Originally published in 2011 and now translated from Urdu by Riyaz Latif, On The Other Side bears the distinct trademarks of Rahman Abbas’s writing: poetic language, an emphasis on the gullies of Bombay, the dangerous divisiveness of religion in contemporary India, and the iron grip of patriarchal terror.
South Asia
The Great Mughals, Art, Architecture and Opulence, edited by Susan Stronge, is a new book published by V&A publications to coincide with the exhibition currently on display at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.
Novels set around the Jewish Bene Israel community in India are as rare as hen’s teeth, but Sheela Rohekar’s 2013 Hindi novel, Miss Samuel: A Jewish-Indian Saga, translated this year into English by Madhu Singh, must be one-of-a-kind. Rohekar is perhaps the only Jewish author in India who writes in Hindi. Her novel reads as two stories in one: the fictional saga of six generations of a Bene Israel family from Amdavad, the Gujarati name for Ahmedabad, and a more general history of the Bene Israel, the earliest group of Jews to settle in India some 2000 years ago, thought (by some) to be a lost tribe of Israel.
Vikas Swarup’s new novel, The Girl With the Seven Lives, opens with its main character Devi locked in a room, forced to retell her life’s story. Or, rather, her life’s stories–starting in the slums of Delhi, Devi reinvents herself time-and-time-again, with a new name and a new backstory, as she tries to carve a niche for herself in Indian society—only to be knocked back down, and be forced to start anew, with a new name.
Set in the early to mid-19th century in British-occupied India, Sayam Bandyopadhyay’s Carnival, at the outset, focuses on a middle-aged recluse living in Calcutta. Despite becoming a landowner at his father’s death, Rajaram Deb prefers a monotonous life confined to the walls of his bedroom—often at the cost of his responsibilities—barring rare moments of socializing. This self-imposed seclusion is made all the more notable by the initial sparks of public uprisings in the world beyond those walls, culminating in the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
Literary history of vernaculars in the West has a well-established narrative. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer is considered the “father” of English literature, followed by the other greats of the Renaissance—Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare—and the canon continues. The literary histories of Indian languages, in contrast, do not have such a straightforward lineage.
Manzu Islam’s Godzilla and the Songbird stands as a mosaic of myth and modernity in which the protagonist’s life can be an allegory of the journey of post-colonial East Pakistan to Bangladesh.