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.
Author: Soni Wadhwa
“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.
History has scarred South Asian cities in very concrete ways. The most well known of these have been carrying the burdens of colonisation and communalism, and, after independence, a rewriting of their histories that are governed by ideologies of nationalism. Lahore, in Pakistan, is one such city. In his book Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore, historian Manan Ahmed Asif shows one evocative way to attempt urban history and narrative for South Asian cities.
The word miniature in fact comes from the Larin miniare or “to paint red”; early European miniatures—palm sized pieces that are parts of manuscripts and books facing a verse or an intense moment in a story or placed behind one—were initially delineated in that pigment. There was an Asian tradition of such painting as well, with Indian examples including illustrations in such texts such as the 12th-century Gita Govinda and 15th-century Rasa Manjari (15th century), as well as a great many Mughal examples.
The Indian epic Mahabharata continues to inspire novelists to retell the story of the war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, the cousins who fight over the kingdom of Hastinapur, especially from the points of view of the women characters who have been wronged. Many of these retellings—including Ira Mukhoty’s Song of Draupadi reviewed in the Asian Review of Books—narrate the battle and the politics from the points of view of the wronged women: the epic is full of awful stories about women being abducted so that they can be married to the prince of Hastinapur, or tricked into marrying the blind king Dhritarashtra or gambled away by her husband(s).
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.
The Partition of India has inspired cinema, some of which has reached audiences outside South Asia, especially when produced or directed by the Indian diaspora: for instance, Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children (based on the Booker winner by Salman Rushdie) and Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House. However, there are more films that draw from partition as setting, theme, entertainment and history in art as well as commercial traditions of film-making in India, and to an extent, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Most of the individual films in this substantial body of work have been brought together by John W Hood in Tear-Drenched Earth: Cinema and the Partition of India. By Hood’s own admission, the book is not an exercise in film criticism but a way of exploring the use of Partition, “a gold mine of stories for filmmakers”, as an idea and as a theme.
Among the epic and stories of great battle, the Mahabharata has certain sections where smaller stories and myths exist to illustrate the larger point about origins of something or explain why things are the way they are. Some characters might seem familiar from other myths or the fables bring to mind other fable texts such as the Panchatantra or the Jataka Tales. Outside of the specialists who read and research the epic, no one has probably heard of them. In her latest book The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals: Some Moral Tales from the Mahabharata, Wendy Doniger brings together stories from the relatively unexplored sections in which the dying Bhishma responds to questions from Yudhishthira, the eldest of the Pandavas. The stories Bhishma narrates relate to esoteric things such as tigers, jackals, dogs, sages (and their wives and disciples).
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