Written in the cursive-like Nastaliq script, and in an adaptation of Perso-Arabic alphabet, Urdu has become caught in religious silos. It “looks” Islamic, and therefore, in popular imagination, belongs to just one community in the multilingual universe. Anthologies of Urdu literature—in Urdu and in translation, especially in English—seem to have perpetuated this simplistic narrative of Urdu equals Islam by only Muslim authors in their collections. With the anthology Whose Urdu Is It Anyway?, Rakhshanda Jalil attempts to bring diversity to the scene by including only non-Muslim writers.
Author: Soni Wadhwa
While war is a perennial subject for historians, stories of friendships and exchanges, especially when set aside in the dustier corners of contemporary memory, make equally memorable material for history. A case study is the story of India and Egypt, the subject of East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World between the Wars in which Erin MB O’Halloran recounts the relationship between the leaders and movements of the two countries between 1919 and 1939, a particularly interesting period that witnessed events such as the abolition of the Caliphate, the Abyssinian crisis, and the partition of Palestine.
Cities and villages are not binaries but exist on a continuum. In Reformatting Agrarian Pasts: Urban History from the Countryside in Colonial India, urban historian William J Glover traces the events and infrastructure projects that intertwine rural and urban spaces through specific administrative policies formulated and implemented by the British government. For Glover, the importance of this history lies in the way the interconnection has continued for contemporary India: India is no longer an agricultural economy the way it has traditionally been understood.
Embedded within Indian ethos, caste is the idea that people (defined by their social positions) are of four types—scholarly-priestly (Brahmins), warriorhood (Kshatriyas), trade and commerce (Vaishyas), and menial jobs (Shudras)—and these are fixed by birth, with no class and social mobility available, especially to the last group. This is no abstract concept; it takes very real form in actual practices and institutions that continue to persist in present times. The so-called lower castes live a life of humiliation normalized with practices of bonded labour and untouchability.
Brahm Saxena summons his family—his wife, daughter and son—to announce that they, especially the children, should not expect anything from him as inheritance. Rohit, the son, is rattled but Tara, the daughter, is financially independent and doesn’t bother about what she doesn’t feel entitled to.
The IT sector seems to be concerned with the flow of information across nations. However, it can also be about the flow of emotions. Labour around technology is not only about programming; it can also be about emotional exhaustion. In The Future of Futurity: Affective Capitalism and Potentiality in a Global City, anthropologists Poornima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta document the workings of call centres by looking at how the BPO “agents” (workers or operators are called agents) navigate the demands of their job: doing “night work”, learning and unlearning accents, and racist abuse from the customers.
Pakistani writer Faiqa Mansab’s second novel The Sufi Storyteller is a South Asian take on stories about stories blended with a murder mystery. It opens with a murder in the library which doubles up as the office of the protagonist Layla, an expert on women and their role in storytelling traditions teaching at a university in Illinois. The naked dead body is that of a woman, has bruises on her throat, and is dressed in a red cloak. The problem is that this is the second dead body Layla has stumbled upon. As Layla searches her memory about the previous victim, she begins to realise that there is a pattern and perhaps some one is after her.
“Writers on writing” is a genre in itself, one to which readers flock. However, Indian authors, especially those writing in regional Indian languages, are rarely represented in this genre meant for the internationally-acknowledged the-Western-and-the-famous. Therefore, Hindi writer Geet Chaturvedi’s The Master of Unfinished Things, translated into English by Anita Gopalan, will come as a breath of curious air.
Great Eastern Hotel is a novel of gargantuan proportions. Set in Calcutta of the 1940s and reconstructed from the perspective of 1970s, author Ruchir Joshi has Saki (aka Robi Nagasaki Jones-Majumdar, a scholar of architecture), put together the life and times of Kedar Lahiri, an artist of zamindar (landowning, feudal) origins, paint critical moments in Indian history from the day of the funeral procession for Rabindranath Tagore to the catastrophic famine of Bengal, the Dharamtolla Street procession for the Quit India movement, the Tebhaga movement among the peasants, and the Naxalite movement.
The 20 years or so after World War Two were a time of rapid development in the publishing industry. For instance, the paperback revolution made books more affordable. Book clubs kept up the momentum of reading, discussions, and curation going to sustain, or even expand reading cultures. The easy availability of books by the roadside, for example, turned borrowers of books into buyers.
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