The Bridge appeared in 1990. Her short story collections are Passion Fruit and Other stories (1980), Come for a Coffee Please (1982) and And in Banares Flows the Ganga (1993). She is best known for her novel Disorderly Women that got her the national Sahitya Akademi Award in 2007. Though she has been a prolific writer who contributed articles for newspapers as well, it was the Sahitya Akademi Award that pulled her out of anonymity. For her, writing is a way to make sense of the chaos that has engulfed human life. Further, writing is a means of self-expression and a way of listening to the inner voice. Writing gives her the support to face life, and though she has written about both men as well as women, the latter get more textual space in her work. She firmly believes that writing enables a writer to create an alternative world where one could give the desired shape to events and feel a sense of control. She is a voracious reader when it comes to Indian writing in English. She greatly admires the works of William Shakespeare, Henry James, Raja Rao, and R.K. Narayan.

346

Encyclopedia Entries

Disorderly Women is the story of four generations of Brahmin women during the first half of the 20th century. The novel blends the personal with the political by questioning the manner in which the patriarchal discourse constructs the female body. This interrogation is further made complex by the tensions imposed by colonialism. Rao addresses the conflict between the individual and society as her protagonist fails to conform to traditional expectations and dares to think differently. Rao was greatly influenced by the stories she had heard from her mother and grandmother. These stories eventually became the driving force behind her novels. Her writing is about ordinary women who grapple with the constraints imposed by patriarchy but there is an inner strength that propels them. Rao’s fiction is an example of how the local experience finds expression in the global language. She had to confront the challenge of expressing her Kannada sensibilities in English. She has always been sustained by an ardent faith that writing gives her the strength to face life.

Further Reading Bageshree, S. “Telling a Local Tale in a Global Tongue.” The Hindu, 8 Jan. 2008. Internet Archive, web.archive.org/web/20110606112006/www.hinduonnet.com/2008/01/08/stories/200801 0858350200.htm. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Krishnan Ramesh, Kala. “There are People Listening.” The Hindu, 9 Mar. 2008. Internet Archive, web.archive.org/web/20080314003434/www.hindu.com/mag/2008/03/09/stories/200803095 0070500.htm. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

NAMRATA NISTANDRA

RAO, R. RAJ (1955–) Ramachandrapurapu Raj Rao, born in 1955 in Bombay, is a writer, poet, and professor of literature. He received his doctorate from the University of Bombay in 1986. For his postdoctoral research, he secured the Nehru Centenary British Fellowship at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick, UK. He was also a fellow at the International Writing Program, Iowa, in 1996. He has served as a head and professor in the Department of English, Savitribai Phule Pune University, India, and is considered one of India’s leading gay-rights activists. He is actively involved in queer activism and politics through his writings. His first novel, The Boyfriend (2003), is one of the first gay writings published in the Indian subcontinent. Another nonfictional work, Criminal Love? Queer Theory Culture and Politics in India (2017), won the Likho Award for Excellence in Media in 2018. Rao’s first collection of poems, Slide Show (1992), is a short collection showcasing India, its attitudes, and beliefs in a realistic manner. His early collection of short stories titled One Day I Locked My Flat in Soul City (1995) comprises fifteen stories set in different geographical locations. The stories revolve around homosexual relationships and the binding themes of loss, despair, and displacement. His play, The Wisest Fool on the Earth, and Other Plays (1996), is a monologue: Jayadev, the protagonist is an unemployed gay man, who rambles a monologue when he is locked up in a luxurious bathroom. Rao’s biography of Nissim Ezekiel titled Nissim Ezekiel: The Authorized Biography (2000), locates the development of Ezekiel’s poetry. Rao’s first novel, The Boyfriend (2003), is set in Mumbai and foregrounds gay subculture with a backdrop of the 1992 riots. It presents the story of Yudi, a journalist, and a young Dalit boy Milind, who meet each other outside the men’s washroom. After their sexual encounter, Milind introduces himself as Kishore Mahadik and leaves Yudi his address. Later, Yudi discovers that Kishore has given him the wrong address and accidentally meets Kishore in an elevator.

347

Encyclopedia Entries

It is now that Kishore reveals his real name to him, and also mentions that he is a Dalit and an untouchable. Meanwhile, Milind who started working at a modeling agency in Goregoan, is sexually harassed and raped by a customer. He returns home and decides to get married and later finds it difficult to manage finances after marriage. The novel presents inter-caste gay relationship and showcases Yudi’s privilege of class, and caste and the power dynamics that operate between the two. Another work, Whistling in the Dark: Twenty-One Queer Interviews (2008), co-edited with Dibyajyoti Sharma probes into uncharted life stories/testimonies of professors, gay activists, students, working-class men, office boys, and men who have served trials. His novel, Hostel Room Number 131(2010), presents the love story of Siddharth and Sudhir who met each other in Pune Engineering College Hostel. The story unfolds and depicts the obstacles, homophobia, and police intervention that the gay couple had to face. Lady Lolita’s Lover (2015) narrativizes the exploration of sexuality by a fifteen-year-old boy Sandesh, who finds himself seduced by a married woman Lolita. His sexual awakening finds its way after meeting Jeevan Reddy, the lawyer who files a case of pedophilia against Lolita. His book Criminal Love? Queer Theory, Culture, and Politics in India (2017) is a theoretical account that analyzed the cites of transgression from established essentialist norms. Rao’s novel Madam, Give Me My Sex (2019), presents an account of the higher education system where the professor and head of a university unfolds his struggles with homophobia. National Anthem and Other Poems (2020) is a collection of poems that explores homosexuality through poetry and expands the horizons of gay literature in India. R. Raj Rao’s novels, poems, and nonfictional work reflect on the private and political lives of gay individuals as they struggle with their sexuality. Rao’s novels surfaced gay cultures at a time when homosexuality was criminalized and focused on the theme of rejecting hetero-sexism and destabilizing dichotomous ways of thinking.

Further Reading Chanana, Kuhu. “Polyvalent Power Structures in the Gay Writings of Contemporary Indian-English Writers: With Special Reference to R. Raj Rao and Hoshang Merchant.” Indian Literature, vol. 55, no. 3 (263), 2011, pp. 143–170. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23341972. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

TANUPRIYA

RAO, RAJA (1908–2006) Raja Rao was born on November 8, 1908, in Hassan, Karnataka. His father, H.V. Krishnaswamy, taught Kannada, at the Nizam College in Hyderabad and his mother, Gauramma, was a homemaker. He was the eldest of nine siblings. His mother’s death, when he was only four, had an indelible impact on his life – evidenced by the recurrence of motherhood and orphanhood as themes in his works. After his schooling at the Madarsa-e-Aliya in Hyderabad, he studied at the Aligarh Muslim University and the Nizam College before graduating with a degree in English and history from the University of Madras in 1929. The same year, he won the Asiatic Scholarship of the Government of Hyderabad and was sent to pursue postgraduate studies abroad. He moved to France to study French literature and history at the University of Montpellier and the Sorbonne, where he researched the influence of India on Irish literature. He was married Camille Mouly, who taught French at Montpellier, from 1931 to 1939. In 1946, he became one of the founding members of the cultural organization Sri Vidya Samiti. Pandit Taranath and Sri Atmananda were among his spiritual gurus. Later Rao relocated to the United States 348

Encyclopedia Entries

of America and in 1966 became a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, teaching courses on diverse topics including Marxism, Gandhism, Buddhism, Indian philosophy, and metaphysics. He was named Professor Emeritus in 1980. He was married twice more, to Catherine Jones from 1965 to 1986 and to Susan Vaught from 1986 onwards. On his return to India from France he edited two anthologies of Indian thought titled Changing India (1939) and Whither India? (1948) with Iqbal Singh. He also co-edited a journal called Tomorrow with Ahmad Ali between 1943 and 1944. He was an ardent supporter of the nationalist movement and participated in the Quit India Movement of 1942. In 1949 he edited Jawaharlal Nehru’s Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions. His other nonfictional works include The Meaning of India (1996), a collection of travel writings, meditations on self and the world, and fables based on the idea of India as a metaphysic and a way of being. Rao also authored a biography of Mahatma Gandhi, published in 1998, titled Mahatma Gandhi: The Great Indian Way. It focused on the concept of Dharma as a framework for Gandhism. Besides his nonfictional writings in English, Rao contributed four Kannada articles between 1931 and 1932 for Jaya Karnataka, a prominent pre-independence journal started by historian and journalist Aluru Venkata Rao in 1922. The publication of Rao’s first and best-known novel, Kanthapura, in 1938, is considered a watershed event in the history of Indian writing in English. Set in the early days of the Indian independence movement, the novel tells the tale of how the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi influenced a small South Indian village. Offering a strong critique of the caste system, the narrative style of the novel draws upon sthalapurana, a legendary historical account which narrates or retells the origins and traditions of a place. Narrated by an elderly woman of the village, Achakka, the novel tells the story of the fictional village of Kanthapura. The people of the village are devoted to the patron Goddess Kenchamma. There is strict adherence to caste rituals and ill treatment of the lowest caste, known as pariahs. The protagonist Moorthy is a young Brahmin who has recently left the village to study in the city and is deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi. The novel focuses on how Moorthy and Rangamma, an educated widow, steer the village toward Gandhian ideals and how Kanthapura navigates new political ideologies and social reform. The influence of traditional, oral literature, myth, and folklore, makes Kanthapura a truly path-breaking literary endeavor. The narrative style of Rao’s writing, distinctly flavored by strong vernacular attributes, and Vedantic discourse, not only set a strong literary precedent but made a deeply political statement as well. His literary ethos is best captured by the oft-quoted lines from his foreword to Kanthapura: “We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have to look at the world as part of us.” Raja Rao’s first collection of short stories, The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories, published in 1947, comprises three stories centered on Gandhism and the independence struggle in India. The title story is based on the process of myth making. Rao uses the characters of Gauri the cow and the Master to foreground motherhood and nationalism as powerful symbols that chronicle the struggle and sacrifice for freedom. The story titled “Narsiga” employs mythology and symbolism to tell the tale of an orphan boy who imagines Mahatma Gandhi as Lord Rama whereas “In Khandesh” is set in the background of colonial oppression and is a stream of consciousness narrative about Dattopant and the surrealistic circumstances of his suicide. His second novel, The Serpent and the Rope, was published in 1960. This is a deeply autobiographical account of Rao’s own experiences in Europe. The story revolves around the narrator Ramaswamy, a young Brahmin with an intellectual bent of mind, and his French wife, Madeleine. Set in India, France, and England, the novel draws heavily upon Rao’s experiences with his first marriage and its eventual breakdown. Rama’s trip to India for his father’s illness forces him to confront his inner conflicts regarding his fraught sense of self. Madeleine goes 349

Encyclopedia Entries

through a similar process too, renouncing her Catholic faith for Buddhism to resolve a crisis of identity. During his trip home, Rama also meets Savithri, a Cambridge student engaged to one of his friends. He develops feelings for her that further complicate matters. As the relationship between Rama and Madeleine deteriorates further, they end up seeking a divorce. However, with Savitri married, Rama realizes that the only way for him to receive spiritual solace is to seek out his Guru. The novel also explores the interface of Eastern and Western cultures and an individual’s metaphysical and spiritual quest in the process of navigating the illusions and realities of these diverse cultural worlds. It is also a modern retelling of the legend of Satyavan and Savithri from the Mahabharata. The novel received critical acclaim and is lauded by many as his best work. Many of the philosophical themes from Rao’s previous works find expression in Cat and Shakespeare: A Tale of Modern India (1965). The novel is essentially a metaphysical comedy. Through the interactions between the narrator Ramakrishna Pai, a divisional clerk in the Revenue Board, and his neighbor Govindan Nair, an astute clerk at the Rationing Office, the novel evokes diverse ideological viewpoints and philosophical questions. The wall between Pai’s house and Nair’s is an important symbol representing the divide between myth and reality. The story is set in Kerala during the period of World War II. While Ramkrishna Pai dreams of building a big house, his neighbor Govindan Nair’s philosophy of life is to surrender to the universe’s supreme energizing power, which he sees as symbolically represented in a “Mother Cat.” Through their divergent worldviews, Pai and Nair encapsulate the spirit and philosophical conundrums of modern India. Although Rao’s novel, Comrade Kirillov, first published in French, was written in 1956, it was not published in English until 1976. The story, narrated by “R,” is a biographical sketch of the title character whose original name is Padmanabha Iyer. Appended to the main text is the diary of Kirillov’s wife, Irene, and a conclusion by the narrator. Aspiring to teach Theosophy, Kirillov leaves India for California. However, his disillusionment with life leads him to Communism. After moving to London and marrying a Czech immigrant, Irene, Kirillov is still on a spiritual quest, much like Rao’s other protagonists. On visiting India after several years, he realizes that Communism has only made limited inroads into his spirit which is essentially Indian, showing him to be a bundle of political and philosophical contradictions. Kirillov represents the modern Indian’s relentless search for a sense of self, complicated immensely by ongoing negotiations between tradition and colonial modernity. A collection of Rao’s short stories titled The Policeman and the Rose was published in 1978. Many of the new stories in the collection are demonstrative of Rao’s thematic preoccupation with metaphysical dilemmas, typical of his later works. For instance, the title story, as well as “India: A Fable” engages intensely in metaphysical discussions. The stories “Javani,” “Akkayya,” and “Nimka” are styled as character sketches. While Javani belongs to a lower caste and Akkayya is a Brahmin, both are subjected to patriarchal persecutions and live in misery. Evoking the universal nature of women’s oppression, “Nimka” tells the story of the misfortune-laden life of a Russian woman, abandoned by her bankrupt husband. Interwoven with her life story is the account of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, heightening the sense of pathos and tragedy in the story. In his last novel, The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988), once again we see non-dualism; God, divinity, and truth emerge as salient themes. With a cross-cultural and truly international set of characters, Rao explores self-actualization and Vedantic, tantric, and Buddhist philosophies. The novel revolves around the unfulfilled love story of Sivaram Sastri (Shiva), an Indian mathematician living in Paris, and Princess Jayalakshmi, the wife of Raja Surender Singh. Various characters of different nationalities and philosophical inclinations traverse through Shiva’s life, constantly reshaping his own perceptions of the world. His conversations with his friend 350

Encyclopedia Entries

Michael, a rabbi, are particularly compelling and evocative. Rao intended the volume to be the first of a trilogy. At the time of his death, he was working on the remaining unpublished volumes, “Daughter of the Mountain” and “Myrobalan in the Palm of the Hand.” Rao’s third and last collection of short stories titled On the Ganga Ghat was published in 1989. The collection of is bound by a common thread – the city of Benares, a holy city for Hindus. The collection comprises eleven stories all set in this bustling sacred city. Considered the destination for spiritual redemption, the city is certainly the most important character in all the stories. The protagonists and central characters are from all walks of life – from Bramchari (one who practices celibacy) Madhoba, Mohini, the dancer, to concubines like Nanna and animals like Bhim, the sage parrot, and the Brahmini cow, Jhaveri Bai. Each of the stories engages with the theme of spiritual salvation and Vedantic concepts like Advaita while exposing the disparities brought forth by caste, class, and mobility. For his exceptional contribution to the literary world, Rao has received several awards and accolades. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1969, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988, and a Sahitya Akademi fellowship in 1997. He was posthumously awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award in 2007. Along with Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao is considered one of the trinity of Indian writing in English. He died of heart failure on July 8, 2006, in Austin, Texas, at the age of ninety-seven.

Further Reading Mercanti, Stefano. The Rose and the Lotus, Partnership Studies in the Works of Raja Rao. Brill, 2009. Mittapalli, Rajeshwar, and Pier Paolo Piciucco, editors. The Fiction of Raja Rao. Atlantic, 2001. Naik, M. K. Raja Rao. Twayne Publishers, 1972. Rao, Sudhakar A. Socio Cultural Aspects of Life in the Selected Novels of Raja Rao. Atlantic, 2000. Sankaran, Chitra. Myth Connections: The Use of Hindu Myths and Philosophies in R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao. Peter Lang, 2007. Sethi, Rumina, and Letizia Alterno, editors. Reading India in a Transnational Era: The Works of Raja Rao. Routledge, 2022.

GAYATRI THANU PILLAI

RAO, RANGA (1936–2018) Ranga Rao was a well-known author, translator, larger-than-life instructor, and literary critic. He was born and raised in Andhra Pradesh before moving to Delhi in 1964 where he taught for thirty-seven years at Delhi University’s Sri Venkateswara College before returning to his native state as Visiting Faculty at the Department of English, Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning (a deemed university), Prasanthi Nilayam. Ranga Rao has published several books and short stories, edited and contributed to several important works of art. His first novel in English, Fowl-Filcher, was published by Penguin Books India in their debut batch of books in 1985. It was a satirical novel that progressed in a picaresque manner. The state of post-independence India is represented in this novel with great sensitivity. The strength of the book is in the manner it exposes the follies and foibles of feudal lords in small cities and villages of India. Fowl-Filcher is a detailed account of many of India’s early changes after independence, and it is especially fascinating because of its focus on small communities in the country. R.K. Narayan: The Novelist and his Art, published in 2017, is another book by Rao. It is a critical analysis of R.K. Narayan in which he captures Narayan’s art of writing. Rao focuses on the author’s stylistic technique, and at the same time presents a timeline of his rise to fame as 351

Encyclopedia Entries

an important contributor to English literature. In the Journal of Commonwealth Literature in 1968 he published three pieces about Narayan. The book successfully condenses the substance of his major works while highlighting the basic concept. It is helpful to scholars as it has a massive bibliography, accumulated over the course of Narayan’s five decades of producing secondary sources such as interviews and profiles. Full of critical annotations, it stands out as a must read for scholars as well as lay readers interested in the subject. Ranga Rao edited the sequel titled That Man on the Road: Contemporary Telugu Short Fiction to his earlier critically acclaimed Classic Telugu Short Stories. This sequel brings together some of the best-known Telugu short story writers today. It is an anthology of eighteen stories that speak about personal experiences that become universal. Dalitism, feminism, religious fanaticism, Naxalism, personal connections, and individual eccentricities are all explored in the book. Rao compiled and edited Full Flame (Infinite Scenarios), a monograph, and Full Flame 2: Unconditional Love, a collection of sixty writings on Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba. It is an anthology that covers all aspects of the spiritual guru’s biographical, spiritual, and philosophical qualities. Each article focuses on a different mission such as education, health, and divinity. The spiritual ideas stated in these books are valuable, and followers can put them into practice for spiritual progress. Ranga Rao’s work is highly lauded and is relevant today because of his refreshingly basic but profound writing style. He appreciates the shift away from traditional academic criticism toward the contemporary scene, stressing what we see now. It rises above the level of yet another to become an important addition to the literature repository.

Further Reading Chandran, Mini. “R. K. Narayan through an Indian Philosophical Lens: Ranga Rao’s New Book Shines.” The Print, 2 Dec. 2017, https://theprint.in/pageturner/afterword/r-k-narayan-indian-philosophicallens-ranga-raos-new-book-shines/19924/. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Orthofer, M. A. “Fowl-Filcher by Ranga Rao.” The Complete Review, 17 Jul. 2012, www.complete-review. com/reviews/india/raoranga.htm. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

JAGMEET KAUR BHATTI

RAY, LILA (1910–1992) Lila Ray was a writer, poet, and translator known for her Gandhian ideals. She was born Alice Virginia Orndorff in El Paso, Texas, to a German and an English immigrant in America. Ray completed her undergraduate studies in Los Angeles and traveled to New York to study piano. While touring through Europe, she chanced upon various forms of Indian classical music which sparked her interest in music. In 1930, Ms. Orndorff arrived in Calcutta to study music where she met Annada Sankar Ray (bureaucrat, novelist, essayist, and poet) whom she married the same year. Soon after their marriage, Annada Sankar took Lila to Santiniketan to meet Rabindranath Tagore, who named Alice “Lila.” During those days, Annada Sankar’s pseudonym was Lilamoy Ray (life full of Lila). Heavily influenced by the ideals of Tagore and Gandhi, Lila Ray was a true internationalist who believed in the harmony of multiple cultures. Ray’s interest in translation grew with her exposure to Bangla literature and culture. She, along with Annada Sankar, became a member of PEN, an international organization of poets, essayists, and novelists. The Indian chapter was set up in 1933 by Sophia Wadia, with Tagore presiding over its initiation in  Bombay.

352

Encyclopedia Entries

Her first publication was an article on the Bengali writer Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, which appeared in the PEN magazine in 1938. PEN also published Bengali Literature: A Historical Survey (PEN, Bombay, 1942), with Ray and Sankar as co-authors. Roy joined Acharya Vinobha Bhave’s program for voluntary land distributions and traveled to the villages with Bhave’s supporters. According to Sailesh Banerjee, Lila was a true believer in the Gandhi-Vinobha approach. She continued to spin the charka even after independence and actively helped create the Khadi center in Bolpur. She translated Bhave’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, which was published as The Steadfast Wisdom. Her collections of poetry include Entrance  (1961), The Days Between  (1976),  Alive and Dying (1976), Songs of Mourning (1976), The Valley of Vision (1978), Once There Was (1985, poems for children written with Chandrahas Ray, one of her grandsons), and  A Visit to the Zoo  (1986, also for children). Her book of poems in Bangla,  Ekoda, was published posthumously in 1993. Lila Ray’s prose includes many essays, the first set of which was published as A Challenging Decade: Bengali Literature in the Forties (1953), Equities (1956). She was invited to give the Tagore Memorial Lecture at Poona University in 1969, which was published later published as The Formative Influences in the Life of Tagore. Ray was a prolific translator of novels, short stories, essays, and poems. She also collaborated with Satyajit Ray on the subtitles of several of his films, such as Ashani Sanket and Ghare-Baire and translated Satyajit Ray’s Bengali script of Pather Panchali at the request of Cine Central of Kolkata. Lila Ray believed that translation should not be regarded as a mechanical process and was convinced that translation needed to be encouraged in  India  as a profession, especially because India is multilingual and diverse. She was invited as the Indian delegate to a Round Table Conference on Translation in Rome, organized by the International PEN. Lila Ray was also asked to design a syllabus that universities could use to train translators. She was a founder member of the Translators’ Society of India (TSI) in 1968. The TSI was the first initiative in India to organize and assist translators.

Further Reading Rajan, P. K., editor. The Growth of the Novel in India, 1950–1980. Abhinav Publications, 1989. Robinson, Andrew A. Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye: The Biography of a Master Film-Maker. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. Tharu, Susie, and K. Lalita, editors. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century, vol. 2. Feminist Press, 1991.

SUCHETANA BANERJEE

RAY, SATYAJIT (1921–1992) Satyajit Ray was born on May 2, 1921, to Suprabha and Sukumar Ray. He attended Presidency College in Calcutta and Visva Bharati in Santiniketan and went on to work for the advertising agency D.J. Keymer and the publishing house Signet Press in his early years. In 1947, he co-founded the Calcutta Film Society. Eventually, he became one of the greatest filmmakers in the world for his path-breaking films such as the Apu Trilogy (1955–1959), the Calcutta

353

Encyclopedia Entries

Trilogy (1970–1975), Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977), and many more films that redefined Indian cinema and influenced auteurs from Martin Scorsese to Wes Anderson. As a prolific author, he gave birth to characters such as Feluda, Professor Shonku, and Tarinikhuro. His diverse talent as an illustrator, calligrapher, lyricist, music composer, and editor of the children’s magazine Sandesh has often led many to refer to him as a “Renaissance Man.” Among numerous recognitions, he was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 1987, the honorary lifetime achievement award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the Bharat Ratna – both in 1992, the year he passed away. Satyajit Ray’s set of original writings in English majorly consist of a couple of short stories and three books on cinema. Ray wrote two stories: “Abstractions” and “Shades of Grey” in his youth around 1941–1942. Consistent with his interests in different mediums, both the stories were on aspects of fine arts and were marked with his signature plot twists. The rest of Ray’s writings in English are mostly on cinema. Our Films Their Films (Orient Longman 1976) is Ray’s first published book and is a compilation of his writings on cinema from 1948 onwards. Under the section “Our Films,” Ray introspects on the craft of filmmaking and his views on the broader ailments in the Bengali film industry. He highlights the political economy of making movies, the diverse labor involved in the process, and the techniques of engaging with the audience. “Their Films” captures Ray’s fascination with world cinema and his interactions with individuals such as Jean Renoir and Akira Kurosawa. The section also captures the range of movies Ray was exposed to – from Hollywood to French New Wave – and his minute observations across genres, from westerns to social satires. A similar compilation of Ray’s writings on cinema was published in 2011 titled Deep Focus: Reflections on Cinema. This book is divided into three sections. “The Film-Maker’s Craft” sees Ray commenting on finer aspects of cinema such as methods of adapting a literary text, nuances of camerawork, and the implications of influences like realism on the art form. In “Pen Portraits,” Ray deliberates on iconic figures of cinema from Godard to Uttam Kumar. The final section, “Celebrating Cinema,” is devoted to Ray’s experiences of traveling to various film festivals in Cannes, Chicago, and Vienna, to name just a few. Ideas on cinema are exchanged and celebrated on these platforms, and Ray narrates these interactions with the global film fraternity. My Years with Apu is yet another notable work that Ray published in 1994 (Viking, Penguin Books). Reconstructed by Ray’s wife Bijoya Ray from the first draft, it narrates the making of Ray’s Apu Trilogy. The book starts with Ray’s first film Pather Panchali (1955) and its years of conception, the interrupted phase of shooting due to lack of funding, the post-production phase, working on the music with Ravi Shankar, the casting dilemmas, and location shooting in Benaras for Aparajito (1956), to the introduction of actors such as Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore in the final part Apur Sansar (1959). The memoir provides a glimpse of the challenging journey of an artist from working in an advertising company to becoming a filmmaker. Simultaneously it gives a glimpse of the significant turn Indian cinema was taking in the hands of auteurs such as Ray. Among Ray’s second set of writings in English are translations of his own short stories, his father Sukumar Ray’s “nonsense rhymes,” and his grandfather Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury’s folk tales, all of which have been compiled in 3 Rays: Stories from Satyajit Ray by Penguin Random House India in 2021. Ray translated a few tales from Ray Chowdhury’s Tuntunir Boi (The Tailor Bird’s Book), some of which were published in Target in 1984–85. The translations are instructive in the way Ray manages to communicate the incidents set in the rural world of Bengal and the easygoing language in which the tales are composed. Especially noteworthy are the verses in “The Toony Bird” and “Narahari Dass” that have a distinctively local flavor in their original Bengali. The English version maintains a lucid retelling as Ray skillfully channels the 354

Encyclopedia Entries

simplicity of the folk tales without discounting the universal lessons inherent in the interaction between the human and the non-human worlds. The much longer translation project that Ray undertook for his grandfather was the film treatment of the latter’s story Goopy Gyne, which was ultimately turned into a Bengali movie titled Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne in 1969. Ray divides the story into brief scenes as he narrates the adventure of two simpletons who turn from terrible to terrific singer and musician when their wishes are granted by the King of Demons. The verses by Sukumar Ray were first translated and published by Satyajit Ray as Nonsense Rhymes by Sukumar Ray in 1970, before appearing in 3 Rays. Taken from his father’s famous book of poems Abol Tabol, Ray keeps the humor, word-play, and structure of the poems intact but makes a few adjustments to the text. Thus, Ramgarur (name of a creature) becomes Rangaroo, and Bombagar (name of a place) was made Bombardia. Ray also translated a couple of stories on Pagla Dashu and Professor Heshoram Hoshiar, characters popularized by his father in Bengali. Ray’s own creations such as Professor Shonku and Uncle Tarini were also translated by the author and published in various magazines in the 1980s. A previously unpublished draft script of Professor Shonku and Khoka shows his intent of adapting his work for television. Finally, Ray also translated some of his popular short stories into English such as “Bonkubabu’s Friend,” “Khagam,” and “Big Bill,” to name a few. The diversity of his translated stories is indicative of the range that Ray possessed as a storyteller – they cover genres from science fiction, mystery, crime, and thriller. Writing for The Independent, Andrew Robinson called Our Films Their Films a “Book of a Lifetime.” Reviewing Deep Focus: Reflections on Cinema, Harsh Mander notes how reflective, critical, and personal – although at times, elitist – the essays read. In the Preface to My Years with Apu, Bijoya Ray lamented that her reconstruction would lack the “wonderfully lucid, polished and impeccable English” of Ray. The review in India Today, however, maintained that it is an “absorbing memoir.” Tribune India called Ray a “grand translator” in a review of 3 Rays.

Further Reading Bhattacharya, Amitabha. “ ‘3 Rays’, a Masterly Rendition.” The Tribune, 30 May 2021, www.tribuneindia. com/news/reviews/story/3-rays-a-masterly-rendition-260582. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Chaillet, Jean-Paul. “Filmmakers’ Autobiographies: Satyajit Ray-My Years with Apu; A Memoir.” Golden Globe Awards, 2 Sept. 2020, www.goldenglobes.com/articles/filmmakers-autobiographies-satyajitray-my-years-apu-memoir. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Dhillon, Amrit. “Book Review: Satyajit Ray’s My Years with Apu: A Memoir.” India Today, 17 Jul. 2013, www.indiatoday.in/magazine/society-and-the-arts/story/19941130-book-review-satyajit-rays-myyears-with-apu-a-memoir-810309-1994-11-29. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Mander, Harsh. “Review: Deep Focus, Reflections on Cinema.” Hindustan Times, 13 Jul. 2012, www.hin dustantimes.com/books/review-deep-focus-reflections-on-cinema/story-aMpmftZKKjzKKKEWqNho PP.html. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Robinson, Andrew. “Book of a Lifetime: Our Films Their Films by Satyajit Ray.” Independent, 24 Sept. 2010, www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/books-our-films-their-films-satyajit-ray-b2235 434.html. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

TITAS DE SARKAR

RAY, SHREELA (1942–1994) Born in Cuttack Orissa, Shreela Ray was one of those unacknowledged poets of the American Indian expatriate coterie whose work, despite its poetic richness and excellence, was overlooked and remained uncelebrated in the American poetry readership. She spent her early childhood in England and India and studied at Loreto Convent School in Darjeeling, West Bengal, India. 355

Encyclopedia Entries

She came to the United States at the age of eighteen and in the year 1966 was part of the reading sessions of poetry at the Spring Arts Festival, University of Buffalo, as a resident poet. At the University of Buffalo, she built associations with Leslie Fielder, John Logan, and Isabella Gardner. Later, she joined the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa to receive an MFA in creative writing in 1972. She also attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College, Vermont, with many other preeminent global poets. At Middlebury, she met Robert Frost, Galway Kinnell, Wystan Hugh Auden, and John Berryman. While she was a disciple of Robert Creeley and Basil Bunting, she has also mentored poets such as Cornelius Eady, working as a professor at Empire State College, New York. She received recognition from Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association, a cultural and community center in New York. Ray published her first book, Night Conversations with None Other, in the year 1977 which appeared while she had a grant for National Endowment for the Arts, in India. It was published as The Passion of Draupadi & Other Poems by the Writers Workshop in 1988. This lyrical collection brings out conflicting realities of the poet’s expatriate identity and political and religious awareness of the religious and political struggles that plague her native country. There are forty-seven short and long poems that rest on the poetic self in disharmony arising out of the negotiations of her identity in the liminal space. A sense of exile runs through the poems, suffused with the uneasiness of compounding the two cultures. The emotive renderings explore the roots of alienation, grief, numbing detachment, and rage over nonacceptance in the new country. This uneasiness is resolved by revisiting India through a reconnection with places, Gods and mythology, landscape, and people who become a repository of faith for the poet. With intensely personal poems on attachment, memories of her childhood visits, letters home, her life lived in the hostel, dreams, and visions, the assemblage bespeaks the anguish of being racially different and the wounds created afterward due to her standing as the poet of color. This mutilated self is further crushed because of her sharp and firm opinions. Her poems also bear witness to the polite and deliberate disregard of her work in academic circles over her political views while her citizenship status as an expatriate limited her possibilities on the path of recognition. The poet, however, does not shy to indict and write back about the cultural insularity of the empire. Rhymes and cadences become spots of resistance, and the revolt against the structures of cultural practices appears in numerous places. Ray’s poems assume a polyphonic nature as the poet imagines herself as a lover, actress, concubine, and writes about historical figures, saints of Jews, hermits from China, chastising Churchill, invoking God as Allah, Ram, and “Yahve,” Biblical paintings, and sculptures of museums. Described in her own words as an “important-closet poet,” Ray’s work celebrates occasions from anniversaries, her two sons Gawain and Kabir, Quasimodo, Easter Sundays, deaths, and elegies. Thematically her poetry finds resonance with poets like Eunice de Souza, Kamala Das, and Tara Patel among Indian women poets. It also slides into the American poetic tradition, typically for being conversational, in-depth, and lyrical. Ray continued to write until her death, and her poems have been published in various journals such as The Dalhousie Review, The Nation, Poetry, Falcon, Southern Poetry Review, etc. She died of a long-term ailment and respiratory disease sarcoidosis. As a poet she received a fair amount of recognition in her lifetime, with grants and scholarships from the Atlantic Monthly, The New York State Council on the Arts, and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation intermittently. She was also part of the poetic cohort of Al Poulin and the Brockport Writers Forum in Rochester, New York.

356

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Ali, Kazim. “Shreela Ray: An Introduction.” New England Review, vol. 41, no.1, Jan. 2020, pp. 103–113. Logan, John. “Introduction to Night Conversations with None Other.” RootsWeb, Ancestry.com, freepages.rootsweb.com/~deleeuw/misc/ShreelaRay/articles/LOganIntroduction.html. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023.

BHAWNA VIJ ARORA

RAYAPROL, SRINIVAS (1925–1998) Born in Secunderabad into a Brahmin family, Srinivas Rayaprol was the son of Rayaprolu Subba Rao, a front-runner of modern Telugu poetry. He studied at Nizam College, Hyderabad, Banaras Hindu University, and also at Stanford University where he obtained his master’s degree in civil engineering. Although Rayaprol went to the United States to study engineering, during his years there (1948–1951) he indulged in literature and arts and “wrote and practised poetry.” He got involved with Yvor Winter’s Poetry course where he met William Carlos Williams and developed a close friendship with him that continued even after he returned to India and lasted until Williams’ death. Rayaprol also met e.e. Cummings, James Laughlin, Kenneth Rexroth, Henry Miller, and Muriel Rukeyser while at Stanford. His close interaction with these literary figures influenced his literary sensibilities. On his return to India, Rayaprol published a literary magazine called East and West from 1956 to 1961 with his own hard-earned money as a government employee. Many bright young writers/literary figures (including Henry Miller, James Purdy, and Carlos Williams) from both India and the United States contributed their work to the magazine. The journal also included translations of Indian texts that Rayaprol thought should be introduced to Americans. His book, Bones and Distances (published in 1968, reprinted in 1975) is dedicated to “the Americans.” Rayaprol’s other books of poetry include Married Love and Other Poems (1972) and Selected Poems (1995). In 2018, Graziano Krätli, a US based translator, editor, author, and scholar of modern and contemporary anglophone literature in India published a book containing the letters exchanged between Rayaprol and Carlos Williams, titled Why Should I Write a Poem Now? Krätli, along with Vidyan Ravinthran, edited another book titled Angular Desire containing selected poems of Rayaprol. The book was declared the winner of the 2020 Poetry Book Society Spring Special Commendation. From Rayaprol’s correspondence with Carlos Williams emerges an accomplished, complex, and enigmatic figure torn between his Indian background and Western education, between his profession as a civil engineer and his literary impulses. These conflicts can also be discerned in his poetry. While the setting of his poems is entirely Indian, the diction and rhythm of his poems are American Modernist. The dry humor in his poems is clearly an influence of Carlos Williams. Rayaprol poems are typically about ordinary experiences of life. He touches upon themes like memory, aging, and death and yet manages to capture moments and insights too fleeting to be described. Other unique characteristics of his poems are the unusual line lengths and almost no punctuation marks or line breaks. Besides this, his colloquial style and the conflation of AngloIndian and modernist American features in his poetry firmly establish his eminent role in the history of international literary modernism. Rayaprol’s contribution to Indian Poetry in English remained largely unrecognized for a long time. Dom Moraes was compelled to call him “a poet whom no one discovered” while

357

Encyclopedia Entries

also acknowledging him as a pioneer in modern Indian Poetry in English. However, there was a revival of his work with the publication of anthologies such as Eunice de Souza’s Both Sides of the Sky and Jeet Thayil’s The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets which is a collection of post-independence Indian English poetry. Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize has also been initiated by Rayaprol Literary Trust in collaboration with the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. The 1st Rayaprol Poetry Prize was given on Rayaprol’s 83rd birth anniversary in 2008.

Further Reading De Souza, Eunice, editor. Both Sides of the Sky. National Book Trust India, 2008. Krätli, Graziano, editor. Why Should I Write a Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams, 1949–1958. U of New Mexico P, 2018. Krätli, Graziano, and Vidyan Ravinthran, editors. Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose by Srinivas Rayaprol. Carcanet, 2020. Moraes, Dom. “Dom Moraes on Srinivas Rayaprol – The Poet Whom No One Discovered.” Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, Srinivas Rayaprol Literary Trust, www.srinivasrayaprol.in/dom-moraes-onsrinivas-rayaprol/. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Rumens, Carol. “Poem of the Week: Godhuli Time by Srinivas Rayaprol.” The Guardian, 25 May 2020, www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/may/25/poem-of-the-week-godhuli-time-by-srinivasrayaprol. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023. Thayil, Jeet, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Indian Poets. Bloodaxe Books, 2008.

GEETANJALI MAHAJAN

RED EARTH AND POURING RAIN by Vikram Chandra Vikram Chandra is an Indian American writer noted for a collection of short stories titled Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), the commercial literary blockbuster Sacred Games (2006), and Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (2014). His first novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain is a complex literary feat that frames a multi-tier narrative where hundreds of interwoven tales find a locus to come together. It won the 1996 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book. Chandra interlaces a good story with vivid storytelling by resorting to the mythical paradigm present in all major world epics from Homer’s Iliad to Vyasa’s Mahabharata, which is that of an overarching macro-storial frame constitutive of multiple micro-tales that encompass “timeless mythologies, ancient histories, and complex cultures” in terms of an across-the-board panorama. Despite the sheer historicity of the events depicted, Chandra luxuriates in the porousness that fictionality offers. He takes all liberties with fiction that normalizes a willing suspension of disbelief. A typist-monkey is seen to spin a stupendous yarn of never-ending stories, like Scheherazade, so that the wrathful eyes of Yama, the God of Death, can be averted. The animal is decisively named Sanjay (in Sanskrit, victory), after the significant narrator in the Mahabharata, who possessed the proleptic “divya-dhristi” and narrated all events to the blind Dhritarashtra. Sanjay’s variegated audience includes Lord Yama, Lord Hanuman, Lord Ganesha, and several others. Before he begins, Sanjay vows and declares that he will “construct a finely colored dream, a thing of passion and joy, a huge lie that will entertain and instruct and enlighten. I’ll make The Big Indian Lie.” The universal domain of storytelling is composed of stories within stories that adopt and adapt the politics of place and specifics of identity. The novel comprises five books that highlight the cultural relativism between the Orient and the Occident – pronounced as the greatest

358

Encyclopedia Entries

Manichean division in the history of human civilization. “The Book of War and Ancestors” highpoints “a curious mélange” of an East–West interstice, that question the plausibility of cultural partitions. Through re-narrativization, Chandra surpasses the scale of clock-time, and lives the past in its “presentness” because the stories of history, fact, and fiction are juxtaposed on a common platform. Chandra highlights the cosmic commonality that transcends relativistic differences across cultures that ultimately overcome superficial cross-cultural differences: “In this anomie .  .  . the universe was one . . . unity is diversity; diversity is unity . . . ‘Everything is the eater and the eaten’ ” (Chandra). Christopher Rollason regards Chandra as “a modern storyteller in the Indian tradition.” Chandra is a present-day proponent of ancient epical forms that he fuses with Western generic types like magic realism and the historical epic. The immanent spiritual traditions of the East and the colonial modernity of the West form a distinct literary iconography in the oeuvre of Chandra. It has been pointed out that Chandra seems bent on keeping his Indianness firmly in place. This has earned the wrath of certain “desi” critics, and the most notorious is the authenticity debate between the writer and the noted JNU academic, Meenakshi Mukherjee. The latter accused Chandra of belonging to the coterie of elite diasporic writers or self-seeking commissars that “worshipped Indianness instead of art,” a charge that has been equally countered by Chandra in his essay “The Cult of Authenticity” which put forward a defense for works like Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Ardeshir Vakil’s Beach Boy, and Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India. Chandra refuted the idea that he and his diasporic compatriots were exoticizing India and peddling the same to the West. His sardonic opinion was that a writer could authentically write about a nation without physically residing there, just as a native academic could teach Wordsworth under neem trees in an alien clime. Critics who questioned its aesthetics were subsumed by what he redefined as “the anxiety about the anxiety of Indianness.” Thus, shuttling between verisimilitude and volatile dreamscapes, Red Earth and Pouring Rain becomes a veritable tour de force that stands on its own merit.

Further Reading Rollason, Christopher. “The Storyteller in the Information Age: Vikram Chandra’s Entwining Narratives.” Rev. and updated ed., Kakatiya Journal of English Studies, vol. 20, 2000, pp.  135–157. Academia, 2003, www.academia.edu/78688150/The_Storyteller_in_the_Information_Age_Vikram_Chandras_ Entwining_Narratives. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

SUBHADEEP PAUL

REQUIEM IN RAGA JANKI by Neelum Saran Gour Set in 20th century Allahabad, Neelum Saran Gour’s Requiem in Raga Janki dwells on the life and times of the Hindustani singer Janki Bai Ilahabaadi, one of the maestros of music of the early 1900s. Janki lived in Allahabad during 1880–1934 and was a popular songstresscourtesan. She is one of the first recording artistes in India. While looking at the gramophone era and the first stirring of anti-colonialism in India, Gour exhumes the skeleton of Janki and develops a protagonist with all the possible shades of her persona, much the way a raga is developed, combining two traditions of storytelling: the biographical narrative and oral storytelling. The narrator is an unnamed woman who has seen Janki up close. She tells the reader what she knows of Janki and what she guesses and imagines. Hence, there is a delicate balance between history and fiction in the book.

359

Encyclopedia Entries

Janki’s father was a halwai. He took a mistress who lived with the family and was responsible for the attack on young Janki which left her disfigured for life. After the mistress disappeared, Janki’s father left the house, never to return. Janki’s life soon took a dramatic turn. Her mother was sold by their neighbor, who took away their gold, to a kotha in Allahabad. So, from Benaras, they had to move to Allahabad where Janki’s mother started a new chapter in her life as a nautch-woman, and Janki started learning music from one of the best of ustads in the city. She soon had a loyal fanbase in the city. Understandably, music finds a prominent place in the narrative structure of the novel. The title itself makes way for an engrossing musical journey. The novel is a requiem because it marks the passing of a meritorious woman artist and also the passing of an age. Gour regards this novel as a raga because it is a tale that is fluid and open to retelling as long as the main episodes remain unchanged. Revolving around Janki Bai’s life journey, the chapters of the book can be divided into two parts: Janki’s life before and after she became a celebrity. The first part is anecdotal, full of stories and gossip in the oral tradition. In the second part of the novel, Gour focuses on Janki’s triumphs, her poetry writing, her marriage, her visits to maharajas, her spiritual quest, and her unhealthy arguments with her mother. The book ends with Janki’s painful and lonely death. In the writer’s stream of consciousness, the character of Janki gradually changes: It morphs from a wide-eyed waif to a proud performer, spiritual seeker to devout wife, domineering matron to loud and violent woman. But Janki remains the center of attention throughout the novel because of Gour’s successful attempt at rationalizing her foibles, reading deeper into her intentions, and understanding her heart. While delving into Jankibai’s mind, Gour showcases her own personal affinity with music and her ability to understand and articulate its inherent power. Though Gour’s focus remains on Janki’s character, she never loses sight of the other well-formed characters who help weave her story. The intertwining theme of memory, storytelling, and beauty finds prominence in the novel. Janki’s nickname is Chhappan-chhuri, which was given because of the stab wounds she received in her youth. Janki uses the narrative of the knife attack by arbitrarily molding it into a story which has been retold many times by different people as well. So, there exist many versions of Janki’s story even today, which perhaps gave Gour the opportunity to comment on how stories are woven and how memory can be deceptive: we remember and forget what we want. The language of the novel has various shades – regional miming, period archaic, and contemporary informal. The intermingling of voices expresses an intermingling of cultures and classes during a specific phase in the city’s history in which Indic, Islamic, and European influences, classes, and masses intermingled to produce a distinctive cultural texture. The novel also brings to light moving verses from Janki’s pen, the neat irony of the couplets composed by her poet-mentor Akbar Illahabadi, and the classicism of Urdu and Awadhi. Popularly known as Akbar Allahabadi, Syed Akbar Hussain (1846–1921) was an Indian Urdu poet in the genre of satire. His masterpiece “Hungama Hai Kyon Barpa” is a popular ghazal.

Further Reading Chishty-Mujahid, Nadya. Fiction: The Song of Fifty-Six Knives. Dawn, 2018. Das, Chhandita, and Priyanka Tripathi. “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, Dec. 2021, pp. 1–11. ProQuest, www.proquest.com/openview/cdb190ab5d7 faa8015fec7619d7098e7/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=2049480. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Gour, Neelum Saran. Neelum Saran Gour, www.neelumsarangour.com/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

RAJESH WILLIAMS

360

Encyclopedia Entries

RIVER SUTRA, A, by Gita Mehta A River Sutra (1993) is a collection of six interconnected stories with a common narrator, a bureaucrat who wishes to renounce the world after the death of his wife and has sought a posting as the caretaker of a government rest house by the small pilgrimage temple town of Mahadeo on the banks of the holy river Narmada. The Narmada connects the narrator to the stories and also stands for the mythopoeic basis of Indian traditional culture. From the six stories and the experiences that they represent, the narrator learns about the deeper truths of the human capacity to love and the necessary preliminaries for attaining enlightenment. In the first story “The Monk’s Story,” Ashok, an heir to a diamond empire, narrates how he gave up his opulent life and exchanged it for the stringent self-denials of Jain monkhood. It reflects the capacity of the human heart to love, in this case, the life of nonviolence and renunciation, the way to love without bondage. In “The Teacher’s Story,” the narrative is that of Master Mohan, a music teacher who trains a precociously blind boy gifted with a “voice that is heard only once in five hundred years.” The boy’s death at the hands of a corrupt rich man who slashes his throat in a fit of jealousy also results in the suicide of Mohan who cannot live with the loss. The story, told by Tariq Mia (the narrator’s friend), allows the latter to “understand the ways of the human heart.” “The Executive’s Story” recounts the painful experiences of Nitin Bose, a former tea estate manager who has been bewitched by a jealous tribal beauty at the tea gardens and nearly driven out of his mind. Bose has come to the Narmada Rest House to placate a local snake goddess to cleanse him of spirit possession. The story teaches the narrator the cost at which one may ignore “the power of desire” (93). “The Courtesan’s Story” is a mixed narrative of two courtesans – a mother and a daughter – from the former state of Shahbag: the mother’s anguish at the kidnapping of her daughter by a bandit is matched by the daughter’s devotion to her captor-husband. After her husband is killed by the police and her unborn child dies, the daughter kills herself because of her love for her dead husband. “The Musician’s Story” recounts the sad tale of a female musician’s “penance” to cure herself of worldly attachment (145). Physically unattractive since birth, she is the daughter of a famous musician who falls in love with one of her father’s students: his betrayal of her love and her travails offer the lesson that one must first experience the world of desire before renouncing it. Recounted by Tariq Mia, “The Minstrel’s Story” is the narrative of a former professorturned-ascetic who wanders about the wildernesses of India in search of salvation. He finds it in the paternal care he invests in a small girl that he saves from prostitution and whom he brings up as a minstrel. He returns to his former life after the realization that one must first experience a life of duty before attaining enlightenment. In 1989, before the novel’s publication, Anita Desai had noted that the term “Indian literature” evoked in the mind of readers (presumably Western-educated Indians and Westerners) Orientalist representations of India because readers allegedly wanted “the satisfaction of the familiar” (Desai). In 1993, Mehta’s novel was criticized for an overt absence of engagement with the harsh socio-political realities of Indian life during the emergence of globalization, and particularly, the clash between capitalist interest groups and environmental groups in the wake of the Narmada dam project. A River Sutra was seen as promoting an Orientalist view of India, given that the stories represented “sensual,” “meditative,” and “contemplative” India (Karamcheti). Over the years, subsequent scholars have admitted that Mehta’s novel contains Orientalist representations, but also argued that she uses them critically to address, albeit tacitly, the larger problems and harsh socio-political realities of Indian society that the narrator does not face while living in the sheltered and isolated environs of the idyllic Narmada Rest House. 361

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Dass, V. N., and R. K. Dhawan. Fiction of the Nineties. Prestige Books, 1998. Desai, Anita. “Indian Fiction Today.” Daedalus, vol. 118, no. 4, 1989, pp. 206–231. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/20025270. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Karamcheti, Indira. “A River Sutra by Gita Mehta.” The Women’s Review of Books, vol. 11, no. 4, 1994, pp. 20–21. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4021734. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Mehta, Julie. “Myth as Metaphor: The Reflection of the Sacred in the Secular in A River Sutra.” Transverse: A Comparative Studies Journal, no. 2, 2004, pp. 9–18.

NILAK DATTA

ROOM IN OUR HEARTS AND OTHER STORIES by Kundan Lal Chowdhury Room in our Hearts and Other Stories is the third short story anthology by Kundan Lal Chowdhury, a renowned author in the canon of Indian writers in English who primarily drew upon the Kashmiri Pandits and their experience of being exiled after they were hounded from their homeland in 1990. First published in 2019, this anthology brings together twenty-two narratives of individuals from Kashmir who have been impacted by the communal struggles that erupted in the valley of Kashmir. The stories are interconnected by the common strand of the communal disharmony that infiltrated into the lives of the innocent villagers who otherwise were linked by their kinships. The stories in the anthology do not follow a particular order but appear as individual accounts that can be read as stand-alone narratives. They reflect the anguish, sorrows, and hopes of the Pandits by recounting, according to Chowdhury, “the extraordinary tales of the ordinary people,” while making a profound statement about humanity, affirming its power to withstand any catastrophe. Chowdhury points out in his introduction to the anthology: My consulting chamber is like a window to humanity; rather, the world comes walking inside it every day. I  see all types of people of every stratum of society. .  .  . There are stories sitting deep inside each one of them. .  .  . They are stories of universal human circumstance. In the first story of the short story collection, “A Forgotten Vow,” he narrates the story of Tulsi Nath, a vigilance officer in the Telecom Department, who got the mysterious opportunity to fulfill his childhood vow to visit the temple of Balaji. On the other hand, in the story titled “Dumbstruck,” he introduces the readers to Moti Lal and how he, Chowdhury, deduced the reason behind Moti Lal’s strange muteness. Remarkable about these stories is the manner in which Chowdhury uses them as windows to reflect the lives of Kashmiri Pandits who consulted him as a medical practitioner, and the worries, fears, and uncertainties of everyday people. The stories in this anthology depict the impact of the communal violence of 1990 on ethnic harmony. One such example is the short story “The Mind of a Terrorist” where he narrates the story of Kakaji Gurtoo and Mushtaq Ahmad alias Nalicha who were neighbors and friends since their childhood despite their ethnic differences, which for them was a fact of little or no significance until their lives were invaded by ethnic disharmony: Kakaji was forced to leave the valley along with the other Pandits while Nalicha joined hands with the growing Muslim militancy. What remains intact at the end of the story is the bond between the two friends, where Nalicha managed to save the old house of Kakaji in the valley as a last gesture of gratitude. A similar theme can be observed in the eponymous short story “Room in our Heart.” Using

362

Encyclopedia Entries

the character of Jana, who was possessed by the village deity Razaseb, the author highlights not only the importance of asking for forgiveness but also the need to forget and forgive a past that is marred with memories of pain and suffering, as the first step to reconciliation. This anthology marks a step forward in Chowdhury’s attempts to heal the wounds inflicted by communal mistrust and violence. It celebrates the value of humanity, love, and forgiveness while discarding ethnic and religious labels. Although the stories have been narrated in English which may presuppose a global rather than a local audience, they allow the readers to look past the petty politics which plague their lives and to realize that there is always room in our hearts to forget, forgive, and reconcile.

Further Reading Bakaya, Priyanka, and Sumeet Bhatti. “Kashmir Conflict: A  Study of What Led to the Insurgency in Kashmir Valley and Proposed Future Solutions.” Academia, www.academia.edu/36503256/Kashmir_Conflict_A_Study_of_What_Led_to_the_Insurgency_in_Kashmir_Valley. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Chowdhury, K. L. Room in Our Hearts and Other Stories. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. “Micro Review: Room in our Hearts and Other Stories.” Times of India, 7 Sept. 2019, timesofindia. indiatimes.com/life-style/books/reviews/micro-review-room-in-our-hearts-and-other-stories/article show/71012225.cms. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Tripathi, Abhinav. “Kashmiri Pandits: The Lost Identity.” ResearchGate, 2014, www.researchgate.net/ publication/261857707_Kashmiri_Pandits_The_lost_identity. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

ISURU AYESHMANTHA RATHNAYAKE

ROUGH PASSAGE by Rajagopal Parthasarathy Rough Passage, the magnum opus of Rajagopal Parthasarathy, was the runner up for the Commonwealth Poetry in 1977. R. Parthasarathy, one of the most significant Indian poets in English, was born in Tirupparaiturai near Tiruchchirappalli, Tamil Nadu in 1934. Besides being a poet, he is also a translator, critic, teacher, and editor. His critically acclaimed poetic work Rough Passage appeared in 1977 under the aegis of Oxford University Press. The work, perhaps the longest autobiographical poem in Indian English literature, consists of three sections – “Exile,” “Trial,” and “Homecoming,” comprising a total of thirty-nine short poems. The tripartite structure of the poem corresponds with the three phases of the poet’s life – his “Exile” to England, the “Trial” of his life, and his “Homecoming” to his mother tongue Tamil. Parthasarathy writes in the “Preface” of the book that it should be read as a single poem in which twenty years of writing have settled. The first section “Exile,” consisting of eight poems, was written between 1963 and 1966. These poems deal with the shattering of the poet’s dreams in England as he is exposed to London’s dirty “lanes full of smoke and litter,” faces racism like other people of color, and realizes that he had been “whoring after English gods.” Along with this realization, the poet becomes aware of his own culture and learns that “roots are deep” and that language “loses colour under another sky.” The poems describe his journey from England to India via various countries like Istanbul, Jerusalem, Syria, and Iran. However, even after his return, the poet still seems to be disillusioned and exiled within his own place and culture. All the sixteen poems that constitute the second part, “Trial,” were written between 1961 and 1974 and are love poems. In his own words, these poems present his attempt in understanding the human love – between man and woman. In his quest for an identity, the poet in this section turns toward love for fulfillment in life. The section contains poems where the poetlover describes physical love in detail with vivid sexual imagery. Though the physical love seems

363

Encyclopedia Entries

to provide some relief to the much-agonized poet, yet he is also aware of its transitoriness. As the poems progress, love becomes less comforting, and the inevitability of death begins to haunt the poet. His growing age and inability to achieve anything consequential frustrates him. Dissatisfied with love, the poet moves to the third section, “Homecoming,” a collection of fifteen poems, which once again marks Parthasarathy’s conflict with the English language and the impossibility of returning to the lost past. These poems were written between 1971 and 1980. He is hopeful that his return from the “English chains” to his “Dravidic tether” would prove helpful in his quest for his cultural identity. The poet, in the second poem, makes a passionate plea to Indian English writers like him to “turn inward” for inspiration instead of depending upon the “foreign poets.” Ironically, even a return to his mother tongue Tamil, is unable to satiate his thirst for an identity. He is pained to find that the contemporary Tamil is not the same Tamil of Thiruvalluvar’s Kural but an “unrecognizable carcass.” It is the Tamil of the modern celluloid. Not only language, but also the Tamil Nadu of his memory has transformed into an unrecognizable place with the ancient river Vaikai being reduced to a “sewer” which is of no use to anybody. Though the poet’s predicament still haunts him, he ultimately decides “to go through life/with the small change of uncertainties.” The poet finally strikes a compromise with English as the language of his writing while borrowing whatever he can from Tamil culture.

Further Reading Chaturvedi, P. D. “The Unity of Design in R. Parthasarathy’s Rough Passage.” Commonwealth Quarterly, vol. 17, 1980, pp. 62–86. Dasgupta, Sanjukta. “Politics of Language and Post-Independence Indian English Poetry.” Indian Literature, vol. 42, no. 5 (187), 1998, pp. 207–217. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23338793. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Devy, G. N. “To the End of the Marriage: R. Parthasarathy’s Rough Passage.” Living Indian English Poets: An Anthology of Critical Essays, edited by Madhusudan Prasad. Sterling Publishers, 1989. King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English, revised ed. Oxford UP, 2001. Puthuceary, Rosaly. “A Study of Rough Passage.” The Journal of Indian Writing in English, no. 8, Jan.-Jul. 1980, pp. 14–21.

VIKRAM SINGH THAKUR

ROY, ANURADHA (1967–) Anuradha Roy was born in Kolkata in 1967. She traveled to various small towns in India with her geologist father and developed a love for reading and art under her mother’s influence. She started writing at the age of four but published her first short story at the age of fourteen which was followed by many short stories. She studied English literature at Presidency College, Kolkata, and the English Tripos, at the University of Cambridge. She worked in several publishing houses before co-founding the academic imprint Permanent Black with her husband, Rukun Advani, in 2000. Presently, she works as a designer for Permanent Black, and she and her husband divide their time between Ranikhet, a small cantonment town, and Delhi. Books, writing, music, and art have been an integral part of her life. She is a huge fan of Nordic noir and nurtures a special love for dogs. She has received many international awards; her third novel, Sleeping on Jupiter, won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longings, begins with Amulya Babu’s move to a big house in rural Songarh, away from Kolkata. His wife, Kananbala’s longing for a life in Kolkata

364

Encyclopedia Entries

with all her relatives leads to her mental illness. As the plot moves, their widower son, Nirmal, secretly nurtures a desire for his widowed cousin Meera. His motherless daughter, Bakul develops a bond with Mukunda, an orphan brought up by the family. But their forced separation leaves Mukunda longing for Bakul. In the end, he returns to break the ceaseless longing that had haunted Amulya Babu’s family for generations. Her second novel, The Folded Earth, is about a young widow, Maya, who moves to a hamlet in the Himalayas to be near her late husband’s grave. She lives alone and makes a living by teaching in a village where she interacts only with the old and eccentric landlord, Diwan Sahib, and a village girl, Charu. When Diwan Sahib’s ambitious nephew, Veer, comes to set up a trekking company she is drawn toward him, and gets engulfed in personal as well as social conflict. Sleeping on Jupiter, the most decorated work of Roy, begins with the protagonist Nomi’s journey back to the sleepy town of Jarmuli, where she returns after fifteen years to confront the demons of her past – the Guruji who abused her as a child. On the journey, her story gets intertwined with that of other travelers – the three elderly women on a trip together, Suraj, the photographer, and Babu, the temple guide. As they undergo a journey of cathartic acceptance, their internal conflicts resolve either after an overwhelming display of violent feelings or purge with a mature acceptance of their troubled past. All the Lives we Never Lived is a layered narrative which incorporates historical figures like Rabindra Nath Tagore and Walter Spies to inspire young Gayatri into the world of art and dance. She breaks free from her stifling marriage to join Walter Spies in his research on Indian dance forms. She leaves behind her nine-year-old son, Myshkin, who grows up longing for his mother. At the age of sixty, Myshkin receives his mother’s letter sent to her friend Lisa, they rekindle his old wounds but also redefine his image of Gayatri and her dilemmas. The Earthspinner (2021), weaves the lives of Sara, a Muslim girl who moves to England for education, and Elango, an autorickshaw driver and potter, whom Sara meets again in England and recalls his tragic love story and their lives in their hometown, Kumarapet. Roy uses the myth of a horse that inspires creativity and hatred. At the center of the plot is Chinna, the dog, who teaches unconditional love. Pottery is used as a healing agent because, in the end, it heals Sara, as it once did Elango. While covering a diverse range of themes, Anuradha Roy’s writing consistently brings small towns to life with her precise and poetic language.

Further Reading Bala, Priya. “Books: In Conversation with Author Anuradha Roy.” Hindustan Times, 2 Oct. 2021, www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle/brunch/books-in-conversation-with-author-anuradha-roy101633193998780.html. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Chatterjee, Meghna. “An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy | Book Review.” Bookish Santa, 14 Aug. 2022, www.bookishsanta.com/blogs/booklings-world/an-atlas-of-impossible-longing-review. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Goyal, Sana. “The Earth Spinner by Anuradha Roy – Love, Loss and Longing.” The Guardian, 27 Oct. 2021, www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/27/the-earthspinner-by-anuradha-roy-love-loss-andlonging. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Lake, Ed. “The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy: A Series of Pastoral Himalayan Vignettes.” NBooks, The National News, 18 Feb. 2011, www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/books/the-folded-earth-byanuradha-roy-1.597039. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Roy, Anuradha. “Mountains Hidden by Clouds: A Conversation with Anuradha Roy.” Interview by Pankaj Mishra. The Paris Review, 16 Aug. 2022, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/08/16/mountainshidden-by-clouds-a-conversation-with-anuradha-roy./. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. ———. Anuradha Roy, anuradharoy.blogspot.com/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

URVASHI KAUSHAL

365

Encyclopedia Entries

ROY, ARUNDHATI (1961–) Arundhati Roy was born November  24, 1961, in Shillong/India to a Syrian Christian mother, Mary Roy, and a Bengali Hindu father, Rajib Roy. After her parents’ divorce, Roy grew up in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Mary Roy successfully challenged the laws of inheritance for Syrian Christian women in Kerala, winning a case with the Supreme Court in 1986. Some scholars have pointed out how her mother’s activism might have influenced Arundhati Roy’s own work on social in/justice. Trained as an architect at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi, Roy decided to focus on a career in writing. Following moderate success with screenplays and in film, she shot to fame both in India and abroad with the publication of The God of Small Things, her first novel in 1997. Set in Kerala in the 1960s, The God of Small Things explores issues of caste and the “Love Laws that dictate who should be loved.” The narrative centers on the twins, Rahel and Esthappen, in the village of Ayemenem in Kerala. Their divorced mother, affectionately known as Ammu, is romantically involved with Velutha, a Dalit who sympathizes with the Communists in the region. After the twins’ cousin, Sophie Mol, accidentally dies when their boat capsizes, Velutha is wrongly accused of killing Sophie Mol. The family is torn apart, Ammu dies at age thirty-one. When the twins are reunited after many years, they attempt to come to terms with their grief. The novel addresses many topics such as loss, love, politics, caste, and social rules in contemporary India. The text catapulted Arundhati Roy to international stardom when it won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997. Subsequently, the novel was translated into many languages. Along with her later work, it has allowed Roy to enjoy a career as a financially independent writer, critically acclaimed yet controversial. After the huge success of The God of Small Things, Roy turned to nonfiction with a series of political essays. “The End of Imagination” was published in 1998, the year that India’s nuclear tests in the Thar Desert proved successful. Roy’s essay is highly critical of both the development of nuclear weapons in general and the Indian government. “The End of Imagination” was republished in the 2002 essay collection, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, along with other texts addressing a wide range of topics from corporatization of essential resources via political issues to environmental crises. In the second essay in The Algebra of Infinite Justice, “The Greater Common Good,” which had also been published as a stand-alone piece earlier, Roy criticizes how contemporary India still engages in building dams across the country. Once hailed by Jawaharlal Nehru as “the temples of modern India,” environmental activists had long warned of the detrimental effects of such mega-projects. Roy protested in the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA – Save the Narmada River) alongside its founder Medha Patkar and many other activists against the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in Gujarat. The 2002 documentary DAM/AGE details the struggle of the movement in ensuring environmental justice. Other noticeable works include Roy’s essay collections such as An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, Walking with the Comrades, Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, My Seditious Heart, and Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction. Over the years, Roy has established a name for herself with her political essays and her activism, supporting various causes that aim at social justice and criticizing the Indian government. This has earned her both praise and criticism alike, some applauding her engagement in political activities, others questioning her right to do so as a writer. In 2008, for example, the author voiced support for Kashmiri independence, which earned her a charge of sedition. Roy has also made controversial statements regarding the 2008 attacks on the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay/Mumbai. The author has also supported 366

Encyclopedia Entries

the Naxalites/Maoists in India, criticizing the Indian government for its handling of the insurgency. Much of Roy’s work includes outspoken statement against US imperialism and the so-called “war on terror.” Ever since the phenomenal success of The God of Small Things, readers, fans, and critics alike had been waiting for more of Roy’s fiction. It took 20 years for her next work of fiction, the novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, to see the light of day in 2017. Explaining the long gap in between these two novels, Roy states: The fiction just takes its time . . . I can’t write it faster or slower than I have; it’s like you’re a sedimentary rock that’s just gathering all these layers. .  .  . The difference between the fiction and the nonfiction is simply the difference between urgency and eternity. (Interview with Decca Aitkenhead, The Guardian, 2017) The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is set in contemporary India, for the most part in Delhi and Kashmir. It tells the story of Aftab/Anjum, a hijra who grows up in Delhi and builds a home for herself in a graveyard. Anjum gets mixed up in the 2002 Hindu–Muslims violence in Gujarat, before returning to the capital. The novel features a multitude of characters and addresses issues such as the Kashmir insurgency, religious belonging, gender identities, and India’s most recent history. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. The COVID-19 pandemic starting in early 2020 was cause once again for Roy to criticize the Indian government’s response to the healthcare emergency. In an essay titled, “The Pandemic is a Portal,” Roy mocks the BJP’s hesitant approach: “there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable” (“Pandemic,” 2020). She points out that the Indian government was ill-prepared to deal with a pandemic, stating that the prime minister “thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted” (“Pandemic,” 2020). Roy attempts to see the pandemic as an opportunity for the future: “it is a portal. . . . We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred. . . . Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it” (“Pandemic,” 2020). Just like many of Roy’s other essays, “The Pandemic is a Portal” laments social injustices in contemporary India and criticizes the Indian government for not doing enough to confront the problems. Arundhati Roy has received much recognition and numerous awards for her work. Other than the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things in 1997, her recognitions include the Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation in 2002, the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004, and the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing in 2011. In 2006, Roy was awarded the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award for her essay collection, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, which she, however, declined to accept.

Further Reading Aitkenhead, Decca. “ ‘Fiction Takes Its Time’: Arundhati Roy on Why It Took 20 Years to Write Her Second Novel.” The Guardian, 27 May 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/27/arundhatiroy-fiction-takes-time-second-novel-ministry-utmost-happiness. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. “Arundhati Roy.” Britannica, 2023, www.britannica.com/biography/Arundhati-Roy. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. “Arundhati Roy.” British Council, 2023, literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/arundhati-roy. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

367

Encyclopedia Entries Ross, Michael Lawrence. “Arundhati Roy and the Politics of Language.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 57, no. 2, Oct. 2019, pp. 406–419. Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021 989419881033. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Roy, Arundhati. “Arundhati Roy: ‘The Pandemic is a Portal.’ ” The Financial Times, 3 Apr. 2020, www. ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Tickell, Alex. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Routledge, 2007.

JANA FEDTKE

RUSHDIE, SALMAN (1947–) Salman Rushdie was born on June 19, 1947, in Bombay (Mumbai) eight weeks before Indian independence, to Kashmiri Muslim parents. He attended the Cathedral School in Bombay from 1954–1961, and he was then sent, at the age of thirteeen, to Rugby School in England. He later wrote about encountering prejudice and culture shock at Rugby, although he also excelled at debating and acting. Rushdie attended King’s College, Cambridge (1965–1968), where he earned a degree in history. After a brief summer visiting his parents, who had moved to Karachi, Pakistan, he returned to London in 1968, where he worked as an advertising copywriter from 1970–1980. During this decade, working in advertising, he began writing novels. Rushdie’s first published novel, Grimus, appeared in 1975. Centering on the quest journey of Flapping Eagle, who has received the gift of immortality, it showcases Rushdie’s interest in combining influences and mythologies, drawing on elements of Sufi, Hindu, Christian, Norse, and Native American myths. Although Grimus garnered little interest at the time, the critic Catharine Cundy later asserted it was “very much a test-run for the successful novels of the 1980s.” Rushdie’s second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), brought him international fame, winning the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers in 1993, and the Best of the Booker in 2008. If Grimus suffered from a lack of anchoring in a specific world or tradition, Midnight’s Children is immersed in the historical, mythical, and cultural richness of India, driven in part by the strength of Rushdie’s childhood memories. Hiding in a pickle factory, the protagonist, Saleem Sinai narrates the story of three generations of the Sinai family to the illiterate Padma, who later becomes his wife, as well as for his son, who will read the story once his father is gone. The novel has is divided into three sections – Book One (1915–1947), Book Two (1947– 1965), and Book Three (1965–1980) – with family events and upheaval occurring alongside the nation’s political growth and struggles. Central to Saleem’s story is the presence of one thousand and one magical children across India, born within an hour of the midnight-moment of independence, each with special powers. Saleem’s power is telepathy, and this ability to hear the thoughts and dreams of all the other children leads him to coordinate their efforts in their own auditory Congress, where he discovers the difficulty of keeping them all together. Saleem also learns that he is not who he thinks he is, as he was swapped at birth with Shiva, who grows up in poverty in Bombay. By the novel’s conclusion, the weight of history and the midnight’s children’s voices have broken Saleem, who proclaims “I have been so-many too-many persons.” Midnight’s Children showcases elements that later became characteristic of most of Rushdie’s fiction: plots with burgeoning casts of characters, storylines with sweeping digressions, engagement with history and politics, the infusion of English with Indian idioms and cadences, use of both high and low cultural referents, and abundant mixing of multiple cultural traditions. A film version of Midnight’s Children was released in 2012.

368

Encyclopedia Entries

In his third novel, Shame (1983), Rushdie explores the recent history of a country that “is not Pakistan, or not quite.” It begins with the three Shakil sisters giving collective birth to a son they name Omar Khayyam Shakil, whose father is an unidentified member of the local colonial administration. Omar leaves the sheltered existence of his three mothers to travel to the city where his story intertwines with two political rivals: Iskander Harappa, a wealthy landowner who becomes prime minister, and General Raza Hyder, who overthrows Harappa to become the country’s dictator. This dark fairy tale and wrenching political satire also explores the constraints on women’s lives, which produce various monstrosities: one of General Hyder’s daughters endures so many pregnancies that she commits suicide, while another becomes a monster who tears off the heads of men before disemboweling them. While the novel’s narrator, a diasporic Pakistani, unpacks the shameful elements of politics, culture, and religion, he also asserts “Shame, dear reader, is not the exclusive property of the East.” Midnight’s Children made a name for Rushdie in the global literary world, but it was his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, that made him infamous. Published in 1988, it opens with two characters, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, falling from the sky because the airplane on which they were traveling from India to England has been blown up by a terrorist. Gibreel is an actor famous for his work in Bollywood, while Chamcha is an enthusiastic Anglophile, his brown skin concealed by his radio work as a voice-over artist. The threads of their storyline unfold in the context of the immigration upheavals and racism of Britain in the 1980s, but these became overshadowed by the explosive response to the novel’s exploration of the beginnings of Islam. Rushdie depicted Prophet Mohammad (called “Mahound”) initially agreeing to include three female deities in the new religion to appease Jahilia’s (Mecca’s) power brokers. On February 14, 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (legal opinion) against Rushdie, and Iranian officials offered a bounty of $6 million for his assassination. Rushdie went into hiding for a decade. During the early years of the fatwa, The Satanic Verses was banned in eleven countries, copies of the novel were pulled out from bookstores due to bomb threats, his Japanese translator was killed, and Rushdie himself had to move regularly for his own safety, sometimes as frequently as every three days. Rushdie’s first official response to the fatwa was an essay titled “Is Nothing Sacred?” which was published in The Independent on February  4, 1990. Later that same year, he published Haroun and the Sea of Stories, dedicated to his son Zafar. In this children’s allegory, Haroun Khalifa, the young son of Rashid, a famed storyteller, goes on a quest to restore his father’s voice after he inadvertently silences him by asking “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” Twelve-year-old Haroun defeats the evil Khattam-Shud (“the end”) and restores the health of the “Ocean of the Streams of Story.” Although Rushdie continued to write essays, nonfiction (collected in 1991 as Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism), and short stories (published in 1994 as East, West), he did not publish his fifth novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh, until 1995. The Moor’s Last Sigh chronicles four generations of the family of Moraes Zogoiby, born with a condition which makes his body age at twice the normal rate but blessed with Scheherazade-like storytelling abilities. His mother, Aurora, is a renowned painter and large sections of the novel focus on her paintings and the art world. The story moves from Cochin to Malabar Hill, a wealthy suburb in Bombay (Mumbai), where crime, political corruption, and religious zealotry hasten the family’s demise. In 1997, Rushdie edited Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947–1997. He defended the exclusion of writing in Indian languages on the grounds that there was nothing that exceeded the quality of Indian writing in English.

369

Encyclopedia Entries

Rushdie’s sixth novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), submerges the reader in a global landscape where rock ‘n’ roll is the common cultural currency. Umeed Merchant is a photographer who chronicles the careers of singer Vina Apsara (who dies in an earthquake) and her musical husband, Ormus Cama. The novel begins with an epigraph from Rilke, signaling that it will be a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. By 2000, Rushdie had relocated to New York City, and he took American citizenship in 2016, while also retaining his British citizenship. His first novel set in the United States, Fury, published in 2001, was not a critical success, although it marked the beginnings of his exploration of the immigrant experience in the United States. Its main character, Malik Solanka, originally from Bombay, abandons his university career and young family in Britain, moving to New York City where he becomes wealthy by constructing puppets for television. In Shalimar the Clown (2005), Rushdie takes on global terrorism and Hindu–Muslim violence in Kashmir. Shalimar’s love for his Hindu wife Boonyi turns to hatred when she leaves him for Max, an American ambassador to India. Shalimar’s desire for revenge takes the story to Los Angeles, where he stalks and then kills Max. Rushdie’s next novel, The Enchantress of Florence (2008), mixes history, imagination, and the world of exploration during the time of Emperor Akbar the Great and the reign of the Medici family in Renaissance Florence. In the next two works, he returned to the world of the fatwa, first by writing Luka and the Fire of Life (2010), a sequel to Haroun, dedicated to his second son, Milan. Now Haroun’s and Luka’s father must be saved when he falls into a coma. Luka slays Nobodaddy, a doppelganger of his father, enabling Rashid to awaken and continue telling his stories. Rushdie’s own experience of forces attempting to stop his storytelling is explored in Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012). He chooses third-person narration to detail his life in hiding, using the alias at the request of the British police who guarded him. Rushdie’s three recent novels have each deepened his engagement with the immigrant experience in the United States, while also continuing to reference and mix together multiple cultural, historical, and mythological traditions. In Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days (2015), a tear appears between the worlds of humans and jinns. While the rationalist Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd and the theologian al-Ghazali debate the merits of reason versus religious faith, a diasporic Indian gardener, Geronimo, living in present-day New York City, works to heal the rift between the spirit and human worlds. The most recent immigrants from India in The Golden House (2017) hope to hide their criminal backgrounds through renaming themselves and starting anew in New York City. A  cinematographer who documents the family’s lives becomes enmeshed with them and fathers Nero Golden’s fourth son. In Quichotte (2019) a writer of unsuccessful spy thrillers decides to rework the story of Don Quixote through the character of Ismail Smile, an aged Indian American pharmaceutical salesman obsessed with a television talk show host. He writes her a series of love letters, signing them as Quichotte, and then, accompanied by an imaginary son named Sancho, begins a road trip across America searching for her. Since moving to the United States, Rushdie has been active in PEN America, as president from 2004–2006, and has helped launch the PEN World Voices Festival in 2005. He taught at Emory University from 2006–2015, where he placed his manuscripts in 2006. In 2015, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2007 for his services to literature. On August 12, 2022 Rushdie was attacked by a twenty-four-year-old American, Hadi Matar having his roots in Lebanon. He was stabbed multiple times causing him severe injuries in his abdomen, neck, and left eye. Rushdie was at Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, to deliver a public lecture when the attack took place. The president of The United States condemned the assault, and Iran officially denied having any connection to it. Rushdie recovered 370

Encyclopedia Entries

but has sustained some permanent injuries. The incident sent shock waves across the literary world and sparked a resurgence of interest in his controversial work The Satanic Verses. Critical reception of Rushdie has, to some degree, risen and fallen. His use of magical realism and exploration of hybridity and cultural co-mingling have won him praise, while he has also been accused of pandering to Western ideas of the exotic. Indian writers in the vernacular have critiqued his valorization of English. Though the reviews of his most recent novels have been lukewarm, the scholarly work on him has been remarkable: as of 2022, the MLA international bibliography lists one thousand and seven hundred and sixty-nine scholarly pieces devoted to his works.

Further Reading Chauhan, Pradyumna S., editor. Salman Rushdie Interviews: A Sourcebook of His Ideas. Greenwood Press, 2001. Eaglestone, Robert, and Martin McQuillan, editors. Salman Rushdie: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Ghosh, Tapan Kumar, and Prasanta Bhattacharyya, editors. Mapping Out the Rushdie Republic: Some Recent Surveys. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Gurnah, Abdulrazak, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. Cambridge UP, 2007. Hamilton, Ian. “The First Life of Salman Rushdie.” The New Yorker, 25 Dec. 1995  & 1 Jan. 1996, pp. 90–113. Mendes, Ana Christina, and Charlie Wesley, editors. “New Directions in Rushdie Studies.” Special Issue of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 52, no. 3, Sep. 2017, pp. 417–562.

PENNIE TICEN

SAHGAL, NAYANTARA (1927–) Novelist and political commentator Nayantara Sahgal was born to a politically influential family. Her mother Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, a diplomat and politician, was Jawaharlal Nehru’s younger sister, and Nayantara spent her childhood at the Nehru family home in Allahabad. Sahgal’s father Ranjit Sitaram Pandit was a barrister and Sanskrit scholar. While both her parents and some other relatives were imprisoned due to nationalist political activities in 1943, Nayantara and her older sister Chandralekha Pandit moved to the United States, where she studied at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. In 1947, she returned to newly independent India and lived in Delhi with her uncle Nehru, as her father had passed away in 1944. Nayantara married Gautam Sahgal in 1949 and had three children. The couple divorced in 1967, which began a new stage in Sahgal’s writing career: she became a professional writer. By that time, Sahgal had already written Prison and Chocolate Cake (1954) and From Fear Set Free (1962), two memoirs about her childhood and young adulthood in the Nehru family during the struggle for independence, as well as two novels. Sahgal married again in 1979. She and her husband, civil servant E.N. Mangat Rai, published a volume titled Relationship: Extracts from a Correspondence (1994). As a political commentator, Sahgal wrote columns for newspapers and grew increasingly critical of her cousin, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, after the nationalization of banks and the split of the Congress party in 1969. Her political commentary was halted during the Emergency (1975–1977), a period of authoritarian rule by Prime Minister Gandhi. Her subsequent book, Indira Gandhi’s Emergence and Style (1978) was a condemning treatise on Indira Gandhi and her leadership. A slightly different American edition entitled Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power (1982) also covered Indira Gandhi’s return to power. The book was republished in India with a new post-script under the title Indira Gandhi: A Tryst with Power in 2012. A collection 371

Encyclopedia Entries

of Sahgal’s political writings and speeches from the Emergency period were published as A Voice for Freedom (1977). Sahgal served as a member of the Indian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly in 1978. In the following years, she had stints at various American institutions: as lecturer at the University of Colorado in 1979 and as fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC, and at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in the early 1980s. She was an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990. From the University of Leeds in 1997, Sahgal received an honorary doctorate in literature. For her confrontation of authority in defense of democracy in India, she received the Alumna Achievement Award by Wellesley College in 2002. Sahgal was the recipient of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasian region) for Plans for Departure (1985), and the Sinclair Prize as well as the Sahitya Akademi Award for English for her novel Rich Like Us in 1986. However, she returned the latter in 2015 in protest against increasing intolerance toward right to dissent in India. She was elected the vice president of PEN International in 2018. She lives in Dehradun. While Sahgal has been critical of her cousin Indira Gandhi, she has expressed her admiration and respect for her uncle Jawaharlal Nehru in many of her works and presented a “politicalpersonal” view of Nehru’s major concerns and policies in Jawaharlal Nehru: Civilizing a Savage World (2010). She is also the editor of Before Freedom: Nehru’s Letters to his Sister (2000) and the collection Nehru’s India: Essays on the Maker of a Nation (2015). Her other works of nonfiction include The Freedom Movement in India (1970), The Story of India’s Freedom Movement (2013), Point of View: A Personal Response to Life, Literature and Politics (1997), and The Political Imagination (2014). Sahgal’s novels are infused with “a sense of history,” as she herself has put it. The lives of her characters are entangled with Indian political and social history. Alongside politics, gender and women’s roles in the family and in marriage have been central themes in her fiction. Her first two novels, A Time to Be Happy (1958) and This Time of Morning (1965), both mix politics with the breakdown of the main characters’ marriages, the former the politics of the preindependence period of 1932 to 1948 and the latter of the post-independence era. In Sahgal’s third novel, Storm in Chandigarh (1969), civil servant Vishal Dubey, accepts a posting to Chandigarh, the capital of both Punjab and Haryana, where he tries to alleviate tensions between the chief ministers of the two states. Referencing and reminiscing the partition, the novel concentrates on the political conflict brewing in the state capital, as well as on two troubled middle-class marriages. The Day in Shadow (1971) puts the personal above the political. The protagonist Simrit is a writer, who is in the process of divorcing her husband Som for both personal and political reasons. Simrit forms a relationship with Raj, an idealistic member of parliament, with whom she has similar values, whereas she differs with Som in her views on Indian politics of the late 1960s. A Situation in New Delhi (1977) again puts politics on the center stage as it examines the Indian political scene in the 1960s after the death of the charismatic leader Shivraj, who is clearly modeled after Nehru. The problem of power, the future of the young democracy, and Nehru’s legacy are at the core of this narrative, which revolves around a circle of Shivraj’s relatives and associates. It also discusses youth, revolution, and violence in a narrative strand that is centered on the University of Delhi. Rich Like Us (1985), possibly Sahgal’s best-known novel, is set in the time of the Emergency. The central character, Sonali, a civil servant with a conscience, resigns after failing to prove her “commitedness” to Indira Gandhi’s corrupt administration. The novel explores the Emergency excesses, such as forced family planning, as well as nepotism, Sanjay Gandhi’s “people’s car” and political corruption. Rich Like Us also follows the life story 372

Encyclopedia Entries

of Rose, an outspoken Cockney expatriate, who had come to India decades earlier as the second wife of an Indian businessman. The novels Plans for Departure (1985), Mistaken Identity (1988) and Lesser Breeds (2003) are set in colonial India. Plans for Departure is set on a hill station in the Himalayas, where a young feminist Danish woman, Anna Hansen, arrives to work as an assistant to an Indian scientist in 1914, at the outbreak of World War I. The novel focuses on the troubled marriages of a British missionary and his wife and the District Magistrate Henry Brewster whose wife has recently left him. Simultaneously, it deals with the colonial relation of Britain and India. Anna Hansen’s romantic interest in Brewster, who has become disillusioned with British rule in India, is shaken by a mysterious death. In Mistaken Identity, the protagonist Bhushan Singh, used to a privileged existence as the son of the Raja of Vijaygarh, is arrested on a mistaken charge and jailed together with Congress party workers and communists in 1929. Singh is charged with treason and spends three years in jail, where he tells the story of his life and becomes familiar with the work of the activists. Lesser Breeds, which takes its name from Kipling’s poem, begins with a section covering the period from 1932 to 1942. A young teacher, Nurullah, becomes involved in the Indian non-violent struggle for independence through Nikhil, who asks him to tutor his young daughter Shan. In the second section of the novel, the focus is on Shan, who attends a university in the United States during the Second World War. In the last part, set in 1966, Nurullah reflects on past and present politics. Sahgal followed her short story collection Day of Reckoning (2015) with a dystopian satire and a critique of Hindu nationalism, When the Moon Shines by Day (2017), set in a nondemocratic India of religious segregation, discrimination and torture. The short novel The Fate of Butterflies (2019) continues this exploration of an India where sectarian, gendered, and caste-based violence is commonplace.

Further Reading Guttman, Anna. “Family Portraits and National Histories: Nayantara Sahgal’s Construction of Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.” South Asian Review, vol. 28, no. 2, 2007, pp. 151–164. Jani, Pranav. Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English. Ohio State UP, 2010. Joseph, Clara A. B. The Agent in the Margin: Nayantara Sahgal’s Gandhian Fiction. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008. Menon, Ritu. Out of Line: A Literary and Political Biography of Nayantara Sahgal. Fourth Estate, 2014. Salgado, Minoli. “Myths of the Nation and Female (Self)Sacrifice in Nayantara Sahgal’s Narratives.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 31, no. 2, 1996, pp. 61–73. Woo, HyoKyung. “Building Global Sisterhood in Post-Colonial India in Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us.” Feminist Studies in English Literature, vol. 28, no. 1, 2020, pp. 123–150.

RAITA MERIVIRTA

SALIM, ANEES (1970–) Anees Salim grew up in Varkala, a small coastal town in Kerala. At the age of sixteen he left school without completing his studies and devoted his time to reading books in his father’s library. He also spent a lot of time traveling, entered the field of advertising in the late 1990s and worked with different brands. His first book, The Vicks Mango Tree, was published in 2012 after many initial rejections from publishers. Despite the wide acclaim and recognition, he leads a quiet and reclusive life in Kochi and continues to work in advertising. His columns frequently appear in many leading newspapers. Salim has published six novels. The Vicks Mango Tree (2012) is set during the Emergency and narrates the life experiences of Rabia Sheikh, a housewife and her neighbors in an imaginary 373

Encyclopedia Entries

town, Mangobaag, created by the author. His next novel, Tales from a Vending Machine (2013) is regarded as commercial fiction; it describes the experiences of a young aspirational Muslim woman, Hasina Mansoor, who operates a vending machine at an airport. The drab monotony of her life is interspersed with the droll humor and astute observations of the protagonist. Salim returned to his fictional town of Mangobaag in his third novel, Vanity Bagh (2013) which was awarded The Hindu Literary Prize for the Best Fiction in 2013. The title of the book derives its name from the Muslim neighborhood in Mangobaag. The novel charts the events that led to the incarceration of Imran Jabbari as he was involved in a bomb blast in the city. It touches upon difficult issues of Muslim identity, radicalization, and violence. The Blind Lady’s Descendants (2014) is in the form of an extended suicide letter, where the protagonist Amar Hamsa recounts the circumstances leading to stress in his family ties, his uncle’s tragic demise, and his own impending death. Salim received the Sahitya Akademi Award for this novel in 2018. In The Small-Town Sea (2017), an unnamed narrator, a young boy, narrates the story of his father who on his deathbed moves his family to his hometown. The narrator uses his sense of humor and imagination to refashion and transform the mostly gloomy and commonplace surroundings of a small picturesque coastal town in Kerala into something extraordinary. The Odd Book of Baby Names (2021) is part fantastical and part historical tale of an old destitute king and his children. The novel, written from the perspective of different characters, describes the many eccentricities and unique circumstances of each of the king’s nine children and the relationship they have with their father. Salim’s novels portray individuals from the lower and middle-class Indian Muslim community. He meticulously resurrects scenes from small Indian towns and neighborhoods, capturing the slow humdrum of everyday life. The settings of the novels appear to have a tangible presence that affects the lives of those living there as much as the place is transformed through the memories, emotions, and imagination of the inhabitants. Death and loss are recurrent motifs in his novels, though many of his characters maintain an amused detachment from the tragic situation surrounding their lives. Strained attachments and conflicts in family relationships constitute another dominant theme in his works. The melancholic tone of the novels is enlivened by his wry sense of humor.

Further Reading Khanna, Stuti. Writing and Space: Writing the City. Orient Blackswan, 2020. Lerner, Adam B. “The Last Laugh.” The Caravan, 1 May 2014, caravanmagazine.in/reviews-essays/lastlaugh. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Singh, Jai Arjun. “Labels and Rebels in Anees Salim’s Novels.” Forbes India, 9 Jun. 2015, www.forbesindia. com/article/think/labels-and-rebels-in-anees-salims-novels/40437/1. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

SHIKHA SINGH

SANGHI, ASHWIN (1969–) Often referred to as India’s Dan Brown, Ashwin Sanghi is currently one of the best-known English fiction writers in India. Born in Mumbai on January  25, 1969, Sanghi completed his schooling at Cathedral and John Connon School, Mumbai, and graduated in economics (honors) from St. Xaviers College, Mumbai. After completing an MBA in finance from Yale School of Management, Sanghi joined his family business in 1993. As the director of a group of family-run companies, he soon started publishing business-related writings. However, this only increased his dissatisfaction with his professional choices, and in 2004 led to a crisis in his life. To help him take hold of himself, his wife told him to pen down his thoughts which made him 374

Encyclopedia Entries

realize that he could write even while attending to his business. This was the turning point in his career; it helped the daytime corporate honcho to become a writer at night. Since then, Sanghi has published six books under the Bharat series: The Rozabal Line (2007), Chanakya’s Chant (2010), The Krishna Key (2012), The Sialkot Saga (2017), Keepers of the Kalachakra (2018), and the recently published The Vault of Vishnu (2020). Sanghi has also written a few other books including two crime thriller book series co-written with James Patterson. Private Lives (sold in the United States as City on Fire [2014]) and Private Delhi (sold in the United States as Count to Ten [2017]), are part of the Private series. Sanghi’s motivational and self-help books, include 13 Steps to Bloody Good Luck (2014), 13 Steps to Bloody Good Wealth (co-author Sunil Dalal, [2016]), 13 Steps to Bloody Good Marks (co-author Ashok Rajani [2017]), 13 Steps to Bloody Good Health (co-author Dr. Mukesh Batra [2019]), and 13 Steps to Bloody Good Parenting (co-author Kiran Manral [2019]). He writes columns for newspapers on diverse contemporary issues. Included by Forbes India on their top 100 celebrity list, Sanghi is the winner of the Crossword Popular Choice Award 2012, Atta Galatta Popular Choice Award 2018, WBR Iconic Achievers Award 2018, and the Lit-O-Fest Literature Legend Award 2018. The Rozabal Line, written under the pseudonym Shawn Haigins, features the historical shrine of the same name at Srinagar, Kashmir, India, as the central motif in the novel. Spanning several continents and centuries, this novel’s narrative is based on the belief that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had “spiritual connections” to India, that Jesus was not crucified at Jerusalem, but lived in Kashmir and that the ancient feminine cult of Mary Magdalene figures as “a personification of Shakti, the divine power of the sacred feminine.” Sanghi’s fourth book in the Bharat series – Keepers of the Kalachakra – again ropes in mythological folklore but this time in combination with quantum theory. The story revolves around a research scientist Vijay whose research is funded by Milesian Labs. However, the Milesian Labs are funded by a secret organization called Minerva that wishes to use Vijay’s research for ulterior ends. Like Sanghi’s other books in the Bharat series, this fast-paced thriller spans several centuries, cults, and faiths, covering various events and regions like Nalanda University, the mythological story of Ram’s crossing over to Sri Lanka, American Presidential elections, and mysterious assassinations of world political leaders. Vijay’s quantum science offers a plausible scientific explanation of Buddhist scriptural understanding of time (Kalachakra) and intersects with Hindu religion’s description of Lord Shiva’s Atma Lingam and rudraksh beads. The novel is set against the backdrop of radical polarization of religious faiths due to the rise of right-wing governments across the world and also the growth of Islamic terrorism that has orchestrated terror in the lives of common humanity. Sanghi’s latest novel, The Vault of Vishnu (2020) is again a racy read. This time the plot is constructed around a parallel timeline that comments on contemporary matters. In the first parallel timeline, the novel begins with the India–China military standoff at Doklam. This timeline also includes the character Paramjit Khurana (or Pam), who works at DRDO and is the daughter of an Army officer who had died when she was still a child. She is on a quest to discover some secret potion. The second timeline, set in the past around 800 AD involves a Chinese traveler, Xuangzang, whose quest for the same potion leads him to India. Both these timelines crisscross at various points, like, Angkor Vats in Cambodia and Nalanda University, trying to make sense of different civilizations to show how Chinese and Indian civilizations shared an “amazing cross-pollination of ideas” since the “ancient times.” Sanghi’s books combine multiple genres to spin fascinating tales of mystery, legend, and politics. From fast-paced thrillers intersecting with global mythologies and history, to contemporary politics, from theology to science fiction, these books have never a dull moment. They allow myths to resonate in our contemporary lives. However, his books are more focused on 375

Encyclopedia Entries

building intricate plot lines than on developing fascinating characters. Apparently, characterization is not Sanghi’s forte. What makes his narratives especially popular among readers is that they can traverse the past and the present, connecting various global myths as part of a universal folklore.

Further Reading Ghose, Chandreyee. “The Ashwin Sanghi Code.” The Telegraph, 23 Feb. 2018, www.telegraphindia.com/ culture/the-ashwin-sanghi-code/cid/1384313. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Mukherjee, Meghna. “I  Am More of a Storyteller Than a Writer.” The Times of India, 17 Nov. 2012, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/books/features/I-am-more-of-a-storyteller-than-a-writer-Ash win-Sanghi/articleshow/16722700.cms. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Vincent, Pheroze L. “The Ashwin Sanghi Formula.” The Hindu, 31 Jan. 2015, www.thehindu.com/ books/literary-review/the-ashwin-sanghi-formula/article6842120.ece. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

INDRANI DAS GUPTA

SARABHAI, BHARATI (1912–) Bharati Sarabhai was born in 1912 and obtained her postgraduate degree from Bombay University. She was an ardent follower of Gandhi and devoted herself to the task of performing daily chores in his Ashram in Sabarmati, Ahmedabad. As a member of the Indian National Congress, she worked as a volunteer under Jawaharlal Nehru at the Haripura session of the Party in 1930 and was the founder member of the Gujrat Vidya Sabha. As a bilingual writer, she writes in English and Gujarati. Sarabhai is the first modern Indian English dramatist. She has two plays to her credit: The Well of the People published by the Visva Bharati Press, Calcutta in 1943, and Two Women published by Hind Kitabs, Bombay, in 1952. Written in the decade that straddled pre-independence India, The Well of the People is a poetic drama influenced by the Gandhian philosophy of austerity, love of labor, and salvation through service to humanity. More specifically, it upholds Gandhi’s doctrine of Daridra Naravana (worship of the poor as God). Sarabhai based her plot on a real-life story published in Harijan, a daily edited by Gandhi, in which an old Brahmin woman who fails to go to Benares due to financial and physical hardships, donates her savings for digging a well for the untouchables of her village. The protagonist of Sarabhai’s play, Rani, is a crippled Brahmin widow unable to go to the holy Ganges in Haridwar. She contributes her life’s savings toward the sinking of a well for the untouchables. While the play has little dramatic action, it highlights the pitfalls of religious domination, focusing on the suffering of the marginalized, the untouchables, and the widows. The play articulates a holistic expression of Gandhi’s support of the subaltern. Instead of seeking personal salvation, Rani arranges “salvation” for her people, and is instrumental in enabling “the subterranean stream (Ganga) to rise to the surface for people’s welfare.” Two Women is a prose play and true to the pulse of a transitioning postcolonial India, it underscores the clash between the age-old Indian customs and beliefs, and the need to transform and adapt to shifting cultures. The play brings together two women, Anuradha and Urvashi. Anuradha is caught in an unhappy marriage to Kanak who glorifies the Western way of life over her Indian values. Urvashi, Anuradha’s childhood friend, is a widow and devotional singer. Clearly fettered in their social roles, both escape to the Himalayas in search of spiritual fulfillment. Their efforts are shattered when Anuradha learns about her husband’s terminal illness. Humbled by the revelation that one does not need to renounce the material world in search of spiritual peace, both women find contentment in their call to duty in the real world. 376

Encyclopedia Entries

While Sarabhai’s women may be symbolic of “millions of women who suffer silently,” the dramatization of the fragile balance between the sanctity of Indian culture and a challenge to ancient dogma renders both plays revolutionary in their historical context. Sarabhai also wrote poetry and made noteworthy contributions to Indian Writing, and The London Mercury, a monthly magazine recognized for publishing short stories and poetry by Indian writers. A significant contribution to Indian Writing (1941) was a poem, “No Time for Remorse” which she wrote for Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. This poem was later republished in Wasafiri: Magazine of International Contemporary Writing. Another poem, “Haridwara” was republished in The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry 1828–1965 by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi.

Further Reading Bhatnagar, O. P. “The Image of Gandhi in Indian Plays in English.” Indian Literature, vol. 24, no. 4, 1981, pp. 127–139. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23330217. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Gowda, Anniah, editor. “The English Plays of Bharati Sarabhai.” Indian Drama, Prasanga, 1994. Mukherjee, Tutun. “How Fares the Well? A Study of the Interstices of the Welfare State: Bharati Sarabhai’s The Well of the People (1943), Mahasweta Devi’s Jal/Water (1976), and Vinodini’s Daaham/Thirst (2005).” Journal of Commonwealth Literature. SAGE Open, 2017, pp. 1–10. Sage Journals, https:// doi.org/10.1177/2158244017723953. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Punekar-Monakshi, Shankar. “The Plays of Bharati Sarabhai.” Perspectives on English Drama, edited by M. K. Naik and Shankar Mokashi-Punekar. Oxford UP, 1977.

NATASHA W. VASHISHT

SARANG, VILAS GOVIND (1942–2015) Vilas Govind Sarang completed his studies in English and comparative literature from the erstwhile Bombay University and from Indiana University, Bloomington. He taught at the University of Basrah in Iraq, and in Kuwait University. Additionally, he headed the Department of English at his alma mater in Mumbai from 1988 to 1991. He has been associated with various literary journals like Encounter, The London Magazine, TriQuarterly, The Bombay Review, etc., as an editor and as well as a contributor. After a brief period of illness, he passed away in 2015 in Mumbai. Sarang was a bilingual writer who published short stories, poetry, critical essays, papers, and novels. Most of his research papers, which were published during the 1980s and the early 1990s, as like “Self-translators” (1981), “Remarks on Modern Marathi poetry” (1982), “Confessions of a Marathi writer” (1994), and “Tradition and Conflict in the Context of Marathi literature” (1992) deal with his identity as a postcolonial Indian writer concerned with the efficacy of a foreign language to narrate Indian experiences. Like many other Indian writers, he deliberated on the idea of Indianness and the inability to define this fluid concept. Because of these concerns, Sarang foregrounded a very significant field of study: even when translation studies was yet to be established as a structured academic discipline in India during the 1980s, Sarang was vocal about the significance of translation studies within the context of Indian literature. In the essay, “Self-translators,” Sarang wrote about bilingualism and self-translation as in the case of Rabindranath Tagore, K. Ayyappa Paniker, Vinda Karandikar, and some others. As a short story writer, Sarang experimented with modernism and existentialism, and acknowledged that he was deeply influenced by writers like Kafka, Beckett, Hemingway, and Camus. His narratives contain the recurring metaphor of death, and they constantly negotiate with crises of life and institutional apparatuses that construct realities for the world. Some of 377

Encyclopedia Entries

his Marathi short stories are Soledad (1975) and Atank (1999). His short story collections in English include A Fair Tree of the Void (1990) and Women in Cages (2006). The short story, “A Revolt of the Gods” is set in Mumbai in the backdrop of Ganapati Visarjan. It showcases how the idols came alive and escaped from the rituals associated with the immersion. Through a diverse array of characters like a professor, photographer, astrologer, blind man, and others, Sarang directs the readers to reimagine the ritualistic constructions and performative nature of religion. In the short story “Musk Deer,” the narrator reconnects with his long-lost elder brother. In “The Missing Link,” daughters are sold off for prostitution by their parents because of the commands of the village chief, which reflects gender inequities in society. In another popular short story “An Interview with Mr Chakko,” the narrator is a shipwrecked sailor on a bizarre island inhabited by only half-bodied women. With several twists in the story, when he returns home after a long time, he cuts ends up cutting his full-bodied wife into two halves as he had got used to being with half-bodied women. The story raises serious questions about the subjectivity of women and feminist concerns. Sarang’s poetry collections include A Kind of Silence (1978) and Another Life (2007), and translations of Marathi poets such as of Vasant Abaji Dahake, Bapurao Jagtap, and Bahinibai Chaudhuri. His poetry deals with “his preoccupations of alienation, the almost psychotic divides in our inner selves but they also show his political engagement” (Kumar). This statement holds true as his poetry evoked transnational agendas like the absurdity of war, religious questions and the craft of writing poetry. Sarang has also written two novels: In the Kingdom of Enki (1983) and The Dinosaur Ship (2005).

Further Reading Kumar, Anu. “Vilas Sarang: The Writer You Should Have Read to Understand Post-Modern Indian Literature.”  Scroll, 20 Apr. 2015,  scroll.in/article/721780/vilas-sarang-the-writer-you-should-have-readto-understand-post-modern-indian-literature. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Sarang, Vilas. “Tradition and Conflict in Marathi Literature.”  Indian Literature, vol. 35, no. 5, 1992, pp. 159–168. Sahitya Akademi. ———. “Confessions of a Marathi Writer.” World Literature Today. vol. 68, no. 2, 1994 pp. 309–312. Thomas, A. J. “Muscles of Imagination and Fantasy.” The Book Review Literary Trust. vol. 30, no. 12, Dec. 2006.  The Book Review Literary Trust, www.thebookreviewindia.org/muscles-of-imaginationand-fantasy/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

ELWIN SUSAN JOHN

SASTRI, PREMA (1932–2017) Prema Sastri was born in Dharapuram in Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu) to V.N. Rajan, a highranked government official, and Jaya Lakshmi, a social worker and actress. She belonged to a family of great Tamil scholars and writers and was interested in writing right since her childhood. Her grand uncle Pandit Natesa Sastri (1859–1906) translated great works of Tamil literature into English. She also drew inspiration from another great-grand uncle who was well-known as Kalki Sadasivam Iyer (1902–1997), a freedom fighter, film producer, and scriptwriter. Her father’s job moved the family from Madras to Bengal. They lived in Calcutta during the partition riots and the Bengal Famine. Both the incidents left a deep impact on Prema’s perception of poverty, violence, and humanity. Sastri attended Dow Hill School in Kurseong, Darjeeling, and continued her studies in Queen Mary’s College (Madras) and at Government Arts College (Coimbatore). She went to the United States on a scholarship to pursue higher studies in the Liberal Arts at Chatham College, Pittsburgh. On her return to India, she got married to an officer of the Indian Army. 378

Encyclopedia Entries

Sastri started her creative writing after her marriage and motherhood. Over the decades, particularly during the sixties and the seventies, she became one of the leading writers of Indian writing in English, mostly writing short stories which were published in both national and international literary magazines. She has three anthologies to her credit: The Blue Convertible (1985), A Fine Gift from Lakshmi (2007), and Butterfly Dreams (2012). Her uniqueness lies in her lucid style and her use of irony and humor. Sastri was also a theater enthusiast and wrote reviews of plays for The Indian Express. During the eighties and the nineties, she wrote plays and also directed them. These include Shivaji, Gandhi: Man of the Millions, Across the Border, My Dear Ba, and Platform Number Three. Shivaji was released in New Delhi by the then vice president of India, B.D. Jatti. Sastri received an award from the Shivaji Tricentennial Committee. Gandhi: Man of the Millions (1987) was published by Writers Workshop. My Dear Ba is a three-act play representing the role of Gandhi’s wife, Kasturba, in his life. After the death of her husband in 2000, Sastri gave up writing for some time. She established “Songbyrde,” a publishing house for encouraging young and upcoming writers. Her novella Madras to Manhattan was published by Songbyrde in 2017. This is an autobiographical fiction which narrates the travails of Ramu, a Madras-based middle-class student who went to the United States during the fifties on a scholarship to study business administration at Columbia University. It deals with issues like cross-cultural encounters, differences in the systems of education, and alienation. Sastri is a master storyteller who can hold the reader’s attention to the end of the tale. Her name is listed in the “Who’s Who of Indian Writers” section of Sahitya Akademi’s archive.

Further Reading Bell, Eva. “Tribute to Prema Sastri.” Induswomanwriting.com, 2017, www.induswomanwriting.com/ tribute-to-prema-sastri.html. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

SHYAMASRI MAJI

SAVITRI by Sri Aurobindo In the epic poem Savitri, generally considered to be his magnum opus, Sri Aurobindo takes up the Mahabharata story of “conjugal love conquering death” and turns it into a “legend and a symbol” (Publisher’s note). The characters, Satyavan, Savitri, Aswapati, Dyumatsena and others, are treated by Sri Aurobindo in the epic not as personified qualities, but in his words, as incarnations or emanations of living and conscious forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch, and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life. (Aurobindo’s note) Begun in 1916, the original narrative poem was restructured several times around 1930 through late 1940s and began to appear in print in 1946. The first edition of Savitri was published in 1950 and the second appeared in 1954 after Sri Aurobindo passed away in 1950; it contained a selection of his letters on Savitri. Sri Aurobindo worked on the text over many decades. Toward the end, with failing eyesight, he dictated the changes to chosen scribes. Sri Aurobindo’s preoccupation with the epic may be compared to Goethe’s Faust in terms of the time the author devoted to the subject. With its 21,116 lines, it is generally regarded as the 379

Encyclopedia Entries

longest poem in any European language, barring the recently published Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, written in present day Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, the latter work running into 33,333 lines. Sri Aurobindo’s handling of the theme of love against death may be seen in his earlier poems of “Love and Death” and “Urvasi.” Savitri uses a variety of poetic styles with a predominantly iambic five-foot line of blank verse. He desired to write a long introduction to Savitri in order to explain his intentions and poetic methods and diction. This could not be realized, and readers may turn fruitfully to his letters written to poetic disciples like K.D. Sethna (Amal Kiran) and others. The inspiration for the poem, Sri Aurobindo explains, essentially came from what he terms as the “overhead planes,” “the hidden range of consciousness above the intellect.” New approaches to visionary poetry are underlined in Sri Aurobindo’s pivotal work, The Future Poetry, which was written in response to the Irish poet James Cousin’s important publication, The New Ways in English Literature. The essays in The Future Poetry were originally serialized in the philosophical journal Arya published from Pondicherry. Sri Aurobindo wrote Savitri as the poetry of the future. It is spiritual and mystical in character and mantric in quality, like the Vedic epiphanies. While the epic has been well received by many leading lights of Indian English literature like V.K. Gokak, K.D. Sethna, K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, and C.D. Narasimhaiah, it has had a fair share of critics as well, including P. Lal (in his earlier days), Nissim Ezekiel, and the other Indian modernists like A.K. Mehrotra. The latter group has critiqued this particular kind of spiritual poetry as vague and abstract, lacking vividness and concrete particulars. In this context, the reader’s attention may be directed to the debates between Sethna and C.R. Mandy, the then editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, dated July 31, 1949. Similarly well-known poet-critic, P. Lal, in his earlier treatment of Savitri, found fault with Sri Aurobindo’s poetic style and diction; Lal claimed that the poetry lacked the din and hubbub, the confusion and indecision, the flashes of goodness and beauty of our age (Gokak). The charges were refuted by Sethna. The differences in poetic credo and responses among the two groups may be seen as radically different approaches to understanding the nature of poetry and poetic craftsmanship. The symbolic and hieratic poetry of Savitri that makes use of mantra, the incantatory speech of the Vedas, departs widely from the accepted canons of modern poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, Savitri and the spiritual poetry of Sri Aurobindo, followed by admirers like Dilip Kumar Roy, K.D. Sethna, Harindranath Chattopadhyay and Arjava, continue to appeal to those who are drawn to mystical and spiritual poetry.

Further Reading Gokak, V. K. “Diction of Savitri.” Savitri, savitri.in/books/vk-gokak/diction-of-savitri. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Reddy, Ananda, and Sachidananda Mohanty, editors. Essentials of Sri Aurobindo’s Thought: Essays in Memory of V. Madhusudan Reddy. Institute of Human Study, 1997. Sraddhavan, editor. Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri: Writings by Amal Kiran. Clear Ray Trust, 2010. ———, Book Seven-The Book of Yoga. Savitri Bhavan, 2017. The English of Savitri 3.

SACHIDANANDA MOHANTY

SCANDAL POINT by Manju Jaidka Scandal Point, by Manju Jaidka was published in 2011. Set in the 19th century, the novel is based on a modern-day myth that narrates a love story surrounding a real place, today a tourist attraction by the same name in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India. This historical fiction revolves around a real-life scandal involving the abduction – or elopement – of a viceroy’s daughter by 380

Encyclopedia Entries

an Indian Maharaja. According to the narrative, the Maharaja spent time in Shimla’s Viceregal Lodge, where he met Betty, fell in love, eloped with her, and later married her in Patiala. The locals believe that the Maharaja who abducted Betty in 1892 must have been Bhupinder Singh (the Maharaja of the Patiala province). However, contrary to popular opinion, in her numerous interviews, the author has maintained that it could not have been Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, who was just two years old at the time. Instead, it must be his father, Maharaja Rajendra Singh, who abducted the girl. The element of romance between Maharaja Rajendra Singh and Betty (the viceroy’s daughter) rests on the fact that the abduction is turned into a willing elopement on Betty’s part, followed by her conversion to the Sikh faith. An older Maharani in the story creates the space for romance and suspense within the narrative. Not long after the wedding, a child is born, a prince named Richard Ram Rahim Singh. The novel builds on this premise and becomes a quest for the identity of their son, brought up as Kartar, who is oblivious of the secret of his parentage and must unravel the well-kept family and state secret. As in the story of Oedipus, Kartar, unaware of his lineage, embarks upon a journey to discover his roots. The reader is intrigued and sits tight, waiting for all the information that may tie Kartar to Scandal Point. There are no records, documents, or witnesses left, and the reader wonders how he will still find the truth based on semi-reliable clues and bits of information. To recreate what might have happened in the Patiala royal palace during those days, the author draws on historical sources as well as her own imagination. The popular belief is that after the suspected poisoning of the Maharaja, followed by the foul murder of the young prince, the historical Betty died of grief and heartbreak. However, Jaidka’s novel breaks away from that line of belief to show that the infant was accidentally switched in the cradle and survived the attempt to murder by his stepmother, the elder Maharani. Finally, the British crown prevails upon Betty’s parents, and she is taken away to England, plunging her royal husband into alcoholism, debauchery, and hedonism. The novel introduces a document as a twist in the plot whereby the British government asks the regent and the viceroy to sign a commitment forcibly separating Betty and the Maharaja and forbidding their heirs to seek the truth of their “unnatural” marital union, failing which there would be severe repercussions. The marriage is perceived as “unnatural” owing to the bond between a lowly colonial subject and a white lady. The enumeration of such historical information – including the foundation of the new Chail Palace and cricket ground, functioning of the British administration, local sentiments for the Patiala royalty et al., makes the novel extremely absorbing. The narration of the novel is lucid, sympathetic, and elegant. The language is poignant, primarily when it deals with the inner monologues and emotions Betty faces before and after her marriage to the Maharaja. Scandal Point was adapted into a multilingual musical performance at Tara Hall, Shimla, titled “Chaubata,” meaning “crossroads.” With a cast of over 700 characters, the dramatic enactment of the novel employed languages like Hindi, English, Punjabi, and Pahadi. Its reception underscored the historical and cultural breadth of the novel: the Patiala kingdom of yore was a melting point of different cultures, dialects, class, and caste hierarchies, which Scandal Point brings back into focus.

Further Reading Bhola, Meenu. “Review of The Problematics of the Identity in Manju Jaidka’s: Scandal Point.” International Journal of Linguistics and Literature, vol. 5, no. 2, 2 Feb. 2016, pp. 11–14. Academia, www.

381

Encyclopedia Entries academia.edu/23318283/THE_PROBLEMATICS_OF_THE_IDENTITY_IN_MANJU_JAIDKAS_SCANDAL_POINT?email_work_card=view-paper. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Correspondent, H. T. “The Mystery Behind Shimla’s ‘Scandal Point.’ ” Hindustan Times, 3 Jan. 2012, www.hindustantimes.com/books/the-mystery-behind-shimla-s-scandal-point/story-nhqD1k28D4 HC1UagqituvL.html. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Sidhu, Puneetinder. “History Recreated as Fiction: Scandal Point by Manju Jaidka.” The Tribune, 8 Apr. 2012, www.tribuneindia.com/2012/20120408/spectrum/book3.htm. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

MANPREET KAUR KANG

SEAHORSE by Janice Pariat Seahorse (2014) is Janice Pariat’s first novel, which was short-listed for The Hindu Literary Prize in 2015. Pariat is a writer, poet, and translator from Shillong and also the author of Boats on Land (2012) and The Nine-Chambered Heart (2017). Written in the first-person narrative form, the plot and the protagonist of Seahorse shuttle between the past and the present, located in Shillong, Delhi, and London at the turn of the century. Narrating a tale of love, loss, and longing, the novel concerns the journeys that Nehemiah undertakes while learning about the often-overwhelming mysteries of desire and affection. Also, as a narrative of the cross-age same-sex romance, in a poetic manner it depicts the intimate affair between Nehemiah, who is a young student from Meghalaya studying in a reputed college in Delhi, and Nicholas, who is a visiting researcher on art at the same college. Portraying Nehemiah’s life back home in the Northeast and his intimate friendship with Lenny, the novel progresses into his emotional and sexual intimacy with Nicholas in a secluded bungalow in New Delhi, up until Nicholas suddenly vanishes from both the city and his life. Later in the novel, Nehemiah travels to London for a fellowship and begins a relationship with Myra, Nicholas’s erstwhile lover, thereupon, introducing a complex aspect of interconnections and fate in the story. Though the book is divided into three, unnamed sections, they do not represent clear-cut separations with respect to the narrative. In fact, even as the sections reveal the gradual progress of Nehemiah’s relationships in Shillong with Lenny, in Delhi with Nicholas, and in London with Myra, the fabric of the narratives becomes inextricable with the intricate nexus of time and space, remembering and retelling, and revealing and returning. The narrative is unique in its portrayal of same-sex romance and relations as the protagonist is a young, bisexual man who hails from Northeast India and is multiply displaced by virtue of educational ventures, socio-cultural and linguistic identifications, and movements within and outside India. It is also different is its depiction of an inter-racial and inter-national romantic and erotic affair between two men. Mythical references play a key role in inserting and sustaining queer intimacy and romance in the relationship between Nicholas and Nehemiah; Nicholas is often referred to as a water-creature and is portrayed as Poseidon. Nehemiah and Nicholas’ same-sex affair, relating to the erastês (lover) and erômenos (beloved) trope, is sensually narrativized as a retelling of the myth of Poseidon and his youthful male devotee Pelops. Within the narrative is entailed and represented the complex relations of the protagonist with each other and with the spaces they inhabit – from a reclusive bungalow and a desolate monument in Delhi to rented apartments and the seashores of England. Remembering and retelling play an important role in the poetry of the narrative; memories of past amorous and sexual affairs serve an important purpose in the narration, becoming markers of time and space and their passing and changing. Pariat’s first-person narrative lets the reader delve into the varied desires of a bisexual character separated by spatial and temporal locales but brought together by the possibility of returning and finding what was lost. The ending of the novel presents a cryptic yet hopeful allegory of arriving at an eventual love bond. 382

Encyclopedia Entries

After her highly acclaimed first book, Boats on Land, Seahorse has further cemented Pariat’s place as one of the most promising writers in English in India today. The reviews of the book are all praise for the artistically appealing way in which the novel has portrayed the complexities of life in a manner that is, as one reviewer in Indian Literature has noted, “heavily implicated in our constant remaking and refashioning” (Dhar). With a queer protagonist from Northeast India, Seahorse is also one of the first texts to delve into a sensitive and important context, specifically when it comes to mainstream English-language publication in India. With several intersecting themes, ranging from non-normative sexuality to appreciation of art, from the memory of homeland in the hills to the realities of being in constant transit, and from loving and losing to finding and loving again, Seahorse is an important contribution to contemporary Indian writing in English.

Further Reading Dhar, Tej N. “Reviewed Work(s): Seahorse. Random House India by Janice Pariat.” Indian Literature, vol. 59, no. 4, 2015, pp. 209–212. Kashyap, Aruni. “In Janice Pariat’s Novel ‘Seahorse’, Real and Metaphorical Journeys between New Delhi and London.” Scroll.in, 29 Nov. 2014, scroll.in/article/692156/in-janice-pariats-novel-seahorse-realand-metaphorical-journeys-between-new-delhi-and-london. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

ANIL PRADHAN

SEALY, I. ALLAN (1951–) Irwin Allan Sealy was born in Allahabad in 1951 and studied in La Martinière School in Lucknow. The city shaped much of “Nakhlau,” the setting of his highly successful debut comic epic, The Trotter-Nama. Sealy completed bachelor’s degree from University of Delhi, master’s degree from Western Michigan University, and doctorate from the University of British Columbia. With the pulse of a trotter, he has worked and studied in the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Travel gives him a strong sense of place. He speaks fondly of his 433 square yards house in Dehradun in his 2014 memoir where he lives now. The Trotter-Nama: A  Chronicle is his debut novel that won the Commonwealth Prize in 1989. The book is a dense network of stories told through several generations of the Trotters describing the history of their family, relocating the community from the periphery to the center of the colonial encounter. The founding father of the clan is Justin Trottoire, a French man who comes to India and becomes a Trotter. As time passed, the mixed marriages redefined the identities with layers of complexity. Sealy describes their lineage from 1750 to post independence where the family disperses throughout the world. By this time, while Muslims move to their land, Hindus firm their footing here and the Englishmen recede, what lies in store for the hybrid Anglo Indians whose ironical predicament is so powerfully captured in the duality of speaking English and using spoon for curries? Hybridity, counter realism, irony, parody, and linguistic extravagance with comic wit – all come together in this monumental book. Hero: A Fable is Sealy’s second novel that tells the story of the eponymous Hero, from South India making it big into the Bollywood industry. After literally being wounded by the villain, Nero, he turns to politics eventually becoming the prime minister of India. The novel is divided into three sections – Entrance, Intermission, and Exit. Like a masala-movie the story traces the trajectory of the protagonist Hero from the day he was conceived in his mother’s body during his parents’ honeymoon to the abrupt end when he is shot down by Zero. Hero is a postmodern novel and a parody of the spaces of Bollywood Cinema and Indian Politics where nation’s dreams are played out. 383

Encyclopedia Entries

The third novel, The Everest Hotel: A Calendar was short-listed for the Booker Prize. The events in the novel observe the seasonal pattern of Kalidasa’s Ritusamhara (Afterword) and are further divided into Baramasih, the first unaligned and latter aligned to human desires. Set in a small town Drummondganj, The Everest Hotel once a luxury hotel, now houses the disabled, orphans and the geriatrics. Ritu, a young nun, comes to the Everest to look after Jed, owner of the place, once a mountaineer, now a senile, libidinous nonagenarian. Brij advances toward Ritu on Jed’s rooftop during kite flying. The story moves toward a triangle involving Brij, Inge, and Ritu when Inge comes from Berlin looking for the grave of her uncle, Otto Planke. Brij helps her in repairing the grave. She however dies of a knife wound in the hallucinatory state of bhaang. Inspector Bisht interrogates her death, bringing in detective elements into the story. Brij demands for a separate state, Akashkhand. Ritu becomes a mother to the orphan, Masha. The Hotel shares a wall with the cemetery where many from the colonial period are laid to rest. Is it waiting for Jed now? Is it a sign of the diminishing number of the Anglo Indians? The novel does not find any closures. Brainfever Bird is Sealy’s “tale of two cities” set in New Delhi and St. Petersburg. This is for the first time that Sealy takes a location outside India to set up his story. Lev, a biological scientist travels from Russia to India. Disillusioned with the Russian government, he wants to sell off the defense secrets to the Indian government. As soon as he lands, he loses his suitcase containing his important documents. He instantly falls in love with Maya, a strong-willed and young independent woman. Their love story is however cut short when a plague grips the Red city, old Delhi. Lev unknowingly infects Maya with a virus and is hurriedly sent back home. The third protagonist, Morgan, is a popular newsreader and shares the apartment with Maya but develops an intimate relationship with her only after Lev leaves. After his mysterious murder, Masha, Lev, and Maya’s daughter lives on as his lineage. Metafictional and postmodern, this book creates illusions of tales like Maya’s puppet play on Razia, picked from history, her symbiotic relationship with a mendicant puppet that swings the narrative between human and non- human world. Red: An Alphabet: Red is like an alphabet book that tells the love story of Aline (A) and Zach (Z). They first meet at The Hermitage Museum where Z’s musical composition is being performed and feel an electrifying connection. The story traverses through Russia, India, and America paving way for several mini narratives including N’s own snippets of life. When Aline comes to Dariya dun for Zach, a chance encounter with Giligan, leader of the Blackshorts excursions (local group of thieves) makes her appreciate his paintings above all the barriers of caste and class. Unfortunately, she is poisoned by the pig girl out of revenge. The color-coded tale muses on the artifice of representation and the (C)anon of art. Non-linear and incoherent, the novel can be daunting for those who look for singular truth. Zelaldinus: A Masque: Sealy imaginatively recreates Akbar and his court in his verse novel yoking fiction and history with themes of kingship, legacy, fatherhood, politics, and love. Zelaldinus is Sealy’s modern Akbar, a sporty figure with sneakers and a radio in his hand. Written in the form of a masque, Sealy tells an Indian story in a European form this time. Unlike previous novels, where Sealy casts his writerly presence implicitly, here he firmly positions himself into the narrative as Irv. He has come to Sikri as a tourist and meets Akbar’s talking ghost who cheerfully passes himself into the hands of Irv and gets embodied in his work. Sealy writes the king into the cross-border love story of Naz and Perci in which he must unite the lovers. Asoca: A Sutra is Sealy’s recent novel, published in 2021. This book marks a departure from the rest of his works which were written in multiple discontinuous strands. Springing from a glimpse of Kalsi edict rock, the novel is about Sealy’s Asoca and not the historical Ashoka. The softer version of the name, Asoca, makes him more of a people’s man of humble background, the son of a lesser queen mother, nicknamed “crocodile.” He becomes the great Asoca with 384

Encyclopedia Entries

a spectacular destiny. After the Kalinga war, Asoca’s frailty beneath the tough veneer of a king captures his predicament before he finally embraces Buddhism. Sealy resurrects him as a contemporary man creating parallels of his administration to the present bureaucracy, but Sealy’s readers rejoice in this secular sutra that dazzles the way with its narratorial intersections of history, literature, and philosophy.

Further Reading Banerji, Mithu. “Puppets on a String. Review of The Brainfever Bird, by Allan Sealy.” The Guardian, 23 Mar. 2003, amp.theguardian.com/books/2003/mar/23/fiction.features1. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Jaidka, Manju. “Allan Sealy-ed is This Bestseller. Review of Hero: A Fable by I. Allan Sealy.” The Tribune, 18 Mar. 2001, www.tribuneindia.com/2001/20010318/spectrum/books.htm#2. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Mijares, Loretta M. “Fetishism of the Original: Anglo Indian History and Literature in I. Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama.” South Asian Review, vol. 25, no. 2, 2003, pp. 7–25. Sealy, Irwin Allan. “Interview: Irwin Allan Sealy, Author, Asoca: A Sutra.” Conducted by Chintan Modi, Hindustan Times, 13 Aug. 2021, www.hindustantimes.com/books/interview-irwin-allan-sealy-authorasoca-a-sutra-101628867280524.html. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

NIDHI SHARMA

SELECTED POEMS by Dom Moraes Dom Moraes’ Selected Poems edited with an Introduction and Notes by Ranjit Hoskote is the first annotated critical edition of Moraes’ work. Bringing to readers a thoughtful and nuanced selection of eighty poems from his nine poetry volumes – A Beginning (1957), Poems (1960), John Nobody (1965), Beldam Etcetera (1966), Collected Poems (1987), Serendip (1990), In Cinnamon Shade (2001), Typed with One Finger (2003), and New Poems (2003–2004), the book spans Moraes’ vibrant writing life of almost half a decade. Hoskote’s lengthy literary biography of Moraes is insightful and meticulous and, along with his detailed notes on the included poems, offers a valuable guide to readers for navigating Moraes’ poetry and situating him in the contemporary light. In his introduction to the book, Hoskote sets out to make certain significant revisions in the understanding and reception of Dom Moraes in the Indian English literary scene. Challenging the accepted image of Moraes as the Romantic and bohemian figure projected in the poetry of his early youth, Hoskote attempts to draw attention to the mature Moraes – his strong realism, his committed engagement with the world’s follies as a war correspondent, and his faith in poetry as a possible antidote to hatred and violence. Hoskote also endeavors to bring out the many traits in Moraes’ dynamic personality that texture his poetry with an emotional intensity that can be arrived at only by embracing the world in its fullness. Through his well-researched information on the significant events of Moraes’ life, Hoskote also offers a corrective to several factual errors of detail, chronology, and inference that have characterized the available information on Moraes so far. Most importantly, Hoskote asserts, with reason and proof, that the seventeen-year lull between 1966 and 1983 in Moraes’ poetic life was a period of preparation for creative germination rather than a phase of aridity, barrenness, and estrangement from the Muse. Hoskote’s selection of poems is undertaken with a keen eye on the depth of ideas, emotional honesty, music, experimentation, and philosophical vitality. Reflecting the best of Moraes’ oeuvre in its wide thematic, linguistic, and stylistic range, the selection affords an opportunity to carry out a diachronic analysis of Moraes’ work and his shifting perspectives on life, value, and art. The poetic themes are diverse – family, relationships, places, landscapes, autobiographical 385

Encyclopedia Entries

reflections, psychological conflicts, love, modernity, politics, injustices, absences, and death. The erotic looms large in Moraes’ poetic universe, manifesting itself as an elevated plane of experience and a mode of inquiry into the more prosaic facets of life. Moraes’ allusions and images are often very private and a lack of access to facts can rob his poems of much of their impact. Here, Hoskote’s notes come forward to contextualize the poems with adequate biographical and interpretative cues, enabling uninitiated readers to find meaning and resonance. Moraes’ language, however, has a surgical sharpness that helps allay his allusive obscurity. His diction is terse, clipped, and very modern in its preference for the ordinary over the ornate. There is in him, the journalist’s analytic urge to observe and record with the greatest economy of expression so that even confessions and autobiographical expressions become shorthand documents of detached and objective self-analysis. Evident also, in these poems is Moraes’ cosmopolitan ability to find a place everywhere and his utter inability to call any place home. As a world wanderer, Moraes was rich in geographical and human connections, but he was unable to anchor himself anywhere. Poetry alone, in its presence and absence, remained a steadfast space for expression, companionship and healing. And yet, his deepest self-revelations are not made without irony, a large part of which comes from his ability to detach himself as an observer from himself. This sense of detachment comes not from being a misfit within a half-understood culture but from being an existentialist in the quest of final truths. Moraes’ marginal cultural location enabled him to anticipate an existential stance that, beyond ties of territory, language, culture or blood, avowed one attachment alone – to the human.

Further Reading Kandasamy, Meena. “Dom, in Love and at War.” The Indian Express, 23 Jun. 2012, archive.indianexpress. com/news/dom-in-love-and-at-war/965603/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Raju, Anupama. “Melancholic Innocence.” The Hindu, 4 Aug. 2012, www.thehindu.com/books/melan cholic-innocence/article3716452.ece. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Swami, Sridala. “A  Variety of Doms.” Mint, 20 Jul. 2012, www.livemint.com/Leisure/5NhCuB Etk6LkqZuqzqn4uK/A-variety-of-Doms.html. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Thayil, Jeet. “Dom Moraes: A Poet’s Progress.” A History of Indian Poetry in English, edited by Rosinka Chaudhri. Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 223–234.

BASUDHARA ROY

SELECTED POEMS by Jayanta Mahapatra Jayanta Mahapatra has won several poetry prizes within India and abroad. In this collection titled Selected Poems published in 1987, which is his tenth volume of verse, Mahapatra brings together his best work from earlier collections, choosing the poems representative of his work till the date of its publication. When exposed to poems such as “Hunger,” “Abandoned British Cemetery at Balasore,” and “Dawn at Puri,” one effortlessly comprehends that despite having a quiet, unassuming voice, his arresting eye seamlessly shifts across contexts. At the core of the volume, there is something deeply and essentially Indian – whether he writes about poverty or a religious ritual – which, more than personal experience, comes from observation. At the same time, the poems arouse a never-ending curiosity that keeps one engrossed and wondering what will turn up in the next phrase. The collection contains several poems from Rain of Rites (1976) including “Hunger,” “A  Summer Poem,” and “Myth” in which he writes about “soughing of the sombre wind,”

386

Encyclopedia Entries

crocodiles moving “into deeper waters,” “mornings of heated middens,” and “the deep roar of funeral pyres.” A mosaic of poems of different hues such as “Taste for Tomorrow,” “Sanskrit,” “The Indian Way,” “Ash,” “The Vase,” and “The Moon Moments” are specimen of variety ingrained in the Indian ethos. “A Monsoon Day Fable” from Life Signs is a different take on the sense of loss and despair. The book highlights the quality of quietude about his poetry and celebrates the nostalgic elements of his poetry. Mahapatra’s earlier poetry tried to capture the multiple facets of love to relate it to a redolent conformation of life. Though Mahapatra is rueful about beginning as a love poet, it is through his love poetry that he could express the nuances of his later poetry. Undoubtedly, Mahapatra is prominent among those who shaped the historiography of Indian English poetry and practiced the art in its nascent years. The poems in this collection highlight the initial journey not only of the poet, but also that of the Indian English poetry. It will be unjust not to elaborate on the poem “Hunger,” one of the masterpieces of Indian English poetry. The poem is about the “clash of hungers” – sex and sexual desire of upper-class men versus the actual hunger of the downtrodden, which leads to the ills of prostitution and social exploitation. The poet is momentarily taken aback by the words “Will you have her?” uttered by the fisherman-father who offers his young and emaciated daughter to the speaker of the poem. Another significant poem, “Dawn at Puri,” in which the poet presents the picture of the Puri beach at dawn and its resemblance to the people living there, is a specimen of how Odisha with its landscape lives through Mahapatra’s poetry. In many poems from this collection, Mahapatra as a romantic poet seems to be wandering in nature: man has failed to understand the voice of nature, a still silent world that needs to be preserved.

Further Reading Ali, Agha Shahid. “Jayant Mahapatra’s New Book of Poems is Hazy.” India Today, 30 Aug. 2013, www. indiatoday.in/magazine/society-the-arts/story/19920731-book-review-jayanta-mahapatras-a-white ness-of-bone-selected-poems-766644-2013-01-04. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023. Ganduri, Srikanth. “View of a Brief Study of the Imaginative World in Jayanta Mahapatra’s Poetry.” Contemporary Literary Review India, vol. 6, no. 1, Feb. 2019. Literary Journal, www.literaryjournal.in/ index.php/clri/article/view/225. Ganguly, Suparna. The Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: A Critical Evaluation. The University of Burdwan, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 2009, hdl.handle.net/10603/61971. Mahapatra, Jayanta. A Whiteness of Bone: Selected Poems. Viking, 1992. Monu. “Nature Unbound: A Study of Jayanta Mahapatara’s Selected Poems.” Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education, vol. 16, no. 2, Feb. 2019, pp. 240–244. Ignited Minds Journals, https://ignited.in/I/a/78868. Swain, R. K. The Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: A Critical Study. Prestige Books, 2000.

PARMINDER SINGH

SEN, SUDEEP (1964–) Sudeep Sen was born to Satyabrata and Ratna Sen in New Delhi. He went to St. Columba’s School in Delhi and graduated in English literature from Hindu College, University of Delhi, followed by postgraduation from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New York. He went to Hollins University for a master’s degree in English and creative writing. He was an international scholar at Davidson College, the international poet-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh (1992–93), and a visiting scholar at Harvard University

387

Encyclopedia Entries

(1995). He founded a poetry publishing company, Aark Arts (1995). He is its editorial director now. Sudeep Sen’s prize-winning books include Fractals: New & Selected Poems/Translations 1980– 2015 (London Magazine Editions), Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain, EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House), Kaifi Azmi: Poems/Nazms (Bloomsbury) and Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation (Pippa Rann). He has edited several anthologies including The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry and Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi). Sen’s works have been translated into over two dozen languages. He has been published in Newsweek, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Telegraph, Poetry Review, Literary Review, and Harvard Review and aired on international television channels such as BBC, CNN IBN, and NDTV. His newer works have featured in Leela: An Erotic Play of Verse and Art (Collins) and Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell). Sen is the first Asian to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival. Sen creates visual imagery, painting, rhythm, and shadow imagery in his poetry by abruptly twisting the idiom woven with technical dexterity and an instinctive understanding of style and rhythm, from which a mosaic of meaning and interpretation emerges. He is very particular about how his words are placed on paper. He is a poet of scenography: he weaves and spins his words and phrases with intimacy and fondness and writes with the concentration and tenderness of a Japanese “Kintsukuroi” master, using form with extreme subtlety, diligence, sympathy, and passion with a strong belief that is important to write things down when they first strike, because often they might vanish. Sen’s passion for classical dance, music, and photography is conspicuous in the metaphor and images that he kneads in his poetry. Whether he is writing about the unsaid pain of Gaza, the terror blasts in Delhi, the Kargil war, or more recently, about the pandemic, or about a painting – his expressions are characterized by inherent ease and poetic grace. Sen does not want to leave any emotion unexpressed or unturned and always strives to go beyond his ultimate capability. This is his commitment and his curiosity as a connoisseur. His poetry exemplifies patience and painstaking craftsmanship. In order to read his poems, one needs to have the poet’s sense of intimacy and fine sensibility. Sen’s The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry has been listed among the sixty essential English-language works of Modern Indian literature. One of Sen’s best-known works – Fractals: New & Selected Poems/Translations 1980–2015, celebrates a complex oeuvre of diverse genres including lyric, free verse, elegies, sonnets, haiku, micro-fiction, and prose poems touching upon themes such as love, sex, religion, illness, loneliness, loss, and death. Certain geometric patterns in his poems impregnated with small details of structure introduce motifs largely unprecedented in the Indian context. His juxtaposition of images from physics, biology, and chemistry fusing them with themes of illness and beauty startles the reader, and he achieves this fusion with the precision of a scientist and patience of a sculptor. His latest book, Anthropocene, focuses on topics of immediate importance, such as climate change, pandemics, and the possibility of consolation while juxtaposing multiple genres, including creative prose, poetry, and photographs.

Further Reading Karim, Ziaul, and Sudeep Sen. “A Conversation with Sudeep Sen.” World Literature Today, vol. 84, no. 6, Nov.–Dec. 2010, p. 54. Ray, Kunal. “Sudeep Sen: The Poet as an Art Seeker.” South Asian Review, vol. 40, no. 4, 2019, pp. 305–318.

388

Encyclopedia Entries Sen, Sudeep. “Interview: A Poet at Heart: Vikram Seth Talks to Sudeep Sen.” Wasafiri, vol. 10, no. 21, 1995, pp. 22–25. ———. Sudeep Sen, sudeepsen.org/. Accessed 8 Aug. 2022.

PARMINDER SINGH

SENGUPTA, ANINDITA (1978–) Anindita Sengupta was born on 15 February  1978. Currently, she lives in Los Angeles, California. She completed her BA in English from Sophia College, Mumbai and later pursued a professional program in Screenwriting from UCLA film school. She is the founder and chief editor of Ultra Violet, a blog on the feminist issues in India. She worked as a freelance writer and editorial consultant in Bangalore. Her flair for writing on culture, art, and society is evident in her articles and reviews published in prestigious dailies such as The Guardian (UK), The Hindu and Deccan Herald. Her poems have been published in international journals like Mascara Literary Review, Eclectica, Pix Quarterly, Asian Cha, Plume and Salamander. Sengupta’s works have been included in anthologies such as The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry and The Yellow Nib Modern English Poetry by Indians. She received Charles Wallace fellowship as well as literary awards from TFA [Toto Funds the Arts] and Muse India. Sengupta started writing in her teens. Anne Carson, Agha Shahid Ali, and Tomas Tranströmer are her favorite poets. Her first collection of poems City of Water was published in 2010 by Sahitya Akademi. Although a debut collection, Sengupta’s skillful experiment with ghazal mesmerizes the readers. In the “Preface” to this book Keki N. Daruwalla rightly observes, “For an initial volume of poetry, the poet exercises control over the craft.” The poems in this volume convey her sensitive and realistic ways of looking at life. Through cinematographic images and taut vocabulary, she unfolds poignant tales of desires, death and separation. In the poem “Oddly,” for example, she views death from three angles: first, the disfigured body of the child who died after falling into a ditch; secondly, the immediate reaction of the parents; thirdly, the subtle memory of the dead. Her second volume Walk like Monsters was published in 2016. The monsters represent the misfits, the troubled and the abandoned. The poems in this collection deal with the crises and the hazards that deeply affect one’s perception and memory. “Glass Hammer,” a poem on the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, reviews the trauma after several years of the incident. In “After Floods” she sketches a picture of scattered lives: “I see bits of roof, children floating on them as if on baskets,/the exhausted jigging of a goat in your arms. Sewage/shawls my legs.” The images present a collage representing the havoc caused by calamities, both natural and man-made. Sengupta describes herself as a “topophiliac” in a personal email, dated 23 Feb. 2022. She is fond of the city and the sea. She deftly creates scenes of misery against the stark background of everyday urban life: “Half in my skin and half hanging out/like leaning from Mumbai local in rush hour” (“Separation” in City of Water). Her third book Only the Forest Knows (2022) comprises poems based on various themes such as sexual assault, trauma, PTSD and recovery, challenges of being a colored person, migration, COVID-19 pandemic, etc.

Further Reading Sen, Sudip, editor. The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry. HarperCollins, 2012. ———. “The Yellow Nib Modern English Poetry by Indians.” The Yellow Nib, no. 6. Queen’s University, 2012. Sengupta, Anindita. Anindita Sengupta, aninditasengupta.com/about/. Accessed 8 Aug. 2022.

SHYAMASRI MAJI

389

Encyclopedia Entries

SENGUPTA, POILE (1948–) Poile Sengupta (née Ambika Gopalakrishnan) is a versatile Indian author who has written several plays, children’s books, poems, short stories, and even a novel, in a career spanning more than five decades. She was born in Ernakulam, Kerala, and did her schooling and higher studies from Delhi, before going on to study children’s literature from Carleton University, Ottawa. Apart from her literary career, she has also acted in several plays and films and has also taught in schools and colleges in various academic roles. A polyglot woman, Sengupta had also started a theater group which then evolved into a not-for-profit trust that supports theater. It was during her college days, in 1968, that she started writing a humorous column for children in a magazine called Children’s World. This column, which then went on to run for three decades, was the stepping stone to a prolific career in which she authored such books as The Exquisite Balance (1985), The Way to My Friend’s House (1988), The Story of the Road (1993), How the Path Grew (1997) The Clever Carpenter and Other Stories, The Naughty Dog and Other Stories, The Black Snake and Other Stories, Waterflowers (Scholastic, 2000), Vikram and Vetal (2006), and Vikramaditya’s Throne (2007). The stories from some of these books have also been included in celebrated anthologies like The Puffin Treasury of Modern Indian Stories, The Puffin Book of Funny Stories, The Best of Target, One World etc. In 1999–2000 she even received a fellowship from the government of India to write one-act plays for children in English, which led to the emergence of the anthology entitled Good Heavens!: A Set of One Act Plays (2007). By then, Sengupta was already an acclaimed playwright. Her first full-length play, Mangalam, was written in 1993, and it won a special award for its social relevance at The HinduMadras Players’ playscripts competition in the same year. Since then she has written more than half a dozen plays, most of which were published in the anthology Women Centre Stage, published in 2010. Such a collection upholds Sengupta’s characteristic versatility, both in terms of the content and the dramatic techniques at play. One thing, however, which shines through all the plays, is Sengupta’s adroit handling of conversational English for weaving her dialogues, which contributes to the performative flair of her plays. It is this that sets her apart from the small coterie of Indian English playwrights before her and places her alongside such modern masters as Mahesh Dattani or Manjula Padmanabhan, who have together marked the gradual maturity of Indian English drama from the early 1990s to the first two decades of the new millennium. While her plays deal with varied themes like political maladies, familial injustice, linguistic politics etc., they consistently gravitate toward the reconfiguration of female and male identities through multidimensional resistance against patriarchal structures, even though she refuses to identify as a feminist. In plays like Mangalam, Inner Laws, Alipha, etc. we see how her female characters resolutely strive against the adversities and seek mitigation through solidarity. However, her plays are not just about victimization of women and their resistance. Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni chooses to humanize two much-maligned characters by placing them within the context of their victimized communities. Likewise, Samara’s Song represents a society’s struggle against tyranny, irrespective of distinctions of gender, class, etc. In 2014, Sengupta opened a new chapter in her career, despite suffering from macular degeneration, with the publication of Inga, her first novel for adults. Luminous with strong female characters and a dazzling mix of regionally inflected Englishes, this is a novel that explores a lesbian relationship, familial exploitation, and the challenge of overcoming emotional scars despite severe obstacles. With such inexhaustible creativity, Poile Sengupta remains one of the most remarkably versatile Indian English writers of our times. 390

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Kaushik, Minakshi. “Struggle and Expression: Selected Plays by Manjula Padmanabhan, Poile Sengupta and Dina Mehta.” Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–8. Galaxy, www.galaxyimrj.com/V1/n1/Minakshi.pdf. Mukherjee, Tutun, editor. Staging Resistance: Plays by Women in Translation. Oxford UP, 2005. Pandey, Rachana. Body and Space in Performance: The Plays of Manjula Padmanabhan and Poile Sengupta. ABS Books, 2019. Parghi, Raju. “Indian Drama and the Emergence of Indian Women Playwrights: A Brief Survey.” Impressions: An e-Journal of English Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2010. Impressions, impressions.org.in/jul10/ar_ rajup.html. Singh, Anita. “Feminist Interventions: A Reading of Light’s Out, Getting Away with Murder and Mangalam.” Muse India, no. 26, Jul.–Aug 2009. Muse India, museindia.com/Home/ViewContentData? arttype=focus&issid=26&menuid=1580.

ABIN CHAKRABORTY

SERPENT AND THE ROPE, THE, by Raja Rao The Serpent and the Rope, Raja Rao’s second novel, was published in 1960. It is often read as an autobiographical novel and regarded as a masterpiece offering a philosophical take on life, faith, and truth. The protagonist’s evolving reflections on Venetian philosophy, Indian culture and timeless traditions, and European culture and way of life, elevate the novel to a magnum opus. It is the story of a young Brahmin, Ramaswamy, his search for identity, self-realization, and truth in a cross-cultural milieu across countries. It focuses on his physical as well as emotional voyage; his unhappy marriage to Madeleine, the French woman; unfulfilled love for Savithri, the Western-educated daughter of the Raja of Surajpur; and the loss of his two sons, one at the tender age of seven months and the other born premature. The fact that Savithri is engaged to Pratap, who is known to Ramaswamy, and has no love for her fiancé, does not deter the latter who finds himself drawn to her and alienated from Madeleine. Family circumstances like his father’s death, the subsequent rituals that he has to perform, and his sister’s wedding make Ramaswamy travel frequently between India and France, which does not allow him to forge any meaningful relationships. His commitment to the siblings – sisters Saroja and Sukumari, brother Sridhar – and stepmother keeps him away from Madeleine. Madeleine’s attempts to make things right do not help. Ramaswamy is drawn toward Savithri, as she represents the enigmatic East to him, while Madeleine is the perplexing West. Unable to coalesce the two or strike a balance in his relationships, Ramaswamy feels that he may find the answer to his questions in Savithri. His inability to appreciate Madeleine’s proclivity toward Buddhism, his ill health and subsequent lung surgery, the proximity between him and Savithri, and his inability to be with Madeleine while pursuing research results in the inevitable separation of the two. Ramaswamy’s writing a thesis on French religious history – Catharism or Albigensian heresy – results in deliberations on Eastern and Western culture, ethics, practices, and values that converge in the narrative as he travels between his homeland, France, and England. His journeys correspond with the inward journey for self-realization and his attempt to understand the true meaning of life. His proficiency in different languages, his love for the poetry of Valéry, Emerson, Whitman, etc.; study of ancient history; and his contemplations make The Serpent and the Rope a unique amalgamation of intellectual quest, cultural insight, and religious inquiry. The novel thus becomes philosophical in its true meaning and offers an understanding of individual progression through physical and emotional journeys. Religious interpolation in the novel brings to the surface the conflict between different ways of faith and family. The Serpent and the Rope, like an epic, provides the reader with insights into socio-political structures, relationships, 391

Encyclopedia Entries

religious practices, metaphysical questions, and spiritual and philosophical realities across countries and cultures. It is an inimitable rendering of multifaceted human experiences. Critics allude to the real or the unreal – the serpent or the rope, referring to the philosophy of the novel where, on the path to self-realization, salvation is as simple as a child’s game of avoiding the snake and ascending the rope or as complex as the intertwined twisted strands of a rope, or as multifaceted as the serpent in Hindu mythology that signifies the casting off of the old skin and being reborn, or a symbol of mortality. Critics also draw parallels in the rituals, symbolism, worship, fear, notion of infinity, spirituality, and evil associated with serpents in both Hinduism and Christianity, which represents the epic nature of the novel.

Further Reading Guzman, Richard R. “The Saint and the Sage: The Fiction of Raja Rao.” The Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 56, no. 1, Winter 1980, pp. 32–50. John, Joseph. “Ramaswamy’s Quest: Explorations of Love in Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 277–292. Parmeswaran, Uma. “Shiva and Shakti in Raja Rao’s Novels.” World Literature Today, vol. 62, no. 4, Autumn 1988, pp. 574–577. Ray, Robert J. “The Novels of Raja Rao.” Books Abroad, vol. 40, no. 4, Autumn 1966, pp. 411–414. Shahane, Vasant A. “Fiction and Reality in Raja Rao, Essays on Indian Writing in English.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 22, no. 2, Summer/Fall 1987, pp. 34–42. Trivedi, Harish. “Raja Rao: The Twice-Born Novelist.” Indian Literature, vol. 50, no. 5, Sept.-Oct. 2006, pp. 8–12.

PRATIBHA NAGPAL

SESHADRI, VIJAY (1954–) Vijay Seshadri is a poet, writer, and literary critic residing in Brooklyn, New York, who serves on the MacDowell Board. He was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954, to Champaka and K.S. Seshadri, who immigrated to the United States when Vijay was just five years old. His father was a chemistry professor at The Ohio State University and Seshadri spent his formative years in Columbus, Ohio. He received his education at Columbia University and Oberlin College. He graduated from Oberlin College with an AB and from Columbia University with an MFA. He has held the Michele Tolela Myers Chair at Sarah Lawrence College, where he currently teaches poetry and nonfiction writing. He is also a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and resides in Brooklyn and currently serves as the director of the graduate nonfiction writing department. In addition to “Non-Fiction Writing,” “Form and Feeling in Nonfiction Prose,” “Rational and Irrational Narrative,” and “Narrative Persuasion,” he has also taught “Non-Fiction Writing” classes. He has served as an editor at the New Yorker and has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Seshadri published  Wild Kingdom  in 1996,  The Long Meadow  in 2003, and 3 Sections in 2014, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He was declared the winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2003 for The Long Meadow. The Pulitzer committee described 3 Sections as a “compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.” In addition, he received the MacDowell Colony Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement as well as The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize. He examines the challenges of growing up with a hyphenated cultural identity. “There were more complicated problems, too. Small, brown, bespectacled, alien, and saddled with a name that 392

Encyclopedia Entries

others thought was unpronounceable, I was an easy target for the casual cruelties of childhood” (Seshadri, “My Pirate Boyhood”). He writes about years before the immigration act of 1965 that abolished the inflexible “quotas imposed on Asian immigration.” There were “hardly any other Indians around. Dressed in her sari, with her bangles and with the bindhi that signified her married status placed carefully on her forehead, my mother could be spotted a mile off ” (“My Pirate Boyhood”). In an interview with Jeet Thayil for Poets & Writers magazine, Seshadri states that history is what he has had to make peace with in his poetry. “You have to find a way to manage it, to appropriate it and not have it appropriate you.” Seshadri’s problems with his complex ancestry are highlighted in his poetry. In his poems, the reader is “often invited to follow the speaker in his quirky, idiosyncratic wanderings, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a vehicle, and oftentimes in the inner spate of a room.” He “sharpens his long lines, at times reminiscent of prose lines, charged through with a powerful interior rhythm driving the quest for what cannot be fully named” (Hariharan). Some poems construct long, winding tales based on epic and speculative prehistory, which eventually result in sudden, hard-earned discoveries, suggesting a preoccupation with the fabulists’ art. And it is because of this hard-won quality that Seshadri’s claim that “only the subtle, ambiguous wins/are worth having” is credible. Seshadri refuses to accept the overused argument or lofty presumption of the bardic voice.

Further Reading “3 Sections, by Vijay Seshadri (Graywolf Press).” The Pulitzer Prizes. 2014, www.pulitzer.org/winners/ vijay-seshadri. Accessed 15 Jan. 2023. Hariharan, Githa, “Vijay Seshadri.” Name Me a Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing, edited by Meena Alexander. Yale University Press, 2018. “Poet: Vijay Seshadri.” Poetry Internation, www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/ poet/102-18366_Seshadri. Accessed 15 Jan. 2023. Seshadri, Vijay. “My Pirate Boyhood.” The Threepenny Review.1998, www.threepennyreview.com/sam ples/seshadri_sp98.html. Accessed 15 Jan. 2023.

EMAN ALMASRY

SETH, VIKRAM (1952–) Vikram Seth was born on June 20, 1952, to Prem Nath Seth and Leila Seth. Prem Nath Seth was an executive at Bata Shoes, and Leila Seth a judge at the Delhi High Court. Vikram Seth attended Welham Boys’ School and the Doon School in Uttarakhand. At Doon School, he was the editor-in-chief of the school magazine. Seth moved on to the Tonbridge School in Kent, United Kingdom, to complete his A-levels education. In 1970, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, politics, and economics at the University of Oxford, and he developed an interest in poetry and Chinese. Later, he started his graduate studies at Stanford University in economics, intending to study Chinese population planning. However, he did not complete the same. While at Stanford, he took courses in Chinese and creative writing. He also took classes at Nanjing University in China while conducting fieldwork for his doctoral dissertation. Seth is a polyglot fluent in Mandarin, Welsh, Urdu, English, and French. Seth experimented with a variety of genres in writing. He started his writing career with poetry, eventually progressing to novels. Mappings in 1980 was Seth’s first volume of poems. Subsequently the second collection of poetry, The Humble Administrator’s Garden, was published in 1985. The poems draw their inspiration from travels in China and India with a central focus on traditional plants and herbs from the region. 393

Encyclopedia Entries

Vikram Seth’s first novel, The Golden Gate (1986), illustrates the adventures of a group of friends based in San Francisco, California. This novel was written in verse, each paragraph being a poem. It explored topics such as homosexuality, Christianity, nuclear power wars, and tolerance. This novel was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award by Sahitya Akademi (Indian National Academy of Letters) in 1988. Seth’s second novel, A Suitable Boy (1993), is one of the lengthiest pieces of published fiction in a single volume with one thousand four hundred and eighty-eight pages in paperback. The novel is set against the backdrop of the 1950s in the city of Brahmpur, which is a part of independent India and follows the life of a young Indian girl and her quest for a suitable boy who would be her husband. It examines national political issues haunting a newly independent nation, such as Hindu–Muslim disputes, the status of lower castes, zamindari systems, feudal lords, and the lives of courtesans. The novel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and W.H. Smith Literary Award. In 2020, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) adapted the novel into a series with several veteran actors, directed under the wing of celebrated Mira Nair. In 1999, Seth published his masterpiece novel titled An Equal Music. The novel is a testimonial to his melodic bias where he symbolizes a heart-wrenching account of a violinist fretted by his breakup with a former lover. The emotive assertiveness and superior knowledge of musical lives demonstrated in the book provide another feather in Seth’s cap. In 2000, this novel was awarded the Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award. Vikram Seth’s travelogue From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983) is a chronology of events and travels through Tibet, China, and Nepal, and it won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. His other works include All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990) and Three Chinese Poets (1992). Seth has also written a series of short stories for young readers under the title, Beastly Tales from Here and There (1992). Seth’s brilliance can be inferred by his contribution to the libretto Arion and the Dolphin: A Libretto (1994) based on the legends from Greek mythologies which was commissioned by the English National Opera. His libretto was performed in June 1994. In 1996, Seth purchased the former residence of George Herbert, an Anglican poet, in Salisbury, United Kingdom. He divides his time between India and England, actively participating in local literary and cultural events in Salisbury. In 2001, he was made a commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2005, he received the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman. In 2007, he received a Padma Shri in literature and education, which is the fourth highest civilian award presented by the Indian government.

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. 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. 142–156. Language in India, www.languageinindia.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. Prasad, G. J. V. Vikram Seth. Pencraft International, 2004.

VISHWAJEET DESHMUKH

394

Encyclopedia Entries

SETHNA, K. D. (1904–2011) Indian English poet Kaikhosru Danjibuoy Sethna (Kekoo), known as a major voice in mystical and spiritual poetry of modern India, was born in a respected Parsi family in Bombay (now Mumbai). His father was a widely respected ophthalmic surgeon. Given the apparent sternness of his father, Sethna was emotionally drawn to his mother. Early life, full of fun and frolic, was cut short by fatal polio that left a leg lame for the rest of his life; a timely operation in London, however, saved him from paralytic effects and permanent deformity. Deeply influenced by the British Romantic and Victorian poets, Sethna wrote two poems in the Byronic style based on a forbidden reading of Beppo and Don Juan. Other lyrical experiments soon followed. At school and college, he excelled in the study of philosophy and literature, bagged the Selby Scholarship in Logic, the Hughlings Prize for English and the Ellis Prize of Bombay University. At the age of nineteen, Sethna wrote an estimate of H.G. Wells that elicited a favorable reply from Wells himself. Similarly, at the launch of Mother India: Monthly Review of Culture, in later years, Aldous Huxley wrote to Sethna: “I can only wish you all success in your venture. You will, of course, be a voice crying in the wideness. But if a few individuals pay attention, something will have been accomplished!” Sethna became a part of the literary-intellectual circle at Bombay and came in close contact with many luminaries of his times such as A.S. Wadia, Simon Pereira, Armando Menezes, D.F. Karaka, Frank Moraes, Frederick Mendonca, R.K. Karanjia, and Nissim Ezekiel. He found a great affinity with the Indian sage and seer Sri Aurobindo, in terms of a synthesis that the latter offered between the East and the West. The notion of mystical – spiritual poetry, based on Sri Aurobindo’s theory of creative evolution, deeply appealed to him. He met Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual collaborator, the French-born mystic Mirra Alfassa, the Mother, for the first time in 1928 at Pondicherry. He spent the next ten and half years there, and thereafter, he alternated between Pondicherry and Bombay while maintaining a regular correspondence with Sri Aurobindo on life, literature, and Yoga. He was named “Amal Kiran” (Pure Ray) by the Master. In 1944 Sethna got married to Sehra, and in February 1953, he made the crucial decision to settle down at Pondicherry. Under the influence of Sri Aurobindo, Sethna wrote mystical and spiritual poetry of a new and radically different kind. His poetry shows an extraordinary use of symbols and metaphors of the hieratic traditions of the West and the East in an eclectic manner. Using the Ashram letterhead, Sri Aurobindo strongly recommended the immediate publication of Sethna’s collection of poetry. This was a rare note of appreciation from Sri Aurobindo. Sethna had fruitful correspondence with several world figures such as Albert Einstein and Paul Brunton. His correspondence with the eminent William Blake scholar, Kathleen Raine, led to a volume entitled English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence Between Kathleen Raine and K. D. Sethna (1994). Sethna helped build a new canon of spiritual poetry to which others like Arjara, Dilip Kumar Roy, Harindranath Chattopadhyay, and Nirod Baran contributed. His poetic and critical works like The Secret Splendor (1941, self-published), The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo (1974), Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare (1991), Sri Aurobindo: The Poet (1999), Overhead Poetry: Poems with Sri Aurobindo’s Comments (1972), Two Loves and A Worthier Pen: The Enigmas of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1984), and The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme’s Symbolist Poetry (1987) were pivotal landmarks in his creative career. Aside from poetry and criticism, Sethna wrote extensively on philosophy, history, education, and culture. He was a prominent literary journalist and edited the cultural monthly Mother India from its inception until he passed away after a long and fruitful life in 2011.

395

Encyclopedia Entries

Despite a considerable literary critical output, Sethna has not received his due in critical, academic, and intellectual circles, nationally and internationally. This is largely because after he took up a literary and yogic life at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry, he detached himself consciously or unconsciously from the larger world of academics and scholarship and lived a primarily inward-looking life with sporadic scholarly interaction with the academic world. He remained confined to Pondicherry and chose not to be part of a publication and seminar circuit. Many of his works went counter to the prevalent taste and critical predilections of the contemporary world. Nevertheless, he received his share of accolades from discerning minds of his time.

Further Reading Mohanty, Sachidananda, editor. K. D. Sethna (Amal Kiran): A  Centenary Tribute. The Integral Life Foundation, 2004. Sethna, K. D. (Amal Kiran). The Sun and the Rainbow: Approaches to Life: Through Sri Aurobindo’s Light. Clear Ray Trust, 1981. ———. The English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence Between Kathleen Raine and K. D. Sethna. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1994.

SACHIDANANDA MOHANTY

SHADOW LINES, THE, by Amitav Ghosh Amitav Ghosh’s second novel, The Shadow Lines, was published in 1988, and it received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1989. The novel has received significant critical attention since its publication and has generally received praise for its narrative style and exploration of ideas of nationhood and homeland within a postcolonial nation-state. Narrated by a young male narrator, the novel unfolds itself through stories and memories. What makes the narrative difficult to summarize is that the stories are often not told by the anonymous narrator, and the memories often do not belong to him. Two significant other storytellers in the novel are the narrator’s grandmother who is referred to as Tham’ma, and Tridib, his uncle. Other storytellers in the novel include the narrator’s cousin Ila and May Price. Tridib and Tham’ma introduce the other main cities the novel focuses on besides Calcutta where the narrator lives as a young boy with his parents and grandmother – Dhaka and London. Through these two characters, the novel can seamlessly cut across different timelines. In Ghosh’s narrative, one story flows into another, as do time and space – showing us the interconnected nature of the worlds and the temporalities we inhabit. The novel is divided into two parts – Going Away and Coming Home. When the narrator’s grandmother describes visiting Dhaka from Rangoon where she lived with her husband, she describes the journey as “coming home,” something that the narrator is amused about. The phrases, beyond signifying the theme of homeland and journeys with which the novel grapples, also allude to a linguistic conundrum. In the narrator’s mother tongue Bangla, there is a single word that expresses both meanings. At the heart of the novel is an interrogation of the idea of nation and nationhood, an investigation and commentary upon the binary between the grand narratives of history and personal memories that official records do not document and the absurdity and arbitrariness of borders – shadow lines that divide nation-states from one another geo-politically. It is in this context that maps occupy a central place in the novel. Toward the end of the novel, through the narrator’s discovery of the newspapers that covered the riots of 1964 in the Teen Murti Library in New Delhi, and his subsequent game with Tridib’s atlas where he draws circles around the world map in what the narrator himself describes as an attempt to learn about distances, Ghosh suggests 396

Encyclopedia Entries

that small histories never find a place in books, and grand narratives, instead of dividing lands as they were intended to, only end up bringing them closer, turning them into mirror images of one another. Mirrors play a significant role in the novel. The narrator, at various stages, finds a mirror image of himself in Ila and Nick Price, May’s brother with whom Ila eventually enters into an unhappy marriage. But the most significant mirror image to which the narrator aspires is Tridib. It is the aspiration of a child longing to grow into the man he has idolized which results, at the end of the novel, in his lovemaking with May, the love of Tridib’s life.

Further Reading Adami, Esterino, et al., editors. Crossing the Shadow Lines: Essays on the Topicality of Amitav Ghosh’s Modern Classic. University of Turin, 2020. Bose, Brinda, editor. Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives. Pencraft International, 2003. Dhawan, R. K., editor. The Novels of Amitav Ghosh. Prestige, 1999. Kaul, Suvir. “Separation Anxiety: Growing Up Inter/National in Amitav Ghosh’s ‘the Shadow Lines.’ ” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 1994, pp. 125–145. Mee, Jon. “ ‘The Burthen of the Mystery’: Imagination and Difference in The Shadow Lines.” Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion, edited by Tabish Khair. Permanent Black, 2003, pp. 90–108. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “Maps and Mirrors: Co-ordinates of Meaning in The Shadow Lines.” The Perishable Empire: Essays of Indian Writing in English. Oxford UP, 2002, pp. 134–138.

SARBAJAYA BHATTACHARYA

SHADOW PLAY by Shashi Deshpande Published in 2013, the novel Shadow Play brilliantly captures the lives of ordinary people, a family in three generations. As a sequel to Shashi Deshpande’s novel, A Matter of Time (1996), the novel continues the story of the next generation of Kalyani’s family after a gap of ten years. In the aftermath of the tragic death of her daughter, Sumi, in a road accident and the desertion of her son-in-law, Gopal, Kalyani wishes to see her three granddaughters, Arundhati, Charu, and Seema, settled in life. Beginning with Aru (Arundhati) who gets married to Rohit, to fulfill Kalyani’s dying wish, the novel still evokes the grandeur of celestial weddings amidst the coming together of the entire family. Kalyani’s musing about the golden hour of dusk, godhulibela, brings together the spiritual and the mundane in an intimate manner that is characteristic of Deshpande’s craft. While the “shadow” of Kalyani’s impending death and Sumi’s tragic death, haunts the lives of characters, it is the heinous act of Seema’s gang rape that causes a seismic shift in the novel. As for Kalyani herself, she lives on in the minds of her family members, especially her granddaughters’, even after her demise. Ironically, in her final will, she also wills the demolition of their family house so as to secure a perennial home for the women of her family. The supportive mother-daughter-granddaughter relationships in the novel form the structural backbone of this matriarchal household. Even man-woman relationships pale in comparison. One is also reminded of Deshpande’s former novel, In the Country of Deceit (2008), where demolition and reconstruction of a new house symbolically become acts of survival on the part of those who are left behind to continue living their lives once their grandparents and parents are gone. Hence, the “wedding” and the “deaths” in the family are structural strategies to enter and understand the intricate relationships between the characters in the novel. Further, the novel, Shadow Play, also utilizes the idea of time which is continuously flowing within the realm of the human mind, connecting the past with the drastically changing present modern world. In addition, the novel also traverses the public versus private divide, showing 397

Encyclopedia Entries

how public spaces drastically alter an individual’s life, as one finds in the case of Hrishi and Charu. Hrishi changes his name to Rishi in America as it is easier for his American circle to pronounce it. Yet, in the alienating aftermath of the 9/11 World Trade Centre terrorist bombings, Rishi realizes his own complicated position vis-à-vis the country he has migrated to (the United States) and his old parents back home in India. However, the novel ends on a note of hope when Aru and Rohit adopt a child, and Aru lets go of her bitterness against her father, Gopal. As for Gopal, he finally experiences a fulfilling relationship with Kasturi, another important character in the novel. Amidst all trauma of death and the labyrinthine paths of living there is hope for children, for parentage, and for life to go on.

Further Reading Deshpande, Shashi. Shadow Play. Aleph Book Company, 2013. ———. “On Concerns and Creativity: An Interview with Shashi Deshpande.” Interview by Manpreet J. Singh. Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, vol. 10, no. 1, 2016, pp. 157–170. Jain, Himani. “Shashi Deshpande’s Shadow Play: A Complex Web of Human Relationships.” The Indian Journal of English Studies, vol. 53, 2016, pp. 221–223. Jain, Jasbir. “Shashi Deshpande.” A Companion to Indian Fiction in English, edited by Pier Paolo Piciucco. Atlantic, 2004.

SUSHILA SINGH

SHAME by Salman Rushdie Shame (1983) was the third novel published by Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie. Rushdie was born in Mumbai (called Bombay at the time) and later became both a British and American citizen. He is a fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature and also of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has won numerous international literary awards, including the Booker Prize for his novel Midnight’s Children. Shame was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Prix Du Meilleur Livre Etranger. Shame’s central theme is shame, its misapplication, and its violent consequences. The book offers a social critique of how and to whom shame is apportioned and is particularly critical of how it is often unjustly applied to women. There are also a variety of more minor themes, such as shame’s opposites – pride and honor (which play a largely negative role in the book) – as well as themes related to immigration and nationalism. Though set in an imaginary country, the setting, characters, and political situation resemble Pakistan and its long history of pseudodemocracy, military coup d’etats, and political corruption. But the narrator informs us that “my fictional country exists . . . at a slight angle to reality. . . . My view is that I am not writing only about Pakistan” (29). However, the themes of Shame are more broadly applicable and not limited to Pakistan. As with many of Rushdie’s books, Shame is written in the style of magical realism. The narrator notes that this was necessary because if he had written a realistic critique of Pakistan – even if not only about Pakistan – “the book would have been banned, dumped in the rubbish bin, burned. . . . I am only telling a sort of modern fairy-tale” (p. 70). The very style of the book is a critique of the intolerance and lack of freedom of expression in Pakistan and other autocratic countries. The main character of the book is Shame, the nickname of Sufiya Zinobia, the eldest living child of General (eventually president) Raza Hyder and his wife Bilquis, their first child, a son, having died. Her very existence began in shame to herself and her mother, as a female unable to replace the lost son. A few months after her birth, her shame deepens when she is afflicted 398

Encyclopedia Entries

by a brain fever and suffers a permanent brain injury, preventing her development into normal adulthood. The unjust shame imposed upon Sufiya Zinobia is contrasted by the shamelessness of her father – who seizes power in a military coup and then uses his position to enrich himself – and her husband, Omar Khayyam Shakil – who is a debauched womanizer, gambler, drunkard, and glutton. He marries Sufiya Zinobia, who never develops beyond the intellectual level of a child, to gain favor with her father, the president. Neither Raza Hyder nor Omar Khayyam are ever ashamed of their actions. The just application of shame has been inverted in this traditional Islamic and patriarchal society, with women bearing an unjust burden merely for their gender, while men are unaccountable for truly shameful behavior. Shame and shamelessness, inappropriately applied, are the roots of social dysfunction and violence (116). As the book progresses, not only is Sufiya Zinobia herself identified with shame, but she begins to absorb the shame that others, particularly her father and husband, should feel but do not. She periodically experiences terrible illnesses, a “plague of shame” (141), which involve rashes, pustules, lumps, excessive salivation, and other disgusting symptoms as she overflows with the deflected shame of those around her. As the family’s shame multiplies through the increasingly wicked actions of its shameless members, this plague eventually dominates Sufiya Zinobia, who becomes “the incarnation of the family’s shame and also . . . its chief cause” (171), turning her into a murderous beast who eventually flees from her family (that had tried to confine her) and engages in murderous rampages throughout the countryside, before finally killing her husband. Shame is a critique of fundamentalist religion and its shaming of women ultimately for their gender and sexuality while allowing men free rein to indulge their masculine whims. Religious puritanism distorts what one should truly be ashamed of; it confuses virtue for vice. It creates shame where there is none while shielding those who deserve it, including dictators and tyrants. In this book, Rushdie exposes the evils of religiously inspired shame prevalent in countries such as Pakistan.

Further Reading Bloom, Harold, editor. Salman Rushdie. Infobase Publishing, 2009. Fletcher, M. D., editor. Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. Rodopi, 1994. Gurnah, Abdulrazak, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. Cambridge UP, 2007.

WILLIAM R. PATTERSON

SHARMA, BULBUL (1952–) Bulbul Sharma’s work is a conversation between nature, art, and sensitivity. Born in Bhilai, Bulbul studied Russian language and literature in Jawaharlal Nehru University and went to Moscow State University for further research. On her return to India in 1973, she began her journey with the canvas. Her collections can be found in the National Gallery of Modern Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, Chandigarh Museum, UNICEF NORAD, British Council, New Delhi, among others. The canvas also made space for the book. In Sharma’s work, writing and painting emerge as forces that complement and inspire each other. In both, her children’s literature as well as short fiction for adults, she focuses on animals, disability, family, and the individual’s tussle between tradition and autonomy. When it comes to gender, the earliest work, My Sainted Aunts (1992), along with Travels with My Aunts (2015), puts together tales of travel by women, some of them almost making a leap of faith in either sustaining or breaking a familial bond. The irony of the word “sainted” is 399

Encyclopedia Entries

stretched throughout the text. The Perfect Woman (1994) introduces us to the lives of women bruised and battered by societal expectations. Sharma here gives us a stark narrative, bringing to fore the frailties of a woman’s existence. In The Anger of Aubergines (1997), food, labor, and notions of care are carefully examined. Food is no simple matter but deeply entrenched in codes of purity, consumption, habit, and survival. Her Eating Women Telling Tales (2009) weaves together feasting, death, and storytelling. For women, in the act of preparing a meal during a death anniversary, there occurs a simultaneous impulse to cook a story, to serve it well, garnish it, and allow the listener to get the taste that it was meant to have. In her first novel, Banana-Flower Dreams (1999), the title is borrowed from an alleged recipe suggested for the birth of a boy. This novel explores varied liminal spaces like dreams, myths, make-believe, and mysticism to sustain the bond between seven generations of women. From a 100-year-old grandmother to an unborn fetus, from death to birth, and all that lies beyond and between, the novel utilizes natural and mythical motifs to talk about the realization, rebirth, and escape that each character strives for, be it men or women. The sense of time, mortality, and body is the subject of another short story collection, Now that I am Fifty (2011). The anthology concerns that turning point in a woman’s life when circumstances either guide her to reclaim her lost independence or reshape her life, which was largely spent in caregiving and managing the household. Bulbul Sharma has also written books exploring the flora, fauna, and landscapes around her, whether in the plains or the hills. Her keen gaze and the exquisite artwork make nature come alive in the pages of books like Grey Hornbills at Dusk: Nature Rambles through Delhi (2014) and Birds in My Garden and Beyond (2020). Her story in The Book of Dog (2022) titled “My Fearless Gaddis,” is a tribute to the ferocious, indomitable, and sturdy Himalayan sheepdog or gaddi, a tale of companionship between human and animal, fraught with trust and fear. Shaya Tales (2006) is another autobiographical reflection on life in the village of Shaya in Himachal Pradesh, exploring the strife involved in living in the mountain villages. Manu Mixes Clay and Sunshine (2005) is a study of human life, a peek into an ordinary potter’s family and how children learn from their immediate environment. Bulbul Sharma has revisited mythology in various books like The Children’s Ramayana (2022), Fantastic Creatures in Mythology (2021), The Book of Devi (2011), and Tales of Fabled Beasts, Gods and Demons (2003). Her murder mysteries, Tailor of Giripul (2011) and Murder in Shimla (2020), show how the sleepy mountain town is shaken by rude murders, elusive suspects, and murky pasts. Bulbul Sharma has firmly established herself as a writer who is as much a wizard of words as she is in charge of the canvas. As a popular writer, the appeal of her writing is ever growing because she works at the cusp of art, literature, and education. The needs and necessities of good storytelling are the pivot of each of her narratives. With over twenty books and several art works to her credit, Bulbul Sharma is a genuine, kaleidoscopic chronicler of her times.

Further Reading Dogra, Sakshi. “Food for Thought-Feeling: Studying Taste’s Affective Function in Bulbul Sharma’s The Anger of Aubergines.” Food Culture Studies in India: Consumption, Representation and Mediation, edited by Simi Malhotra, et al. Springer, 2020, pp. 59–64. Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978981-15-5254-0_7. Lau, Lisa. “Emotional and Domestic Territories: The Positionality of Women as Reflected in the Landscape of the Home in Contemporary South Asian Women’s Writings.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 4, 2006, pp. 1097–1116. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3876642.

DISHA POKHRIYAL

400

Encyclopedia Entries

SHARMA, PARTAP (1939–2011) Partap Sharma was a Sahitya Akademi Award-winning playwright, novelist, children’s writer, documentary filmmaker, commentator, and actor. A Zen Buddhist enthusiast, Partap Sharma, was born in Lahore, in undivided India (now Pakistan). He was a bright student, receiving a triple promotion and completing high school at the age of fourteen. His former education was at Trinity College, Kandy, Ceylon (Srilanka), and  Bishop Cotton School, Simla (now Shimla). Later, he graduated from St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, and married Susan Amanda Pick. Partap’s education and his father’s job postings exposed him to several neighborhoods. His empathetic and observant self encapsulated these realities and critically engaged with them in his writings. One prime example of this is his novel Days of the Turban (1986), where one finds scintillating talk about Punjabi villages, reminiscent of his times spent in Punjab. Additionally, he wrote children’s books like Surangini Tales (1973), Dog Detective Ranjha (1978), The Little Master of the Elephant (1984), and Top Dog (1985). Pratap Sharma worked as an independent producer for both the Indian government’s film division and Channel Four, a British state-owned media company. He was intuitive, original, and introspective with his documentaries which include The Framework of Famine (1967), The Flickering Flame (1974), The Empty Hand (1982), View Point Amritsar (1984), and The British Raj Through Indian Eyes (1992). Sharma was a skilled dramaturgist. He was assiduous in pointing out the harsh realities of the times. The plays he wrote from 1956 to 2005 include Brother Under the Skin (1956), Bars Invisible (1961), A Touch of Brightness (1965), The Word (1966), The Professor Has a War Cry (1970), Queen Bee (1976), Power Play (1991), Begum Sumroo (1997), Zen Katha (2004), and Sammy! (2005). Additionally, it is interesting to know that his association with the Indian National Theatre began in 1961 with the production of his play Bars Invisible and ended with the banning of A Touch of Brightness because the play had “unsavory elements” (Shende). Later on, a tribute was given to Partap’s literary contributions by broadcasting the said play on BBC radio in 1967, and the Indian National Theatre produced it in 1973. Brothers Under the Skin, a one-act play that Sharma wrote in college, won him two awards. It was his first play, marking the beginning of his dramatic career. His play, A Touch of Brightness considered as his literary debut, has poetic undertones and spiritual motifs. The three-act play, The Word, specifically written for the Bombay Arts Festival was directed by Alyque Padamsee. The Professor Has a War Cry is a complex synthesis of uprooted ancient Indian religious and spiritual addictions, sex, and the horrors of partition. The assemblage is presented through the dilemmas of a university professor. The colloquial Indian English and the amalgamation of several themes and motifs make this play one of the most interesting reads. Pratap’s Queen Bee, produced and directed by Sam Kerawala in Bombay in 1976, is a play with all-female characters, making it unique on the Indian English literary front. Moreover, Pratap wrote a satirical farce titled Power Play, which was produced by the Dynasty Club and Hosi Vasunia in Bombay in 1978. Begum Samroo and Zen Katha are historical plays; the first deals with a female protagonist, Farzana aka Begum Samroo, and the other talks about Bodhidharma and the monastery of Shaolin; it was directed by Lillete Dubey and produced by Primitive Theatre Company, Mumbai. Pratap Sharma had a versatile personality with the uncanny ability to weave plots that had powerful dialogues regarding poverty, sex, social reality, myth, history, Indian sensibilities, and spirituality along with the ability to stay rooted in the contemporary. 401

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Bhatia, Nandi. Modern Indian Theatre. Oxford UP, 2009. Dhawan, R. K. 50 Years of Indian Writing. Prestige Books, 1999. Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa. Drama in Modern India & The Writer’s Responsibility in a Rapidly Changing World: Symposia at the Fourth P.E.N. All India Writers’ Conference, Baroda, 1957. P.E.N. All India Centre, 1962. Naik, M. K., and S. Mokashi Punekar, editors. Perspectives on Indian Drama in English. Oxford UP, 1977. Shende, Yogeshkumar. “Pratap Sharma: Playwright and a Rare Talent in Theatre.” The International Journal of Humanities & Social Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, Jan. 2015.

SRISHTI SHARMA

SHOURIE, ARUN (1941–) Arun Shourie is a well-known Indian writer who built his reputation as a journalist and editor of one of the leading newspapers of the nation. He has had an illustrious career as an economist with the World Bank and consultant to the prestigious Planning Commission of India and has served as Minister of Communications and Information Technology (1998–2004). Nowhere was he more visible than as the editor of leading dailies like Indian Express where he built his reputation as a trail blazing journalist and became a household name for urban Indian intelligentsia and the middle classes. Born on November 2, 1941, he studied at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, and completed his PhD in economics from Syracuse University in 1966. He has written thirty books which cover a vast array of topics, including politics, religion, state corruption, and personal memoirs. In 1982, he was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in the Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts category. The Indian government honored him with the Padma Bhushan in 1990. Shourie’s earliest books are written in an inimical debating style. Symptoms of Fascism (1978), for example, discusses Hitler, Mussolini, and their excesses, comparing their practices with those of the Indira Gandhi regime. Much of this critique reappears in Mrs. Gandhi’s Second Reign (1983), where he details the characteristic features of the political anatomy of India – sycophancy, chicanery, and corruption. Written in response to the Emergency declared in 1975, the book discusses and fears that India under Indira Gandhi may be moving in toward dictatorship. Earlier books by Shourie are frequent attacks on various people, organizations, and ideologies. Heads of state have directly been attacked in The State as Charade: V. P. Singh, Chandra Sekhar & The Rest (1991) and These Lethal Inexorable Laws: Rajiv, His Men and His Regime (1991). The Only Fatherland: Communists, Quit India and the Soviet Union (1991) is a direct attack on Marxists who make convenient use of their ideological positions, while Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (1998) challenges the work of Marxist historians. For the most part of his career, Shourie’s books are responses to state-level political decisions. Shourie’s personal experiences resonate with the reader in Does He Know a Mother’s Heart (2011), a book that focuses on suffering as he records his journey with his child, Adit, and the challenge of bringing up a special child in India at a time when resource centers were limited, and society was more judgmental. The book contains detailed discussions on Karma, dialogues between Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore on the role of God, divine intervention, and God as arbitrator or God as a cosmic presence. All this makes for a rich reading. By the end of the book, Shourie suggests that our lives serve no cosmic purpose because the religious texts lead to the conception of a God who is punitive and arbitrary. He also leans toward Buddhism as the religion that seems to provide the most comprehensive answers to his questions about the relationship between life and suffering. Shourie’s Preparation for Death, 402

Encyclopedia Entries

published in 2020, is also heavily based on personal experiences, and in this book, he discusses death in connection with euthanasia and suffering. Like his books on religion, he tries to be levelheaded, but is clearly taken in by miracles and marvels. Shourie’s prolific oeuvre contains several books on religion. He started writing about the role of religion in state matters as early as 1987 when he published Religion in Politics. Two Saints examines the lives of Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharishi while attempting to reconcile science and faith. Shourie is on less sure ground when he examines other religions as in World of Fatwas: Shariah in Action (1995). His books on the system of caste-based reservations, Worshipping False Gods: Ambedkar and the Facts Which Have Been Erased (1997), and Ambedkar: Falling Over Backwards: An Essay on Reservations, and on Judicial Populism (2006) attempt to grasp the enormity of the problem of caste in rural India. His books Missionaries in India (1994) and Harvesting Our Souls: Missionaries, Their Designs, Their Claims (2000) take on Christian missionaries and their doublespeak. According to Shourie, while missionaries argue for equality while converting, they also fight for the convert’s right to reservation. Shourie’s expose of the judicial system is detailed and tenacious. Courts and Their Judgments: Premises, Prerequisites, Consequences (2001) discusses constitutional limits in some brilliantly argued cases. The Indian judiciary is called into question in Anita Gets Bail (2018). Based on the personal experiences of his wife, the book is a Kafkaesque exposition of the usurpation of power by the judges of the Supreme Court, their irrational rulings, the miserable conditions that violate the dignity of those held in arraignment as well as the carelessness of the whole judicial system. In his most recent book, Commissioner of Lost Causes (2022), Shourie reconstructs the most important investigations of his career – mistreatment of undertrial prisoners, trafficking of tribal women along state borders, bills to curb the freedom of the press, and misuse of the institutions, including the judiciary. Shourie’s greatest strength as a writer rests on the substantial achievements of his journalistic career. His brilliant investigations and his determination to get beyond the surface of current events to uncover corruption provide the raw material for his books. His arguments are detailed and polemical, and his indignation is a powerful tool. His overall writing career can be difficult to assess if one tries to pin him down either as a leftist or a right-wing ideologue. He has criticized minority communities, religious leaders, Marxist historians, and the current right-wing regime. Shourie enjoys taking contrarian positions, but his writing is sometimes seen as simplistic and too message-oriented. R.K. Srivastava, writing in India Today, opines, “One effect of Shourie’s writing for a daily has been the hit and run quality of his pieces; the breathlessness of daily journalism has not given him time to reflect on the root causes of change.” However, in the ultimate analysis, his books are pierced with the passion for freedom that inspires a young nation. Most importantly, his writing remains deeply committed to India and Indians.

Further Reading Embree, Ainslie Thomas. Utopias in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in Modern India. U of California P, 1990. Nussbaum, Martha. The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Harvard UP, 2009. Srivastava, R. K. “Book Review: Mrs. Gandhi’s Second Reign by Arun Shourie.” India Today, 15 Jul. 1983, www.indiatoday.in/magazine/society-the-arts/books/story/19830715-book-review-mrs-gandhissecond-reign-by-arun-shourie-770823-2013-07-18. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.

DEBJANI BANERJEE

403

Encyclopedia Entries

SIDHWA, BAPSI (1938–) Bapsi Sidhwa is a Pakistani-American novelist whose perspective as a Parsi writer in her novels has provided readers with unusual accounts of experiences, including those of the partition, and of the historically diasporic Parsi community living in India, Pakistan, and the West. She was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and later her family migrated to Lahore. She went on to obtain her degree from Kinnaird College for Women in Lahore in 1957, and later moved to the United States in 1983. She has taught at various places such as Mount Holyoke College, Brandeis University, Columbia University, Rice University, and the University of Texas at Houston. Apart from being a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe-Harvard, she has received several awards, including the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, the most coveted award in Pakistan, and the prestigious German prize, LIBeraturepreis. Sidhwa’s important novels include The Crow Eaters (1978); The Bride (1982) (published as The Pakistani Bride in the United States in 1990); Ice-Candy-Man (as Cracking India in the United States), which was made into the film, Earth, by Deepa Mehta; and An American Brat (1993), which has also been adapted for the stage. Sidhwa’s first published novel, The Crow Eaters (1978), humorously narrates the family dramas of the diasporic Parsi community in Pakistan whose lives are split between Karachi and Bombay. The novel depicts the rags-to-riches story of Faredoon Junglewalla, a Parsi entrepreneur, his migration from a village in central India to Lahore on a bullock cart with his growing family, and his death in 1940 as a powerful leader of the Zoroastrian community. The novel became controversial among the Parsi community because of its title, which alluded to the stereotyped “talkative” nature of Parsis, and to their custom of abandoning the dead to vultures (Jussawalla 208). The portrayal of Faredoon’s struggle seems to work as a metaphor for the perpetual migrant experience of the Parsis. Characterized by her acerbic humor and fun, the novel is not only concerned with an individual experience but the entire community and their diasporic life struggle. Her second published novel (which she wrote before The Crow Eaters), The Bride/The Pakistani Bride (1983) is based on a true story. The novel, which is divided into three sections, focuses on the boy Qasim and his life in his tribal society of Kohistan, and on the multiple displacements of a young peasant girl named Zaitoon, who has lost both her parents in the violence during the cross-ethnic border crossing of 1947. As a girl who grew up in the city, Zaitoon is adopted by Qasim when he comes to Punjab in search of a job amidst the horrible events of 1947. However, she is forced into an arranged marriage with a boy from Qasim’s community in the hills. She finally escapes from her husband’s cruelty and rape to urban freedom. Sidhwa’s third novel, Ice-Candy-Man/Cracking India, published in 1999, brought her true success and fame. It was made into the film Earth by Deepa Mehta in 1999. Apart from exploring the rise of ethnic nationalism in the pre-partition era, the novel also examines – through a detailed depiction of brutal violence and abduction of women belonging to different religious groups during the partition – the gendered construction of a nation. Seen through the consciousness of the child-narrator, Lenny, the events of the novel revolve around the muchwooed Hindu woman Ayah, who is abducted and raped by some Muslim hooligans. Later, she is rescued by Ice-Candy-Man, who transforms her into a dancing girl and marries her. Lenny’s godmother discovers her later and sends her to India. Through gripping details, Sidhwa has created in the novel one of the most powerful indictments of the violence, especially the gendered violence of the partition of India.

404

Encyclopedia Entries

An American Brat (1993), her fourth novel, is a coming-of-age novel that depicts the struggles and adventures of a young Parsi immigrant woman, Feroza, in the United States. Like Crow Eaters, the novel is more notable for its humorous presentation of family dramas within the diasporic Parsi community. Once settled in America, Feroza tries to connect herself to the place and its mores by clinging to “the umbilical cord by which she had attached herself to Jo.” However, she is unable to adequately satisfy her need and search for belonging because Feroza, as a self-proclaimed ‘‘Paki Third Worlder,” can only belong in the margins of an America whose “suction-like force’’ overwhelms her. Her attempts to inscribe herself in the heart of America in different ways are not without traumatic experiences. In her efforts to seek her identity, Feroza feels lost between the American and the Parsi communities that define her identity. In a nutshell, the novel depicts very evocatively her struggle for success, freedom, and identity in America. In her more recent collection of short stories, Their Language of Love (2013), Sidhwa returns to chronicling stories from both sides of the Indo-Pak border that are culled from her life and experience as a Parsi, migrant woman. Sidhwa has also written a novel based on Deepa Mehta’s film Water (2005), titled Water: A Novel (2006), and produced a fascinating work of nonfiction titled City of Sin and Splendour (2005) which is an anthology of writings that offers brilliant insights into the rich heritage of Lahore gleaned from various perspectives, and including poets and writers like Madho Lal Hussain, Bulleh Shah, Muhammad Iqbal, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Rudyard Kipling, Samina Qureshi, et al. The result of such a sterling mix of different narratives is a rich depiction of the culture and of Lahore. As a writer who is well-informed of the history of the partition and Diaspora writings, Sidhwa’s work demands rereading from new perspectives vis-à-vis contemporary politics of nationalism, gender, border-politics, and refugee issues as they emerge in the Indian subcontinent. Sidhwa’s writing belongs to a new wave of writings that marked the post-Salman Rushdie South Asian literature. Her work, which also complicates the strict border of national literature, has not only served as a documentation of the predicament of Parsi refugees, but also played a prominent role in the shaping of the consciousness of people in India and Pakistan about the history of the partition and the subcontinent. If post-1947 South Asian novels are evaluated for their powerful depiction of women characters and subaltern voices, Sidhwa’ s work will undoubtedly figure as one of the most impressive examples of writing that has made a strong impact on our understanding of the history of the subcontinent, especially its history of violence. As Kavita Daiya rightly sums up, Sidhwa’s diasporic writing “constitutes a counter-public that uncovers the subaltern past of violent un-belongings that mark the failures of nationalism.”

Further Reading Daiya, Kavita. Violent Belonging: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India. Temple UP, 2008. Didur, Jill. Unsettling Partition Literature, Gender, Memory. U of Toronto P, 2006. Jussawala, Feroza, and Reed Way Dasenbrock, editors. Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World. UP of Mississippi, 1992. Ray, Sangeeta. “New Women, New Nations: Writing the Partition in Desai’s Clear Light of Day and Sidhwa’s Cracking India.” En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives. Duke UP, 2000, pp. 126–147. Russo, Teresa, editor. Landscapes of Writing: Collected Essays of Bapsi Sidhwa. Peter Lang, 2019. Sidhwa, Bapsi. “Bapsi Sidhwa: An Interview.” Interview by David Montenegro. The Massachusetts Review, vol. 31, no. 4, 1990, pp. 513–533. JSTOR, www. jstor.org/stable/25090210.

THEMEEM T.

405

Encyclopedia Entries

SINGH, KHUSHWANT (1915–2014) Khushwant Singh was born as Khushal Singh in Hadali, Khushab District, Punjab (currently in Pakistan) on February 2, 1915, and was educated at the Modern School, New Delhi (1920– 1930), St. Stephen’s College (1930–1932), Government College, Lahore (1932–1934), and King’s College, University of London. At King’s College, he completed an LLB in 1938. While at the Modern School, Singh met Kanwal Malik, whom he later married. The couple had a son, Rahul, and a daughter, Mala. Singh’s wife predeceased him in 2001. In addition to his noted career as a writer and commentator, Singh was also a lawyer, a diplomat, journalist, and politician. Singh was called to the bar at the London Inner Temple in 1938 and served the Lahore High Court as a lawyer for eight years, from 1939 to 1947. Following India’s independence in 1947, he was recruited to the Indian Foreign Service. He commenced this career as the information officer of the government of India in Canada and as the Press Attaché and Public Officer for the Indian High Commission in London and Ottawa for four years. Working as a journalist for All India Radio in 1951, and the Department of Mass Communications of UNESCO in Paris from 1954 to 1956, prepared Singh to pursue a career as a writer. From 1951 to 1953, Singh acted as the founder-editor of Yojana, a government journal, before proceeding to edit the weeklies The Illustrated Weekly of India, The National Herald, and Hindustan Times. He continued to serve as a popular and successful editor throughout the 1980s while working for several literary and journalistic magazines, and two newspapers. Between 1980 and1986, he served as a member of Parliament in the upper house of the Indian parliament, Rajya Sabha. Singh was an open supporter of the Indian National Congress and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. However, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 shifted Singh’s outlook on Indian politics despite his unwavering belief in the secular ethics from which Indian democracy sustained itself. The influence of his grandmother, with whom he shared a room till he was nineteen, played a dominant role in the shaping of Singh’s literary sensibility. His well-known short story, “The Portrait of a Lady,” is loosely based on this maternal figure, whose recitations of the scriptures appeared to have sparked Singh’s interest in religion at a young age. He went on to specialize in Sikhism and translate Guru Nanak’s “Japji,” the Sikh morning prayer, to English. He also wrote The Sikhs Today (1959) and A History of the Sikhs (1963). A second edition of A History of the Sikhs was published in 1966. Between 2004 and 2006, Singh published three further volumes which examined Sikh history from the 15th century to the present: A History of the Sikhs: 1469–1838 (2004), A History of the Sikhs: 1839–2004 (2005), and The Illustrated History of the Sikhs (2006). Singh’s long career as a creative writer gave birth to several prominent novels and collections of short stories, which testify to a range of common threads in his work that often intersect one another. Early collections such as The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories (1950) and The Voice of God and Other Stories (1957), and later, Paradise and Other Stories (2004), examine themes such as the traditionalism of rural society, superstitious beliefs, the limitations of social hierarchy, and the friction between archaic and modern value systems. The title story of The Black Jasmine (1972) presents Singh’s penchant for the risqué and the bawdy, a trajectory which he later crafts into a critically acclaimed longer work, The Company of Women (1999). Singh’s fame as a novelist has been established through works published between 1956 and 2010, which include Train to Pakistan (1956), I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale (1959), Delhi: A Novel (1990), The Company of Women (1999), and The Sunset Club (2010). Train to Pakistan, transcreated as a film in 1998 by Pamela Rooks, was largely based on his own biographical experiences and other witness accounts of the social upheaval during the Partition of 1947. Set 406

Encyclopedia Entries

in a fictional border village predominated by Muslims and Sikhs, the novel focuses on the social and human implications of the Partition as religious zealots stir Sikh hatred against the Muslims who are on the verge of leaving for the newly established Pakistan. Uncertainty, political decline, and turmoil manifest as key themes in Singh’s I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale which is set in pre-partition Punjab in 1942 and 1943. The story is centered around two generations of a socialite Sikh family toward the end of the British Raj. It brings on conflicting ideologies between a father and a son that magnify the ruptures in loyalties and confidences of both domestic and social life as the colonial empire is challenged by rebellion and the cry for independence. Delhi: A Novel took twenty-five years to complete and presents a complex narrative which moves between different timeframes while drawing on a vivid, exotic, and exuberant Delhi which remains both, ever evolving yet static over the centuries. The main backdrop to the story is the relationship between a repatriating Indian journalist and a hijra (eunuch) who had just been released after serving a prison sentence. The novel is marked by a dense and informative collation of historical facts, legends, and myths held together in a measured balance between creative storytelling and academic rumination. It concludes with the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 that followed the assassination of the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi which the narrator-protagonist accidentally witnesses. The Company of Women unfolds as a series of sexual relationships that Mohan Kumar, the novel’s protagonist, had with a host of women in the course of his life. The novel reads as a celebration of the carnal and the promiscuous, as it presents a variety of sexual affairs different in character, vigor, and temperament from each other. The story is playful and mischievous and is written with a mixture of deprecating humor and satire. Singh’s Burial at Sea offers psychedelic insights into the life of Victor Jai Bhagwan, a young freedom activist in British India, who returns to his home country with an English education to become a follower of Mahatma Gandhi. He is a modern man who strives to promote an industrial culture at the village level to uplift India to meet global standards. He begets Bharti, a daughter, from his wife, who dies at childbirth. As he dedicates his life to the daughter, he develops an intimate relationship with a tantric practitioner in remote Hrishikesh, Durgeshwari. Bharti, in turn, develops a relationship with a yogi. The tantric and the psychedelic dominate and consume the Anglicized Bhagwan and his relationship coincides with a downward spiral in his political career. Singh’s last novel, The Sunset Club, is set in contemporary Delhi and revolves around the lives of three aging friends, of over forty years, who meet at a park bench at sunset. The story runs over a year between 2009 and 2010 and refers to social and political events of the time. The novel draws on the mutable process of aging and the intimate views of the main characters on a range of issues, from mundane politics and systemic corruption to philosophical themes such as death, the loss of vitality, and the meaning of life. Singh’s fictional works are marked by his signature humor, irony, sarcasm, witty interventions, and agnostic predilections. The work draws on time and place in minute detail in which the history and the locality of Delhi predominate. For his early nonfictional works and social commentaries, Singh notably drew on the political and social history of the Punjab region as exemplified in The Fall of the Kingdom of the Punjab (1962), Ranjit Singh: The Maharaja of the Punjab (1963), Ghadar 1915: India’s first Armed Revolution (1966), and, with Kuldip Nayar, Tragedy of Punjab (1984). His later nonfictional work relates to a wider Indian national interest and includes India: An Introduction (1990), We Indians (1993), and The End of India (2003). Singh’s criticism of popular religion and religious cults is expressed in two acclaimed works published in 2012: Gods and Godmen of India and Agnostic Khushwant: There is no God. 407

Encyclopedia Entries

Singh’s essays and writings covering a range of miscellaneous themes have been collected in several volumes that include Malicious Gossip (1990), More Malicious Gossip (1991), Sex, Scotch and Scholarship (1992), Not a Nice Man to Know: The Best of Khushwant Singh (1993), Why I Supported the Emergency: Essays and Profiles (2009), and Big Book of Malice (2000). Noted biographical and autobiographical works include Men and Women in My Life (1995), Truth, Love and a Little Malice (2002), with Humra Qureshi, The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous (2013), Khushwantnama: The Lessons of My Life (2013), and The Freethinker’s Prayer Book and Some Words to Live By (2012). Over the years, Singh’s stories have been numerously published and, in 1989, were collected as The Collected Stories of Khushwant Singh. With Sharda Kaushik, he published Declaring Love in Four Languages (1997); his translation of works by eighteen Panjabi short story writers was published as Land of Five Rivers (2006). A collection of obituaries Singh wrote was published in 2005 as Death at My Doorstep. Singh was a self-proclaimed agnostic, and his later writing was dedicated to dispensing his views against organized religion and concepts of rebirth and reincarnation, which are central to Hindu and Buddhist faiths. Singh also wrote in denial of judgment and the Christian heaven and hell. His critique extended to clerics, priests, and religious institutions. In 1974, Singh was awarded the Padma Bhushan, which he returned in 1984 in protest against the Indian Army’s raid of Amritsar. In 2007, he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian award in India. In 2013, Singh retired from writing after the completion of The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous. Singh passed away on 20th March 2014 at his Delhi residence, at the age of ninety-nine. He was cremated at Lodhi Crematorium in Delhi and his ashes were scattered in Hadali, his birthplace in Pakistan’s Punjab.

Further Reading Banerjee, Saikat. “Khuswant Singh’s Black Jasmine and other Stories: Strains of Modernity.” Dialogue: A  Journal Devoted to Literary Appreciation, vol. 9, no. 1, 2013, pp.  59–64. Dialogue, dialoguethe journal.com/index.php/Dialogue/article/view/68. Chopra, Radika. “Fiction as Social History: A Study of Khushwant Singh’s Novels.” The IUP Journal of English Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, Jun. 2013, pp. 59–77. Khatri, Chhote Lal. “Trauma of Partition in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan.” Indian English Fictions: Readings and Reflections. Sarup and Sons, 2003, pp. 38–51. Marlewicz, Halina. “Heterotopian City. Khushwant Singh And His Delhi: A  Novel.” Politeja, no. 40, 2016, pp. 159–175. Politeja, Ksiegarnia Akademicka, https://doi.org/10.12797/Politeja.13.2016. 40.11. Mathur, O. P. “Khushwant Singh’s Delhi – A Gloss on History.” Modern Indian English Fiction. Abhinav Publications, 1993, pp. 184–191. Mittal, Sangeeta. “Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel: Recollecting and Reclaiming the City.” Research Journal of English Language and Literature, vol. 5, no. 3, 2017, pp. 56–65. Rjelal.com, www.rjelal. com/5.3.17/55-64%20SANGEETA%20MITTAL.pdf.

VIHANGA PERERA

SINHA, INDRA (1950–) Indra Sinha, a British writer of Eurasian descent, was born in Mumbai in 1950. His English mother, Irene Elizabeth Phare, also a writer, wrote under the pen name, Rani Sinha. His father was an Indian naval officer. Sinha began his education at Mayo College in Rajasthan. After his family moved to England in 1967, he attended Oakham School and Pembroke College, Cambridge University, where he studied English literature. He became an advertising copywriter in 408

Encyclopedia Entries

London and had the honor of being voted by his peers as one of the top ten British copywriters of all time. From 1993, Sinha raised funds through hard-hitting campaign-advertisements for many charitable causes. He co-founded the Bhopal Medical Appeal, which was committed to offering free medical care to people affected by the gas and water poisoning in Bhopal. In 1995, he gave up advertising to become a full-time writer. In 2015, Sinha was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by Brighton University for “his major contribution to literature and demonstrating the power of words in changing people’s lives.” Sinha resides with his family in France. Sinha’s first published work was an English translation of Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra. This was published by Hamlyn in 1980. In 1993, Sinha pursued his interest in ancient Sanskrit texts with Tantra: The Search for Ecstasy, also published as The Great Book of Tantra: Translations and Images from the Classic Indian Text. Discussing this text, Sinha remarked: “I was invited by a publisher to write the text for Tantra. Having done some research, what fascinated me was the evidence that many ‘tantric’ ideas actually came to India from the Mediterranean.” He notes, however, that this is a rather dry narrative and those looking for salacious passages would be disappointed. In 1999, Sinha wrote a nonfiction memoir about the pre-internet generation, The Cybergypsies: A True Tale of Lust, War, and Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier. In this, he explores the years of his growing political commitment and how, as a highly paid copywriter, he began to use his talent for good causes. He also narrates his disillusionment with his Net friends’ games and confesses to the near collapse of his marriage. Roz Caveney calls this “a moving and wise book.” Sinha’s first fiction, The Death of Mr. Love, followed in 2002. This is set in 1950s Bombay and weaves a fictional story around the notorious Nanavati murder case, which led to the abolition of the jury system in India. The novel spans two continents and reveals the secrets of fifty years, linking myth and murder, fact and fiction, but leaves the end somewhat unresolved. Animal’s People, published in 2007, brought Sinha acclaim and fame. Set in Khaufpur and based on the Bhopal gas disaster, it was short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Best Book, Eurasia Region) the following year (2008). Narrated from the point of view of a nineteen-year-old orphan, whose spinal deformation due to toxins meant that he could only walk on all fours, this is a profound and humane tale. “Animal,” as the protagonist is known, is devoid of self-pity and is profane, disrespectful, and obsessed by sex. Infatuated by the local musician’s daughter, Nisha, he lives with a crazy old French nun called Ma Franci, and his dog, Jara. The book was very well received and widely reviewed. The New Statesman Reviewer describes Animal’s People, as “bawdy, irreverent and smart . . . a bold and punchy tale.” Indra Sinha’s writing trajectory, though checkered, shows an impressive scope and depth. Whether writing about Tantric traditions or tracing the woes of a subaltern, his style is clear, incisive, and bold.

Further Reading Gymnich, Marion. “ ‘We Are the People of the Apokalis’: Narrative Voice and the Negotiation of Power Structures in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.” Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form, and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives, edited by Divya Dwivedi, et al. Ohio State UP, 2018, pp. 141–155. Mahlstedt, Andrew. “Animal’s Eyes: Spectacular Invisibility and the Terms of Recognition in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, 2013, pp. 59–74. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44030341. Wallace, Molly. “We All Live in Bhopal? – Staging Global Risk.” Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty, U of Michigan P, 2016, pp. 64–92.

CHITRA SANKARAN

409

Encyclopedia Entries

SMALL DAYS AND NIGHTS by Tishani Doshi Tishani Doshi is an award-winning poet and novelist of Welsh-Indian descent. She is also a professional dancer and journalist. Much like the author herself, the narrator of Small Days and Nights (Bloomsbury, 2019) is half-Indian and has a sibling with Down syndrome. However, here the similarities end, and Doshi tells the story from the first-person perspective of Grace or Grazia. Grace is drawn back to India from the United States after her mother’s death and finds her life changed by her inheritance. Bequeathed to her are two shocking responsibilities: a beach house in Madras and a hidden sister with Down syndrome. Weaving a tale both progressing forward but also pulling on strings of the past, Small Days and Nights follows Grace as she navigates a new life returning to her native birthplace in India. She leaves behind her husband, their unhappy marriage, and her lonely existence in the United States. The return to India allows Grace to come to terms with her past and to uncover her mother’s mysterious Thursday visits to meet her second daughter, Lucia, who is institutionalized. Grace has so far been completely unaware of her sister’s existence. In an ironic twist of fate, the narrator, who is childfree by choice, elects the role of full-time and primary caregiver of her sister, Lucia, with heavy assistance from various other characters like Mallika. At times selfish and self-absorbed, at times supportive and understanding, Grace’s journey is grounded in realism. As the sibling and guardian of Lucia, Grace moves into her new life through various emotional states. She is both a part of India and an outsider, a willing and unwilling participant in her own family relationships. There is both a push and a pull within her Indian identity as well as her familial identity. After a devastating incident where Grace’s negligence causes Lucia to return to the institution where she grew up, Grace is forced to address her own shortcomings and accept that she cannot be an island unto herself. With a grace that matches her name – “Grace is simple, Grace is good” – the conclusion of the novel is focused on renewal. Day by day, Grace’s life expands; as she says in the prologue, “It is marvelous – all this life.” As the title suggests, it is in the small movements of time that life unfolds and reflects change. The New York Time’s reviewer, Aditi Sriram, notes that the setting of the book in its closeness to water mirrors its plot. “The tide’s push and pull settle into a horizon, a plotline that’s both repetitive and linear. . . . Days and nights pass this way . . . momentous and mundane, day after day” (Sriram). Doshi’s poetic voice is clearly present in the narrative, as well as in her use of the minutiae of the human experience.

Further Reading Doshi, Tishani. “Interview with Tishani Doshi.” Interview by Kendra. Reading Women, Reading Women, 29 Jan. 2020, readingwomenpodcast.com/blog/interview-with-tishani-doshi. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023. Sriram, Aditi. “In South India, a Fragmented Family Turns into an Overflowing One.” The New York Times, 22 Jan. 2020, nytimes.com/2020/01/22/books/review/small-days-and-nights-tishani-doshi. html. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.

JOSIANNE LEAH CAMPBELL

SOLO by Rana Dasgupta Solo by Rana Dasgupta is a critically acclaimed novel that won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2010. The novel was written during the American bombing of Baghdad and counters the idea of a glorified capitalist modernity that considers the 20th century to be a great era with its technological advancements and better living conditions for people. The narrative navigates 410

Encyclopedia Entries

into the past of Bulgaria and gradually charts its way to the present through Ulrich, the central character of the novel. The entire novel revolves around Ulrich, a hundred-year-old blind man who lives an isolated life and is submerged in his own fading memories. Ulrich’s life covers a vast expanse of historical events like the last years of the Ottoman Empire, the World Wars, the Nazi and Russian occupations, postwar Communism, and finally the establishment of an independent nation, Bulgaria. Through small episodic conversations, the novel brings out how Ulrich’s father was a passionate man who loved music but ended up building railways and strongly believed in the power of technology to make human life better. However, he ended up a sad and broken man when he witnessed the abuse of science as his creations were blown up or exploited for military advantage. The characters in the novel speak in a lofty, idealistic manner but depict the lives of people who can be read as mere illustrations of the brutality of Bulgarian history. Music is Ulrich’s first love, but his father pulls him into the world of chemicals. He goes to study chemistry in Berlin and encounters Einstein during his stay. However, the novel also talks about how Ulrich’s friend, Boris, loses his life during a fascist coup and his mother is incarcerated in a Soviet labor camp and he himself “withdraws into the traumatized solipsism of the survivor” (Deckard). He remains apolitical and unwilling to intercede during the events, standing as a witness to the “tragic collision between historically distinct characters and social forms” (Anderson). Ulrich thus remains the century’s sole survivor. In worldly terms, Ulrich’s life can be seen as a disappointment. He not only failed to complete his education but also lived through a failed marriage and a failed career. He remembers how he would find sadistic pleasure in taunting his deaf father. Ulrich, alienated from his own past, barely remembers happy episodes from his life. Fragments of memories of his courtship with Clara Blum, the only woman he truly loved, is presented in eloquent paragraphs that flash like snapshot of distant memories. Toward the end of the first part of the book, Ulrich reflects on his diminishing sense of self and finds himself full of regret as he broods, blind and inert in his loneliness. Ulrich travels solo most of his life, as his human attachments last mostly in his daydreams. The novel then makes us ponder if dreams and ambitions of the heart are not as much an integral part of our lives as real-world activities and accomplishments. It seems naive when Ulrich is hopeful that the next generations will not have to go through the same agonies in the future. Dasgupta strategically divides the book into two parts: “Movements” and “Daydreams.” “Movements” uses the method of free indirect discourse and detailed exposition that covers a vague chronological memoir of Ulrich’s sweeping historical timeline. The latter half of the novel, titled “Daydreams,” is seemingly haphazard in manner and enumerates Ulrich’s jazz like riffs in his own life. Dasgupta explores the repressed responses of Ulrich and, in the process, introduces three new characters. The first being Boris, who is Ulrich’s part-doppelganger, part-son. Khatuna and Irakli are two more characters who are siblings with complex relationships with the chemist. The action shifts from rural Bulgaria to the cosmopolitan life of postmillennium New York, where the violin-playing Boris becomes a musical sensation. Solo indeed is a profound and poignant book which skillfully exposes the absurdities of history and the horrors of the great metanarratives of the 20th century.

Further Reading Anderson, Perry. “From Progress to Catastrophe.” London Review of Books, vol. 33, no. 15, 2011, pp. 24–28. Deckard, Sharae. “ ‘Surviving Globalization’: Experiment and World-Historical Imagination in Rana Dasgupta’s Solo.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 47, no. 1–2, Jan.–Apr. 2016,

411

Encyclopedia Entries p. 59+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A459171007/AONE?u=googlesc holar&sid=googleScholar&xid=c9f4499d. Quaerentia. “Book Review: Solo by Rana Dasgupta.” Seattlepi, 28 Apr. 2011, www.seattlepi.com/default/ article/Book-Review-SOLO-by-Rana-Dasgupta-1356445.php. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.

PRACHI PRIYANKA

SRILATA, K. (1968–) K. Srilata was born on April 11, 1968, in Ranchi, Jharkhand. She is the daughter of Tamil writer R. Vatsala. Her family moved to Chennai in the early 70s, and she did her schooling at Kendriya Vidyala, IIT Madras. She completed her BA in English from Stella Maris College, Chennai, in 1988. After that, she went to Hyderabad Central University, from where she completed her MA, MPhil, and PhD. During 1995–1996, she was a Fulbright pre-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2000, she joined the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at IIT Madras, where she taught creative writing, fiction, women’s writing, and translation studies. She won the prestigious Charles Wallace Writing Fellowship cum residency at the University of Stirling, Scotland in 2010. She retired from her full-time position as a professor of English, IIT Madras to focus on her creating writing in 2022. Currently, she is an Adjunct Professor at the Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI). She also co-curates the CMI Art’s Initiative, which provides a platform for students and professionals to interact and learn from artists and other experts in the field of arts and humanities. Srilata’s poems have appeared in prominent magazines like Caravan and Muse India and anthologies like The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry (2013). She has published four collections of poetry. Her first collection of poems, Seablue Child, was published by the Brown Critique, Kolkata in 2002. Her second book of poems, Arriving Shortly, was published in 2011 by Writers Workshop, Kolkata. Arriving Shortly is a collection of sixty-one poems, arranged in seven sections. This collection includes her poem, “In Santa Cruz, Diagnosed Homesick,” which won the first prize in All India Poetry competition organized by the British Council and the Poetry Society, India in 1998. In 2013, she published an anthology of poetry titled Writing Octopus. In this collection of forty-five poems, the octopus, with its many arms, is a recurring metaphor. Her fourth collection, Bookmarking the Oasis (2015), carried poems on a wide range of themes like nature, memory, history, politics, and gender. Her latest collection of poems, The Unmistakable Presence of Absent Humans (2019), is centered on the theme of absences and presences. This collection is perhaps the most autobiographical of her works as there are reflections on the lives of the poet and her mother in several poems. K. Srilata also has to her credit short stories, translations, edited anthologies, academic publications, and a novel. She has published short stories in Guftugu, The Punch Magazine, The Little Magazine, and Out of Print magazines. She edited and translated from Tamil, a collection of essays and fiction by women in the self-respect movement titled Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History (2003). She co-edited with Subashree Krishnaswamy an anthology of short stories from Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu titled Short Fiction from South India (2007). Along with Subashree Krishnaswamy and Lakshmi Holmstrom, she edited and translated a collection of Tamil poetry from the earliest known works to the modern period titled The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry (2009). Her debut novel, Table for Four, was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2009. The novel tells the story of four housemates who, over dinner conversation, reveal their secrets, fears, tragedies, and sense of loss. She has translated into English her mother and Tamil writer R. Vatsala’s

412

Encyclopedia Entries

novel Vattathul as Once There was a Girl (2012). Srilata and Kaamya Sharma translated Vatsala’s second novel, Kannukkul Sattru Pazhanithu, into English as The Scent of Happiness (2021). K. Srilata’s poems encompass a whole gamut of themes like writing, life of the women writers, nature, history and memory, motherhood, and teaching. She employs humor, striking metaphors, terse language, and allusions to the works of other poets in her works. She has written some very political poems on the Gujarat riots, unmarked graves in Kashmir, war crimes, and the changing political scenario in India. Her poems carry personal narratives and reflections on the lives of mothers and daughters, real and mythical. Her work has been translated into many other languages.

Further Reading Karunakar, Martha. “Portrayal of Women in the Select Works of K. Srilata.” Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Women Poets, edited by K. V. Raghupathi. Aadi Publications, 2015, pp. 289–298. Srilata, K. “Creative Writing and the Creative Process.” Interview by Hemachandran Karah. Fortell, vol. 40, 2020, pp. 117–123.

SHEEJA RAJAGOPAL

SUBRAMANIAM, ARUNDHATHI (1973–) Arundhathi Subramaniam is an Indian poet, editor, biographer, cultural curator, and critic. She is the author of several poetry collections, prose, and edited volumes. She has won notable awards, including the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Zee Women’s Award for Literature, the International Piero Bigongiari Prize, and the Mystic Kalinga Award. Her poetry collection, When God is a Traveller, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2020. Arundhathi explores culture and spirituality through her writings. Her works show an increased interest in mystical experience and practice. Her introduction to the edited volume, Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry (2014), frames the questions of Bhakti and Bhakti literature. She captures not only the content and spirit of Bhakti but also presents the aesthetics of Bhakti through her writing. The title of the book is taken from a Nammalvar’s poem wherein the phrase suggests how a bhakta seeks to fully consume God and be possessed by God. The volume brings together different poets from the 8th century to the 18th century through translations of their poems in English. Arundhathi’s poems are personal, sensual, and enrapturing. In the poetry collection titled When God is the Traveller, she explores uncertainties, pleasures, and existential ethos and brings them out in language as the union of the sensual and the scared. Poems in this collection pay attention to language and its multiple possibilities for pleasure and knowing. In a poem titled “Lover Tongue,” the poet writes that she is “yearning for . . . the soft flesh of pure vowel” to present the tongue as an organ of language and sensual pleasure. In the same collection, she also writes about personal gods, Shakuntala, death, and nirvana, weaving everything together and eschewing nothing. Arundhathi focuses on contemporary women spiritual practitioners in her 2021 book, Women Who Wear Only Themselves. She depicts four women – Sri Annapurani Amma, Balarishi Vishwashirasini, Lata Mani, and Maa Karpoor – who have navigated the questions of gender, body, societal norms, transcendence, and intense spiritual quest. In one of the conversations with the Madras Book Club members, she explained how this book is born from a “twinge” of pain from the voices that have not been heard as they fell “on the wrong side of the historical,

413

Encyclopedia Entries

cultural or gender divide.” This book redefines and represents the notion of spirituality from locations that are normally unacknowledged in the literary scene. This book tells us vibrant stories of independent women who move beyond normative reason and desires in their search for the divine. In addition to the works already described, Arundhathi has written poetry collections titled Love Without a Story (2019), Where I Live: New and Selected Poems (2009), On Cleaning Bookshelves (2001), and edited anthologies titled Another Country (2013), and Confronting Love (2005). She has written a book on the Buddha titled The Book of Buddha (2005), a biography titled Sadhguru: More than a Life (2013), a book tribute to Shiva named Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga (2017; co-written with Jaggi Vasudev), and edited an anthology of essays and poems on sacred journeys titled Pilgrim’s India in 2019.

Further Reading Subramaniam, Arundhathi. “Arundhathi Subramaniam on Her Book Women Who Wear Only Themselves Conversing with Alarmel Valli.” YouTube, uploaded by Jayanthi Ramesh, 6 Oct. 2021, www.youtube. com/watch?v=15hfaecyiYY. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023. ———. Women Who Wear Themselves: Conversations with Four Travellers on Sacred Journeys. Speaking Tiger, 2021.

VEENA MANI

SUITABLE BOY, A, by Vikram Seth Published in 1993, Vikram Seth’s magnum opus, A Suitable Boy, set primarily in the fictional town of Brahmpur, somewhere in the upper Gangetic plains, follows the lives of four families in a time span of eighteen months. At almost fifteen hundred pages, it is one of the longest novels in the English language to be published in a single volume. In tracing the interconnected and intersecting private and public lives of the four families through the sleepy town of Brahmpur to bigger cities like Delhi and Calcutta and to the heart of rural India, Seth traces the travails and tribulations of a nascent nation as it grapples with newfound independence while touching upon the issues of religion, caste, and class. The events of the novel begin in 1951, a seemingly unimportant year in the history of India. This timeline allows Seth to explore the everyday life of the people and the country without bringing in a particular historical event or incident as the central focus of the text. The four families whose lives the novel follows are the Mehras, the Kapoors, the Khans, and the Chatterjis, whose lives intersect mostly through romantic or marital relations. Arun, the eldest son of the Mehra family, for instance, is married to Meenakshi Chatterji, while Savita, his sister, is married to Pran Kapoor. In a novel so densely populated, much like the nation, which is its subject and setting, there are two other characters which demand attention – Saeeda Bai, a courtesan and singer who Maan Kapoor falls deliriously in love with, and Harish Khanna an upcoming selfmade young man in the shoe business who represents the enterprising new generation of a new nation. Harish is also one of the three men vying for the hand of Lata, the youngest daughter of the Mehra clan who is a student of English literature, the other two being Kabir, a boy from Lata’s college, and Amit, the eldest son of the Chatterji family. It is the search, sometimes inadvertent and sometimes conscious (especially on the part of Lata’s mother, Rupa Mehra), for a “suitable boy” for her to marry that is the main driving force of the narrative, reminding some readers of the female protagonists of Jane Austen. Within the novel, Lata is seen reading Emma and also buys a copy of Mansfield Park. In broader terms,

414

Encyclopedia Entries

the text is replete with allusions, translations, and quotations from British and Indian literature. Three of the main characters are students of English literature, one is a poet/novelist, and an entire family – the Chatterjis – breaks into spontaneous couplets, often to the great annoyance of those around them. The novel’s intimidating length and scope have led critics to liken it to 19th century novels such as War and Peace and Middlemarch. A reviewer for The Independent (UK) mentions that Seth’s publishers in Britain and the United States have been marketing the novel as “Great Literature,” comparing Seth to the likes of Tolstoy. A reviewer in The New York Times seems to agree with the publishers, claiming that the novel is an analog to the works of Tolstoy and Trollope. Critics in India have responded diversely to the novel, some likening it to soap operas, others praising it for its depiction of the quotidian life of India. In the late summer of 2020, the BBC released its six-part miniseries adaptation of A Suitable Boy. Prior to its release, the series was publicized as the first BBC drama to feature an all-South Asian cast and crew, led by director Mira Nair.

Further Reading Atkins, Angela. Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum, 2002. McGirk, Tim. “Playing Happy Families in Brahmpur: Tim McGirk on the Exhausting Charms of Vikram Seth’s Frothy Comedy Manners, Marriages and Mynah Birds.” The Independent, www.independent. co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/book-review-playing-happy-families-in-brahmpur-tim-mcgirk-onthe-exhausting-charms-of-vikram-seth-s-frothy-comedy-manners-marriages-and-mynah-birds-a-suitableboy-vikram-seth-phoenix-house-pounds-20–1500296.html. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023. Mesher, David. “Suitable Allusions: Literature, Music, and Unintended Consequences in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy.” (In)Fusion Approach: Theory, Contestation, Limits, edited by Ranjan Ghosh. UP of America, 2006, pp. 213–226. Paranjape, Makarand. “Post-Independence Indian English Literature: Towards a New Literary History.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 33, no. 18, 1998, pp. 1049–1056. Prasad, Murari, editor. Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy: An Anthology of Recent Criticism. Pencraft International, 2005. Woodward, Richard B. “Vikram Seth’s Big Book.” The New York Times, 2 May  1993, www.nytimes. com/1993/05/02/magazine/vikram-seth-s-big-book.html. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.

SARBAJAYA BHATTACHARYA

SUNDARESAN, INDU (1968–) Indu Sundaresan was born in India and spent her childhood at air force bases where her father served as an Indian Air Force pilot. She inherited her love of storytelling from her father, whom she lost at a young age. Having completed her undergraduate education in India, Sundaresan attended graduate school at the University of Delaware, where she completed her MS in operations research as well as an MA in economics. She currently lives in Seattle. Her first work of historical fiction, The Twentieth Wife, was written in 2002 and published by Pocket Books. The winner of the 2003 Washington State Book Award, it received overwhelmingly positive reviews globally. In India, the book won the Light of India award for Excellence in Literature. The sequels, The Feast of Roses (2003) and Shadow Princess (2010), complete the Taj trilogy. Sundaresan’s debut novel, The Twentieth Wife, is a sweeping tale revolving around the dynamic character of Mehrunnisa, better known as Nur Jahan. The wife of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, she has been eclipsed in the popular imagination by her niece, Mumtaz-i-Mahal. Sundaresan decides to bring her out of the shadows and narrates her story, beginning with the long

415

Encyclopedia Entries

and arduous journey of her parents from Persia. This novel is meticulously researched, and each chapter opens with an excerpt from a historical document, which includes travelogues, court documents, and testaments, notably the journals of Sir Thomas Roe. But what can be lackluster in historical archives comes alive in the exotic setting and momentous historical events that make this remarkable book. Along with the interpersonal conflicts, Sundaresan is able to evoke the grandeur of the period. The famous Mughal gardens are described in detail. All the books in the trilogy include a genealogy, a list of characters and an afterword, which contains details of her research and helps navigate some dense history. Feast of Roses, the sequel to The Twentieth Wife, traces the rise of Mehrunnisa as Empress. First, she overcomes the boundaries of convention by stepping out in public alongside her husband. To consolidate power, she forms a junta with her father, brother, and her stepson, Prince Khurram, who is a contender for the throne. She also exploits Jahangir’s love of authority and power. Along the way, she makes many enemies, and those whose authority she oversteps vow revenge on her. Finally, with the death of Jahangir, her astounding journey comes to an end as she finds herself confined and exiled, betrayed by none other than her brother Abul Hassan. As with the previous books, in Shadow Princess, Sundaresan continues to paint a picture of Mughal India and focuses specifically on the stories surrounding the construction of the Taj Mahal, one of the seven wonders of the world. The opening chapter of the book takes us directly into the heart of Aurangzeb and his hunger for power. However, the story belongs to Aurangzeb’s older sister, Jahanara, who at seventeen is burdened with the responsibilities of running the royal household as well as dispensing official duties. Her father, Emperor Shah Jahan, is still mourning the death of his wife Mumtaz-i-Mahal and is an absent center. Jahanara’s character is pious, intelligent, and almost perfect, but she is not able to outwit her sister, Roshanara, who supports Aurangzeb for the throne and wins. As in the other books of the trilogy, Sundaresan’s historical fiction peaks in its description of grandeur and its twin decadence. History continues to be one of the characters in Indu Sundaresan’s writing. The Splendor of Silence is set against the backdrop of World War II and the struggle for Indian independence. The town of Rudrakot is brilliantly evoked, but the story of forbidden love is interrupted by multiple subplots. Sundaresan’s nuanced characters make a strong comeback in the short story collection, In the Convent of Little Flowers. The themes of the stories offer a social critique that maps the limits of globalization in a contemporary world. The stories largely focus on women’s lives and empowerment as they make their choices between tradition and modernity. In The Mountain of Light, Sundaresan traces the departure of the Kohinoor diamond from India while also staging the intrigue within princely families and the consolidation of power by the East India Company. The demise of the princely states in India is poignantly captured, and the book ends with the elderly Dalip Singh of Punjab, who reminisces the loss of the precious diamond along with his kingdom. Sundaresan’s oeuvre has reshaped the contours of historical fiction writing in South Asia. Her work has been translated into twenty-two languages. The meticulous research of her books sets her apart from the ordinary writer of historical fiction, and at the end, the reader feels that they have lived with the women of the stories. The care with which the evidence and the creative liberties are documented in the afterword sections tells us that Sundaresan has worked hard to maintain the historical essence of her work.

Further Reading Andrew, M. “Histories that Matter: On the Limits of Gender and the Consequent Subjugation in Indu Sundaresan’s The Twentieth Wife.” The Journals for English Language and Literary Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 14–20. TJELLS, www.tjells.com/article/722_ANDREW.pdf.

416

Encyclopedia Entries Lau, Lisa. “Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Orientals.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, 2009, pp. 571–590. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20488093.

DEBJANI BANERJEE

SURENDRAN, C.P. (1958–) C.P. Surendran was born on June 9, 1958, in Ottapalam, Kerala, to an illustrious literary family. His father, Puthanveettil Narayanan Nair, was a prolific author and a prominent figure in the political left, and his mother, Parvathy Pavanan, was a recipient of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award. After completing his graduation from Kerala and securing an MA in English literature from the University of Delhi, Surendran taught for a brief period at Calicut University. In 1986, he moved to Mumbai to begin a career in journalism. He served as a journalist with Times of India (ToI), Times Sunday Review, and Bombay Times before moving on to editorial positions at, among others, ToI (2003–2006), Open Magazine (2009–2012), and DNA (2013–2015). He is currently a contributing editor and consultant at Khaleej Times. Alongside his journalistic endeavors, Surendran has published four novels, four volumes of poetry, and two screenplays. Surendran’s debut novel, An Iron Harvest (2006), is a fictionalization of a true 1976 event involving the custodial killing of an engineering student during the Naxalite uprising in Kerala, set amid the larger national context of the Emergency. His next novel, Lost and Found (2010), is about two people held hostage in a Mumbai terror siege based on the 26/11 attacks. Hadal (2015) is similarly based on real events – the 1994 ISRO espionage case – where the inciting incident is used as a platform for social and political satire. Surendran’s novels are united in their skepticism toward grand unifying narratives of nation and religion and characterized by irreverent commentary. However, in the aftermath of being credibly accused by several women of workplace sexual harassment as part of the global #MeToo movement, Surendran’s latest novel – One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B (2021) – embraces a more reactionary stance, particularly toward feminist thought, freedom of speech, and sexual politics. Surendran’s poetry traverses the terrain of the personal and the political. Collections like Gemini II (1994) and Posthumous Poems (1999) are thematically bound in their exploration of the lovelorn self, characterized by restrained emotion and a spare narrative style. Other volumes like, Canaries on the Moon (2002), are more worldly along with a shadowy war forming the backdrop of many poems (“A Necessary War,” “Soldier”). His poetry, though considered uneven in quality, received critical acclaim. Surendran’s screenplays, Gouri Hari Dastaan (2014) and Mai Ghat (2019), based upon real incidents of social injustice, also garnered positive attention. Though Surendran’s work has been reviewed in both print and new media, it has largely evaded academic scrutiny.

Further Reading Girardin, Cécile. “The Inheritance of Modernity: Insurgencies in Contemporary Indian Fiction.” Études Anglaises, vol. 62, no. 3, 2009, pp. 292–304. Jose, Vinod K. “ ‘An Iron Harvest’ By C. P. Surendran: Reviewed by Vinod K. Jose.” Counter Currents, 28 Jul. 2006, www.countercurrents.org/arts-jose280706.htm. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023. Rao, Mani. “Up, Down, Up: C. P. Surendran’s Collected Poems Let Readers Trace the Progress of a Poet.” Scroll.in, 11 Nov. 2017, scroll.in/article/857196/up-down-up-cp-surendrans-collected-poems-letreaders-trace-the-progress-of-a-poet. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023. Wong, Mitali Pati, and Syed Khwaja Moinul Hassan. The English Language Poetry of South Asians: A Critical Study. McFarland, 2013.

NEHA YADAV

417

Encyclopedia Entries

SURI, MANIL (1959–) Manil Suri was born to R.L. Suri, a Bollywood music director, and Prem Suri, a schoolteacher. A mathematician of Indian descent who now lives in the United States, Manil Suri has written a book series, the title of each paying homage to a different Hindu deity. In 2001, his first novel, The Death of Vishnu, was published and short-listed for the Booker Prize, the PEN/ Faulkner Award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize. After that, he published two more novels, The Age of Shiva (2008) and The City of Devi (2013), which form a trilogy. Suri attended the University of Bombay for his undergraduate studies before moving to the United States to enroll at Carnegie Mellon University for graduate school. Having earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1983, he subsequently took a position teaching the subject at the same institution. In the 1980s, Suri started to spend part of his time penning short tales, although none of them was ever published. He began writing The Death of Vishnu in 1995, a novel on social and religious issues in India, set in a 1995 high-rise apartment complex in contemporary Mumbai. Following the novel’s international bestseller status in 2001, an excerpt titled “The Seven Circles” was published in The New Yorker. In a bidding fight between various publishing organizations, Suri was granted a six-figure advance from W.W. Norton. The novel The Death of Vishnu by Suri won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize in 2002. His second book, The Age of Shiva, was named by About.com as one of the best books of the last decade. His 2013 novel, The City of Devi, ranked number 12 on Flavorwire’s list of the fifty most essential works of LGBT fiction. Suri planned to create a trilogy with the titles of all three novels incorporating the names of the Hindu trinity: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. The second volume, The Age of Shiva, was published in 2008, and the final volume, The Birth of Brahma, is expected to be published soon. His third novel, The City of Devi, was inspired by the Mother Goddess, Devi. A vision of humanity on the precipice of doom, The City of Devi is both darkly humorous and brazenly provocative. The novel provides a terrifying yet joyful view of the world’s end. In the process, it does a remarkable job of flipping conventional ideas about politics, religion, and sex. Because of the imminent threat of a nuclear strike, the citizens of Mumbai have fled, leaving the streets to bands of marauding Hindu and Muslim criminals. Sarita has one thought, however: buying the last pomegranate in the city. She believes the fruit is her only hope of reuniting with her scientist husband, Karun, who has been mysteriously missing. She had spent over 2 weeks searching for him. An arrogant, beautiful, intelligent man named Jaz is amid this chaos, trying to locate his girlfriend. He considers having intercourse with guys to be his religion, despite his identity as Muslim. The Jazter is what he calls himself. He and Sarita are both drawn to the city’s patron goddess, Devi ma, who is said to have appeared in person to save her people. Suri has the dubious distinction of being presented the “Bad Sex in Fiction” trophy in December  2013 for the climactic sex scene in The City of Devi. A  critic for the Wall Street Journal and a reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement both praised the way the book writes about sex. Suri “admirably” manages the threads of “sex,” “mythology,” and “global politics,” according to the latter critic. Granta magazine has published an article by Suri on his life as a gay adolescent in India. Additionally, Suri has written opinion pieces for The New York Times and The Washington Post on issues about LGBT rights.

Further Reading “Bad Sex in Fiction: Manil Suri Scoops 2013 Award.” BBC, www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainmentarts-25212762. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023. Basu, Chitralekha. “Rev. of Sura, The City of Devi.” The Times Literary Supplement, 7 June 2013.

418

Encyclopedia Entries Coates, Tyler. “50 Essential Works of LGBT Fiction.” Flavorwire, 21 Aug. 2013, www.flavorwire. com/409723/50-essential-works-of-lgbt-fiction. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023. Sacks, Sam. “Bollywood Ending: A Romping Novel. . . . Review of The City of Devi, by Manil Suri.” The Wall Street Journal, 4 Feb. 2013, www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324610504578276333 641227750. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.

NEERAJ PIZAR

SWORD AND THE SICKLE, THE, by Mulk Raj Anand Mulk Raj Anand’s The Sword and the Sickle is the final novel in his trilogy. Affectionately known as the Lalu Trilogy, the saga of a much evolving India maps the experiences of Sikh hero Lal Singh. “Lalu” is an adolescent rebel in rustic Punjab in The Village (1939), an Indian soldier and prisoner of war in Europe in Across Black Waters (1940), and a hired agitator in postwar India in The Sword and the Sickle (1942). In his “Introduction” to the Trilogy, Saros Cowasjee writes, “[T]here is nothing more dehumanising than subjugation to foreign rule.” Anand’s focus, however, is empowered Indian subjects, not disaffected colonial agents. The heart of Anand’s social saga, foregrounding an emerging India, is the preservation of land. His masterful English prose proves to be as accomplished as that of D.H. Lawrence, yet, as in all his novels, Anand’s prose integrates the bhashas. He supplements the linguistic domain of English literature by code-mixing vernacular Indian terms. His leading role in India’s earlyto-mid-20th-century literary renaissance thereby influences nonstandard English forms across the global market in the long wake of British Imperial retreat. The title The Sword and the Sickle was suggested by Orwell and adapted from a William Blake stanza; the title bespeaks power asymmetries. The sword represents repressive colonial cooptation, and the sickle India’s British Raj subjects. The novel opens on the Bombay-Peshawar mail, thus suggesting Anand’s birthplace in today’s Pakistan. The introduction also intimates letters (or links) across India while noting how a rail line extant in various forms since 1890 comes to signify partition. Anand’s third-person narrator highlights diversity. Lal Singh finds himself awakened – “Awake, Brother, awake!” – in a third-class compartment by a train conductor who warns the soldier, recently debarked in Bombay, that Lahore cantonment, his required stop, is next. Feeling like “an utter stranger, a foreigner, a freak like a Hooi Sipi from Ladakh or a Nepalese Bear,” Lalu irreverently engages an orthodox Brahmin and a “Muhammadan” in conversation. He says, “I have no religion or caste . . . since I have been in Vilayat [England] for some years among beef- and pig-eating Sahibs.” This Indian figure, readers soon learn, even in the absence of the Trilogy’s first two volumes, has not been Indianized; he is not an Indian figure returned to British India to naturalize British conventions. By contrast, Lalu embodies anti-colonial agency. Lalu’s defiant nature is inflamed when he is demobilized without his promised “gift” of land because he was under the apparent influence of communist seditionists in charge of the Indian prisoners of war in Germany. He returns to a much-altered version of “home,” with his mother dead and the family property lost to the evil Sarkar, and with nothing to show for his years of service. Still, Lalu’s resolve against colonial discrimination and religious delusion redoubles when he returns to his boyhood village, one predictably mired in ignorance, destitution, distrust, custom, superstition, and indigence. The general spirit of unrest in postwar India has Lalu politically awakened to the idea of a new, free India – one unencumbered by ryot superstition and Sarkar landlordism. In this partly historical novel of considerable action, Lalu participates in a host of momentous events. These 419

Encyclopedia Entries

integrate: (i) the peasant uprisings in the United Provinces, (ii) a fictional version of communist Zamindar firebrand Kanwar Brajesh Singh, and (iii) a simplified rendition of the Kisan march. Like Anand, albeit from the bottom up, Lalu is an impassioned political agent in a pivotal period of Indian literature and nationhood.

Further Reading Ben, Conisbee Baer. “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. Project Muse, https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.0.0104. Berman, Jessica. “Toward a Regional Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Mulk Raj Anand.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 55, no. 1, 2009, pp. 142–162. Bhuyan, Iman. “Untouchability in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and The Road.” Deliberative Research, vol. 24, no. 1, 2014, pp. 62–67. Mohan, T. M. J. Indra, editor. The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand: A New Critical Spectrum. Atlantic, 2005. Vandertop, Caitlin. “Peripheral Urbanism, Imperial Maturity, and the Crisis of Development in Lao She’s Rickshaw and Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 52, no. 3, Nov. 2019, pp. 369–385. Duke UP, https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-7738542.

JASON S. POLLEY

TAGORE, RABINDRANATH (1861–1941) Rabindranath Tagore was born on May 7, 1861, in a wealthy Brahmin family in Calcutta, West Bengal. The youngest among the thirteen children of Debendranath Tagore and Sarda Devi, he was a poet, songwriter, and composer with more than two thousand two hundred songs credited to his account. A  traveler with an experience of around thirty-four countries across the globe, he was also a skilled painter with more than two thousand three hundred artworks; essayist; playwright; philosopher; social reformer; and humanitarian whose literary craft first shaped the literature and society of Bengal and later added intellectual and scientific tangents to world philosophy. The demise of his mother at a very young age left him in the care of servants, a period he later defined as Servocracy. Tagore was reluctant toward classroom learning and academics in general, so his elder brother Hemendranath Tagore and his father tutored him by indulging him in traveling, reading, and sports. At the age of eleven, he was taken on a tour of India by his father, and it was during this period that he read history, modern science, astronomy, the Upanishads, and the poetry of Kalidasa, which aroused his interest in philosophy. In 1878, as per his father’s wishes, he went to London to pursue law at the University College of London but later dropped out, studied works of English literature, particularly of Shakespeare, and got in touch with Scottish and Irish music, which shaped his aesthetic sensibility. Given Tagore’s Bengali roots and his love for his people and motherland, most of his works are in Bengali. Some of them he himself translated into English, and many others were translated by others when he was alive and also posthumously. He started writing poetry when he was eleven, and his first poem “Abhilash” was published in 1874. Among his critically acclaimed poetry collections is the English translation of Gitanjali, which won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. His early writing was in the genres of poetry and short stories, and his first work of drama Valmiki-Pratibha (The Genius of Valmiki) was published in 1881. His finest play to date is known to be Visarjan (The Sacrifice) published in 1890 which was an adaptation of his novella Rajarshi. His novels and novellas cover a span of themes from highlighting the hardships and life experiences of a common man and the issues prevalent in society, to the impact they had on their psyche, from showcasing various social and religious beliefs to satirizing them subtly. Novels like Shesher Kobita (The Last Poem) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and The World) 420

Encyclopedia Entries

are some of his best writings. Tagore’s poetry was influenced by Upanishads, Sufi, and Bhakti music of mystics like Kabir and Baul and his songs were a great blend of Bengali folk music, Indian classical, and Irish music. Through his poems and songs he promoted patriotism. Post 1912, Tagore transformed into a philosopher with a firm belief in the ideology of internationalism, unity of mankind, respect for individuals’ rights and traditions. For him there was no innate contradiction between the opposites, the flesh and the spirit, the human and the divine, love of life and God. His English translation of Gitanjali and the Nobel Prize showered him with global praise and recognition and marked the beginning of his English writings in the form of numerous lectures which he was invited to deliver globally, letters that he wrote to poetic geniuses like W.B. Yeats and friends like Mahatma Gandhi which were later compiled into volumes like Letters from Europe, Thought Relics (1921), and other essays. His Thought Relics is a series of meditations on the divine soul which puts forward the idea of believing in the soul than the self, as by doing so one may arrive at the true meaning of life. The Religion of Man (1931) is a collection of lectures delivered by Tagore at Oxford University on theological issues, in which around fourteen are on divine experiences and spirituality. One of the appendixes named “Note on the Nature of Reality,” is his short conversation with Albert Einstein. East and West (1935) is a collection of letters exchanged between Tagore and Gilbert Murray an Australia-born British scholar and intellectual on issues concerning the post world war European society. Tagore’s writings of the 20th century, which are associated with the mature phase of the author by his critics, reflect his thinking on uniting the East and West. Witnessing incidents like the Jallian Wallah Bagh tragedy and the World War, he realized that the West may excel scientifically but is degraded morally and ethically, and India – with its spiritual heritage – may be a potential master in teaching the world. The lectures he delivered in various countries, such as Japan and North America, and his open letters, conversations, and interviews bear proof of his constant effort to unify the whole world under the umbrella of philosophy. Sadly, in his last years, he gave up on the idea of unifying the East and the West, and he wrote in the essay “Crisis in Civilization”: I had at one time believed that the springs of civilization would issue out of the heart of Europe. But today when I am about to quit the world that faith has gone bankrupt altogether. . . . And yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man. I would rather look forward to the opening of a new chapter in his history.

Further Reading Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi. Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation. Penguin, 2017. Chaudhuri, Sukanta, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Das, Sisir Kumar, editor. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore: Volume Three a Miscellany. Sahitya Akademi, 1996. Kriplani, Krishna. Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography, 2nd revised ed. Visva Bharti Press, 1980. Thompson, Edward. Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Dramatist. Read Books, 2008.

KRITIKA VARMA

TALE OF A BELEAGUERED SOLDIER, THE, by Tej Nath Dhar The Tale of a Beleaguered Soldier (2021) is Tej Nath Dhar’s second novel, which elaborates on some of the concerns that figure in his first novel, Under the Shadow of Militancy: The Diary of an Unknown Kashmiri (2002). It puts the 1990s exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, a heavily 421

Encyclopedia Entries

persecuted Hindu minority group, in a historical perspective by dealing with their history in Kashmir from the earliest times to the time of their massive exit from the Valley. Though the author calls his book a novel, it exhibits the features of a tale in the sense in which Walter Benjamin understood the form. It also shows features of a historical reportage, a meditation on aesthetics, and a penchant for fantasy – all geared to reveal a sense of inevitability in the main character’s fate. This makes it a genre-crunching book, which is its strength. In fact, as the blurb says, the “novel” has several dimensions, and each contributes to its shape. The principal one, however, is exile, of being wrenched from one’s roots and left to wander. The protagonist’s journey from the condition of homelessness to a partial return to home creates the narrative fulcrum around which the story moves. The fact that the home he returns to proves to be elusive adds to the pessimism the author shares with the people he describes so feelingly. The narrative is woven around Manav. As his name suggests, he is the “Everyman” Pandit who seeks his home amidst the turmoil of history in which he is caught. Since he acquires various incarnations in the book, he is destined to live some bright parts of his past, the Hindu one in particular, in which he meets great kings and warriors and some of the best-known philosophers and aestheticians of their time. He also lives the ignominy of his humiliations at the hands of the Muslim Sultans, the Mughals, and Pathan rulers. He ranges throughout the history of the Kashmir Valley, embodying the sufferings of his people. Here it is pertinent to mention that the history of Kashmir is narrated to him by Swamiji, who nurses him back to health after he has been wounded. He does not act but is acted upon by his circumstances throughout his presence in the book. In the latter sections of the novel, Manav is found among the wandering hordes of his people, accompanied by his father. The earlier sections are narrated by Swamiji, who doubles as an omniscient narrator, knowing it all. These sections have the feel of a universal tale in which Manav acquires various incarnations and lives through different phases of his community’s history. As the Ashtavakra Gita would say, his very forgetfulness helps him in his self-discovery. The author reemphasizes the fact of persecution through which Pandits passed and are still passing. Indeed, the book becomes an emblem of the indictment of the rulers who held back a dynamic and resilient Pandit community of Kashmir. Through Manav’s predicament, Dhar has highlighted the plight of the entire community, those who were forced to leave home in the face of Muslim hostility. Even though some commentators on Kashmir try to whitewash the atrocities against the Pandits by attributing them to a handful of misguided Kashmiri fanatics, the novel establishes that the Pandits’ exodus was total and complete. Manav’s passive presence brings out the enormity of the trauma suffered by all. The novel is an out-of-the-box experimental work – not common in the canon of Indian writings in English. Its narrative style shows the author’s skill and control. Though reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, who also goes through many incarnations, Manav acquires a solidity of his own. Dhar eminently succeeds in his aim as a chronicler of his beleaguered community. On that score alone, the book is a welcome addition to the corpus of Indian novels in English.

Further Reading Bhat, Raj. “Review of The Tale of a Beleaguered Soldier (A Novel), by Tej Nath Dhar.” Academia, 2022, www.academia.edu/51712907/THE_TALE_of_A_BELEAGUERED_SOLDIER_A_Novel_by. Chopra, Sukhvinderjit Kaur. “Book Review: The Tale of a Beleaguered Soldier (A Novel) by Tej Nath Dhar.” Dialogue, vol. 17, no. 1 & 2, Jan.–Dec. 2021, pp. 93–95. Narayan, Shyamala A. “Book Review: The Tale of a Beleaguered Soldier (A Novel) by Tej Nath Dhar.” The Literary Criterion, 2021, pp. 145–150.

422

Encyclopedia Entries Pandita, K. N. “Review of The Tale of a Beleaguered Soldier (A Novel), by Tej Nath Dhar.” The Daily Excelsior, 12 Sep. 2021, p. 3.

MOTI LAL RAINA

THAKORE, ANAND (1971–) Poet and Hindustani Khayal vocalist Pandit Anand Thakore “Sabadpiya,” was born in Mumbai in 1971, spent a portion of his youth in Britain, and has lived in Mumbai, India, most of his life. He hails from a family with a wealth of literary and musical skills. His sitar-playing father, Sandip Thakore (an avid wildlife photographer and environmentalist), was a long-time disciple of the late Ustad Mohammed Khan “Beenkaar” and a close colleague of the sitar virtuoso Ustad Rais Khan Saheb. His grandmother, Kapila Thakore, was a renowned author and translator of Gujarati children’s literature. As a child, Anand Thakore was intrigued by Hindu mythology and Indian traditional music and dance. In addition to his usual academics, he received lessons in Western choral singing, violin, and music theory while his family temporarily relocated to England. He attended Solihull School in the West Midlands and The Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. He studied Hindustani vocal music with Ustad Aslam Khan of the Jaipur-Atrauli Gharana and Pandit Satyasheel Deshpande, Pandit Kumar Gandharva’s seniormost teacher. While studying music, he simultaneously developed a love for literature in English and many Indian languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and Brajbhasha. He received a Bachelor of Arts in English literature from the University of Mumbai, where he also took Sanskrit literature courses. After receiving an MA in English literature from the University of Pune, he taught literature at Elphinstone College for one year. Thakore has performed vocal recitals at mehfils and music festivals and has read his poetry at literature festivals across the nation. He is the founder of the publishing group Harbour Line, a publishing collective dedicated to English poetry in the Indian subcontinent, and the interactive forum Kshitij for musicians. He resides in Mumbai, where he sings, composes, writes, and teaches Guru-shishya-style Hindustani vocal music. His poems and analytical articles on music and poetry have been published in prestigious national and international publications and anthologies. The first publication of Thakore’s poems was in Literature Alive, a British Council journal. He was an active member of Loquations, a poetry-study club created by Adil Jussawala, for many years. Most of the lectures and presentations he gave at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai on poets such as Roethke, Hart Crane, and Adil Jussawala were later published as essays. Thakore’s poetry collections are titled Waking in December, Elephant Bathing, and Mughal Sequence. Poems such as “Chandri Villa” and “What I Can Get Away With” from his first collection, Waking in December, demonstrate his respect for specific poetic forms and his interest in traditional structures like the sonnet and the villanelle. Thakore found a greater integration of thought and meaning through the meter and discipline of ancient poem forms. Elephant Bathing, the second book published by Thakore, maintains this formalist approach while leaving room for the mythological. With Mughal Sequence, he adopts a style of broad verse libre and modifies his stance. In 2006, Anand Thakore was awarded a grant from the Charles Wallace India Trust for experimental music-poetry collaboration in the United Kingdom with guitarist and composer Pete Wyer. He served as a judge and co-editor for the 2011 edition of the first Montreal Prize Global Anthology. Some of his recorded readings with music – both Hindustani and Western – are now included in his books of poetry. 423

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading “Anand Thakore.” India – Poetry International, www.poetryinternational.com/pi/poet/24792/AnandThakore/en/tile. Accessed 6 Feb. 2023. “I  A  Richards.” Scarriet, https://scarriet.wordpress.com/category/i-a-richards-2/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2023. Mehta, Leeya, and Plume. “21 Contemporary Indian Poets.” Plume, 29 Jan. 2021, https://plumepoetry. com/featured-selection-22-contemporary-indian-poets/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2023. Thakore, Anand. Official Website, www.anandthakore.com/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2023. Thayil, Jeet. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. Bloodaxe, 2008.

NEERAJ PIZAR

THAROOR, SHASHI (1956–) Shashi Tharoor was born on March 9, 1956, in London as the eldest of three children to Chandran Tharoor and Sulekha Menon. His parents hailed from Palakkad in Kerala, India. After returning to India when Tharoor was two years old, the family raised him in Mumbai and Delhi. Tharoor attended Campion School (1963–1968) and later St. Xavier’s Collegiate School in Kolkata (1969–1971). He graduated from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, in 1975 and left for a doctoral degree in international relations at Tufts University, Massachusetts, which he was conferred in 1978. From 1978 to 2007, Tharoor served as an official at the United Nations for twenty-nine years. In 2001, he rose to the position of the under-secretary general, the third highest position, in the UN. Retiring from his UN career in 2009, Tharoor entered active politics as a member of the Indian National Congress. Between 2009 and 2022, he represented the Thiruvananthapuram constituency in Kerala and was elected to parliament on three occasions. Tharoor has held important portfolios and served as the minister of state for external affairs in 2009 and 2010, and the minister of human resource development from 2012 to 2014. As a writer, Tharoor has published both fiction and nonfiction with a diverse range of themes. His fiction is based on local situations but often demonstrates the cultivation and discipline of a global author. As a novelist and short story writer, Tharoor debuted in the late 1980s and published three acclaimed works in quick succession: The Great Indian Novel (1989), The Five Dollar Smile and Other Stories (1990), and Show Business (1992). Riot was published in 2001. As of 2021, Tharoor has authored twenty-three works of fiction and nonfiction, which examine a vast area from the complexities of India’s colonial heritage, aspects of culture, foreign affairs, history and colonialism, politics, the entertainment industry, and more recently, aspects of morality and religion. The breadth of Tharoor’s scholarly and literary interests are reflected in the titles of his noted nonfictional work that include India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), Nehru: The Invention of India (2003), Bookless in Baghdad (2005), The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: India, the Emerging 21st-Century Power (2007), India Shastra: Reflections on the Nation in our Time (2015), Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (2017), Why I Am A Hindu (2018), and The Paradoxical Prime Minister (2018). Tharoor also authored Reasons of State (1985), Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century (2012), The Battle of Belonging (2020), Tharoorosaurus (2020), Pride, Prejudice and Punditry: The Essential Shashi Tharoor (2021), and The Struggle for India’s Soul: Nationalism and the Fate of Democracy  (2021). With Shaharyar Khan he co-authored Shadows Across the Playing Field: Sixty Years of India-Pakistan Cricket  (2009) and, with Samir Saran, The New World Disorder and the Indian Imperative (2020). In 2013, Tharoor edited India: The Future is Now  which collated views and visions for the country’s future by an emerging generation of Indian statesmen. As a columnist, Tharoor published in leading journals and newspapers, including The Asian Age, Deccan Chronicle, Mail Today, Newsweek, The New York Times, Times 424

Encyclopedia Entries

of India, The Washington Post, and TIME. He was a noted correspondent for The Indian Express from 1991 to 1993 and from 1996 to 2001. His letters appeared in The Hindu from 2001 to 2008, while the monthly column “India Reawakening” appears in several newspapers is distributed worldwide by Project Syndicate. Tharoor’s fiction often manipulates history and myth, politics and factionalism, and dayto-day frictions of Indian life in creative and often ironic ways. His memorable use of parody is often framed by a refined satire which, over time, has evolved as a trademark of Tharoor’s creative expression. His fiction explores a varied thematic range to include love and romance, communal relations, postcolonial complexities, local political friction, emergencies and riots, and the continuation of history in the present. In The Great Indian Novel, which on publication was received with critical applause, Tharoor frames aspects and episodes of recent Indian history, from the years of India’s struggle for independence to the 1970s, through a retelling of the ancient Hindu grand epic, the Mahabharata. Narrated by Ved Vyas (V.V. for short), the novel subversively incorporates several works and treatises on India, including the Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown, Raj Quartet, and the Towers of Silence, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Louis Bromfield’s The Rains Came, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s An Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. The book’s title alludes to an approximate translation of the Mahabharata (“great” and “India”). The novel is experimental, mischievously irreverent, and undermines in its representation renowned figures of India’s independence movement such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. In Show Business, Tharoor generates a scathing critique of the socialite networks, the glamour culture, deep-rooted nepotism, political patronage, and crony culture that have come together as an industry to support and feed off Bollywood. The novel follows the career of Ashok Banjara, a rising cine star who is also the son of a leading minister and expounds how tradeoffs work within the worlds of big business and party politics. At one level, Tharoor’s presentation of Bollywood becomes an allegory for Indian politics with façades, stunts, and make-up taking the place of back-door deals, roadshows, and diplomatic tradeoffs. There is almost a decade’s hiatus between the publication of Show Business and Tharoor’s next noted work, Riot. Riot is resonant of the writer’s willingness to experiment in form and structure and demonstrates Tharoor’s penchant for novelty. Here, he employs multiple narrators and complex evidence and witness stories in a non-linear memory-driven narrative that examines the violent death of Priscilla Hart, a young American volunteer in India, in an abandoned building in Zalilgarh, Uttar Pradesh. The killing takes place on the day of a violent Hindu–Muslim clash over a disputed site housing an abandoned 16th-century mosque. Tharoor masterfully holds together multiple thematic lines, which include complex and taboo love stories, the longing for fulfillment, the haunting memory of suppressed pasts, religious friction, and mob violence in modern India as a part of a chaotic postcolonial inheritance and the friction between Western and Oriental values and cultures. In 1991, Tharoor was awarded the Federation of Indian Publishers’ Hindustan Times Literary Award for the Best Book for The Great Indian Novel and, in 1991, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (for the Eurasian region) for the same book. Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness won the Sahitya Akademi Award in the nonfiction category in 2019. In 1981, Tharoor married Tilottama Mukherji, an academic and writer, with whom he had twin sons, Kanishk and Ishaan. After divorce, Tharoor married Canadian diplomat Christa Giles (2007–2010). In 2010, upon returning to India, he married Sunanda Pushkar, a businesswoman, in Palakkad, Kerala. In 2018, Tharoor was charged under the Indian Penal Code with abetting suicide and marital cruelty after Pushkar was found dead at a Delhi hotel in January 2014. Tharoor was discharged by a Delhi court in August 2021. 425

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Bhagya, C. S. “ ‘The Reign of Error’: Tropes of Exception in Shashi Tharoor’s the Great Indian Novel.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 56, no. 6, 2020, pp. 761–774. Taylor and Francis Online, https:// doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2020.1766854. 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. Haider, Nishat. “Shashi Tharoor’s Riot: A Novel about the Construction of Identity, the Nature of Truth, Re-Presentation and the Ownership of History.” South Asian Review, vol. 27, no. 2, 2006, pp. 235– 251. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2006.11932452. Skinner, John. “Literary Moonlighting: The Cultural spaces of Shashi Tharoor.” Alicante Journal of English Studies/Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, no. 16, 2003, pp. 255–268. Universidad De Alicante Servicio De Publicaciones, https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2003.16.19. Vincent, Suhasini. “Celluloid Dreams in Shashi Tharoor’s Show Business.” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2007, pp. 83–92. Open Edition Journals, https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.9270.

VIHANGA PERERA

THAT LONG SILENCE by Shashi Deshpande Shashi Deshpande, one of the most well-known contemporary Indian novelists in English, writes about the inner lives of Indian women in her novels. That Long Silence (1989) won her the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990. It is a landmark in Indian writing in English, a first-person narrative in four parts that tells the story of Jaya, an Indian housewife, who maintains silence throughout her life. It is both a story of subjugation and self-discovery. Jaya is an educated middle-class woman and writer who lives with her husband Mohan, an engineer, and their children, Rahul and Rati. The plot begins amid a crisis. Mohan is being investigated for shady business activities and to seek temporary anonymity; the couple relocate from their posh Churchgate home to a small flat in Dadar, leaving their children with their friends, Ashok and Rupa. Jaya sits in deep contemplation of her seventeen-year-old marital life at the Dadar flat. It is through this stream of Jaya’s thoughts that the plot develops, as she is torn between love and hate, liking and disliking. Even after seventeen years of marriage, she realizes that she and Mohan are nothing more than strangers: two people linked only by their physical relationship, and while they appear to be well-balanced, their relationship was never deep enough. She believes that family has always been unbearable to her, despite the fact that she has always behaved like a duty-bound, perfect wife. Jaya’s memories of her family revolve primarily around her father and their Saptagiri home. Her father named her “Jaya,” which means “victory,” because he wished his daughter to be unique, educated, cultured, and ambitious. However, her father’s death when she was fifteen dealt her a devastating blow. After college, she married Mohan, a handsome young engineer who worked at Lohanagar Steel Plant and had a bright future. He married her because he wanted a sophisticated wife, “a well-educated, cultured wife.” Shortly after her marriage, he gave her a new identity, “Suhasini,” which means “a soft smiling, placid, motherly woman,” Thus, she is forced to transform into a model of an Indian married woman who must conform to tradition despite having progressive ideas. Mohan, unable to ask for what he requires, and Jaya, unable to decipher what to provide, are trapped in a lonely marriage. Kamath, the lonely neighbor, addresses her as a companion, recognizes the failed, frustrated writer in her, and provides her with some solace. But she runs desperately away from society because she is just the “wife of Mohan” wherever she goes. One day, Mohan and Jaya break their silence with an open argument. Mohan blames her for all his

426

Encyclopedia Entries

failures. Jaya’s rage and frustration cause her to laugh, which irritates him, and he leaves her in a rage. When their son, Rahul, runs away from home, the situation becomes even worse. But Rahul soon pays his mother a visit, accompanied by Mohan’s brother, Vasant. The novel ends when Jaya receives a telegram from Mohan in which he states that everything is fine and that he will join her soon. Deshpande’s novels highlight the plight of modern Indian women who struggle to understand themselves to maintain their identities as daughters, wives, mothers, and, most importantly, as human beings. Her primary concern in writing her novels is to lift the veil of inequality in man-woman relationships. Her plots are preoccupied with modern middle-class women’s emotional and mental distress. Her characters are caught between patriarchy and tradition on the one hand and self-expression and autonomy on the other. It is then not surprising that she has explained the various tragic stages in Jaya’s life that lead her down the path of introspection and consequent self-transformation.

Further Reading Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English, 6th ed. Permanent Black, 2014. Moham, Indra T. M. J. Shashi Deshpande: A Critical Spectrum. Atlantic, 2004. Myles, Anita. Feminism and the Post-modern Indian Women Novelists in English. Sarup and Sons, 2006. Pathak, Vandana, et al. Contemporary Fiction: An Anthology of Female Writers. Sarup and Sons, 2008. Sharma, Siddhartha. Shashi Deshpande’s Novels: A Feminist Study. Atlantic, 2005.

NITHIN VARGHESE

THAYIL, JEET (1959–) Jeet Thayil is an Indian author, novelist, poet, and musician who was born into a Syrian Christian family in Mamalasserie, Kerala. He received a Masters in Fine Arts from Sarah Lawrence College and was educated in Bombay, Hong Kong, and New York. He has received several fellowships and residencies from different institutions including the New York Foundation of Arts, the British Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Swiss Arts Council, and M. Literary Residency. Thayil worked as a writer and an editor for various magazines, newspapers, and journals. He was a columnist for various publications, including Times of India (Bombay) and The Independent (Bombay). He wrote art and news features, interviews, and book reviews for The Guardian (London), Newsweek (New York), The Indian Express (New Delhi), and Caravan (New Delhi). However, he left journalism in 2004 and began writing fiction and poetry. As a poet and musician, he has worked on a libretto for the opera, Babur in London, and has had collaborations and performances with composers in India and Italy. As a poet, Thayil’s book, English: Poems (2004), explores emotions, forgiveness, and addiction through the landscapes of New York, Bombay, and Hong Kong. Similarly, These Errors Are Correct (2008) is a rich and vibrant collection which offers collective emotions of grief, love, and loss. It is a rendition of nostalgia, tragedy, loss, love, recovery, and sadness presented through moments from everyday life. The collection was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for English in 2012. Thayil has also edited The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008), which traces the poetry of canonical poets of Indian English such as Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar, and Dom Moraes, to contemporary writers, wherein he also rediscovers the forgotten figures of Indian English poetry.

427

Encyclopedia Entries

Thayil’s debut and alluring novel, Narcopolis (2012), opens in Bombay in the 1970s and unfolds the history of the city’s secret opium dens and its inhabitants. The novel was nominated for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction (2012) and The Hindu Literary Prize (2013). The narrator arrives in Bombay and is inclined to explore the underground opium networks and brothels. Considered to be a semi-autobiographical work, it captures the hallucinatory world of the opium underground with its characters like Dimple, a hijra (eunuch), who makes pipes in the opium den with Rashid; the opium house’s owner, Mr. Lee, a former Chinese soldier who fled communist China; and a group of poets, prostitutes, pimps, and gangsters. One moves in and out of the lives of the characters inside a drug-induced territory. The novel is written with a mix of lucid poetry and prose that chart the underbelly of a metropolis. Thayil’s second novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints (2017), is regarded as an intelligent piece of literary fiction. Francis Newton Xavier, the protagonist, is a painter and poet who has long lived in the by lanes of London and Oxford and has lost touch with his native country, India. The novel has autobiographical elements in its representation and characters. It traces the life of Xavier from his childhood to his old age and can also be seen as a coming-of-age story. It explores the Eurocentric approach, which is based on the existence of non-Western civilizations. In challenging Eurocentric ideas, Thayil represents saints as white men and calls them “chocolate saints.” He also represents Jesus as a man of color. His third novel, Low (2020), pushes the boundaries of possibility and delves into the dark lands of sadness and grief following his wife’s death. The central character, Dominic Ullis, escapes to Bombay carrying his wife’s ashes to perform the Hindu ritual of immersing the ashes in water. He is drowned in grief and guilt and finds refuge in sleeping pills, drugs, opium, alcohol, and the new drug mephedrone, or Meow Meow. With the effect of heightened drug intake, he engages in a hallucinatory dialogue with his dead wife. The novel traces the highs and lows, grief and guilt, the drunken and sedative state of the character as he handles his grief and agitation. His recent novel, Names of the Women (2021), is a collection of stories of fifteen women who have seen the life of Christ closely during the crucifixion even when his followers left him. The novel presents a retelling of the stories of gospels. He voices the marginalized and misrepresented female characters in the New Testament including Mary Magdalene; Jesus’s sisters, Assia and Lydia; followers Susanna and Joanna; Mary of Bethany and Martha; the sisters of Lazarus; and Herodias and her daughter Salome. Thayil’s thematic concerns are driven by his life experiences in the cities, especially as a former drug addict. His novels are widely read and appreciated. His novel, Narcopolis, is often compared to the works of Burroughs and De Quincey. In The Guardian, poet K. Satchidanandan said that his novels are infused with extreme verbal artistry and lyrical intensity as he mixes reality and imagination to weave a compelling narrative.

Further Reading Gomes, Shane. “Review of Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, vol. 68, no. 2, 2014, pp. 244–246. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/rmr.2014.0043. O’Connor, Maurice. “The Narcotic Memes of Bombay: Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis.” Wasafiri, no. 83, 2015, pp. 11–16. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2015.1044776. Thayil, Jeet. “An Interview with Jeet Thayil.” Conducted by Siddhartha Bose, Wasafiri, no. 69, 2012, pp. 38–43. Taylor and Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2012.636895.

TANUPRIYA

428

Encyclopedia Entries

THOUSAND FACES OF NIGHT, THE, by Githa Hariharan Githa Hariharan’s debut novel, The Thousand Faces of Night (1992), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and has received more critical reception than her other works. The novel deals with the stories of three female characters, Devi, Sita, and Mayamma, representing gender inequality across time and class. Devi, the youngest of the female characters, who is also the main protagonist, returns to Tamil Nadu, India, after completing her MA in America to live with her widowed mother, Sita, who has been living a lonely life. Sita has been a devoted wife and a caring mother, who is forced to renounce her love for playing the veena after marriage. She desires better opportunities and a better life for her daughter. After arriving in India, Devi comes across a few difficulties in reconciling with her life in India because of her contact with Western lifestyle. However, she soon realizes that she cannot fight her mother or the traditional system. As an obedient daughter, she also refuses an offer of marriage from her African American friend, Dan, anticipating her mother’s disapproval and society’s insults. At her mother’s bidding, Devi marries Mahesh, the regional manager of a multinational company. But, immediately after that, she is disillusioned as Mahesh is mostly away on his work trips, leaving Devi behind at home. Further, Mahesh controls Devi’s life and rejects her requests to go out and engage in new hobbies. Subsequently, Devi finds her life monotonous and spends her time listening to her maid Mayamma’s painful stories. Mayamma recounts the horror of her marriage as a child bride. She suffers at the hands of her mother-in-law, who attacks her childlessness and forces her to undergo some ridiculous superstitious rituals to become a mother. She is also tormented by her drunkard husband, who exploits her both physically and economically. Furthermore, when she attains motherhood, she suffers another blow as her son takes after his father and ill-treats her. Devi also suffers the pain of infertility, which sours her marriage further. She is forced to undergo a medical examination, while her husband believes that he is irreproachable and refuses to see the doctor. When Devi proposes to adopt a child, Mahesh rejects that too. She realizes the futility of her marriage and decides to end it by eloping with Gopal, a music teacher. However, after spending a few days with Gopal, she realizes that he is another patriarchal agent, so she leaves him too. Hariharan portrays the ordeal of women in a male-dominated society and its impact on women of different social groups and ages, particularly mentioned in the restrictive institution of marriage. A critic observes about the lives of these women as the “underworld of Indian women’s lives – where most dreams are thwarted and the only constant thing is survival” (Trikha). Another important character is Sita, who tries to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity. The third one is Mayamma, the family maid in Devi’s husband’s house, who believes that a successful married life means to endure pain without complaining. These women embody the struggle between tradition and modernity. Hariharan deals with powerful themes like gender injustice, women’s oppression, superstitious beliefs, and search for female identity. She punctuates her narrative with characters from Indian mythology to compare and examine the characters in the novel.

Further Reading Garg, Tripti. “Narrative Technique in Githa Harihaaran’s the Thousand Faces of Night.” Atlantic Literary Review, vol. 8, no. 2, Apr.-Jun. 2007, pp. 60–69. Joseph, Avis. “The Intricate Web of Human Relationships in Githa Hariharan’s the Thousand Faces of Night.” Indian Journal of Postcolonial Literatures, vol. 9, no. 2, Dec. 2009, pp. 124–130.

429

Encyclopedia Entries Ohira, E. “Redeeming Bleeding: The Representation of Women in Githa Hariharan’s the Thousand Faces of Night.” Indian Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, Feb. 2012, pp. 73–92. Sage Journals, https:// doi.org/10.1177/09715215110190010. Trikha, Pradeep. “Githa Hariharan’s the Thousand Faces of Night: Straight from a Woman’s Life.” Feminism and Literature, edited by Veena Noble Doss. Prestige, 1995, pp. 169–173. Tripathi, Shubha. “Voice of Protest and Assertion: A Comparative Study of Githa Hariharan’s the Thousand Faces of Night.” Critical Responses to Feminism, edited by Binod Mishra. Sarup and Sons, 2006, pp. 136–147. Varma, Urmila. “Satire as a Mode of Expression in Gita Hariharan’s the Thousand Faces of Night.” Indian Fiction of the Nineties, edited by R. S. Pathak. Creative, 1997, pp. 100–104.

M. ANJUM KHAN

TRIPATHI, AMISH (1974–) Amish Tripathi is an Indian author who has revolutionized the Indian literary and publishing field with his mythically-informed fiction. In fact, Tripathi is lauded as “India’s Tolkien” and “Asia’s Paulo Coelho” by BBC News for his writing style and imagination (Pandey). The writer was born and brought up in a religious family. His grandfather was a Pandit (priest) in the holy city of Varanasi and a teacher at the Banaras Hindu University. Understandably, Tripathi grew up to be a connoisseur of folklore and religious texts. He is a graduate of St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. He worked in banking and finance for the first fourteen years of his career before pursuing writing. During this period, he worked as a marketing and product manager for firms such as IDBI Federal Life Insurance and DBS Bank. After many rejections from various publishing houses, Tripathi self-published the first book of his Siva trilogy titled, The Immortals of Meluha, in 2010. His experience with marketing and ability to cater to contemporary consumers are showcased by the immense success of his debut novel. He published the other two books of this trilogy, namely, The Secret of the Nagas and The Oath of the Vayuputras in 2011 and 2013, respectively. He has also written a set of books based on the Ramayana under the Ram Chandra Series. The series is declared to be a pentalogy, of which four books are already published – The Scion of Ikshvaku (2015), Sita: Warrior of Mithila (2017), Raavan: The Enemy of Aryavarta (2019), and War of Lanka (2022). Legend of Suheldev: The King Who Saved India (2020), is a part of his Indic Chronicle series. Tripathi has also written two nonfiction books titled Immortal India (2017), wherein he explores the essence of Indian identity through mythology, history, religion, and contemporary social and ethical behavior, and Dharma: Decoding the Epics for a Meaningful Life (2020), co-authored with his older sister, Bhavana Roy, which attempts to decode the tribulations of the modern world through ancient Hindu religious texts. For his literary success and innovation, Tripathi was appointed the director of Nehru Centre, London, by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in 2019. His contribution to the Indian literary and cultural sphere earned him the prestigious Ustad Bismillah Khan Award (2018). The writer has also won accolades such as the Society Young Achiever’s Award for literature and the Pride of India Award for literature. Further, he was named the Man of the Year by Radio City, one of the Top 50 Most Powerful People by India Today, and one of the 100 most influential celebrities in India by Forbes magazine. The writer was also awarded the Golden Book Award in 2022 for Legend of Suheldev and the Raymond Crossword Popular Fiction Award for The Scion of Ikshvaku in 2016. His Siva trilogy is the fastest-selling literary work in Indian publishing history. It has been translated into ten Indian and nine international

430

Encyclopedia Entries

languages. True to his entrepreneurial spirit, in 2020, Tripathi announced his venture into the Indian film industry with a production of his novel Legend of Suheldev with Wakaoo Films and Casa Media. Through his mythological fiction, Tripathi explores the meaning of dualities such as good/ evil, truth/lies, and dharma/adharma while challenging the popular perception of Gods and their purpose. Siva, in his books, is not a God but a human who bravely shoulders his responsibilities, wisely acknowledges his mistakes, and fights for the downtrodden. He is introduced as a chillum-smoking tribal leader from Tibet who leaves his homeland with his people in search of a better life. Tripathi cleverly situates his fictional land of Meluha in the Indus Valley Civilization, thereby providing archaeological authenticity to the narrative. He depicts sati as a vikarma who is deemed polluted and untouchable for the sins of her past lives, and Ganesh as a Naga who is shunned for his physical deformities by the perfect Meluhans. The portrayal of Siva as an outsider allows Tripathi to objectively apprehend the evil that pervades society and question its moral complacency. In the Siva trilogy, Tripathi creates an ideal world only to demonstrate that such a society is utopic and is infested with myriad dysfunctions (R. Manikandan and Dr. M.R. Bindu). Similarly, in his Ram Chandra series, Tripathi depicts gods as humans with flaws whose divinity is discerned only in their dedication and perseverance. Here, Tripathi confines the plotlines within the parameters set by the epic Hindu text of Ramayana but confers its characters with unique personalities. He portrays Ram and Sita as equal in might and bravery, and both are hailed as Vishnu’s reincarnations. Tripathi’s Sita is not a demure, fragile woman who is a victim to the Ramayana narratives of exile, abduction, and final rejection by Ram. Instead, she is a fearsome warrior who is more experienced than Ram in administration and warfare. In Sita, Tripathi embarks on creating a feminist narrative for one of the most revered women in Hindu mythology. Though clearly the antagonist of the story, Raavan is not dismissed as evil but only as a flawed individual who made the wrong choices in difficult situations. In an interview with The Financial Times, Tripathi states that “In my Ram Chandra series, both Ram and Ravan suffer. Life treats them unfairly. But Ram behaves differently and Ravan behaves differently” (Khan). Essentially, through his works, Tripathi conveys to his audience that choices make a person good or evil. Despite Pramod K Nair’s accusation that Tripathi’s “muscular deities” are a token of the “spectacular and hypervisible Hinduism” and propaganda to make Hinduism “a spectacle” (Digital Hinduism), the author’s contribution to Indian literature and society cannot be dismissed. Tripathi, through his fiction, showcases a modern outlook of various Hindu myths, making them relatable to his contemporary readers. The writer appreciates mythology’s power to articulate philosophy and uses it to convey his message of honor and morality.

Further Reading Khan, Faizal. “ ‘Dharma is Erroneously Translated as Religion in India’: Amish Tripathi & Bhavna Roy.” Financial Express, 30 Jan. 2021, www.financialexpress.com/lifestyle/dharma-is-erroneously-trans lated-as-religion-in-india-amish-tripathi-bhavna-roy/2182608/. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Manikandan, R., and M. R. Bindu. “Misbeliefs of an Ideal World in Amish Tripathi’s Immortals of Meluha.” Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education, vol. 12, no. 2, 2021, pp. 1115–1116. Pandey, Geeta. “Amish Tripathi: ‘India’s Tolkien’ of Hindu Mythology.” BBC News, 16 Jun. 2017, www. bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-40284980. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Zeiler, Xenia, editor. Digital Hinduism. Routledge, 2020.

ASWATHI VELAYATHIKODE ANAND

431

Encyclopedia Entries

TROTTER-NAMA: A CHRONICLE, THE, by I. Allan Sealy The Trotter-Nama: A  Chronicle is I. Allan Sealy’s first novel. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989. The book captures the fictionalized history of the Anglo-Indian community from an insider’s perspective. Oscillating between realism and postmodernism, myth and history, omniscient narration, and an unreliable narrator, the book concerns itself with charting out future possibilities of “the protean people” and mapping out their cultural identities in the shifting contours of the landscape of India. Sealy combines both Western and homegrown modes of storytelling of the “nama” to convey the liminality of the Trotter clan who in turn stand for “the other Anglo Indians” and have not been covered by history. The unfinished task of history is taken up by the chronicle to capture the paradox of their existence. Their struggle in proving their loyalties to the British and Indians brings up postcolonial themes of identity, exile, home, belonging, and diaspora (especially near the time of independence when the Trotters start to move across the globe). Inspired by the reading of The Tin Drum, which recorded the under-histories of Germans in a remarkable way, Sealy turned to India to write a comic epic in prose. Eugene, the seventh Trotter, rejects European historiography and declares it a “foul” history. The story of the Anglo-Indian Trotter family is narrated from the 18th century to the present with humor. The colorful lot of Trotters are soldiers, artists, painters, illustrators, and leaders. Their story is mostly set in San Souci. Justin Aloysius comes from France to etch his name in human history as a great Trotter and gets a large estate as a gift from the Nawab of Nakhlau for doing an extraordinary job as the chief commander of his army. He has four wives. With time, the family tree keeps sprawling to create a vast expanse of the Trotters in the next two hundred years. The Gypsy Trotter, Mik, undertakes adventures, invoking an anagrammatic allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, traveling abroad for a syncretic experience. But when Justin accidentally dies after falling from the hot air balloon, he leaves his family with a jigsaw puzzle. From here, the Trotter clan must wander through the vagaries of time and grapple with questions that stare them in the face. Mik’s outburst of the tale of his abandonment is, “I have traveled and fought battles . . . under more than one flag. Both my masters chose to disown me, the foreign and the native.” Can their roots ever be traced successfully? The novel attempts to find answers to the crisis of the transitional period in history. The “icelight” period between light and darkness, the regular eye pattern of the family with one eye blue and the other brown, and the narrator’s titular manuscript that runs back and forth are crucial to the postmodern style of this narrative adorned with a pastiche of letters, asides, notes, advertisements, hybrid cuisines, and diverse interpolations. The book received wide critical acclaim. Time Out magazine hailed the book as an “epic farce” and “a contemporary classic.” Sunday Observer applauded Sealy’s “comic genius” parallel to Hogarth. Chicago Tribune assessed it as “unique, imaginative and challenging.” The New York Times, however, gave a scathing review that led to the disappearance of the book from the literary scene. Sealy draws much from Laurence Sterne and critics place him in line with Salman Rushdie’s style of magic realism and the mock-heroic style of G.V. Desani. The book was widely admired in India. Sealy has ever since been indebted to Indian readers while he called the book “outside the ken of the Western reviewer” in a 1991 interview (Nelson). Sealy has been “bypassed by stardom,” as Amrita Dutta observes in The Indian Express, but he stands tall in the league of contemporary writers.

Further Reading Crane, Ralph. “Contesting the Can(n)on: Revisiting Kim in I. Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 44, no. 2, 2008, pp. 151–158.

432

Encyclopedia Entries Dutta, Amrita. “Allan Sealy on Becoming a Writer.  .  .” https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sun day-eye/the-sense-of-a-beginning-the-trotter-nama-the-small-wild-goose-pagoda-an-almanack-zelal dinus-books-writer-irwin-allan-sealy-6219619/. Accessed 20 May 2023. Ganapathy-Doré, Geetha. “Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama: A Postcolonial Synchronicle.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 32, no. 1, 1997, pp. 67–78. Jaidka, M. “I. Allan Sealy (1951).” South Asian Novelists in English: An A-to-Z Guide, edited by Jaina C. Sanga. Greenwood Press, 2003, pp. 243–246. Mijares, Loretta M. “Fetishism of the Original: Anglo Indian History and Literature in I. Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama.” South Asian Review, vol. 25, no. 2, 2003, pp. 7–25. Nelson, Emmanuel S, ed. Writers of the Indian Diaspora – A  Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Greenwood Press, 1993, pp. 387–389. Sarma, Arindam. “History and Cultural Memory in Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama.” The Context, vol. 2, no. 1, 2015, pp. 30–42.

NIDHI SHARMA

TWENTIETH WIFE, THE, by Indu Sundaresan Indu Sundaresan is a writer of historical fiction and has published six novels that deal with the lesser-known aspects of Indian history. The Twentieth Wife (2002) is her first published novel and part of the Taj trilogy or the Taj Mahal trilogy. It won the Washington State Book Award in 2003, followed by The Feast of Roses (2003) and Shadow Princess (2010). The trilogy has been translated into twenty-three languages, with the Tamil translation done by Madhuram Sundaresan, the author’s mother. The present novel and its immediate sequel, The Feast of Roses, narrate the bildungsroman of Mehrunnisa (“Sun of Women”), who later becomes Empress Nur Jahan (“Light of the World”). In the annals of official history, she was the enigmatic twentieth and the last chief consort (“Padshah Begum”) of the third Mughal Emperor, Jahangir (formerly Prince Salim). Yet, she became a co-regent, minted coins in her name, and formed a junta with her father (Ghias Beg), brother (Abul Hasan), and Prince Khurram (Emperor Shah Jahan). The Twentieth Wife spans the period beginning with Mehrunnisa’s (un)fortunate birth in a caravan in Qandahar in 1578 to her remarriage and rechristening as “Nur Jahan” by Emperor Jahangir in 1611 (4 years after the death of Ali Quli, her first husband). Thus, the novel only describes the first part of her journey as a strong-willed and perceptive female character, who accepts Jahangir’s marriage proposal out of “love.” Nonetheless, implicit in her acceptance is the recognition as well as the desire for power and prestige that come with the title of “Padshah Begum.” Her striking and uneasy relationship with Empress Ruqayya Begum (Akbar’s chief consort) helps Mehrunnisa acquire valuable life and “career” lessons, both inside and outside the royal harem. Further, Mehrunnisa’s personal trajectory is contrapuntally juxtaposed with the historical milestones of the official Mughal history. Such intermeshing of public and private spaces in the novel allows one to see Mehrunnisa’s interiority as she navigates the labyrinth of Jagat Gosini’s (Jahangir’s wife) hatred, Ruqayya’s temper-tantrums, and Hoshiyar Khan’s (royal eunuch-bodyguard) reservations amidst the larger socio-political context of Deccan wars, court intrigues, royal proclamations, and strategic marital alliances. The novel also shows Mehrunnisa’s unhappy married life with Ali Quli (Sher Afghan Khan) in Bengal; the trauma of multiple miscarriages; the birth of her only daughter, Ladli Begum; Quli’s betrayal and death; and her final return to the Mughal harem (where she works for a living) before her quiet remarriage to Jahangir. Sundaresan deftly fills the gaps in the 400  years of Mughal history with creative liberty, “bazaar gossips,” and 17th-century travel accounts to reimagine the hidden recesses of Mughal women’s private lives and to posit the missing female experiences, aspirations, and the quest for 433

Encyclopedia Entries

power in harem politics not mentioned in recorded history. The result is a captivating work of feminist revisionist historiography or herstory that highlights the power, astuteness, ambition, and intelligence of Mehrunnisa (Chari). This perspective contrasts with the sole focus on her “beauty, charm, and bewitchery” by male historians like Beni Prasad (Bhardwaj). Moreover, the third-person omniscient narration also provides ample space for other pivotal characters and their complex relationships, such as Akbar and Ruqayya, Akbar and Salim, Salim and Khurram, and Salim and Mehrunnisa. Thus, Sundaresan humanizes her characters – male, female, and trans people (royal eunuchs) – by depicting their inherent flaws and strengths. Even Mehrunnisa is not spared from the readers’ scrutiny in her confrontations with Jagat Gosini. The critical reception of the book was largely positive, with various reviewers in print and online media hailing it as a masterpiece of historical fiction (Andrew; Chari). However, Publisher’s Weekly opined that the “often stilted prose” of the novel and the squeezing of too much plot into the narrative left “little time [and space] for character development.” The book was also adapted for the screen as a Netflix series titled Siyasat.

Further Reading Andrew, M. The Expansive Dialect: History and Conceptual Metaphor at the Crossroads in the Fiction of Indu Sundaresan. Manonmaniam Sundaranar U, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 2018, hdl.handle. net/10603/248615. Bhardwaj, Ananya. “Postcolonialism and the Historical Novel: Tracing Nur Jahan in Contemporary Historical Accounts and Fictions.” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 45, no. 2, 2022, pp. 103–110. Chari, Nanduri Subhadra. History Through Feminist Lens: A Critical Study of Indu Sundaresan’s Novels. Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha U, PhD dissertation. Shodhganga, 2019, hdl.handle.net/10603/389326. “Interviews.” Indu Sundaresan, 2023, www.indusundaresan.com/interviews/. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Sundaresan, Indu. The Feast of Roses. HarperCollins Publishers, 2012.

SAKSHI SUNDARAM

TWILIGHT IN DELHI by Ahmed Ali Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, published by Hogarth Press in London in 1940, was one of the first Indian Muslim novels to be written in English. Since then, it has continued to enchant readers. The plot revolves around the tragic denouements in the social and familial lives of the protagonist, Mir Nihal and his family. Set in the early two decades of the 20th century, around the time of the coronation of King George V, Mir Nihal’s story unfolds against the backdrop of the social and public changes inaugurated by the colonial British administration. Mir Nihal is a merchant whose own grand affair with his young mistress, Babban Jan, ends abruptly because of her untimely death. His other passion, that of looking after pigeons, also meets a sorry fate with the birds being killed by a stray cat. The tragedy of his life exacerbates when his favorite son, Habibuddin, dies. Nihal’s younger son, Ashgar, meanwhile, moves away from his Muslim roots to embrace “farangi” traditions. It is Ashgar’s love for Bilqueece, a lower-class Muslim girl, that constitutes the central organizing of this novel. Ashgar’s passion for Bilqueece leads him to confide in his mother, Begum Nihal, and sister, Begum Waheed. They resist Mir Nihal’s disapproval against this alliance. Even as Ashgar manages to marry Bilqueece, he is doomed to a life full of misery and loneliness, like his father. He soon falls out of love and Bilqueece dies in the course of the novel. After her death, her sister, Zohra, looks after her niece, Jehan Ara. In time, Ashgar falls in love with Zohra. However, Zohra’s parents are unhappy with this development as they were aware of how 434

Encyclopedia Entries

Bilqueece was mistreated by Ashgar. They propose Zohra’s marriage to some other man and Ashgar is left broken-hearted. Meanwhile, Mir Nihal, unable to bear the death of his elder son and the unfortunate changes taking place around him, slips into a coma and dies. Ali’s novel gives a graphic description of the Muslim lifestyle with its intricate politics of zenana and mardana. Drawing a complex web of social and familial relationships of Mir Nihal’s family, he offers a vivid glimpse of how colonialism impacted families. The novel dramatizes the intensity of human and social experiences and shows how personal losses and public suffering give voice to the enslaving of minds by the enemy. Mir Nihal’s rage against this subjugation foregrounds the changes between the times of the First War of Independence that took place in 1857 and the first two decades of the 20th century. Nihal’s observation that “[t]here were those men of 1857, and here were the men of 1911, chicken-hearted and happy in their disgrace. This . . . filled him with pain.” The novel’s poignancy and evocative description of the passage of time, memories of the disintegration of Muslim splendor occasioned by the defeat in the 1857 uprising, and the subsequent rise to glory of the British colonizers, is mirrored in the eventual decline of a proud and secure patriarch, Mir Nihal. A highly symbolic and lyrically evocative novel attuned to the moods and memories of times long ago, this is a novel of loss and tragic suffering outlined in the decline of cultural values in a period of transition visible in the description of the splintering of family bonds corresponding to the humiliation of the Mughal culture. The wheel of time keeps moving and like the passing away of the multiple characters and the death of the birds, we are given a glimpse of a bygone age that cannot ever be recovered.

Further Reading Anderson, David D. “Ahmed Ali and ‘Twilight in Delhi.’ ” Mahfil, vol. 7, no. 1/2, 1971, pp.  81–86. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40874415. 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. Kumar, Anita S. “Twilight in Delhi: A  Study in Lyricism.” Indian Literature, vol. 19, no. 2, 1976, pp. 25–38. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24157261.

INDRANI DAS GUPTA

TWO WOMEN by Bharati Sarabhai Bharati Sarabhai, one of the earliest women playwrights of modern India, writing in English, is greatly influenced by Gandhian ideology, as reflected in her two well-known plays, The Well of the People and Two Women. First published in 1952, Two Women predominantly explores the intertwined themes of womanhood and nationhood. The play is set in the peninsular region of Saurashtra in Gujarat. The location is the house of the prime minister of Kathiawad, Kanak Raya. Although the play was published post-partition, temporally it is situated “anywhere between the launching of Gandhiji’s movement and the achievement of India’s independence,” as Sarabhai herself explains. This kind of ambiguity spills into the other moments of the play, giving it a surreal and chimerical quality. The play begins with Anuradha, wife of the Anglicized, modern Kanak Raya, chatting with her brother, Darshan, who is painting the Himalayas on a canvas. The audience sees an exuberant Anuradha recalling her carefree girlhood days. Her demeanor changes drastically when her husband enters the scene, and the audience instantly notices a tension in their marriage. A partition runs through their house – one corner with modern architecture belonging to Kanak 435

Encyclopedia Entries

Raya and the other, a traditional Hindu corner belonging to Anuradha. Anuradha is awaiting the arrival of her childhood friend, Urvashi, with her father, Shastriji. Urvashi, the dancer, and singer, lives a life totally different from Anuradha’s guarded, matrimonial life. On Urvashi’s arrival, Anuradha’s longing for an escape from her worldly duties, like Mirabai’s, finds affirmation. Even her marital relations with Kanak Raya undergo a transformation. He suddenly realizes that he may soon lose his wife to saintly pursuits in the Himalayas. This transformational moment provokes an internal interrogation in both the characters, and they emerge from it with a newfound understanding of their relationship. Among other things, the play is a meditation on the survival of ancient traditions and customs in modern India. While there is tension between the two, there is also a genuine reflection on their coexistence by characters inhabiting both modern and traditional identities. The play suggests that a timeless essence of the past – ingrained in the body of the Hindu woman as mother, wife, daughter, and sister – will live on in each house. At the same time, the play also critiques such a straitjacketing of women’s roles. Through its lyrical prose and philosophical arguments, it also touches upon the themes of gender and nationhood through the identification of the nation as mother and goddess, and husband-wife relations through the lens of dharmic duty. As suggested by the partition of Raya’s house, the play portrays an India on the threshold of transition.

Further Reading Basu, Aparna, and Malavika Karlekar. In So Many Words: Women’s Life Experiences from Western and Eastern India. Routledge, 2008. Bhatta, Krishna S. “Indo-English Women Playwrights.” Sangeet Natak. Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1979, pp. 38–44. Indian Culture, www.indianculture.gov.in/indo-english-women-playwrights. Huston-Findley, Shirley, editor. Disparate Voices of Indian Women Playwrights: Creating a Profession. Lexington Books, 2020.

SHEKHA KOTAK

TYREWALA, ALTAF (1977–) Altaf Tyrewala was born in Mumbai where he did his schooling before he moved to New York to get a BBA degree. He returned to Mumbai in 1999 to write his first novel. He now lives in Dallas, Texas, and works in the e-learning sector as an instructional designer. He worked as a cashier, telemarketer, and a clerk. He also worked with the publishing industry, often citing his stint as an editor as the time when he truly honed his writing. He has previously taught Indian literature and the MFA program in literary translation at the University of Iowa in 2006. Tyrewala has written two novels and edited one. His debut novel, No God in Sight, was published in 2006 around the world and translated into several European languages. The book offers a contemporary slice-of-life view of Mumbai, where the fifty or so characters are all linked tangentially and occupy only a few pages each. The characters are etched through monologues, anecdotes, and vignettes that ultimately allow the city to take centerstage through the inner lives of the inhabitants. The reader is briefly invited to peep into the innermost workings of the minds of these characters before abruptly moving to the next. Some of the more prominent characters are an abortionist, a poet, a convert, a pregnant refugee, a gangster in hiding, a butcher, and an apathetic CEO. The anecdotes work as allegories for religious intolerance, political difference, and class difference, providing a commentary on the divisions that inhabit and animate the city and serving as a reflection of the contradictions of postcolonial India. His second novel, Ministry of Hurt Sentiments, published in 2012 follows the same broad strokes and presents a haunting painting of Mumbai through the mindscapes of the inhabitants 436

Encyclopedia Entries

on the very margins, many from the minority Muslim community. The writing is not prose; it is poetry that allows the city to come to life through the author’s stark imagery and his sharp, unsparing eyes. His third publication, published in 2014, is a short story collection, EngglishhhFictional Dispatches from a Hyperreal Nation. It comprises a selection of short stories, evoking the postcolonial conundrum of fraught characters caught between modernity and tradition, suspicious of the “Evil West” but simultaneously flawed through the contradictions they inhabit themselves. The characters are selected from the milieu of Mumbai, much like his debut novel, but they are allowed complete arcs, and the stories end in pure irony. Tyrewala has edited the crime fiction collection, Mumbai Noir, and is a member of the board of advisers for the literary journal, The Bombay Review. His work has been praised for the kind of attention devoted to etching the dystopia and the contradictions of modern-day Mumbai while making relevant commentary on the state of affairs in contemporary India. Some critics have labeled him as too bitter; others find his gritty but surreal depiction of Mumbai as a worthy successor in a cannon that critically picks at postcolonial pretensions, burdens, and tensions of the Nation (comparable to Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy). He continues to work as a columnist and short story writer for online portals such as The Mint and Out of Print: The Short Story on Line. Tyrewala’s writing is suffused with wit and irony and his attempt at genre reinventions has been praised, as is his usage of the street lingua franca that displays an attention to the location of each character while telling a universally appealing story. Interestingly, he self-consciously calls himself a writer for the Indian and American audience, which blurs some distinctions between the Indian and the diasporic writer. He finds that the changes brought in by economic and political shifts in contemporary times have resulted in a section of Indians and Indian Americans who occupy much the same position in the world and a shared worldview marked by similar cultural contradictions and perhaps even aspirations. The strongest markers of his own location remain his attention to the language and dialects on the street, the crisscrossing of English and the vernacular, something that he shares with contemporary writers and possibly the ones to come after.

Further Reading Kurup, Indu B. “City of Dreams/Extremes: Strategic Exoticism and (Re)presentation of Bombay in Altaf Tyrewala’s. No God in Sight and Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis.” Singularities, vol. 4, no. 2, Jul. 2017, pp. 23–34. Singularities, www.singularitiesjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Journal-Vol4-Issue-2.pdf. 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. Reimer, Anna Maria. The Poetics of the Real and Aesthetics of the Reel – Media Visuality in the Contemporary Indian English Novel. Universität Potsdam, PhD dissertation. Universität Potsdam, 2015, publishup.uni-potsdam.de/opus4-ubp/frontdoor/index/index/year/2016/docId/9566. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023.

SHAMBHAWI VIKRAM

UNQUIET WOODS, THE, by Ramchandra Guha The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (1989), by Ramchandra Guha, is a short history of the Chipko Movement in India. The new expanded edition (2013) of this path-breaking study of the peasant’s movement against commercial forestry introduces a new epilogue that brings the story of Himalayan social protest up to date, reflecting the movement’s continuing influence in the wider world. Being one of the most famous examples of 437

Encyclopedia Entries

a grassroot environmental protest movement in the “developing” world, this has been instrumental in affecting the environmental policy of the country. Further, many of the peasant and native peoples’ movements, against large dam projects and commercial lumbering in many countries, are inspired in part by Chipko’s successes. However, contrary to its popular image, Guha contends that it was primarily a peasant’s movement “to defend traditional rights in the forest” which consequently became the environmental conservation movement led by Sunderlal Bahuguna. The book is a subaltern history of Uttarakhand in the western part of the Himalayas that was divided into two kingdoms in the past, Garhwal and Kumaon. Guha narrates the story of this region from the colonial times and draws a parallel between the movements of the colonial and post-independence times against the repressive forest policies of the administration. The Forest Act of 1878 brought in “scientific” forestry techniques like commercial forestry that had a serious impact on village life. The first part of Guha’s study extends from 1815 to 1949 while the second half relates to the continuities and breaks in the relationship between state and village in the post-independence era. The book is divided into eight chapters along with a subject index. In the preface, Guha notes that “the relationship between colonialism and ecological decline is neglected by historians of modern India. However, they have been rather more aware of the social and political consequences of British rules.” Thus, Chapter 1 details the political history and social structure of Uttarakhand during the colonial era and the consequent ecological changes and peasants’ resistance in the Himalayas. The next two chapters outline the reasons and roots of the “Chipko Andolan” in the northern part of India. Another two trace the success of Chandi Prasad Bhatt’s invention of “Chipko” (hugging the tree) in preventing the felling of a single tree in the region. Guha prescribes local control over natural and political resources as a resolution to such conflicts. Chapter 6 quotes the Forest Act of 1878 as the cause of people’s angst and unrest against the authorities. It introduced a scientific forest management system wherein the villagers lost their traditional rights to the trees and other resources of the jungle. The last two chapters juxtapose the pre-colonial and post-independence societies concerning people’s rights over the flora and fauna of their respective lands. They ascertain the “Chipko Andolan” as a non-violent resistance to protect the villagers’ rights and the environment. Furthermore, the author portrays the role of women, children, and people from varied castes and classes in this fight against injustice. Over three thousand men, women, and children participated – “one for every Chir tree in the forest.” Guha’s account ends in 1984 with the Chipko’s success as the state government banned all commercial logging for fifteen years. At the end, he hints at another rebellion for a separate state of Uttarakhand in reference to the success of Chipko. Guha’s interpretation condemns the simplistic stereotype of seeing this movement from the lens of a feminist, Gandhian, or ecological perspective only. “Chipko” emerging as an expression of consciousness toward the sustainable use of natural resources and sustainable development, keeping in mind the necessities of the future generation, was understood more clearly by local peasants even before the global acceptance of “sustainable development” was formed by the Brundtland Commission in 1987. In conclusion, The Unquiet Woods deals with the peasant insurgency and environmental history attached to the Chipko movement. Guha claims that all such rebellions are inspired by the changing ecology. His book is viewed as never before told story of the region which was ignored by the colonialists as well as by the governments of modern India.

Further Reading Gadgil, Madhav. “Ram Guha: A Radical Progressive.” Outlook India, 31 Mar. 2018, www.outlookindia. com/magazine/story/ram-guha-a-radical-progressive/299987. Accessed 17 Jan. 2013.

438

Encyclopedia Entries Peer, Basharat. “A Conversation with Historian Ramchandra Guha.” The New York Times, 21 Oct. 2013, archive.nytimes.com/india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/a-conversation-with-historian-ramachan dra-guha/. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023.

KHEM RAJ SHARMA

VADUKUT, SIDIN (1979–) Sidin Vadukut was born in a village near Guruvayur, Kerala, on April 30, 1979. When he was a one-year-old, his family moved to Abu Dhabi. Vadukut returned to Kerala at the age of sixteen to complete his pre-degree at St Thomas College, Palai. He went on to acquire a degree in engineering from the Regional Engineering College (renamed the National Institute of Technology in 2003), in Trichy, Tamil Nadu. Vadukut continued his advanced studies at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, where he obtained a management diploma – a credential, the typically affable Vadukut has been known to quip, his father purchased for him. He dutifully leveraged his IIM certification into a consulting position at Mumbai’s AT Kearney, a business management firm with forty offices worldwide. The success of his regular and oft parodic writing for the message boards at Ahmedabad’s IIM alongside his popular weekly email newsletter to friends proved pertinent precursors to Vadukut’s move to blogging in 2002. By January 2006, Vadukut had moved to full-time freelance writing, and he was already on his way to being known as India’s first famous blogger. Now, nearly two decades later, Vadukut has completed an MA in historical research from Birkbeck, University of London, and enrolled in a part-time PhD on the nature of charity in the early Islamic world. His longform publications now include the Dork Trilogy (April 30, 1979), the nonfiction The Sceptical Patriot: Exploring the Truths behind the Zero and other Indian Glories (2014), and the prescient medical thriller Bombay Fever (2017). Vadukut’s Indian prominence catapulted in the early 2010s on the heels of his Dork trilogy, which consists of Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese (2010), God Save the Dork (2011), and Who let the Dork Out (2012). Vadukut has admitted to avoiding the fiction of Chetan Bhagat while writing the Dork trilogy. Five years Vadukut’s senior at IIT Delhi, Bhagat’s influence proves impossible to ignore. Whereas Five Point Someone is a satirical sendup of what passes for student “life” at India’s purportedly premier engineering college, the parody Vadukut first engages in in Dork is directed at flawed hero Varghese’s transition between graduation and employment in a pedestrian midmarket Mumbai consulting firm. The second novel, God Save the Dork, finds the hapless Varghese (oft-annoyingly) navigating successive comedies of errors after a voicemail fiasco finds him transferred to London, so the title of the book implies. The final novel of the series, Who let the Dork Out, eschews the frequent frivolity – or cheap laughs – of the trilogy’s second volume. Readers encounter a mature Varghese returned to India in the more joco-serious Who Let the Dork Out, which encodes the hubbub adjoining Delhi’s bungled preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Varghese, now a master strategist, media mastermind, and financial virtuoso running the Delhi Lederman office, steps in to rescue the “2010 Allied Victory Games,” an undertaking that involves restoring order to the Ministry for Urban Regeneration and Public Sculpture, handling an irate Indian PM, outmaneuvering Lok Sabha scheming, dealing with devious journalists, and besting an insistent BBC reporter. Vadukut’s authorial voice evolves markedly through the Dork trilogy. He comes to acquire the tonal quasi-gravitas necessary to the reliable representation of the comic within the tragic, without compromising seriousness. This developing narrative skill is evident in his final longform publications. 439

Encyclopedia Entries

From the get-go, the nonfiction The Sceptical Patriot: Exploring The Truths Behind the Zero and Other Indian Glories* makes a virtue of sincerity and informality. The asterisked callout in the title leads to the qualifier “Conditions Apply,” located four-fifths down the book-cover. Vadukut converses with his reader through The Sceptical Patriot, evident again in the book’s introduction, titled “Extensive Disclaimers,” which begins, Hello. A new book! How exciting! First of all, thank you for buying a collection of somewhat personal explorations into Indian history, by an author who has previously only written humour novels set in fictional management consulting firms. Vadukut’s dialogic, informal narrative style integrates social satire, self-parody, and readerly hailing. He invites readers into a series of informed conversations, covering such claimed “Indian Glories” (some more dubious than others) as the invention of the zero, specifically how it’s used in modernity, and the invention of plastic surgery, expressly rhinoplasty. Vadukut’s most accomplished work to date is Bombay Fever (2017), a multilayered thriller rendered belatedly more harrowing as a result of COVID-19. Speculative – and realist – the informed novel integrates an ample cast of characters from all walks of life from places as various as Switzerland, Sri Lanka, Delhi, Bombay, and Port Blair. As with the final Dork novel, the text is especially savvy when it comes to medicine, politics, and the media – only here Vadukut the social commentator has no need to take refuge in comic relief. Instead, Vadukut operationalizes sporadic chapter-long forward flashes, ones featuring the relief, a post-Bombay Fever in a notso-distant future. Vadukut thus masterfully manages to instill hope into a text with episodes as horrifying as those detailed in Richard Preston’s Ebola and Marburg’s nonfiction The Hot Zone (1994).

Further Reading Pasricha, Pallavi. “London Central: The Young MBA in Sidin Vadukut’s Second Novel. . . .” India Today Travel Plus, Mar. 2012. ProQuest, www.proquest.com/docview/929015775?pq-origsite=primo&acc ountid=11440. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Polley, Jason S. “Bombay Fever, the Toujours Vu, and our Plague Era: A Phenomenology of Reflexivity.” MEJO: The MELOW Journal of World Literature, vol. 6, Feb. 2022, pp. 34–45. Vadukut, Sidin. “Thierry Lamouroux | Selling Luxury During Uncertain Times.” Mint, 8 Sep. 2011, www.livemint.com/Companies/vWsuLfiqxfvA8ZYxS3JIGM/Thierry-Lamouroux – Selling-luxuryduring-uncertain-times.html. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. ———. “Maharashtra with Sidin Vadukut. .  .  .”  India Today Travel Plus,  Jan./Feb. 2013. ProQuest, www.proquest.com/magazines/maharashtra-with-sidin-vadukut/docview/1285445475/se-2. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. ———. Bombay Fever. Simon and Schuster, 2017.

JASON S. POLLEY

VAID, KRISHNA BALDEV (1947–2020) Krishna Baldev Vaid was born on July  27, 1927, at Dinga in Gujrat District, now in the Punjab province of Pakistan. He accomplished his primary education from Mangowal, secondary education from Dinga and graduation from Govt. College, Lahore. Thereafter, he migrated to India along with his family surviving the aftermath of the partition of the country. That changed the course of his life forever. After coming to Jalandhar via Amritsar, he was put in a refugee camp along with his family for a month or so. Overcoming many hurdles, he earned

440

Encyclopedia Entries

an MA in English literature from Panjab University, Chandigarh, in 1949 and a PhD from one of the most prestigious institutions, Harvard University in 1961. His teaching career spanned across decades, and he taught English literature, American literature and creative writing at Indian as well as American universities. After having lived a long and fruitful life, Vaid breathed his last on February 6, 2020, in New York. Vaid was a prolific writer who chose Hindi as the medium of his literary expression. He experimented with a variety of genres including short stories, novels, plays, diaries, interviews and literary criticism, and enriched Hindi literature by contributing over forty books. Vaid’s contribution to Indian English literature is also indispensable due to the excellent translations he did of his own works as well as those of his contemporaries from Hindi to English. His first novel in English translation, Steps in Darkness (1962) is the story of a young boy, Beero, an offspring of a lower-middle-class family with an alcoholic father and a screaming mother. Born and brought up in a claustrophobic environment of domestic disharmony, Beero’s childhood is strangled making him insensitive and morbid. The iconic novel was hailed as a masterpiece the world over. Silence and Other Stories (1972) was his first anthology of short stories in English translation containing stories on the vicissitudes of love and life debunking the myth of ideal and romantic love. His second novel, Bimal in Bog (1974), is a stream of consciousness novel. The protagonist Bimal Bihari is a desperate middle-class college lecturer always fantasizing about sex. Through his persona, Vaid succeeds in exposing the suppressed and inarticulate desires of the Indian middle class often shackled by the hypocrisy of pseudo-righteous life. The novel was experimental in theme and stylistics including the use of complex word-play, negative syntax, parody, humor and irony. The anthology Dying Alone: A Novella and Ten Short Stories was published in 1992. The novella Dying Alone is a vivid portrayal of an old and disheveled man, lonely and close to death. Circumscribed within the four walls of his home, he keeps crawling from one room to another, scribbling down his notes in order to find solace and freedom from a life replete with guilt and shame. The Broken Mirror (1994) was written as a sequel to the first novel. The protagonist is again Beero, now a young man. This novel delineates the story of pre-partition Punjab and records the various aspects of bestiality that took place there through the point of view of Beero and his motley group of friends. As an authentic voice of partition literature, the autobiographical novel was widely acclaimed. Sculptor in Exile (2014) contains some highly experimental short stories on diverse themes – love, marriage, time, aging, death, self-identity and creativity. The stories not only vary in form and length but also in tone, wit, and rigor. The last book, None Other: Two Novellas (2017) comprises two novellas, None Other and Here I Am if I Am. The first one is the same story that was published before under the title Dying Alone. The second one mirrors the trials and tribulations of a lonely and deformed road-sider. Both the novellas are highly innovative in technique and treatment dealing with the biggest anxieties of modern life such as precarious existence, neglect and abandonment and of course, the inevitability of death. Vaid’s works have been well received by critics all over the world. A pioneer of a new idiom, Vaid transgressed boundaries that defined the literature of his time. He had an eye for the absurd and his narrative style was hailed as experimental and iconoclastic. However, some critics indict him as bizarre, obscene and problematic. Despite the criticism, his work articulated the social, political and creative radicalism that took the world by storm in the 1960s and earned him the title of “Rebel of the Sixties.”

441

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Burger, Maya, and Nicola Pozza, editors. India in Translation through Hindi Literature: A Plurality of Voices, vol. 2. Peter Lang, 2010. “In Conversation with Krishna Baldev Vaid.” Penguin Random House India, 10 Apr. 2017, penguin. co.in/in-conversation-with-krishna-baldev-vaid/. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Jaidev. The Culture of Pastiche: Existential Aestheticism in the Contemporary Hindi Novel. Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1993. Montaut, Annie. “Vaid’s Poetics of the Void.” Hindi, Language, Discourse and Writing: A Journal of Mahatma Gandhi Antarashtriya Vishwavidyalaya, vol. 2, no. 2, 2001, pp. 81–108.

NAMRATA PATHANIA

VAKIL, ARDASHIR (1962–) Ardashir Vakil is an Indian-born British author who has written two novels, Beach Boy (1997) and One Day (2003). Born in Bombay, Vakil lived in India for eighteen years before moving to London. He attended Cambridge University and The Doon School in Dehradun, India. He has taught English in a number of London comprehensive schools and is currently a creative writing lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London. His short stories have been published in anthologies and aired on BBC Radio. Since 2006, Ardashir Vakil has taught BA, MA, MPhil, and PhD students at Goldsmiths. He developed a flagship MA program with the Education Department called “Writer Teacher” (now “Creative Writing with Education”), which combines his talents and experiences as a teacher and a writer. His work has been published in major magazines and anthologized and broadcast on the radio. “Laptop,” his most recent short tale, was published in The Iowa. The international journal of English teaching, Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, has published several of his essays on pedagogy and practical assistance for instructors and students of creative writing. “Who Else Can I Talk To?” (1998), “The Whole Biriyani” (1999), and “Eva” (2001) are among his short stories (2006). In 2004, his narrative, “Soft Boy,” aired on BBC Radio 4 and BBC World. Beach Boy (1997), his first novel, follows the adventures of Cyrus Readymoney, who lives in Bombay. It was published in eight languages and was nominated for a Betty Trask Award and a Whitbread First Novel Award in 1997. Beach Boy is set in Bombay, and several critics have compared it to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is the story of Cyrus Readymoney, a precocious eight-year-old, born into a rich Parsi family. Cyrus lives the life of a vagabond, wandering the streets of Bombay and intruding into the lives and homes of his neighbors. It deals with themes of sexual awakening and religion and cultural alienation, much like Joyce’s modernist masterpiece, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as the nomadic narrator traverses a metropolis, attracted and repulsed by the sacred and vulgar, faith and food. Cyrus’ parents’ tumultuous marriage generates constant background noise, but because they are so far removed from his daily existence, the parents’ quarrels seem to have no effect on him. When they eventually part, he has no idea what is about to happen. Meanwhile, Cyrus takes the reader on a tour of Bombay, which Vakil (a Bombay native) depicts in a lush, sensual setting. Cyrus’ transition from boyhood to adolescence has been narrated through his simple desires and fascinations such as Hindi films and local girls. A bildungsroman, Beach Boy, dexterously captures the imagination and thought process of a young boy as he grows up amidst a mundane urban life. The novel has received praise from eminent authors like Salman Rushdie and John Updike. While Rushdie finds the book “sharp, funny and fast,” Updike has compared Beach Boy to Vladimir Nobakov’s Russia in terms of its portrayal of India. 442

Encyclopedia Entries

Vakil’s second novel, One Day, takes a completely different form and setting in that it is set in London and the events are presented from an adult perspective as opposed to Beach Boy. As the title suggests, the novel is about a single day in the lives of the characters Ben and Priya, describing their marital struggles and other problems. The novel once again provokes the modernist tradition, being replete with modernist techniques like interior monologue and stream of consciousness. Ben is a teacher and an aspiring writer who lives with his wife Priya and son Whacka in London when one day he suffers from writer’s block. Vakil says that the novel is a “sense of loss that the characters feel. I have presented life as it were for the two characters. With its ugliness (which some found quite shocking), with its beauty, involving love and hate – the whole spectrum.” While One Day is a definite shift from his previous novel, both Vakil’s novels are highly autobiographical and much of his life has crept into the storylines. His writing style is influenced by modernism which is evident from the chaotic thought processes of the protagonists as well as the episodic structures of the novels.

Further Reading Chandra, Aparna. “Twenty-Four Hours with Ardashir.” Pune Newsline, 6 May 2003. Internet Archive, web. archive.org/web/20030506142948/http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=49645. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Ganesan, Sharmilla. “Having the Write stuff.” The Star Online, 26 Feb. 2010. Internet Archive, web. archive.org/web/20110628191343/http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2010/2/26/life bookshelf/5549884&sec=lifebookshelf. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Vakil, Ardashir. Beach Boy. Penguin Books, 1997. ———. One Day. Hamish Hamilton, 2003.

NAVREET SAHI

VANITA, RUTH (1955–) Ruth Vanita was born in Burma (Myanmar) on December 19, 1955, to a Christian family. Both her parents grew up in Burma. Her father is South Indian (Tamilian), and her mother is from Northern India. When Vanita was two years old, the family moved to Delhi (India). After a few years of schooling in an upscale private school in Delhi, she was advised not to pursue further education due to her poor eyesight. She withdrew from school but did not stop her education. Her mother, a teacher, homeschooled her until she finished high school. She received her education in India. Vanita joined Miranda House College (University of Delhi) and later became a lecturer in the same institute at the age of twenty. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Delhi. Her dissertation was based on the works of Virginia Woolf (1882– 1941). She taught at the University of Delhi from 1976 to 1997. At present, she is a professor at the University of Montana (USA) and Co-Director of South & South-East Asian Studies. After her MA degree, Vanita co-founded the journal Manushi with Madhu Kishwar in 1978. It was one of the first feminist journals in India, and since its inception, it got a fair amount of recognition. It was published in both English and Hindi for the initial few years. The journal published articles on women-centric issues in politics, law, and communal riots. She confessed that working for the journal brought ideological shifts in her thinking, and she became a nonMarxist. She left Manushi in 1991. The years following Manushi and the University of Delhi led to some groundbreaking scholarship on gender and sexuality. She co-edited Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History with Saleem Kidwai (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). This anthology covered ancient, 443

Encyclopedia Entries

medieval, and modern literary texts translated into English from Persian, Hindi, Urdu, and other Indian languages. Through the translations, the anthology makes accessible to its readers the long history of same-sex love in India. Another seminal work by Vanita is Gender, Sex, and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India, 1780–1870 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). It is the first book-length work on rekhti – poetry centered around women – and introduces us to many first-time translated writings into English. In addition, the book introduces its readers to northern Indian cultures from 1780 to 1870, where women (of all social status, including courtesans) played a crucial role in influencing urban speech and culture in Lucknow (in northern India). In her monograph Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2018), Vanita explores the subject of the courtesan through cinema. She looked at two hundred and eleven movies on courtesans and twenty-four other movies that were useful for the study. In the book, she engages in debate and disagrees with the scholars who think courtesan culture shows the influence of Islam (p.  9). She showed several examples that these women shaped Indian cinema through their music, acting, and direction skills. She argues that courtesans had agency and influenced modern sensibilities regarding the idea of family and nation. Vanita has also translated several critical works from Hindi and Urdu into English, such as About Me (autobiography of Pandey Bechan Sharma Ugra) (Penguin India, 2007) and The Co-Wife and Other Stories by Premchand (Penguin India, 2008). Furthermore, she published, A Play of Light: Selected Poems (Penguin India, 1994) and recently wrote the novel entitled Memory of Light (Penguin India, 2020) which is a love story between two women in the 1700s. Ruth Vanita, through her writings, has been admirably contributing to the field of gender studies in India, where subjects like same-sex love and the agency of courtesans are underresearched. She is a pioneer in her field and has opened avenues for future researchers. Her scholarship will benefit students of literary studies, history, and social sciences.

Further Reading Vanita, Ruth. Gender, Sex, and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India, 1780–1870. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ———. Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema. Bloomsbury, 2018.

MAUMITA BANERJEE

VARMA, PAVAN K. (1953–) Pavan K. Varma was born on November 5, 1953. Pavan K. Varma is a former Indian Foreign Service officer and was an adviser to the chief minister of Bihar Nitish Kumar, with cabinet rank. Writer-diplomat Pavan K. Varma is a graduate in history from St. Stephen’s College (securing the first position in the College), after which he took a degree in law from the University of Delhi. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1976 as Ambassador of India to Bhutan. He was a Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) from 2014 to July 2016. He was the national general secretary and national spokesman of the Janta Dal (United). Mr. Varma was the national general secretary of the JD(U) till January 29, 2020. He joined the All India Trinamool Congress on November 23, 2021, and was appointed the national vice president of the party on December 19, 2021. Pavan K. Varma has written over a dozen of best-selling books. The first one Mirza Ghalib: The Man, The Times, was a critically applauded biography of the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. In this enlightening biography, Pavan K. Varma has captured the spirit of the Urdu poet and essence of the times he lived in.

444

Encyclopedia Entries

Varma’s second book, Havelis of Old Delhi, focuses on the mansions built in the 18th and early 19th centuries, of which in some cases, little remains beyond a pile of rubble, while in others, there is sufficient evidence of an indigenous architectural technique and the gracious lifestyle it once upheld. Pavan K. Varma’s next best seller was The Great Indian Middle Class. The book focuses on how for the first time in our history, the Indian middle class has emerged as an important player in the elections, both in terms of numerical size and the influence it wields. Varma further highlights for the first time, a pan-Indian class, largely homogeneous, mostly educated and universally angry, a factor in the war rooms of almost all political parties. In the era of the global middle-class revolution, will the Indian counterpart emerge as a credible game changer? Does it have a wide and inclusive agenda, strong organization, effective leadership, and an alternative vision that shows up political discrimination? Or will it be mere cannon fodder for calculating, cynical politicians? In this important and timely book, Pavan K. Varma – the most respected analyst of the middle class in India – looks at the 2014 elections as a watershed in the evolution of this class. Crucially, he argues that what the middle class does now and the choices it makes will shape the future of India, for better or for worse. Varma’s fourth best seller was Being Indian: The Truth about why the Twenty-First Century will be India’s where he addresses some very crucial concerns confronted by world’s fourth largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity. Despite all these developments India confronts challenges like extreme poverty, widespread communal violence, corruption, high illiteracy, subjugation of women and persistent hold of casteism in urban and rural setup. The book is divided into six chapters starting with “Introduction” where he tries to separate reality from the image of India. He highlights what questions the book attempts to answer, methodology followed and basic traits of Indians such as retaining hope even in difficult circumstances and resilience that comes due to continuous exposure to adversity, to name a few. Then through the next chapters i.e., “Power,” “Wealth,” “Technology,” “Pan-Indianness,” the author goes on to unpeel layer-by-layer the Indian psyche and how they tick and succeed. Finally in the “Epilogue” he suggests what needs to be done to unleash the potential of Indians so that the 21st century certainly and much faster, becomes India’s. Pavan K. Varma has presented a very detailed and comprehensive canvas of Indian tradition, culture, history, and political landscape through his exhaustive writings on different legendary figures in India and covering the political, social, and economic constraints confronting India. He seems to have a great susceptibility toward the use of the word “Great” in the title of most of his books published so far. It can probably be described as an attempt to highlight the richness of Indian civilization, culture, and tradition. Varma, through his writings, has attempted to take the readers on a journey of rediscovering India and the legacy of its ancient civilization. His writings critically analyze the questions related to Hindu religion and current belief systems that have been politicized on several counts. Varma has also been effective in taking readers through the trajectory of empires, leaders, colonization, and conquest. He has also shown the changing idea of India through different centuries. Pavan K. Varma’s book, The Great Hindu Civilization: Achievement, Neglect and Bias, depicts all these aspects in quite an elegant manner. The book also pushes readers to introspect the idea of India in a discursive way that opens several new dimensions. Varma joins other Delhi gentlemen inhabiting the corridors of power who have recently engaged in the same enterprise: reassuring us all, Hindus and others, that the essence of Hinduism is not about aggressive identities that revolve around creed or denomination and that civilized people like themselves can be proudly Hindu. Pavan K. Varma’s prolific work has enriched Indian writing in English and opened several new perspectives for introspection.

445

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Agarwal, K. A. Indian Writing in English: A Critical Study. Atlantic Publishers, 2021. Govind, Nikhil. “This Book on Adi Shankara Charaya. .  .  .” Scroll.in, 27 Jan. 2019, scroll.in/arti cle/909999/this-book-on-adi-shankaracharya-could-have-been-a-vital-revaluation-of-tradition-it-isnt. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Iyengar, K. R. Indian Writing in English. Sterling Publications, 2019. Kapse, Dhananjay, editor. Modern Indian Writing in English Translation a Multilingual Anthology. Worldview Publications, 2016.

KUNWAR SIDDARTH DADHWAL

VEILED SUITE: THE COLLECTED POEMS, THE, by Agha Shahid Ali The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems was published in 2009, eight years after Ali’s death from brain cancer. The book collects poems from six earlier volumes and has a foreword written by Donald Hall. He notes that Ali’s poetry illustrates his “magpie method” in both the poetic forms he employed and the range of references contained within the poetry. The volume’s title poem, “The Veiled Suite” precedes the poems from earlier volumes, and Hall indicates that it is the last poem Ali wrote. The poems from The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987) focus on Ali’s ancestors in Kashmir, as well as the region’s culture and history. Several of the poems document arts that have been lost over time, such as the ethereal cloth described by his grandmother in “The Dacca Gauzes.” Other poems memorialize the singing of Begum Akhtar and the exiled existence of poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. The seven poems set in the United States show Ali straddling languages, cultures, and poetic forms. Also published in 1987, the poems from A Walk Through the Yellow Pages are mostly set within the southwest United States. They are more experimental, using free verse and incorporating references from commercial jingles about telephone service and advertisements. In “Language Games,” Ali indicates his disorientation in the midst of his new environment, asserting “I  went mad to undergo/a therapy of syllables.” The last three poems rework Grimm’s fairy tales. In A Nostalgist’s May of America (1991) Ali uses the figures of Eurydice and Gilgamesh to explore the desert landscapes and deserted mining towns of Arizona. The knowledge of death leads to the poet’s will to commemorate both loss and reconnection across time and geography. “In Search of Evanescence” records his pleasure at discovering an exit to Calcutta off an Ohio interstate: “India always exists/off the turnpikes/of America.” This section ends with the poet in Tucson, reading about saguaro cacti and remembering Begum Akhtar singing during a blackout in New Delhi. The Country Without a Post Office (1997) centers on violence in Kashmir. While some poems are written as personal letters, which are unmailable or never received, others tie the region’s violence to historical battles for Kashmiri independence, which he connects to the Russian revolution, quoting Osip Mandelstam, and the Irish uprising, quoting Yeats’s reference to the birth of “terrible beauty.” The final poem begins at a wedding in Lahore, Pakistan, juxtaposing the couples’ happiness with the poet’s grief over “Freedom’s terrible thirst, flooding Kashmir.” A note from Ali opens 2001’s Rooms are Never Finished, where he explicitly ties this volume with the previous one. The selections begin with his mother’s treatment for brain cancer in the United States; at her death, the family brings her body to Kashmir for death rites and burial. Many of the poems juxtapose Ali’s overwhelming personal grief with mourning for the violent repression in Kashmir.

446

Encyclopedia Entries

Call Me Ishmael Tonight, made up entirely of ghazals, was published posthumously in 2003. It begins with a note from Ali explaining the nature of the ghazal form, its origin in 7th-century Arabia, as well as its flourishing in 11th century Persian. Many of the poems investigate abstractions, such as “Air,” “Water,” and “Of Snow,” while others are dedicated to contemporary poets who were friends of, and influences on, Ali’s poetry and career. Reviews of The Veiled Suite commented on Ali’s range of cultural and literary references, noting the themes of mourning and loss in connection with Kashmir’s history and the personal loss of his mother. They also note his introduction of the ghazal form to American readers and poets.

Further Reading Ahmad, Hena. “ ‘First and Foremost . . . a Poet in the English Language’: Agha Shahid Ali.” A History of Indian Poetry in English, edited by Rosinka Chaudhuri. Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 375–388. Ali, Kazim, editor. Mad Heart Be Brave: Essays on the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali. U of Michigan P, 2017. Ghosh, Tapan Kumar, and Sisir Kumar Chatterjee, editors. The World of Agha Shahid Ali. SUNY Press, 2021. Islam, Maimuna Dali. “A Way in the World of an Asian American Experience: Agha Shahid Ali’s Transimmigrant Spacing of North America and India and Kashmir.” Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, edited by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, et al. Temple UP, 2006, pp. 257–273. Qadeer, Haris. “The City and the Beloved Witness: Mapping Cityscapes of Delhi in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 57, no. 2, 18 Nov. 2019, pp. 371–387.

PENNIE TICEN

VENKATARAMANI, K.S. (1891–1952) K.S. Venkataramani was born in Kaveripatnam, an ancient port celebrated in classical Tamil literature. His family had lived in the region for generations and his father was a landlord and excise officer. After studying at the National High School in Mayavaram (now Mayiladuthurai), he studied English literature at Madras Christian College and then law at Presidency College in Madras. He contracted tuberculosis while working as a rural development adviser to the Maharaja at Alwar, and his health was affected for the rest of his life. Venkataramani’s earliest book was Paper Boats (1921) which was a collection of prose poem sketches of village life. The favorable review in the Times Literary Supplement cited villagers drawn “with a loving intimacy” (August 4, 1921, p. 501 “Review”). His second book, SandDunes (1923), is also about rural life. A Day with Sambhu (1929) reflects on the life of a schoolboy and “expounds the philosophy of tender boyhood” (Ramaswami, p. 43). In the preface to Jatadharan and Other Stories (1939), Venkataramani states that some of the stories date from as early as 1915, appearing in journals and newspapers including the Hindu and The Madras Mail. The fourth story “Collision” shares some characters and elements of plot with the train crash in Kandan the Patriot, discussed further. Mehrotra says the collection “amplifies the Gandhian creed of ahimsa . . . and his violent denunciation of modern civilization” (p. 170). Venkataramani also wrote nonfiction about the improvement of India. The Next Rung (1928) includes a consideration of contemporary issues such as “The Indian Village” and “Some Problems of Swaraj India.” In 1929, he revised and expanded the second part of The Next Rung as a separate publication, Renascent India. It received excellent reviews, including from Tagore who wrote of its “originality of thought and felicity of expression” and Upton Sinclair who praised its “intelligent and clear-sighted point of view.” The chapter about the Indian village was reprinted as a pamphlet in 1932 and expanded once more and published as The Indian

447

Encyclopedia Entries

Village (A Ten Year Plan) in 1936. Venkataramani’s vision of the ‘reconstructed village left out the economic specifics which would make it viable’ (Jackson, p. x), but Venkataramani’s belief that the village – reformed – must be at the heart of the struggle for independence chimed with that of Gandhi’s. It is primarily for two novels that Venkataramani is best known. Murugan the Tiller (1927) is often seen as seminal because it is the first novel written in English to feature a Gandhi-like hero. While the protagonist of Premchand’s Hindi novel Premashram (1922) espoused the idea that social change could be brought about by individual sacrifice, Murugan The Tiller was the first novel to introduce a similar figure to literature in English. Critics have argued that it ‘became almost generic in the sense that nearly every other Indian novelist, including  R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao, and Mulk Raj Anand, discovered and exploited the fictional possibilities of Gandhian thought’ (Jagadisan and Nagarajan). The novel is idealistic, and the Utopian vision at the end, in which land is given to the tiller and each farmer who joins the scheme is given enough to support his family but no surplus, is more radical than any proposal for land reform enacted by Congress. Kandan the Patriot represents the ideas of Gandhi for a political movement. It was published in 1932 during the Civil Disobedience Movement and translated into Tamil by Venkataramani and published as Desbhakta Kundan (1932). Its eponymous hero, Kandan worked among the village of Akkur for a year, distributing spinning wheels and homespun cloth and trying to persuade the laborers to give up toddy, as Gandhi urged. The novel ends with a rally in which ten thousand people are hemmed in between the old Danish fort and the sea and the police fire on the crowd fatally wounding Kandan. Nevertheless, the mood is hopeful as all of the main characters in the novel have been converted to Gandhian thought and although they are jailed, the reader is left with the impression that this is a temporary setback. References to Venkataramani in histories of Indian literature are often fairly brief, but critics agree on his importance as the first novelist writing in English to combine the representation of the village, including Dalit laborers, with the ideas of Gandhi.

Further Reading Das, S. K. “Political Movements and Indian Writers.” A History of Indian Literature: 1911–1956. Sahitya Akademi, 1995. Jackson, William J. “Introduction.” Kandan, the Patriot, edited by K. S. Venkataramani. Academia.edu, 2012, www.academia.edu/1410927/Kandan_the_Patriot_by_K_S_Venkataramani_introduction_by_ William_J_Jackson. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Jagadisan, S., and M. S. Nagarajan. “Venkataramani, K. S. (1891–1952).” Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, 2nd ed., edited by Eugene Benson and L. W. Conolly. Routledge, 2005. Mehtrotra, A. K. A History of Indian Novel in English. Hurst, 2003. Ramaswami, N. S. Makers of Indian Literature: K. S. Venkataramani. Sahitya Akademi, 1988. Internet Archive, 2020, archive.org/details/dli.ernet.5412. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023.

ANGELA EYRE

VENKATESWARAN, PRAMILA (1959–) Pramila Venkateswaran was born in 1959 in a Tamil family. Growing up in Bombay, she earned her bachelor’s degree in English literature from Sophia College and master’s degree from Bombay University. Venkateswaran attained her doctorate degree from George Washington University, United States, and is presently teaching English and women’s studies at Nassau Community College, New York. Venkateswaran runs writing workshops for cancer survivors

448

Encyclopedia Entries

and has worked with foundations like Maria’Z and Strength for Life. Apart from conducting poetry workshops, she participates actively in feminist and social organizations. She co-directs Matwaala, the first South Asian Diaspora Poets Festival in the United States with Usha Akella, where they offer a creative platform for South Asian poets. She is also the founding member of Women Included, a transnational feminist organization that challenges the notions of compartmentalizing and stereotyping women across nations. Venkateswaran could not stay in a city for more than three years and was continuously learning to adjust and acclimatize to new environments. Feeling displaced, she found security through reading and writing. She brings in a fusion of ideas in her poetry, as she incorporates philosophies of Tamil, Sanskrit, American, and European traditions. Venkateswaran has also indulged in translating poems from Tamil to English. Besides translating the poems of Indian Tamil women writers like Malathi Maithri and Sukirtharani, she has translated few poems of the Sri Lankan poet, Sharmila Seyyid. In her first poetry collection, Thirtha, Pramila Venkateswaran deals with the themes of human connections, diversity of cultures and sensibility. She documents her experiences with regard to the aspects of displacement, hope, and pilgrimages in her first anthology of poems. Her second poetry collection, Behind Dark Waters, which encompasses around sixty poems, was published in 2008. She paints this particular collection rich by grounding it with multicultural mythologies and present day politics, which range from Ramayana to Aung San Suu Kyi. An attempt at interrupting and interrogating the grand narrative of patriarchy is performed through this collection, as Venkateswaran takes the stands of body writing and gynocriticism. A carnival of Indian imageries and metaphors is carefully employed in Venkateswaran’s Trace. The meticulous allusions to the forms of Yoga and Patanjali reiterate her spiritual inclinations and metaphysical intonations. The confluence of poetics and personal is highlighted in Venkateswaran’s Thirteen Days to Let Go. A careful blend of spiritual and material, Indian and Western, roots and diasporic dilemmas gets essentially evinced through the poet’s fifth anthology. The eponymous poem details the Tamil Brahmin funeral rites and rituals following the death of her father. The poetical sensibility of the poet captures her shared bond with her father, and that gets evinced especially through the employment of vivid images and metaphors. In Slow Ripening, she explores various facets of life, such as the journey of individuals and memories occasionally lined with the poetics of Indian mythology. For instance, she alludes to contemporary national rivalries and cold wars by referring to the Indian epic, Mahabharata. From demystifying the superstitions associated with lunar eclipse to subtly critiquing the female cosmetic companies, Venkateswaran’s poems engage with a medley of cultural aesthetics. Her book The Singer of Allepey was published in 2018, and Venkateswaran brings back her grandmother Sitala to life through her provocatively charming lyrical poetry. The poetical innovations employed in this book encompass a medley of Carnatic ragas, boat songs and Kummi songs, besides incorporating the navarasas as mentioned in Sanskrit Aesthetics. Venkateswaran’s recent book We are not a Museum, published in 2022, a collection of forty poems, traces the history of the Jewish community in Kerala by capturing the cross-cultural correlations. One of the finalists for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, Venkateswaran is also the prize winner of NaPoWriMo Poetry Contest for the year 2015. This poet cum translator is also the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Long Island Poet of the Year, 2011. She was the poet laureate of Suffolk Country, Long Island, during 2013–2015. The messy mixture of materiality, spirituality and cultural dynamics runs wild and rich throughout the writings of Pramila Venkateswaran.

449

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Akella, Usha, editor. En(Compass): The Poetry Caravan Anthology. Yuganta Press, 2005. Venkateswaran, Pramila. “Pramila Venkateswaran Interview. The-Pov, 2020, www.the-pov.com/pramilavenkateswaran. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. ———. “Matwaala: The Birth of the South Asian Diaspora Poetry Festival.” Matwaala, www.matwaala. com/matwaala-statement-by-pramila.html. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Wong, Mitali P., and M. Yousuf Saeed, editors. The Changing World of Contemporary South Asian Poetry in English: A Collection of Critical Essays. Lexington Books, 2019.

S. KEERTHANA

VERMA, MONA (1970–) Award-winning author Mona Verma has written sixteen works of fiction, including A Bridge to Nowhere, God is a River, The White Shadow, The Clown of Whitefields  & other stories, The Other, Lost & Found in Banaras, You v/s Yours, Laughter Lines, Readomania Book of Indian Mythology, The Readomania Book of Folk Tales, Better Parenting, Book of Historical Fiction, and Remnants of Loss. She has edited a number of scientific journals, self-help books, and biographies, and she frequently writes features for internet publications. Many research scholars have written theses based on her works, and the ICSE ELT series has incorporated excerpts from them. Mona Verma serves on the advisory boards of several universities and is in high demand as a visiting professor for creative writing, haiku, and limericks. She has appeared on talk shows titled “Incredible Women of India.” Her devotion to writing has earned her a spot among Dateline Dehradun’s list of the state’s most illustrious citizens. For her distinguished status as a literary character, she has also been included in the “Iconic Authors 2022” catalog. In educational institutions around the nation, she has led a number of workshops aimed at enhancing creative writing abilities, the art of storytelling, and the creation of haiku and limericks. She is in high demand as a visiting professor by numerous prestigious MNCs, PSUs, corporate houses, and universities for faculty development, personality enhancement programs (PEP-soft skills v/s hard skills), placement selection improvement (PSI) programs, interview etiquette, and group discussion techniques for aspirants. Mona Verma currently co-owns a corporate training company called Disha, where she conducts seminars on organizational etiquette, corporate proprieties, soft skills, and how to enhance skills, among many other aspects of employee, and faculty training at renowned universities across the nation. The extensive workshops held, which included interactive discussion, exercises, enjoyable activities, and deep covering of behavioral and practical topics, have been very beneficial to students, teachers, parents, and professionals from a variety of sectors. However, they also cover specialized subjects that, through customized training programs, can assist in maximizing potential and providing solutions to address challenges inside an organization. Published in 2011, God is a River: A Story of Faith, has 1947 partition of India as its background. Verma portrays the partition, British tyranny, and Indian fundamentalism from the perspective of a young child. The inexperience and innocence of a child forms a sharp contrast to men attacking each other in the name of God. As a child, the protagonist is unable to comprehend the difference between Hindu and Muslim identities. At the same time, the reader notices the wisdom and tolerance of a child who is unaffected and untouched by the sheer madness of blood thirst surrounding her. By making the protagonist a Muslim girl, Verma layers the experience of partition. Noor (the protagonist) is stuck between two worlds as she is slaughtered by Muslims confused by her talking about River Ganga, and by Hindus as they know that she is

450

Encyclopedia Entries

from a Muslim family. This is further complicated by the fact that Noor is only three years old and does not possess the appropriate vocabulary to talk about religion. Lost and Found in Banaras is also a well-known book where Verma deals with the issue of child marriage and widows. The protagonist of the story is a three-year-old girl who is widowed after only a few hours of the marriage. After being branded as “Munhoos,” her family refuses to give her shelter. She is led to Nirmala Ashram in Banaras which is run by Vasanti Bua and her friend Debi. The novel deals with the suffering of widows and the ashram where they live. However, the city of Banaras itself becomes a character caught between the ancient and the modern world.

Further Reading Verma, Mona. Mona Verma, www.monaverma.in. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023.

SAMRAT SHARMA

VIJAYAN, O.V. (1930–2005) O.V. Vijayan was born on July 2, 1930, in Palakkad in present day Kerala. He was born into a middle-class Ezhava family, and his father was an officer with the Malabar Special Police. Vijayan was a novelist, short story writer, cartoonist and political commentator who wrote both in Malayalam and English. Vijayan’s early education was primarily at home, under a private tutor. He completed his college education from Victoria College Palakkad, and Presidency College, Madras. Vijayan worked as a college lecturer for a short while at Malabar Christian College, Kozhikkode and Victoria College Palakkad, after which he moved to Delhi to pursue a career in journalism. Vijayan published six novels and nine short story collections. Writing at a time when literary modernism was on the horizon, Vijayan’s works have been compared with Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. O.V. Vijayan rose to prominence with the publication of his first novel Khasakinte Ithihasam (The Legends of Khasak), published in 1969 as a book after being serialized in the Mathrubhumi Weekly. The popularity and influence of Khasak was such that many commentators make a distinction between Malayalam novels before and after Khasak. Khasak tells the story of Ravi, who travels to the village of Khasak to teach in a single-teacher school, and the way in which he gets himself entangled in the mystic world of the village. Ravi, an outsider, is transformed after his encounter with the people of Khasak. Ravi, the hero of the novel, is torn between desires and contradictions, and his journey to Khasak is an escape. K. Satchidanandan writes that the novel “created a new readership with a novel sensibility and transformed the Malayali imagination forever.” The novel was translated by the author himself into English in 1994. The novel has also been staged as a play by Deepan Sivaraman. Divya Dwivedi points out that “dispersive focalization is at the heart of The Legends of Khasak.” While the narrative of the novel initially appears to be centered on Ravi and the time he spends in Khasak, there are several instances in the novel that focalize on other people and events. The novel, published two years after Gabriel García Márquez published his One Hundred Years of Solitude, has been noted for its use of magical realism, a reason why Vijayan’s novel is compared with Márquez’s. Like Márquez’s Macondo, Vijayan constructs the imaginary land of Khasak. The novel has also been talked about for capturing the mood of existentialism in the 1960s. In 1989 Vijayan published Ithihasathinte Ithihasam (The Legend of the Legend), in which he revisits the writing of the novel as well as its reception.

451

Encyclopedia Entries

Vijayan’s second novel Dharmapuranam (The Saga of Dharmapuri) which he wrote during 1971–1975 is regarded as one of the finest political satires in Malayalam literature. Initially serialized in the magazine Malayalanadu in 1977, and later published as a book in 1985, the novel offers a critique of the Emergency period in India. As E.V. Ramakrishnan points out, in Dharmapuranam, Vijayan offers a dystopian vision, in which “the nation-state has become a predatory monster that blacks out all possibilities of human emancipation” (Ramakrishnan). Gurusagaram (The Infinity of Grace, 1987), dedicated to Karunakara Guru who influenced Vijayan’s turn toward spirituality in the later part of his life, is set during the India–Pakistan war of 1971. Departing from his previous two novels, in Gurusagaram Vijayan explores human psyche through the central character Kunjunni, who travels to Bengal to report the war, and the spiritual transformation that he undergoes. Vijayan himself translated his first three novels into English. His later novels, such as Madhuram Gayathi (1990), Pravachakante Vazhi (1993), and Thalamurakal (1997), mark a clear departure from his earlier works. While Pravachakante Vazhi is set in the context of Operation Bluestar, Madhuram Gayathi deals with questions of spirituality. Thalamurakal (Generations), a novel that is seen as partly autobiographical, interrogates the question of caste, especially with relation to the lower caste Ezhava community in Kerala. By narrativizing the life of an Ezhava man, the novel attempts a fictionalization of the caste society. The novel addresses questions such as religious conversion, Sanskritization, and upward mobility through inter-marriage. In addition to being a writer of fiction, Vijayan was also a cartoonist and a political commentator. Once a member of the Communist party, Vijayan revolted against the socialist-realistic aesthetic that the writers associated with the Progressive Writers’ Association in Kerala adopted. For instance, in the story “The Progressive Classics,” Vijayan makes fun of socialist realism. In this story, Vijayan presents a situation where two lovers meet on a riverside in the night, and they start reading Das Capital. It is after taking months to read Das Capital that they proclaim their love. Vijayan adds that if the readers read Das Capital and fill the blanks that he left in the story, it would become the lengthiest socialist-realist novel. Vijayan’s first collection of stories, Moonnu Yuddhangal (Three Battles), shows his early commitment toward revolution and socialist realism. Vijayan has talked about how the Hungarian revolution of 1956 changed his attitude toward Marxism and revolution. While Vijayan wrote both in Malayalam and English, most of his fictional works were written in Malayalam and later translated into English, sometimes by the author himself as is the case with Khasakinte Ithihasam. The question of translation poses interesting questions for Indian writing in English. Vijayan’s translation of Khasak has been discussed in terms of how the novel, which had a radical edge when it was published in Malayalam, lost much of it when it became an “Indian” text. The regional diversity, which is brought using nonstandard variants of Malayalam, is completely yielded in the English translation, thereby losing the focus on questions such as caste.

Further Reading Dwivedi, Divya. “O. V. Vijayan – The Echo of the Cupola (Literature-New Literatures).” Southern Postcolonialisms: The Global South and the ‘New’ Literary Representations, edited by Sumanyu Satpathy. Routledge, 2009. ———. “The Addressee Function, or the Uses of Narratological Laity: Lessons of Khasak.” Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form, and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives, edited by Divya Dwivedi, et al. Ohio State UP, 2018, pp. 251–272.

452

Encyclopedia Entries Ramakrishnan, E. V. “The Novel and the Crisis of the Nation/Nation-State: A Reading of Some Malayalam Novels.” Locating Indian Literature: Texts, Tradition, Translations. Orient Black Swan, 2011, pp. 106–118.

P. MUHAMMED AFZAL

VIRANI, PINKI (1959–) Pinki Virani is an Indian journalist, author, writer, and acclaimed human rights activist. She is the author of one fiction and four nonfiction books, and she is famed as India’s first women editor of an evening paper. Apart from being a critically acclaimed author and journalist, Virani was instrumental in the 2011 Supreme Court of India’s landmark judgment which legalized passive euthanasia among other things. Pinki Virani was born into a Gujrati Muslim family on 30th January 1959 in Mumbai, Maharashtra. Her father was a shop owner while her mother was a teacher. She went to school in Mumbai, Pune, and Mussoorie. After her schooling, she went to the United States on a scholarship to study journalism. She is married to Shankkar Aiyyer, a senior journalist and the couple has chosen to remain childfree. Her first book Aruna’s Story, published in 1998, is based on the true story of Aruna Shanbaug, a twenty-five-year-old nurse who was sexually assaulted, sodomized, and strangled with a chain that left her brain dead and blind. She was treated at the same hospital for 48 years and kept alive through tubes until her death in 2015. Virani narrates, in vivid and heart-wrenching detail, the tale of this hapless young woman, abandoned by her family and loved ones following this incident and whose attacker walked free after a light sentence due to lack of evidence. Aruna’s Story displays Virani’s prowess as an investigative writer, and this book also established her as a strong human rights activist. Her second book, Once was Bombay, was published in 1999. Divided into three novellas and four short stories this book laments the loss of the city ‘Bombay’ that once existed and how it has been usurped by its politicians, its underworld, the dons, the mafia, gang wars, and communal divides. The book is the author’s way of seeking answers to how a beautiful city representing the rich Indian culture and heritage, the commercial capital of the country was turned from a “shahar” into a “shamshaan ghat.” Through a medley of characters, the author gives us glimpses of the many Bombays that exist side by side. Nostalgic and thought-provoking, Once Was Bombay is a diverse picture of the Bombay city. Her third book, Bitter Chocolate, published in 2000, is about child sexual abuse in India. For the first time ever in the country, a book challenges and exposes the hideous parameters of family honor and morality and the silence in Indian homes around the subject of child sexual abuse. Virani makes shocking and enlightening revelations about the prevalence of sexual abuse inside family homes by adults known and trusted by innocent children. She endeavors to provide a voice to the victims of abuse and also a warning to all the parents, children, guardians, teachers, and law enforcers to be aware of the dangers lurking in their own homes. Her fourth book, Deaf Heaven, published in 2009, is a novel and her first and only piece of fiction to date. Interestingly, it is also the first “cell novel” of India which was sent to readers through ninety messages over a span of three months. The novel is about the constant battle between the old and new and how under the façade of progressiveness lie numerous age-old beliefs and customs perpetually threatening our cultural progress toward modernity. Her fifth and latest nonfiction was published in 2016. Politics of the Womb – The Perils of IVF, Surrogacy & Modified Babies, addresses the harmful effects of surrogacy and IVF. Virani

453

Encyclopedia Entries

argues that in hiring wombs for making babies we are sacrificing the human factor and warns that this amounts to genetic theft and results in broken children and broken parents. This book addresses a controversial topic while lashing out at the rich who have turned it into a business and have reduced a women’s womb to a recycling machine. Pinki Virani’s writings are no ordinary writings. With every new book, she brings up issues that no one dares to touch. Her intensive contribution to the Aruna Shanbaug case is an example of the changes that a writer’s pen and efforts can bring about. Her works encompass gender, politics, and aggression while specifically speaking up for the marginalized and the vulnerable. Her writings place her among the pioneers of modern socio-political change.

Further Reading Chatterjee, Nikita. “A Harsh Truth to Digest: Revisiting Pinki Virani’s Bitter Chocolate.” The Chakkar: An Indian Arts Review, www.thechakkar.com/home/bitterchocolate. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Virani, Pinki. Aruna’s Story. Penguin Books, 1998. ———. Bitter Chocolate Child Sexual Abuse in India. Penguin Books, 2000. ———. Once Was Bombay. Penguin Books, 2003. ———. Deaf Heaven. HarperCollins, 2009. ———. “The Aruna Shanbaug Story: ‘Perhaps She’s Paying for All Our Sins’.” Firstpost, 18 May 2015, www.firstpost.com/living/aruna-shanbaug-story-perhaps-shes-paying-sins-2249784.html. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023.

NAVREET SAHI

WAHEED, MIRZA (1974–) Born and raised in Srinagar, Kashmir, Mirza Waheed experienced the conflict between Kashmiri separatists and the armed forces of the Indian government firsthand. At eighteen years old, he moved to Delhi, where he majored in English literature at the University of Delhi and began working in journalism while completing his degree. In 2001, Waheed moved to London and joined the BBC’s Urdu Service, during which time he completed his first novel, The Collaborator. After ten years with the BBC, Waheed left his editorial position in 2011 to complete his second novel, The Book of Gold Leaves. Since 2011, Mirza Waheed has worked as a freelance author, writing for the BBC, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, New York Times, Granta, and Guernica. His most recent novel, Tell Her Everything, was published in 2018, and is set in London, where Waheed lives with his wife and two children. Mirza Waheed’s debut novel, The Collaborator, released in 2011 to positive critical reception; it was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the Shakti Bhat Prize. Set in the mountainous village of Nowgam in Indian Kashmir, The Collaborator follows an unnamed teenage boy whose friends have gradually left to train as militants in Pakistan. Flashbacks reveal the narrator’s ordinary, peaceful childhood and chronicles his community’s upheaval during the border conflict, as well as their eventual decision to leave the village behind. In the present action of the story, the themes of survival and wartime morality take center stage, as the narrator begins working for the Indian military, searching bodies for identification. Upon finding a secret cache of naked, dead militants in the army compound, the narrator makes the decision to join his friends in Pakistan, but not before setting the bodies aflame, offering them the only funeral rite he can manage: a mass cremation. In 2014, The Book of Gold Leaves was published. Waheed’s second novel is set in Srinagar and centers on two young adults, Roohi and Faiz. Sunni and Shia Muslim, respectively,

454

Encyclopedia Entries

they conduct a secret love affair before Faiz leaves to train as a militant in Pakistan. Upon his safe return, the couple marry, with the blessings of their parents, and their marriage solidifies the novel’s central theme: love in the time of insurgency. When Roohi’s father is killed after unknowingly supplying information to the Indian government, their neighborhood revolts. The novel ends with the implication that Roohi and Faiz have been shot, as the military begins to open fire on the mourners. Waheed’s third and final novel to date, Tell Her Everything, breaks from the pattern of his first two, instead focusing on themes of isolation and medical morality. Written in the style of a dramatic monologue, readers enter the mind of Dr. Kaiser Shah, an Indian doctor now living in London, as he imagines a conversation with his estranged daughter, Sara. Readers learn that Shah worked for several decades as a “punishment surgeon” in an unnamed country, where he amputated convicted criminals in an effort to make the process more “humane.” After the sudden death of his wife, Atiya, Shah sends Sara to a boarding school in the United States, and their relationship largely dissolves. The novel ends with Shah describing the amputation of his close friend Biju, who had been caught stealing from the hospital’s drug stores, and Shah’s refusal to operate on him.

Further Reading Ghosh, Amrita. “Reading Discourses of Power and Violence in Emerging Kashmiri Literature in English: The Collaborator and Curfewed Night.” Review of Human Rights, vol. 4, no. 1, 2018, pp. 30–49. Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Kashmiri Alternatives: Rival Ideologies in Three Anglophone Novels.” Imagining Kashmir: Emplotment and Colonialism. U of Nebraska P, 2016, pp. 132–175. Morey, Peter. “Hamlet in Paradise: The Politics of Procrastination in Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator.” Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora. Routledge, 2014. Morton, Stephen. “Sovereignty and Necropolitics at the Line of Control.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 50, no. 1, 2014, pp. 19–30. Pirzadeh, Saba. “Topographies of Fear: War and Environmental Othering in Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator and Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden.” Interventions, vol. 21, no. 6, 2019, pp. 892–907.

MORGAN RICHARDSON DIETZ

WHITE TIGER, THE, by Aravind Adiga The White Tiger is Aravind Adiga’s first novel, which won the Booker Prize in 2008. Its plot is organized as a first-person narrative in which its protagonist narrates the story of his rise, from a village boy Munna to a successful businessman, to the Chinese premier, by writing letters to him. Because of his father’s efforts, he has a brief stint in a local school, where his teacher changes his name to Balram. His grandmother Kusum pushes him out of there to work with his brother Kishan in a tea shop, where, after overhearing the customers, he decides to become a chauffeur. His grandmother gives him money to learn to drive on the condition that, after getting a job, he would send his earnings to her every month. Balram’s first job is with a businessman from Dhanbad to drive one of his two cars and also to attend to household jobs. When his employer’s son, Ashok, and his wife, Pinky, move to Delhi to resolve problems related to their coal business, Balram chauffeurs them around. In Delhi, frequent quarrels between Ashok and Pinky force the latter to leave India, but not before causing a scare to Balram. During one of their outings, she takes over the steering wheel from him, drives recklessly, and kills a young child. Balram is readied to take the blame on himself but is saved from being punished because Ashok’s father uses his influence with the police to hush up

455

Encyclopedia Entries

the case. After Pinky’s exit, Balram takes Ashok to bars, prostitutes, and the homes of ministers, with loads of money to solve their tax problems. Because Balram thinks that he deserves more than what he is paid by Ashok, he kills him by hitting him with a broken bottle and runs away to Bangalore with his bag containing seventy thousand rupees. He starts a new business under a new name, bribes the police to eliminate his competitors, and establishes a successful taxi service to carry call center employees. Within the frame of this fast-moving narrative, Adiga claims to present his truth about India, which is at variance with the official truth of the “moral and saintly India,” for, with its two distinct patches of darkness and light, it is like two countries in one. The dark one is full of poverty, disease, stark inequalities, pollution, and rampant corruption, both in politics and business, and the light one, though prosperous and attractive, is also full of corruption. That is why the truth about businesses run by its entrepreneurs is also different from what it is made to appear. They rise not because of hard work and honesty but by using fraudulent means and immoral expedients, where even a murder is legitimized for moving upward in life. Adiga’s dark vision of Indian polity, in which the poor suffer at the hands of the powerful and rich who thrive because of immoral practices, is so bleak that there is hardly any redeeming feature in it. This, coupled with his winning the Booker, has bred divergent responses to the novel. Many believe that Adiga plays to the Western gallery by showing that the country is truly bad, where the poor and the downtrodden are just “human spiders” and where “stories of rottenness and corruption are always the best stories.” He does that to get a sizable share in the expanding field of literary cosmopolitanism. Some argue that he is warning of the rise of the marginalized, the subalterns. And some, like a reviewer in The Hindu, consider the novel a critical failure for using politics, history, and sociology as paperweights “to prevent the frail fictional edifice from fluttering away” and making it the best example of fiction that is “just non-fiction with a storyline.”

Further Reading Anjaria, Ulka. “Realist Hieroglyphics: Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61, no. 1, 2015, pp. 114–137. Anwer, Megha. “Tigers of An-other Jungle: Adiga’s Tryst with Subaltern Politics.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 50, no. 3, 2014, pp. 304–315. Arora, Sudhir K. The White Tiger: A Freakish Booker. Authors Press, 2011. Detmers, Ines. “New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s the White Tiger as a ‘Condition-ofIndia’ Novel.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 47, no. 5, 2011, pp. 535–545. Dhawan, R. K., editor. The White Tiger: A Symposium of Cultural Responses. Prestige, 2011. Mendes, Anna Cristina. “Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 45, no. 2, 2010, pp. 275–293.

TEJ N. DHAR

ZAIDI, ANNIE (1978–) Annie Zaidi was born in a family of writers and raised in Rajasthan by her mother, Yasmin Zaidi. Her grandfather was bestowed with national recognition for his work in Urdu literature, and her maternal grandfather was awarded the Padma Shri. Annie Zaidi received her BA from Sophia College in Ajmer. She enrolled in journalism classes at Mumbai’s prestigious Xavier Institute of Communication. In the beginning of her career, Zaidi worked as a journalist for various publications. While working for Frontline, she also began writing a blog titled, “Known

456

Encyclopedia Entries

Turf,” which later served as the basis for her debut collection of essays by the same name. Zaidi writes for The Hindu and teaches journalism at the OP Jindal Global University in Sonipat. She currently resides in Mumbai. Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales (2010) was among the finalists for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award. The author describes her experiences as a reporter while covering stories about feticide, hunger, female genital mutilation, and what appears to be a resurgence of Sufism in Punjab. She also depicts the economically poor communities, like primitive tribes in Madhya Pradesh and weavers in Uttar Pradesh, who suffer from hunger, gender discrimination, or other forms of prejudice. Likewise, Love Stories # 1 to 14 (2012) compels the reader to dive deep into the colors, textures, and magical depths of human emotions. Zaidi gives a fresh take on love in each of her tales, whether it be a young woman’s obsession with a dead police officer; a wife who leaves her family twice a week to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings; or a woman who vents her repressed emotions on a train announcer. Zaidi’s 2014 novella, Gulab, tells the tale of a Muslim woman who perishes in a 1990 earthquake, uniting the worlds of the living and the ghosts. Nikunji is searching for the grave of his beloved when he sees two men decorating the same grave with flowers. Confusion opens the door to the enigmatic truth about how a dead woman continued to love several different men. Gulab exceeds the limitations of ghostly powers that the reader has in mind. Her next book, Prelude to a Riot (2019), received the Tata Literature Live! Award and was short-listed for the JCB Prize for Literature in 2020. Zaidi skillfully captures the anxieties and fears of almost a dozen residents of a southern town, surrounded by lush banana and spice plantations, whose lives are forever altered by communal violence in an era of political division where ironically, organizations like “Self Respect Forum” act as skilled practitioners of terror and violence. Zaidi’s winning essay for The Nine Dots Prize developed into a full-fledged book, Bread, Cement, Cactus: A Memoir of Belonging and Dislocation (2019). The book examines the ideas of “home” and “belonging” that are based on her observations of modern life in India where migration, particularly from villages to cities, is common. Zaidi creates a detailed portrait of the individuals she met in person or learned about from others. She also takes the opportunity to consider her own place in society in terms of gender, language, marital status, religion, parentage, and property. Zaidi’s latest novel, City of Incidents: A Novel in Twelve Parts (2022), describes the daily activities of characters fighting to maintain their equilibrium in a city that gives them little hope and little chance of redemption. Women characters challenge stereotypes and live their lives on their own terms, and men struggle to support their families, manage their careers, and carry out their legal obligations. Annie Zaidi has received numerous accolades. In 2018, her play “Untitled 1” won The Hindu Playwright Award for Best New Play. “Jam” was the South Asian winner of the BBC International Playwright Competition for radio plays. “The Journey of Indian Women,” Annie Zaidi’s debut documentary, follows the lives and struggles of women as they are depicted in literature. She discusses middle-class lifestyles, intercultural romance, friendship, and religion. Investigating the possible collapse or recovery of a citizen’s sense of home is another preoccupation in her writing. Annie Zaidi is a perceptive observer of the world around her, and her work is motivated by concerns for social justice, cultural preservation, and the elimination of caste bias.

457

Encyclopedia Entries

Further Reading Jain, Saudamini. “Review: City of Incident; A Novel in Twelve Parts by Annie Zaidi.” Hindustan Times, 30 Apr. 2022, www.hindustantimes.com/books/reviewcity-of-incident-a-novel-in-twelve-parts-byannie-zaidi-101651257301068.html. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023. Zaidi, Annie. “Interview with Annie Zaidi.” Conducted by Anna Georgia Mackay, Griffith Review 49: New Asia, edited by Julianne Schultz and Jane Camens, 2015. Griffith Review, www.griffithreview.com/ articles/interview-annie-zaidi/. Accessed 17 Jan. 2023.

NITIKA STAN

458

OUR CONTRIBUTORS

P. Muhammed Afzal teaches at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. His areas of research include Malayalam cinema, intellectual and cultural history of the Left in India, popular culture and popular politics, cultural studies in Asia, and language politics. He is a recipient of the National Film Archive of India Film Research Fellowship. Komal Agarwal, Assistant Professor of English, Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi, obtained her doctorate from the Center for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has published several research papers, articles, and translations. Her research areas include the epic and popular versions of the Mahabharata, Indian classical literature and aesthetics, folk and popular cultures in India, gender studies, and translation studies. Maalavika Ajayakumar holds a PhD in English language and literature awarded by the University of Kerala. She has authored several academic papers and poems, some of which have been published in UGC-Care listed journals and online magazines. Her research interests include Kerala studies, cultural studies, women’s writing, and popular culture. Moin Ashraf Akhoon is a PhD candidate and teaching associate at Shoolini University, Solan. He did his bachelor’s degree from Bangalore University and worked with one of India’s leading broadcasting houses but later opted for English literature and finished his MA in 2020 from the Central University of Kashmir. Passionate about teaching English literature and literary theory, he is presently writing his thesis on the problem of dissent and its literary representation in cross-cultural contexts. V. Neethi Alexander holds a PhD in English literature from the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. Her research interests include contemporary British and American fiction, Gothic studies, and popular culture. Eman Almasry is a PhD scholar of English literature at Shoolini University, currently pursuing research on diaspora studies. She got her bachelor’s degree in English literature from Albaath

459

Our Contributors

University, Syria, and her master’s degree from Marwadi University, India. She has taught English as a second language both in Syria and India. Aswathi Velayathikode Anand is a doctoral scholar in the Department of Liberal Arts at IIT, Hyderabad. Her research interests include contemporary American fiction, women’s literature, gender studies, religion, and radical Christianity in America. She has published in journals like Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction and ANQ: A  Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews. Currently she is exploring the representation/re-presentation of Biblical narratives in contemporary American women’s fiction. Bhawna Vij Arora teaches English literature at Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies, Delhi, affiliated with GGSIP University. She was a Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant at Yale University in 2015–2016. She regularly contributes articles to reputable journals. Other than academics, she is keenly interested in poetry and has published her lyrical vignettes on various platforms. Malvika Avasthi is a research scholar in the faculty of Liberal Arts and Ancient Indian Wisdom, Shoolini University, Solan. She received her BA and MA in English from M.C.M. D.A.V. College for Women, Chandigarh. She has also participated and made presentations at national and international conferences. Purnima Bali is an associate professor of English, Shoolini University. She has a PhD in English literature from Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla (HP), India, and more than 12 years of teaching experience. A versatile teacher engaged in academic and administrative pursuits, her publications include several international research papers, reviews, book chapters, edited books. Debjani Banerjee teaches humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Her research areas include South Asian literature and nationalism. She has written on South Asian women writers and film makers including Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee, and Mira Nair. She holds a PhD from Stony Brook University, New York. Her translations, published by Penguin, include  The Nectar of Life: Quotations from the Prose Writings of Rabindranath Tagore,  The Penguin Guide to Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Maumita Banerjee is a historian of modern Asia. She completed her MPhil from Delhi University (India) and PhD from Waseda University (Japan). She has held research positions at Harvard Yenching (Harvard University, USA), and Waseda University. Currently, she is a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the Sainsbury Institute of Japanese Arts and Culture (University of East Anglia, UK). She briefly taught at Daulat Ram and Khalsa College (Delhi University). Poulami Banerjee is a research scholar of English literature, Shoolini University. She is a published author and has also presented a paper titled “The Intertwined Relation between Music and Color in Films” at an International New York Academic Research Congress, and “Sheltered Shore and Devastated Depth: A Plunge into the war-ridden life of Arjie” at an International Conference organized by CHRIST University, Bangalore. Suchetana Banerjee, a comparatist, is a thespian who has been engaging with performance practices for over two decades. Currently she teaches literature and theater at the Symbiosis

460

Our Contributors

School for Liberal Arts, Pune. Her research interests include comparative literature, cultural studies, and performance studies. She has published with Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi), Peter Lang (Brussels), Harvard University Press (Cambridge), and Jadavpur University (Kolkata). Hem Raj Bansal is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamshala. He has co-edited three books: Mapping Diaspora Identities: India and Beyond, Homogeneity in Heterogeneity: Memory, Culture, and Resistance in Aboriginal Literatures from around the World, and Gendered Spaces and Ruptured Identities: Representation of Women in African Literature. He has also been the recipient of the Best Paper Presentation Award on Shakespeare and the Isaac Sequeira Memorial Award, MELOW 2021. Shilpi Basak is an assistant professor of English at Sudhiranjan Lahiri Mahavidyalaya, West Bengal, India. She has published several research articles in reputable journals and books. She completed her PhD in 2020 on the poetry of the Indian American poet, Agha Shahid Ali. Her areas of research include diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, and gender studies. Tasmiya Bashir teaches English at the PG Department of English, North Campus, University of Kashmir. She has also taught in the UAE for some years. Her areas of research are literature of resistance and diaspora writings. She has authored a book, presented papers in conferences, and published research papers in national and international journals. JapPreet Kaur Bhangu is a professor of English at the Department of Management and Humanities, Sant Longowal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Longowal, Punjab, India. She is the author of Reaching Centrestage: Cultural Identity in African American Theatre. She has also published more than forty research papers in various journals. Amit Bhattacharya is a professor of English at the University of Gour Banga, Malda, West Bengal. He did his Master’s and PhD from the University of North Bengal. He has over twenty years of experience in teaching and research and has contributed more than thirty essays to journals and anthologies of critical essays in India and abroad. His areas of research include Postcolonial Studies, Trauma Studies, Intersectionality Studies, and Spatial Criticism. Sarbajaya Bhattacharya is currently a PhD student at the Department of English, Jadavpur University. She has published several essays in national and international journals including Studies in Travel Writing and Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities. She was a part of the inaugural batch of the South Asia Speaks Mentorship Programme (2021) as a translation fellow. She works as a freelance translator and editor with the People’s Archive of Rural India. Jagmeet Kaur Bhatti is a research scholar at Shoolini University. Her research focus is on children’s literature. She earned her master’s degree in English literature from Panjab University, Chandigarh. She has presented papers at international and national conferences. Josianne Leah Campbell is the English Department Chair at a secondary school in South Carolina. She earned an MA in English from UNC Charlotte and an MS in Education from Walden University. Sixteen years as an educator, her research lies in the field of pop culture, folk and fairy tales, and literature.

461

Our Contributors

Abin Chakraborty, Assistant Professor in English, Chandernagore College, specializes in postcolonial studies, Indian writing in English and Cultural Studies. He is the author of the monograph Popular Culture published in 2019 by Orient Blackswan. His papers have been published in several national and international anthologies. He has also written entries for Literary Encyclopedia and the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. He edits the online, peer-reviewed, international, interdisciplinary journal Postcolonial Interventions. Tuli Chatterji is an associate professor in the Department of English at LaGuardia Community College of City University of New York, where she teaches composition and literature courses. Her research interests include postcolonial literature, transnational studies, South Asian queer studies, and composition theory and pedagogy. Her work has been published in Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments; Journal of West Indian Literature; South Asian Review; and Radical Teacher. Rahul Chaturvedi teaches language and literature at the Department of English, Banaras Hindu University (Varanasi, India). He has also taught at AMPG College, Varanasi, and the Central University of Jharkhand (Ranchi, India). He has published research papers in journals of national and international repute. He has also co-edited Hero and Hero-Worship: Fandom in Modern India. His areas of interest include Indian and South Asian literatures, film studies, and translation. Tanzin Choedon is a lecturer in English at the Central Institute of Buddhist Studies (deemed to be University), Leh, Ladakh. She did her BA from St. Bede’s College, Shimla, and MA in English literature from Panjab University, Chandigarh. She is currently pursuing her PhD in English from Shoolini University, Solan, Himachal Pradesh. Her areas of interest include Indian writings in English, film studies, literary theory and criticism, diasporic writing, and science fiction. Kunwar Siddarth Dadhwal, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Shoolini University, has taught in Amity University Mumbai and St. Xavier’s College Mumbai. He has authored research articles on disability and regional and linguistic politics. Sanghamitra Dalal is a senior lecturer at the College of Creative Arts, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Selangor, Malaysia. She completed a PhD in postcolonial diasporic literature at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include the postcolonial, migration, and diasporic literatures, with special focus on South and Southeast Asian literatures in English; transnational and transcultural literatures and cultures; and life writing. She has published articles in indexed journals and book chapters with Palgrave Macmillan and Springer Nature. Indrani Das Gupta is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Maharaja Agrasen College, University of Delhi. She is currently pursuing her doctoral research in the field of Indian science fiction in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her articles have been published by Routledge, Bloomsbury, and Macmillan. Nilak Datta has earned degrees from University of Calcutta (India), Jawaharlal Nehru University (India), and Carnegie Mellon University (PA, USA). He has taught in Qatar and the United States. In his current institutional home at the Department of Humanities and Social

462

Our Contributors

Sciences, BITS Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus (Goa, India), he teaches courses in 19th century urban reform, postmodernist fiction, and literary and cultural studies as Assistant Professor of English. Nitya Datta is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. Her research interests include science fiction, children’s literature, British 18th-century literature, critical theory (with emphasis on the Frankfurt School), and Indian English fiction. Her work has been published in anthologies by national and international publishers. Titas De Sarkar is a PhD candidate at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago. Previously, he was a student at the Department of History, Jadavpur University and Center for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. De Sarkar works on modern youth cultures and cultural histories. He has contributed chapters in The Nation and its Margins: Rethinking Community (2019) and The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies (2021). Gerardo Del Guercio, formerly of the Royal Military College of Canada (St-Jean), Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, and Université de Montréal, is the editor of Psychology in Edgar Allan Poe (Logos Verlag GmbH, 2019), as well as the author of The Fugitive Slave Law in The Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: American Society Transforms its Culture (Edwin Mellen, 2013). He is presently teaching English in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Vishwajeet Deshmukh graduated with a law degree from Government Law College, Mumbai, India in 2022. He has received the Likho Fellowship 2021 at the Humsafar Trust, Young Critics Lab Fellowship 2020 at the MAMI Film Festival, and the Tata Trusts 1947 Partition Archive Research Grant 2021 for his research on the 1947 Partition of British India. He has published in Live History India, Eastern Herald, Times of Israel, Armstrong Journal of History, and South Asia Journal. 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, The Tale of a Beleaguered Soldier, edited fourteen books, and published over fifty critical essays and four hundred book reviews. Renuka Dhyani, Associate Professor of English, SMMDGS College, Panchkula, has served in various government colleges of Haryana since 2001. With a keen interest in poetry, she pursued her MPhil on Seamus Heaney and PhD on Robert Frost. She has worked as a co-investigator in a major project of the University Grants Commission, presented papers at National and International Conferences, and contributed articles in National and International Journals. Morgan Richardson Dietz is an English PhD candidate at the University of Georgia. Her dissertation, titled “Political Portions: Women and Hunger in Contemporary South Asian Fiction,” asserts that women’s food preparation, consumption, and abstinence are political actions,

463

Our Contributors

despite their typical coding in South Asian literature as mundane or repressive. Her work has appeared in  Studies in the Novel,  The Explicator, and  The  Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. Shayeari Dutta completed her PhD at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her dissertation explored the roles of V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie in negotiating issues of caste, class, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and migrancy. Currently an assistant professor at the Department of English, Surendranath College, University of Calcutta, she is interested in Caribbean literature, diasporic studies, cultural studies, world literature and politics, and has published papers in these areas. Angela Eyre is an associate English lecturer at the Open University, UK. Her publications include “The use of Hindi/Hindustani and Urdu words in Kim” in Kipling in India: India in Kipling, ed. by H. Trivedi and J. Montefiore (Routledge, 2021) and “Organised Peasant Resistance in Fiction: Mulk Raj Anand’s The Sword and the Sickle and Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others,” in SAMAJ-EASAS 21.2019. She has also published A Reader’s Guide to A Suitable Boy, Continuum Books, 2002. Jana Fedtke, PhD, is Assistant Professor in Residence in the Liberal Arts Program at Northwestern University in Qatar. Her research and teaching interests include data justice, science and technology in fiction, gender studies, and transnational literatures with a focus on South Asia and Africa. Her work has been published in journals including Online Information Review,  Asian Studies, Journalism Practice,  South Asian History and Culture, and Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge). Michael H. Fisher, Danforth Professor of History, Emeritus, Oberlin College, USA, has periodically studied, researched, and lectured in India and Bangladesh since 1971, including a stint as a visiting faculty member at Delhi University and the University of Hyderabad. Among his dozen books are: The First Indian Author in English: Dean Mahomed (1759–1851) in India, Ireland, and England (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996, 2000) and Environmental History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Nisha Ghatak, PhD, is a research communities adviser  and  guest lecturer at  the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has published various articles and book chapters on women’s autobiographical writing and her research interests include South Asian feminisms, women’s postcolonial writing, translation, and gender studies. Aaleya Giri teaches English at institutions affiliated to the University of Delhi, India. Her research interests include popular culture, crime fiction, subaltern studies, gender studies, myths and mythologies, graphic narratives, diaspora, and film studies. Stephanie Laine Hamilton is a freelance academic, historian, and author, who is the proprietor of Zephyr Heritage Consulting. She works and lives in the Canadian Rocky Mountains near Banff, Alberta, Canada, where her work can be experienced through her popular history books, exhibits, and talks/tours. Hamilton has published on ancient Roman performance culture, representations of sport in the works of Plutarch, and the poetic practices of late antique cento and mid-20th century cut-up.

464

Our Contributors

Nalini Iyer is Professor of English at Seattle University and the Theiline Pigott-McCone Endowed Chair for the Humanities. She teaches postcolonial studies including South Asian and African writing and courses on postcolonial and transnational feminisms. Her publications include Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India (2009); Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest (2013); and Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays in Memory, Culture, and Politics (2016). She is the chief editor of South Asian Review. Manju Jaidka, former Senior Professor and Dean at Shoolini University, Solan, HP, and former 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. Sunaina Jain is an assistant professor of English at Mehr Chand Mahajan DAV College, Chandigarh. Besides publishing academic writing and editing books, her creative writings have featured in national and international anthologies, journals, magazines, and newspapers. Her translated stories have featured in an anthology titled Vignettes published by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, in 2018. She is also on the review panel of the literary journal Muse India. Elwin Susan John is an assistant professor of English at Sophia College (Autonomous), Mumbai, India. Her doctoral research was on the reconfiguration of skin in literary narratives. Her areas of academic interest  and publications  are  mostly located within a  cultural  study of the body in humanities, literary disability studies, memory studies, and Indian literature. Niveditha Kalarikkal teaches at the Centre for Comparative Literature, Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, Kerala, and holds a PhD in translation studies from the University of Hyderabad. Her latest publication is “Refuge in the Land of Redemption: Serial Migration as a Theme in Contemporary Fiction about South Asia” in Sayantan Mondal, et.al. (eds.), Contextualising Migration: Perspectives from Literature, Culture and Translation by NTM, CIIL, Mysore (2022). Manpreet Kaur Kang, Professor of English, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, is also the director, Students’ Welfare of the University. She has been the president of the International American Studies Association, a Shastri Fellow, and the recipient of a research grant at the American Studies Research Centre. She is the chief editor of the reputed e-journal, MEJO, and the author/editor of several books and critical essays in reputed journals. Rajender Kaur is Professor of English at William Paterson University, New Jersey. Her research and teaching interests are interdisciplinary and focus on gender, class, and social justice issues in South Asian and South Asian American literatures and culture, early American studies, postcolonial theory and literature. Her articles and book reviews have appeared in a host of scholarly journals, and she is co-editor most recently of India in the American Imaginary, 1780–1880 (2017).

465

Our Contributors

Urvashi Kaushal is an assistant professor of English at Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, Gujarat. She teaches English and communication skills to engineering and science students at the undergraduate and postgraduate level. Her areas of research are postcolonial fiction, diaspora literature, communication skills, and employability skills. She has published around fifty research papers in national and international journals and also presented papers in international and national conferences. S. Keerthana got her MA in English and comparative literature from Pondicherry University, India, and is currently a research scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Madras. The focus of her doctoral thesis is on gender and sexuality in regional literature in translation. Her areas of interest include sexuality, postcolonialism, social psychology, women studies, and Indian literature. She has presented and published articles on gender, social psychology, and domesticity. Aateka Khan was educated at the University of Delhi and the Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi. She holds MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees in English and has been engaged in teaching English language and literature to undergraduates since 2001. She is currently employed as an associate professor of English at Bharati College, University of Delhi. M. Anjum Khan is an assistant professor of English in Avinashilingam Institute for Home Science and Higher Education for Women, Coimbatore. She has authored/edited Ethnic Silhouettes, M.G. Vassanji in the Light of New Historicism; Narrating Bodies, Reading Anosh Irani; and Environmental Postcolonialism: A  Literary Response. She has published several research articles in reputed national and international journals, chapters in books, and presented papers in national and international conferences. Harsh Vardhan Khimta is an assistant professor in the Department of Higher Education in Shimla. He has taught in government colleges in Himachal Pradesh. He wrote his MPhil dissertation on Cervantes’ Don Quixote while his PhD thesis centered on the issue of tribal subjectivity in selected novels of a few prominent Indian authors. His published work consists of two collections of short stories, Maidens of Trafford House and The Golden Staircase. Shekha Kotak is a PhD student in the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. She pursues South Asian literature with a focus on the intersections of translation studies, literary theory, and subaltern studies. As a graduate student instructor, she has taught undergraduate-level courses on Buddhism and is currently teaching an upper-level writing requirement focusing on natural disasters in East Asia. Pawan Kumar is an assistant professor of English at Dyal Singh Evening College, University of Delhi. He completed his doctoral degree from the Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He was a visiting research fellow at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, in the year 2016. His areas of research include Modernist literature, mysticism, esotericism, Indian philosophy, Tantra, and Hindi literature. Sukrita Paul Kumar, a noted poet and critic, held the Aruna Asaf Ali Chair at the University of Delhi. An invited poet at International Writing Program, Iowa, USA, and recipient of many residencies and fellowships, she is a former fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 466

Our Contributors

Shimla. She has published several collections of poetry, translations, and critical books including Narrating Partition, Ismat: Her Life, Her Times, The New Story, Dream Catcher, and others. Malashri Lal,  Former Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi specializes in Literature and Women’s Studies about which she has sixteen books including The Law of the Threshold: Women Writers in Indian English  (1995, 2000), In Search of Sita  (2009),  Tagore and the Feminine (2015), Finding Radha (2018), Cosmopolitan Spaces (2018), and Betrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (2020). She has received research fellowships at Harvard University, Bellagio, and Newcastle. Juan Liang is a doctoral scholar of English literature at Shoolini University, currently undertaking research on how language is used as a manipulative tool in feminist dystopian fiction. She got her bachelor’s degree in medical English with a concentration on translation in China, and her master’s degree in applied linguistics from Old Dominion University, USA. She has taught English as a second language both in the United States and China. Geetanjali Mahajan, Assistant Professor, Lyallpur Khalsa College, Jalandhar, is a PhD from Panjab University. She has fifteen years of teaching experience. Her areas of research/interest include narratology, Indian writing, and women’s writings. Shyamasri Maji teaches English at Durgapur Women’s College (West Bengal). She completed her PhD in English from Burdwan University. The title of her doctoral thesis is “Anxiety of Representation in Select Anglo-Indian Writers.” Her areas of research include Indian writing in English and the Anglo-Indian community. Her articles and reviews have been published in international journals such as Antipodes; Indialogs; International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies; Asiatic; Situations; and New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies. Veena Mani is an assistant professor of English at Stella Maris College (Autonomous), Chennai. She has published research articles on sport, community, poetry, ethnography, and South Asia, in addition to translations and poems. M. Alroy Mascrenghe has written on a wide range of subjects, and his works have been published by IEEE, Elsevier, Peter Lang, and Springer. The Society of Biblical Literature published his essay comparing classical Tamil literature with Biblical literature. His research work has been presented in conferences in Sri Lanka, Japan, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States. He earned his PhD from the University of Cape Town where he is currently an honorary research associate. Raita Merivirta is university instructor at Tampere University in Finland. She gained her PhD in Indian English literature at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She is the author of The Emergency and the Indian English Novel: Memory, Culture and Politics  (Routledge, 2019) and a co-editor of Finnish Colonial Encounters: From Anti-Imperialism to Cultural Colonialism and Complicity (Palgrave, 2021). Nivedita Misra graduated with a doctoral degree from the Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies, The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. Earlier, having completed her BA (Hons) English, MA (English), and MPhil (English) from the University of Delhi, she served as assistant professor, Satyawati College (E), University of Delhi. 467

Our Contributors

She has to her credit publications in various anthologies and peer-reviewed journals such as Journeys, South Asian Review, Transnational Literatures, and Postcolonial Text. Sachidananda Mohanty is a former professor and head of the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. Winner of many national and international awards, such as the Katha, British Council, Fulbright, Charles Wallace, and the Salzburg, he has published extensively in the field of British, American, gender, translation, and postcolonial studies. His books have appeared in Oxford, Sage, Routledge, and Orient Longman, among other notable publishing houses. He was the former vice-chancellor of the Central University of Odisha. Debali Mookerjea-Leonard is a gold medalist in comparative literature from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, and holds a PhD from the University of Chicago. A professor of English and world literature at James Madison University, she is the author of Literature, Gender, and the Trauma of Partition: The Paradox of Independence and the translator of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novel Rakta/Blood. Her research has been supported by prestigious fellowships and published in premier journals. Amitrajeet Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of English, has taught at the Non-Collegiate Women’s Education Board, University of Delhi. He is currently pursuing his PhD in English from the University of Delhi, and his research is focused on exploring the political dimensions of aesthetics. He has also presented papers at several conferences in India and the United States, primarily around the themes of war literature and memory studies. Payal Nagpal is a professor, Department of English, Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi. She has authored and edited eight books, including a book on Jean Genet, and published several research papers, and translations. In the Labyrinth is her debut poetry collection. Her areas of research include literary theory, modern drama, and Indian English poetry. Along with Shyamala A. Narayan, she compiles the India section of the “Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature” for Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Pratibha Nagpal has served as Chair, Professor, and Dean at the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh. She has taught Indian and postcolonial literatures. Her area of research and interest include Indian and postcolonial literature, gender studies, and translation. Shyamala A. Narayan retired in 2012 as Head of the Department of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She has been compiling the Indian section of the “Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature” for The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (Sage, UK) since 1972. Her books include Indian English Literature 2001–2015: A Critical Survey (2020), Indian English Literature 1980–2000: A  Critical Survey (2001), Raja Rao: The Man and His Work (1988), and Sudhin N. Ghose (1973). Hasan Nassour is a research associate working for his PhD at the Department of English literature at Shoolini University in Himachal Pradesh, India. He is in his second year of PhD studies, and his research interest focuses on feminist dystopian fiction. Nassour did his BA in English literature at Tishreen University, Syria, and his MA at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has taught English as a foreign language in Syria and done some translation work from English into Arabic.

468

Our Contributors

Namrata Nistandra is an associate professor at the Dept of English in Doaba College, Jalandhar (India). She did her PhD on the fiction of J.M. Coetzee and a UGC research project on Coetzee’s literary affiliations with Gandhi and Tolstoy. She teaches phonetics and postcolonial literature. She is a life member of MELOW, a reputed organization for studying the multiethnic literatures of the world. Her research and publication interests include gender studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies. Yash Pal is an assistant professor of English in a government college in rural north Haryana. He was trained as an electronics and communication engineer and worked with BSNL before quitting to pursue literature as a vocation. He did his PhD in English literature from the Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamshala, and won the national first position in essay writing there. He is also working on translations from Hindi poetry. Vaibhav Iype Parel is an independent researcher based in Delhi. He is interested in South Asian Diasporic fiction, narratives of crime and detection, and Indian writing in English. His work has been published in Libri et Liberi and ARIEL. His book reviews have appeared in Wasafiri, Contemporary South Asia, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and The Book Review. Rasheda Parveen is an assistant professor at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vellore Institute of Technology University, Andhra Pradesh, India. Her areas of interests are Indian English poetry, sexuality and gender, religion, and cultural studies. She has published research articles in various journals and critical collections. Prishanti Pathak did her MA in 20th–21st century literary studies from Durham University, UK. Her undergraduate dissertation focused on the politics of language, style, and narrative in Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things. She is greatly interested in the immense political potential of world literature and tries to cultivate decolonial, feminist goals for academia. Her master’s degree research focused on refugee literary narratives. Namrata Pathania is an assistant professor at the Department of English at Govt. College, Bilaspur in Himachal Pradesh. Serving in college cadre since 2009, she has presented and published research papers in peer-reviewed national and international journals and published poems and book reviews. She has authored a poetry collection, Rhymed and Unrhymed (Authors Press, 2022). She is also a panel reviewer at Muse India, a literary e-journal. Umasankar Patra, Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, is a recipient of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation Fellowship. His essays have been published in Biography, Journal of Homosexuality, The Explicator, and Indian Literature and in anthologies published by Routledge and Bloomsbury. His research interests cover Anglo-American Modernism, autobiography, queer studies, and modernity in India, with a particular focus on Odisha. William R. Patterson is an independent scholar who has a PhD in international studies from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, USA. He is the author of Democratic Counterinsurgents and more than thirty journal articles and encyclopedia entries on a variety of topics. He was formerly an associate professor at Paul D. Camp Community College and an adjunct professor at Old Dominion University.

469

Our Contributors

Meenakshi F. Paul, Professor of English, Himachal Pradesh University, is the Principal, Department of Evening Studies, and former Dean, Faculty of Languages. She is a translator and poet. She has authored and edited several books and articles. Her areas of interest are Women’s Studies, gender studies, and folkloristics. Subhadeep Paul is Assistant Professor, Department of English, School of Literature, Language and Cultural Studies, Bankura University. He has co-edited Anxieties, Influences & After: Critical Responses to Postcolonialism  & Neocolonialism (Worldview Publishers, in association with Wimbledon Press, UK, 2009), and authored Finite Sketches, Infinite Reaches (Writers Workshop, Kolkata, 2009). His next co-edited volume, Beyond the Heteronorm: Interrogating Critical Alterities, is scheduled to be released by Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield. Vihanga Perera is an academic, researcher, and creative practitioner operating from Kandy in Sri Lanka. He is a widely known poet and fiction writer in his country and the recipient of several awards. Earlier, Perera taught literature in the universities of Sri Jayewardenepura and Peradeniya. His research focuses on Sri Lankan and South Asian writings, conflict writing, and Indian Ocean memory. Ega Peter is a junior research fellow at Vimala College (Autonomous), Thrissur, under the University of Calicut. She has worked as an assistant professor at St. Mary’s College, Thrissur, for three semesters. Her research interests include literary disability studies, narratology, and Indian English fiction. A postgraduate and MPhil in English literature, she has been trying to understand the literary and cultural expressions of disability unique to her own culture and community. Gayatri Thanu Pillai is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English Linguistics and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She holds a PhD jointly awarded by King’s College, London, and NUS. She was awarded the Maurice Baker Prize for her doctoral research on colonial South Indian literature. Her areas of research are postcolonial theory, South and Southeast Asian colonial and postcolonial literature, ecocriticism, and translation studies. She is the managing editor of The Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism. Neeraj Pizar is an assistant professor in the Department of English Shoolini University. He completed his master’s degree in English from Himachal Pradesh University and is now pursuing his doctoral studies. He has been teaching since 2012 at various educational institutions. His areas of interest are cinematic adaptation of world literature, drama, and linguistics. Disha Pokhriyal is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Satyawati College (Evening), University of Delhi. Her areas of interest are life writing, pedagogy, theories/expressions of the self, translation, and visual arts. Her ongoing doctoral research explores the dynamics of liminality, precarity and self-fashioning in the debut life-writings of contemporary Indian women. Jason S. Polley is an associate professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. He has articles on John Banville, District 9, Jane Smiley, Watchmen, Wong Kar-wai, House of Leaves, Joel Thomas Hynes, critical pedagogy, R. Crumb, and Bombay Fever. He has co-edited Poetry in Pedagogy (2021) and Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong (2018). His monograph is Jane Smiley, Jonathan

470

Our Contributors

Franzen, Don DeLillo: Narratives of Everyday Justice (2011). He has two nonfiction publications: Cemetery Miss You (2011) and Refrain (2010). Anil Pradhan is a PhD candidate and senior research fellow at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He earned an MPhil and an MA from Jadavpur University and a BA from Presidency University, Kolkata. His areas of interest include South Asian queer diaspora studies and Indian queer literature in English. His research articles have been published in several scholarly journals. His book of poems, flitting oddments (2020), was published by Writers Workshop, Kolkata. Anil K. Prasad, Professor of English, has taught at different universities of India, Africa, and the Middle East. He has published a collection of short stories in English; poems in English, Hindi, and Bhojpuri; and research papers in international journals. He has also presented papers in the universities of India, the Middle East, the United States, China, and the United Kingdom. Prachi Priyanka takes interest in areas such as intertextuality and visual culture, Indian literature in translation and Partition narratives. Her research articles have appeared in Routledge publications and Scopus journals. She has three books to her credit: Thistle and Weeds; Caste, Class, and Gender in Modern Indian Literature; and Wabi Sabi. Currently, she is an assistant professor in the Department of English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Sharda University, India. Moti Lal Raina, Professor Emeritus, taught at Panjab University from 1960 to 1994. He served as a visiting lecturer at Princeton and Rutgers universities and at the University of Poona. A renowned scholar, he has published in scholarly British, American, and Indian journals and in books published by Macmillan, OUP, and Arnold Heineman, and he has edited the Minnesota Review and the New Quest. Raina has been a recipient of the Commonwealth Fellowship, Ministry of Education Humanities Scholarship, the British Council Visiting Fellowship (Cambridge), and the Fulbright Senior Fellowship. Sheeja Rajagopal received her PhD in English studies from IIT Madras for her work on breast cancer narratives from Kerala. Her research interests include women’s writing, medical humanities, oral histories, and translation. She has published articles in national and international journals and presented papers in India and abroad on the female body and illnesses, eco-feminist literature, women’s writing in India, and teaching of English as a second language. Shazia Hafiz Ramji  is the author of  Port of Being,  a finalist for the 2019 Vancouver Book Award, BC Book Prizes, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. It has been assigned in classes taught by David Chariandy and Chelene Knight. She lives in Calgary and Vancouver and is a PhD student in English at the University of Calgary. Isuru Ayeshmantha Rathnayake is a visiting lecturer at the Department of English, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, from where he also holds a BA (Honors) in English studies. Being a visually-impaired person, his research examines an intersection of disability studies, English studies, and critical pedagogy.

471

Our Contributors

Jose-Carlos Redondo-Olmedilla, Associate Professor, University of Almería, and professortutor at the National University of Distance Education (UNED), both in Spain, heads the Applied Linguistics and Literary Studies research group at the University of Almería and holds doctoral degrees in English Studies and in Spanish and Latin American literature. He is currently working on transnational/cosmopolitan poetics and flows in new postcolonial and decolonial literatures in English and Spanish. Dieter Riemenschneider, former Professor of English Literature, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, has taught at universities in India, France, and New Zealand. He has been the recipient of fellowships by the DFG, DAAD, the Canadian Government, and Delhi University; authored/edited eight books on India, among them his PhD thesis (in German), as well as The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934–2004, Essays on Indian Writing in English, and more than forty essays plus book reviews and essays. Basudhara Roy is an assistant professor of English  at Karim City College, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, where she has been teaching for over a decade. A gold medalist of Banaras Hindu University, she holds a PhD in diasporic women’s short fiction from Kolhan University, Chaibasa.  Her research articles and reviews have appeared in journals and magazines. Drawn to poetry, diaspora theory, culture, and ecological and gender studies, her published books include a monograph and three collections of poems. Vivek Sachdeva, Professor of English, GGS Indraprastha University, New Delhi, has authored Fiction to Film: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s The Householder and Heat and Dust and Shyam Benegal’s India: Alternative Images. He is the co-editor of Identities in South Asia: Conflicts and Assertions, has translated Hindi poetry, and his translations of Punjabi Partition plays have been anthologized in Plays from a Fractured Land published by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. His recent publication is The Biryani Shop and Other Stories. Sheelalipi Sahana is from Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. She is a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. She is working on the confluence and influence of material space and gender in the writings of South Asian Progressive Writers in the 20th century. Her recent publication in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing looks at the agency of domestic objects in Ismat Chughtai’s short stories. Navreet Sahi is an associate professor at the Department of English, Shoolini University, Solan (HP), India. She received her PhD (2014) in English from the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh. An MPhil and gold medalist from Panjab University, she has ten years of experience in teaching English.  She also supervises doctoral research and has published and presented more than twenty-five research papers. Jason Sandhar teaches postcolonial literature, literary criticism, and critical race studies at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. His recent scholarly publications have appeared in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Chitra Sankaran (PhD Lond.), is currently the Acting Head and Chair of Literature, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. She teaches and publishes in the fields of postcolonial and feminist theory, and environmental humanities. She 472

Our Contributors

has published three monographs and nine edited volumes along with book chapters and journal articles. She is the president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in ASEAN and the chief editor for the Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism. Debarun Sarkar is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Mumbai, research associate at the Vidyashilp Research Centre, Vidyashilp University, Bengaluru, and member of Kibitz, a non-profit research organization. As an independent researcher, he is a co-PI on a project on AI auditing. Anchored around science and technology studies, his work spans anthropology/geography/sociology. He recently published his first collection of poetry in book form titled . Jayjit Sarkar is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Raiganj University, India. He is the author of the monograph  Illness as Method: Beckett, Kafka, Mann, Woolf and  Eliot (2019). He is also the co-editor of volumes like Border and Bordering: Poetics, Politics, Precariousness (2020); The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer: On Writing Illnesses and Illnesses in Writing (2021); and Geographia Literaria: Studies in Earth, Ethics and Literature (Stuttgart: ibidem Press, 2021). Mamata Sengupta teaches English at Islampur College, West Bengal, India. She has worked extensively on postwar British drama during her MPhil and doctoral studies. Sengupta has also completed one UGC-MRP on the works of Sarah Daniels. Her research interests include postwar British drama, performance studies, audience reception studies, and gender studies. She has contributed articles to several edited anthologies and international journals including Theatre History Studies, Crossings, etc. Hemant Kumar Sharma holds MA and MPhil degrees in English from Delhi University and has been teaching English language and literature to undergraduate and tertiary level students in India and the Middle East. He has taught at various colleges in Delhi and for over seven years in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Presently he is an assistant professor of English at Shoolini University in Solan, Himachal Pradesh. Khem Raj Sharma teaches English literature at Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamshala. His areas of interest include postcolonial literatures, Indian writing in English, folk literatures, comparative literature, and translation studies. He has published forty-eight research papers in national and international journals of repute and co-edited Critical Voices on Toni Morrison (2015) and Cats Talk (2018). Nidhi Sharma is an assistant professor in the Department of English at SGND Khalsa College, University of Delhi. She is currently pursuing her PhD from Panjab University, Chandigarh. She has an MPhil in American Jewish writings, has authored a book titled Philip Roth: Dystopian Imagination (2017), and has published in national and international journals. Her areas of interests include American literature and spatiality studies. Riti Sharma  is a researcher and has taught at universities and schools in Kolkata, Pune, Nagpur, Haldwani, and Noida. She has held the position of a project fellow at Jadavpur University. Her areas of research include comparative literature, African, and Indian literatures and she has authored several papers and book reviews for multiple international and national publications. 473

Our Contributors

Roshan Lal Sharma is Professor of English in Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamshala. A Senior Fulbright Fellow and Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Research in the Humanities in UW–Madison, during 2007–2008, he has authored Walt Whitman and Shorter Fiction of Raja Rao; co-authored  Som P. Ranchan: Dialogue Epic in Indian English Poetry. Sharma has edited one book, co-edited nine, translated one, authored four poetry books, and published over seventy papers and book chapters. Samrat Sharma is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Shoolini University. He is pursuing his PhD in education from Penn State University. He has published in many international peer-reviewed journals and his research interests include autobiographies, ancient Greco-Roman literature, European demonology, childhood studies, gender, and LGBTQ+ studies. Srishti Sharma is a PhD Fellow at the University School of Humanities and Social Sciences, GGS Indraprastha University, New Delhi. Her research interests include film and adaptation studies, gender studies, disability studies, and folk and culture studies. In addition to presenting and publishing academic papers, she has held two exhibitions of her paintings in Delhi. She is the sub-editor of Indraprasth: An International Journal of Culture and Communication Studies and MEJO: The Melow Journal of World Literatures. Parminder Singh, Assistant Professor of English, Dev Samaj College for Women, Chandigarh, is an IT Professional-turned-educator, and specializes in cultural studies, provinciality, and cyberspace. He is a multilingual poet, short story writer, and translator. He has set up the Panjab Digital Library and is the founder coordinator of the Digital Cell of his college. He received Jathedar Gurcharan Singh Tohra Award from the Sikh Educational Society for his translation of P.S. Sachdeva’s Appreciating Sikhism. Sangeeta Singh is an associate professor of English at Govt. College Sujanpur. Himachal Pradesh. A  PhD from Panjab University Chandigarh, she has taught for over twenty-three years, published papers in international journals of repute, and presented over thirty papers in national and international conferences. She received an appreciation certificate for her presentation at the MELUS-MELOW conference in 2013. Shikha Singh is a PhD candidate at the Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature and Cultural Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Her research interests include the South Asian visual culture, popular culture, and media studies. Sushila Singh, Professor Emeritus, Banaras Hindu University, has taught for about forty years. She has held fellowships and visitor assignments at Yale University, USA, and University of Paris, France. She has published three books, Jane Austen: Her Concept of Social Life, Feminism and Recent Fiction in English (ed.), and Feminism: Theory, Criticism, Analysis; a hundred critical essays; chapters in books; articles; and book reviews. Kumud Singhal is a research scholar in the Department of English, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Ancient Indian Wisdom, Shoolini University, Solan, Himachal Pradesh. She has BA (Hons) from Bede’s College, Shimla, and MA English literature from Himachal Pradesh University. She has presented papers in national and international seminars.

474

Our Contributors

Nitika Stan is a research scholar at Shoolini University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Ancient Indian Wisdom. She graduated with honors from Panjab University, went on to earn a master’s degree in economics from the same institution and a master’s degree in English from Indira Gandhi National Open University. Sakshi Sundaram is an assistant professor at the Vivekananda School of English Studies, VIPSTC, New Delhi. She is a member of the Shakespeare Society of India and MELOW (the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the World). She is interested in collaborative and interdisciplinary research that crisscross with gender studies, environmental impact, and innovation. Tanupriya is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Delhi NCR campus. She is an awarded gold medalist for her MPhil degree in English. She was also awarded a JASSO (Japan Student Services Organization) fellowship for attending a conference at Kumamoto University, Japan. She has published her works in peer-reviewed and Scopus-indexed journals in the area of transgender studies. Sonika Thakur is a research scholar at Shoolini University, Solan, in the Department of English, Chitrakoot School of Liberal Arts. She is an MPhil in English, MEd, and BEd from Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla. She has taught for over ten years in high and senior secondary schools in India and the Kingdom of Bahrain. Vikram Singh Thakur, a PhD in comparative literature, teaches English literature in the School of Letters at Ambedkar University Delhi. His research interests include Shakespeare studies, drama and theater, poetry, postcolonial literature, and graphic narratives. His Shakespeare and Indian Theatre: The Politics of Performance was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury. Besides being an academic, he is also a theater performer, an occasional dramaturg, translator, and podcaster. Themeem T. is an assistant professor of English at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. His major areas of research and teaching include American literature, partition literature, postcolonial literature, technological culture, and posthumanism. He has published articles in peer-reviewed, UGCCare Listed journals, and has presented research papers at international conferences. He has also submitted his PhD dissertation on Don DeLillo at the University of Hyderabad. Pennie Ticen, Associate Professor of English, Virginia Military Institute, has taught at colleges in Virginia and Alabama. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she focused on the use of epics and myth in the works of Joyce, Walcott, and Rushdie. She has published an interview with Bharati Mukherjee, and her recent conference presentations have focused on Arundhati Roy’s essays and Salman Rushdie’s exploration of the South Asian American experience. Nithin Varghese is an assistant professor of English at St. Berchmans College, Changanacherry. He is a University Grants Commission – Inter-University Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences (UGC-IUC) Associate at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India. He has published scholarly articles in reputed national and international journals

475

Our Contributors

and is currently pursuing his doctoral studies at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, Himachal Pradesh. Kritika Varma is a research scholar in the Department of English at Shoolini University of Biotechnology and Management Sciences, HP, India. She completed her MA from Himachal Pradesh University, Summer Hill, Shimla in 2019 and served as Assistant Professor of English at APG Shimla University before enrolling for PhD in 2020. Her areas of interest include science fiction, Indian mythology, and literary criticism and theories. Natasha W. Vashisht teaches undergraduate courses in the Department of English and Drama at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. She has also been a visiting professor at the University of Toronto’s Theatre Erindale and the Centre for South Asian Civilizations. Previously, she was an assistant professor in the Department of English at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi in India. Her research interests include world drama, postcolonial theater, and drama of the Global South. Shambhawi Vikram is a PhD candidate at JNU with the Centre for Women’s Studies, having completed her MPhil from the same department. She has received her master’s degree in English literature from Delhi University. She is currently a research fellow at IIT Delhi, works as an editor and translator, studying discourses around menstruation in contemporary India using interdisciplinary frameworks. Mukesh Williams, a university educator, global media analyst, author, and poet, has taught world literatures and cultural history. He is the adviser to the South Asia Research Center at Soka University, Japan, and Distinguished Professor at Shoolini University, India. He has received the Soka University Award of Highest Honor in 2001, co-authored a book, Representing India (Oxford University Press, 2008), and figured in Encyclopedia of Indian Creative Writers in English and UK Who’s Who. Rajesh Williams  is an assistant professor cum senior trainer at the School of Liberal Arts, Shoolini University, Solan (HP), India, where he teaches English language skills.  A highly experienced language trainer with a background in instructional design, technical editing, and content creation, he possesses well-developed communication and interpersonal skills along with a high degree of technical competence and a commitment to quality. Neha Yadav received her PhD in contemporary Indian graphic narratives from BITS, Goa. She holds a BA and an MA in English Literature from the University of Delhi, has published papers in CLRI, Visual Resources, and the Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics and contributed an essay on the gun moll in Hindi cinema to Bad Women of Bombay Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan). Her work has appeared in EPW, Scroll, Strange Horizons, and The Wire.

Editorial Assistants Hasan Nassour Hemant Kumar Sharma Navreet Kaur Sahi Neeraj Pizar Purnima Bali Sakshi Sundaram 476